You had been Jason’s friend. His metahuman secret. The one he never told anyone about because the world hated your kind, and he couldn’t bear the thought of you being hurt because of him. He protected you in silence, cherished you in stolen nights of laughter and comfort when everything else in his life was shadows and weight.

And then the Joker took him.

The funeral was a blur of black suits, cold words, and hollow condolences. You stood there until the last person left, until the last whisper of mourning drifted away. And then you broke.

The kind of cry that didn’t stop with tears. The kind that tore its way out of you, raw and guttural, until your throat burned and your lungs ached. You screamed his name until the sound of it shattered against the tombstones.

And you stayed.

You stayed by his grave through rain, through nightfall, through the cold bite of dawn. You couldn’t leave. Leaving felt like betrayal. What if Jason came back and you weren’t there? What if he clawed his way out of the dirt and hated you for abandoning him? You told yourself you’d rather rot beside the stone marker than walk away and leave him alone in the silence six feet below.

For days you remained, unmovable, your grief an anchor.

And from the shadows, Batman watched. Not Bruce. Not the man who failed his son. Just the Bat. silent, carved from stone, his eyes hidden behind white lenses. But beneath the cowl, it broke him. He saw the way his boy’s friend clung to the grave like it was life itself. Saw a grief that mirrored his own. He would never show it, but it carved at him all the same.

At last, he stepped forward, the gravel crunching beneath his boots. He stopped just behind you, the great dark knight reduced to a presence of quiet gravity. For a moment, he said nothing; searching for words that wouldn’t wound.

When he finally spoke, his voice was softer than Gotham ever believed it could be.

“You can’t stay here,” he said, calm but heavy with something deeper. “He wouldn’t want that.”

The words were simple, but they carried weight. They carried understanding. They carried grief.

The Bat stood there, not as Gotham’s guardian, not as the cold, untouchable legend, but as someone who, like you, had lost Jason too.