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Damian thought he was immune to the deceitful promises of sexual seduction. He had long admitted that his body had needs. And he was no fool, knowing exactly how to satisfy them. He just had never had any desire to satisfy them with the help of another.
The word ‘hot’ was not in his vocabulary where people were concerned. There was ‘pretty,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘dashing,’ and ‘handsome,’ but neither ‘hot’ nor ‘sexy’ was truly among them.
Not until the beginning of sophomore year.
Damian thought his dorm mate looked rather plain the first time he laid eyes on him back in his first semester. Black hair and blue eyes on a five foot eight frame. Danny fell into Damian’s version of generic, considering how many black haired blue eyed men he lived and worked with.
He thought the boy himself was rather plain as well for about five minutes before Danny had fully launched into a rave session about space and how the justice league had revolutionized what earth understood about it. Damian was a little relieved it was a topic he was somewhat knowledgeable on, though Danny proved to far out pace him on the technical despite not having personally experienced it like Damian.
That small first impression had sparked something within Damian. It inspired him to do better, to know more. Sure, Damian had learned a wide variety of subjects to excel. But there were so very few he was passionate about and hardly to that degree. He had never just been passionate about his personal expansion of knowledge. That was too close to Drake’s obsession with it.
But, in the presence of Danny, he felt he could do it without losing himself. He could learn to reach Danny’s level, without a need to surpass it.
So he started with Justice League published space exploration. He studied private and public mission logs and spoke with - practically interviewed - Miss Martian, Superman, and the Flash.
He took copious notes and had a tiny journal with quotes and facts labelled “For Danny.” He thought, perhaps, he’d find something Danny didn’t know and get to see how the other guy handles new information.
That went well… to a degree. Danny already knew 95% of the public information, so he was really only unfamiliar with the notes Damian had taken about internal - some *classified* - Justice League documents. It would have been all well and good if Danny was as plain as Damian had initially thought.
“Where’d you learn this?” He asked excitedly, pointing to a fact about M’arzz that Miss Martian had provided.
Damian froze. In all that time, he didn’t think to create a cover story. He didn’t think he’d need one for his good natured, laid back roommate who still thought pizza rolls were suitable sustenance long term. Who had once attributed an Abraham Lincoln quote to Michael Jackson.
“It’s public knowledge that my family funds the Justice League.” Damian was going to let Danny come to his own ‘smart’ conclusions.
“Wait, so ‘Wayne’ as in WayneTech??”
Perhaps ‘smart’ was too strong of a word. Despite that, Damian couldn’t bring himself to be angry about it. He just nodded and let the conversation change course. Instead the conversation completely died as Danny just said “neat.” And returned to his engineering studies.
To Damian’s embarrassment, his Western Literature grade suffered a bit that first term as he dedicated a good chunk of his free time to the space thing. He decided that would be his next area of study. And he knew just who to contact.
Jason unloaded all of his literary opinions on Damian while figuratively stacking books to read in his hands. Unsurprisingly, his older brother was much more coherent in his passionate discourse about the difference between regency era and victorian than Danny had been. And how comparing Austen to Wilde was a crime against literature that too many people committed for the sole fact that they only really knew a handful of classic authors.
Discussing the topic with Todd did not hold the same appeal as it had with Danny, but Damian still found join in reading the books he’d recommended and finding similar themes that, according to Jason, were lacking in modern mainstream works. Damian wrote a few essays on the books here and there over the holidays with no intention of showing Jason.
He did end up showing Danny though, when the other man asked if he could see it since “it is clearly important to you.”
“Wow.” The word was slow, drawn out as Danny actually took the time to think out his next words. The wait was aggravating to Damian. For a man who always foolishly said things the second he thought them, though he could be quite witty when it came to interpersonal banter, he took his sweet time with explaining whether that was a good wow or a bad wow.
To his relief, Danny not only praised his paper on Dorian Gray and the everyday Faustian bargains the masses might make on a whim, but he did so rather articulately without using the word ‘dude’ once.
“I’m surprised you didn’t reference any of the homoerotic themes.” He said, once again causing Damian pause. What was he talking about? “Hardly mentioned Basil at all really.”
“What on earth are you referring to?” He’d taken to using that phrasing around Danny as he noticed it would make him smile a bit, so there wasn’t much chance for Danny to take it negatively, despite being inherently so.
“Dude,” And there it was. Danny said it with a blank stare. “Basil was veeeeery gay. Like, it got him killed with how much he let Dorian sway him.”
“I thought that was to do with vanity and how the simpleminded masses ignore the sins of creatures they find to be visually appealing.”
Danny actually facepalmed right in front of him and chuckled a bit. His light freckles looked a bit more pronounced in the dorm lighting, especially against the faint rosiness that no doubt matched Damian’s own when embarrassed in such a manner.
“When presented with the hideous picture of Dorian’s soul, Basil still refuses to admit the man is rotten to his core, noting there was still golden hair.” He held his own hair to properly demonstrate.
“I didn’t know you were quite the literature connoisseur.” He refused to accept such a valid critique of his observational skills, instead deflecting to Danny himself.
“Ehhh, you almost fail it once in highschool, makes you super paranoid even into college.”
That was where that conversation ended. Danny so infrequently spoke about before Gotham. Still, his criticisms gave Damian something to think about. How had he missed something so obvious about the inclusion of Basil’s character? In previous renditions of the essay, he’d included how Basil’s purpose was to properly demonstrate from an objective point of view how beautiful Dorian was as a subject. Who better than a classically trained artist to portray the visual truth of Dorian?
Damian reread the scenes that were marked with green tabs, reading every description given about Dorian while Basil was present.
Had Damian said these, they would just be literal descriptions. He didn’t understand why Basil had formed an emotional attachment based solely on them.
He didn’t figure it out that night.
Over the spring and through the summer term, which Damian had decided to fill with extra classes upon hearing Danny would diligently be doing so, Damian started applying himself to learning psychology after Tim mentioned working on screening therapists for Father. Damian also knew it happened to be an area that Danny’s sister, Dr. Jasmine Fenton, had dabbled in on top of her doctorate in Neurology.
He wouldn’t say he was a psychology prodigy, but he would say he was pretty gifted at diagnosing his siblings, much to their chagrin.
Tim had thrown his coffee when Damian suggested that he might be insecure about his place in the family and his over-achieving self-sacrificing tendencies were likely the result of simply being expected to be perfect without any parenting whatsoever. Clearly that was a sign he’d hit the nail on the head, unlike Tim’s mug.
Stephanie similarly, while not one of his siblings, had not appreciated his deduction that her pranks were the result of being ignored as a child, bad behavior being the only thing to win her parents absent attention. He assured her that she could just ask to hang out with any of the family. She subsequently began pranking Damian more. And not just her usual harmless antics that only affected Damian.
Damian had an awfully hard time explaining to Danny how someone had completely removed their dorm door without being caught on any of the cameras… but he could immediately explain why they had done it.
“So you pissed off your brother’s ex who is like a sister to you.” Danny asked slowly, smartly recounting the details, gesticulating with his smooth and slender hands that were only marked with nice rough callouses where his tools would rub against. Damian nodded. “And her solution was to sneak onto campus and destroy school property as ‘a joke?’”
Damian nodded again which earned a one of Danny’s more hearty laughs. The way the corners of his mouth lifted drew Damian’s attention to his cheeks. He wondered if the soft skin he knew Danny to have would hide the respectable firmness of his bone structure should Damian reach his hand out to grasp it. Would his hair be greasy should he continue further to caress it, or did it just naturally shine like obsidian?
“So,” Danny cleared his throat a little, completely undisturbed by Damian’s piercing gaze as Danny’s Adam’s apple bobbed while he swallowed. Damian idly thought it looked delectable, before Danny brought Damian’s attention back up to his face , to his royal blue eyes commanding his presence with their depth and regality, by asking a question. “How are we going to retaliate?”
Damian did not respond as he found himself horrified by the fact that he wondered how good Danny would look glistening with sweat beneath Damian. Wondered how beautiful his stuttered breaths would sound with Damian’s ear so close, kissing the junction where Danny’s neck met his jaw, the joining of their flesh being the cause of the delightful noise.
Damian was absolutely mortified, that had Ms. Brown not stolen their door, he might stoop to levels he never dared before and proposition Danny. Terrified that he found him to be.... No, Damian could not think the word.
Damian excused himself to ‘call Dick,’ who always seemed so at ease with carnal desires, he may just know what to do about this. In actuality he drove the forty-five minutes to Dick’s Bludhaven apartment and waited in his favorite chair till his brother, who was pushing forty and well experienced, returned from work.
Damian smiled at him as he came in and filled him in on all the fascinating things he’d been learning about psychology.
Apparently Ms. Brown and Tim had already told him quite the tale about their response to his studies. Figures Drake would help her. Damian had been prepared to forgive Babs for her interference with the cameras… But Drake would not receive such mercy.
Damian smoothly segwayed from their ridiculous prank into the issue of Danny being attractive. Damian left out the bits of still being half hard from the thought of touching Danny. He left out that his mind had hardly strayed from the mental image of fucking into the other man and how wonderful it would feel.
“Sooooo, you’re upset that the guy you just met is hot?” Dick asked, quite unintelligently.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” His voice adopted his proper cadence that it had been lacking for the entire story. His arousal having petered out from Dick’s ineloquent stumble. “Danny and I have shared a dorm for nearly 12 months.”
The absolute audacity of Dick at some moments astounded Damian. The older man facepalmed in an exaggerated manner. Well, exaggerated to Damian. Which was any at that point considering Dick is the one who had said something that was dumb.
“You’re attracted to your roommate cause you like him.”
Oh. That made a lot more sense than the affections of Basil Hallward.