Chapter Text
The Batcave hummed with its usual symphony: the distant drip of groundwater, the whir of the supercomputer, the click of Jason cleaning a pistol he didn't need to clean, and the unholy sound of Rook demolishing Alfred's sandwiches.
Not eating. Demolishing.
The nineteen-year-old was perched on the edge of the med bay table like a gargoyle who'd learned table manners somewhere in a back-alley and immediately forgotten them. Breadcrumbs scattered across his charcoal tactical suit. A smear of strawberry jam clung to the corner of his mouth. His pale blue eyes, flat, assessing, too old for his face, tracked everyone in the room simultaneously while he chewed.
Nightwing stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the glass case that held a retired Robin suit. His domino mask was off. His expression was carefully, deliberately neutral—the face of someone who had learned to ask hard questions softly.
"If you don't have the rule your future self sets out," Dick said, "then why didn't you kill?"
The cave went quiet.
Even Jason paused. His fingers stilled on the barrel of his pistol.
Rook swallowed. Took another bite. Chewed thoughtfully, like the question was a particularly interesting piece of gristle.
"I do kill," he said between bites.
"I mean, sure, but—" Dick started.
"I carried guns." Rook's voice was flat. Matter-of-fact. "Well, just one."
The silence thickened.
"The rest?" Rook continued, reaching for another sandwich—butter and strawberry jam, the crusts cut off because Alfred was a saint. "The gadgets could be weaponized, you know. A grappling gun could be shot straight into someone's navel and pulled out. Spill their guts." He bit down. Crunched. "Literally."
"What," said Duke, who had been mid-bite into his own sandwich and had now frozen entirely.
Jason set down his gun. Not because he was shocked. Because he was interested. "What about the villains who have powers?"
"Good question." Rook pointed the crust of his sandwich at Jason like a professor acknowledging a promising student. "You gotta get creative. Depends on the day. Depends on who you're dealing with."
Stephanie's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "You mean—"
"Okay." Rook wiped his mouth with a napkin—at least he had that much manners. "Let me make an example."
He set down the napkin. His posture shifted. Still relaxed, still casual, but something underneath it sharpened—the way a blade catches light before it moves.
"Remember when I told you about that criminal who could control sand? Manipulate it?"
Tim nodded slowly. He remembered. He'd filed it away in the part of his brain labeled Rook's Rogues Gallery: Do Not Touch Without Gloves.
"I set up a trap." Rook's voice was soft now. Almost conversational. "Lured him into a corridor between two water trucks. Pulled something—I forget the name—some kind of release mechanism. Triggered both trucks to crash into each other with the guy in between."
He paused.
"Disintegrated him."
The cave was so quiet that the bats in the upper rafters sounded like thunder.
"Dude," Tim said. His voice came out strange. Higher than he meant it to. "That's murder."
He regretted it immediately. Not because it wasn't true. Because of the way Rook looked at him—not angry, not defensive, just tired. The tired of someone who had already had this argument with himself a thousand times and was bored of repeating it.
"I'm not killing anyone directly if I let things kill the person," Rook said. "That's more... manslaughter."
"That makes it worse," Cassandra said.
Her voice was quiet. She rarely spoke to Rook—preferred to read his body instead, and his body was a disaster of contradictions. But she said this one clearly. Firmly. Like someone drawing a line in sand that wasn't sand anymore.
Rook looked at her. Held her gaze. For a moment—just a moment, something flickered across his face. Recognition. Respect, maybe. The acknowledgment of someone who understood that reading people was a weapon, and Cass wielded it better than anyone.
"Hey now," he said finally. "I'm still working on my wording. Most of the time, it's the villains who die by their own work. Their own failure."
He picked up his tea, when had Alfred poured him tea?—and took a long, slow sip.
"Easy to avoid murder as a charge," he continued, "because in my era, cameras are shit. Police think villains are fighting each other. I operate almost everywhere while traveling the world. No one connects the dots."
"Now that's something," Jason said. He hadn't gone back to cleaning his guns. He was leaning forward now, elbows on his knees, watching Rook like a cat watching a slightly smaller but much more interesting cat.
"Jason," Dick said. Warning.
"What? It's true."
"That isn't the worst compared to what I did to that one guy." Rook set down his tea. "I threw him in front of a train."
"WHAT."
That was multiple people. Stephanie and Duke in unison, Tim with his jaw hanging open, even Damian, who had been pretending not to listen from the computer chair—turning his head sharply.
"Oh, come on." Rook waved a dismissive hand. "I was angry."
"Anger—" Dick pinched the bridge of his nose. "Anger isn't an excuse, Rook. You know that."
"Anger gives you enough balls to pull stunts." Rook's voice dropped. Got harder. "My anger is important to me."
He wasn't looking at any of them anymore. He was looking at the floor. At his own hands. At the scars across his knuckles that hadn't quite healed because he never let them.
"Like that one time I visited a man in jail at fourteen," he said. "Just to beat the crap out of him."
Silence.
"Tried to strangle an asshole villain with a bike chain at thirteen. First time out as Rook." A beat. "Nearly killed a man at sixteen because he was killing children."
"Rook—" Barbara's voice came through the cave speakers, softer than usual. She'd been listening. Of course she'd been listening.
"I slapped Deathstroke at eighteen." Rook looked up. There was something in his eyes now—not flat. Not assessing. Something alive and ugly and raw. "Or twenty. Could be twice. I mean, I did that to Ra's al Ghul too. And Dracula—flashbanged that fucker. How long since he's appeared again? I don't know."
He stood up. Stretched. His spine popped audibly.
"I would have been eighteen when I came back to Gotham," he continued, like he hadn't just admitted to assaulting two of the most dangerous immortals in the world. "The mayor of my time had just died. So somewhere between eighteen and twenty—first plant metahuman. I'm not sure about yours." He glanced at the group. "Your Poison Ivy seems A-okay. Nothing compared to the nightmare fuel of a crime lord I've been fighting for three years."
He reached for the last sandwich.
"His name is Belladonna," he said. "By the way."
And then he ate it.
The cave stayed quiet for a long moment.
Jason was the first to break. He laughed—short, sharp, almost admiring. "I like him."
"You would," Tim muttered.
"Master Jason," Alfred's voice cut in from the top of the stairs, perfectly level, "I would remind you that disposing of a body in the rose garden is still against house rules."
"I didn't—"
"I was speaking hypothetically."
Rook looked up at Alfred. For a moment, just a moment, the flatness in his eyes cracked. Something younger bled through. Something that looked almost like homesickness.
Then it was gone.
"Thanks for the sandwiches," Rook said.
"You are welcome, Master Bruce," Alfred said. And there was something in his voice too—something careful, something pained, as he looked at this boy who wore the face of the man he'd raised, but wore it like a mask he'd stolen.
Rook didn't notice. Or pretended not to.
He was already heading for the shadows at the edge of the cave, his short scalloped cape settling across his shoulders, his posture shifting back into something predatory and empty.
"Same time tomorrow?" Stephanie called after him.
Rook paused at the edge of the light.
"Maybe," he said. "If I don't die."
And then he was gone.
The bats settled.
And somewhere in the rafters, an adult Bruce Wayne, who had been watching from the shadows since the second sandwich, cloaked in silence and a cowl he hadn't taken off, closed his eyes behind white lenses and breathed.