Can Even a Biggle from Crime Alley Become Gotham's Godfather?

This story will switch to paid chapters starting August 20, with chapters 37 through 21 becoming paid. Please be careful not to buy the wrong chapters, everyone.

[I’m Riley Vito, an orphan struggling to survive in Crime Alley. I get by on Mrs. Walker’s kindness and whatever scrap metal I can scavenge. Then one day, kind Mrs. Walker is brutally murdered by a gang of thugs.

To avenge her, I plan to make the Bat do the dirty work.

Gotham’s Bat has been too busy lately to haul every little thug off to the police station. This is my only chance.

I pretend to get mugged by a drunk. The Bat steps in, knocks the thugs down, and leaves.

With no one around and no cameras watching, I hear the guy groaning in pain. Mrs. Walker’s wretched final expression rises before my eyes, and, trembling, I raise my knife to the killer’s neck.

Just before the blade falls, the roar of a motorcycle tears through the night.

“Bang!”

The knife clatters to the ground, and blood splashes across my cheek.

The rope is cut. The thug clutches his bleeding hands and flees in a panic. The punishment I expected never comes.

He crouches down. After a long, awkward pause, he asks me out of nowhere, “Are you hungry, kid?”

That night, I eat my first hot hamburger since Mrs. Walker died.

Tossing and turning, I remember the story that’s always circulated in Crime Alley about Robin.

If you can go out at night and eat a burger from the Bat, you can become Robin, leaping across the skies above Gotham.

But what if you run into Gotham’s rising star of the underworld, the guy in the red helmet?

The next day, a man calling himself Mr. Todd comes to see me.

“I was a friend of Mrs. Walker’s. Maybe you could use a little help?”

That was how I met Jason, and the day I got a new lease on life.]

Riley props her chin on her hand and draws a thick line beneath the sentence. Jason’s voice comes from behind her.

“Come on, Riley. Alfred and the old man are waiting to take the family picture!”

Riley is expertly swung onto the motorcycle. Pressed against the back of her two-hundred-pound godfather, she drawls, “Okay. Tim says we can make it in time for the pre-dinner cookies, as long as we beat Dick there.”

Jason twists the throttle, gloating. “Then let Dickie Bird eat dust!”

“No! Big Red, you can’t do this to me!”

Over the comms, the old butler chuckles and soothes them. “Young masters and misses, there will be unlimited cookies today.”

“Yay! Alfred’s the best!”

Inspired by Mrs. Walker, the neighbor who kept Todd family mementos in “A Death in the Family,” and the plot in “Lost Days” where Jason kills his mentor to save a kidnapped child. The story takes place just after Jason has returned to Gotham. He is bitter and obsessive, but never loses his kindness.

The heroine is ten at the start. Neither of them is mature, and she’s fairly lively. This isn’t a copy of Jason. It’s about Jason seeing himself and his relationship with Bruce more clearly through Riley’s eyes, as he steps into the role Bruce once had. In short: become a father, understand the father, reconcile with the father.

The main story is told in third person.

Also known as My Helmeted Godfather

Coming soon: Batcat Looks at You Disapprovingly

On the afternoon the Joker tortured Jason Todd in Ethiopia, Jason wished countless times that Bruce would come save him.

Bruce did come, but why was he a cat?

Come give it a read.

Theme: Never lose the drive to move forward, even when you’re in a difficult situation