It was cold. Wet. The kind of November night that sank into the bones and stayed there, no matter how many layers you wore. Rain had been coming down in thin, persistent sheets for hours, turning the streets of Gotham into black mirrors that reflected the sickly orange glow of streetlamps and the occasional flicker of a neon sign.

In the narrow canyons between warehouses in the industrial district, the dark was deeper. The rain fell harder there, funneled by the wind, and every sound echoed. A distant siren. The drip of water from a broken gutter. The scuttle of a rat.

Batman moved through it like a shadow, cape barely rippling despite the wind. He was high on the rooftops, the city spread out beneath him in a sprawl of rusted metal and broken concrete. This part of Gotham had been dead for years. Abandoned factories, storage units, the occasional truck depot. The perfect place for a meet.

He'd been tracking a weapons shipment for three nights. Small-time smugglers, but they'd gotten their hands on some serious military hardware, and that made them dangerous. Intel said the handoff was happening tonight, at the old Keystone Shipping yard.

He landed on the edge of a rooftop, silent, and crouched low. The binoculars in his cowl zoomed in, scanning the yard below. There. Two vans, headlights off. Half a dozen men, fanning out. The familiar dance of a deal in progress. One of them carried a case, another held an umbrella, another kept glancing at his phone. They were nervous.

Good. They should be.

Batman shifted, ready to move, when something else caught his attention. A sound, faint, from a nearby alley. High-pitched. Almost lost under the rain.

He turned his head, the cowl's audio filters zeroing in. And there it was again.

A child's sob.

For a split second, everything else faded. The deal could wait. The weapons could wait. The cold, the rain, the mission — all of it dropped away in the face of that single, small sound.

He moved before he made the conscious decision to do so, a dark shape leaping from rooftop to rooftop, cape flaring behind him. The alley was one block over, a dead-end service lane behind a shuttered textile factory. The walls were slick with rain, the ground covered in scattered garbage and shards of broken glass.

And huddled in the corner, behind a stack of rotted wooden pallets, was a child.

Small. Drenched. Maybe six years old, if that. Curled into a tight ball, arms wrapped around their knees, face buried against them. Shivering violently. They wore a thin jacket, torn at the shoulder, and sneakers that were more hole than shoe. No sign of an adult anywhere.

Batman landed at the mouth of the alley, silent, but the child's head snapped up anyway. Wide eyes, dark hair plastered to their face, cheeks blotchy and wet with tears.

And for a single, breathless second, Bruce Wayne forgot how to breathe.

Because the face looking up at him was Dick's.

Not just similar. Not just a passing resemblance. The shape of the jaw, the line of the nose, the way the eyes tilted up at the corners. The exact shade of dark hair. The same stubborn set to the chin, even now, even terrified and half-frozen.

It was like looking at a ghost.

For a long moment, Batman didn't move. The child didn't either. They just stared at him, trembling, lips pressed together like they were trying desperately not to cry again.

Then the child flinched.

A full-body flinch, like they expected him to hurt them. Like they'd learned, already, at six years old, to expect the worst from the world.

Something in Bruce's chest cracked.

He moved slowly. Carefully. Dropping into a crouch, making himself smaller, less threatening. The rain kept falling. The city kept making its usual noise, but in that alley, everything felt suspended. Silent.

The child watched him with wide, wary eyes, still shaking, still pressed back against the wet brick. A streak of blood ran down their arm, thin and pink, diluted by the rain.

Batman held out a hand, palm up. Not grabbing. Not reaching. Just offering.

The child didn't take it. They just stared.

And Bruce, who had faced down monsters and metahumans and the very worst Gotham had to offer, felt his heart break for a child who looked exactly like his son.