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After Richard leaves, Damian stays on the window seat, thinking. He told Richard that he would look into masturbation – the very word makes him suppress a shudder, remembering the mortifying conversation he’d just had – so he should probably do that.
He makes sure Richard closed the door securely and that no one is nearby, then goes into his bathroom, locks the door and presses the corner of one of the tiles in the wall. The tile pops loose, and Damian pries it away to retrieve what he likes to call his classified cell phone. In other words, the one his father doesn't know about, which Damian uses for anything he thinks Batman, as a vigilante, or Bruce Wayne, as his father, would give him grief over. He made most of the device himself, cobbling together the hardware and coding the software over several months. Therefore, only he is able to use it, due to the five different passwords needed just to unlock the phone and the encoded mix of Arabic, French, Mandarin and English that he set as the system's only available language.
Opening the Internet browser, he types in female masturbation. He hates using feminine terms to describe himself, but he knows that most articles and web pages concerning female genitalia refer to women, and he wants to get helpful results as fast as possible. The top result (excluding the pornography sites) is a WikiHow page; he raises a dubious eyebrow, but opens the link.
There aren't any diagrams, thank Allah, and the terminology is all clinical. He still blushes furiously as he reads, his face burning in a mix of embarrassment and something he doesn't quite want to name. He commits the important parts of the instructions to memory, then exits the browser, locks the phone, and hides it back in the secret compartment behind the tile.
Damian hesitates, unsure what to do next. His thought process is hampered by the persistent lack of focus that's been plaguing him over the past couple of weeks, and he splashes cool water on his face from the sink in an attempt to concentrate. He really hopes that following the instructions on the web page will help as Richard said it would.
As he thinks of his adoptive brother, an image flashes unbidden in his mind's eye: Richard, naked with his legs spread, hand working between his thighs. Damian banishes the scene as quickly as it comes, horrified at himself for thinking such a thing, and blames the errant thought on his recent wandering mind. He determinedly ignores the spike of heat that the idea of Richard pleasuring himself sends between his own legs.
Damian takes a deep breath and unlocks the bathroom door, sitting on his bed. He glances at the door leading to the hallway, and gets up again to turn the key and engage the deadbolt. Drake may be annoyed if he finds out about the locked door (Father is very firm in his beliefs that there should always be an easily available exit, and he's instilled that principle into his third son), but dinner isn't due for another ninety minutes, and no one should disturb Damian until then. He walks to the window, drawing the curtains, then makes his way back to the bed. There, he pauses to consider whether or not he should remove his clothes; he decides against it, too embarrassed to expose himself in that way, even with no one able to see him.
Leaning back against the pillows, he inhales, holds the breath for a count of four, and releases it. There's nothing wrong with what he's about to attempt, he tells himself. It's a natural biological process. With that thought, he gathers his courage and slips a hand beneath the waistband of his sweats.
He stops moving, letting himself adjust to the novel sensation of a hand between his legs. He isn't wearing underwear, prefers not to if he isn't going anywhere before patrol, so it's skin on skin. The only barrier remaining is the curls of his pubic hair, pressing against his palm where it rests just above his crotch. After a few moments, he ventures lower, fingertips dipping into the top of his slit. The instructions said to touch his clitoris, and he knows where that is, just below where his fingers currently reside; he's known the precise layout of his own body since he was ten years old. He just didn't give much thought to what this particular part could be used for.
Damian inches his hand lower still, until he brushes against a nub that sends sparks of pleasure up into his abdomen. Found it, he thinks as he inhales sharply, and moves the tips of his index and middle fingers in a slow, experimental circle. He's rewarded with another burst of sensation, so he does it again almost unconsciously, repeating the movement over and over with increasing speed. It feels – it feels amazing, like nothing he's ever felt before. He suppresses what would have been an embarrassingly loud moan, his hips twitching up into the touch.
He's panting, Damian registers dimly, his chest heaving. He can feel the rising intensity of sensation with every rub of his fingers over that nub. It builds steadily, and something tightens in his lower belly, his breath catching in anticipation – of what, exactly, he doesn't know. He knows what orgasms are, but he has no idea what they feel like, other than a vague concept of great pleasure. He can't really imagine a pleasure greater than what he's already feeling.
He feels as if he's approaching the edge of a cliff, not knowing what lies below. The drop draws closer, and just as he thinks he's going to fall into the unknown, there's a sudden sharp stab of pain from his groin.
He snatches his hand away involuntarily, the pleasure ebbing to a dull pulse immediately. “What the fuck?” he breathes, not mentally present enough to remember his father and Alfred instructing him against the use of foul language. He lifts his hips and pushes his sweats down, examining himself for what might have caused the pain. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. His labia are slightly more swollen and flushed than usual and the sheen of moisture between them is new, but that's normal according to the WikiHow page. It's supposedly a sign of arousal, and Damian is definitely aroused. He presses his fingers to his clitoris again, rubbing in the same motion, and it feels just as good as before – right up until he's on the edge of what he assumes to be orgasm, at which point the hurt returns and he has to pull back once again.
Now that he's expecting it, he recognizes it as the burn of an overstimulated nerve, like when his skin touches something hot. He supposes that makes a sort of sense, given how many nerve endings he recalls are in the clitoris, but why would he be overstimulated before he even reaches his orgasm?
He tries once more, with the same result. He thinks that if he could just keep moving his fingers through the pain instead of pulling away, even if only for a few seconds, he would tumble over that cliff – but his subconscious forces him to stop touching himself when it starts to hurt. He pulls his pants back on, even more frustrated than before he had started this endeavor.
He washes his sticky hand and tries to read a book Alfred recommended to him a while ago, one of the few things he's actually been able to concentrate on recently. The butler figured out Damian's taste in literature even before Damian himself, which is mildly unsettling, but even the endless plot twists and drama of The Inheritance Games fail to keep his attention. He sets the book back on his nightstand and resigns himself to spending the evening irritable and restless. He'll try to sleep and look for an answer to his body's unexpected self-sabotage tomorrow.