Bludhaven

When a young hero finally becomes their own person, the very first thing they need is a place of their own.

Bruce had Gotham. The Teen Titans had Jump City. Superman had Metropolis. Wonder Woman had Themyscira and Washington. Even the Flash had Central City. Every great hero, Dick had noticed over the years, eventually settled into a city. The hero and the city changed each other. The hero learned the streets. The streets learned the hero. They became one thing.

Dick Grayson needed a city.

He sat in his apartment in T-Tower one weekend with a fat road atlas of the United States open on his lap. He had a yellow legal pad next to him. He drew up a list.

Boston. Already had heroes.

Philadelphia. Already had heroes.

Star City. Green Arrow's town. No.

Coast City. Hal Jordan's town. No.

Central City. Flash's town. No.

Metropolis. Superman. Definitely no.

Gotham. Bruce's. The whole reason he was doing this in the first place was so he wouldn't be in Bruce's shadow anymore. No.

He went through the atlas page by page, crossing names off. He kept hoping he would find one that lit up for him, that pulled at him, that said, this is yours.

He turned a page. And there, on a map of the eastern seaboard, half-hidden in a fold of paper, was the city of Blüdhaven.

He had heard of Blüdhaven, of course. Everybody had. Mostly because of the jokes. Blüdhaven was the city that you mentioned when you wanted to make people laugh. Blüdhaven was Gotham's grimy little brother. Blüdhaven was where good ideas went to die. Blüdhaven had been called, by a famous reporter at the Daily Planet, "the most corrupt city in America that nobody had bothered to write about."

Dick looked at the little dot on the map. He read its statistics in the small print along the side of the page. Population: about half a million. Major industries: shipping, light manufacturing (mostly closed), trucking, fishing (mostly polluted). Police force: known for corruption. Mayor: under investigation for accepting bribes. Crime rate: high. Hero coverage: none.

A crooked port city, with rusting factories, foggy alleys, and a corrupt mayor, and absolutely no heroes.

Dick stared at it.

A small bright feeling lit up in his chest — the same feeling he had felt as a small boy standing in the wings of Haly's Circus right before he climbed the trapeze ladder.

Yes, he thought. There. That one.

He told the Titans first. He told them at a team dinner on the top floor of T-Tower, with all five of them sitting around the big circular kitchen table, eating Cyborg's eight-cheese lasagna. He said, "I'm moving to Blüdhaven."

Beast Boy stopped chewing. "Where?"

"Blüdhaven."

"Where is Blüdhaven?"

"It's down the coast from Gotham."

"WHY?"

Dick smiled. He had been expecting this. "Because nobody else is going."

Starfire reached across the table and put her hand on his. "Friend Nightwing. We shall miss you tremendously."

Raven, who almost never cried, blinked several times very fast and then looked down at her lasagna.

Cyborg said, "You'll come back for Sundays, right?"

"Every Sunday," Dick promised. "I'll fly down."

So he flew down.

Blüdhaven, when Dick saw it for the first time from the air, was — there is no kind way to say this — kind of ugly. The whole city was an old port that had never been redesigned. The skyline was made of rusting cranes and squat brown warehouses. A wide gray river ran through the middle of it, choked with shipping. A thick fog hung over the whole place in the mornings and a yellowish smog hung over it in the evenings. The buildings were tired. The streets were tired. The buses, when they came at all, were old.

Dick loved it instantly.

He rented an apartment in a small brick walk-up building on Parkthorne Avenue, in a neighborhood that wasn't quite the worst part of town and wasn't quite the best, but was, the realtor told him cheerfully, "honest." The apartment was on the fourth floor. It had one bedroom, a small kitchen, a stoop with a view of the river, and a fire escape that ran right up to the roof — exactly the way Dick wanted it.

In the bedroom closet, behind a false back panel that Dick built himself in a single weekend, he hid his Nightwing suit, his escrima sticks, his grappling launcher, and a small folded photograph of Mary and John Grayson in their Flying Graysons costumes.

Then Dick did something Bruce had never done. Something the Teen Titans had never done. Something that made him a brand-new kind of hero.

He got a day job.

He enrolled at the Blüdhaven Police Academy.

He was good at it. Of course he was good at it. He had been trained by the greatest detective on Earth. He passed every test. He graduated near the top of his class. The Blüdhaven Police Department, which was used to recruiting tired men in their forties who didn't ask too many questions, found themselves with a bright, handsome twenty-year-old rookie named Officer Dick Grayson, badge number 168, who could outrun any criminal on foot, who never seemed tired, and who asked a LOT of questions.

His training officer was a sharp-eyed woman named Sergeant Amy Rohrbach. Amy had been a cop for fifteen years. She had seen everything. She had survived the corrupt years, kept her own hands clean, and built up a quiet reputation as the one detective in the BPD that the bad guys actually didn't want to draw the attention of.

Within a week of working with Dick Grayson, Amy noticed three things.

One. Dick Grayson could pick locks faster than anybody she had ever seen.

Two. Dick Grayson knew detective techniques that nobody teaches in a police academy.

Three. Whenever Nightwing — that masked vigilante who had recently shown up around town — pulled off some particularly clever rooftop chase, Dick Grayson was always tired and bruised the next morning, with a fresh cup of coffee and a wide, innocent smile.

Amy didn't ask. Amy was smart enough to know that some questions are not for asking. But she watched Dick. And over the months, very slowly, she came to like him very much.

By day, then, Dick Grayson was a Blüdhaven cop in a navy uniform, taking the bus to the precinct house, doing paperwork, working petty theft cases, and slowly building up an honest reputation in an honest pocket of the BPD.

By night, he was Nightwing.

And being Nightwing in Blüdhaven was different from being Robin in Gotham.

In Gotham, the bad guys had been theatrical. The Joker wore a purple suit and laughed at his own jokes. The Riddler left big green question marks at crime scenes. The Penguin walked with a top hat and a long umbrella. Crime in Gotham was loud. Crime in Gotham announced itself.

Blüdhaven crime was quiet. It wore an ordinary gray suit. It did not laugh. It owned a trucking company on the south side of town. It paid a small monthly bribe to four different police captains. It threw extra cash to longshoremen who would "lose paperwork." It did not put on a costume, and it did not announce itself, and it had been running quietly for thirty years.

That kind of crime is much, much harder to catch.

So Dick became patient.

He spent his off-duty hours sitting in old diners along the docks, drinking endless cups of coffee, listening to retired longshoremen tell their stories. He sat on park benches near the courthouse listening to bail bondsmen complain. He spent weekends in the public library reading through old shipping manifests, tracing patterns of who paid who, who shipped what to where, who had quietly become very, very rich.

Slowly, on his bedroom wall in the Parkthorne apartment, he built a map.

It was an enormous map, taped together from twenty smaller pieces of paper. It covered the entire wall. At the center of it, drawn in red marker, was a single name.

ROLAND DESMOND. BLOCKBUSTER.

Blockbuster was the spider in Blüdhaven's web. He was an enormous man — six-foot-eight, four hundred pounds, with shoulders as wide as a refrigerator and a calm, almost gentle way of speaking. He had been raised in Blüdhaven. He had inherited a small trucking company from his uncle. He had quietly turned it into a criminal empire that owned half the city. On paper, Roland Desmond was a respectable businessman. Off paper, Blockbuster was the reason the mayor was crooked, the police were paid off, the docks ran two sets of paperwork, and the buses never came on time.

You could not arrest Blockbuster with a single bust. He had lawyers. He had judges. He had aldermen on his payroll. He had a fortress of legitimacy built up around him.

You had to take him apart slowly. One brick at a time.

It took Dick two years.

He worked it like a detective and like an acrobat at the same time. By day, Officer Grayson would investigate one of Blockbuster's smaller front companies through legitimate police channels — collecting evidence, building affidavits, filing search warrants. By night, Nightwing would slip into the same company's warehouse at three in the morning and photograph documents, copy hard drives, gather quiet proof.

He worked with Amy Rohrbach, very carefully. He worked with an honest federal prosecutor named Marlene Diaz. He worked with the very few honest reporters at the Blüdhaven Sentinel.

One by one, the small companies were closed down. One by one, the corrupt cops were peeled away from the force, indicted, replaced. One by one, the bribed aldermen lost their seats in elections that Dick quietly helped along by leaking the right documents at the right times.

There were nights when it was very dangerous. Blockbuster sent men after Nightwing. Nightwing fought them off — sometimes a single attacker, sometimes seven at once, his escrima sticks spinning so fast in the fog that they sang. There was a fight on the roof of an old refrigerator warehouse on Pier Eleven where Nightwing took on twelve men at once and walked away with two bruised ribs and a torn ear.

There were also nights when it was very quiet. Long stakeouts on cold fire escapes. Long reads of long ledgers. Long meetings with Amy in a back booth at a diner called Pat's Place, going over evidence on legal pads. Patience. Patience. Patience.

And then one day, two and a half years after Dick first moved to Blüdhaven, the whole web came undone at once.

Marlene Diaz filed the first set of charges. Twenty-three counts. Then a second set. Then a third. The Blüdhaven Sentinel printed a special edition. Federal agents arrived. The mayor was led out of City Hall in handcuffs. Six police captains were suspended. Roland Desmond — Blockbuster himself — was arrested at his home overlooking the harbor at six in the morning by a quiet woman named Sergeant Amy Rohrbach, who read him his rights very politely while a young officer named Dick Grayson stood behind her with his arms folded.

Blockbuster, sitting at his enormous kitchen table in his bathrobe, looked up at Officer Grayson. Looked. Just looked.

Dick smiled, very small, very polite.

"Good morning, Mr. Desmond. Time to come with us."

The city changed slowly after that.

It did not change overnight. Cities don't. But over the next year, small wonderful things started happening in Blüdhaven that nobody had thought possible.

The buses started running on time.

A new honest mayor was elected. She was a former schoolteacher.

The docks reopened with honest crews and the longshoremen got their pensions back.

The police force was overhauled and new officers were sworn in.

The fog still rolled in off the river every morning. Blüdhaven was still ugly. Blüdhaven was still rusting in places. Blüdhaven would never be Metropolis. But Blüdhaven was, for the first time in fifty years, an honest city.

And up on the rooftops of Parkthorne Avenue, in the fog, in the dark, a young man with a great spread of royal blue wings across his chest stood with his escrima sticks crossed behind his back, looking down at his city.

His city.

Bruce had Gotham. The Titans had Jump City. Superman had Metropolis.

Nightwing had Blüdhaven.

And he loved every rusted, foggy, honest inch of it.

He had finally come home.