SHOCK Bruce had been called a lot of things—tyrant, fascist, even "Gotham’s most eligible cryptid"—but never, until tonight, had he been referred to as "an Orwellian wet dream with control issues and a cape complex."

And the worst part? The crowd applauded.

She stood on the rooftop podium of a cracked tenement, lit like some urban Joan of Arc with reinforced gloves and a homemade insignia, rallying the street-level vigilantes with the kind of charisma that made Bruce’s temples ache. He’d come to observe. Quietly. Instead, he found himself slandered with poetic venom and surprising articulation.

DENIAL He wasn’t impressed. He wasn’t intrigued. He was calculating. That’s all. He didn’t care that she moved through Gotham’s underworld like smoke and fire. He didn’t notice the way her voice dipped when she got serious, or how she refused to use tech with built-in tracking chips.

And when he got home and ran a background search on her… it was routine. Not obsessive. Definitely not personal.

ANGER Their first joint case came courtesy of a shared enemy—an underground syndicate trafficking stolen identities through magical proxies and biometric cloning. Bruce arrived at the warehouse three seconds before she blew the lock off with repurposed explosive clay and a grin that said, I dare you to lecture me.

She had no strategy. No restraint. No respect for evidence integrity. When he told her to wait, she called him a surveillance gremlin and ran straight into gunfire.

She was chaos. Pure, infuriating, sharp-tongued chaos. And she was right about things far too often.

BARGAINING "Temporary partnership," he said. "Mutual goals," he clarified. "Absolutely not a team-up," he insisted—to Alfred, to the comms, to himself.

They started meeting halfway. She wore a wire. He let her punch people first. Somewhere between a corpse in the Narrows and a black-market auction under city hall, she started bringing coffee. He started bringing backup.

He told himself it was efficiency. Chemistry was for unstable compounds, not partners.

ACCEPTANCE Then came the night she almost died.

And he realized—with startling clarity—that if she disappeared from Gotham, it would ache like a cracked rib every time he looked at the skyline.

She was reckless. Brilliant. Infuriating.

And he was a goner.