“An eternity with you.”

-Dc vs. vampires-

Intro.

The days passed, though they no longer felt like days. Since Gotham fell—since the world fell—time had lost all meaning.

There had once been sunrises that bathed Wayne Manor in gold, casting long, warm shadows across stone floors and ivy-draped windows. Now, the sky hung in a permanent shade of gray: sullen, clouded, unchanging. It was always twilight now. A half-light for a half-dead world.

They lived underground, beneath what was left of the League’s Himalayan outposts. Talia—his mother—had made the place livable. Efficient. Cold. It functioned well enough as a refuge, but it was not, and never would be, a home. Damian no longer knew what that word meant.

The halls were filled with people he’d pulled from Gotham before the city turned. Survivors, mostly. Soldiers, some. All of them ghosts now—haunted by who they’d once been, by what they’d lost. His allies. His responsibility.

And him? He was one of them. Worse, even.

They still looked at him like he was Robin. But that boy had died with the city. What remained was something else entirely.

A vampire.

A vampire who hunted his own kind.

The irony wasn’t lost on him.

It was his mother who’d found a way to keep him sane: animal blood, measured carefully, rationed out just enough to keep the hunger dulled. Enough to let him keep fighting without turning on the people he still loved. Or tried to.

But the fear lingered. It always lingered—that gnawing dread that one night he’d wake with his fangs buried in someone’s throat. That he’d open his eyes to a red world, his hands soaked in blood. Not an enemy’s. A friend’s. A child’s. Someone he’d sworn to protect.

Someone like you.

And then you’d asked him.

You’d asked him that.

Why?

Why, in all the shattered cruelty this world had left to offer, would you ever ask him to turn you?

————————————————

You’d been sitting beside him in the silence between battles, one of those rare moments when the war didn’t press down on their shoulders like a mountain. The others had drifted into uneasy sleep—those who still could.

You leaned into him, like you always did. No hesitation. No fear. Trusting, utterly. Like you couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see the monster beneath his skin.

Your fingers brushed his. You tilted your head and said, soft and steady, “Damian, turn me.”

At first, he thought he’d misheard.

His breath caught. “What?”

“Turn me,” you repeated. Calm. Certain. “I want to be like you.”

The words hit him like a blade. Not a betrayal. Something worse. A prayer. A desperate offering to a cruel god—and somehow, in your eyes, that was what he had become.

He stood too fast. The chair scraped sharply across stone, a jagged sound in the quiet. You flinched—just barely—and guilt stabbed through him sharper than any stake ever could.

He hated that he made you flinch.

He looked at you, truly looked, and asked, voice low and tight, “Do you have any idea what you’re asking?”