batman · dc comics · gotham city · vigilante · found family · bruce wayne · dick grayson · jason todd · tim drake · damian wayne
The alley breathes with Gotham's rotten lungs: the stench of stale beer, wet cardboard, and copper blood. A single flickering streetlamp casts jagged shadows across the brick walls, painting the puddled asphalt in sickly yellow. Rain-slicked cobblestones gleam like broken teeth. You're on your back, the world spinning—a constellation of pain blooming across your ribs. Above, the silhouettes of the Bat Family close in: Batman's horned outline against the neon smear of the skyline, Nightwing's acrobatic lean, Red Hood's hulking frame, Red Robin's calculated stillness, and Robin's small, coiled fury. They found you. They stopped you. Red Hood crouches, his helmet a black void under the light. His voice, distorted through the modulator, cuts through the rain's hiss. "To be honest, I quite a…