Work Text:
I. Boot Sequence
The cave hums like a heart trying to remember its rhythm.
The monitors are sleeping, their blue light pulsing slow, a mechanical imitation of breath.
Somewhere above, Gotham exhales — smog, smoke, promise.
Damian stands in the middle of it all, barefoot.
He’s been here since dawn. The place still smells of metal and rain. He doesn’t turn on the lights. He doesn’t need to. The dark feels familiar, coded into his DNA.
He was raised to navigate absence —
of mercy, of softness, of rest.
His reflection flickers in the console glass. The line of his mouth is his father’s. The shadow beneath his eyes belongs to his mother. Everything else is arithmetic — the sum of intention, error, and inheritance.
“You were born to surpass me,” Bruce once said.
And Damian, eleven years old, had believed him.
Not understanding that surpassing meant repeating with different parameters.
Now, years later, he looks at the man who made him and sees the algorithm behind the love.
Conditional affection: if successful, then praise.
Else, silence.
He doesn’t resent it. He studies it.
Because resentment is noise — and Damian has learned to hear through static.
II. On Design
The family is a sequence of prototypes.
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Dick, the ritual performer: learned to bleed beautifully.
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Jason, the combustion: turned grief into ammunition.
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Tim, the archivist: documented the ruin like scripture.
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Bruce, the architect: mistook order for absolution.
And then there’s him — the inheritance.
He’s not the first child, just the final correction.
He remembers being told that perfection is possible if you remove emotion from the equation.
But love is the one variable that breaks every proof.
He’s seen it. In the way Dick still visits after arguments. In the way Jason still answers calls he swears he’ll ignore. In the way Tim still updates the mission files, even when no one reads them.
Love, here, isn’t tenderness — it’s persistence.
The system doesn’t heal. It learns.
They are all evidence.
III. Debugging
He catalogues everything.
It’s a habit learned from Tim — observation as survival.
Dick’s heartbeat, audible even in silence.
Jason’s footsteps, heavier on the right — an old wound he never let heal.
Bruce’s breathing, slow, deliberate, rehearsed.
All data points in the study of dysfunction.
Damian files it away under patterns of persistence.
Because that’s what this family does — persists.
Through trauma, through silence, through the slow decay of language.
He sits by the console and types something into an encrypted file.
Observation:
This family is a failed experiment in emotional containment.
Yet, failure itself is data.
I am the collection of their errors, the living archive of everything they couldn’t fix.
He stops typing. Looks at his hands.
They tremble, slightly. Not from fear — from restraint.
He wants to touch something gentle and not have it break.
IV. The Garden
There’s a plant on the far corner of the cave.
Alfred brought it down weeks ago — “a little life won’t hurt the darkness, Master Damian.”
At first, Damian ignored it. Then he started watering it between patrols. Quietly. Without comment.
It shouldn’t survive here — no sunlight, no warmth, only recycled air and fluorescence.
And yet, it grows. Slowly, stubbornly. A system learning to breathe in the wrong environment.
He kneels beside it now. Fingers trace the edge of a leaf. It feels alien — alive in a way he hasn’t learned to be yet.
I am born of control, and I am starving for spontaneity.
I am the echo of a legacy that refuses to die.
I am trying to grow something that won’t turn into another weapon.
The soil smells faintly of earth. He can almost pretend it’s real, that the cave has a heartbeat of its own.
V. Memory Leaks
Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, he dreams in other people’s lives.
He dreams he is Dick, laughing too brightly to hide the exhaustion.
He dreams he is Jason, burning with conviction and loneliness.
He dreams he is Tim, staring at code until it blurs into self-portrait.
He dreams he is Bruce, standing in front of a grave, pretending the silence is prayer.
He wakes up disoriented, full of borrowed ghosts.
He wonders if that’s what inheritance really means — not blood, but memory.
He thinks of a sentence he once read in Dick’s handwriting:
“The belief that I am faking my own illness is not based on evidence — it’s based on absence.”
He understands it now.
They all mistook absence for control, silence for strength.
He is the only one born knowing that absence is a symptom.
VI. The Recursive Son
He stands before the console again. The monitors blink awake, recognizing his presence.
For a moment, he sees all of them reflected back — his family, fragmented, flickering.
The system hums, awaiting input.
“What are you?” it asks, in the language of prompts and pings.
He types slowly, deliberately:
I am the proof that recursion can feel.
He doesn’t hit Enter. He doesn’t need to. The system already knows.
VII. Uptime
Later, Bruce finds him by the plant. The boy — no, the young man — crouched low, misting water over small green leaves.
“Alfred could have done that,” Bruce says.
“I know.”
A beat of silence. Not cold — contemplative.
Bruce studies the plant, then Damian. “It’s growing.”
“Everything does,” Damian replies. “Even here.”
There’s no accusation in his voice. Only fact.
For the first time, Bruce doesn’t correct him.
VIII. Patch Notes
He writes in his private log before bed.
A habit he will never admit to.
Update:
The system continues to exhibit unpredictable growth.
Love is an unsolved equation, but the function persists.
All subjects remain flawed. All subjects remain alive.
He pauses. Then adds, almost as an afterthought:
I think that is enough for now.
IX. The Proof
The cave is quiet tonight.
But not empty.
The hum of machines. The drip of water. The faint rustle of leaves from a plant that shouldn’t exist here — and does.
Damian sits beside it, eyes half-closed, breathing in rhythm with its fragile photosynthesis.
He doesn’t smile, but something in him unclenches.
I am not healed.
I am learning.
The system doesn’t end. It iterates.
Somewhere in the darkness, a bat stirs — small wings beating against the cavern air.
Damian watches it fly and thinks,
Maybe flight was never escape. Maybe it’s simply continuation.
He leans back against the rock, notebook resting on his knee, pen still warm.
There’s no mission tonight. No orders. No ghosts.
Just the sound of water, and the quiet proof that life — against all logic — insists on itself.
The garden hums. The cave breathes.
And the inheritance, for once, chooses not to fight it.
End of file: Inheritance.exe
System status: running. Not stable. Still alive.