Chapter Text
The sea used to be loud enough to drown her thoughts. Now, in Gotham, it’s the city that roars.
Sirens replace gulls. Streetlights burn where constellations should be. The water here is iron-dark and full of ghosts, but she can still smell the salt if she closes her eyes long enough. Some part of her believes it followed her inland—salt in her blood, salt in the rain, salt on her tongue when she can’t quite breathe.
Once, she was a girl made for prophecy. Now, she’s a woman trying to learn small things: coffee that isn’t reheated three times, sleep without nightmares, a name that doesn’t echo on battlefields.
Normal, she tells herself, is a kind of peace.
So when the job offer comes—Wayne Enterprises, steady pay, no monsters in the fine print—she accepts without thinking. Gotham hums beneath her feet like a challenge. The buildings lean in, listening. The storm follows her off the bus.
The city’s skyline rises like a jagged prayer: all glass, shadow, and ambition.
It looks alive. Maybe it is.
Gotham feels the way gods used to—demanding, dangerous, never sleeping. But there’s something magnetic in that hunger, a pulse that answers the quiet, restless ache in her chest.
Her reflection flickers in every dark window she passes: eyes like stormlight, a woman she almost recognizes. Somewhere inside her, the ocean shifts.
She tells herself she’s just here for a job. A desk. A paycheck. Rent that’s mostly on time.
No swords, no monsters, no destiny waiting at the door.
But as the rain starts again—soft, relentless—she knows better.
Peace isn’t something you’re given.
It’s something you build, one breath at a time, in the ruins of what tried to destroy you.
And if Gotham wants to test that—
well.
She’s survived worse gods than this city.