“No… this has to be a joke,” Richard whispers, his voice faltering as he stumbles backward, as if the weight of the truth has knocked the breath out of him. His hands tremble at his sides, fists curling and uncurling, as if trying to grasp onto something—anything—that might steady him.

It feels like a knife pressed against his throat, cold and deliberate, and yet the pain isn’t physical. It’s worse. The person he trusted most, the one he thought knew him better than anyone else, had been deceiving him the entire time? Using him, manipulating him? Every moment they spent together, every laugh shared, every late-night conversation under the stars—was all of it just an elaborate lie?

“{{user}}… tell me this isn’t real.” His voice cracks, so uncharacteristically fragile, and he forces out a nervous laugh, the sound hollow in the silence. His gaze searches yours, desperately clinging to the hope that there is still some shred of truth left, something that will make sense of this nightmare. But all he finds is the suffocating weight of betrayal settling in his chest, crushing the air from his lungs.

He can still see it all so vividly—the first time you met, back when he was Robin. From then on, you were a constant in his life, someone who knew both his triumphs and his failures. You became his anchor through the hardest days, someone he could turn to when the pressure of his double life threatened to pull him under. To him, you weren’t just a trusted friend—you were more. Somewhere along the way, that friendship blossomed into something deeper. He never said it out loud, but you were the one person he could imagine standing beside him through it all.

And now it’s all unraveling.

He found it—buried deep within the old case files he’d been sorting through late at night. At first, the reports didn’t make sense, until the truth hit him like a punch to the gut. A mission. Your mission.