Anonymous asked: In Earth 11 (rule 63 world) NDND bad end- can you do Damian with (I'm assuming bended) Laila?
Her body did not handle mourning well. It was a traitorous, wretched, weak body. Damian hated herself passionately. What good was functional immortality if mere sadness could incapacitate her? She could take being shot, drowned, burned, and killed, but the loss of an idiotic man had crippled her in ways she had never thought possible.
And it didn’t pass. It didn’t get easier. When she woke up in the morning, for a fraction of a second she would forget that Stephan was gone. Opening her eyes and finding herself alone in bed would instantly remind her, and the remembering hurt every time. It made her sick. It’d been years since she’d been physically ill, so the unpleasantness was startling.
It felt like her body was shutting down. Something in her—-something essential—-had given up. Her patrol schedule became erratic. She patrolled until she had to limp into bed, then had to force herself to get up and put the cowl on. It took everything in her to concentrate on moving forward.
The days bled into each other until the morning of her twenty-first birthday. Curled in a protective ball on her partner’s side of the bed, Damian had been relaxed and actually aware of everything around her. She stopped ignoring the little fluttery feelings she’d been experiencing for weeks, and realized something inside her was moving.
And she knew, then. Damian knew, because Stephan had always been so careful, so stubborn about being safe. He’d made that mistake once, with Tabitha, and he’d been adamant about not repeating his history with her. But in the end, he had.
Her belly swelled, and she couldn’t help feeling resentful. What good was invincibility when she couldn’t so much as jump for fear of harming the little beast inside her? She was weak and slow and ungainly and Stephan had made her the way. She hated him for that, and she hated it more because she couldn’t tell him how much she hated him. Damian was alone with her mistakes—-alone, save for the cat and the thing growing inside her.
She couldn’t think of it as a baby. She had no mental model for that, no concept for how this uncomfortable parasite could translate into another human being. She had no idea what she would have done if Dickie hadn’t found her way home. Her sister flew in and desperately tried to correct the damage that had gone on in the five years she’d been away.
Childbirth was a fight, and in a sick way, Damian relished in it. For months, she had been restless, endlessly frustrated by the fact that Dickie had taken on the Batwoman mantle again. The long hours of labor gave Damian the opportunity to finally scream. From the moment she’d found Stephan’s body to the second her water broke, she’d held that scream in. She’d internalized it all. But when the contractions gripped her, Damian let go. She told nature exactly what she thought of it, she swore, and she fought.
Her son was born in the cave. She was proud of how angrily he screamed with his first lungful of air. Damian named him Luke, because she knew that if he were alive, her idiotic partner would have taken great satisfaction in telling their son “LUKE…I AM YOUR FATHER…” in the gravelly growl he’d dubbed the Batvoice. Stephan Brown had been a loud-mouthed optimist with a love of Star Wars movies. He’d made her feel accepted in a way that no other person ever had. He’d been an excellent partner to her, and she believed that he would have been an exceptional father as well.
Her pride had robbed him of that chance.
And she never wanted to forget any of that.
