What if...
Bruce hadn't adopted Richard Grayson?
Richard Grayson is twelve years old when his parents are murdered. One moment, they're swinging on the ropes he's been around his entire life – the next, the ground is red and his parents are crumpled bodies and people are screaming and he's an orphan, in just a few seconds. All it took was one refusal – 'no, we aren't going to pay you off' – and a little boy finds himself alone in the world.
(He had no way of knowing that, somewhere, many universes away, another little boy finds himself not as alone.)
Three hours later, a social worker takes his hand and pulls him from the police car and into the orphanage. He gets a single metal bed in a room of fifty others; the sheets are starched and white, the pillow hard, the mattress harder. The other boys leave him alone; they were told to not talk to him, to let him acclimate.
(Alfred makes Richard Grayson chocolate chip cookies and Batman helps the police investigate and Bruce assures Richard he'll never be alone again.)
Richard is only there for two months and twelve days.
(And though Richard Grayson (soon to be Wayne) doesn't know it now, Bruce hasn't lied – the family will stick together for the rest of their lives.)
A nice couple agrees to foster Richard Grayson. He'll forget their name in the future, when he's been through too much to care to remember, but they're older – her hair is gray like steel, and his head is bald, and not because he's shaved it. They live in the city, in a small apartment, and he has to sleep in a small, closet-like room. He doesn't mind, though, because he's still numb from death and he gets food and no one is hitting him.
(And in that universe far, far away, a thirteen year old little boy is learning to fight and sleeping in a California queen.)
Six weeks later, his foster father is diagnosed with cancer. The tumor is removed, but it costs money, and Richard – he goes by Richard, now, because only his father called him Dick and only his mother called Robin – goes back to the group home. He puts his essential belongings in a black garbage bag and sticks it under the hard metal bed for the second time.
(Richard is Dick and sometimes Robin and Robin gets injured; he's stuck in a metal bed, too, while Alfred cares for him and Bruce protects them both.)
It's a month less than a year before someone else agrees to foster the temperamental, violent teenage boy named Richard.
(It's four months before Dick gets back to full strength.)
The couple who fosters Richard are actually an overweight woman and a husband that's never home, along with seven other foster children. The children stay in their room and avoid the house if they can, but it isn't as bad as it could have been. They all get two meals a day, enough school supplies, and, sometimes, new clothes.
(Dick Grayson-Wayne skips two grades and enters a private school; he fights crime at night, gets straight A's and becomes best friends with Kid Flash.)
Then Richard Grayson walks in on the foster 'father' touching the youngest foster girl. Blood soaks the floor, and the man never regains movement below his waist. The young girl gets saved like so many others never are.
(In the universe far away, Bruce stops Dick from killing the man that murdered his parents and arrests him, instead.)
Richard stays in a juvenile detention center until he turns fifteen, then he moves back to a group home. He isn't fostered again. Instead, the courts emancipate him when he turns sixteen and he vanishes from the eye of the government, living on the streets. He never finishes high school.
(Dick Grayson-Wayne moves away from Gotham when he turns sixteen; he arrives in Jump City, graduates early, and founds the Teen Titans.)
Richard Grayson is arrested on his twentieth birthday for assault and battery. He's beaten a man almost to death after witnessing the man abusing a woman, a stripper. He receives ten years with a good chance of early release for good behavior. The other man receives twenty and never gets the feeling back in his right hand.
(Dick Grayson-Wayne also turns twenty, drops the 'Wayne' and becomes a police officer in Bludhaven – he arrests a man who is beating his stripper girlfriend on his first evening of patrol.)
Ten years later, Richard is released from prison. He's gotten a high school diploma and an associate's degree in prison, but he's also a felon. He drifts with no real job for two years before being hired as a custodian in a Wayne Tech facility in Bludhaven.
(Nightwing is in the paper one morning, having defended a Wayne Tech building from a villain named Blockbuster. The only casualty was a janitor who'd once been a felon. No one will miss him.)