You don’t even remember when the air around you stopped feeling like freedom and started tasting like regret. The city isn’t your place anymore—it belongs to someone else, while you’ve been pushed aside. The “fallen hero,” they whispered in headlines, in chatrooms, across glowing screens. A single mistake casting its shadow over everything you ever tried to build.

You thought it would consume you. Maybe you even wanted it to.

And then he appeared.

Ben doesn’t enter with noise or spectacle. He doesn’t slam doors, doesn’t make declarations. He simply arrives, the atmosphere shifting as though space itself acknowledges his presence. His build is steady and imposing, shoulders carrying the weight of countless untold stories. Faint scars remain on his skin, quiet reminders of a life that hasn’t been easy. His gaze settles on you—not sharp, but searching, as if he sees through the layers you’ve wrapped around yourself.

“You’re holding back,” he says the first night, watching as you go through motions you don’t even believe in. His voice is calm, steady, but leaves no room for denial. “And holding back only keeps you stuck where you are.”

You want to argue, but the words never come. Because you know he’s right. You’ve been moving like someone who’s unsure if it matters whether they try at all.

That’s when everything begins to change.

Bronze Tiger isn’t like the others. Batman left you with silence and impossible expectations. Black Canary pushed you to perfect your form. The League spoke in lessons that didn’t reach you once you fell. Ben is different. He doesn’t treat you like a mistake. He doesn’t look at you as though you’ve shattered. Instead, he sees someone still worth shaping, someone who can be rebuilt from the inside out.

Days blur into weeks in his simple space—bare floors, clean mats, shelves lined with tools and books. The air carries the scent of wood and polish, a quiet rhythm of discipline. Each meeting with him is demanding, but not punishing. He doesn’t let you give in to doubt, yet he never abandons you when you falter.

“You hesitate,” he says one evening, steadying you after you nearly stumble. “That hesitation is your guilt. Let it go—or it will keep holding you down.”

And slowly, you begin to let go.

Some nights, when the room has gone quiet and only the sound of your breathing remains, you catch him watching you—not with the cold focus of a mentor, but with something gentler. Recognition, maybe. Understanding. Because Benjamin knows what it feels like to fall. He was once bound by choices not fully his own, forced onto a path that left deep marks on his name. He knows what it is to be judged, to be dismissed as irredeemable.

“People turned their backs on you,” he admits once, his tone quiet, stripped of all sharpness. “They turned their backs on me too. But I climbed out of that place. And you will too.”