The Shape of a Silence
Content warnings: drug use, addiction, overdose, neglect, suicidal ideation, major character death. This is a tragedy. No comfort, no redemption. Please read with care.
---
you are dying in a house full of heroes.
This is not a metaphor. You feel it in the brittle architecture of your bones, in the tremor that lives beneath your skin like a second heartbeat. Your body has become a haunted thing, a repository for all the poisons youâve poured into it, and stillâstillâno one has noticed that you are disappearing right in front of them.
You sit on the floor of your bedroom, back pressed against the foot of an antique four-poster bed that has never felt like yours. The curtains are drawn, heavy brocade that swallows the late-afternoon light and spits it back in shades of amber and rot. Somewhere in the cavernous belly of Wayne Manor, laughter peals like a bell. It echoes through the heating vents, distorted and tinny, a transmission from a world that has no space for you.
Your fingers curl around a prescription bottle. Oxycodone. The label is worn, the name smudgedâsomeone elseâs pain, stolen from the medical bay three weeks ago when Alfred was busy suturing a gash in Jasonâs shoulder and Bruce was already back at the Batcomputer, already lost in the next catastrophe. You remember walking through the cave with the silence of a ghost, barefoot on cold stone, plucking the bottle from a drawer of neatly organized catastrophe supplies. No one turned around. No one said your name.
You dry-swallow two pills and chase them with the flat dregs of a soda you left on the nightstand three days ago. The carbonation has long since died. It tastes like sugar and oblivion.
Downstairs, they laugh again. You can pick out the individual threads: Dickâs bright, easy warmth, the kind of laugh that makes people fall in love with him. Timâs quieter chuckle, a little awkward, as if heâs still surprised heâs allowed to be part of the joke. Even Damian is thereâyou hear the precise, clipped cadence of his voice, less a laugh and more a reluctant acknowledgment that something is amusing. And Bruce. Bruceâs laugh is so rare it cuts you every time, because it is a sound that has never been offered in your direction. It is a relic of a man you do not know.
You tilt your head back against the mattress and let the opioid crawl into your bloodstream with the patience of a lover. The edges of the world soften. The laughter becomes bearable, then beautiful, then nothing at all.
This is how you survive. This is how you die.
...
The first time you realized you were ignored by your family, you were twelve years old.
Youâd been living in Wayne Manor for two years by thenâyour whole life, technically, but the years before Bruceâs return from his training were a blur of boarding schools and nannies who called you miss with the kind of professional distance that made you feel like a piece of expensive furniture. Then Bruce came back, and for one glittering, impossible moment, you thought you might become real.
He was your father. Your biological father. The only child born from his short-lived, ill-fated marriage to a woman whose face you had to reconstruct in your memory from photographs because she died when you were two years old. You had his (.....) hair, his stubborn jaw, and his tendency to withdraw into silence and contemplate. That must have meant something. It must have meant that you definitely belonged there.
But then Dick came, and then Jason, and then the cave opened up beneath the manor like a second heart, and you understood: Bruce did not want a child. He wanted soldiers. He wanted mirrors that reflected his own grief back at him, sharpened into weapons. And youâyou were just a girl who cried when she skinned her knee, who was afraid of thunderstorms, who wanted to be held. You were soft. You were useless.
You remember the night you asked him to train you. You were twelve, small for your age, wearing pajamas with little stars on them. Youâd crept down to the cave after hearing the roar of the Batmobile returning from patrol. Bruce was still in the suit, cowl pulled back, sweat darkening his hair. He looked like a god. He looked like your father.
âI want to help,â you said, and your voice echoed in the cavernous space, thin and reedy. âI want to be like Dick. I want to fight.â
Bruce turned to you, and for one breathless second you thought you saw something soft in his eyes. But then his expression shuttered, became the mask he wore even without the cowl.
âNo.â
âBut I can learn. I can be good. I canââ
âThis isnât a game.â His voice was not cruel, but it was final. It was a door closing. âYouâre my daughter. I wonât lose you. Go back to bed.â
I wonât lose you. What a beautiful lie. Heâd already lost you. He just hadnât noticed yet.
You went back to bed. You didnât cry. You were too hollow for tears. The next morning, Dick taught Jason how to throw a Batarang in the gymnasium, their laughter ringing against the high ceilings. You watched from the doorway for seventeen minutes before anyone noticed you were there, and even then, it was only Alfred, who offered you a cup of tea and a sad, knowing smile that did nothing to fill the chasm opening in your chest.
That was the year you learned that love in this house was a finite resource, and you had been deemed unworthy of it
...
By fourteen, you had stopped trying.
This is what the history books will never record: the slow, quiet erosion of a girl who lived in the margins of a legend. The way you stopped setting a place for yourself at dinner because no one remembered to call you anyway. The way you learned to move through the manorâs hallways without making a sound, a skill born not of training but of the desperate, animal need to avoid the pain of being seen and then ignored. It is worse, you discovered, to be acknowledged and then dismissed than it is to never be acknowledged at all.
You remember the afternoon Damian first arrived at the manor. He was ten, imperious, all sharp angles and sharper words. Bruce introduced him to everyoneâDick, Jason, Tim, Alfred, even Barbara, who had come by to assess the new addition to the chaos. They stood in the grand foyer, a tableau of fractured family, and you watched from the top of the staircase, half-hidden behind the balustrade.
No one introduced you.
Later, you found Damian in the library, examining a first edition of The Art of War with the critical eye of a general. You hovered in the doorway, trying to find the right words. Iâm your sister. I know you donât know me, but Iâm here. Iâve always been here.
Before you could speak, he glanced up and fixed you with a stare that could have cut glass. âYouâre the civilian,â he said. Not a question. A designation.
âIâyes. Iâm yourââ
âTt. Donât get in my way.â
He turned back to his book. You stood there for a long moment, the air pressing in on you from all sides, and then you walked away. You didnât blame him. He was a child raised by assassins, taught that value was measured in utility. In his world, you were useless. He was just the first person to say it out loud.
That night, you stole a bottle of wine from the cellar and drank it alone in your room until the walls stopped closing in. It was the first time you used a substance to mute the noise inside your head. It would not be the last
....
The escalation happened so gradually that even you didnât notice until it was too late.
At fifteen, you broke your wrist falling down the grand staircaseâa genuine accident, not a cry for help, though youâd be lying if you said you hadnât been tempted by those before. Alfred drove you to the emergency room because Bruce was in the middle of a Justice League operation and couldnât be reached. Dick was in BlĂźdhaven. Jason was off on one of his brooding self-exile stints. Tim texted you a single âu ok?â and didnât follow up when you didnât respond. Damian didnât even glance at the cast when you returned home.
The doctor prescribed Vicodin. You remember staring at the bottle in the harsh fluorescent light of the pharmacy, the orange plastic warm in your palm. Youâd never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen before. You were scared of it, a little. But the pain in your wrist was a relentless, grinding thing, so you swallowed one pill and waited.
The relief was not just physical. It was existential. The Vicodin didnât just mute the ache in your bonesâit muted the ache in the hollow of your chest where your family was supposed to be. It wrapped you in cotton wool. It made the loneliness feel distant, like a storm on the far side of a thick window. For the first time in years, you felt something that might have been peace.
You finished the prescription in five days. When the bottle was empty, you felt the absence like a physical blow. The noise came backâthe laughter, the silence, the unbearable weight of being invisible. You needed it gone again.
So you went looking.
The medical bay in the Batcave was a treasure trove of chemical solutions. Morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone, codeineâa pharmacopeia of battlefield medicine kept stocked for the inevitability of violence. Security was tight, but youâd lived in this house your whole life. You knew the blind spots. You knew that the caveâs motion sensors were calibrated to ignore anyone under a certain height thresholdâa leftover from when Damian was small and prone to wandering where he shouldnât. You had never been a threat, so you had never been a variable worth accounting for.
Stealing became a ritual. Youâd slip down in the small hours of the morning, when patrol was still underway and Alfred was asleep, and youâd take just enough to keep the silence at bay. One pill at a time. Two. Three. You told yourself you could stop whenever you wanted. You told yourself it wasnât a problem because a problem required someone to notice, and no one did.
The first time you ran out before you could steal more, the withdrawal hit you like a freight train. You spent a night curled on the bathroom floor, shivering and sweating, your stomach cramping so violently you thought you might die. You didnât die. You just wished you would.
The next day, you went to school for the first time in a weekâGotham Academy, where you were enrolled under a fake name because Bruce was paranoid about kidnappings but couldnât be bothered to remember which fake name belonged to which child. You moved through the hallways like a wraith, hollow-eyed and trembling, and a boy named Leo found you in the parking lot, leaning against the brick wall, trying to remember how to breathe.
âYou look like shit,â he said, not unkindly.
Leo was seventeen, tall and lanky with nicotine-stained fingers and eyes that had seen too much. He sold weed to the scholarship kids and harder things to the rich ones who wanted to feel dangerous. He didnât ask why a Wayneâbecause he recognized you, despite the fake name, because everyone eventually recognized youâwas shaking like a leaf behind the gymnasium. He just pulled a joint from his pocket and offered it to you.
âThis wonât fix it,â he said. âBut itâll take the edge off.â
You smoked with him behind the bleachers, coughing on the first inhale, and when he asked if you needed something stronger, you said yes without hesitation.
That was the beginning of the end
....
By sixteen, you were no longer a girl who used drugs. You were an addict.
The word sits ugly in your mouth, but youâve learned to swallow it like everything else. You smoke weed to sleep. You take pills to function. On the bad daysâand there are so many bad days nowâyou let Leo inject you with heroin in the dingy back room of his apartment, a place that smells of mildew and old cigarettes and the particular desperation of people who have nothing left to lose.
Leo is not your boyfriend. Heâs not even really your friend. Heâs a transaction in human form, a pair of steady hands and a ready supply, and you pay him in cash and jewelry stolen from rooms in the manor that no one ever enters. Youâve taken a diamond bracelet from a drawer in the master suite that probably belonged to your mother. Youâve taken cufflinks from Bruceâs study, a silver letter opener, a handful of antique coins from a display case in the library. No one has noticed. No one has ever noticed.
Sometimes, when Leoâs pressing the needle into the crook of your arm, you close your eyes and pretend his touch is love. You pretend the warmth spreading through your veins is the warmth of being held, of being wanted. Itâs pathetic. You know itâs pathetic. But itâs all you have.
Youâve stopped going to school. The Academy sends letters home, but Bruce is in the middle of a war with the League of Assassins and Alfred is too busy keeping the household running to follow up. You intercept the letters when you can, forge Bruceâs signature on the responses, and when you canât, you just throw them away. No one asks where you go during the day. No one asks why your eyes are glassy, why your hands shake, why youâve lost so much weight that your clothes hang off you like they belong to a stranger.
Once, Dick corners you in the hallway, his hand gentle on your shoulder. You flinch. He doesnât seem to notice.
âHey, kiddo,â he says, his smile the same easy, practiced thing he gives to the press. âI feel like we havenât talked in a while. Howâs school?â
âFine.â Your voice is a croak. You havenât spoken to another person in three days.
âThatâs great. Listen, Iâm sorry I havenât been around muchâBlĂźdhavenâs a mess and the Titans are running me raggedâbut we should do something soon. Just the two of us. Sound good?â
You nod. You know he wonât follow through. He never does.
He pats your shoulder once and is gone, leaving behind the faint scent of his cologne and the hollow echo of another broken promise. You lean against the wall until the shaking stops, and then you go to your room and crush a pill on the nightstand with the flat of a silver hairbrush that hasnât been used in months.
The powder burns when you inhale it. The burn is the only thing that feels real
....
Your bedroom has become an observation deck, a silent perch from which you watch the family that isnât yours.
Youâve learned the rhythms of the manor the way a prisoner learns the rhythms of a jail: the creak of the third-floor floorboard at 4:37 a.m. when Bruce returns from patrol. The clatter of pans in the kitchen at 5:30 when Alfred begins preparing breakfast. The precise momentâ6:15âwhen Damianâs alarm goes off and he begins his morning training, his footsteps a metronome of discipline in the gymnasium below your window.
You are not part of any of it. You are a ghost haunting the margins, a smudge on the periphery of their vision. But you watch. You canât stop watching.
There is a particular cruelty in the way they orbit each other, a gravitational pull that excludes you with the casual precision of physics. They donât mean to shut you out. Thatâs the worst part. You are not a victim of maliceâyou are a victim of irrelevance. You are the variable that doesnât factor into the equation. The side character in a story that was never about you.
You watch them from the top of the stairs on movie nights, when Dick commandeers the entertainment system and makes everyone watch old musicals that Jason loudly complains about but never actually leaves. You watch Damian pretend to hate the musicals, his small body wedged between Bruce and Tim on the couch, his mouth pressed into a thin line of disapproval even as his eyes track the dancers with reluctant fascination. You watch Bruce, the cowl gone, the weight of the city temporarily set aside, his arm draped over the back of the couch in a gesture of casual affection that makes your chest ache.
You watch and you are not invited.
You tried, once. Months ago. A lifetime ago. Youâd come downstairs in your pajamas, drawn by the sound of laughter, and hovered in the doorway of the media room like a moth at a window. Tim glanced up, saw you, and offered a small, distracted smile before turning back to the screen. No one else acknowledged you. The couch was full. The space was full. There was nowhere for you to sit.
You stood there for five minutes, waiting for someone to make room, to say your name, to do anything. No one did. Eventually, you went back upstairs, and no one noticed you were gone.
Now you donât go downstairs at all. You sit on the floor of your room with your back against the door and you listen to the distorted echoes of their happiness through the vents, and you tell yourself itâs enough. It has to be enough.
The first time you overdose, itâs an accident.
Youâve been using heroin for six months now, but youâve been careful. Careful in the way that addicts are carefulâmeasuring doses, testing potency, telling yourself that you have it under control because the alternative is admitting that you donât. But the supply Leo gives you this week is different, stronger, cut with something that hits your bloodstream like a fist, and suddenly youâre on the bathroom floor with your cheek pressed to the cold tile and your heart stuttering in your chest like a dying bird.
You can feel your body shutting down. Itâs not painful, not really. Itâs like sinking into warm water. Like falling asleep after a lifetime of insomnia. Part of youâthe part thatâs been screaming into the void for five yearsâwhispers that this wouldnât be the worst way to go.
No one finds you. No one comes.
You wake up three hours later, alone, your face crusted with dried vomit and your arms covered in bruises you donât remember getting. The house is silent. No one has noticed you were missing. No one has come looking for you. You lie on the bathroom floor for a long time, staring at the ceiling, and you feel nothing at all.
The next day, you call Leo and ask for more
...
The invitation appears on the kitchen island on a Tuesday morning, written in Alfredâs precise copperplate on heavy cream stationery: Family dinner this evening at 7 p.m. All are expected to attend. RSVP not required.
All are expected. You stare at the word all for a long time, tracing the elegant loops of the script with your fingertip. Itâs been months since you last sat at the dining table. Youâre not sure anyone noticed your absence then, either.
You spend the afternoon in a state of low-grade panic, cycling through the contents of your closet like a woman preparing for battle. Your body is a ruin. You can see it in the mirror: the sharp jut of your collarbones, the hollows beneath your cheekbones, the bruise-dark circles under your eyes that no amount of concealer can fully disguise. Your arms are a roadmap of track marks, some fresh, some faded to silvery scars. You choose a long-sleeved blouse in deep burgundy. You pull your hair back into a neat ponytail. You practice smiling in the mirror until your reflection looks almost human.
You are ready. You are terrified.
At 6:58, you descend the grand staircase and walk toward the dining room. Your heart is a war drum. Your hands are shakingâwithdrawal is starting to creep in, a familiar ache settling into your bonesâbut you clench them into fists at your sides and keep walking.
The dining room glows with candlelight. The table is set with the good china, the crystal goblets, the silverware thatâs been in the Wayne family for six generations. And there they are: Bruce at the head of the table, Dick to his right, Damian to his left. Jason is slouched in his chair, flicking a bread roll at Tim, whoâs trying to explain something about a case while simultaneously defending his plate. Even Barbara is there, seated next to Dick, her wheelchair tucked neatly beside the table. They are laughing. They are beautiful. They are a family.
You step into the doorway.
The laughter falters. Not dramaticallyâitâs not a record-scratch moment. Itâs subtler than that, a brief hiccup in the flow of conversation, a flicker of confusion that crosses Bruceâs face as he registers your presence.
âOh,â Dick says, recovering first, his smile bright but faintly puzzled. âHey, youâre here.â
You donât know what to do with your hands. You shove them into the pockets of your pants. âAlfred said there was a dinner.â
âYes, of course.â Bruceâs voice is neutral, but thereâs something in his expression that you canât read. Surprise, maybe. Or something closer to guilt. âI didnât realize you wereâtake a seat. We saved you a spot.â
There isnât a spot. There are exactly enough chairs for the people already at the table. You watch Tim and Jason exchange a glance, a silent negotiation, and then Jason sighs and scoots over, dragging a chair from the corner of the room and wedging it between himself and the wall. âHere,â he says, not quite meeting your eyes. âSit.â
You sit. The chair is cold. The space is too small. Your elbow knocks against Jasonâs as you reach for your water glass, and he doesnât say anything, but you feel him shift slightly away from you. A small, unconscious recoil. It shouldnât hurt. It still does.
The conversation picks up again, tentatively, like a car engine sputtering before it catches. Dick tells a story about a mission with the Titans that you donât have the context to understand. Tim and Barbara launch into a debate about encryption protocols. Damian insults Jasonâs fashion sense, and Jason fires back with something about Damianâs height, and Bruce chides them both with the weary fondness of a man who has done this a thousand times.
You sit in the middle of it all, silent, invisible even in your visibility. No one asks you about your day. No one asks why youâve lost so much weight, why your eyes are glassy, why you keep scratching at the inside of your wrist beneath the table. You push food around your plate and count the minutes until you can escape.
Halfway through the meal, Bruceâs phone buzzes. He glances at the screen, and his expression shiftsâthe father receding, the vigilante taking over. âWeâve got a situation,â he says, standing. âRiddlerâs left a trail of clues across the financial district. I need everyone suited up in ten.â
The table explodes into motion. Chairs scrape. Plates are abandoned. The family that was laughing together moments ago transforms into a tactical unit, efficient and synchronized. They sweep out of the dining room in a blur of dark hair and determined expressions, and not one of them looks back at you.
Not one.
You sit at the table for a long time after theyâre gone. The candles gutter. Alfred appears silently at your elbow, his face creased with a sadness that you canât bear to look at directly.
âShall I clear your plate, miss?â
You nod. You donât trust your voice.
He takes the plateâstill mostly fullâand hesitates. For a moment, you think heâs going to say something, something that might change everything or nothing at all. But the moment passes. He retreats to the kitchen, and you retreat to your room, and the gap between you and the rest of the world widens another inch.
...
That night, you hear them come home. The cave entrance rumbles open around 3 a.m., and voices drift up through the ventsâtired but triumphant. The Riddler is in custody. The city is safe. SomeoneâTim, you thinkâlets out a whoop thatâs half exhaustion and half exhilaration. Bruceâs laugh rumbles like distant thunder.
You lie in your bed, curled on your side, staring at the wall. The withdrawal has become a creature living inside your skin, gnawing at your nerves with tiny, relentless teeth. You need a fix. You need it, with a desperation that eclipses hunger, thirst, even the ache of your loneliness.
But you donât go to the cave. You donât steal more pills. Instead, you reach under your mattress and pull out a small velvet pouchâthe last piece of your motherâs jewelry that you havenât sold. A locket, delicate and gold, with a tiny photograph of her inside. Youâve kept it through everything. Itâs the only thing you have left of her. The only proof that you were ever part of a family that wanted you.
You hold it in your palm, the metal warm from your body heat, and you make a decision.
....
Three days later, you pack a bag.
Itâs not a big bagâjust a worn duffel you found in the back of a closet, stuffed with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and the locket. Youâre not running away, you tell yourself. Youâre just⌠leaving. Leaving implies agency. Leaving implies choice. And after years of being a passive observer in your own life, you need to feel like you have a choice about something.
You write a note. You donât know who youâre writing it for.
Iâm sorry. I tried. It wasnât enough.
You donât sign it. You leave it on your nightstand, tucked beneath an empty pill bottle, and you walk out of your bedroom without looking back.
The manor is quiet at this hourâlate afternoon, the golden light slanting through the tall windows in dusty shafts. Alfred is in the city, running errands. Bruce and the boys are in the cave, prepping for patrol. You can hear the low murmur of their voices as you pass the grandfather clock that conceals the entrance, and for a moment you pause. Your hand hovers over the wood. You could open it. You could go down there, one last time, and say everything youâve never said. You could scream. You could cry. You could make them see you.
But youâve tried that before. Youâve tried it in a hundred small ways, and itâs never worked. So instead, you press your palm flat against the clock face, feel the vibration of their voices through the ancient wood, and you whisper, âGoodbye.â
No one answers. No one ever answers.
You slip out through the kitchen door and into the dying light. The grounds of Wayne Manor stretch before you, impossibly green, impossibly beautiful. A world you have never been allowed to inhabit. You walk down the gravel drive with your duffel slung over your shoulder, and you donât look back.
...
Leoâs apartment is in the Narrows, a part of Gotham that the tourists never see and the newspapers only mention in the context of body counts. The building reeks of damp plaster and stale cigarette smoke and the particular hopelessness of people who have been failed by every system meant to protect them. You fit right in.
Leo opens the door with a cigarette dangling from his lips and raises an eyebrow at the duffel bag. âRunning away, princess?â
âSomething like that.â You push past him into the apartment. Itâs a mess, as alwaysâtakeout containers piled on the coffee table, a mattress on the floor with sheets that havenât been washed in weeks, a needle and spoon on the nightstand that makes your skin itch with anticipation.
âI need a place to crash,â you say. âJust for a while.â
Leo shrugs. âSure. But itâs gonna cost you.â
You pull the locket from your pocket. The gold gleams in the sickly light of the bare bulb overhead. Leoâs eyes flicker with interestâhe knows quality when he sees it. âThis is real,â you say. âTwenty-four karat. Worth a couple thousand at least.â
He takes it from you, turns it over in his fingers. Opens it. Glances at the photo insideâyour motherâs face, younger than you are now, smiling at the camera with a joy youâve never felt. He doesnât ask who she is. He doesnât care.
âYeah, alright,â he says. âI can move this. You can stay.â
He pockets the locket, and something inside you splinters. The last piece of your mother. The last piece of a life where you were loved. Youâve traded it for a filthy mattress and a man who sees you only as a transaction, and you donât even have the strength to mourn.
âI want a hit,â you say. âSomething strong.â
Leo grins. âIâve got some new stuff. Fentanyl-laced. Be careful with itâthis batch is no joke.â
You donât want to be careful. You donât want to be anything.
...
He ties off your arm with a rubber strap. The needle slides in with a familiar sting, and you watch the blood bloom into the syringe before he depresses the plunger. The heroin hits your bloodstream like a wave of light.
This is what youâve been chasing. This is the silence. This is the peace that the manor never gave you, the love that your family never offered, the belonging that was always just out of reach. Your head lolls back against the mattress. The ceiling swims. Your heartbeat slows to a languid, syrupy rhythm.
Somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice whispers that this dose was too strong. That something is wrong. Your breathing is too shallow. Your limbs are too heavy. The warmth that was so comforting moments ago is starting to feel like drowning.
But youâre not scared. Thatâs the strangest part. Youâve been dying for yearsâslowly, invisibly, in a house full of people who were supposed to love you. At least this way, you get to choose the ending.
Your eyes slip closed.
The last thing you think of is the grandfather clock, the vibrations of their laughter humming through the wood. The last thing you feel is the phantom weight of a hand on your shoulder, a touch that was never really there.
And then nothing.
....
Alfred is the one who finds the note.
He returns from his errands at 6:47 p.m., precisely on schedule, and begins his usual routine of preparing the evening meal. It is only when he goes to collect the laundry from the upstairs bedrooms that he notices your door is ajarâa small irregularity, but an irregularity nonetheless. You have kept your door firmly closed for years.
He steps inside. The room is too tidy. The bed is made. The clutter that usually accumulates on your nightstandâbooks, empty soda cans, the detritus of a life lived in isolationâhas been cleared away. All that remains is a single piece of paper, the empty pill bottle serving as a paperweight.
Alfred reads the note. His hands, steady for decades of combat and crisis, tremble.
He descends to the cave.
The family is gathered around the Batcomputer, reviewing satellite footage of Black Maskâs latest operation. Bruce is in the chair, cowl down, his expression the focused intensity of a man who has no room for anything but the mission. Dick is perched on the edge of the console. Tim is typing. Jason is cleaning a gun with methodical precision. Damian is sharpening a knife.
âMaster Bruce,â Alfred says, and something in his voiceâsomething quiet, something brokenâmakes every head in the room snap toward him.
âAlfred?â Bruce is already on his feet. âWhat is it?â
Alfred hands him the note.
The silence that follows is the loudest sound you have ever not heard.
Bruce reads the words once. Twice. His face, that impenetrable mask, cracks open like a fault line. âWhat is this? When did sheâwhere is she?â
âI donât know, sir. Sheâs not in the house. Iâve checked every room.â
âTrack her phone,â Tim says, already typing. His fingers fly across the keyboard, and within seconds a map blooms on the screen, a blinking red dot in the heart of the Narrows. âSheâs there. An apartment building on Kane Street.â
Bruce doesnât wait. He pulls the cowl up, his movements sharp and mechanical, the Batman taking over because the father doesnât know what to do. âLetâs go. Now.â
The drive to the Narrows takes eight minutes. Bruce breaks every traffic law in the city. Dick is in the passenger seat, phone pressed to his ear, trying to call a number that goes straight to voicemail. In the back, Jason and Tim are silent. Damianâs hands are clenched into fists, his expression unreadable.
They burst into the apartment building like a tactical breach, scattering startled residents, climbing the stairs three at a time. The door to Leoâs apartment is flimsy. Bruce kicks it open without breaking stride.
The smell hits them first: sweat, mildew, the metallic tang of old blood. And then the sight.
You are on the mattress, your body curled into a fetal position, your face slack and pale. The rubber strap is still tight around your arm. The needle is still on the floor. Your eyes are closed.
âNo.â Bruceâs voice is not his own. It is a raw, guttural thing, torn from somewhere deep in his chest. He crosses the room in two strides and drops to his knees beside you, his gloved hands pressing against your neck, searching for a pulse that isnât there.
âCall an ambulance,â Dick says, and his voice is shaking. âTim, call an ambulance, now, nowââ
âItâs too late.â Bruceâs words are a death knell. He gathers your body into his arms, cradling you against the armored chest of the Batsuit, and the sound he makes is not a cry. Itâs a howl.
The others stand frozen in the doorway. Jasonâs face has gone white. Tim is on the phone with emergency services, his voice a monotone of shock. Damian takes one step forward, then stops, his gaze fixed on the track marks on your arms, the evidence of monthsâyearsâof suffering that none of them saw.
Dick sinks to the floor. He doesnât say anything. He just stares at you, his little sister, the one he promised to spend time with, the one he never got around to calling back.
The ambulance comes. The paramedics do what they can, which is nothing. You are declared dead at the scene.
...
They find your diary three days later, wedged between your mattress and the box spring. Alfred discovers it while stripping the bed, and he does not read itânot at first. He carries it to Bruce with the solemnity of a man delivering a coffin.
Bruce reads it alone, in his study, with the door locked.
He reads about your first attempt to join the family, your twelve-year-old hope crumbling under the weight of his rejection. He reads about Damianâs dismissal, Dickâs broken promises, Timâs distracted smiles, Jasonâs indifference. He reads about the first pill you stole, the first needle you let a stranger press into your vein, the first time you overdosed and woke up alone on the bathroom floor. He reads about the locketâyour motherâs locketâand how you sold it for a final hit, a final night, a final silence.
He reads the last entry, written the morning you left:
I used to think that if I just tried harder, theyâd see me. I used to think that love was something you earned. But Iâm so tired. Iâm so tired of watching them be a family without me. Iâm so tired of being a ghost in my own home. I donât know if Iâm running away or if Iâm just finally admitting that I was never really here at all. Either way, I donât think it matters. They wonât notice Iâm gone. They never have.
Bruce closes the diary. He sets it down on his desk with the careful precision of a man handling a bomb. And then he does something he has not done since his parents died in a pool of blood and pearls on a rain-slicked Gotham street: he weeps.
....
The funeral is small. The family stands in a tight cluster around the grave, dressed in black, their faces carved from stone. The Gotham sky is a bruised purple, threatening rain but never delivering. Itâs the kind of day you always hated, the kind that made the manor feel like a mausoleum.
Alfred reads a eulogy that he wrote in the small hours of the morning, his voice steady but his eyes rimmed red. He speaks about your kindness, your quiet resilience, the way you used to follow him around the kitchen as a child, begging to help with the cookies. He does not mention the drugs. He does not mention the neglect. He does not need to.
Bruce stands at the front, his head bowed. He has not spoken in three days. The cowl hangs heavy in his mind, a shield he no longer knows how to take off. He keeps replaying momentsâthe night you asked to be trained, the dinner where he didnât save you a seat, the thousand tiny betrayals of absence and inattention that accumulated like snow until they buried you alive. He wonders if there was a single moment when he could have saved you. He knows there was. He knows there were a hundred moments, a thousand, and he missed every single one.
Dick stands to his left, his arm around Barbara, who is crying silently. He is thinking about the hallway conversation, the easy promise he made and then forgot. We should do something soon. Just the two of us. He never did. He never will.
Jason stares at the coffin with a hollow expression. Heâs thinking about the way you flinched when he shifted away from you at the dinner table, the way he never bothered to ask why. Heâs thinking about all the times he brushed past you in the hallways, too caught up in his own ghosts to notice the living one right in front of him.
Tim is running through the data in his head, the missed signs, the pattern of thefts from the medical bay that heâd dismissed as inventory errors. Heâs the detective. Heâs supposed to notice things. He didnât notice you.
Damian says nothing. His face is a mask, but his hands are trembling. He remembers calling you a civilian. He remembers every time he looked through you like you were furniture. He was a child, he tells himself. He didnât know. But he did know. He just didnât care.
The coffin descends into the ground. The first clod of dirt hits the lid with a sound like a door closing.
And the family that was never really yours stands in the silence, and they grieve, and they will carry this grief for the rest of their lives. It will not bring you back. It will not fix what was broken. It is too late for apologies, too late for love, too late for anything but the slow, corrosive knowledge that they failed you in every way that mattered.
You were seventeen years old. You were dying in a house full of heroes. And now you are dead, and they are still heroes, and the world will never know your name.
The rain never comes. The sky just stays purple, bruised and waiting, and somewhere in the distance, the Bat-Signal cuts through the gloom like a razor.
Life goes on. It always does.
But in Wayne Manor, a bedroom door stays closed, and a chair at the dining table stays empty, and the silence you left behind is louder than any scream.
