Gotham was the same as it had always been in his memories, imposing and violent and dirty.
He stayed all of a few day before the worry of running into someone he knew, running into Bruce, drove him out.
Bludhaven was the sister city of Gotham, about an hour east, situated in the middle of a bay across an interconnected chain of islands. A former whaling town left disparate when the industry fell through, it was as corrupt and broken as Gotham was, but where Gotham had hope and money, Bludhaven was nothing more than the place where dreams went to die.
It seemed fitting a place as any to settle down in.
To its north was a renowned University, the one shining beacon of change in the otherwise dark hell called Bludhaven, and to the south and west were suburbs that sprawled until they intertwined with those from Gotham, joining the two cities in a way that blurred county lines.
The city reminded him of the cities had had been in during his time on the streets and returning to such a place proved to be a type of catharsis to him, a way to reclaim that lost time.
It was perfect, the kind of place where he could envision a future of perhaps making a difference or, at the very least, getting by well off enough. The city was challenged for skilled workers, left under funded and under worked by those migrating to Gotham. He could make a good life here.
With the considerable funds left to him by Talia as payment for his service to the League, he was able to secure an apartment: a large studio in the heart of downtown. No one wanted to live in the neighborhood he'd set his sights on, one of the more dangerous, but quaint and homey all the same, so market prices were down and he soon found himself standing in a near thousand square foot studio, looking around at his new home. It was a steal. The landlord had looked almost relieved looking over his application and background papers.
He had money enough to get him by for a few months, but he sought out a job right away.
The requirements for the police academy were low with the most likely applicants being many of those whose lives were already hardpressed by the rough streets of the city, and so he was accepted near immediately and finished soon enough.
Being a beat cop was hardly his life's aspiration but it paid the bills and he liked it well enough and relished in the opportunity it gave him to quickly learn the city and provide help to those in the most need, where he could.
Most times, though, he was on traffic assignments, but still, it was a living.
It wasn't long before the call of helping the city drew him back into costume.
He had free time. Too much of it. With no friends in the city, with few hobbies and long shifts condensed across fewer days, a side effect of being an officer of the law, he found himself idle and anxious and missing the life he'd had with the League, with days filled with strict training regimens and deep cover assignments across the farthest corners of the globe.
With the return to a life that could almost be considered normal, Robin found himself more and more reminded of his life before, of when he was Robin, a costumed hero, and not just Robin the assassin turned beat cop with too much free time eating away at him.
He remembered being that Robin and all the adrenaline and excitement it brought with it and he longed for a return to that time.
It was the thought of his friends now, though, after so much time since his death, that stayed him from showing up at Bruce Wayne's Manor and confessing the truth to him. He couldn't go back, ever, though every bit of him ached to.
But he longed for something more, all the same. A darker part of him said he missed hurting people, missed beating justice into those who most deserved it, and maybe that darker part was the truest.
He made his own costume, modeled it from a concept he had once put together when he was still Robin and all too aware that he couldn't be Robin forever, that at some point he had to transcend that role and become his own hero, whose name was said without accompaniment to someone else's.
He had called it Nightwing, had scribbled costume concepts and weapon designs in notebooks. Something different from the flashiness of his Robin costume, something darker and more mature.
He settled on black with a single blue accent: a bird across the front, drawn in a V pattern, reminiscent of the way birds flocked together through the sky. It was a throwback to the suits he had worn as a member of the Flying Graysons, though that life felt so far away from him now. In most other ways, it resembled his League suit, with armor built into the key areas, strategic pockets, a utility belt to give Batman a run for his money.
In the end it looked almost as he had envisioned, a tactical suit with just enough changed to make it his, but a far enough cry from the League outfits that it didn't immediately reek of assassin.
He spent the longest time deciding on the face, but eventually he settled on the same style eye mask that he had worn as Robin, with a much sharper accent to it, a little more complex. It was enough. Wearing it, his appearance was generic enough he could not be immediately recognized as someone supposed to be long dead.
Still, he wasn't certain he could stand up to the scrutiny of Batman, but with any luck the risk would never come to fruition. He had no intention of working with other heros and loners were notoriously unfriendly enough that the Justice League only rarely reached out to them.
For his weapon, he chose a set of eskrima clubs that could be formed to make a longer staff. It was a throwback to his swordsmanship, which Talia had spent grueling months instructing him in until the thought of shooting people dead with a gun seemed much more preferable. But it was as much a familiarity to his day job, as well, to the nightstick he carried at all times, and he practiced with the clubs for weeks before he finally decided on them.
He would have prefered a sword, but he daren't risk the unholy hell that would be rained down on him by the Justice League should he start slaughtering people in the streets. Besides, it wasn't really him, deep down inside.
He decided he was done killing people.
He'd heard whispers of another vigilante in town among his colleagues at work, though the general consensus was that she was small time and little worry among the force, despite the alarming trail of violence she left in her wake. With a city so big and her as the only vigilante, she made little enough trouble for the police and the local government that no move was made to approach her, for better or for worse.
Sportress was her name, and Robin hardly expected to run into her only a few short weeks into his stint as Nightwing.
She found him in the early morning hours, as he sat at his favorite vantage point on a roof, looking down at the streets below. It was a quiet night and he was in pain, the firebrand pain that set deep in his flesh and drove him to distraction. He was on edge, fire in his lungs, flame burning across his flesh, and so he sat where he could watch but only intervene if necessary.
The city had survived without his presence, and it would survive another night. But he was out in costume all the same, too restless to sleep.
Sportress landed softly enough behind him that he doubted an ordinary person would have heard her. But he was League trained and he didn't so much as flinch as she crept up behind him to stand by his side.
She was blonde with short tousled hair that hung barely passed her chin. Her costume was similar to his own, a dark gray made for its tactical advantage. There were accents of deep green, though, running down the sleeves and across the chest in a spiral where it ran back down to her sides, crossing down the seams of her pants. Her mask covered all but a diamond shape where her mouth and nose were, stopping at her hairline. Tactical goggles had been sewn across the holes for her eyes and he caught a flash of deep brown on the other side of them. She was asian.
Her utility belt held everything imaginable: a collapsible staff similar to his own, knives, several sets of brass knuckles, including the ones currently adorning her hands, which she had settled onto her hips. At one hip hung a crossbow, large and dangerous, though collapsed, and across her back was strapped a quiver.
He wondered if the stories of her violence has been downplayed to him at the precinct. Maybe he needn't have worried so much about killing people.
"You're Nightwing," she stated calmly and her voice sent a chill down his spine. It was rough and low and he'd know it anywhere, so distinctive was it when combined with the blond hair, the style of her costume, the crossbow. Even the name, so similar as it was to her father's.
It was Artemis. He almost choked as she looked down at him, eyes narrowing behind her goggles. "You look familiar. Do I know—" she began, but he cut her off, springing to his feet, though the effort only pained him all the more.
"You're Sportress," he said, deepening his voice ever so slightly. He doubted she would recognize him by that alone. He'd changed far more than she had, he had shot up in height and he towered over her now and his voice was no longer the high pitched cackle it had been at thirteen. He was a man, now, whereas she had been almost a woman already the last time he had seen her. "If you're here because you want to work together, I'm sorry to have to tell you I don't play well with others."
The intimidation act was new to him, despite so long as a mercenary, but he thought he pulled it off well enough. Sportress practically sneered at him, drawing her lips back into an angry frown that didn't quite fit the Artemis he remembered.
"If you don't know what you're doing, you'll get your ass killed in a city like this, working alone," she snapped at him.
"It's a good thing I know what I'm doing," he said, laughing. He lost himself for a moment, so surprised by her boldness, that he found himself slipping into his real laugh, a laugh that he knew she knew was familiar and her eyes widened.
"Are you sure I don't know—" she tried again but he waved her off.
"Never seen you before today," he told her, hopping back onto the ledge. "Now, if you'll excuse me—" He dropped from the ledge abruptly, enough to send her likely running over to look after him, but he didn't follow her movements, instead focusing only on catching the edge of the fire escape just below it, slowing his fall and positioning himself to land perfectly on the ground. The landing was as gentle as he had planned it and he took off the moment his feet hit the ground, heading for a nearby alley he knew for a fact was famous for its near death muggings.
She didn't follow him and he leaned against the wall just out of her sight, heart pounding.
His old life was going to find a way to come back to him, one way or another.
He looked her up, at last, the next morning. He'd hesitated to look up anyone after his return to the states, worried he'd tempt himself into returning to his old life, worried more they might somehow realize someone had been looking into them.
But social media was prevalent nowadays and it was easy enough to find her facebook profile. She looked nothing as he had remembered, her hair now shorn short and wild, though she wore it back in the majority of her pictures. It was difficult to reconcile her with the vigilante he had seen the night before, with her blood stained brass knuckles and wide range of knives.
She was a graduate student at Bludhaven University, working on her masters.
She was single, which was the most surprising thing he saw. Somehow he had thought she would have stayed with Wally, but they had been young and, at heart, vastly different people, so maybe it wasn't really meant to last.
He wondered if his death had played a role in that.
He closed it out as quickly as he had opened it, determined not to let himself start digging any deeper. What mattered was that she was in the city, after all his attempts to avoid his past, and there was little he could do to truly avoid her, short of uprooting his life again and changing locations.
He couldn't keep running. He would have to find a way to avoid her.
"Why the sudden interest in Sportress?"
Robin looked up from his office computer, where he was doing his mandatory desk duty shift. He had multiple articles of Sportress sightings pulled up and he didn't bother minimizing them as Mark, one of his precinct's detectives, came up behind him.
He shrugged, scrolling through an article containing only a blurry photo of her. "She's interesting, is all, that we know so little about her."
Mark dropped into the seat next to his desk, usually used to handcuff suspects during processing. Today they were slow, though, and so the seat sat blissfully empty. He took a swig of his coffee, setting it down on the desk. Robin eyed it wearily. It would leave a ring on the wood if left too long, but he kept his mouth shut. It wasn't his desk anyway, it belonged to the department.
"Whatcha want to know about her?" Mark asked, and Robin blinked, looking up to him from the coffee mug. "I worked with a few of the detectives that were looking into her, before the department decided to drop the case. Not really worth the resources, you know what I mean? And a lot of us feel she's doing some much needed good."
Robin frowned, not at all surprised to hear such praise for a violent vigilante in a place like Bludhaven. "Why so little information on her online?" he asked, closing out of the windows. He'd turned up nothing new, as before.
"She's doesn't really work the streets, you know," Mark said. "Sticks to bringing down organizations, big time things on a small time scale, if you get what I'm saying. She targets higher ups, drug lords, corrupt politicians. She doesn't make herself busy much with muggings and petty thefts, not like the Nightwing fellow does."
Robin didn't react at all to the mention of his alter ego. He'd had yet to hit the news, but it seemed his name was making its rounds nonetheless.
"Anyway," Mark continued, "It's hard to catch her in the act of much of anything, since she tends to target the people out of our reach, even. Finds the evidence, leaves them bloody and unconscious by the time we make it to the scene. She's left a few of them dead, even. She really knows that she's doing, that one. Wouldn't be surprised if she'd learned from the Bats himself."
"Huh," Robin said, taking it all in. She was as violent as he'd heard, but he didn't doubt she knew what she was doing. It explained why he'd only ever run into her the once, and then only because she'd sought him out.
Mark stood, grabbing his mug. "Yeah, she's in a league of her own. Doing a better job cleaning up this city than we are, if you ask me."
Somehow Robin doubted she'd been trained by Batman, though, but he couldn't really argue that last point.
He didn't run into her again until a few months later, when he bumped into Artemis, out of costume, in a coffee shop.
He was waiting for his name to be called, standing near the sugars and creams. He was avoided by everyone, his presence in his cop uniform intimidating to all of those who shuffled by him. But he was preoccupied with his phone, leaning against the wall with ears only for the name he was waiting for.
When they finally announced it he took his coffee without a word and turned sharply, colliding directly with her. His coffee spilled down her blouse and he already had a handful of napkins in his hands, apologizing profusely, by the time he looked up and realized it was her.
Artemis stared up at him with wide eyes from behind wire framed glasses, her hair down and tousled, coffee now splattered across her shirt, her scarf, her jacket. She didn't seem to pay it any mind, though, her eyes only on him, locked with his, mouth hanging agape. A fine tremor ran through her and she drew in a sharp breath.
"Dick," she said carefully, hand clenched around her purse.
He stared back at her in a stupor, internal panic claiming him, half empty cup clutched in one sticky hand, a wad of napkins in the other. "Arte—" He stopped, catching himself. "I— I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—" he trailed off, holding out the napkins to her as he set his own cup down on the counter. She took them with a trembling hand but didn't do anything with him.
"No," she whispered. "No, it's you, it's—"
He turned and bolted before she could finish.
"Wait! Don't— Don't go!" she called after him from the doorway, but he knew the city well, knew it enough to disappear into the crowds of early morning commuters making their way down the street. No one spared him a glance.
He had to leave, he told himself. He had to leave the city.
But he didn't.
This was the decision being made for him. The truth would come out, one way or another.
Days passed and he went about his life with no interference from Artemis, the team, the Justice League: Cop by day, Nightwing by night.
After a week had gone by, he hoped maybe she had let it go. The eyes played tricks on people, grief had a funny way of striking deep into the soul, and surely she would doubt herself before she would believe her old friend was back from the dead.
He had no such luck.
Barely a week and a half later, one of the silent alarms he kept in his apartment was triggered while he was out on patrol. Robin returned via the front door, but the half ajar window adjoining his fire escape did not go unnoticed by him as a he circled the building to the entrance.
She was there when he opened the door and let himself in. He'd changed from his costume on his way back and he stepped in quietly, duffle bag thrown across his shoulder, his gun held tight in the grip of his hands.
He'd only ever rarely had cause to use it, but better safe than sorry, walking into the unknown in his own apartment as he was. He had no reason to be Nightwing, here, with an intruder. He was just Robin Gray, defending his home.
Artemis was there, in costume, sitting politely on the edge of his bed, scrolling through her phone as if there was not a care in the world. She looked up as he dropped the duffle bag loudly on the floor, no longer concerned with keeping silent at the sight of her.
He stood in the doorway, staring at her with some level of disbelief.
She'd broken into his apartment.
"You have a gun," she commented, surprised.
"I'm a cop," he retorted, setting it down on his kitchen counter as he walked into the room. Hardly the best gun etiquette, but it was just her and him. Hardly seemed worth the trouble. "You triggered the alarm on purpose, to lure me back."
She sniffed as if offended. "I'm hardly an amateur," she said. "If I didn't want you to know I was here, you wouldn't have known I was here." She gave him a cocky smirk, the same one she'd been notorious for when she had just been Artemis to him, so many years earlier.
She reached up and peeled back her mask, tossing it aside. She shook out her hair from where it had been pulled back, letting it settle around her face, fluffy and thick. Then she stood and strode over until she was standing in front of him and all at once she was Artemis again, hardly unchanged now that he could see her without the mask.
He was almost a head taller than her and she had to look up to him to take him all in and she did, a sad look in her eyes as her gaze roamed over his face, finally settling on meeting his eyes.
"It's really you," she said after a long moment had passed. "I didn't dare let myself believe it was true until— until I saw you again with my own eyes." She reached out to him with her hand, placing it against his chest, digging her fingers into the fabric of his shirt.
He reached up himself and caught her hand in his where it lay, intertwining his fingers with hers. "How did you find me?" he asked, a lump forming in his throat.
"You left your cup at the coffee shop," she told him. "Your name was scrawled on it and lucky for me the barista who took your order had neat handwriting. It only took me a little sleuthing to find your address."
She gave him a wry smile and he looked down at her, feeling every bit as overwhelmed as she likely did. "It's really you," she echoed, letting go of his hand and stepping back.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "It's really me."
Her eyes dampened with unshed tears and he himself felt what could have been a few tears of his own coming on, but he quelled it
And then she surprised him. She reached up and wiped from her eyes the coming tears and then she lurched forward on her tip toes, catching his mouth in hers in a kiss, her hand coming up behind his head to bury itself in his hair.
The move caught him by surprise but he leaned into it, returning her kiss in turn and wrapping his arms around her, pulling her against him. It was a smooth motion, familiar in it's comfort and he kissed her harder, dropping one hand down to settle it against her lower back.
He pulled away after a moment and looked down at her and her now flush lips and red tinted face. It felt almost natural, to be kissing her as he had, and he thought of his time at the League and blond haired Sarah, who had reminded him so much of the woman he now had in his arms. But there had been others, too, a long list of lovers, male and female alike, and the thought of adding Artemis to that list suddenly made him hesitate.
Robin reached out and swept a lock of hair from her face and, searching her expression for any sign that she wasn't committed to this, but she was panting and heavy lidded. "Are you s—" he began, but she cut him off.
"Yes, yes," she said, catching his hand in hers and squeezing it tight. Her hands were calloused and rough, as an archer's would be, and he squeezed it in return. "I'm sure, D— Robin. I'm— yeah."
He swallowed, throat dry, and he moved forward, catching her face in his hands and kissing her again, but deeper and far less chaste than before. Her chest heaved against his, her breasts pressing hard against his shirt, her hand snaking up to wrap around the back of his neck, urging him onwards, refusing to allow him even the smallest break.
He'd had a lot of lovers, over the last few years, but Artemis was the most beautiful of them. When they were young, he'd had a crush, definitely. But she had been with Wally and Wally— Wally had been it's own problem, because he'd had eyes for Wally, too, but lacked the capacity to really understand those feelings, at the time.
But Artemis, now, was here, and every bit what he had once thought she might be. And he relished in it and in her as the night went on, exploring her, finally, as she explored him— alive and whole again.