Gotham is not a kind city.

She sucks the life from her inhabitants, devouring self-respect, warping morals, and encouraging savagery and viciousness. But for all her cruelty, for all she takes and takes, she was more of a mother to Jason than Catherine Todd ever was.

Catherine may have loved him, but love was not enough to put food on the table, to keep clean clothes on their backs. Love was not enough to protect Jason from the leering stares and pedophilic touches from her dealers and Johns when she was too doped up to stand. Her love was not enough to stop Willis Todd's drunken beatings, or to stop the thugs who came by looking to settle his father's many debts long after a shiv found its way into his throat in a Blackgate cell.

Love was never enough to protect Jason, and Jason's love for Catherine had not been enough to keep her alive. This was a reality he had to face on the cold January morning he found her rigid body slumped against their bathroom wall, a dirty needle still stuck in the crook of her arm. Jason knew Catherine Todd's spirit was consumed by the city long before the heroin claimed her physical body. He knew she had not been in any state to care for herself, let alone to care for her nine year old child, for a very long time, regardless of how much she truly did love him.

No, Jason did not survive homeless in Gotham's worst streets for three years because of Catherine Todd's imparted love. It was his true mother, Gotham herself, which granted the skills and tools that allowed him his continued existence.

It was the streets that shaped him, taught him hard and painful lessons that often left him curled up and broken in her shadowy corners and musty tunnels, shivering from more than just the chill in the air. But Jason had always been an apt student and each painful lesson on the streets made him harder, faster, stealthier and more clever.

He learned how and when to fight.

He saw that the code of the streets was rooted in respect. Be it often fragile and tenuous respect or not, respect still meant survival. This kind of respect was only earned through the strength of one's fists. Jason was brutally and thoroughly educated on what situations required he let go of his pride and shame to take a beating, and what situations required he stand his ground and fight.

Alliances were soon formed with other street kids and he came to certain understandings with questionable people willing to trade obviously stolen items for money or food.

He was a skilled pickpocket, having teamed up with other street kids to lift wallets off unsuspecting targets. He soon knew the best neighborhoods to find easy marks and felt a certain glee at stealing from the more obviously wealthy. He also learned the value of restraint, never hitting the same area too often and never taking more than he needed.

In the three and a half years that he lived in Gotham's underbelly, Jason never surrendered his spirit to her as Catherine Todd had. He grew and hardened and was more intimidating that any 12 year old had a right to be.

His backpack that had long ago held several notebooks for school now held only the essentials for survival, items that saved him trouble when he had to leave a meager shelter behind and run at a moment's notice, which happened more often than he would like.

He got good at running, at using his superior knowledge of the streets to his advantage in a chase.

He had more than once found himself on the bad side of power tripping thugs, angry that he dared spend the night in the empty warehouses their crime bosses owned. He sometimes found himself having to outrun desperate tweekers half out of their mind and willing to steal and kill for their next fix. Most terrifyingly, he found himself ducking away from dark vans with blacked out windows in which many unfortunate street children were said to disappear inside and never return, if the talk on the street is to be believed.

Jason always had the most trouble snapping himself out of the total panic he felt on these occasions, unable to sleep or let his guard down for days.

However, awful as those aforementioned encounters always were, Jason most often feared being apprehended by the less than stellar Gotham police department. If he were lucky he would be passed off to CPS or juvie, and if unlucky a crooked cop would try to sell him off to either the creeps in vans or to any number of crazies willing to pay for untraceable kids in this town for who knows what nefarious purposes.

All outcomes were wholly undesirable.

Jason never expected his streets to one day lead him to the filthy alley in which the batmobile was parked, gleaming under the setting sun in stark contrast to its surroundings, tires just begging to be swiped. He never imagined a confrontation with the goddamn Batman, or that instead of the Bat turning him over to the GCPD after he had the gall to attack him with a tire iron, that he would offer him a place in his home and provide him with care and a newfound purpose.

Jason was sure that Gotham would never show such a kindness to one of her children without a heavy price. He accepted her gift, but couldn't help but wonder at the cost.

Despite feeling that the shoe was going to drop at any moment and demand Jason pay for his turn of luck, he allowed himself to ease into the world of Bruce Wayne, to believe that he was worth the chance Bruce had taken on him. After getting over the culture shock, he slowly began to trust that his new home in the breathtakingly opulent manor was real and permanent, that it wouldn't be ripped away if he accidently displeased Bruce or his mild mannered butler. He began to look forward to the daily lessons Bruce required he attend with the various tutors he supplied.

He relished in the elation of flying from roof to roof each night, bringing unholy terror and justice to those who so deserve it. He felt he had found his true place as the green and yellow blur flying across Gotham's skyline alongside the billowing black bat.

Jason's Robin training built upon the foundation of skills that Gotham had already provided and instilled in him for years. It was true that Jason was fundamentally different than his acrobatic predecessor who had originally donned the Robin name and uniform; he was more outspokenly harsh, angry, and unapologetically violent than Dick had ever been when dealing with Gotham's criminal element.

This was a fact that many of Bruce and Dick's vigilante peers took to mean that Jason was a bit too wild, ready to snap like untrained pit bull at the slightest push.

Neither the vigilante crowd nor Gotham's high society made much effort to hide their disdain or prejudice after taking in Jason's unrefined attitude and accent. Even Dick did not do much to quell the talk, initially unwilling to fully accept him as his brother due to his resentment about Jason taking up the Robin mantle after his own falling out with Bruce.

And while it did sting to know his predecessor and supposed peers did not think him stable or worthy enough to hold the title of Robin, Jason did his best to convince himself he should not care about the opinion of those who had done nothing to earn his respect, and so made no effort to change their view of him as Bruce's damaged teen ward, tainted by the worst of Gotham. In fact, he proudly antagonized those who he knew saw him as a street rat out of pure spite, much to Bruce's exasperation.

Bruce, to his credit, never stopped believing that Jason was in essence, good. And anyone who dared make a condescending comment about his son in front of him was treated to an ice-cold bat glare and cold shoulder, regardless of whether he was his wearing his Batman or Bruce Wayne persona.

Bruce tried hard to redirect Jason's simmering anger and frustration into his training, and to provide Jason a productive outlet in which to unleash his frustrations by helping those who need it, those who the law fails to protect in Gotham's streets at night. He made it clear to Jason that his anger was valid, that he was valid, but that he could never let the anger subvert logic and planning.

To be ruled by anger, he warned him, was a sure way to get himself killed in a fight.

Jason couldn't bring himself to tell Bruce that his anger is what kept him alive his whole life. His anger is what Gotham kindled and stoked for years until it was a steady burn deep in his chest, always present under his skin.

Jason knew that Bruce could never fully understand his experience. It was something that neither Dick nor the subsequent Robins after Jason could ever hope to grasp. They may work in the streets of Gotham, they may dance along her rooftops, discover some of her secrets and convince themselves that know her, but Jason is the twice living embodiment proving that they don't. Not really.

How can any of them hope to understand a city having never been truly taken in by her?

They saw Gotham as an oozing, septic wound, in need of gauze and disinfectant; they saw her as something to be healed.

Having never been truly raised by her ruthless hand, they can't know what it means to live in her arcane hollows, shielded by her clammy passages, comforted by her groaning and howling each night. They were not bathed in her grime; they had not inhaled her putrid stench since birth.

Gotham was not a festering wound to Jason, not something to be covered and healed. She was an entity of chaos, never bending to the likes of human will, even the iron will of the Batman. To wholly survive one must accept her teachings and punishments and play by her rules. To make change within her streets Gotham demands blood, she requires death and sacrifice. She will accept nothing less.

And as Jason returned to her ugly embrace after years away from her heavy hand, crouched on the edge of one of her many frigid rooftops, red hood in hand; he knew he would no longer deny her this.