The sounds of Gotham are different from what you used to know, but sometimes, it feels all too familiar.

It’s the shouting, the frustration hanging thick in the air, like an ever-present weight that you can’t shake. The Batfamily fights, too—against their enemies, against their own demons—but when it gets too loud, when the anger or the emotions come too close, you fall back on the habit you’ve carried with you for years.

You slip your AirPods in.

It’s automatic, a defense mechanism you learned long ago. Back before you ever found yourself here, in the middle of Gotham’s madness, you would slip those white earbuds into your ears, tuning out the noise of your parents’ arguments. Their voices would rise and fall, sharp with anger, then silence, then the resumption of the cycle, but you never stayed for it. You’d retreat into the music, into your own world, as a way to escape from the mess they were always caught in.

Here, it’s the same. The Batfamily doesn’t fight like they did—no screaming matches in the halls or slamming doors—but there’s the occasional tension, an argument between Dick and Jason over strategy, or Bruce’s cold silence when he can’t quite reach someone. You’ve never been one to get in the middle of it, but you can feel the heat in the room, the crackling energy of frustration in the air.

It’s easier to just block it out, to retreat into a world of noise you can control.

No one notices when you pop in the AirPods. They’re used to it by now, but they don’t always know why you do it. They don’t know it’s not just the noise of Gotham that gets to you, but the noise of feeling like you don’t belong, like you’re waiting for something to fall apart again, the way it always did before.

The music helps. It drowns out the fear, drowns out the feeling of never being good enough, drowns out everything except the one thing you can hold onto: the rhythm, the beat, the soft pull of sound that tells you that maybe, just maybe, everything will be okay.

For now.