Chapter Text
When you were young, hope was short of supply.
Gotham was not a forgiving city to the tender-hearted. If you were to survive its concrete, oil-slicked, and graffitied jungle, you needed to wrap yourself in steel and weld the seams shut.
Violence embedded itself within the soil, the water and air, poisoning the weak to do its bidding.
You learned of violence very young. You learned it through how neighbors looked down on you and how your classmates whispered about your smell. You learned it through your father’s bellowing voice and your mother’s tears, you learned it through their disagreements on money and how your father clung onto every penny tight. You learned it through how your father did not mourn his parents’ passing, but how he mourned an empty bottle.
You learned of violence through poverty, through family, through vice.
A lot of memories from back then were hazy. It was the only way to survive.
But one night stuck to you.
Hope was short of supply, but still alive.
It came in the silhouette of a bat, and later on, a bird.
Batman and Robin kept you looking to the skies when stars were blinded by Gotham’s yellowed light. They were a North Star that kept your sweet heart intact, knowing that there were heroes that walked among you.
No one in Gotham relied on cops to save them, but vigilantes. They became mythic in a way, how everyone could feel the weight of their stares but never find them. They were the figures in the corner of your eye, but when you looked, they were gone. Stories about them got more outrageous the more locals telephoned it around, turning a simple foiled bank robbery into a Hero’s Journey full of mysticism and impossibility.
Kids in your class would always lie about talking to Batman and Robin, using their names more as social capital than an inspiring story of hope, but everyone knew if you had truly met the Caped Crusader, you were either a criminal or a victim of a horrible tragedy.
You were the latter.
Looking back at it now, it was a simple equation. One alcoholic father plus one abused mother equaled a traumatic act of violence that wiped an eleven year old’s mind clean.
One moment there was your mother’s blood-curling scream and hot tears running down your cheeks, and the next an impossibly huge black figure darker than night stood between your mother and your father, while a smaller set of arms dragged you away from the gruesome sight.
That was the first time a vigilante saved you.
Robin’s arms were warm as he held you as you cried your eyes out, finally letting go of all your sorrow and grief you let accumulate all these years. He sat with you in the stairwell, yellow cape around your shoulders, hands covering your ears as your father was dragged away from Batman and cops. All you could hear was your own roaring heartbeat, and the quiet coos coming from the young boy only a few years older than you.
Robin in the papers always looked older and formidable, but that night, you learned even at a young age, you could be strong and make a difference. His voice cracked, he smelled of sweat and iron, his hair was a greasy mess and his teeth were a bit crooked. He was just a kid like you, who spoke with a thick Gotham accent like your own, someone human and real and warm.
You could be Robin, a symbol of hope. A hero that could stand with Batman. Someone who protected and comforted ones who cried.
Even when Batman vanished into the night after your father was taken away, Robin held your hand as you spoke to cops, men everyone in your life urged you to never speak to, and gave you the strength to vomit all your father’s dirty secrets.
“You’re going to be ok, now, little bird,” Robin murmured after the cops left. “The worst has passed. You’re going to be ok.”
It felt like he was lying, your life up till then a myriad of disappointment and sorrow, but the way he held out a pinky to promise felt different than the rest. He had taken off his glove, and you remembered how calloused and scarred his hands were. Robin was a symbol of hope, bright and powerful, but even he could get hurt. Even he was mortal, skin rough and bumpy against yours from freshly healed flesh.
“I’m always in the shadows. Don’t be afraid to call out.”
And then he was gone.
But you didn’t lose hope, because he was right.
Your father was convicted, and your mother was taken in by a Wayne-sanctioned women’s shelter. Your mother could finally laugh, and you slept soundly at night even in an unfamiliar home, because the dark did not scare you.
It held hope.
Gradually, your time before Batman and Robin felt like a dream. Your time after, felt like a rebirth.
Your belly was full, a roof was over your head, and you even made friends. Sometimes grief would hit you in unexpected ways- the smell of cigarettes or the clatter of a glass bottle- but just as if he could sense your tears begin to fall, when you looked up to the black sky, you always caught a flash of yellow in the corner of your eye.