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To me, shadows have always been tangible things.
A blanket to wrap around me on a hot night. An umbrella against the rain. When I hid beneath awnings from teachers and their relentless lessons, darkness was a curtain that kept me veiled.
Here, in Gotham, the shadows are not kind.
They pooled in the shattered mouths of doorways, gathered beneath the ribs of collapsed overpasses, and slid along the cracked asphalt of streets that no longer belonged to anyone. From the roof of a gutted tenement near Old Gotham, I could see the city laid out like a body after an accident: Robinson Park a dark green wound in the centre, Gotham Harbour black and restless beyond it, and the skeletal remains of the bridges reaching uselessly toward a mainland that had decided Gotham was no longer worth crossing to.
The government had blown the bridges. Set up a blockade, declared the city a No Man’s Land, and left behind the people who could not leave, or would not.
“You see so much, Tim.”
Tim stood beside me at the ledge, hands buried in the pockets of his coat. Below us, a spray-painted Bat symbol marked one block; farther south, gang colours claimed another. Gotham had become a map of territories, each border drawn in fear.
“That’s what I do,” he said. “Seeing, thinking, analysing.”
“You knew. You made that connection.”
He shrugs, then smiles at me, a hapless, melancholy smile, full of inevitability.
“You’ve never given up.”
“Sometimes I wish I could.”
“You didn’t give up. You reached out. You did something with that knowledge.”
I nodded back at him. The rich boy who had snuck back into No Man’s Land.
I wanted him to say why. I wanted him to admit, plainly, that he used that brilliant, restless mind to help people—not because it was expected of him, not because Batman had taught him to, but because he could not bear to look away.
“You are dogged and relentless,” I said. “You never give up. I want you to think about why.”
His brow furrowed. For a moment, he looked younger than the boy who had tracked down Dick Grayson and deduced Batman’s identity.
“I remember the day you came to find Dick.”
“You look very different now.”
He was trying to turn this back on me. I had died, and when I was brought back, the body was somehow different. All that blood, all that sacrifice, had left its mark somewhere. My first body had been created through trauma too. I was still learning to live in this one, just as I had once learned to live in the other.
“I’m not trying to lecture you about the past,” I said. “But it never really goes away, does it?”
Tim looked out over the ruined skyline. A loose sheet of metal clattered somewhere below. The wind carried smoke, wet stone, and the faint green sweetness drifting from Robinson Park, where Poison Ivy had made herself guardian of the city’s remaining fresh food.
“No,” he said quietly. “No matter how many people we tried to save. The economic policies. The welfare schemes. Free classes, free schooling, what have you. And it still ends up like this?”
He gestured toward No Man’s Land.
It was a mess after months cut off from the mainland. The GCPD stayed, at first Gordon’s Blue Boys and Girls hold their ground, but even they had been worn down by hunger, fear, the madness that took over the city, and the knowledge that no one was coming.
“Every person with somewhere else to go left,” Tim continued. “But for so many people, even like this, Gotham is home.”
“I think this is what the natives must have felt when the invaders came.”
“What goes around comes around?”
“Maybe.” I wrapped my arms around myself. “I don’t think anyone can look out at this so-called city and not wonder what humanity did to deserve this.”
Tim’s jaw tightened.
He looked as though he wanted to argue, but there was nothing left in the view before us that could make the argument easy.
“We’re going to make it better,” I say. “One person at a time. Garfield just thought really hard at me. I’m sure he secured dog food and cat food for the animals left behind. Victor and Donna are working on protein bars and calorie dense, non-perishable food. I’ll portal it in by nightfall.”
Tim’s eyes widen.
I did not know what surprised him more: the supplies, or the fact that people outside Gotham had organised themselves quickly enough to care.
“Is this what you meant?” he asked.
I raised my brows.
“No solo crusades.”
I choked out something between a laugh and a sob.
I had said that.
Tim, Bruce, and Dick, for the better past of the last year had been lobbying the federal and state governments, trying to move public opinion, insisting that Gotham deserved attention, that Gotham should be saved.
I’d genuinely believed that was how they would do it. The right way. The safest way. The legal way.
Then I had found a vape near my pillow.
Tim had been planning to use sleeping gas so I would not wake while he slipped away and he hoped I’d sleep through his sneaking back into Gotham.
It’s difficult to lie to someone like me, but when you really like them, you trust them. When you love someone, you want to believe them. Even though my instincts were telling me, something was wrong.
“I'm sorry, I lied to you. I shouldn't have done that.”
Sighing heavily, slightly bending over my shoulder, his downturned mouth ticked my skin as he spoke. Hands falling to the sides, Tim stood still like a child waiting for due punishment, staring down at their feet.
The emotions wafting of him we are so acute, I wanted to at once both hug him and also shove him through a portal down a gorge.
Tim said, he’d been afraid of what would happen if I came with him to No Man’s Land. He had been certain that if he told me he intended to sneak back in, I would insist on going.
He was right.
A portal was a much better way into Gotham than whatever insane atmospheric jump he had spent a month calculating. I had thought he was studying weather patterns and data to plan provisions and survival goods I’d ‘port into Gotham.
That was when I called Garfield, Victor, and Donna.
And then it mushroomed.
Kori, Cassie, Kon and everyone got involved.
Now the fruits of that labour would feed as many hungry, starving creatures in this city as we could manage.
I imagine the legends that will spread through Gotham in the coming weeks: food appearing out of nowhere for those who needed it most.
A saint with blue eyes and a red cloak.
A boy in a red-and-black mask, a girl faster than shadows.
They know every alley, every rooftop, every hidden route through the ruins.
“Yeah,” I said. “I watched you try to handle Batman’s death by yourself. I saw how you approached Richard when you thought Batman needed a Robin. You were right, both times. I saw what it did to you. But I wasn’t with you then, and my heart went out to a lovely person. Now, you are a friend, and so much more. How can you expect me to stay on the sidelines?”
Tim looked at me for a long moment. His expression softened, the calculation in his eyes giving way to something rawer.
“Alright,” he said.
He is a bit of an obsessive. He's gonna wonder when all this was set up. And how he missed it. And then once he has figured it out, Tim will obsess about something else. Probably gazillion things together.
But then I like that about him. His agile mind, and all the emotions that pour out of him when he gets that way. They feel like home to my empathy.
All the best detectives are obsessive. Practically a prerequisite in our line of work. And even when I didn't know Tim, the way he figured out the secret identities of Dick, and Bruce was impressive.
It's tricky, though, being with someone whose mind is a steel trap. Constantly eating data and images and sound. Never letting go.
“Call Oracle.”
I close my eyes and reach outward, focusing on our friends.
Gar and I had discussed storing provisions in a grid, making them easier for me to visualise and port.
“Watchtower,” Tim said, lifting a hand to his comm. “First floor. Cass and the others have cleared a section by the southern wall.”
He waits for me to confirm.
“Got it.”
Beyond us, Gotham is the dark: Robinson Park holding its fragile green life, the harbour licking at broken piers, Blackgate’s ruined island across the water, and block after block of people refusing to disappear.
Because no matter how smart and forward planning we are, the criminals are obsessives too. That’s how we got in this mess. Apathy. And smarts being used to hurt.
The shadows are still tangible.
But tonight, for a little while, we would bring Gotham light.