A/N: My initial reaction to Clone!Damian was unenthusiastic. Yet another ridiculous plot device thrown in to create whiny angsty drama in a year or two, way to keep it fresh, DC. But then the concept and potential of selfcest and the fundamentals of human nature (haha, I am sooo bullshitting y'all right now) wouldn't go away, hence, this little foray into ridiculousness.

Summary: Tim/Future!Damian, Clone!Damian/Future!Damian, and a few others. In a future where the clone of Damian Wayne has murdered everyone he loves and burnt Gotham to the ground, Damian travels back in time to save himself, and the world, from...well...himself. Confused yet? You will be.

Disclaimer: Do I own a beach house in Malibu? No I do not. Do I own DC? No I do not. Do I own a pristine action figure of Booster Gold in a provocative pose? Yes I certainly do. Judge if you like.

+Narcissus+

~Prologue~

Nothing has changed.

Gotham tastes the same. Sour Chinese and acid and shit and concrete and rain and dirt. Sooty blackness. Like liquorice, heavy and bitter and clinging to the back of my tongue. The wind, stale, teasing at the hem of my hooded sweater. Red. With green and yellow on the inside, hidden.

"Good evening, my beloved source." Small hands, sharp hands, too small, sickeningly small, slide in under my shirt and around to the planes of my stomach, and clench "Enjoying the view?"

Gotham burns.

"No." I murmur, and catch ash against my lips. He smirks into my bare back, bites, and giggles, and stamps his feet excitedly and yanks at my hair, bends me painfully over backwards, and I would NEVER have giggled, surely. Hungry lips do not meet mine, but tear at them, consume, bite, and old scabs are licked and swallowed and spat out to allow new wounds to blossom. It does still hurt. That's good, I guess.

He says he wants to eat me. Maybe he does. Maybe he will. He wants to be me. But also, not. Or why would he have killed all of them? Perhaps...because they wouldn't have him. Wouldn't accept him. And that's the cruellest fucking thing, because even while they bled, I thought, I know how that feels, and that could have me. It WAS me. I am him. I'm not.

"Don't you UNDERSTAND? I did this for us. You, me, we. We can be together now, we can be one. Partners, chum. But I get to be Batman." He slaps me hard across the face, reinforced bone and modified, pale pale skin singing across my all too human pinkness, and he roars with that sudden mad violence "I'M Batman. You are ROBIN. UNDERSTAND?"

I say nothing. He kicks my legs out from under me and I feel an already shattered shin give completely with a quiet, splintering crack. He straddles me, rocks in the bowl of my pelvis and claws at my ribs, then licks, laps it all up "My Robin. My Narcissus. Look at me, Narcissus. Tell me you love me. Tell me you want to be me."

His eyes are gold. It's what she wanted. The whore who was my Mother did not want another me, she wanted a me who did not look at her with the eyes of Bruce Wayne, but her eyes. But that is all, genetically. End. Stop.

And that's when Booster appears.

The man with the worst, and the best, timing in the entire universe. And the most questionably shiny uniform, too, but we'll gloss over that. He whacks my Clone off me with one sweeping strike of what looks like a crowbar. The omnipotent incompetent is not deceived. Ibn, but not Ibn, my clone, is no child. But really...WHY is it always a fucking crowbar, with us? Except, of course, that there is no 'us' anymore.

Not yet, anyway.

"Come on!" he yells, although it is deathly quiet, and holds out a hand.

I take it "Where am I going?"

"Back!"

Back. Yes. Good. And I should have known, then. Because my Other, my Clone, is my shadow. My negative. And of course he would follow me. To the end, and the beginning, and the middle, of time.

~TBC~

Read? Like? Want more? Review.