A DC X DP IDEA #45
Mine, Mine, MINE!
I know Damian is raised in an environment where he is treated as a prince, the only grandson, the heir. Sure those privileges may come in the price of ripping his innocence and childhood away from a very young age. In the end he got everything he ever wanted nor needed. A single word from him and all gather around to get what he needed.
But there will be a day where there is something you cannot get no matter your demands or commands.
By the time Damian could form full sentences, he had learned the art of taking. To demand was his birthright; to receive was merely the universe setting itself right. If another child had a toy, Damian wanted it. If a servant carried a blade of exceptional craftsmanship, it belonged in his collection. Even as a young boy, his chambers were overflowing with silken robes, masterfully forged weapons, and rare treasures pilfered from across the world.
His first words had been "Mine." He was greedy from the cradle, claiming everything within reach with an iron will and a clenched fist. As an infant, a single furrow of his brow or a half-formed cry summoned an entire team of wet nurses, attendants, and servants who scrambled to appease him, terrified of drawing the ire of the Demon’s heir. His crib was adorned with silk imported from lands that no longer existed, and gold-threaded blankets were replaced the moment they became even slightly soiled.
When he took his first steps, the world shifted to accommodate him. Marble floors were polished before his feet touched them, and his path was lined with offerings—daggers forged by masters, scrolls of ancient knowledge, carved figurines from forgotten civilizations. Every item he glanced at was quietly removed from its place and added to his collection, regardless of its original owner. He collected without remorse, hoarded without gratitude. His chambers grew into miniature treasure vaults, filled with relics and riches that served no purpose beyond feeding his insatiable desire to own.
Neither Talia nor Ra’s al Ghul discouraged his possessiveness. To them, it was simply a symptom of his lineage. The blood of conquerors and kings ran in his veins, and if he took, it was only because he was destined to. The League of Assassins reinforced this belief with every passing day. He was not taught humility or restraint—only power, precision, and domination. He was forged to rule, molded to believe that the world was his birthright.
But then there was Danyal.
His twin, born under the same stars, shaped from the same blood, yet utterly alien in his quiet nature. Danyal never demanded, never claimed, never expected. While Damian amassed trinkets and trophies with the entitlement of a young emperor, Danyal existed in the spaces left behind—content with simplicity, with little, with the unremarkable. When Damian snatched one of his brother’s few meager toys and added it to his already overflowing pile, Danyal gave no protest. He simply let it go, his eyes soft, his hands uncurled, his expression free of malice or resentment.
To Damian, this was a maddening contradiction. They were both of noble blood. They were descendants of kings, warriors, legends. Danyal should have yearned for greatness, fought for it. But instead, he bowed his head, stepped aside, and surrendered without a sound. Damian saw weakness. He saw foolishness.
When Danyal died on a mission gone wrong, Damian did not weep. His hands did not tremble, his eyes did not stray from the trail of blood that marked the last place his twin had stood. The League moved on without pause, the death barely a footnote in their endless ledger of sacrifice. There was no funeral pyre, no rites or remembrance. The corpse was retrieved, cataloged, and discarded like a failed weapon. Damian told himself it was fate, a destiny trimming the weak from their bloodline.
Danyal had never fought for more. He had never claimed what was owed to him. In Damian’s mind, that made him unworthy. A noble soul without the teeth to defend its title. A flickering candle smothered by the wind. And so Damian forced himself to move on. He trained harder, sharper, faster. He swallowed whatever little grief he has and reforged it into ambition.
At ten years old, when he was finally sent to Gotham, he carried himself like a young prince returning to his rightful throne. He arrived at his father’s doorstep cloaked in expectation, armored in superiority. His every step was deliberate, as if the very ground of Wayne Manor should bend to his will. He was the blood heir, the legacy reborn. Everything in the manor should have been his.
But instead of reverence, he was met with resistance.
When he challenged Drake—Timothy Drake, the imposter who had dared to stand at his father’s side—Damian expected combat, a duel to settle succession. He anticipated a fight that would end with his place solidified and his father's acknowledgment finally secured. But Drake refused. He did not raise a hand. He yielded with words instead of steel, and Damian, raised in a world where weakness was unforgivable, saw it as cowardice.
Worse still, Bruce his father had intervened. Not as a warrior stepping into the arena, but as a father—shielding the usurper. Protecting someone who had no claim, no birthright, no Ra’s al Ghul in his lineage, no biological connection that is burning in his veins. Damian had lashed out. Fury surged through him like fire through dry kindling. How could his father not see it? He was the true son. The legacy of both Bat and Demon ran through his blood.
But here, in this foreign house built on sentiment and ideals, that blood meant nothing.
His hours of grueling training, his flawless blade work, his mastery of languages, poisons, shadows, everything none of it mattered. In the League, every achievement was tallied like gold, every drop of noble blood a weapon to be honored and sharpened. In Gotham, he was just a child with a name. No better than the orphans his father had chosen. He was expected to earn his place not through heritage, but through heart.
And that was a battlefield Damian had never been taught to fight on.
By fourteen, Damian had changed. The transformation had not come swiftly, nor easily. It had been carved into him over years of clashing ideologies, quiet lessons, and countless moments of silent observation. The boy who once barked orders, who demanded the world bend to his will, had been slowly, methodically unraveled.
Gone was the child who screamed, "Mine!" at every turn. In his place stood a young warrior with weary eyes and calloused hands, one who had tasted loss, rejection, and the sting of unearned entitlement.
He had learned, through long nights spent watching others from the shadows of Wayne Manor’s hallways, that love was not given by birthright but earned through sacrifice. He had watched Dick steady the weight of leadership with a smile, watched Tim endure with patience and quiet brilliance, watched Jason bleed and rage and come back again and again for the family that had once failed him. And he had watched Bruce—not the detective that his grandfather would say nor the beloved that his mother would whisper of bedtime legends, but a flawed, weary man who carried his family not with a sword but with open hands.
The League had taught him to take. His siblings had taught him to stay.
“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” He had not heard the phrase spoken aloud, but he lived it in the moments that unfolded around him. He saw it in the way Alfred laid out tea for children who weren’t his. In the way Cass would wordlessly spar with him until exhaustion broke his fury. In the way Stephanie left notes on the fridge with dumb jokes just to make them laugh. These people—none of whom shared his blood—had chosen each other again and again.
And yet… in the quiet corners of his mind, sometimes, he still wished Danyal were here.
Danyal, who would have thrived in this strange and stubborn family. Danyal, whose softness would have been a strength here, not a flaw. Danyal, who had always looked at Damian not with envy or resentment, but with quiet love.
Damian had spent so long dismissing that gentleness as weakness, never realizing it had been a gift. Looking back now, he could see the missed moments—the times he could have shared instead of stolen, the times he could have listened instead of taken. His brother had not been lesser. He had simply been different. And Damian, in his arrogance, had mistaken compassion for cowardice.
Now, with Danyal long buried and the world colder for it, Damian carried the weight of that realization like a blade across the ribs—never fatal, but never forgotten.
Then came the mission with the Flash. A time anomaly had rippled through the fabric of reality. Barry had worked tirelessly to fix the damage, racing through different timelines until order was restored. But this time, though fixed, have a new aftermath. A vision stitched together from remnants of a path not taken.
The Justice League, ever analytical, treated it like a curious glitch in the multiversal code—a harmless projection of a possibility that never came to pass. They gathered to observe it as they would a peculiar ripple in a still pond, detached but intrigued. Damian had been pulled along by Jon, who bounced with his usual boundless energy, unaware of what the vision would show. Damian followed, armored in detachment, a practiced indifference in place.
The flickering image glowed before him like a memory he had never lived. There, seated around the long dining table in Wayne Manor, was a scene so mundane, so heartbreakingly normal, it rooted him in place. His father sat at the head of the table, a rare softness in his posture as he poured tea. Nightwing laughed mid-conversation, shoulders relaxed, while Tim rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. Jason leaned back with his feet on the table, earning a nudge from Cassandra. And at the center of it all, smiling as if he'd always belonged—was Danyal.
Danyal passed the bread basket to Tim with a crooked grin, said something that made Alfred chuckle. He nudged Damian's double with his elbow, teasing him, effortlessly folded into the rhythm of a family Damian had once believed unreachable. It was a life that had never happened, a universe where Danyal had lived—not just lived, but thrived.
Damian’s breath caught in his throat. His chest rose and fell once, twice, the motion sharp and sudden. His fingers, usually so still, twitched at his sides, as if the rest of him hadn’t caught up with the emotion rising within. Before he could wrest control back from his heart, his hand extended—reaching, aching, needing.
And the word tore from him before thought could stop it.
It escaped in a whisper but echoed like a roar in his ears. Not the scream of a spoiled prince demanding treasure, but the broken, silent cry of a boy mourning what he had never known he needed. It was not greed that moved him, not anymore. It was grief. Regret. A raw, unfiltered longing for the life that had slipped through his fingers before he had ever realized he wanted it.
Around him, the room shifted. Justice League members who moments ago stood in detached curiosity now exchanged curious glances, as they saw the projection and Robin’s reaction to a projection that is just showing a what-if scenario.
The projection flickered. Danyal’s laughter shimmered and dissolved into static. The dining table faded. The light dimmed.
And Damian remained frozen, hand still half-raised, reaching for a future that was never his to claim.
In the heart of the Infinite Realms, where time unraveled and rewound in endless loops and rivers of light, a lone figure hovered silently above the drifting threads of fate. Clockwork, the Master of Time, ancient and eternal, gazed down upon the scene unfolding within the mortal world. His staff gleamed as it gears ever turning, ticking in rhythm with realities both seen and unseen.
His eyes that is both ageless and all-knowing, rested on the image of a boy no longer a child. Damian Al Ghul Wayne stood still before the dying glow of a vanished vision, his heart laid bare. Once a prince of shadows, molded by assassins and pride, Damian now stood not as a conqueror, but as a brothe still grieving. He no longer sought to possess or dominate, but to reclaim something that had always been just out of reach: family.
The Observers had spoken long ago, their verdicts cold and absolute. Danyal’s future, they had said, was a path carved in steel and soaked in blood. The catalyst of the Infinite Realms, the one who will bring the end. But Clockwork had always known better. Time, after all, was not a straight line, it branched, curved, rebelled. And in one of those near-forgotten offshoots, he had seen a flicker. A possibility so faint it could have been dismissed as error. But Clockwork did not dismiss.
He had seen a future in which the Infinite Realms chaotic would finally know peace. He had seen a king . And that king—against all odds—had come in the form of Danyal Al Ghul Wayne.
A soft, amused breath escaped the Master of Time as his gaze shifted across the layers of existence to a shadow nestled within the Realms themselves. There, hidden among the currents of ectoplasm and fractured echoes of forgotten souls, stood a young ghost. His white hair drifted like mist in the realm’s gentle current, his glowing green eyes solemn yet radiant. Gone were the dark locks, icey blue eyes and quiet smiles of Danyal Al Ghul. In his place stood Daniel Fenton—Danny Phantom—the Halfa. Half-human, half-ghost. A being unlike any other. A bridge between life and death.
Clockwork observed him with fondness, a rare warmth in his otherwise distant demeanor. He remembered the moment clearly, the crack between timelines where fate had faltered just long enough for intervention. The Observers had turned away, believing that Clockwork will carry out their verdict to execute the young boy, but Clockwork had seen the glimmer of what could be. He had rescued the boy from his grave and scattered his memories.
He had delivered the amnesiac child to a quiet home in Amity Park, into the waiting arms of the unsuspecting Fenton couple—eccentric, brilliant, and just compassionate enough to raise him without ever questioning the mystery of his arrival. The boy was given a name, a room, a place to grow. And on that fateful day, when Danny stepped into the portal and his molecules split between two worlds, Clockwork had watched it happen with a quiet, satisfied nod. That had been the moment. The transformation. The birth of a future king.
The Infinite Realms would have their High King.
And now, as the Realms shimmered in resonance with Damian’s grief, and Danny’s own presence and ignorance hummed at the edge of understanding, Clockwork let the corners of his lips curl just slightly.
He had never told the Observers about this faint possible of a timeline. The one he saw only once, a future so far removed it flickered like starlight on the edge of perception. This timeline where, both the Realms have their king but he will have a granchild.
Clockwork kept that knowledge close. Even for a being beyond time, some secrets were too precious to share.
As he look at the grieving Damian telling his family a future could have been and Danny enjoying his somewhat normal routine for a young Halfa like him not knowing the immediate danger that is quickly closing in on him.
Clockwork smiled, All in due time.
PS: If someone out there wants to continue or make a fic about this you are free to do so, don’t forget to tag me though.
PPS: Again it got too long for my liking....
PPS: I got a bit carried away, hehehehehe.....
