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Damian and Ra's went down together in the end. At age fifteen he would not have expected anything else, but at age thirty Damian had higher expectations for his own life. Family, friends, animals, a fulfilling daytime occupation that had nothing to do with inflicting violence... He had a good thing going for him, much better than he deserved, before it all ended.
He had been wearing the cowl at the time of the glorious sendoff. Did he want to be wearing the cowl? Not really. Gotham was doing well enough that Batman was rarely ever necessary. And Damian himself had become more than all the legacies thrust upon him. But he was the only one available at the time, so Damian performed the dubious honors of leading his grandfather into the afterlife permanently.
He knew it was permanent because there had been several overpowered occult beings and many extensive debates around said permanence. His grandfather's vying for immortality had finally managed to annoy the celestial authorities enough that they were willing to do something about him.
The utterly tragic thing was that Damian had been forced by his own damnable conscience to advocate for the bastard. For all that he tried his best to follow his father's code as Batman, he would have happily allowed Ras's to burn in any pit of hell he happened to stumble into.
Unfortunately, the list of punishments put forth by the Oh So Venerable Council had been deeply existentially horrifying. That's coming from him. So as representative of his species more than a relative of the accused, he had argued for a bit of leniency in the form of complete and utter destruction of body, soul, mind, and spirit.
In any case, Ra's escaped. The details of how Ra's had managed to squirm out from a different dimensional plane under the nose of somewhat-omniscient guards are irrelevant. Damian could only speculate there had been bribery in the weight of souls involved.
Their final battle ended up somewhere in the Bialyan desert (he will never understand the man's pathologic nostalgia for scorching, sandy landscapes). They fought on the creaking platform of yet another Lazarus pit, because his grandfather was too predictable for words.
As Damian nearly managed to incapacitate the old fool, the executioner fell on them both with the impatience of a man who had been standing around far past his regular shift, and thus even less cognizant of collateral damage than god-like beings are on a regular day. The collateral damage in this case being Damian himself.
Just moments before the magical executioners' blade took effect, Ra's used the very last bits of Pit magic in his system to curse Damian's next life.
Now, if Ra's had known that he had a tiny little scrap of Lazarus Pit power left, he would not have used it to ensure his disappointing grandson would "never escape the shackles of his upbringing, even in his next life". Ra's was deeply petty, but he had always been much more concerned with extending his own pathetic existence.
But Ra's had not known. And the magical god-blade mixed with Lazarus juice probably had strange side-effects. So they both blew up in a spectacular explosion, and almost the next second, Damian woke up a screeching, barely breathing, wriggling baby.
Half-blind and cold, Damian slowly realized that the thing about his next life had come much earlier than expected. Not that he ever had the wish or expectation to reincarnate as an afterlife, if he would have had any say in the matter.
Which he really didn't, because the expressionless white masks floating in and out of his blurry vision practically screamed "assassin cult". He would know. He had had enough of those to last him several hundred thousand lifetimes.
Damian could speak Japanese.
As a teenager, he would never have admitted that he learned it because he wanted to read an untranslated shoujo manga, but it was true. He told Dick he could speak it because of a Japanese tutor his mother had assigned him as a child. In itself not a lie, as he was the one Damian learned to use the katana from, but they had lessons in English and Arabic. Mostly English. The man's Arabic accent had been horrific.
But because of Damian's perfectionistic streak, carefully cultivated by the League and later intensified by the fear of rejection that seems to plague all of Bruce's sons, he had to master all skills he dipped his toes into. So he learned Japanese well enough to speak it like a Tokyo native and could read far more kanji than he had ever needed in his previous life. Especially for manga.
Which is how he knew that there was something far stranger going on than the fact that he was currently a baby with thirty years’ worth of knowledge, being bottle-fed in the dank halls of what was undoubtedly a secret society.
Their language was weird. The people around him spoke little, but he could still tell that their Japanese was not just accented differently. Some words were archaic, others were completely unknown to him, but he could tell from context they meant ordinary things like "celling" and "spoon".
The possibility that these people were some sort of extreme Japanese racial purists occurred to him after he realized there were no European loan-words at all. But that didn't quite fit. There were too many other random linguistic choices for that to be the case. And the sheer variety of weird hair and eye colors didn't quite mesh with "race purist cult".
If reincarnation was truly what had happened to him, he could assume he was in the future. A very bleak future where the Court of Owls was revived and expanded to Japan for some reason.
Or perhaps he was in a coma dreaming the whole thing up. Not unlikely. Though if this was the case, he had no choice but to play out the scenario straight, because if the horrors of having his diaper changed by a man in a Court of Owls-looking mask didn't wake him then nothing would.
This puzzle was the only thing that kept him sane as he was passed between masked individuals and raised in the most clinical possible fashion, mostly in the dark. All the carers were stiff, emotionless, and only the barest hint of shadowed eyes behind masks betrayed their humanity.
Damian was glad he wasn't a real baby. Babies need to see human faces. And light. And colors. Who knows what being raised like this would do to someone like him? He already had enough trouble deciphering human emotion as it was.
The Court of Owls theory was wrong. His first glimpse of the map in the so-called classroom disproved it. But he couldn't really blame himself for the false assumption. The masks, the underground facilities and the assassin training were only three of the commonalities with the Court.
The reason why he had latched onto the idea of the Court itself and not just assumed Ra's had sent him to just any other assassin society that might have sprung up in the meantime was mostly his new body. And probably latent trauma.
At first, he had also assumed that he was some sort of Talon experiment because of his unnaturally paper-white skin. Not pale Caucasian skin. Literally white. Like an undead Talon. But apparently that was just what he looked like now. And there were other children with much stranger features like fangs and geometrical birth-marks.
The superpowers used to be another tally mark in the "Court" box. Some Talons had been enhanced. Damian, or 565 as he was called now, was too young to use the power yet, as some of the other children were doing, but he could feel the potential in his veins. He could remember his short stint as a metahuman just after his father had revived him when he was twelve and it had felt... similar enough. Though this power felt tamer, like it was part of him instead of bursting from underneath his skin.
The training style had been another false clue. They were trained to be disposable. His grandfather, for all he had been a horrendous human being, trained his assassins with the long-term survival in mind. At least the ones who were part of the league since infancy. Because he was stingy about resources, not because he cared about the human lives under his care, but still. For all that League assassins were expected to sacrifice themselves at Ras's smallest whim, the framework of their actual training still had certain fundamental assumptions about the agents' survival and general self-preservation. The Court had no such qualms, and apparently neither did these people. There’s conditioning, and then there's being treated as an actual object.
The children were violently discouraged from all normal human interaction. The punishment for fraternization differed depending on the individuals, the severity and the handler's mood, but it ranged from heavy manual labor without meals to bloody beatings.
They slept in rows on nothing but mats between their bodies and the stone floor, but were not allowed to touch each other, even when winter came and the cell became so cold the smaller kids died of hypothermia.
The food was tasteless and insufficient. Stealing food from each other was encouraged, unless one was caught, in which case the punishments were almost as severe as the ones for fraternization. Only one child ever stole from the handlers, and she had vanished by the next day.
Stealing other things was not possible, because they did not own anything. Clothes, blankets, weapons, books were constantly redistributed. When a child formed enough attachment to something to keep reaching for it, it disappeared and was replaced. Taking or giving things for a short while (and sometimes even swapping) like blankets overnight, was too dangerous because the handlers always seemed to know and they were punished for getting caught. They were only allowed to sleep in the same place for a short while before they rotated. The rotations came at random time intervals. They were only allowed to rotate when ordered.
The effect was incredibly destabilizing, even for someone who knew exactly what was happening and why. Though perhaps things were worse for him, because he had something better to compare this life to.
But the lack of possessions, the cold and the hunger would not have been so bothersome if it wasn’t for all the ways they would deliberately shut down any sort of emotional display, no matter how minute or private.
Early on, some of the children still cried sometimes. The punishment was isolation for a minimum of twelve hours. Most learned to stop themselves, but the human body does what it does, especially when it is so tiny and vulnerable. The punishments grew longer as they grew older.
In the classroom, they switched desks the same way they switched sleeping mats, and they were not given notebooks at all. Only cheap loose-leaf paper for calligraphy and slates and chalk for any other writing, which were always collected at the end of the theoretical classes.
It was here that Damian realized the magnitude of his predicament. The map had been the first thing. He had held a small, vain hope that he was in some distant future where the Japan had actually managed to fulfill its imperialistic ambitions and that was why they were speaking Japanese on the continental mainland, but no. His grandfather had not even allowed him the small comfort of being on the same damn planet. If the astronomy class was any indicator, this was a completely different solar system, if not a different dimension entirely.
Damn that Demon's Head! The knowledge of the decrepit vermin's obliteration was not nearly satisfying enough to lessen the blow of Damian's grief. The miasma around him grew so strong the lead handler felt the need to spontaneously send him to the isolation chamber. All he said was:
“Room 3, two and a half days.”
Damian went. The door was not even locked or watched. It didn’t need to be. They were all without will, after all. A tool stays where its master puts it.
Before, he had held onto some small hope that he could go home. Now, he had nothing but memories, masks, a teeny tiny body, and twenty-one children who have never heard a single kind word.
Usually what happened when he ended up in this sort of situation (plus or minus a new body) he simply contacted someone from the Batfamily, the JL, or the Titans and then would bide his time until he could break the kids out and blow up the lair behind them.
But now Damian was alone. No backup. No network. No base. He had nowhere to take the children, no way to protect them. Not even the slightest clue if they could have a future outside of the literal hole in the ground they were wasting away in.
And he had no one to go home to.
The loss was too big. It was so big he could barely grasp it. His emotions were going so fast it was like they were completely still. He couldn’t even contemplate the idea of never seeing his siblings again, let alone his entire world.
He didn’t even have the option to send an SOS off-planet to call a Green Lantern, if the blank (more blank?) body language he received from the masked tutor when Damian asked about space travel was any indication.
But Damian supposed he was still Batman. And if there is one thing that the Batman does, is turn the darkness against itself so that children may play in the light.