I could have done more.

In the same cemetery where my parents lie, I'm watching her as everything around her is blanketed in overcast. I'm out much sooner than usual, but I owe her that. I stand behind the large tree that is naked from the oncoming threat of winter. The breeze is stiff, but she seems as unfazed by it as I am.

She's been standing in that position for twenty minutes now as she looked down, I know she saw me.

Good.

Two weeks ago, Oracle received an anonymous tip from a message board that she frequents during her free time. She's always looking around for anything sticking out that could be a lead to something big.

During her free time, remember…

She had logged in into one of her regular message board websites, specifically one that is an online haven for troubled teens. Runaways, drug abusers, abuse survivors, etc. Oracle came across a series of posts by different users that all referenced a new method of dealing drugs. One user in particular was very specific with how he used the method of using coded messages with other online users in receiving drugs.

Oracle noticed that the user was deleted from the website in risk of encouraging others to following his specific details.

She managed to save every one of his posts and was able to piece together where exactly she could find the online trail. It leads her to three ISP addresses, one in particular that had more frequent traffic than the other two.

Oracle identified the ISP address that was registered to a man by the name of Ramon Escobar. I did a background check; Mr. Escobar is a physical trainer for the wealthy circle in Gotham. Well paid, I heard he's been mostly guilty for having affairs with the married women of powerful men.

He is a widowed father with a sixteen year old daughter named Patricia. She attends St. Andrews Private School, a school that focuses on troubled young women. Patricia has ties to the local gang The LoBoys, where her twenty-six year old boyfriend is a highly ranked street soldier. Oracle even managed to find out that her ex-boyfriend was a younger member of the LoBoys, until her current one sent him to an emergency room for spying for a rival gang.

Since then, Patricia has been used by the LoBoys in countless drug dealings with their customers through the internet. The LoBoys had lost enough product from trying to deal on the streets, so they sought to find another means of pushing their drugs.

Patricia had been dealing for almost nine months now; the online trail goes to countless upper class residents of Gotham. All of which have children old enough to be interested in what the LoBoys had to offer. Oracle was able to send anonymous emails to the parents of each child while I focused on the source.

A day after Oracle found the trail; I followed Patricia home from school as Matches Malone. I waited outside of her school in an old Dodge with no identifiable features that stood out.

She was chauffeured by her father's Bentley after Patricia said her goodbyes to other classmates as they exited the school. The school uniforms they wore seemed a bit to revealing for this being a reform school, but Patricia's uniform made her seem over dressed compared to the other girls. The girls here were no different than some who attend Gotham High. However those kids don't have the parents with the money to send them to a school like this.

It doesn't make the wealthy parents saints by any measure. The majority of these parents love the fact that they can pay someone else to handle their responsibilities for them.

The bug I planted in the Bentley earlier is working perfectly. I hear the conversation, talk of her progress in school coming along perfectly. She says that her latest evaluation scored her the highest since she had enrolled.

I can also hear the sounds of her legs rubbing against the leather interior.

The car leads back to their house in Berkley Hills, an exclusive Gotham suburb and a place where you want to raise your kids. Ramon Escobar is scheduled to have a session with a "well paying" client in an hour, meaning Patricia is free to make some of her deliveries.

Escobar leaves within twenty minutes of bringing Patricia home; she left four minutes after he did. Patricia rode her bike to the exit of her subdivision, where her boyfriend's lowrider pickup truck waited for her. He quickly loaded her bike in the bed of his truck as she entered the cab with an order sheet with delivery spots folded in her hand.

I was able to follow them as they made their rounds. One stop after another as she passed out small packages discretely from the passenger window, they spread their product all around town. I counted twenty-six stops across town, with at least twenty bucks per package. From what I remember, they mostly pushed marijuana, cocaine and sometimes crack. The LoBoys always try pushing newly acquired narcotics, but most of their customers today purchased marijuana.

The fall sun began to set early, just in time for me to change clothes.

I'm Batman as I trail them back to an old house on Gotham's lower eastside, one of those neighborhoods where you don't want to raise your kids in. This is LoBoys turf, as their taggings can be seen sporadically around the area.

I realize that I need to get to her alone.

She's young enough to turn her back on all of this if done properly. The trick is to use my patience as I let the rest of the gang go about their daily routine. The house is obviously a party house as loud music is played and alcohol can be smelled from where I am on the roof.

Below me is a window to a bedroom, where Patricia and her boyfriend now find themselves. I don't have to watch to know what's going on. His grunts and moans mixed with her muffled voice gives me more information than I want. Other than the fact that he's sexually active with a minor, I want to break his ribs for making me listen to it.

After he's finished, I hear her say to him in a forced accent that she's going for a walk. When she receives a reply in snoring, she leaves the room. I quickly work my way to the front of the house where I see Patricia dodging other members of the LoBoys as she made her way out, most of them wanting her to give them what she just gave her boyfriend.

She continued walking as she flipped them off, heading towards the unlit portion of the neighborhood. I find myself on the top of a house that is condemned, giving shelter to a few homeless families. Patricia's phone rings and I hear her talking to her dad. She tells him that a friend picked her up and she's at the mall. The conversation is short after her father fails to ask for further information. She hangs up routinely and replaces the phone in her hand with a pipe.

She looks down in her purse to find her lighter, only to find me directly in front of her when she raises her head.

"Shit!" she screamed as LoBoys laughed from a good enough distance.

They must have thought something scared her.

As her pipe hit the ground, she tried to turn and run only to be stopped my hands on her shoulders.

"I know where you go during the day, Patricia", I said as she struggled in my hands.

Her fear is accompanied by shock as she hears me hiss her name. She's now petrified of me.

"Your boyfriend won't last long in his game, don't go down with him."

I turned to leave, only to hear her find her voice.

"He…I'm pregnant", she slowly says, her accent nowhere to be found.

My hard look does not shift.

"He loves me, he does!" she says like she's tried to convince someone else before. "I do this for him and he'll take care of me and our baby."

I contemplate telling her about the last girl who, on record, said the exact same thing. Instead, I fire a grapple to the highest tree and lift myself from there.

I follow her back by rooftop as she runs awkwardly back to the house. She pushes through the same LoBoys sticking out their tongues and grabbing their crotches at her. I'm on the roof as she enters the same bedroom where her boyfriend is asleep. She's crying hysterically as she tells him what she just saw.

I hear a smack, then a quiet thud followed by a slightly louder thud, finally him screaming at her.

I hear him cursing at her, demanding to know what she told me when I reach the window. She's on the ground with him over her.

Patricia is clutching at her stomach.

I quietly panic to myself as I leap into the bedroom. He's injured before he realizes it was me. I slam his head against the wall, hoping he gets a bad concussion, the loud music blocking our noise from reaching downstairs. Before he falls limp to the ground, I'm already over Patricia. She has a mark on her face where he slapped her, and a fading mark on her stomach that matches the tip of his boot.

She was already bleeding down there.

Minutes later I break character as I walk her into the emergency section of Gotham General. The orderlies take her from me as I quickly give her name, age and tell them that she's four months pregnant. Had they not already been in awe of hearing the Batmobile roaring up to the entrance, they probably would have wasted time trying to gather themselves had I just shown up.

I'm on the rooftop, telling Oracle to have the others start patrol without me and that I'd catch up. I tell her everything that happened and I'm surprised when I hear her slightly choke up. I forget that beneath her tough exterior, she's a human being on the inside.

I have to keep telling that to myself from time to time.

Not so much to keep myself from turning into some type of monster, but to remind myself that mistakes can happen.

No, not like this they can't.

I should have confronted her much earlier, rather than risk her being in that environment again. I should not have left her alone in that emotional state.

I don't have to wait to hear the condition of her child.

I already know as I drop to my knees.

Another innocent lost.

I spent the last week finishing off the remainder of the LoBoys drug ring. The members behind the ring were given life sentences. An easy decision to make by the judge as two of their customers overdosed on newly distributed heroin.

Their funerals are tomorrow.

She still has yet to move from the grave of her baby girl. The funeral was a week ago, and only her father was there for support. Somehow, he managed to convince her that a move to Metropolis was a good idea. That getting out of Gotham was the only thing to save their already crippled family.

I agree with him.

They leave tomorrow morning, and Patricia is here one last time to ask her child for forgiveness.

She stopped sobbing when she noticed me twenty minutes ago, and I owe her to show myself first. I begin to walk towards her as she speaks with her back to me.

"You were right", she quietly said as I approached her. "I…I wanted something so foolish. How…how could I believe in such a thing?"

I'm directly in front of her when she turns to me. Her eyes are much different than I last remember them. They still were a deep brown, but the look on them showed the years she has aged over the past two weeks.

Another child has grown much too fast.

"I'm leaving tomorrow, I just wanted to tell Esperanza bye…"

She begins to sob before she throws herself in my arms. She's wailing out the pain as her arms find themselves around my torso. All of the training in the world could not give me the reflex action to read that. Patricia cries the tears as I'm frozen, not sure of what to do.

Then I wrap my arms around her.

Remembering what I wanted that night when I was eight years old.