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They meet for the first time when Dick is fifteen.
He's never been to Gotham before, despite living in its sister city for the past six years, and is only doing so now during a field trip with his class.
He's been looking forward to it, he can admit. Gotham is the stuff of legends, and while Dick is perfectly happy with his relatively normal city, where the criminals are just criminals and not supervillains, he's been extremely curious about what a city with so many strange villains, and a hero still shadowed in mystery, despite the fact that he's a member of the very public Justice League.
Dick's a rather responsible kid usually--has to be, with the job he's dedicated himself to--but he can't resist the urge to slip away from his group when the teacher's busy breaking up a fight. They won't miss him, anyway. The chaperones are too focused on controlling the group as a whole, not on the individual members. As long as Dick gets back to the hotel in time for the check-in, he'll be fine.
So, he goes exploring. Gotham's night all that different from Bludhaven really, in the way everything looks from the ground. Blocky streets and dirty alleys, tired-looking people and potential crime on ever corner. The architecture's a little strange--Dick's certainly not used to being stared at by gargoyles--but overall everything's kind of the same.
It makes him wonder what it would be like to visit Metropolis, or Central City. He can't even imagine how different they must be.
It's starting to get dark and Dick is somewhere near a large park when he hears the panicked scream. As opposed to the people around him who simply tense, Dick is immediately in motion, sprinting towards the sound and pulling his hood up over his head.
He comes upon the mouth of an alley, and Dick sees two men crowding a woman against the wall, one with a knife pointed at her stomach.
Dick doesn't wait another moment, darting forward on silent feet, getting right next to them before the men are even aware of his presence. They startle, whirling around to face him, and Dick punches one across the face then kicks him in the gut, sending him crashing to the ground with a loud wheeze.
The second man strikes out at him, panicked, and Dick easily ducks the swipe of the knife, sending a fist to the man's shoulder and hitting the pressure point there, watching with satisfaction as the arm drops limp. The man's panic doubles, and he tries to run, but Dick whips out the birdarang sitting in his pocket and throws it at him, hitting the back of his calf purposefully and smirking at the man shouts and collapses, clutching his bleeding leg.
Dick walks over to the two men with a pep in his step, swinging his bag around to the front of himself and digging around until he reaches the compartment at the bottom, pulling out two pairs of zip ties and quickly binding the men, smiling in amusement as they curse at him.
Then he turns back to the woman, who has remained frozen against the wall, clutching her purse to her chest and staring at him with wide eyes.
Dick checks the status of his hood, pleased to find it's still firmly in place, pulled down far enough to leave his face in shadows and hide his features. It's not the same as his mask, for sure, but it's better than nothing.
"Are you okay?" Dick asks gently.
The woman stares at him for a moment longer, and then nods.
Dick smiles. "Great! I'm glad. Want to call the police or just go home?"
Normally, Dick has a beacon he can set off to let the (actually clean) cops know where a couple downed criminals are, but Gotham isn't his city, and he doesn't have a line like that here. He doesn't really want to, either. It feels like inviting trouble to get himself inserted in another city's police, even if said city is only an hour away from his house.
The woman fumbles into her purse and pulls out a cellphone, so Dick figures that means she's calling the police and it's okay for him to take off.
He can't stop smiling for the next fifteen minutes, energized from taking those guys down and preventing them from hurting an innocent woman. He's been working as a hero for the past four years and still that never gets old, never fails to fill him with excitement and hope and plain old joy.
There wasn't anyone around to save his parents, when they were killed. There was no one waiting in the wings to catch them, no one who'd been on the case to catch the mobster before he sabotaged the wires. There wasn't even anyone after the fact, working to find justice.
He does his best to keep anyone else from experiencing that. He goes out each night and fights and watches and investigates, and while he can't save everyone he can damn well try. And even those he can't, he'll he damned if he doesn't bring their killers to justice.
It's...a lot of work, especially when he's doing it (almost) completely alone. But it's worth it.
Dick does in fact make it back to the group before his teacher does a head count, and none of his fellow students rat him out because they couldn't care less.
They're staying over night, and Dick ends up sharing a hotel room with two of the other boys on the trip, one of whom Dick knows is a pothead and the other so wrapped up in his phone that he barely even recognizes where he is--if Dick sneaks out again tonight, he'd be surprised if they even noticed, let alone will say anything.
And sneak out again Dick does. He can't help it; this might not be his city, Gotham might be like his city on crack, but he hasn't spent a night not patrolling in over a year. He's too energized from what happened earlier to even consider just lying down and trying to get some sleep.
So he makes his way out of the hotel, his bag slung across his back, carrying everything he's going to need.
He changes in a secluded alley a couple blocks from the hotel, double- and triple-checking to make sure all of his gear is in place and then stashing the bag with his regular clothes for later before beginning to free climb up the brick wall of the building.
He stands on the roof and looks out over Gotham, breathing in the crisp air. It's odd to be atop a different city, a different landscape spread out before him. He's gotten so used to Bludhaven that it's almost daunting to be facing Gotham. Will he encounter any of the strange supervillains? Should he avoid them, if he does? Should he be doing this at all, considering Gotham already has a hero?
Oh well, he's already up here; what a waste it would be to just climb back down and head to the hotel.
Instead, Dick breaks out into a run, sprinting to the edge of the roof and then leaping, flipping through the air and then tucking his body into a roll as he hits the next roof, popping to his feet with a grin and not stopping, using his momentum to leap to the roof after that, as well.
Dick technically has a modified grapple gun that his foster father made in his workshop, but there's nothing compared to whipping through the sky on his own, making his own way over the city far beneath him.
Of course, the grapple sure becomes necessary when he leaps off the edge of a high-rise and into open air, letting himself freefall for a few blissful seconds before unhooking his grapple from his belt and aiming, bracing for the jolt as the line goes taunt and swings him through the air, a rush of joy filling him.
The first time she watched him do that, his foster mom Maria nearly had a heart attack. She ripped him a new one once he was on the ground again, but despite how terrifying she can be when she's mad, it hasn't managed to break Dick of the habit.
Maria and her husband James were Dick's saving grace, honestly. The time after his parents' death was brutal for a number of reasons, his grief made all the worse from the awful conditions he then found himself forced into. Bludhaven doesn't really care about its orphans, and Dick's anger of the injustice of his parents' murder only festered and deepened as he himself was treated like he was nothing.
He'd run away from the system that was failing him, angry and young and grieving and alone, desperate to do something but unable to find a way. He lived on the streets for a couple months, not proud of himself for the shoplifting he did simply to keep himself going. Far more proud of himself for standing up to the assholes trying to hurt people on the street, even if that got him a beating or two.
He ended up with Maria and James by pure chance. Maria caught him trying to steal from a supermarket, but instead of turning him in, she instead took him home, contacting a social worker she trusted as she did so.
She was already a registered foster mother, with two kids staying with her and her husband. She didn't hesitate for a single moment to take him in as well, and no one tried to stop her.
She did four tours before getting injured and forced out of service; she knew what it was like to have a calling, to feel deep inside yourself the need to do something. She chastise Dick when she caught him sneaking out, trying to find the man who killed his parents. She didn't tell him he was crazy when he said he wanted to help people, in a way no one was helping Bludhaven.
Instead, she got him training. She knew she wasn't going to be able to stop him, and didn't really want to try. She made sure he knew what he was doing, made him promise to wait until he was actually ready before putting on a suit. They made him gear in James' workshop.
And then, a year and a half into living with them, Robin flew for the first time.
The sound of a fight draws Dick from his musing, and he drops down to street level, throwing himself down onto the shoulders of a man wielding a gun, his weight sending the man to the ground.
From there, everything is as easy as breathing, muscle memory and training making him a quick, untouchable blur through the thugs, until all of them were down, only Dick remaining standing with a bright grin.
He restrains all of them and then takes the cellphone from one of their pockets, dialing the police and then tossing it down with the call still connected before taking off again.
He stops a mugging and an attempted rape in the next hour, and then takes to swinging through the air again. A perfect night.
That's when the shadow descends.