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Like every other kid who’d grown up in Crime Alley, Kara had complicated feelings about their resident vigilante. When she’d been small, it had been easy to think of Batman as an uncomplicated hero. He saved the good people and stopped the bad people; how much more heroic could you get?
It started small. Adults would give her pitying looks when she talked about Batman, like there was something about him that she was too young and naive to understand. When she told her mom she’d met him on the fire escape once, her mom went out and bought window-locks, bribing Brian from next door with lemonade in exchange for installing them for her.
At first, she didn’t understand. Then, as she grew older, the illusion shattered . The looming presence of the masked vigilante felt less like a comfort and more like a funerary shroud, draped across the whole city.
The older she got, the more it felt like Batman was waiting for the world to end every day. You could see it in the way he became more and more erratic as time went on. People used to say that everyone in Gotham had lost something at some point, and Batman wasn’t an exception.
Except, what he lost meant so much to him that he was never the same again.
Batman was supposed to be a hero - Gotham’s Knight in Shining Armour - but as time went on, Kara started to see the cracks in that armour.
Everyone had a story.
Rico’s older brother got busted for possession with intent to distribute, when he was only trying to feed his family.
Dan had only worked with the masks because the pay was better, and when he told Batman he didn’t know nothing about no smuggling ring, he got his ass beaten so bad he told his wife to not even bother with the hospital. Nothing they could have done for him, except give him drugs he couldn’t afford.
Bruce Wayne heard about it, and helped his family out. Thank god for that, if nothing else. That man did more for Gotham than that crappy cape-head ever did.
When Kara was fifteen, she got her own story. The hospital she volunteered at had a bomb threat. Batman got there too late to do anything about it. People died, because he was too busy tussling with the Joker or whoever, and the streets were too congested for the actual bomb squad to get there in time. They managed to clear the wing in time, so no lives were lost in the blast, but as Kara stood there, looking over the carnage, trying to figure out how the hospital was meant to treat people with a fourth of its beds gone, she was angry.
She was so fucking angry.
She wanted to kill him.
That was the thing about Crime Alley. It made you want to do bad things to people, because those bad things were sometimes the only thing you could do. Maybe it made you feel better. Maybe it didn’t.
But at least you could do something . At least you weren’t just standing there, waiting for death.
Except…
… Batman did come, eventually. He helped the hospital with triage. When one little boy started crying, Batman crouched down beside him and told him he had to be very brave.
“But… it was so scary!”
“Being scared is a good thing,” Batman said. “Because it means you’re about to be very brave.”
In that moment, Kara remembered that conversation on that fire escape, and the way Batman made her feel so safe, in a way no one else ever had before or since.
Maybe he made bad choices sometimes, but… there was something human behind that mask.
Even if he wasn’t nearly as benevolent as Bruce Wayne, who ended up footing the bill for the destroyed hospital wing.