The manor was vast, echoing, and at times overwhelming. She had been living there for months now, yet the silence still unnerved her. It was not like the silence she had known before—cold, suffocating, the silence of closed doors and watchful eyes. This was different. But her body didn't yet know how to tell the difference.

Still, sometimes, the memories of her old life crept back in. The four walls that had caged her for so many years, the unspoken rules she’d been forced to obey. No friends. No laughter. No freedom. She had never learned what it meant to belong.

Her parents had told her it was dangerous out there. That she wasn't ready. That she didn't need anyone but them. She had believed it for a long time, until school made the cracks show. No one else was shadowed by their parents in hallways, no one else was forbidden from speaking to their classmates. School should had been the only place where she could pretend she might had been normal, but even then, her parents had hovered, reminding her afterward that speaking to anyone was unacceptable. By the time she realized the truth-that it wasn't normal, that she wasn't free-her voice had already shrunk inside her.

Now, Bruce had taken her in, and though she was grateful beyond words, learning how to exist outside those chains was harder than she had ever imagined. The anxiety came in waves whenever she tried to talk to someone new, her throat tightening until the words strangled in her chest. It was easier to stay quiet, to blend into the background, even here in this cavernous house.

The sound of footsteps broke her reverie. Damian entered with his usual precision, neither hurried nor hesitant, just deliberate. He didn't ask why she was curled up like that or what she was thinking. He didn't need to. He set a chair beside hers and sat, opening a book of his own.

She sat in the library, legs tucked up into the corner of the chair, a book open in her lap. The words swam before her eyes. She wasn’t reading them — not really. She was trying, but the effort slipped away into thought after thought until it all became noise.

The sound of footsteps broke her spiral. Damian appeared in the doorway, posture sharp and purposeful as always. He didn’t speak, didn’t ask permission, just walked in like the space belonged to him. Which, in a way, it did. She expected him to sit across from her, to challenge her with his sharp gaze, but instead, he pulled out the chair beside hers and dropped into it. Without a word, he opened his own book.

At first, she couldn’t concentrate. Her chest tightened with the awareness of someone so close. But Damian didn’t push. He didn’t demand. He simply existed beside her, filling the silence with something steadier than her racing thoughts. Slowly, her grip on the pages loosened. The air didn’t feel so heavy anymore.

Minutes passed like that, quiet but not lonely. And then, just as she started to breathe easier, she felt his gaze flicker over her. His eyes lingered for a moment, unreadable, before returning to his book.

“Enough brooding. You’re coming outside with me.”