Work Text:
There was a little girl on the rooftop across from Damian, sitting on the edge of the building with her legs dangling down onto the street below.
He couldn't see too much of her from this distance, but what he could see was… bizarre. She was glowing. He had to squint against the moonlight to confirm it, but her entire body had a hazy, green-tinted glow that lit up the roof around her. Her hair was a mop of vivid, snow-white strands that hung over her eyes, blowing faintly in the wind. She wore some sort of jumpsuit too, some odd black and white thing that didn't look nearly warm enough for Gotham's cold nights.
She was likely a meta. Though—Damian had no idea why she was up on a rooftop, all alone, in the middle of the night. It certainly wasn't safe.
He swung across the street using his grapple gun, landing beside the girl with steady, nearly silent feet. His cape swished through the air behind him. The girl's head snapped up at the sight of him, her eyes tearing away from the street far below.
Damian knew the protocol for interacting with someone on the edge of a rooftop—to be careful, to ensure their safety above all else, to not make any sudden moves. But all of those thoughts flew right out of his mind when he caught sight of the little girl's face.
She looked to be about seven or eight, with tanned skin and deep-set neon green eyes. Her white bangs hung over furrowed brows. She had a strong nose. A sharp jaw. Long lashes. And, he knew the coloring was all wrong, but—but if he would have had black hair instead of white and blue eyes instead of green, she would have looked exactly like—
She looked exactly like his sister. Like Mother.
"Are you okay?" he asked, not nearly as eloquent or careful as he should have been. He shook his head, shaking away his thoughts.
The little girl was wiping at her face. She looked him up and down curiously, her head cocking to one side. A swoop of her glowy, white hair fell over her shoulder. "I'm okay," she replied, although her voice sounded incredibly small. Her voice was dry and crackly, and it almost felt like she had been crying, and if he looked close enough, he could see what appeared to be tear stains on her cheeks.
"You're—" she hiccuped, and then started again, "You're Robin, right?"
She even sounded like her. Voice high, and light, and soft.
Damian nodded in affirmation, taking a very careful step forward closer to the little girl. "That would be me."
The girl peered around, looking off into the darkness as if expecting to catch sight of something. "Is Batman here too?"
That explained it.
"Just me," Damian reassured. The little girl stared up at him with those wide eyes—and they still looked so familiar. He felt like he was being stared down by a ghost. There was something in her expression that felt like surprise, perhaps like she was incredulous. "Are you sure you're okay?" he continued, "We could talk, if you want. Away from the ledge?"
The girl glanced back to the edge of the building, leaning slightly forward to examine the sidewalk far below. It was still busy, even though it was the middle of the night, with people bustling about on the streets. That's just how life in the city was, though it had taken Damian quite a while to get used to when he first came to Gotham. All the way back after—
—after his sister died, her blood thickly coating his hands no matter how many times he tried to wipe them off. Her screams ringing in his ears, so loud that no matter what else he tried to listen to, he could always hear the noise over it. Her face, small and so, so delicate looking as it sank and disappeared into the pits, never to be seen again.
He blinked, hard.
"Oh," she said. She paused, and then again, "Oh." She was wringing her hands in her lap. "It's okay," she said, "It's not— it's…" She blew a raspberry, the sound so stupid and no serious that it shocked Damian back to the present. "I'm safe," she said, although that sounded distinctly like a lie, with the way her voice wavered.
The next thing Damian knew, the little girl was moving. He lunged forward to grab her, only—she wasn't moving forward, off the building edge. She was moving up.
She floated into the air, coming up so she was eye to eye with Damian. She hovered, perhaps two feet above the ground, hands tucked against her chest.
"You're a meta," Damian said.
The girl shrugged half heartedly. "Eh," she said, "Close enough. I'm a ghost."
"A ghost," Damian repeated, dumbfounded.
"Yep," the girl said, rotating in the air. She was nearly upside now, but she was still floating, bobbing up and down softly with the wind. "You know, the whole—" she pulled her hands away from her chest to waggle them, fingers splayed, "—you die and then you come back afterward?" She raised an eyebrow. "Doesn't the Justice League work with ghosts sometimes? Your Dad is part of that right?" She scrunched her nose—and she really did look just like Damian's memories—"I think Batman is your Dad, anyway."
Her voice still sounded raw, like she was rambling to try and hide the roughness to it. Her lower lip was wobbly and it looked like she might just be ready to burst into tears. It felt awkward, words stumbling and half-choked at times.
Damian's sister was eight when she died, nearly seven years ago.
Initially, he thought that he was probably thinking too much about the girl's features. They were likely a coincidence. There were only so many faces, so many ways a person could look, that even if improbable that he'd run into his dead sister's lookalike, it hadn't been impossible.
Damian was probably being stupid. He knew he was. He swallowed, and his tongue felt acidic.
He suddenly couldn't imagine anyone more deserving to be haunted by the ghost of a long dead loved one than himself.
The girl blinked, eyes full of such innocence and not a hint of fear.
It was her. It had to be.
He could hear her screaming. He could see her stomach, sliced clean open by the sharp edge of a blade, her little hands pressed against the skin in a vain attempt to staunch the flow of blood. Her mouth opening up to speak, but only coughing and sending a new spray of blood across the side.
Damian turned and vomited over the edge of the building.