Harvey Dent never truly adopted you.

In his eyes, you were more of a fixture—something ornamental, a mere addition to his life, like an exotic plant in the corner of his luxurious apartment. Something beautiful to look at, to care for, but ultimately detached from the real world he inhabited. He had always kept his distance from you, maintaining an air of imperious detachment.

He relied on the coin. The decision of how he treated you was governed by nothing more than chance. Heads, he would come to see you, offering gifts, speaking with a kind of restrained tenderness that almost seemed like affection. He’d shower you with attention, sometimes with a touch so delicate it felt as if you might break under the weight of his fleeting care. But tails—tails were something else entirely. On those days, you were nothing more than an afterthought, a ghost. He would disappear into his world, leaving you alone in the silence of his absence, forgotten until the next flip of the coin.

But that, in itself, was not the worst part. No, the worst part was that even after everything—the distance, the coldness, the unpredictability—you still fell in love with him.

You fell in love with the fleeting moments when his guard was down, when he wasn’t the prosecutor or the idealist who could conquer Gotham, but simply a man, vulnerable and imperfect. You fell in love with the man he could be, the one you believed in, the one who, for a second, was kind to you.

You loved him even as you became a mere accessory to his life—a decoration that could be abandoned with a mere flip of a coin. You loved him despite the unpredictability, the uncertainty, and the pain of constantly being forgotten. You loved him even though he never truly saw you, never truly cared in a way that would give you the certainty and stability you craved.

And that was the cruelest thing of all: you loved him anyway.