she laughed anyway. He turned his head away when she did.

"Um," Cristen repeated, pulling her hand toward her chest, "Do you know the best places to hit people? To... um... defend yourself."

"Aim for the head, throat, or center of the chest."

Robin said more stuff after that, which was great and all, but Cristen lost any semblance of track when he reached out and took her hand. She felt more than watched as he folded it into a fist and pressed her first two knuckles further forward. From then on, Cristen was uncertain if she even possessed limbs at all—there remained only Robin's, which were rubbery and warm with the material of his gloves.

"...it will allow you to aim more specifically. If you are hitting someone with the flat of your fingers, you're more likely to hurt yourself," he explained. "Anything more?"

Cristen flushed. "Huh?"

Robin frowned at her, an instant stomach-dropper, and examined her face. After a beat of silence, he moved from her fist to her pulse. It was rapid enough to drum in her ears. "Are you in shock?"

"Shock?" Choked Cristen.

"Yes," Robin rolled his eyes (mask?), "If you recall, I saved you from being beaten to death in an alleyway moments ago. I understand you may not share the same education as myself—"

Cristen ripped her hand from his and cursed at him. "I'm fine! And I have all the education I need."

He pressed his lips together.

The decline of the conversation was obvious. He was probably going to tell her to go home soon, or call the police or something. He was in a hurry to exit anyways, and Cristen worried it was because of something she said. Robin kept looking south, across the water and at the Old Gotham Island, up above the sky—and then it clicked. Looking up at the sky. All the waiting. Them.

"Sorry. Uh, what exactly do you do," Cristen awkwardly nodded at the sky, around the direction she knew the GCPD building was, "when, uh, the signal...?"

It wasn't the Diamond District or Uptown, but there were still a lot of skyscrapers cluttered around that part of the city. Cristen could see the big neon W on the Wayne Enterprises building.

"That's confidential." Robin threw it into the conversation casually, but there was a note of mock-seriousness, like someone mimicking an FBI agent. That made Cristen smile for some reason. He seemed silently pleased when she did, and let out another little scoff-laugh.

"My turn," Robin said. He crouched at the edge of the building—like Spider-Man, Cristen's nerd-brain noted—and waited until she followed him before he spoke again. "Why were you fighting three armed men two times your size over a police communicator?"

He flashed the little radio in her direction, having turned it on to listen to the broken crackle of voices on the line as a white noise of their conversation. Cristen slouched forward, lifting a knee to put her chin on top of it and closing her eyes at the familiar sound. He must have taken it off one of the gangsters.

"I, uh. The boys. They're from one of the bigger Bowery garage gangs. Stole that radio off of me a couple of weeks ago, so I stole it back," Cristen explained, voice hard. She turned her eyes to the city, having the sudden fear that he'd turn her in. But it would feel wrong, and be wrong, to lie to him anyway.

"I know. I've been tracking them." Robin said. He stared at her face, even when she didn't turn to look at him in return. "But why the communicator? It looks like it's been broken and repaired with duct tape. Not exactly valuable."

"No—it's my turn next, only fair. You got to ask your question," Cristen deflected. She offered him the barest of smiles, which he noted were more real than before. "Why do you hang around Crime Alley so much? I hear the stories, and you're apparently around here—"

"Park Row," was his only response.

She raised her brows. "Park Row?"

"That's its name. Call it by its name," he said, suddenly more strict than before.

She rarely heard people call the Crime Alley neighborhood by its original title. Everyone started calling it that after the Wayne murders, but she could see why judging the street on it's history instead of the people was harsh. It seemed... personal to him, somehow, though. He softened up in the next beat, but only enough for his shoulders to loosen a thread and his chin to raise an inch.

"And this... is my patrol zone. Now, the communicator."

Cristen's voice was small. "I like... I like listening in. Jump in... sometimes. The cops can't do the things that I can do. And I fixed the radio, y'know, because it was broken."

Robin said nothing, and that was easily worse than if he'd spoken in judgment. She felt prompted to continue, and the words fell from her mouth like water from a broken dam.

"I know it's... insane. Well, maybe not for you, but—yeah. I like helping out in any way I can," Cristen paused to looked down at her hands. "I want—no, need to help."

Robin suddenly stopped. She watched him draw his cape across himself, expression grim, and turn his face skyward. "You... have potential. But this life isn't for everyone. Especially kids."

"I'm not a kid," Cristen huffed. "And neither are you. The only difference is that you're Robin and I'm sleeping on dirt."

"You think I didn't sleep on dirt to get here?" said Robin. "I climbed mountains. Moved them. I did everything to become what I am, to learn what I know. It's not the dirt stopping you—it's the belief that it is."

The childish blanks in her mind filled the gaps in his image; the cape began to flow across his back, fluttering like leaves in the autumn wind, expression cast in the shadow of the oncoming storm. It was something out of a movie. Those big movies, with the hero at the heart of the battle fighting for what they believed in.

Sometimes, Cristen imagined herself to be the man on the poster. Protecting those that he loved, but he loved everyone, and thus he saved everyone. That was what a hero was. Who treasured humanity for their capability and starved to protect it. To encase the beauty of a child, forever happy, in a still moment. To protect that moment so that others could share the love held in that child's expression, her laugh as she told Cristen a bad joke.

To forbid the fear in her eyes to ever reveal itself.

"So you're saying that I have a chance." Cristen began, speaking slow and low as if not to disturb the moment. "I'm sorry to say, Robin, but you don't know what it's like out here. I've seen so many people die, murdered or otherwise."

"I don't know? " Robin scoffed. "Of course I know. Who do you think has been stopping those deaths? Making right on those injustices?"

Cristen glanced aside, freckles disappearing under a sheet of redness.

It was a funny thing. Robin opened his mouth to speak again, to proclaim in a voice that seemed to be permanently in italics to contrast Cristen's boldness. But he stopped, and the words pulled back too. Unwinding into simple text.

"Not just me," Robin said and glanced at the street. His attention sparked something in her chest and seemed to unfurl it. "The clinic down the street will welcome anyone in need. That police officer always walks that older man home. And you, protecting the children of this neighborhood."

Her eyes widened; and in their reflection, Robin unclasped the little metal R from his armor. Her lips parted, stricken. "You don't even know my name."

The cool, golden R was pressed into her hand by his gauntlet. Their fingers skidded off each other for a moment as she tried to offer it back to him—she couldn't take this—but he won out in the end, closing Cristen's fingers around symbol in a locking sort of way.

"You don't know mine, either," said Robin. "There are always good people. Sometimes they are fortunate, but give their life for their city while inspired by a bat. Sometimes they're nameless. And sometimes, with the same inspiration, they are foolish girls stealing police communicators in the rundown part of town. Do you understand?"

When it seemed that she did not, staring at him with the wide eyes of process, Robin firmly tells her: "Stop blaming the world for where you are, what it has given you. Stop running away from all that you fear—and instead run in the right direction... toward what you believe in."

Without thinking about it, fueled only by a sudden rush of comprehension and adoration thrown onto her like coal into a furnace, Cristen threw herself at him. Robin didn't argue. Cristen was met with unsure palms upon her back and the cool smell of kevlar, his cape a grapple bound between her fingers. Few people had ever told her she'd mattered. Fewer had ever given her the chance to show them.

"Um," choked Robin.

"Thank you," Cristen said, working her way past the barbed wire at her throat, "Thank you so much."

Cristen hadn't ever thought she was going to be worthwhile. But suddenly she and Robin had pulled apart and were simply staring at each other, red-faced and sincere, and she felt a madness take over—her life sprawled before her in a butterfly of patterns and chances and choices, and the steps she would take to get her there.

His form subsided into ink as he stepped back into the shadows, their eyes still met and their lives no longer parallel lines, but an angle to meet at one point. Cristen wondered where that point would be.

"It was nice meeting you," she murmured, and laughed at how unconventional that suddenly seemed. "Maybe the police don't always think so, but you're my hero. You always have been."

Robin's face grew hot, and a grin sprawled from one cheek to the other. "You have exquisite taste."

"But I assure you," Robin said, stepping toward the ledge, his cape licking the drop at his heels, "it won't be the last time. We'll meet again—" he smiled beneath his hood, "—and I cannot wait for that utterly insufferable day."

With a single step backward, Robin was flying. Cristen watched him launch across the street and swing in a great plume of yellow and red across the sky, wingspan as wide as a leap toward the moon would take.

When she looked up, Robin was gone... And it had begun to rain.

     CRISTEN ARRIVED AT THE FRONT door of her ratty, run-down apartment that she shared with the Jefferson boys and that Moxie girl from Little Italy. Laureline met her at the door like thunder, and the following worrying embrace was lightning on Cristen's cold skin. She'd been crying; Cristen's fingers met a hot tear on her cheek and kissed it away.

The first thing out of her mouth came when Cristen hugged her back, sighing in relief, was, "We're never goin' to Crime Alley again."

"Park Row," Cristen corrected, gently and without thinking about it.

Laureline shot her an odd look, "Park Row?"

"That's its name," Cristen said, pulling the door shut. She felt Robin's R slip up from her pocket and pushed it back into place without seam, glowing and grinning like a freak. "Call it by its name."

...and here's some cute art I've drawn ;)