Archive of Our Own

Electricity crackled through the air, bringing a burnt smell of ozone. Rose wrinkled her nose against it and braced a hand against the ledge of the rooftop. Down on the street below, the object of their pursuit marched on in his makeshift, metal armor, the machinery in it whirring with every step.

“What the hell is he supposed to be?” Rose asked in a murmur, nudging the hunched figure at her side.

Her companion shifted his weight slightly, leaning away. “An opportunist. With Blockbuster gone, it’s open season,” he said. “And keep your voice down.”

Behind the concealing safety of her mask, Rose rolled her good eye. She didn’t remember losing the other one, but her daddy had been there when she came to, half-blinded and in pain. Daddy took care of her, and if his way of doing so meant spending her nights listening to an ex-vigilante with a missing sense of humor, she’d just have to play along.

His driver’s license read Richard John Grayson, her daddy called him Grayson or Nightwing, and she knew from Arsenal’s passing comments that among his friends, he went by Dick. Rose didn’t know what to call him, Richard or Grayson too formal, Dick running the risk he’d forbid her from using something so familiar. Nightwing didn’t fit right now, the old black-and-blue suit he used to wear traded for a new red one. In the dim light, it almost matched the dark hair spilling out the top of his mask.

And if he caught her looking, he was bound to snap about where her attention was supposed to be, and Daddy’s rules meant she couldn’t even snap back. Rose turned away preemptively, focusing again on the man running electricity through his exoskeleton of a suit. Metal covered his body, welded together at the joints, from the boots covering his feet to the half-mask over his face. Rose itched for a fight like ants running beneath her skin, to take out her sword and test its edge and her skill against that poorly made armor. But at this time of the night, the street lay deserted, and Dick—she decided on Dick for now—seemed content to sit and watch.

Tapping her fingers against the concrete roof, Rose squirmed with impatience, stilled again as a new set of voices met her ears. She honed in on the source just as a pair of teenage girls, her age or maybe a little older, came around the corner talking and laughing. At the sight of the metal man, their conversation cut off abruptly, and they looked up in wide-eyed, open-mouthed silence like a pair of dead fish at the supermarket. Rose held back a scoff. She shifted in place, ready to move, but a hand grabbed her elbow and kept her still.

“Hold,” Dick said.

God, he was the worst. Rose yanked her arm out of his grip and settled again with a huff. Even from this vantage point, she could see the metal man’s savage grin. He raised his hand, the palm of his glove suddenly glowing with light, and shot a blast in the girls’ direction. They screamed, but it went wide, burning a harmless hole in the metal railing of steps leading up to an apartment building. But it did seem to unfreeze the girls from their open-mouthed staring—they clutched each other and fled back around the corner with the man laughing in their wake.

“That’s right!” he crowed, triumphant. “Flee before Electrode!”

Rose couldn’t help it—she snorted hard enough that she almost choked, and even the stick in the mud she was stuck with muffled a suspiciously laugh-like cough.

“Electrode?” Rose muttered.

Dick definitely laughed this time, said, “Seems all his creativity went into his suit.”

To be fair, that must’ve required a decent amount. Electrode—and she had to fight a giggle—continued his reign of terror, his energy blasts taking chunks of out cars and trees and park benches, the few people that passed him on the street or got curious enough to look out their windows quickly retreating to safety. Rose’s hand kept drifting to the hilt of her sword. She wanted to attack so bad she could taste it, to tear that man’s armor off and punch him in the face.

Knuckles rapped her knee. “Not yet.”

“What are we waiting for?” Rose asked, half a second from abandoning him and tearing off on her own.

“For him to start attacking civilians instead of firing warning shots,” Dick said. “Until then, we observe.”

Boring, as usual. Rose let her breath out in a hiss. “You’re supposed to be training me,” she said. “What the hell am I supposed to learn by watching this idiot?”

“Maybe if you keep quiet and keep watching, you might just impress me by figuring that one out yourself,” he responded dryly.

As far as manipulation tactics went, that one leveled out between obvious and effective. Rose ground her teeth, but didn’t have time to voice her frustration. Dick sprung into fluid motion, running and jumping from one rooftop to the next, forcing Rose to follow in pursuit of their target. Electrode marched on to the next block, taking out a fire hydrant and leaving a geyser of water to shoot skyward. At the corner, he shattered the glass window of a closed convenience store and climbed in through the front, having evidently decided on a target for his rampage. Rose started to wonder if she could snag a candy bar when she moved on under the guise of investigating the scene—it’d been hours since dinner—and then a new sound pushed all other thoughts out of her head.

Police sirens, fast approaching.

In the concealing dark, Rose grinned and shifted up to the balls of her feet. Former Officer Grayson of the Blüdhaven Police Department would never let his precious cops get killed, not after all the trouble he’d gone through to clean up the force. The sirens wailed closer, lights flashing up the sides of buildings as they sped down the last few blocks. An hour ago, Rose couldn’t have imagined welcoming the cops, much less her anticipation to defend them, but they’d been skulking around rooftops all fucking night. She’d take any excuse to move.

The arrival of two cruisers, screeching to a stop next to Electrode with their lights flashing, provided that excuse with room to spare. “Blüdhaven P.D.!” one of the cops announced over the loudspeaker. “Get on your knees and put your hands behind your head!”

Predictably, Electrode laughed again, lifted his hand, and sent an energy blast right through the hood of one of the cruisers. It didn’t do anything as interesting as explode, but the smoking crater left in the cruiser’s hood did its job. Three cops emerged from the two separate cards, standard-issue Smith & Wessons at the ready, and gave Rose the opening she needed.

“Ravager!” Dick called—too professional to ever slip up and use her real name in the field—but she was already gone, vaulting over the ledge of the roof and landing lightly on the sidewalk.

Bullets ricocheted uselessly off Electrode’s armor. He raised his hand again, the center of it glowing with energy. Pulling out a knife, Rose pinched the tip between her fingers and sent it flying through the air. It hit the center of the weapon, the light of it sparking and dying. Electrode stared at it for a second like he’d never seen a knife before, then turned to her in a slow whir of machinery. Rose grinned wide and feral as she drew her sword. She charged at him with a wordless shout, her sword meeting his armor in a metallic clashthat reverberated into her bones.

A swing of his arm threw her off with greater force than she’d bargained for. Rose nearly fell, catching her balance at the last second and skidding a few feet before coming to a stop. Mentally, she added augmented strength to her list of that shitty suit’s tricks and ran back in. Electrode brought his other arm out to meet her, the armor denting beneath the blow but ultimately holding true, although his hiss of pain indicated she’d at least left a nasty bruise. Rose slid off again, victim to her own momentum, and spun around to strike her sword against his ribs, smacking the flat of it against his back before he could recover. Electrode tried to grab her, machinery whining and stinking of burnt copper as he pushed its limits, but his bulky suit couldn’t match her speed. Laughing, Rose jammed the tip of her sword into the weak spot by his knee joint, thrumming with satisfaction as he screamed.

Then, a deafening bang drowned out even that sound. The cops—she’d half-forgotten they were there, standing just a few feet away with guns drawn. Evidently, one of the idiots had felt left out, or, going off his paper-white face and trembling lower lip, had simply gotten over-excited.

“I’m on your—!” Rose started, but didn’t manage to finish. The gun in trigger-happy’s hand suddenly flew out of it, struck loose by a projectile Rose hadn’t even seen. A human-sized blur followed the same path, Dick finally joining the party and hitting the cop with both feet on his way down. He knocked the guns of the other two away with a lightning-fast pair of kicks and began engaging them hand-to-hand, ducking and weaving like he wasn’t quite solid.

Ok. So, Dick was kind of impressive when he wasn’t being annoying as hell.

Turning back to her own opponent, Rose brought her sword to bear, but the distraction had kept her still for too long. Electrode had seized the opening and moved into position, and Rose realized the open palm he held in front of her stomach wasn’t the broken one as it burst into light and electricity. She swung her sword, too late. The blast hit her hard enough to stop her breath and knock her off her feet. The world spun nauseatingly around her in a series of colors and shapes, ending abruptly in the dark.

*

Gasping awake, Rose sat up and tried to catch her breath, losing it again as a cough wracked her body. She shook her head to clear her ringing ears and tried to blink past her blurry vision, the dark room and rectangular square of light in front of her absurdly calling up the image of a movie theater before the last few minutes came rushing back. She’d landed among the ruined shelves of the convenience store Electrode had been breaking into when the cops arrived—the ones she’d last seen Dick fighting.

Rose struggled to her feet, grabbing a mostly-intact shelving unit for support. She opened her mouth to call for Dick and coughed again instead, which gave her enough time to think better of it—if she blurted out his real name, he just might kill her. She took another stumbling step, and then an explosion of light nearly blinded her. Rose closed her eye, the light transforming to spiraling afterimages in the dark. After a few moments of darkness and silence, she risked opening it a sliver, just in time to see a figure climbing through the convenience store’s broken window.

On panicked instinct, Rose threw a punch, but Dick caught her wrist neatly. “It’s me,” he said.

Yeah, he was coming into focus now. Rose cleared her throat, asked, “What happened?”

“I knocked out the cops, overloaded the circuits in Electrode’s suit, and radioed for backup and an ambulance,” Dick said, speaking fast and quiet. “And we need to go.”

He let go of her hand, turned, and slid through the shop and out the back door like a shadow. Gritting her teeth against the lingering pain in her midsection, Rose followed. Dick probably wouldn’t leave her behind and go back to her daddy empty-handed, but probably wasn’t definitely, and the chance she’d have to find her own way home wasn’t worth the risk. Rose made it into the alley in time to see Dick’s shadow move from the fire escape of the next building to its roof. She grumbled under her breath and hurried after.

Just as Dick arrived at his motorbike, Rose finally manged to fall into step. He handed her a helmet wordlessly, and Rose took it in the same fashion, fixing it over her mask and getting on the bike behind him. Comms in their helmets theoretically allowed for conversation, but Dick’s stony silence prevented Rose from using them. Rose fixed her arms around his waist for the ride back and mentally poked at her injury, a nuisance that didn’t even let her enjoy the warmth and closeness. It’d fade fast, though, thanks to the healing factor she’d inherited from her daddy—if not for that, she’d be laid up in the hospital for weeks if she was lucky, on a slab in the morgue if she wasn’t. Rose tried to dredge up some gratitude for that as she rested the side of her helmet against Dick’s shoulder and settled in for the rest of the ride.

In the garage, with the bike parked and their helmets off, Rose cleared her throat. “Nightwing, I’m—” she tried to say, opting for the formal route.

“I don’t think you are.” His response came like a slap. “And seeing as you aren’t interested in listening to me, I don’t see the point in talking.”

Gaping in astonishment, Rose watched him stalk past her and into the house. She shook herself and trailed after, glaring at his back as the initial shock receded and left her indignant and pissed. Well. If that’s what she got for being nice… Rose pulled her sweaty mask off and her pressed a hand to her middle with a grimace, limping up the steps to the living room. Where, as she knew he’d be, her daddy was waiting.

His good eye found her immediately, a frown of concern tugging at his mouth. Daddy folded the newspaper he’d been reading and set it on the coffee table, standing up from the couch. Rose liked him better like this, dressed in a sweater and slacks with his Deathstroke suit absent, the appearance of a normal father except for the eyepatch over his right eye and the stark-white hair he was too young for. The same covered her own head, and she relished every one of their similarities, counting them like coins: their meta-human abilities, her Ravager modeled split black-and-orange after his Deathstroke, her missing left eye to match his right.

Now that she had his attention, Rose sniffed for effect and held back a smirk as Daddy’s eye snapped from her to Dick. Daddy folded his arms, the concerned frown going cold.

“I tasked you with training my daughter, Grayson,” he said, evenly but with a coiled threat beneath. “Not bringing her back hurt.”

“Some idiot in a home-built, mechanized suit got her with an energy blast. He’s in police custody now, so we won’t have to worry about him again,” Dick reported, then went on pointedly: “Rose went in without a plan and without my say-so. She’s lucky she isn’t hurt a lot worse.”

Turning back to her, Daddy asked, “Rose? Is this true?”

“He said we’d go in once the guy started attacking people, and he was going to start attacking those cops,” Rose protested. “And my plan was to kick Electrode’s ass—how was I supposed to know that one cop was gonna shoot at me?”

“Electrode?” Daddy echoed, droll like he shared her and Dick’s sentiments on the stupidity of that name.

“That’s not important,” Dick said shortly. And, to Rose, “One, ‘kicking his ass’ isn’t a plan. Two, and I can’t believe I have to say this, if someone is pointing a gun in your general direction, you need to plan for the possibility of them shooting at you. Three, I did have a plan for that, which you would know if you hadn’t disobeyed a direct order.” He sighed through his nose. “I can’t train you if—”

“But you’re not training me!” Rose shouted, cutting him off. “All I’m doing is sitting on rooftops and freezing my ass off while we stare at nothing!”

The forced calm in Dick’s voice made Rose want to punch him, the urge tempered by the knowledge he’d block her easily. “I can’t train you if you won’t listen,” Dick finished. “The fact you think we’re ‘staring at nothing’ would be proof enough that you don’t care enough to try, even if tonight wasn’t.”

Before Rose could think of an answer, Dick turned his back in dismissal and stepped up to her daddy, so close the tips of their shoes almost touched. A shitty intimidation tactic, and Rose glowed with pride that her daddy didn’t fall for it. He didn’t give an inch, drawing his spine straight and his body to its full height, forcing Dick to look up at him.

“Control your daughter,” Dick said quietly. “I’m not taking her out again until I’m convinced she knows how to listen.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Daddy replied between his teeth. “Or have you forgotten our arrangement?”

Dick leaned in even further, got right into his face. “I watched two of your kids die in front of me, Slade,” he said. “I think we’d both prefer to not make it a third.”

If Daddy ever looked at her like that, Rose would run for the hills. Dick, though, just glared back for another few seconds, meeting it with equal fury before stepping back. As he passed the coffee table, Daddy seemed to recover from his initial surprise and start after him, his face still red and livid. Anticipatory thrill and dread mingled in Rose’s stomach, bracing for the fight about to erupt.

Except it didn’t. The appearance of a figure in the open doorway to the kitchen froze both Dick and her daddy in place and made Rose recoil, stomach flipping like she’d missed a step on the stairs. There, framed by the dark kitchen behind her, stood Sophia Teves. Wide-eyed, mousy-haired, fifteen-year-old Sophia Teves, legs sticking out like twigs beneath the oversized t-shirt she wore as a nightgown and her cheeks still rounded with baby fat. She rubbed the bottom of one foot across the top of the other, a move that made her look coltish and unfinished and far too innocent to believe.

On Dick, though, it had what Rose assumed was the desired affect. He ripped his mask off, and the change came over him just as quickly. All his earlier rudeness towards Rose and antagonism towards her daddy melted into worry as he strode across the living room.

“Sophia, it’s late. What are you doing up?” Dick asked, reaching Sophia and blocking Rose’s view of her with his body—like a shield. Like a room containing both Rose and her daddy posed too much of a threat.

“I woke up and wanted some water, and I heard voices,” Sophia said, which had to be the oldest story in the book. “Are you ok?”

At this angle, Rose could just make out the curve of a smile on Dick’s face, the skin crinkling around his eye. The kindness in it that had never once been directed at her. “I’m fine, Soph,” he said. “Let’s get you some water and get you back to bed.”

He steered Sophia away with a hand on her shoulder, ushering her back into the kitchen. Just before they disappeared through the doorway, Sophia turned her head and looked directly at Rose, her gaze cool and her spoiled nose in the air. Rose clenched her fists. She wanted to smack that look off her face, to scream that Sophia’s daddy was a gangster and in prison , that Sophia had no right to act like she was any better than her . That was why Sophia had ended up in that juvenile center in the first place, why Dick had to break her out a week back with Rose’s roped-in help and stash her somewhere safer. Now, Rose wished she’d listened to Dick and let him keep Sophia a secret—but Daddy would’ve found out, and Daddy would’ve been mad, and rightly so. Rose had done the right thing by telling him about Sophia, even if it meant he’d gone and kidnapped the brat to keep Dick in line, even if it meant Sophia being here.

Then, Sophia turned away and let Dick finish pushing her into the kitchen. The position of his hand on her back made Rose think of her mama so suddenly that her breath caught. Soft hands and sweet-smelling perfume, belonging to Mama or one of the other women, getting Rose something to drink in the middle of the night and singing her back to sleep.

As they left the room, Daddy turned to Rose and set his broad palms on her shoulders. “I’m depending on you, Rose. You know that. I need you to help me keep Grayson here and keep him occupied.”

Rose looked sideways towards the half-open door to the kitchen, but a short burst of laughter from Daddy had her looking at him again .

“Oh, don’t worry. Even if he can hear me, he knows that already,” Daddy told her conspiratorially. He let his hands fall from her shoulders, but still kept close. “I don’t trust him, and the feeling is mutual.”

“If you don’t trust him, why is he training me?” Rose asked, keeping her voice low regardless.

“Because whatever fool game Grayson thinks he’s playing now, he’ll still do the right thing until it kills him. I don’t need to trust him to know that,” Daddy said with a reassuring and self-satisfied smile. “If he half-assed or sabotaged your training and you were hurt because of it, he’d feel responsible. The damned bleeding heart cares too much to let that happen.”

Sighing, Rose said, “He doesn’t act like he cares.”

“It’s a delicate balance he’s trying to maintain here. Grayson’s put himself under a lot of pressure, so you aren’t meeting him at his best,” Daddy said with a quirk of his lips almost like sympathy. “But you can still learn a lot from him, Rose—this isn’t only about keeping him busy. Take advantage of the opportunity while it’s here.”

Arguing further would probably extend past the limit of her daddy’s understanding. Rose ducked her head in a show of contrition. “Yes, Daddy.”

“Good. Now, you should also be getting to bed,” Daddy told her. “I’ll have a discussion with Grayson in the morning.”

Bed sounded nice—she’d been on those stupid rooftops for hours, her body cold and stiff. Standing up on her toes, Rose kissed Daddy’s cheek and said, “Ok. Goodnight.”

He hugged her in response, one-armed and brief. “Goodnight, Princess,” he said.

His arm fell away, and Rose stepped back reluctantly and went over to the stairs leading up to the second floor. She paused on the first step to cast a glance back at her daddy and found him staring off at the dark kitchen doorway that Dick and Sophia had disappeared through, wearing an expression that she couldn’t read.

*

Sunlight streaming through her bedroom window woke Rose hazily. The clock on her nightstand read just after ten—late by her daddy’s figuring, but he hadn’t come to wake her yet, so she figured the late night had earned her an extra couple hours of sleep. Hauling herself upright, Rose grabbed a bathrobe from a hook by the door and went downstairs to find something to fill her empty stomach.

The smell of sizzling fat, coffee, and sweet syrup floating out into the living room indicated that someone else in the house had the same idea. Rose’s stomach rumbled and propelled her towards it without much thought besides a vague hope that she’d find her daddy cooking, or barring that, leftovers from Dick or Sophia that she could steal without having to make her own breakfast. Reaching the door to the kitchen, she pulled it open and stopped, staring blankly.

Sophia leaned over the stove, her face flushed with heat and her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. As Rose watched, she forked the last two pieces of French toast onto a plate already piled high, turned off that burner, and scrambled the eggs cooking in another pan. The light in the oven showed bacon curling on a sheet, and a full coffee pot sputtered on the opposite counter. At the sound of it, or perhaps at the intrusion of a figure in her peripheral vision, Sophia looked up and smiled.

“Good morning,” she said, then added very unnecessarily, “I made breakfast.”

The words and Sophia’s gaze went a little past Rose’s shoulder, and she turned around her blind side to find Dick behind her, looking about as half-awake and bewildered as Rose felt. His hair stuck up in sleep-rumpled cowlicks, a pillow crease bisected his cheek, and he still looked better than he had any right to.

“Hey, Soph,” he said, blinking and stifling a yawn. “What’s all this?”

“I knew you were out late, so I got up early and made breakfast,” Sophia said. “It’s almost ready. Mr. Wilson’s setting the table, so you can go ahead and get your drinks.”

As if on cue, Daddy filled the doorway leading to the dining room. “I already got your orange juice, Rose,” he said, pulling a pair of mugs out of the cabinet and picking up the coffee pot. “Grayson, I assume you still take coffee with your sugar and cream.”

Dick let out a little, amused huff. “Only a splash,” he said, moving past Rose to get the creamer out of the fridge. “I don’t want to over-caffeinate,” he went on, setting the carton on the counter by Daddy. “You already have trouble keeping up with me.”

“We can test that theory whenever you like,” Daddy said in the tones of a thinly-veiled threat, but added three tablespoons of sugar to one of the mugs and a generous dose of creamer, topped it off with coffee, and handed it to Dick.

Taking it, Dick sipped and made an appreciative noise, earning a derisive snort as Daddy poured his own coffee. Black and no sugar, the opposite of Dick’s, and he blew on it before taking a sip.

“Ugh,” Dick said, shuddering for effect and faking a gagging noise, and Daddy rolled his good eye, and Dick laughed, and Daddy caved and smiled in response.

“Come on. Let’s get out of Sophia’s way,” Daddy said, tapping Dick’s arm as he brushed past him. Dick followed him into the dining room, disappearing through the doorway like a heat mirage.

It all made Rose want to pinch herself to see if she was still dreaming. The oven beeped, startling her in its suddenness, and Sophia pulled the pan of bacon out with a pair of towels for oven mitts and set it on a cooling rack on the side of the stove opposite the French toast. She went to stir the eggs, pausing in the middle to look over at Rose, still standing there dumbly.

“Go on and sit down,” she said with a smile that wasn’t as big as the ones she shot at Dick, but was still nice enough to make Rose a little awkward. “I made enough for everyone.”

“Uh. Sure,” Rose hazarded, shuffling past Sophia and into the dining room.

Settling into her seat, Rose drank some of her orange juice for lack of anything better to do while Dick and her daddy continued to debate the right way to make coffee. Not like, seriously or anything—it was just argument for argument’s sake, something to fill the air, and the furthest thing in the world from the fight that nearly got physical in the living room the night before. Things had switched, somehow, moved around her in the dark. Rose frowned behind her glass, squirmy and uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

The arrival of breakfast provided a welcome distraction, Sophia setting plates down on the table and, of course, taking the chair right next to Dick. Rose rolled her good eye when no one was looking. She tore off a bite of French toast with her fork and nibbled it suspiciously, but it tasted fine—ok, it tasted really good—and Sophia probably didn’t have the balls or the resources to do anything like poison them. Hunger won out over the initial hesitation, and Rose started shoveling food in her mouth and elected to ignore the rest of the table.

“Everything was amazing, Sophia,” Dick said around the time Rose was scraping the last of the eggs off her plate. “Thank you.”

“Yes, thank you. I can’t remember the last time someone cooked me breakfast,” Daddy said.

That left Rose to mutter her own thanks through a mouthful of food, quickly washing it down with orange juice when Daddy caught her eye and frowned his displeasure at her table manners. Sophia, though, didn’t appear to mind; she sat there beaming so hard Rose thought she was liable to start glowing like a light bulb. Second-hand embarrassment tamped down even the urge to laugh; it was so pathetic, so transparently needy.

The meal ended—at fucking last—their plates empty and Sophia starting to gather the dishes. “Here, I’ll help clean up,” Dick said, leaping to his feet.

“You really don’t have to,” Sophia protested quietly. “I’m fine by—”

“It’s really the least I can do,” Dick said over her with a dazzling smile.

Sophia went brilliantly red in the face, then looked down at the table hastily and started piling silverware onto to one of the plates. If Dick ever did kiss her, she’d probably spontaneously combust or die of a heart attack. Rose amused herself with a cartoonish imagining of both scenarios until her daddy’s voice snapped her out of it.

“Why don’t you let Rose help?” he asked in the way that meant he wasn’t really asking.

Bristling with offense, Rose asked, “Why do I have to help? He already said—”

“It builds character,” Daddy said, pushing himself to his feet and coming around the table to kiss her forehead. “And the grownups have something to talk about.”

“This had better not be because I’m a girl,” Rose grumbled, unappeased.

Her daddy’s expression went flat. He licked his lips and looked somewhere off to the side. “I assure you, being a boy would not get you out of chores,” he told her.

Just like that, Rose knew he was thinking about Grant and Joey, the dead half-brothers she’d never had a chance to meet. She wanted to apologize, but with Dick and Sophia standing there, the sorry stuck in her throat.

And Daddy was already turning his attention towards Dick, anyway. “Join me in the study,” he said. “We need to finish our”—he paused meaningfully—“discussion from last night.”

For a second, Dick didn’t move, stuck there with a stack of dishes clutched in his hands. Then, he nodded and set it back on the table. “Yeah. Sure.” He offered a final, brief smile to Sophia and said, “Thanks again for breakfast.”

He ran a hand through his dark, curling hair, a nervous movement that momentarily pulled it away from the side of his neck. There, just below his ear, a bruise stuck out, purple and quarter-sized. It hadn’t been there when Dick pulled his mask off in the living room the night before—Rose was sure of it. Then again, normal people, people without a healing factor and meta-genes like Rose and her daddy, sometimes got hurt and didn’t have the bruises show up until later. Maybe Dick had taken a hit from Electrode, and his body took all night and into the morning to reveal the evidence.

In any case, Dick was following Daddy out of the dining room and taking his weird bruises with him, which just left Rose, Sophia, and a table full of dirty dishes. Rose sighed through her nose and decided she wasn’t quite enough of an asshole to risk Daddy’s wrath by dumping the whole mess on Sophia, even if she hadn’t made the little idiot get up and cook for everyone. Standing, she rolled up the sleeves of her robe and started gathering.

They brought everything to the sink in silence, Sophia washing the dishes and Rose rinsing them and placing them in the drying rack. Rose was content to keep it that way, to get through this stupid non-interaction with a minimum of fuss, so that of course meant Sophia had to open her mouth a few minutes in.

“Do you know why your dad wanted to talk to Crutches?” she asked without looking at Rose, busily scrubbing silverware.

Rose strongly considered telling Sophia it wasn’t her fucking business, but that sounded too much like admitting she didn’t know. And she did know—hadn’t Daddy promised her he’d talk to Dick in the morning? She certainly couldn’t think of anything else their ‘discussion’ might have entailed, even if she couldn’t quite account for the mismatch between Dick’s hissing fury the night before and the hesitation, almost wariness, when Daddy had called him into the study after breakfast.

“He was being an asshole to me yesterday, so Daddy’s telling him to quit it,” Rose settled on with more smugness and confidence than she felt.

“Oh,” Sophia said, a frown darkening her expression. Then, it smoothed out, and she asked, “Do you like your dad?”

A speechless second passed, Rose baffled and offended in equal measure. “I—yeah, I like him. He’s my dad.”

“He’s kinda scary,” Sophia commented.

A laugh barked out of Rose before she could help it. “He’s the world’s deadliest mercenary,” she said. “He’s supposed to be scary.”

“I guess,” Sophia said with a one-shouldered shrug. “He’s not that bad, though. He’s nice to me.”

“Sure,” Rose said with heavy sarcasm.

“I just...I wanted to say, I know you told your dad about me after Crutches asked you not to, and I know that’s why he brought me here, but it’s ok,” Sophia said. “I’m safer with Crutches than anywhere else.”

How Sophia had survived to fifteen with a head full of air, Rose would never know. “Why the hell do you call him Crutches?” she asked.

“He had a broken leg when he stayed with us, so he used to walk with crutches,” Sophia replied. “It’s what we called him.”

Rose huffed. “That’s dumb. It’s like, if you had braces when you were a kid, so people called you brace-face forever.”

“It is not. Crutches doesn’t mind,” Sophia said defensively.

“He’s just humoring you, kid,” Rose told her.

“You sound like your dad,” Sophia said, which was uncannily perceptive. Fortunately, she didn’t know how to quit while she was ahead. She lifted her chin haughtily and said, “Crutches likes me better than you.”

It made Rose snort so hard she almost hurt herself, if only to cover up how much the evidence pointed to that being true. “Is that what he told you?” she asked, then went on without waiting for an answer: “Because he told me that you’re a kid. He doesn’t even want you here.”

“He wouldn’t say that!” Sophia said, dropping a plate in outrage. It clattered in the sink, but didn’t break.

“He did. He said it the first night you were here,” Rose insisted.

The very best part was that she didn’t even have to lie. “She’s just a kid,” Dick had told her, quietly furious after they came home to find Sophia with her wrists tied with rope, Daddy smirking at her shoulder. “I wanted her somewhere far away from here.”

“I don’t believe you,” Sophia said, but it sounded forced. “And anyway, I might be fifteen, but you’re only seventeen. Legally, we’re both kids, and Crutches is a lot older than us.”

At twenty-nine, Dick had twelve years on Rose. She didn’t consider that a lot, necessarily; some of the men who used to visit her mama and the other ladies had twenty or thirty years on them, easy. Besides, a cape changed things. Dick, per Daddy, had been running around with Batman from the time he was nine. From the little she’d gotten out of Arsenal, when he’d had a few beers and the words came out easier, Joey had joined the Titans at sixteen, and Dick—the team’s leader at the time—hadn’t treated him any different. And Grant, the first Ravager, hadn’t worn his suit until he was nineteen. He’d died in his second battle, lasting the least of any of them.

Thinking about that, though, only led to morbid imaginings and sleepless nights. “You mature a lot between fifteen and seventeen. I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” Rose said with sweet condescension. Tilted her head to the side and continued, “You know he used to date Starfire, right? That seven-foot-tall alien girl who can shoot lasers out of her hands? And I heard from the Titans that he used to run around with Huntress and Batgirl. Do you really think,” Rose asked, drawing the question out slow and deliberate, “that cooking him breakfast is gonna make him fall in love with you?”

Sophia went immediately and gratifyingly pink. “What about that Barbara girl?” she asked defensively. “He used to carry around her picture, and she looked normal.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Rose said. “She probably had something special about her, too.” Unlike you, she didn’t add, left it unspoken in the air between them.”

The water ran unimpeded for a few breaths, light steam rising from around the drain. “My mom,” Sophia said, then had to stop and swallow, her hands gripping the edge of the still running sink. “My mom used to call what my dad did a boys’ club, but there were women he worked with. I met a few. Some of them were even pretty.” She drew in a fortifying breath and began washing the last pan. “But my dad didn’t want that. He wanted someone he could come home to.”

“Yeah, well, my dad married his drill sergeant,” Rose said, not mentioning that the drill sergeant hadn’t been her mother or that if Daddy hadn’t fucked that up, Rose herself might’ve never been born. “That’s the problem with a sample size of one.”

With the last pan finished, Sophia dropped it in the rinse sink with enough force to splash Rose with lukewarm water. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see,” she said acidly, turned, and stalked out of the room without even bothering to dry her hands.

Ok—Sophia had some nerve, more than Rose had been expecting. She laughed quietly, wiping a few errant drops of water off her chin with her sleeve. In this, as in so many other things, Rose took after her daddy.

She’d get more fun out of someone who put up a fight.

*

An hour later, Daddy knocked on Rose’s door. “Get changed and meet Grayson in the dojo,” he said when she answered it. “He’s going to do some sparring with you.”

Daddy looked distinctly pleased with himself, like a cat who got the cream, like he’d negotiated a contract and gotten one over on a client he despised. So, the ‘discussion’ with Dick must’ve gone well. A nagging voice in Rose’s head wanted to poke at that, to ask or at least hint and see how much Daddy would tell her, but it wasn’t worth the risk of ruining his good mood.

“Be right down,” was all she said.

In any case, she’d been lying on her bed with a book on her face before Daddy knocked, bored and unable to focus on the words on the page; it wasn’t like she had anything better to do. Rose pulled on a tank top and exercise pants and headed downstairs. In the hallway outside the dojo, she ran into Dick dressed similarly in his own tank top and sweats like her mirror image. His skin looked a little flushed like he’d been warming up, or maybe like the so-called ‘discussion’ with Daddy had escalated into a real fight, but Dick didn’t have any black eyes or split lips that Rose could see, and she knew her daddy didn’t pull punches. Even the bruise on his neck now lay concealed behind a beige band-aid.

As Rose approached, Dick stopped and smiled at her. “Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” Rose said back.

“I’m sorry for how I acted last night,” Dick said suddenly. “You made a mistake, but I berated you instead of helping you learn from it. I was acting like...” He trailed off, sighed. “It’s not what a teacher should do.”

“Thought you were a bad guy now,” Rose said, looking him over suspiciously. “Bad guys don’t have to apologize.”

“Well, this one is,” Dick insisted.

Her daddy must’ve really given him an earful. Rose shot him a smile that she hoped looked more pleasant than gloating and said, “’Kay. Thanks. I guess I should’ve listened to you, too,” she added belatedly. “So, uh, sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Dick said with a smile nice enough to make Rose forget why she was ever mad at him.

She tamped down the flutter in her heart and tried to look serious. “So, what are we learning today?”

“I was thinking we’d get warmed up and then try some joint manipulation,” Dick said as he walked up to the door of the dojo and pushed it open. “Have you ever—?”

A gasp stole the rest of his question, and Rose echoed him with her own sucked-in breath. Her daddy had transformed the whole, wide room into a dojo, punching bags along one wall, a mini-fridge with water bottles in the corner, and most of the floor taken up by a thick, padded mat that would hurt less to get thrown onto than the wooden floorboards beneath. Off in the middle of the pad, Rose stared at the thing that had stopped them both in their tracks: Daddy, pulling Sophia backwards by her hair.

Time slowed. Rose gawked like an idiot while Dick took an abortive step in their direction, and then Sophia moved. She took a step back and circled her small arm around Daddy’s, trapping it and turning to punch him in the throat so hard that he actually coughed . It loosened his hold enough to let her pull out of his grip and spin around into a fighting stance.

“Good,” Daddy said, nodding to Sophia in approval that made made Rose feel hot and cold all over, like she was getting sick. “Grayson,” Daddy said next, his eye turning towards Dick. “I was beginning to wonder when you’d deign to join us.”

“Slade,” Dick said. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Teaching,” Daddy replied easily. “What the hell are you doing?”

Dick answered him with a glare that could cut through glass . “I thought I was using the dojo to train Rose,” he said at last. “I didn’t realize it was occupied.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s more than enough room for all of us,” Daddy said.

True on its face, although the line of Dick’s jaw suggested he didn’t appreciate that answer. “Sophia,” he said, addressing her while still glaring daggers at Daddy. “Did you ask Slade to teach you?”

“No, but I don’t mind,” Sophia said quickly, eyes darting nervously between the two of them. “It’s kind of fun.”

Dick’s face did something funny, like he’d accidentally eaten something bad at a party and couldn’t spit it out in the face of the smiling host. “Slade, a word?” he asked.

“Certainly,” Daddy said, grinning like a shark.

“In private?” Dick clarified.

The grin grew wider. “If you think we can spare the time.”

To Rose’s surprise, Dick went so red that he looked like he might pop. He took in a breath, let it out. Stepped right up to Daddy, as close as they’d been in the living room the night before.

“You want my attention, you have it,” he said lowly. “Leave Sophia out of this.”

“Do I need to remind you who brought her into this?” Daddy asked, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “The girl already said she didn’t mind, so I don’t see why it’s any concern of—”

“You kidnapped her, and you’re holding her captive!” Dick shouted over him. “Do you really think she feels like she can say no to you?”

At this, Sophia opened her mouth, then seemed to think better of it. She looked everywhere except at Dick and Daddy—down at her feet, up at the ceiling, and finally at Rose as if to ask, are you seeing this? It caught Rose off-guard, and she couldn’t help the minute shrug, the hey, don’t look at me. Sophia’s slight grimace in response ignited a small spark of unwanted kinship that Rose immediately did her best to smother.

Her daddy chuckled , still trying to stare Dick down . “If you’re going to take issue with men in masks teaching children to fight, I really think I should get in line behind a certain vigilante,” he said, briefly making fists by his temples and holding the index finger of each hand up over the top of his head. “It’s basic self-defense, Grayson. Something her father—a middling mob boss, trying to sit at the table with Black fucking Mask—never taught her. Neither have you, for all your supposed concern.”

“So, you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart?” Dick asked like he didn’t believe that for a second.

“I’m not that charitable, kid. I’m mostly doing it because it gives me something better to do than sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring, and it gives your darling Sophia something better to do than trying to break into my bedroom,” Daddy told him simply.

“I was just—” Sophia piped up.

A raised palm quieted her. “You were looking for some advantage to use against me. I don’t blame you for trying, girl, but you won’t succeed.”

“Slade, I don’t want this life for her,” Dick said, a pleading note in his voice.

“What, one where someone might hurt her? That’s been her life since well before you or I came into it,” Daddy said. “Now,” he went on with an air of finality that meant the conversation was over, “I believe you came down here to train Rose.”

He leaned in as he said it, forcing Dick to crane his neck to look up at him, their faces so close their noses were almost touching. Dick’s hands clenched into fists, and Rose was dead sure he’d punch Daddy in the face. In the end, though, Dick retreated. He turned and headed off in the other direction, signaling with a rough wave for Rose to follow.

And so Dick trained Rose, taking one corner of the padded mat while Daddy and Sophia took the other. They went through a warm-up, some stretching and light sparring that Rose could admit she didn’t do her best at, preoccupied with the argument she’d just witnessed and the muffled sounds of the pair on the other side of the room. Dick probably would’ve gotten on her about it more if he hadn’t been so obviously distracted himself, his eyes distant and the rest of him going through the motions until he announced they’d done enough and could try some new techniques.

“I’m going to throw a punch at you,” Dick said, bringing his guard up. “I want you to catch it and put me in a wrist lock.”

He didn’t ask if she was ready, but Rose hadn’t expected him to. Dick’s fist shot straight and fast at Rose’s face, and she snapped the side of her palm into his wrist before it got there, grabbing his hand and bringing her other hand up to help bend it back.

“Ok,” Dick said, tapping her arm twice so she’d let go, then stepping back to stretch his wrist. “Your form’s almost there, but you’re forcing it. Joint manipulation isn’t about strength—it’s about leverage. Here,” he said, raising his hands in a guard again. “Punch at me.”

Well, if he insisted. Rose took after her daddy: she didn’t pull punches, either. In deference to Dick’s face, which it would be a shame to ruin, Rose lined up and planted her fist right in the center of his chest.

Or, she tried to.

The next thing Rose knew, Dick had her punch caught and redirected into a twist of her wrist, using that and her preexisting momentum to flip her head over ass and send her flying through the air. She landed on the mat with an impact that knocked the breath from her lungs and lay there for a minute, dazed. Dick smiled down at her—a real one, eye crinkles and all—and offered his hand to help her up. Swallowing her pride, Rose accepted it and let him pull her to her feet.

She regained her balance to find Sophia watching her from across the room, insult to injury. Rose scowled to make the flush rising to her face look more like anger than embarrassment, grateful when her daddy ushered Sophia back towards the punching bags—maybe he hadn’t seen her wipe out that badly.

“Do you think you got that?” Dick asked, calling Rose’s attention back to him—still smiling like an asshole. “Or do you need to see it again?”

Stretching her wrist helped it feel better, but the lingering throb of pain made Rose less eager for a repeat performance. “I think you just want to beat me up,” she said.

“If I just wanted to beat someone up, I’d call your dad over here,” Dick said, and Rose laughed a little in spite of herself.

“Can you show me again slower?” Rose asked. “And without throwing me?”

Obligingly, Dick took her through the motions: how to grab an opponent’s hand and bend their wrist with minimal effort. “Done properly, this should work even on someone bigger and stronger than you,” he said.

“Punching them in the face usually works,” Rose muttered as she tried to twist Dick’s hand the way he’d shown her.

“You’re stronger than most people you’d meet on the street, and I’m sure that’s served you well so far,” Dick said. “But it won’t last. If you want to help your dad, you’re gonna be fighting people out of your weight class. Having an extra trick up your sleeve can be the difference between life and death.”

Rose blew a stray strand of hair out of her face and caught Dick’s next punch. “Ok, but you just said I’m still stronger than most people. Why spend so much time on this if I’m not going to use it much?”

“I never said you can’t use it on normal people, just that it can be particularly effective against a larger opponent,” Dick told her. “Think about it. When might you choose this over just punching someone?”

It was a test—one she had to pass. “When you… I mean, if I hit someone, I usually knock them out, or they run, or they try to hit me back so…” Rose bit her lip in thought. “I guess I’d use this if I wanted someone to talk? Like, if I wanted information?”

“That’s right,” Dick said, and the praise warmed Rose right through. “It’s a way to end a fight quickly without the risk of them running or fighting back and without causing more serious damage.” He slid back into a fighting stance and brought his fists up, asked, “Ready?”

Rose grinned and raised her own guard in response. This time, when Dick tried to hit her, she sidestepped, grabbed his hand, and twisted it to throw him down onto the mat. He even let out a gratifying grunt of pain, or a least of impact, before jumping back to his feet.

“Good,” Dick said, squaring off once more. “Let’s try it again.”

They went through the three wrist locks Rose sort of knew and a few she’d never seen before, practicing back and forth until Dick was satisfied she could do them perfectly. Rose fell into the rhythm of it, thrilling with pride at each success, and it was—not easy, exactly, but reassuring to have a singular task and an achievable goal. It wasn’t like their nighttime patrols, boring and complicated and every move she made somehow the wrong one.

When their wrists were sore enough—Dick wincing and stretching and remarking on his lack of a healing factor—they switched to an arm lock, a new challenge for Rose to tackle. She got it on the first try, riding her swell of accomplishment like a wave.

And then she looked up to find Sophia watching her again, and the wave crashed against the shore. Their resident idiot stood just off the mat, her eyes round and her hand clutching a sweating water bottle that reminded Rose suddenly of her own thirst; they must’ve been going an hour. A few paces off stood Daddy with his own bottle, resting an arm across the top of the punching bag. He inclined his head in approval and raised his bottle in a silent toast, bringing a smile to Rose’s face and giddiness in her chest, something not even Dick’s turn of attention towards Sophia could dispel completely.

“Hey, Soph,” he said, giving her a smile that probably looked more tired than he’d intended. “You doing ok?”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. Mr. Wilson was showing me how to get out of some grabs and some different punches.”

“That’s—nice,” Dick said, which sounded very forced.

If Sophia noticed, she kept it to herself. “Yeah,” she replied vaguely, then asked, “What are you doing? It looks interesting.”

“We’re doing some joint manipulation. It’s probably a little advanced for you,” Dick told her apologetically. “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“Oh, I think she can handle one of the simpler techniques,” Daddy said. “The girl’s a fast learner.”

Dick stiffened visibly. “I wouldn’t want to take the time away from Rose.”

“Excellent idea,” Daddy said, clapping his hands together once. “Rose, why don’t you show Sophia here something you’ve learned today?”

“But Rose is—” Dick began.

“Still learning?” Daddy guessed. “I’ve found there’s no better reinforcement than teaching someone else.”

He gave Sophia a little push between the shoulder blades, plucking the water bottle out of her hand neatly as she stumbled onto the mat. Sophia looked back at Daddy first, smiling back at her like a wolf, then at Rose, doing her best like she didn’t care one way or the other, and finally to Dick, a little green around the gills and a lot panicked.

“Listen, Soph, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Dick said, low and urgent. “No one’s forcing you.”

As a deterrent, it backfired spectacularly. “It’s ok. I want to learn,” Sophia said, which earned her a few grudging points in Rose’s book, a few more when Sophia marched up to her and tilted her head back to look her in the eye. “So, what do I do?”

Rose somehow managed not to laugh right in her dumb, little face or at the opportunity suddenly offered up on a golden platter. “Did Daddy teach you a straight punch?” she asked instead.

“Yeah,” Sophia replied.

“Ok, good.” Rose stepped into a fighting stance. “Try to hit me.”

To Sophia’s credit, she responded unhesitatingly with a perfect form and a clean strike—but Rose had meta abilities on her side and the muscle memory honed by years of fighting. She moved before Sophia even had her arm fully extended, blocking the punch, twisting her wrist, and flipping her over using the first move Dick had shown her.

The moment Sophia hung in the air seemed to last forever. Rose was aware of the tiny, delicate wrist bent in her hand, Dick starting towards them, Daddy watching them from his spot by the punching bags. Then, Sophia collided with the mat. Unlike Dick, she didn’t know how to breakfall, and she went down hard, head bouncing and startling out a cry of pain. Rose’s stomach sank uncomfortably like guilt, like she’d taken something too far.

“Sophia!” Dick fell to his knees, sliding the last foot or so towards her. “God. Are you ok?”

Sitting up, Sophia rubbed her head and nodded. “I—I think so, yeah. I’m ok.”

“How’s your wrist?” Dick asked anxiously, taking Sophia’s hand and turning her as red as a bad sunburn.

“It’s, uh. A little sore, I guess. But I think it’s fine,” Sophia told him.

“Here. Stretch it like this,” Dick said, taking his hand back to show her.

A longing look passed briefly over Sophia’s face, like she still wanted that hand to be touching her, but she copied him obediently. Satisfied, Dick gave her a final, warm smile that vanished as he stood, turning on Rose like a flipped switch.

“What were you thinking?” he hissed. “You can’t just throw her around like that!”

“I threw you around like that!” Rose retorted, falling back on defensiveness.

“I have the training to handle it! She doesn’t!” Dick said, pointing at Sophia. “You could have seriously hurt her! If you did this on the street—”

“Oh, my God! It’s not going to be innocent, little civilians coming at me on the street!” Rose interrupted him, well and truly losing her temper. “I’m meta-human! If someone attacks me, they deserve what they get!”

That stopped him for a minute, his arms crossed and mouth pressed thin. “What happens when someone’s scared and doesn’t know you’re there to help? When it’s a crowd that’s breathed in Scarecrow’s fear gas, or security guards Poison Ivy drugged into thinking they’re in love with her, or someone infected with Joker Venom?” He gave a slow shake of his head. “Your dad might kill people for a living, Rose, but even he’s more careful about collateral damage.”

His speech complete, Dick stalked up to the edge of the mat and stopped right in front of Daddy. “Slade,” he said. “Get over here and make yourself useful.”

Daddy raised an eyebrow at him. “How do you intend to use me, Grayson?”

“I’m going to attack you, and you’re going to take me down without hurting me,” Dick said.

The responding smile looked sharp enough to eat Dick alive. “So, it seems you’ve found a way to beat me up, after all,” Daddy said—meaning he’d heard Dick’s earlier comment from clear across the room, a revelation that provoked no surprise from Dick nor any reaction at all. Daddy cracked his neck and asked, “Why don’t we make it interesting?”

He stooped down and reached behind the punching bag, coming up with a pair of wooden escrima sticks. A toss placed them in Dick’s hands like they’d been pulled there by magnets, the catch effortless and automatic. Testing their weight, Dick slid back into a fighting stance and twirled them a few times like extensions of his arms, something he’d momentarily set aside and had just been waiting to get back.

“Clear the floor, girls,” Daddy ordered, stepping onto the mat.

Sophia scrambled off it first, leaving Rose to follow belatedly. She backed up against the wall in time to watch her Daddy measure his distance from Dick, falling about ten steps back. He nodded to him and said: “Go.”

It wasn’t a fight. Rose knew how to fight, knew what they felt like and looked like from the outside. This was too fluid to qualify, reminding her of nothing so much as a video of liquid mercury she’d watched once, the combination and separation of those slipping, silver drops. Dick struck with his escrima sticks, and Daddy shifted out of the way in perfect anticipation—except for how Dick moved next, creating his own opening. One of his weapons snapped across Daddy’s face, bringing a hiss of pain and burst of crimson blood. The motion blurred after that, and the end came so fast Rose didn’t even see it, the escrima sticks rolling away and Dick on the ground. They grappled for a minute, Dick twisting and sinuous as a snake, Daddy seizing and forcing him still. On his stomach, and then on his back with his hands pinned above his head.

Teeth bared in a snarl, Dick tried to buck and throw Daddy off, but Daddy had his full weight seated on Dick’s hips and thighs and was just too heavy. Daddy leaned down and growled right back, blood dripping from his nose and onto Dick’s face, and Rose felt strange watching them. Like she shouldn’t be there, despite this whole demonstration supposedly being for her.

Like Dick and Daddy had forgotten everything and everyone else, and they were the only two people in the room.

*

The bitter scent of stale coffee greeted Rose as she walked into the kitchen after her post-workout shower, the pot still partially full and abandoned after breakfast. She took hold of the handle with the intention of pouring it out, and then let it go as a bolt of inspiration struck her. Rose began opening cabinets and rooting through their contents until she found what she was looking for: a can of condensed milk that tipped easily into her palm. She found a glass and made coffee the way her mama used to, adding condensed milk first, enough lukewarm coffee to dilute it, and then ice and more coffee all the way up to the brim.

Drinking it brought back memories of her mama that Rose had long left buried, emerging now and cutting her fresh. Quiet afternoons in the old house in New York, surrounded by the implicit warmth and presence of the ladies napping in preparation for the night ahead. Rose always felt that, even when they were all locked in their rooms and she couldn’t see them. Her mama would make a coffee like this one and pour Rose a little in a separate cup, then set her to help chopping vegetables or measuring spices while she stood over the stove, making rice noodles in broth and coconut curry soup and fried rice and fishcakes.

Rose swallowed around the lump in her throat, blinking against the hot, prickly feeling in the back of her good eye. Abruptly, thoughtlessly, she reached up again and started wrenching cabinets open, slamming ingredients onto the counter in a whirlwind like the one her in head. Breakfast that morning. Daddy and Sophia. Dick and Sophia. Her daddy and Dick. How Rose felt like a spectator in all of it, standing at the edge of something she couldn’t quite understand. She missed when it was just her and Daddy, when everything was simpler.

She missed her mama most of all.

Fishcakes and fried rice. If Sophia could make breakfast for everyone, Rose could duplicate something she’d helped her mama make a thousand times. She sorted her ingredients on the counter, drank her coffee, and got to work.

Thirty minutes later, the smell of burning told Rose she must’ve miscalculated somewhere along the way. Oil bubbled and spat in the skillet holding her attempt at fishcakes, splashing all over the stove and counter, all over her arm when she tried to turn off the burner. She yanked it back with a yelp and then frantically tried to stir the smoking fried rice. In the absence of an actual wok, she’d resorted to the deepest frying pan they had, and now every grain that touched its surface was stuck fast and going black. Rose moved it to a cool burner and tried to reach for the knobs again, but the oil kept forcing her hand away. She grabbed a towel hanging over the side of the sink and used it to wrap her arm as shielding, then jumped as a shrill, beeping sound split the air.

It continued unrelenting as Rose hissed through her teeth, beating mercilessly against her eardrums. She looked around wildly for the fire alarm and found it on the wall above the door, too high for her to reach. Cursing, Rose ran towards the dining room, a plan fast-forming to grab one of the chairs around the table and turn the smoke alarm off before anyone came to witness her fuck-up—and ran into her daddy’s chest so hard she nearly fell on her ass.

“Rose, what’s—shit,” Daddy said, heading for the stove and turning off the burners, unheeding of the spitting oil as he moved the frying pan containing the failed fishcakes off the heat.

Humiliation sparked in Rose’s chest, bursting into flames as Dick ran in a second later. He immediately leapt up onto the counter, standing on his toes and leaning at an almost impossible angle to hit the button on the smoke alarm. The sudden silence rang in Rose’s ears. Hopping down, Dick opened one of the windows and began fanning the smoke-filled air with a towel.

“Jesus, Rose, was that on high?” Dick asked, peering at the stove as he worked.

Even if she’d wanted to, Rose didn’t trust her voice to answer. She looked down at her feet, only looking up again at her daddy’s approach. Oil burns peppered his arms, and his face held incredulity and exasperation in equal measures, and Rose wanted to sink into the floor, wanted to fucking cry.

Wiping the oil off his arms with a towel, Daddy asked, “What the hell were you trying to do?”

“I was—I was trying to make fishcakes. Like mama used to,” Rose mumbled at her feet again, unable to hold his gaze.

Her daddy let out a deep, heaving sigh, his shoulders slumping in her periphery. “Rose…” he began.

But Rose couldn’t afford to let him say more; if she cried over this in front of him, in front of Dick, she’d never recover. “I’ll clean it up, ok?” she said quickly.

It didn’t work—Daddy was still looking at her with something so close to pity that Rose wanted to scream and punch something until her knuckles bled and burn the whole fucking house down. Daddy opened his mouth, but no words came out. He shut it again and rubbed at his temples.

“You should leave that open for a bit,” Dick said, nodding at the window as he set the towel on the counter and came over to stand at Daddy’s side. “And that pan you were using for the rice might not be salvageable, but you’ll need to soak it and see if the stuff stuck to the bottom comes off.”

Yelling would’ve been easier to deal with, and Rose wished she could’ve traded Dick’s censure in the dojo earlier for his kindness now. She bit her tongue and managed to keep her voice steady, said, “Ok, I—are you wearing my dad’s shirt?”

The thought exited her mouth before it fully registered in her brain. He was wearing one of Daddy’s undershirts, though, a white t-shirt several sizes too big, the collar nearly slipping off one shoulder.

Both Dick and her daddy froze. Dick looked down at his shirt like he was seeing it for the first time. “I was about to do laundry when the smoke alarm went off,” he said. “I must’ve gotten our clothes mixed up.”

Daddy huffed through his nose, raising an eyebrow at Dick like he found the mix-up funny, and Dick went a little red in the face and scratched at the back of his head. It was kinda funny, Rose guessed, and she could get Dick’s embarrassment, but something about it felt...weird. It reminded her too much of their meaningless argument about coffee and of their fight in the dojo, how they’d slowly separated like people waking from a dream.

Then, the moment passed, and Daddy stepped over to Rose and kissed the top of her head. “There’s cleaning supplies under the sink,” he said. “Get this cleaned up. Make a sandwich if you’re hungry.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Rose said, acutely aware that his reaction could have been a lot worse.

He gave her upper arm a squeeze in response and left the room, Dick shooting her a smile too tight to be comforting as he trailed out after, the oversized shirt hanging off his shoulders. Rose squinted at his back, then at the empty doorway he’d passed through, and at last shook her head and squatted down next to the cabinet under the sink in search of the promised cleaning supplies. Grabbing a spray bottle of Lysol and a roll of paper towels, she stood back up and swore in surprise.

At the stove behind her, right behind her, Sophia stood on her toes inspecting the pans. Rose hadn’t even heard her come in.

“What were you trying to make?” Sophia asked.

Rose let her breath out and sprayed down the nearest counter. “Why the hell do you care?”

“There’s not much else to do around here,” Sophia said. “Just curious.”

A silence stretched out, and Rose found herself snapping to break it. “Fishcakes and fried rice,” she said, then stated the obvious: “I fucked it up.”

“Your mom was Cambodian, right?” Sophia asked, the shock of the question enough that Rose forgot to be mad.

She stopped the paper towel mid-swipe. “...Yeah?”

“I think I…” Sophia trailed off, tapping her chin in thought. “Gimme a minute,” she said, turning and marching importantly out of the room.

“Ok, weirdo,” Rose muttered under her breath when she was sure Sophia was out of earshot—but at least the little idiot had gone and left her in peace. Sighing, Rose refocused on cleaning, wiping the counters and stove clean.

A couple minutes later, though, Sophia returned triumphant and placed a large, heavy book on the table. “Here,” she said.

The title read The Taste of Cambodia: 101 Khmer Recipes. Rose stared at the book. She stared at Sophia. She licked her lips and asked, “Where the fuck did you get that?”

“I found it in the study,” Sophia told her with a shrug.

“You better hope my dad doesn’t find out you were in his study,” Rose said.

Sophia rolled her eyes. “All he’d even do is loom over me like a cartoon bad guy like, ‘your determination is admirable, but you won’t find what you’re looking for’,” she said in a spot-on impression of Daddy. “And then he’d make me learn how to shoot a gun or something to piss off Crutches.”

Biting her cheek kept Rose from laughing outright, but she couldn’t help the amused quirk of her mouth, and Sophia’s responding smile said she’d seen it. Rose dried her hands off on a towel and walked over to the table, the book pulling her in with gravitational force. Its spine cracked when she opened the cover like she was the first to ever do so. Rose flipped slowly to the table of contents, then deeper into the pages, skimming past recipes. At one for fried rice, she scoffed at herself.

“It wasn’t the pan,” she said mostly to herself. “Fresh rice is too wet—that’s why it stuck.”

Her mama had always pulled a container out of the fridge rather than spooning it fresh from the rice cooker. Rose remembered that; she’d just forgotten why. In the corner of the page, an artsy picture of fried rice in a fancy bowl looked nothing like the way Rose’s mama used to make it. She smoothed her fingers over its glossy surface and closed the book.

That stupid lump in her throat was back. Rose willed it away, turning back to the counters and wiping down a section she hadn’t reached yet. “Don’t have most of the shit I need to make anything, anyway,” she muttered.

“There’s an Asian mart in town. I could show you,” Sophia offered. “It’s not that far from the regular grocery store, and I wanna pick up some stuff anyway.”

And just like that, the game was up. Rose turned her head back to look at her. “Nice try. I’m not gonna take you into town just so you can run away on my watch.”

“I already told you, I’m safer with Crutches than I would be anywhere else,” Sophia replied evenly. “I promise I’m not gonna run away. I swear on—on my mom, alright?”

Which still didn’t mean she wasn’t lying, but… Rose was getting sick of this house, of whatever the hell was going on between Dick and her daddy, of all the stupid rules she had to follow. Besides, she still wanted those damned fishcakes.

“Fine,” she said. “Help me wash up, and I’ll take you.”

It wouldn’t matter, anyway, because Rose knew they’d get caught. Daddy and Dick would hear them leaving and show up to investigate, and there was no way they’d be allowed into town on their own. The certainty stuck as she left a note on the kitchen table—Went to get groceries, be right back—and as she fumbled the emergency roll of cash from the silverware drawer. But then she was sneaking into the garage with Sophia and a pair of empty backpacks, and Sophia lifted the garage door to let Rose wheel Dick’s motorcycle out and down the driveway. At the end of it, Rose took a breath and revved the engine, let it out when no one shouted down from a second-floor window or burst out of the front door. Sophia settled in behind her, and they rode off without incident.

Daytime Blüdhaven felt strange to pass through, the buildings even more cracked and worn down in the sun compared to the streetlights. Rose couldn’t believe that Dick had moved here on purpose, as her daddy had told her, wanting to save this place like a knight charging in to save a princess from a crumbling tower—minus the princess. How it looked to Sophia, Rose couldn’t guess. Sophia’s arms around her waist felt as unreal as the city around them, light and small and the opposite of Dick’s solidity when Rose had occupied Sophia’s seat, hugging him from behind.

True to her word, Sophia didn’t run. She moved through the grocery store with a robotic efficiency, steering her cart up and down the aisles and grabbing items off the shelves almost without looking. Rose followed her a bit aimlessly, buying the few ingredients for her own recipes the store carried and raiding the candy display at checkout. Fortified with a chocolate bar and Reese’s cups, she got back on the bike with Sophia and proceeded on to the next stop.

Scrawled copies of the fishcakes and fried rice recipes allowed Rose to muddle through the Asian mart, grateful Sophia hung out near the front. Little, innocuous things kept forcing her to stop and collect herself, a familiar brand here, a smell she couldn’t quite place there. Rose shoved her purchases into the backpack’s remaining space, took a deep breath, and waved for Sophia to follow her out the door.

Back in the garage, Rose removed her helmet with her heart in her throat. She braced for Dick and her daddy waiting in the living room, arms folded and ready to berate them both—only to open the door and find the house as dim and silent as when they’d left. Even the note still sat on the kitchen table, undisturbed. Crumpling it in her fist, Rose decided gratitude at not getting caught outweighed her curiosity, and she began unloading groceries onto the counter.

This time, drying the freshly-cooked rice on baking sheets in the oven kept it from sticking to the frying pan, and cooking the fishcakes over lower heat kept the oil from spitting. Rose had the right ingredients to grind into a paste, too—better fish, real lemongrass rather than trying to substitute with lemon juice, actual galangal instead of powdered ginger.

Sophia, meanwhile, commandeered the table to chop vegetables and shape a combination of ground turkey and pork into meatballs. Rose watched from the corner of her eye with idle interest as Sophia placed the meatballs on a baking tray and then set the oven to preheat. The sound of hissing oil called Rose’s attention back to the stove, and she smiled with quiet pride as she managed to flip her fishcakes without a single drop of oil splashing anywhere.

Her food done, Rose moved both pans onto a cooling rack and raised an eyebrow at the pot now bubbling on the stove. Sophia added her meatballs to it, stirring the contents with a spoon.

“What are you making?” Rose asked, her voice pitched low in observation of their long-held silence.

“It’s called wedding soup,” Sophia said, and after a tiny pause: “You want some?”

After the cookbook and the shopping trip, it seemed almost rude to refuse, so— “Sure,” Rose said.

Portioning out the rice and fishcakes, Rose traded some for a bowl of wedding soup, which looked mostly like meatballs and pasta and vegetables. Cautiously, she took a sip. “Huh. It’s good,” she said, because it was—better than it looked, anyway.

“Thanks. Yours too,” Sophia said, nibbling a bit of fishcake. She set her elbows on the table and bowed her head. “It’s not the same, though.”

“Not the same as your mom’s?” Rose guessed.

“Yeah,” Sophia said, looking off into the distance.

Rose didn’t know what possessed her to say it. “Yeah, mine’s not really the same, either.”

“Yeah,” Sophia said again. She smiled, but it looked sad. “My mom had her own recipe for wedding soup. It was from her mom, who came over from Italy. Nonna died when I was little.” A pause, and Sophia tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Mom always said she’d teach me the recipe when I got engaged so I could make it for my future husband. She never got the chance.”

It wasn’t news, exactly. Rose knew about the police raid, about Sophia’s father in jail and her mother not anywhere, not anymore. “Sorry,” she said, because she had to say something.

“She never did anything,” Sophia said, harsh and sudden. “She was just married to dad, and in the wrong place and the wrong time, and the cops came in and shot her. They shot my mom,” she said again. “Right in front of me.”

Her eyes shone with tears that didn’t fall. And Rose remembered the gunshots, her feet in the snow. How it hadn’t even been about her or her mama, but someone who hated her daddy and wanted revenge—the exact thing Mama had kept Rose a secret to avoid.

“Yeah,” Rose said, looking down at the imperfect homage of their food. “Mine too.”

*

That night, the sky split open and let out a truly apocalyptic amount of rain, and Rose came downstairs to find Dick and her daddy having a verbal spat in the living room.

“Afraid of a little storm, Grayson?” Daddy was asking. “Don’t tell me it’s always sunny in Gotham.”

Dick scoffed and folded his arms in response. “That’s not a little storm,” he said, just in time for a crack of lightning and a rumble of thunder to punctuate his words. “I don’t go out in conditions like this unless it’s an emergency. No one does, and there’s no point in us going out if there’s nothing for me to teach.”

Meaning, the night’s patrol was canceled, and the restless ball of energy that had been growing in Rose’s stomach all afternoon battered against her ribs in frustration. “It’s my training,” she said, walking up and forcing herself into their little bubble of conflict. “Don’t I get a say?”

“No!” Dick and her daddy shouted in unison, turning to her monetarily and then focusing back on each other, their attention always pulling back into that mutual orbit.

It made Rose feel off-balance again, intrusive, even though that shouldn’t make any sense. Without the training, Dick wouldn’t even be here. She opened her mouth to point that out, or to argue in favor of patrolling on her fucking own if she had to, or to just say something to get one or both of them to look at her again—but the sound of a quiet, muffled snort stopped her. Dick and Daddy stopped, too, frowning at something behind Rose’s back, and she turned just in time to see Sophia sit up and rest her elbows on the back of the couch where she must’ve been laying.

“Sophia,” Dick said, not scolding, exactly, but closer to it than any tone Rose had heard him use with her before. “Were you listening to us the whole time?”

“Once you came in and woke me up,” Sophia admitted easily, stretching and yawning. “You were kinda loud.”

Daddy gave her a level look and asked, “Don’t you know eavesdropping is rude?”

“Don’t you know kidnapping is illegal?” Sophia shot back immediately.

Thunder boomed overhead, and Dick went pale as the corresponding flash of lightning, but Daddy just laughed. “I can see why you like this one, Grayson,” he said. “She’s got spunk.”

He moved over to the window, hands clasped behind his back. “Alright, you’ve convinced me. You’ll stay in tonight.” Added over his shoulder, “We wouldn’t want to aggravate your delicate constitution.”

“That’s why you keep the smelling salts,” Dick said, and just like that, the wild pendulum of their interactions swung back from argumentative to almost-friendly, giving Rose whiplash.

“I’ve unfortunately used them all up,” Daddy said, turning away from the window. “But there’s always the cattle prod if you faint.”

And Dick laughed into his hand and pushed his hair back out of his face, and it reminded Rose of—something. She frowned, considering the motion and trying to piece it together with a memory just out of reach.

“Well, I’m famished,” Daddy announced, cutting her musings short as he strode past them and towards the kitchen. “Let’s see if you kids left me anything to eat.”

Automatically, Rose looked over to Sophia, biting her lip in an expression that mirrored Rose’s own trepidation. They’d cleaned up after lunch, washed the dishes and put away all the leftovers, but Daddy wouldn’t miss all the extra groceries in the fridge. Rose tiptoed over to the kitchen doorway and stood just outside it, unsure of whether to run or head Daddy off at the pass.

The sound of the fridge opening carried out into the living room. A pause followed, and then Daddy’s voice: “Where the hell did all this come from?”

“Uh.” Rose stepped into the doorway, Dick and Sophia crowding behind her. “We went shopping.”

Daddy turned to her slowly. “Where did you go shopping?” he asked.

“The, uh. The grocery store in town?” Rose said, her voice going up at the end like a question. “And the Asian mart because I wanted some—some other stuff.”

His forehead pinched. “How did you get there?”

“We took the bike,” Sophia said.

“You took my bike?” Dick echoed, incredulous.

“Oh my God, it was fine,” Rose said, rounding on him. “We needed food, we got food! It’s like, way less dangerous than anything you make me do on patrol.”

The fridge turned on, its motor whirring quietly. Daddy leaned away as if it had startled him and shut the door. “You should still tell me if you’re going somewhere, Rose,” he said. “Especially now.”

“I looked for you and couldn’t find you,” Rose said, which wasn’t a complete lie—she’d popped her head into the study and listened for movement up the stairs, a precaution against getting caught. “Where were you two this afternoon, anyway?”

“Sleeping,” Dick said, at the same time Daddy said, “Outside.”

They recoiled like they’d shared the same electric shock, Dick looking at Daddy like he’d been the one to deliver it, Daddy looking back at Dick with equal accusation. A glance at Sophia showed a tilted head and puzzled frown that Rose couldn’t have put better herself.

“Sleeping...outside?” Rose asked.

“I had trouble sleeping last night, so I thought I’d catch a few hours before patrol. I wasn’t anticipating the weather,” Dick told her with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Your dad was taking care of something else.”

“Fine! Don’t tell me,” Rose said, throwing her hands up in the air. She brushed past her daddy and opened the fridge again. “There’s fishcakes and some fried rice I made, and Sophia made a whole pot of this husband soup. It’s pretty good.”

“It’s called wedding soup,” Sophia corrected her. “I’m supposed to make it for my husband.”

She glanced briefly at Dick as she said it like she just couldn’t help herself, and then resolutely at the floor, going a brilliant shade of scarlet. Oh God, Rose thought, wincing internally and opting to pretend like she hadn’t noticed. Dick seemed to follow suit, looking politely in the vague direction of the cabinets.

In the midst of it, Daddy chuckled and said, “I think I’m a little old for you, kid.”

Going even redder in the face—if that were possible—Sophia stammered something unintelligible with a look of such abject horror that Rose laughed. Her daddy laughed, too, and Dick even joined in a little, Sophia smiling self-consciously and scuffing her foot along the floor.

“Ok,” Daddy said, stooping down to look in the fridge again. “Where’d you put this soup?”

They split up the leftovers for dinner, and it was—fine, actually. No one talked much, but Daddy and Dick both complimented Rose on her fishcakes, and she rode that high for the rest of the meal. When she caught Sophia’s eye, beaming similarly as the rest of her weird soup disappeared, Rose couldn’t help a smile. She thought of her mama and the other ladies, the meals where they’d all crowded around the table and talked over each other until Rose gave up listening to any single conversation and let the noise wash over her.

After dinner, Daddy leaned back in his chair and burped hugely. It earned him an, “Ugh, Daddy!” from Rose and a pair of affronted looks from Dick and Sophia, which made him laugh in turn.

“Don’t blame me; blame the food,” Daddy said, crossing his arms behind his head. “We’ll have to have you two cook more often.”

Rose narrowed her eye suspiciously, torn between warming at the praise and avoiding the imposition of another chore. At the look on her face, Daddy laughed and said, “Only since you seem so eager. Go on upstairs,” he told her next. “Grayson and I can clean up.”

“Uh. Ok,” Rose said, not quite believing that was it, that she’d gotten away with taking Dick’s motorcycle so cleanly. “Thanks.”

Pushing herself to her feet, she went around the table and kissed Daddy’s cheek. Sophia, meanwhile, hovered near Dick for second, but thanked him and Daddy politely and followed Rose out of the room without protest.

“What?” Sophia asked on the stairs, causing Rose to realize she’d been looking at her sideways.

“Nothing. Just thought you’d want to hang out with your ‘Crutches’,” Rose said.

Sophia stuck her lip out. “I can’t be around him all the time. I don’t want to like, bother him or anything,” she said. “And your dad’s there, so…”

“And?” Rose asked when Sophia trailed off. “Are you scared he’s gonna find out you were in the study or something?”

“No, I already said I’m not worried about that,” Sophia said, waving her off. “It’s just—something’s weird with him and Crutches. Don’t you see it? It makes me feel like—kinda like when my parents were fighting, you know?”

Mama used to have disagreements with some of the other ladies, inevitable with that many people living under the same roof, but Rose didn’t think that was quite the same. “I don’t know. Maybe,” she said.

“It just feels like I’m not supposed to be there,” Sophia said.

They reached the second-floor landing, a Rose made a noncommittal noise. She didn’t want to talk about Dick and her daddy anymore, didn’t want to think about whatever they might be saying to each other as they cleaned up after dinner. Something was going on with them, but Sophia saying it out loud made it unignorable, too real.

“Anyway,” Sophia said, calling Rose’s attention back. “What do you want to do now?”

Rose squinted down at her, and Sophia blinked back innocently. Like the afternoon spent together had changed something essential, made them friends. The casual confidence of that assumption hit like an attack on Rose’s pressure points, leaving her off-balance and numb in weird places. She took in a breath to throw it back in Sophia’s face because it didn’t work like that and Rose had better fucking things to do than hang out with a fifteen-year-old—except maybe it did work like that. A few other children had shared space with her in the big house in New York, but the handful of years separating any of them from Rose had prevented her from becoming close, and the Titans had mostly treated her like a kid.

Friends had just…never really happened. And if Rose made Sophia fuck off now, with the rain pounding dully on the roof and Dick and Daddy doing whatever downstairs, the night held no other prospects save to sit in her room and stew.

So, she tilted her head to the side like she was thinking and said, “I don’t know. Maybe watch a movie or something?”

“I don’t think there are any. I looked all over this place, and I couldn’t find any DVDs,” Sophia said with a sigh of disappointment. “I wish we had a board game, at least.”

“I’ve got some cards in my room,” Rose said with sudden inspiration. “You know how to play anything?”

A shrug came in answer. “Mostly just Go Fish.”

“C’mon,” Rose said, cuffing Sophia lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll teach you poker—maybe some card sharping if you pick it up fast.”

As it turned out, Sophia did pick it up fast. She nearly beat Rose in the second game, forcing her to pay more attention, and giggled at the sleight-of-hand tricks. “My dad would have a fit if he saw me doing this,” she said conspiratorially, like she couldn’t believe her own daring. “He used to have friends over to play poker, but I wasn’t allowed in the room.”

Rose thought again of her mama and the other ladies and all the things she hadn’t been allowed in the room for, either. “They just wanted to make sex jokes without you hearing,” she said and enjoyed watching the tips of Sophia’s ears go pink. “It was probably boring anyway.”

At least, that’s what Rose’s mama always told her.

The hours passed, and Sophia started yawning hugely into the crook of her arm, nodding off and then shaking her head awake over the cards in her hand. Rose went to the bathroom around midnight and came out to find Sophia asleep, curled up on her side with her head against the pillow and her cards still folded protectively to her chest. Stepping over to the bed, Rose looked down at Sophia, the slow rise and fall of her stomach. She thought about waking her up and telling her to sleep in her own bed, then didn’t. Carefully, Rose gathered the cards and turned the light off, taking a last look at Sophia before slipping into the dark hallway.

On an entirely different schedule, Rose was still wide-awake. She paced up and down the hall aimlessly, stopping and cocking her head at the muffled sound of someone talking. Moving towards it, Rose turned a corner at the end of the hall and followed the sound to the balcony, the door leading to it left slightly ajar. The voices resolved into Dick’s and her daddy’s, and a quick glance through the partially opened door showed them sitting in a pair of lawn chairs angled to nearly meet at the corner where Dick’s right armrest touched Daddy’s left.

The small, covered balcony overlooked the garden, though at this time of night, Rose couldn’t imagine there was much of a view. It couldn’t be comfortable, either, sticky dampness from the still-falling rain even reaching where Rose stood, making her sweat. But the storm had let up from a torrent to a drizzle, letting Rose hear their conversation over the continuing patter on the roof and surrounding trees.

“I still couldn’t tell you what was in that formula,” Dick was saying. “I think part of it must’ve come from some type of indigo? In any case, Gar came out of his room that morning, and he was blue. Like, vibrant blue. I mean, he looked like a smurf. And he’s up at the top of the stairs, yelling at us and demanding to know which one of us did it, and we’re all staring at him like he’s grown an extra head, or y’know, turned a whole different color, and Joey’s standing there looking as innocent as anyone else—”

At that name, Rose sucked in a breath and then covered her mouth with her hand to keep silent. Joey, her brother. Her dead brother Daddy would never talk about and didn’t even like her asking about, always changing the subject when she did. Rose strained her ears, trying to make out and commit to memory every word.

“It look a week for Joey to come clean, and that week was just chaos at the Tower,” Dick went on. “Gar hounded all of us—literally, he’d turn into a bloodhound and sniff our stuff—and he kept trying to, I don’t know, force or annoy someone into confessing. He pissed Donna off bad, and I think Kori almost killed him. Vic only made things worse because he started calling Gar ‘blue genes’ instead of ‘green genes’, or maybe it was ‘blue jeans’ like the kind you wear, but I can’t say for sure because never wrote it down.”

He paused, the lapse filled in by the sound of rain. “A whole week of this goes by, right? And then one morning, there’s a full-on screaming match over breakfast because Gar turned into a spider and webbed all of Roy’s arrows together, and I think Joey got sick of it—I knew the rest of us were. He said something like, ‘Oh my God, it was me, ok?’ but he had to sign it like three times before Raven noticed, and she had to get the rest of us to stop yelling at look at him, and after all that, Gar was so impressed that he stopped being mad.”

Daddy laughed in response, a quiet, sad sound. “Joe always did have that damned, cherubic face. Used to get away with everything. I remember the morning Addie found a broken vase on the floor, and he gave her one look with those big, blue eyes of his and said he didn’t know anything about it, and she went off to find Grant.” He rubbed a hand across his face, then set it back on the armrest. “That lasted until about ten seconds after Addie actually found Grant and started tearing into him. Joe couldn’t stand that. He ran up to her all guilty and crying, and of course she forgave him immediately.”

His voice grew distant as he continued, reaching back into the past. “He was always her son. Grant took after me, but Joe was Adeline’s through and through. He used to—he had such a lovely voice. Before I—”

“Don’t,” Dick said, cutting him off. His hand covered Daddy’s on the armrest. “Slade, how did it all go so wrong?” he asked plaintively.

“I was involved,” Daddy said. “That’s usually a pretty good start.”

“No, it—that wasn’t your fault. Grant and Joey. I’m not—there’s a lot of bad shit you did that is your fault, but what happened to them wasn’t,” Dick said insistently. “You’re not poison, Slade. You can change.”

Another laugh, this one short and humorless. “Between me and this cesspool of a city, you’re becoming the champion of lost causes.”

“I’m getting close here. I can take care of Blüdhaven. I might not be saving the world, but I can take care of my city. That’s got to count for something,” Dick said, quiet and fervent.

“Say you can. Then what?” Daddy asked. “The four of us just keep playing house forever?”

“Would that be so bad?” Dick asked in turn with a note in his voice that sounded almost wistful. “Sometimes, I—I’ve been a vigilante for twenty years, and I’m not even thirty. I don’t even think that’s what this city needs.” He leaned forward, resting his head in his free hand. “I’m tired, Slade.”

Daddy murmured something too quiet for Rose to hear and pulled their chairs together. He put his arm around Dick’s shoulders, pulling him close and combining the silhouettes of their bodies into a single shadow. Rose’s stomach twisted, and she suddenly couldn’t stand it anymore. She turned and fled, back down the hallway and past her room where she couldn’t take refuge because Sophia was sleeping and then down the stairs, her footsteps fast and noiseless against the carpet.

The kitchen at this time of night felt unreal, the light left on over the stove casting long shadows. Rose sat down at the table and took several heavy, shaking breaths, trying to calm her racing heart. Daddy had never told her any of that. “Grant was the Ravager,” he’d said, showing her pictures of their suits. “Joey called himself Jericho.” She’d picked the Ravager because she liked how it looked better, liked the mask and the colors closer to Daddy’s. Asking for more, though, had just led to Daddy’s clipped-off words and set jaw, a fortress she couldn’t break into.

He talked to Dick like it was nothing.

Folding her arms against the tabletop, Rose rested her head on them and closed her eye. A heaviness gathered in her throat like she was about to cry, but no tears came out.

“Rose? What are you still doing up?”

At the sound of Daddy’s voice, Rose jerked awake and blinked blearily at the oven clock. She must’ve dozed off; over an hour had passed.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she mumbled, shaking her head so her hair fell back over her shoulders. “What’re you doing up?”

“Wanted some water. What they’ve got coming out of the tap here tastes like shit,” Daddy said, opening the fridge and pulling out a pair of water bottles. He set one down in front of her, and Rose was a little thirsty, so she opened the bottle and took a sip.

As she did, Daddy leaned back against the opposite counter facing her and drank from his own bottle. “Better?” he asked.

Uncertain, Rose just nodded.

“Good,” Daddy said. “Go back to bed. Try to get some sleep.”

“I—” Rose sipped her water to stall. “I heard you on the balcony.”

The light above the stove cast Daddy’s face in shadow, but Rose could feel him watching her. For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. “What did you hear?” he asked finally.

“You were talking about Joey,” Rose said.

Daddy went quiet again, not answering save to turn his head to the side and set the water bottle down on the counter.

“I asked Mama about you,” Rose said impulsively, needing something to fill the silence. “I thought you were just one of the johns, but I got curious, and she told me about you saving her. She made you sound like a hero.” She smiled briefly at the memory, even though it hurt. “So, I asked her why—why you didn’t want me, and she said that she’d never told you about me. It’d be too dangerous. She said there were bad people who might come and hurt me because of you, and you wouldn’t give up your work to take care of me. Is that true?”

At first, Rose was sure she’d pushed it too far. Daddy would just tell her to go to bed again, or leave the room, or both. Then, he sighed and walked over to the table, pulling a chair out to sit down across from her.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Adeline never gave me that choice. After the Jackal took Joey to get to me and slit his throat, Adeline didn’t tell me I had to either give up Deathstroke or leave. She just tried to kill me. Then again, I didn’t give her a choice when I’d taken up as a mercenary behind her back, so I suppose it was only fair. Your mother…” He trailed off, folded his hands before him on the table. “We had a few weeks when I was smuggling her out of Cambodia. A few days, here and there, after that. I barely knew her. I don’t know what I would have done if she’d told me.”

“Ok,” Rose said. It was no better or worse than she’d expected, but it was honest. She’d just have to take that. “Just, the way you talked about Grant and Joey sounded like—like you loved them. I guess I wish I could’ve known you when I was a kid. Maybe that I could’ve met them.”

He reached a hand out and set it on Rose’s arm. “I did love them,” Daddy said. “I wish you could have met them, too.”

“Then—why won’t you tell me about them?” Rose asked, more desperately than she would’ve wanted, but it was too late and she was too tired to be embarrassed. “They were my brothers. I want to know.”

“What’s the point of knowing them if you’re just going to miss them?” Daddy asked.

Rose already missed them—to know about them at all was to miss them, a fissure in the fabric of her life. “I still want to know,” she said.

“Fine,” Daddy said, leaning back in his chair. The light from above the stove fell over him, illuminating his good eye. “What do you want to know?”

Hesitantly, and then more confidently, Rose asked her questions, and Daddy told her the story he’d told Dick and others, and others still. They sat the table and spoke quietly, passing the long and rainy night.

*

In the small hours, so late it was pretty much early, Rose stumbled back upstairs and into her bedroom where she’d completely forgotten Sophia was sleeping.

“Ah, shit,” Rose swore aloud, passing a hand over her face.

Despite Rose’s complete lack of stealth, Sophia didn’t stir. Sometime in the night, her hair had fallen over her face and now puffed out rhythmically in time with her breaths. It looked kinda funny, and Rose covered her mouth to muffle a giggle brought on more by exhaustion than humor. She steadied herself and took a breath before it could turn hysterical, close enough already with everything her daddy had told her circling around her head, the memory of her dead brothers standing like sentinels at her shoulders.

Joey used to play piano and paint—and sing before his throat got cut and he lost his voice. Grant had wanted to be a pilot when he grew up, at least the last that Daddy knew. As a child, when he was too young to learn how to fire a gun, Daddy had given him a slingshot that he used to knock acorns out of trees. Rose heard the pride when Daddy said it along with the grief, like Grant’s lack of the meta-gene passed on to her and Joey made any accomplishments even more impressive. Fondness and exasperation, when Daddy talked about a young Joey’s habit of climbing to the top shelf of closets or cabinets and falling asleep there, making his parents go crazy looking for him.

The impulse to cry welled up in her throat, but Rose was just too damned tired for it to spill out in the form of a sob or tears from her good eye. She yawned so wide her jaw cracked, then looked down at Sophia and sighed. Thought, Fuck it. The effort of either waking Sophia up or finding somewhere else to sleep suddenly felt insurmountable. Gingerly, Rose lifted the covers and lay down as far away from Sophia as she could without falling off the bed. Sophia slept on, the quiet and regular puffs of her breath unchanging, and Rose slowly relaxed.

She guessed she didn’t hate Sophia anymore. The place Rose’s grudge had occupied now felt strange and empty, a relief and a loss at once. Closing her eye, Rose rolled over so her back faced Sophia and fell almost instantly asleep.

The next time Rose woke, the sun lit up the room and birds chirped somewhere past the cracked window. From the angle of the light and the gummy tiredness that clung to the inside of her head, Rose knew she hadn’t slept long enough, but sat up anyway. Her daddy wouldn’t let her sleep the day away—a surprise he hadn’t come to wake her up already—and even if he did, she’d regret becoming entirely nocturnal.

Rose swung her legs over the side of the bed, and only then noticed the other half of it left vacant, the covers pulled back. She frowned, bothered by…something. That Sophia getting up had failed to wake her, or the possibility she’d caught Rose drooling on her pillow or talking in her sleep. A last look at the empty bed, and Rose banished the feeling. Nothing Sophia could throw at her could be as embarrassing as accidentally falling asleep in someone else’s bed.

A shower helped Rose feel a little more human, and she made her way downstairs for breakfast in a more tolerable mood. This time, no one was setting the table or standing over the stove, so Rose made her own coffee and poured her own cereal and ate it at the kitchen table rather than progressing to the dining room. She half-expected someone to wander in and find her there, but no one appeared as she finished her breakfast and drank the last dregs of her coffee.

Now that Rose thought about it, she hadn’t seen Daddy or Dick or Sophia since she got up, hadn’t heard distant voices or the creak of upstairs floorboards. The space between her shoulders went suddenly tight. It definitely wasn’t from worry, so there had to be another reason she began methodically searching the house. The door to the dojo was locked and the study proved empty, all the bedrooms closed and yielding no answer when she rapped her knuckles against their doors.

Out on the balcony, the end of the line, Rose balled her hands into fists, anxiety spiking like she expected an attack. She didn’t really, but she’d grown up in the big house with her mama and all the other ladies and in Titans Tower after that with people always coming and going. An empty house would always set her on edge. The rational part of her guessed that everyone else had woken up early and started the day without her, and likely the only thing she might miss was Dick and Daddy sniping over Sophia again.

Still, that didn’t give her much to do except wait for them to return. Back downstairs, Rose came to a stop in the living room. She put her hands on her hips and blew a raspberry at nothing. Yeah, Daddy and Dick and Sophia probably hadn’t vanished to points unknown to fuck with her personally, but it sure felt like it. Also, they really shouldn’t have all left without leaving a note or anything. Rose turned towards the stairs, movement to offset the trickle of something that was now definitely worry, and then stopped as she heard a sound.

It came again muffled, almost inaudible, and Rose couldn’t initially tell where it was coming from. Soft hitching breaths, gulps of air. Someone crying in a voice too high to belong to Daddy or Dick, and that had to mean Sophia hiding behind the door to the study, where Rose ultimately followed the noise.

The unlatched door opened at Rose’s touch, and there Sophia sat in the big chair behind Daddy’s desk. Her face blotchy, her eyes red, and her cheeks wet. On the desk in front of her, the crystal decanter that held Daddy’s good bourbon sat with its stopper off and resting alongside it, refracting the light. As Rose watched, glued to the spot and speechless with surprise, Sophia lifted a heavy-bottomed glass with a few sloshing fingers of bourbon at the bottom and took a drink, grimacing and shuddering as it went down.

“What the hell are you doing?” Rose blurted, still standing there stupidly in the doorway.

Sniffling, Sophia grabbed a tissue from the box on the desk and blew her nose loudly. “You were right, you know,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “Crutches was never gonna look at me like that.”

“Jesus, kid,” Rose said, rubbing at her temples with one hand. She could guess what had happened: Sophia had confessed her burgeoning, pubescent feelings, Dick had let her down gently, and Sophia had come in here to cry and lick her wounds.

“I’m not his type,” Sophia went on bitterly. “He only likes pretty girls like his Barbara or special ones like you said, or—” She laughed, a sound with edges like broken glass. “Or old men.”

Static filled Rose’s head. “What?” she asked.

Another broken laugh, another drink of bourbon that made Sophia’s face twist. “They’re in the dojo,” she said.

When Rose reached it, so fast she didn’t really remember getting there, the door to the dojo was still locked. She pressed her ear to the door and heard nothing. That might mean Sophia was lying, and Rose wanted to believe that and march back to the study and tell her off for fabricating fucked-up shit, but those tears hadn’t been for nothing. Rose had to know now; she had to know.

Retracing her steps through the house, Rose exited the back door by the kitchen and stepped into the backyard for the first time since they’d moved in a few weeks ago. Overhead, the balcony jutted out from the side of the house. Rose stuck close to the edge, grass crunching under her feet and her heart in her throat as she approached the window that looked into the dojo. A bush partially covered the glass, but Rose could still squeeze in next to it and peer through.

It took her a minute to piece together what she was seeing, even with Sophia’s warning, even with knowing what would be there. Dick on his back, in the middle of the mats, Daddy above him like when he’d pinned him the day before. Except Dick’s pants had been on then, and now the dark shape of them lay beside him on the mat, his bare legs hooked over Daddy’s shoulders as their bodies moved.

Fortunately—the only good thing about this—Rose couldn’t see much. Just Daddy’s hand cupping the side of Dick’s face and his mouth moving like he spoke, although Rose couldn’t begin to guess what he was saying. Just Dick looking back up at Daddy like he was about to cry, and then surging up, grabbing his face, and kissing him like he’d die if he didn’t.

And that was enough. Rose got up numbly and backed away from the window and what lay past it. She stood there for a minute, the sun still shining overhead and the wind blowing and all the other laws of the universe firmly in place. Then, she turned and went back inside.

In the study, Sophia looked up as Rose entered. Rose looked mutely back, and they shared a moment of silent understanding. Breaking it, Rose stepped over to the side table and picked up one of the heavy-bottomed glasses that came with Daddy’s bourbon set, brought it over to the desk, and poured some out. Raising the glass in a silent toast, Rose held her breath and threw it back.

“Oh, fuck,” she swore, shuddering like Sophia had and convinced for a second that she’d puke. “That’s fucking nasty.”

“Yeah,” Sophia agreed. “But it gets better the more you drink.”

Rose raised an eyebrow at her. She might’ve just seen something that made her want to gouge her other eye out, and she’d never think of Dick or her daddy the same way again, but still wasn’t about to let Sophia show her up. A pair of armchairs faced a cold fireplace across the room; Rose dragged one up to the desk, took a seat, and refilled her glass. Touching it to Sophia’s, she took a cautious sip, and they sat there drinking together and saying nothing.

Which, an indeterminate amount of time later, was how Dick found them. “Rose? Sophia?” he asked, pushing open the door to the study. “There you—wait, is that Slade’s bourbon?”

“Uh-huh,” Rose said defiantly, taking another sip. True to Sophia’s words, it had stopped burning as much.

“Right. Ok.” Dick steepled his hands and pressed them against his face, then pointed them towards the desk and the bourbon. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to be drinking that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rose said, gesturing grandly and nearly making her bourbon slop out of the glass. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to fuck my dad?”

Primly, Sophia leaned forward and added, “We saw you. In the dojo.”

A series of interesting things happened to Dick’s face. It went red, then white, then a sort of shocked grey. His mouth opened and shut a few times before pressing into a thin line, eyes wide and staring and then darting off somewhere to the side. He looked very much like he wanted to run, like he wanted to be anywhere but there.

Finally, he let out a long, ragged sigh. Still not looking at them, Dick retrieved a glass from the side table and then crossed over to the desk, pouring some bourbon from the decanter. The way the glass fit against his lip and the line of his throat as he swallowed might have interested Rose if she’d seen it yesterday, but she couldn’t look at his mouth now without seeing her daddy’s against it. She dropped her gaze, starting when Dick’s empty glass slammed onto the desk.

“God, that’s disgusting,” he said, his voice choked.

Sophia glared up at him, her eyes red-rimmed but dry. “How could you?” she asked, small and injured. “You told me Mr. Wilson was dangerous and that I had to be careful around him. So how can you just—just—do that?”

A beat of silence passed. Dick spun his glass on the surface of the desk. “Soph,” he said in that tired, grown-up way that made him seem very old. “Sleeping with him doesn’t mean I agree with what he does. It just means I want to sleep with him. When you’re older—”

“If you tell me that I’ll understand when I’m older, I’m going to scream,” Sophia said decisively, cutting him off.

The sound of footsteps forestalled that possibility, turning them all towards the door as Daddy stepped inside. He stopped, stared. Rose, along with Dick and Sophia, stared back.

“What the hell is this?” Daddy asked, close enough to Rose’s initial question on finding Sophia here that she almost laughed.

“They know,” Dick told him simply. “They, uh. Saw us in the dojo.”

“Ah,” Daddy said. Picking up the last glass from the side table, he carried it over to the desk and took the decanter to pour himself a drink. In contrast to the rest of them, he didn’t react at all as he swallowed, like the glass contained nothing more than water.

He set the glass down on the desk and said, “I sense you have questions.”

Suddenly, Rose realized that she did. “Is that why I couldn’t find you yesterday or this morning? Because you were…” She trailed off, unable to say it.

“Grayson and I were together, yes,” Daddy replied vaguely, though Rose guessed she didn’t want the specifics.

“Did you clean up the mats?” Sophia asked, her arms folded. “It’s pretty gross to do that in the dojo we all use.”

Daddy snorted. “They’ve been thoroughly disinfected.”

“How long has this been going on?” Rose asked next.

“Longer than we’ve been here,” Daddy said.

Another non-answer, but a glance at Dick, stiff and distinctly uncomfortable, kept Rose from addressing it. “Ok, fine,” she said. “I mean, I absolutely don’t get it, but I can be cool or whatever.”

“Well, Rose.” Daddy cleared his throat. “Sometimes, when two grown-ups want to get close to each other—”

“Oh, my God! You are not giving me the sex talk,” Rose said. “I grew up in a brothel, Daddy. I know what sex is.”

“Then I really don’t see what you’re having troublegetting,”Daddy told her.

“I don’t get why you couldn’t just do it in your room like normal people,” Sophia said.

That earned her a baleful look from Daddy’s good eye. “We got carried away. It won’t happen again. Going forward, Grayson and I will keep our private activities private, and we will not discuss them further. Is that acceptable?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Rose said quickly while Sophia voiced her own assent—about the last fucking thing she wanted was to talk about this again.

“Excellent. Now, put that away before you make yourselves sick,” Daddy said, nodding at the bourbon. “I had a late night and early morning, so I’ll be going upstairs to lie down.” To Dick, he added, “You’re welcome to join me, Grayson.”

Dick flinched like he’d been hit. “Slade,” he said in strained protest.

“It’s just a suggestion. You could, of course, stay here,” Daddy said, drawing close and forcing Dick to look up at him. “If you so prefer.”

A dull flush crept up Dick’s neck. He shot a single, panicked glance in Rose and Sophia’s direction, swallowed, and turned his attention back to Daddy. It reminded Rose of their fight in the living room the night before last (was it only the night before last?), the steel in Dick’s eyes and the angry set of his jaw, Daddy a solid, unyielding obstacle in his path. But this time, Dick didn’t get the last word. He looked down and licked his lips, and Daddy smiled, triumphant.

In that moment, Rose saw them, really saw them, for what felt like the first time. Their fight in the dojo. The bruise on Dick’s neck. All those arguments over her and Sophia like—shit. Like when my parents were fighting, Sophia had said. How that transitioned so quickly into an easy banter and back-and-forth, to Dick laughing like her mama used to with customers she favored and Daddy smiling the way those customers had smiled back.

“God, you asshole,” Dick said quietly, so quietly that Rose barely heard it.

Daddy’s smile grew. He hooked his first two fingers into one of Dick’s belt loops and pulled him towards the door, and Dick let him do it without a backwards glance.

In the doorway, Daddy paused. “Behave yourself, girls,” he said, gave Dick a final tug, and disappeared.

The silence in the wake of their departure came down like a hammer. For several long minutes, Rose and Sophia sat there in an increasingly uncomfortable silence that ended when Sophia pushed her glass away.

“I don’t think I want any more,” she said.

“Me neither,” Rose said. Her stomach was starting to feel funny, and she didn’t know if was from the bourbon or everything else.

Reaching over, Sophia opened one of the desk drawers and pulled out a DVD case, setting it on the desk between them. “I did find this,” she said.

It was, of all fucking things, a DVD of the movie Alien. “Huh,” Rose said.

“You wanna watch it?” Sophia asked.

“Sure,” Rose said.

They sat on the couch, drinking water to counteract the bourbon and watching the a monster stalk people through a spaceship. At a thump from upstairs, Rose seized the remote and turned the volume up, and neither one of them said a thing.

***