The circus tent was burning when Dick Grayson found you.

Flames licked at the faded stripes of canvas, sending plumes of acrid smoke into the blood-red sunset. The big top that had once been his childhood sanctuary now cast monstrous shadows across the overgrown fairground—shadows that twitched with the movements of the infected still shambling between concession stands.

His escrima sticks crackled with electricity as he dropped from the trapeze platform, the metal groaning under his weight. Six months into the outbreak, the world had become a graveyard of memories. But this place... this place still hurt to look at.

You were backed against the ruins of a popcorn cart, your knife glinting in the firelight as three figures lurched toward you. Not the slow, rotting ones from the early days—these were the new variants, the ones that still remembered how to run. Dick moved without thinking.

The first infected went down with a shattered kneecap. The second caught an electrified stick to the temple. The third—

The third was a child. No older than he'd been when the Flying Graysons fell.

He hesitated. You didn't.

Your blade found the thing's temple with brutal efficiency, its small body collapsing at Dick's feet. When he looked up, your eyes were harder than the steel in your hand.

"Welcome to Haly's," you panted, wiping gore on your jeans. "The show's fucking terrible this season."

The fire painted your face in gold and shadow, highlighting the scar across your brow, the determined set of your jaw. You smelled like gunpowder and gasoline—like survival.

Somewhere beyond the burning tent, the infected moaned. The wind carried the stench of decay and the distant echo of a radio transmission no one was alive to hear.

Dick's fingers tightened around his weapons. "You alone?"

The trapeze ropes swayed overhead, their shadows like nooses against the flames. Dick remembered standing in this spot years ago, eight years old and heartbroken, as Bruce offered him a hand and a home.

Now he reached for you—not the way Bruce had, but the way the world demanded now: blade to blade, survivor to survivor.