Your birth was messy, chaotic, and exactly what anyone would expect when the two most unhinged people in Gotham decided to play house for a night. Still, somehow, you came out mostly sane. A little jagged at the edges, maybe, but you could think straight when it mattered. Nobody outside those walls gave a damn that one of Gotham’s most infamous clowns was pregnant. The news never leaked. No headlines. No GCPD task force. Just another secret swallowed by Arkham’s concrete guts.

Harley didn’t leave you alone in a cell. She kept you with her—right there in the padded observation room she’d claimed as her personal suite during one of her longer “vacations.” Pink and blue crayons scribbled over every inch of wall she could reach. A nest of stolen blankets and pilfered pillows in the corner. She’d sit cross-legged on the floor for hours, cradling you against her chest while she hummed twisted lullabies or talked to “Mistah J” through the two-way mirror like he could hear her. Sometimes she’d dress you up in miniature versions of her old outfits—tiny jester hat, red-and-black onesie patched together from torn inmate scrubs. She’d giggle and spin you around until you were dizzy, calling you her “little miracle” or “the best joke we ever pulled.” Other times she’d cry—big, messy sobs—promising you’d both get out soon, that Daddy was just busy planning the biggest show ever. The guards mostly left her alone. Nobody wanted to deal with the hysterics that followed if they tried to take you away.

You stayed in that room until you were six. Then the night came when everything burned. Your father’s laughter echoed through the vents right before the first explosion. Harley scooped you up, pressed a sloppy kiss to your forehead, and shoved you toward a ventilation grate she’d loosened weeks earlier. “Go, puddin’! Mama’s gotta help Daddy finish the punchline!” Smoke and screams swallowed her last words. You crawled through ducts until you dropped into a collapsed hallway and ran.

After that, the streets became your playground. You bounced between safehouses, learned to hot-wire mopeds before you could reach the pedals properly, figured out which dealers gave free candy to kids who kept their mouths shut. You watched henchmen come and go, listened to endless rants about the Bat—how he ruined everything, how he always showed up at the worst moment, how one day someone would finally break him. The name grated on you like sand in a wound. Every “Batman” that fell from painted lips felt like a personal insult.

So you started scheming.

Not loud. Not crazy. Precise. You were eleven when the plan locked into place. Stolen GCPD maps. Hours crouched over police scanners. Trips to the docks for rope that wouldn’t snap under two hundred pounds of muscle and Kevlar. You built everything yourself: pressure plates from old elevator parts, knockout gas mixed from cleaning supplies and stolen chemistry textbooks, a chair bolted straight into the concrete floor of an abandoned MTA maintenance tunnel. You tested every knot until your palms were raw. You rehearsed his possible escapes in your head until you could counter them in your sleep.

And it worked.

Perfectly.

He woke up slow—groggy from the gas, wrists lashed behind the chair back with nautical rope, ankles secured to the legs, torso wrapped tight enough that even his chest barely rose and fell. No belt. No batarangs. No comms. Just the single bulb swinging overhead, throwing his shadow long and sharp across damp tiles.

You stepped into the circle of light. Twelve years old. Hood up. Grin sharp enough to cut. You tilted your head, studying the way the white lenses tracked you without blinking.

For once, the city’s boogeyman wasn’t the one calling the shots.

He didn’t speak at first. Just watched. Assessed. Calculated. The silence stretched, thick and heavy.

Inside the cowl, Bruce Wayne felt something unfamiliar twist in his gut.