Chapter Text
In the night, one could hear a variety of noises.
The caw of a crow,
The woosh of a cape,
The sound of a door creaking open.
Some of these noises were more important than others, at least in this story.
The crow, while involved in what was to come, was ultimately innocent. It was a crow afterall, it couldn’t have anticipated what was going to happen. Not that it wasn’t startled by the following events. It had, until that moment, been quite friendly with the victim, sharing trinkets and the like in return for some pieces of the granola bars they kept on them.
The wearer of the cape would also be involved in the crime approaching. Not that they were aware of it, they were halfway across the city at the time, breaking up a fight between two gangs. No, this involvement was caused by the paranoia of the offender. You see, in the months and years before this crime, the offender had met the caped one, and he had no intent to do so again without killing them. The cape wearer was much more involved in the later parts of this story, when all there was to do for the victim was solve their case.
The person opening the door, as you may have guessed, was the offender of this crime, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The crime afterall, wasn’t solved the moment it happened.
A crow cawed,
A clicking sound could be heard in response.
The door creaked,
Gravel shifted.
A gasp,
A flutter of wings,
More gravel.
Two clicking sounds, not of the same type.
A bang and a scream.
A wet crunch and the shattering of glass and metal.
Rattling breaths.
More rattling breaths, wet this time.
Silence.
The body wouldn’t be found for three days, and no one identified it. It was assumed that, because it was in Crime Alley, there was no one to care.
This wasn’t entirely wrong, there wasn’t anyone who would care within that three day timeframe. The boy’s parents weren’t at home and wouldn’t realize he was missing for another four months at least. When they did, a missing person alert would go out, and then they would leave again. The boy didn’t have many friends and rarely showed up to school, so it would have been even longer before someone else noticed.
However unplanned the murder was, the offender would not be caught, especially not without interference.
Fortunately, or rather unfortunately, Gotham had taken a liking to the victim, it was rare that someone would notice its beauty even in its worst places, and the child, while reckless, certainly did notice it.
In fact, the reason that the child was even out so late at night, was to watch Gotham. Usually he would have been following its birds and bats, but tonight, he had been far more focused on the architecture and wildlife while he waited for them to arrive.
This, of course ultimately led to his death. Not, I believe that he would have survived for long, he died rather quickly of his injuries. If he had been near a bird or bat, they may have noticed the crime while it was happening though, and however dead he was, he would have at least not been an unsolved crime.
Perhaps that would have helped him avoid his fate given by Gotham.
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Batman, however much he wished he was everywhere, was not. That’s why he wasn’t as distraught about this case as Robin was. People died all the time, especially in Crime Alley, the fact that the body was an unidentified child didn’t change anything.
It was probably stressing out Robin because he could have been that child.
It didn’t matter, the case was cold and had been for three years now, which was why the two of them were looking into it. Robin needed something to do while he was benched and cold cases would be a good enough distraction.
Why Robin had decided to look into the dead bodies of children in Crime Alley while knowing how it would affect him was beyond Batman, but it wasn’t like he was going to stop him.
Surprisingly, despite the coldness of the case, there was a decent amount of evidence as to what had happened. From the injuries, it could be deduced that the child was shot on the rooftop above the alley he was found in and had fallen when the bullet had hit him. Why he was shot was a harder case to crack, but the camera which had been found beside him painted a pretty ugly picture.
If the kid had been taking pictures of his surroundings, there was a chance that he had taken a picture of his killer before getting shot for it.
Though if this was the case, it didn’t make sense for the case to be cold, it should have been pretty easy to solve with evidence like that.
Robin sent Batman to get the camera.
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Despite what the general populace may try to tell you, being dead wasn’t all that great. Sure your wounds didn’t hurt much unless you thought about them and no one could hurt you, but you couldn’t fly. Where that myth came from was beyond Tim. It wasn’t like he could talk to people either, they all just heard clicks and gravel whenever he tried to talk and it was rare that he got emotional enough for people to see him. Even beyond that, if they found out about him, they tended to run.
Probably because he spent so much time staying ahead of Batman’s patrol route so that he could take pictures.
Apparently after three years of keeping ahead of Batman people started noticing that he was around right before they got pummeled into the ground.
Sorry Batman.
At least crime rates had lowered with the amount of people he scared!
But really, it was incredibly lonely being a ghost. There weren’t many others, at least not many others like him. Lord knew why Boston could fly or possess people, he said it was because he was special, but Tim thought he was just being dramatic, he wasn’t stupid enough to believe that being special was the reason behind those abilities.
He also kind of didn’t stick around Batman much other than when they were working on cases, so it wasn’t like he was getting less lonely because of him.
So yes, he was lonely, bored, and quite frankly, about to start haunting the Joker in Arkham out of spite, at least until he felt someone pick up his camera.
You see, most of the time, the only reason that ghosts existed was because some spirit or god or other powerful being decided to bring their soul back to the living realm without fully resurrecting it. Depending on why they were being brought back they might get different abilities. Boston could possess people and fly (why he got those abilities specifically was something Tim had spent months trying to figure out), and Tim could interact with his camera and talk to people in gravel crunches and camera clicks.
Not very useful abilities, especially if no one cared enough about him to actually figure out what was causing the sounds.
That is to say, when Tim felt his camera being picked up, he was surprised enough to go find out who it was that had become interested in it after three years of collecting dust on a shelf.
Clearly he had not been keeping a close enough eye on Batman that night. It was a mistake he wouldn’t be making again, especially since he had just expressed interest in Tim’s case.