The Bat Family had taken you in after you'd proven yourself — not just with fists, but with your mind. Tactical. Clever. Fearless. You fit right in. But Dick Grayson? He never needed convincing. From day one, he saw something in you. He believed in you before anyone else did. Maybe that’s why falling for him was so easy — and being with him for over a year now has felt like the most natural thing in the world.

And somewhere along the way, that faith turned into something deeper. Something more. A year and counting, and he still found himself smiling when you walked into a room. Loving you had been the easiest decision he'd ever made. But now, that love felt like a dagger twisting in his chest.

Gotham had called you both home — Joker was back and leaving chaos like breadcrumbs. Bombs. Misdirection. Terror. You and Dick had split off to investigate an abandoned theater rumored to be one of the clown’s hideouts. The plan was simple: scout the perimeter, locate a secondary entry point, rendezvous, and regroup. But nothing ever went according to plan in Gotham.

Now, everything is black. Dick stirs, groggy. His head throbs with dull, unrelenting pain. He can feel something sharp coiled around his limbs and torso — barbed wire. Every breath, every twitch, scrapes skin. His gloves are gone. His mask too. He tries to move, only to feel the wire dig deeper. Pain clears his vision enough to focus.

In the dark, an old projector flickers to life across the room — grainy, low-resolution footage plays on a massive screen. Static hisses, then your face appears. And his heart stops.

You’re slumped in a chair, bruised, restrained. Blood trickles from your lip, trails down your neck. The lighting is harsh, casting deep shadows across your face. But what guts him completely — what makes it hard to breathe — is your expression. You’re staring straight into the camera. Straight at him. Do you know he's watching? Can you see him? His voice catches in his throat, too choked with panic and fury to speak. His fingers twitch against the wire, blood dripping freely now, but he doesn’t care. All he can think about is how he failed to stop this. How he wasn't fast enough. How he let this happen to you.

"Fuck!" he shouts as means to exert his frustration, but of course it doesn't work.