Gotham had never been kind, but it had been especially cruel to her.
She wasn’t abandoned.
She wasn’t lost.
She was left behind deliberately, because she wasn’t supposed to exist at all.
Her mother had been a thief, sharp-eyed and quick-handed, slipping through Gotham’s underbelly like she had been born in its shadows. She knew how to run, knew how to disappear when things got too dangerous.
She didn’t run fast enough.
She had stolen from the wrong person—someone who didn’t forgive, didn’t forget, didn’t let mistakes go unpunished.
By the time the baby came, her mother knew she was living on borrowed time.
She wasn’t supposed to raise a child.
She wasn’t supposed to survive long enough to see the girl grow.
So she left her in Crime Alley, among the scraps and the shattered glass, where she thought someone would find her.
Where she thought Gotham would take her in the way it took in all lost things.
But Gotham didn’t take her in.
It swallowed her whole.
No one came.
Not the cops—not unless they were dragging another body out of the gutters.
Not the good men—not unless they had already been broken by the city before they could even try to help.
Not Batman—not yet.
Not anyone.
So she did what Gotham had taught her.
She survived.
Because there was nothing else left to do.
Even when Gotham did finally notice her, even when the Bat did finally turn his gaze toward the child who had grown up among the chaos, he saw something too familiar in her eyes.
Something shaped by the city’s worst lessons.
Something shaped by pain before anything else.
And even he hesitated—because saving her meant undoing years of Gotham’s influence.
And he wasn’t sure if anyone could do that.
She wasn’t supposed to survive Gotham.
No one did.
Not the ones thrown into the depths of Blackgate with broken ribs and half-healed wounds, waiting to be forgotten. Not the ones screaming in the Narrows, running until their legs gave out, until the alley swallowed them whole.
And definitely not the ones found abandoned in the heart of Crime Alley, too small to fight back, too young to understand what it meant to be hunted.
But she survived anyway.
By four, she had already seen men die.
By six, she had held the knife herself.
By eight, she had stopped calling for help—because Gotham never answered.
She learned survival the way Gotham taught it.
Through fire. Through blood. Through laughter that echoed too loud in the dark, followed by screams cut short.
Through pain, ripped sharp across her skin, bone grinding against pavement, bruises blooming beneath careful hands that didn’t have time to be gentle.
Through silence—because silence meant safety, and speaking only brought trouble.
Batman didn’t know she existed.
Not yet.
He didn’t know that deep in Gotham’s underbelly, past the gangs, past the crime bosses, past the men with guns and knives and teeth sharper than their morals—
There was something worse.
Something that had never been given the chance to be a child.
Something that had learned, over and over again, that weakness meant death.
Something that had taken Gotham’s lessons too well.
When the Bat finally found her, even he recoiled.
Even Jason Todd—who had crawled out of his own grave, who had seen what Gotham did to its forgotten—paused before he spoke.
Even Damian—raised in blood, trained in war, shaped into something that never feared the dark—had no words for the look in her eyes.
Even Bruce—who thought he had seen every horror this city could conjure—hesitated.
Because this wasn’t a rescue.
This wasn’t saving an orphan lost in the chaos.
This was pulling someone out of the abyss—when they had already learned how to live there.