CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: OLD HABITS

By day, Gotham wore a mask of order.

Students hurried between lectures with earbuds in and heads down, professionals disappeared into concrete towers with coffee in one hand and a device or stack of papers in the other, and traffic pulsed like a lifeline—horns blaring, signals blinking in an obedient cacophony. On the surface, it looked functional. Structured.

But Taylor knew better.  

She’d lived in Gotham long enough. 

This was a city where things festered just out of sight. Where silence didn’t mean safety. Where the absence of noise was a warning. So when the sun dipped behind the city’s skylines and the streetlights flickered to life, the real city stirred. The shadows deepened, stretching out across alleyways and rooftops, speaking in whispers only certain ears could hear. The kind of whispers Taylor had grown used to. 

They were calling to her again.

She moved through the Narrows with practiced ease, her route chosen, her steps careful. Every alley she passed, every ledge she crossed, was familiar—both in geography and in spirit. 

It had started with an overheard name near the edge of campus.  

A conversation caught half-finished near a rusted-out bus stop.  

Shipments moving again. The old smuggling routes reactivating.  

Not surprising. Not really.

She hadn’t expected the Calculator’s network to vanish, not in a place like Gotham. Things like that didn’t die here. They just slipped out of sight. Regrouped. Waited.

And now, the same threads she’d spent weeks unraveling were pulling taut again. Reshaped, restructured.

The network hadn’t ended with his retreat.

It had evolved.

Worse, some of those threads still led back to the League of Shadows.

She kept her movements quiet. Careful. Old habits didn’t die; they lingered beneath the surface, ready to rise. It felt like breathing—sliding through alleys and slipping across rooftops, scanning windows for snipers, tuning her ears for the faint click of pressure plates, body poising for sudden violence.

And yet, it felt different now. Slower. Not because she was rusty—she wasn’t—but because restraint was the only thing separating instinct from escalation.

She stilled, back pressed against the wall of an alley. 

She wasn't alone. 

Someone  was watching her.

She saw it—just barely—in the reflection of a grime-streaked skylight. A shape against the dark. A cape shifting in the wind. A silhouette too still to be anything but intentional.

She didn’t turn towards it.

“You don’t need to tail me,” she said.

Batman didn’t step into the light, nor come to a stop beside her. 

“I’m not tailing,” he said, his voice gruff yet carrying to her easily. “I’m intercepting.”

Taylor crossed her arms. “You knew I’d come here.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

She let out a slow breath, her posture taut with the kind of tension that never really left her. “I’m not trying to cause trouble.”

“You’re digging up pieces of a war that isn’t over,” Batman said. “Pieces that were meant to stay buried—for now.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she snapped, more sharply than she meant to. But she couldn't take it back, so she continued, undeterred. “But if something’s still moving in the dark, I’m not going to sit in a classroom and pretend it doesn’t exist.”

There was a long beat of silence. Then:

“If you want to do this,” he said, “you do it as part of the family.”

The word hit harder than she expected. 

Family. Not team. Not group. Not another more appropriate, in her opinion, descriptor.  

Family.

She looked away. Her fists clenched. “Don’t say that.”

Batman finally stepped forward, just enough for the outline of his cowl to catch the ambient glow of the city lights.

“Then what would you call it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she muttered, shaking her head. The word brought unneeded memories to the forefront—memories she had done well to not dwell on since coming to this world. Not once. “Not that.”

The silence between them stretched again—not exactly uncomfortable, but thick with unspoken truths and sharper with everything they weren’t saying.

“They’re watching you,” Batman said. “The League. The city. Us. They’re waiting to see if you become what they expect,” he added.

“And if I don’t?” she asked.

“Prove it.”

She didn’t answer. Not out loud.

But later that night, when she slipped back into Wayne Manor—mud crusted on her boots, blood dried at her knuckles—she didn’t bother to hide it. She didn’t sneak through a side door. Didn’t clean up before stepping inside.

And when Alfred met her at the door with a towel and a look that said he’d known exactly where she’d done, she didn’t offer an excuse.

She just took the towel, nodded once, and turned towards the stairs.

Some ghosts didn’t haunt.

Some ghosts waited.

And some, like her, refused to stay buried.