routine

The apartment was quiet.

Nolan sat at the small kitchen table, lit by the pale morning sun cutting through the blinds. A mug of black coffee sat cooling beside his laptop, the screen displaying a dark custom interface, something Quentin had insisted on to look 'cooler'.

His phone buzzed once. The burner. He picked it up.

"Yeah," he said.

"Kid in Burnley's nervous. Thinks someone's tailing him. You got someone?"

Nolan didn't pause. "Yeah. I'll send someone over."

Click.

He leaned back and cracked his knuckles. The keyboard under his fingers felt like second nature now. He opened the routing system, quickly scanning a list of names and active handlers. Color-coded, tagged by trust level and region. He assigned a runner, updated a few location nodes, and flagged the client's number under "high alert." Another couple keystrokes and the data was encrypted and backed up in a hidden partition.

He opened another screen, a map of Gotham. Markers blinked in faded red and green. Drop zones. Safe houses. Police sweep routes. The Penguin's side of the city had started to glow more dangerous lately. He didn't like that.

He sighed, finished his coffee, and shut the laptop.

The city always sounded louder after a morning of staring at code. Nolan stepped onto the sidewalk, hood up, earbuds in with no music — just the illusion of privacy. He walked to a corner cart and handed over a few crumpled bills for a greasy egg sandwich.

The vendor smiled, grill sizzling behind him. "Back again, huh?"

Nolan gave a tired nod. "Best sandwich in the city."

"Damn right it is," the man said, handing it over.

Nolan took a bite, still walking. Eggs were overcooked, but he didn't care. He finished the sandwich by the time he hit 8th, wiped his hands on a napkin, and turned toward the gym.

Inside, the air was thick with sweat and the hum of machines. Familiar. Simple.

He hit the treadmill first — slow jog, building up to a run. Fifteen minutes. He wiped down, grabbed a sip from the fountain, and moved to the heavy bag. His form wasn't great, but his rhythm had gotten better. Jab. Jab. Cross. Elbow tucked.

A voice behind him — older, casual. "You keep squaring your shoulders. Makes you slow."

Nolan turned slightly. Guy was tall, maybe late forties, bald, with a calm face and a taped-up wrist.

"Try pivoting more from your hips," the man said. "Makes the punch snap."

Nolan gave a nod, took the advice. Next few hits landed cleaner.

"Thanks."

"No problem. You move like someone who's been cornered before."

Nolan didn't respond. He just gave a faint smirk, turned back to the bag.

By noon, he was walking again, the gym behind him and a smoothie in hand. Banana, peanut butter, oat milk. One of the few luxuries he let himself have. He passed a little park — barely more than a bench and two sad trees — and sat for a minute, scrolling through a backup phone. No calls. No new pings. Quiet.

He watched people pass by for a while. Normal people. Office types, delivery guys, moms with strollers. And him — this shadow walking through their world.

Later, back at the apartment, he changed into a clean hoodie, sat at his desk, and powered the laptop again. Time to update the safe house logs. His fingers moved quickly — custom encryption layers, dummy email routes, mapped escape paths out of Gotham if things ever went south. He ran a test ping on a few of the burner phones currently in use. One wasn't responding.

He flagged it, set up a low-level alert.

He checked his internal notes next. Penguin's name came up more now, especially in the East End. Nolan highlighted the area in orange.

Nolan thought for a moment before a smile bloomed on his face, "I haven't had an episode in a while, is it because I'm finally realizing you guys are apart of me?" He asked aloud

Out of the corner of his eyes Kieran appeared lounging on the beaten up couch in the living room, "Who knows, I'd say you've been through more since we arrived in Gotham did you even had to go through in our world. Maybe you got shocked into believing finally."

A chuckle escaped Nolan's lips, "Yeah something like that."

"So when are you going to let me run a con, I'm itching to be put in you know?" Kieran asked playfully as he stood almost floating bedside Nolan

"Why do you insist on ruining a good thing?" Nolan asked while groaning into his palm, "We have a real thing here and we were lucky it worked."

"Eh, you will see the fun of it all eventually you know?"

***

The Batcave was quiet, save for the low hum of machines and the occasional chirp of a data stream shifting focus. Multiple monitors glowed in the dark, illuminating Bruce's face in sharp edges. A surveillance video was playing again — third time in an hour. Same alley, same timestamp, same group of bundled homeless figures clustered around a trash fire.

They all had something in common.

Each one carried a burner phone.

Bruce tapped the keyboard, isolating the devices. No patterns in their use. No sim card history. All off-the-grid. But not invisible.

He shifted to a new screen — a schematic of Gotham with pinpoints for every location that had reported bulk sales of prepaid phones over the past thirty days. Seventeen locations. Six of them with no exterior cameras. He eliminated those.

Eleven left.

Another few keystrokes brought up the camera feeds from the ones that did. Most of the customers were normal — contractors, tourists, paranoid types. But one man came back. Four separate locations. Always hooded. Always cash. Always in and out in under two minutes.

Bruce froze the frame.

Even in low resolution, the posture was distinct right shoulder dipped slightly, favoring the left foot. Slight hesitation when stepping away from the counter. Noticed it before.

He pulled up archived security footage from a bank robbery committed by a single man with a fake gun. Same limp. Same gait. Same build.

He ran the body metrics overlay. Height: 6'0". Weight: ~170 lbs. Gait speed. Arm swing. The computer ran a comparison.

MATCH: 87.9%.

Not enough to make an arrest. More than enough to dig deeper.

An hour later, Bruce was perched on the edge of a rooftop above Burnley. Wind howled past him. Below, two figures traded packages and small envelopes under a busted streetlamp. He didn't care about them.

He was watching the alley behind the diner.

A woman homeless, probably mid-thirties stepped into the shadows and pulled out a familiar, scuffed-up burner phone. She dialed, waited. Then she spoke low into it. A rendezvous time. A location.

Bruce narrowed his eyes behind the cowl. This was how it worked. No drop zones. No supply hubs. It was a living network. Human, transient, untraceable unless you tracked the man behind it.

He returned to the cave.

This time he cross-referenced local bulk burner purchases with the schedule of shelter meal times. One shop stood out — on 14th, half a mile from a known shelter. A camera outside faced the sidewalk.

He paused the footage.

There.

A figure in a dark hoodie, head down, purchasing five prepaid phones. He zoomed in, tried to get a better look at the face, grainy, but there was a jawline. Pale. Hair dark and shaggy. He enhanced the image, then cross-checked with the robbery footage.

Same guy.

He didn't need to know the name yet. Didn't need to kick in any doors.

He just needed to keep watching.

—-

To clarify the limp isn't very noticeable, just the result of an old injury it's well on the way to healing.