Chapter Text
It was a surprisingly quiet morning in the Manor when Duke stumbled downstairs, bleary-eyed and with a slight crick in his neck from sleeping at a wrong angle. He had a low-grade dehydration headache and his toes were cold on the hardwood floor, and he was too preoccupied with wondering about what he'd do for the English essay he procrastinated on to fully realize that the house was suspiciously silent for nine in the morning on a weekend.
He stopped on the bottom stair, foot frozen in descent, as it hit him that there was no audible chaos in any part of the house.
"Guys?" Duke called into the emptiness. He heard a slight shuffle down the hall on the way to the kitchen and went to investigate, like a good little detective.
"Oh, Master Duke," Alfred responded, his head stuck halfway in the hallway closet he was rummaging through. "Could you fetch the biscuit tin for me?"
Duke took a second to translate in his head before heading for the blue box of Danish cookies on the counter.
"This one?" he asked.
"The very same," Alfred confirmed, straightening up. He walked past Duke, who took it as an unspoken 'follow me' and trotted after the older man, clutching the metal box in hand.
"Your brothers should already be waiting," Alfred said, walking into the study. Duke glanced at the grandfather clock before looking back at Alfred.
"Waiting for what?" He asked. The nervousness came back; ever since he'd come to live at the Manor, he'd felt off-balance, off-kilter, and always terrified that he'd missed something absolutely vital. Alfred remained calm and placid, however, which was reassuring. If it was life-or-death, Duke wasn't sure the stiff upper lip would break, but he'd probably be told to hurry at the very least.
"Maintenence," Alfred said, each syllable crisply enunciated in a delivery so dry, it could be packaged and sold as an alternative to silica gel. "Though, Master Jason has a few alternate suggestions on naming."
"Uh," Duke said eloquently, glancing back down at the cookies in his hands. "Okay." That had cleared precisely nothing up for him, but these people insisted on some kind of cloak-and-dagger super-spy euphemism for everything, and, in his experience, it was best to just go in headfirst and figure out what they meant on the way.
"Go on down," Alfred said, turning to head back to the kitchen. "I will come down shortly with refreshments."
"Sure," said Duke, wondering if "refreshments" was code for some kind of Bat-gadget or if he was just talking about the kettle on the stove. He shrugged and walked down into the damp cave, wishing he'd thought to pull a hoodie on before he got out of bed. Or, at the very least, some socks.
He stopped at the entrance and surveyed his foster brothers all arranged in a circle, their costumes splayed out in front of them, and all arguing with each other, probably lightheartedly. His foster dad was chugging a mug of coffee and making eye contact with none of them.
"Welcome," Jason said from his spot in the circle, "to Stitch 'n' Bitch."
"I keep telling you," Tim said, "that's for knitting, not darning."
"Darning," Damian repeated mockingly, his nose scrunched up. Damian, Duke noted, was also carefully placed between Dick and Bruce and as physically distant from Tim as possible. He figured that was smart of them.
"Someday," Dick said, "I'm gonna knit Jason a sweater, just so you can't say that anymore."
"Would he even wear it?" Tim asked.
"Depends," Jason said. "How good are you at knitting?"
"Eh, I'm a 4 out of 10. Bet I could get your bat symbol into the pattern, though."
"Duke," Bruce said, finishing his coffee and setting his mug aside. "Glad you could join us."
"Yeah," Duke said slowly. "Sure. I brought, uh, Alfred told me to bring this?" He held up the cookie tin and belatedly realized that the things sliding around in the metal box were clearly too small and metallic to be cookies.
"Yes, thank you," Bruce said. "Take a seat, your costume is next to Tim."
"And ignore Damian," Tim said, "he gets cranky when he stays up too long."
Damian let out an outraged screech, not unlike a suddenly and abruptly soaked cat, which was enough warning for Bruce to reach around and grab him firmly. Meanwhile, Duke gingerly set himself down between Tim and Jason, picking up his costume and fingering at the hole that some whackjob had left in his costume after coming for him with a knife. Which was the sort of thing he'd never had to worry about before he'd decided vigilantism was a good idea, but, no use considering a career change now.
Jason and Dick, clearly, had been continuing their conversation.
"But Jay," Dick said, voice going mocking-sincere, "I worry about you, out there alone in those cold, cold, Gotham nights!"
"Jackass," Jason said, shoving him in the shoulder as Dick's act cracked and he started laughing. "I swear to god, if I wake up on Christmas or Chanukah and you hand me a hand-made sweater -"
"Well," Dick said, "now I have to."
"I think it's time we get started," Bruce said, his voice heavy and tired and his arm still wrapped around a surly pre-teen. Duke resisted the urge to point out that the only reason any of them were foster brothers was because Bruce literally signed up for this, since that seemed a little mean.
Bruce held out his hand for the cookie tin and Duke leaned forward to hand it to him. He cracked open the lid to reveal the sewing supplies inside, which, in hindsight, made perfect sense to Duke. After taking out a sewing needle and some thread, Bruce handed the tin clockwise to Tim, who pulled his own needle and thread out and gave it over to Duke.
"Is your costume made from Kevlar weave?" Tim asked as he passed the box over.
"Yeah," Duke said, because that sounded right. "I think."
"Here," Tim said, fishing through the box to pull out a roll of pale yellow thread. "You'll want to use the Para-Aramid thread, the other kinds don't have the tensile strength."
Duke hesitantly took it, passing the box on to Jason. "Thanks," he said.
"No problem," Tim replied, hunched over and threading his needle.
"Ask him about the P-A threads," Dick called, reaching over to grab his own. "He's been helping Fox make 'em."
Tim blushed a little, which took Duke completely aback. "Helping is a bit of a strong word for it," Tim said.
Bruce looked up. "Did your experiments with the meta-aramides succeed?" he asked, and then they were off talking about chemistry at a level that Duke, who had a public high school education and then two months of crash-course bat-education, couldn't quite grasp yet.
"Don't worry," Dick said as he rewired something in his gauntlets. "The rest of us can never figure out what they're talking about either."
"Speak for yourself," Damian muttered, sewing another straight running stitch into the tear in his hood. "I grasp it all perfectly fine."
"Good job on that one," Dick said. "I think your backstitch is improving."
"Don't condescend to me," Damian said, clearly pleased with the praise.
"I'm not!" Dick said. "It's really good now."
Duke watched Damian's next few movements very carefully before copying; Alfred had at some point a few months ago taught him the basics, but only on normal clothes. His Signal costume was rougher, with more layers of Kevlar weave to get through with the needle, and Duke was worried with each pass of the needle that he'd mess it up a little beyond repair. It was dumb, because this costume could literally stop bullets, but it was also not dumb, because this costume was the only thing standing between him and a bullet.
After half hour of silent work, Duke had begun to relax. He had even felt a little more comfortable, here with the members of his new family, taking part in what was clearly a family ritual/sibling bonding exercise/logistical challenge for a superhero household. Duke had felt slightly out of lockstep before for reasons he couldn't even begin to explain -- there was something just uncomfortable about standing around his foster brothers, all of whom had relationships and trauma with each other that he simply did not figure into. He often felt like a guest in the house, even now, months after his legal fostering. But for this one Sunday morning, down in the cave, his fingers and feet freezing as he sat on the hard rock ground of the cave sewing in a hunched position that made the crick in his neck that much worse, he felt a little like he really was part of something bigger. Like he really could claim to be one of them.
Naturally, this is when it went sideways.
"Can you pass me some of the red," Tim asked, glancing over at the box. It was stretched in front of Jason, who was taking a very tiny screwdriver to his helmet.
"Yeah, sure," Jason said, fishing a spool of thread out without looking and tossing it over. Tim caught it and then brought it closer to his vision.
"Jason, this is your thread."
"What?" Jason asked, still distracted. Dick paused from where he was showing Damian his wrist gauntlet's inner workings, looking over.
"The thread. This formulation's for your suit, not mine. Mine's the other red thread."
Jason finally looked up, furrowing his brow. He leaned forward and rummaged in the metal box, coming up with another spool of thread, also in red.
"Tim," Jason said. "Is your costume seriously the same shade of red as mine?"
"Well," Tim said, "It'd make sense. Technically, it's your suit originally."
"I cannot believe you just took the same shade of red as my costume and called it a day," Jason said, shaking his head. "Red Robin. Oh my god."
"Drake certainly doesn't win points for originality," Damian sniped.
"Shut up, you're like, the fourth Robin."
"Fifth," Bruce corrected, then refused to elaborate. Duke wondered briefly if he counted, then discarded that thought because, no, he did not want to be sixth. He held the Signal costume a little closer and squinted at Tim's Red Robin costume, then Jason's in turn.
"Hang on," he said. "Those aren't the same shade at all."
Everyone turned to him at once. It was the slightest bit unnerving.
"What are you talking about?" Damian demanded.
"They look pretty similar to me," Dick said, "but the lighting here always sucks. 'Cause it's a literal cave."
"No," Duke insisted, looking closer and feeling even more sure of himself. "Those are definitely not the same reds. The blacks too, those are totally different colors. Tim's red is, I don't know, more loud?"
"Wait," Dick said. "What's your meta power again?"
"Holy shit," Tim said, catching on. "You can see outside the visible light spectrum."
"What?" Duke asked, very caught off guard.
"I think you're seeing infrared on my costume," Tim said.
"Wait, you see more colors than the rest of us?" Jason asked. "What does infrared look like?"
"Uh," Duke said, because well, how would you explain what red looks like to someone blind from birth? "It just, looks like that?"
"Wait here," Tim said, rushing off. Bruce watched as he ran for the chemical storeroom with a weary sigh.
"Huh," said Dick to a blinking Duke. "You're like a mantis shrimp."
"What?" Duke said, surrendering to his bewilderment.
"You know, mantis shrimp? Four times as many photoreceptors as humans, so they see a bunch of different colors that we can't."
"Flattering comparison," Duke said. Jason snorted.
"What does black look like to you?" Damian asked, a hint of real curiosity in his voice, hidden mostly by his scowl.
"Uh," Duke stalled, his eyes landing, naturally, on Bruce. "Like a bunch of different colors at once. Kinda like… they all run together, like an oil spill. If I tilt my head in one direction, it looks totally different than from another direction."
Bruce nodded, encouragingly. "All black? Is it different on surfaces or on shadows?"
"Shadows are different," Duke agreed. "They're more uniform colors."
Tim, out of breath, came running back to the circle with ziploc bags of white powders grasped in his hands.
"What colors are these?" He asked.
"White?" Duke responded, feeling uncomfortably like this was a trick question.
"Are they the same white?" Tim asked, undeterred.
"No?"
"Hm," everyone else hummed with the same tone and pitch. They had all clearly learned it from Bruce, but knowing that didn't make it any less freaky.
"Is it not for you?"
"I hate to break it to you," Jason said, "but there's only one white for us normal non-meta suckers."
Tim rapidly shuffled through the bags before pulling one out. "Is this white one, I mean, does this white one look red-ish to you?"
"No?" Duke said. "I don't know how to explain it. It doesn't look like red, it looks white. Just not the same white as the other ones."
Tim paused mid ziploc-bag-shuffle. He stared at Duke for just long enough for the younger boy to start feeling distinctly like a specimen about to be put under observation.
"Dad," Tim said, "is it okay if Duke and I skip out on Stitch 'n' Bitch and take a day off?"
"That's not fair," Damian said. "We all are curious."
"Hear, hear," Jason said. "This is the most fun maintenance day I've had in a year."
"You come to two of these a year," Dick pointed out.
Bruce sighed heavily, ignoring his other sons. "Duke, is this okay with you?"
"Well-" Duke started.
"We'll help you figure out how your powers work better," Tim said all in a rush.
"Sibling bonding," Dick added.
Duke glanced around and felt a little like he was sealing his fate when he breathed out heavily and said: "Yeah, sure."
It wasn't too bad, though. They finally left the cave, Duke stopped back up at his room to put some socks and shoes on, and they went tromping out into the woods beyond the manor.
Damian tried to catch various lizards or bugs to see if the principle of "they have weird vision and so do you" would yield any interesting sights for Duke, while Jason was preoccupied mostly with trying to dunk Tim in the creek and asking Duke what color water looked like to him. The answer, apparently, was different from the others, though nobody could figure out how to communicate how, exactly.
Dick eventually figured out that Duke could distinguish plant species based on the color of their leaves with shocking accuracy, which lead to a scavenger hunt that eventually led to a weird hybrid game of tag and tackle football, the rules of which Duke was told he'd learn as he went. He did, several bodily flings into the dirt later, and even managed to pull one of his own on Jason.
A good day in the woods, all in all.