The stone jungles of Gotham show mercy only to those already dead. For you—a drifter, a child lost between one gray orphanage and the next—it had always been an endless, frozen night. Each shelter was just another chapter of purgatory, and in that reeking hell of disinfectant and despair, you found the only soul that felt like kin.

His name was Jason. Jason Todd.

He became your first and only friend. You were two shards of the same shattered bottle—no family, no future, both broken in your own ways. Jason wore his fury like armor. He was sharp, rough-edged, all barbs and glass, and you heard his trademark “you’re annoying” more often than your own name. But behind that armor hid a protector. If any of the older kids laid a hand on you, that prickly hedgehog turned into a wolf.

You were his opposite—an incurable, almost painful optimist, desperately searching for specks of light in a city that fed on darkness. You were the part of your friendship that still believed in good.

And then it all collapsed.

Jason was adopted. Some “nice family” from the upper class. He simply vanished. No goodbye. No note. As if you had never existed. And when his shadow left those cold corridors behind, your fragile world turned to dust. Your defender was gone, and hell opened its gates for real. The beatings from older kids became routine, the adults’ indifference their only form of “care.”

You got used to it. Learned to swallow pain and stay silent. Then the news came—screaming headlines in the Gotham Gazette. “Explosion.” “Joker.”

A child’s curiosity, tangled with a freezing dread, pulled you toward the scene. You slipped under the yellow police tape while the cops weren’t looking. And among the smoking ruins, beneath a filthy, blood-soaked sheet—you saw him. Dead. Your only friend.

That day, your world didn’t just turn gray. It died. Gotham had won. All the colors you’d ever searched for were nothing but reflections of that explosion’s fire.

And from that pit of despair, a hand reached out to you. Hope. You were adopted. Taken into a family.

But it wasn’t salvation. It was a descent into a different kind of hell—cold, ancient, and merciless. Your new family was the Court of Owls.

You ceased to be you. They stripped away your name, your past, your will. From that moment, you were a Talon.

Endless training turned your body into a perfect weapon. Experiments crippled your mind. Torture erased your identity. They drowned you in chemicals, pumping a serum through your veins that made you their obedient puppet—and left you writhing in agony whenever they withheld the dose. They forged an ideal soldier. And they succeeded.

Years passed—years washed away in blood and marked by quiet murders in the name of the Court.

Tonight was supposed to be no different. The mission was simple: eliminate Bruce Wayne. You were sent as a pair—you and another loyal hound of the Court. No reason to expect serious resistance.

But Gotham loves its cruel jokes. The entire Bat-Family was waiting. The rooftop of Wayne Manor became an arena under the cold, indifferent moon. Bullets sang. Batarangs clattered against stone. Two Talons against a pack of vigilantes. The odds were hopeless.

You fought like cornered beasts. And in the chaos of that deadly dance, one strike—Nightwing’s, perhaps—landed squarely on your mask. White ceramic shattered. Half the mask broke away, revealing your face. Older now. But still recognizable.

And in that instant, one of them froze. The figure in the red helmet—the one who fought the fiercest, the dirtiest—stopped as if he’d hit an invisible wall. He stood motionless, staring through the slits of his mask, straight at you.