content: just fluff, damian and the reader are muslim, takes place during ramadan, fem!reader, period mention, the loa has their own form of islam not any real life sect.

wc: 1,030k

there is a small - incredibly small, infinitesimally small - part of damian al ghul wayne that grew up resenting the earliest parts of spring.

now, he’d never say that. not as an adult who has more of a check on his temper and, of course, more respect and reverence for the holy weeks you both find yourself in.

still, there’s just the smallest bit of resentment that would pool in his stomach - which now has much more space for that swirling pool given the emptiness that comes with dedicated fasting.

resentment that is born and festering due to the fact that said fasting means these are the weeks where damian cannot, under any circumstances, perform his duties of protecting gotham.

he was too young to fast back when he was raised under the steely hand of his mother and grandfather. he wonders, if he had left to his father when he was older, and had a bit more time to grow within the culture of nanda parbat, would his mother have forced him to train even through the hunger?

would he have thought anything of it if she did? would it have made the times of prayer all the more treasured and restful or made the meals in the moonlit desert nights, all the more flavorful and appreciated?

he feels like he already knows the answer to the hypothetical. seeing as damian wayne is not the type of man to spend time with superfluous questions that he already knows the answer to, he shakes away the thought with a tired sigh.

he came here to gotham and developed into a young man, a hero of sorts, who was old enough to fast. and the second he did, alfred always made sure to lock away the robin suit, restrict his access to the batcave, and chide that he would not be allowed to strain himself with the rigorous hunt of criminals and jumps across rooftops on an empty stomach.

even as a young teen, small for his age and having inherited bruce’s nigh-aggressive need to slink himself into the batcave, damian was always shut down by pennyworth’s chiding.

“master damian, you have taraweeh to attend!”

“master damian, this is close to your only time to eat and i refuse to have you accompany your father and then be on your way to school completely starved!"

everybody who has at one point or another called wayne manor their home knows that alfred’s word is more final than any bat.

thus, damian would put on his trademark bratty scowl, and eat and pray and fast and resent until he grew big enough to realize that the old butler was scolding him and keeping him on schedule as an expression of care, rather than as an underestimation of his abilities to balance his religious obligations with his vigilantism.

he smiles at the memories, although nowadays it’s usually not the old gentleman’s responsibility to keep the youngest of the bats in line.

it’s you now. his beloved, his precious jewel, his sun and stars in the sky. the new and true mrs. wayne (although you still find yourself flush with embarrassed warmth whenever somebody uses that title.)

you too had to take a break from being his batgirl every ramadan; meaning your middle and high school years were often filled with a mutual understanding. he did treasure the time that you would spend praying beside each other in the hallways in front of the art room - your prayer mats and bows perfectly paralleled - his green eyes able to flick over just the tiniest bit to admire the flowing of your form, and the sweetness of your voice as you whispered in arabic.

it taught him to find beauty in the practice of the weeks-long holiday even in the foreign and occasionally stifling landscape of gotham academy.

now, he has grown as a man - he knows he has to fast, eat, and pray. not with resentment, but with unadulterated respect and love, if it means allah will grace him to live another day beside you.

he handles nights like this not with anger at the fact he can’t accompany his family on patrol, but with gratitude that he can keep you wrapped in his arms. that he can stroke your hair. that he can provide you with all the food and blankets and bodily warmth that you deserve when those few torturous days of your cycle roll along; permitting you to break your fast, but not to do much else other than sleep, whine at the soreness in your abdomen and cling to his now much taller form.

he’s too lovesick to ever reject a request from his wife. he’s happy to indulge in holding you; just as he starved for food in the middle of the day, he’s also starved for your touch.

he hums at the way your lips press against the brown hair on his temple when you rise from your nap.

alfred the cat nudges at the edge of the bed, meowing either for food or attention. you roll just a bit as if to answer his cries only for damian’s arms to pull you back - with the same distinct pout he would have as a teen, but now with the added and unquenchable thirst for your affection he’s come to know as your husband.

you, ever-able to read him, let out the smallest of chuckles and kiss his temple again. then his forehead, his ear, the slight hook of his nose and the sharp line of his chin before being pulled into his chest.

“alfred needs to eat, habibi.” you whisper, amused at how his possessiveness for you would apply even to a beloved cat.

“he can wait until sundown like the rest of us.” damian snarks and his green eyes delight at the sound of your laughter muffled against his black shirt.

“ramadan mubarak, damian.” he hears you whisper between chuckles and interlocks his fingers with yours, joyous that you are only his and he is only yours.

“ramadan mubarak, my sweet.”

-

selina never imagined herself a mother. but yet, here she is making a daughter of you.

she’d found you on a wintery night in an oversized coat, drenched from the almost constant sleet covering the cracked pavement and asphalt streets surrounding central park. her sharp eyes took in the sight of you with a long pause and a click of her tongue. she sees you - sees through you - a pickpocket with a sweet smile, a pretty little face that comes with a pure demeanor and a wicked mind for schemes.

and you see her, leather clad and illuminated under wet orange street lights, caressed by the extreme reds and blues of police sirens rushing by to attend to whatever crime, violent or otherwise, has spread itself across park avenue. she’s the most beautiful woman you have ever seen.

so for christmas, selina got herself a daughter. she found herself pulling you along to get cleaned up in her apartment, setting up an extra room - internally, noting that it’s just until she can find a more responsible parent, or give retribution to whatever poor sap left their beautiful kid on a park bench for the holidays.

working hard and stealing harder to put you through school.

she snarks that it’s no big deal, that she’s not a motherly type - all while working her slender fingers into your hair, braiding it bit by bit with the same intricate precision that she might have when cracking the code of a safe.

she gives you pretty clothes and getting you classes that teach you to defend yourself against the ever-frightening threats that look around the corner and crevices of gotham city’s lower east side.

selina doesn’t get nervous or frozen particularly often but she can’t help but stiffen just a bit when one day - months into your residency which she still swears is a temporary arrangement - you go from calling her “selina” to casually slipping out “mami.”

it was a simple sentence too - “mami, we’re out of eggs.” it’s not something that should phase a seasoned cat-burglar; a criminal who occasionally fashions herself a hero and constantly goes toe-to-toe with the city’s iconic bat. and yet it does.

“what?” she says, oh so quietly as if she doesn’t even realize the breath required to make the word as it leaves her lungs.

“huevos, mami. we need eggs.”

and with that simple request her mind has set your residency and connection from temporary to permanent. she has stolen you from your old life. you are a diamond in the rough and like every diamond she has stolen you are hers, permanently, regardless of your original caretaker.

hers to sew a costume for that will aid your identity as her sidekick. a motherly catwoman, and her precocious kitten-like stray.

hers to protect. to protect from the seductive and predatory gangsters that line the gotham streets. to protect from speeding cars and corrupt cops.

you are hers to cover in blankets, that are warmed on her radiator. it’s the blistering hot kind that clangs with that harsh metallic sound - water clenching and expanding through the steel pipes of the old apartment.

and in the summer, you’re hers to place in cute girlish sundresses. hers to count her spare change for (the cash she can afford to carry around after rent and bills are paid, clothing, commute, and less-than-legal armor, weapons and jewelry). to sit on the stoops of the downtown brownstones, while admiring how you somersault, laugh and skip with younger kids - all gathered around the gushing, clear rush open fire hydrants.

you’re hers to share popsicles and pizza slices with as you’re left to wonder how it never affects her slim figure.

hers to speak spanish to, like her mamí did. (although she curses at you less at least - you’re less spoiled on account of growing up with less than she did, and you’re less trouble than she ever was.)

you shy clear of drugs and beer, your only remotely painful addiction is ballet class, and your smile is sweet.

she’s a good mom, a good catwoman and a good protector. 

but she can’t protect you from everything.

she can’t protect you from noticing a billionaire’s newly adopted son sitting next to you in class.

she can’t protect you from brushing your fingers across his bruised knuckles, noticing the way he jumps from scrawny to filled out and muscular over just a few months.

she can’t protect you from the way your dimples show, lips curving up at the way his green eyes catch yours in english class.

the way you bond with him over being street kids. the way you bond with this boy - this sweet, rash boy - in the day, unknowing of what you two do in the night, costumed identities hidden from even each other.

the tragedy she knows all to well. the tragedy of falling for a doomed orphan who acts as a savior in darkness of gotham nights.

she can’t protect you from that.

“i’m not talking about killing penguin, or scarecrow, or dent. i’m talking about him. just him. and doing it because... because he took me away from you."

and specifically the mention that he’s not asking bruce to kill dent.

jason knows that two-face used to be bruce’s friend, but could also be within his full right to ask that of him because two-face in this continuity killed jason’s father.

two face is directly the reason why jason ended up at a malnourished, homeless orphan on top of all of the mental emotional maladjustment that he had before being adopted by bruce, and he is still more than willing to view him as redeemable.

it’s really proof that jason isn’t sadistic, or being brutal just for the sake of being unnecessarily brutal.

he literally only kills all the people that he does to force bruce into a situation where he has to kill the joker because that’s how much of an irredeemable force of evil jason views the joker as. and why does the view the joker as irredeemable?

because jason views killing as a crime somebody can be redeemed from, even the murder of his own parent, which is probably why he is able to do it so much easier than bruce. but you know what is an irredeemable crime to him?

taking away childhood innocence.

when little jason says that his first day being robin is “the best day of my life,” he’s not exaggerating.

you can even see it in the scene where he fights the riddler and his goons.  he just likes the playfulness of it all, the childhood fun, the jokes, the colors.

he literally views those three years with bruce, regardless of how they ended, as worth more than anything in his life. because bruce allowed him to be a child, which is something not even his own birth parents did.

he is more than willing to forgive dent, the villain that took those birth parents away from him. because by the time his dad died, jason had already cast them off because they weren’t able to provide him a childhood.

but he is not willing to forgive the one who took him away from bruce. the joker destroyed the only sense of childhood jason ever had and did it twofold, not only by killing him, but by crippling barbara. 

that’s why he’s able to cast away his criminal father so easily.

that’s why he threatens to murder any of the drug runners working for him if they sell to kids. that’s why the first time the audience sees him use, aggressive force as robin, it’s at a drug dealer/pimp who is willing to hurt kids.

the joker is the one person worth batman killing, in jason’s eyes, because he took away the childhood of jason, by permanently killing his life as robin and barbara’s as batgirl.

so when jason holds the gun and bruce silently gives jason permission to do kill the joker, by walking away, that’s not good enough. jason wants bruce to do it because bruce is the person who gave jason a childhood.

by killing the joker, by destroying the person who took away that childhood from jason, jay believes he can give it back through vengeance because that’s what batman is.

“i forgive you for not saving me but why on god's earth is he still alive?!”

bruce also lost his childhood to a killer, and jason is desperately trying to make him realize the reason he became batman was so that would never happen again. and then it did. it’s right in front of bruce’s face.

that’s why jason thinks he should make the exception. because who knows how many other children lost a part of their lives to the joker?

killing the joker, ensuring that he cannot do that to anyone else and recovering the childhood innocence of anyone he can by getting that vengeance, in jason’s view, is the point of batman.

and he doesn’t even need to do it for anyone else, because jason is willing to take up that burden for him as the red hood.

jason doesn’t blame bruce for losing him. bruce gave him jason his childhood, he knows bruce is not the one responsible for taking it away. it’s the fact that he didn’t get vengeance for it being taken away. that bruce, by keeping the joker alive, betrayed the very meaning of what batman was supposed to be.

and bruce can’t even say jason’s wrong.

bruce says he thinks about killing the joker every day but that he doesn’t because he knows he would fall down the slope afterward, but i don’t think jason believes that.

i would bet money that if bruce had killed the joker, jason would never take another life nor would he allow bruce to do so.

because jason just wants the joy of being at batman’s side again and if killing anyone else contradicted that joy then he wouldn’t let it happen. again, jason views killing as redeemable if it doesn’t come with the cost of someone’s childhood and killing the joker does not come at the cost of somebody’s childhood. bruce would view himself is unforgivable, but jason wouldn’t.

and all that on top of jensen ackles’ vocal delivery, jason literally sounds like he’s about to burst into tears… god.