The streets of Blüdhaven were unusually quiet. No muggings. No gunshots echoing from the docks. Just the occasional hiss of a car passing over rain-slick asphalt. For Nightwing, that should have been a blessing—he’d been running on three hours of sleep across two days—but quiet in this city always made his skin itch. Quiet meant something was coming.

He was perched on the edge of a rooftop, letting his eyes sweep over the dim-lit street below, when movement caught his attention.

A small figure darted out from behind a dumpster—a kid, couldn’t be more than ten. Their clothes hung loose, torn in places, hair matted. They kept their head low as they approached the corner bakery. One sharp glance over their shoulder, and then—quick as a shadow—they snatched a loaf of bread left out for the morning rush and bolted down the alley.

Nightwing’s jaw tightened. Stealing bread wasn’t exactly high on his list of Blüdhaven crimes, but kids running alone in these streets? That was different.

With a soft thwip, his grapnel hooked the edge of the next building, and he swung silently above the narrow backstreets, keeping just far enough to avoid spooking them. The kid ran with purpose, slipping through garbage-strewn corridors and hopping over a collapsed fence until they reached a crumbling apartment block at the end of the lane. No lights. No neighbors peering out.

They vanished through a side window on the second floor.

Nightwing landed on the building’s ledge, the faint groan of wood under his boots masked by the wind. The glass was smeared with grime, but when he leaned in to look—

—his chest went still.

Inside, the kid knelt on the cracked linoleum floor, carefully setting the loaf down in front of a figure slumped in a battered armchair. The shape was human, wrapped in a thin blanket, but the air in the room told the truth before his brain caught up: the stagnant, sour stench of rot. Plates of untouched, mold-speckled food were scattered on the coffee table—soups congealed to jelly, bread hardened into stone.

The corpse sat unmoving, the skin on their exposed hand pale and tight, nails yellowed. Flies buzzed lazily around the stillness.

The child didn’t seem to notice. They adjusted the blanket around the shoulders of the dead, murmuring something too soft to hear, then pushed the fresh loaf toward them like an offering.

Nightwing’s stomach twisted.

This wasn’t just a crime scene. This was a kid who didn’t know they were alone.

And that—he thought grimly—was worse than anything he’d been expecting tonight.