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From deep in the recesses of the cave, there was a steady dripping. The natural, unfinished pockets of cavern were usually damp, far away from the dehumidifiers that kept the computers and gear functioning, but after long days of constant rain those little tunnels were drenched with runoff from above. It seeped down through the grass and dirt and slithered through rivets in the stone, where it swelled and splattered in a discordant chorus that rose above the hum of machinery.
It scratched across Duke Thomas’ aching head like nails on a chalkboard. It was a little after two in the morning and his mouth was dry, his skin prickly, his stomach roiling, and he wanted nothing more than to stumble upstairs and crawl into a bed.
There were two things keeping him planted in the chair in front of the broad computer monitors. One was that Batman had sent him home early, promising to follow within the hour, unaware that Duke was sick. He felt a touch of pride that he’d hidden his worsening condition, determined to tough it out for the night. The stories he heard from the others when they were around, the tales that stuck with him, were of surviving more horrible things than a mundane flu while out in Gotham. Batman had sent him home after a single glance inside a room at a crime scene, and something about the set of his jaw beneath the cowl and the pallor of his visible face in the street lamp glow overrode Duke’s stubborn streak.
The flu was one problem he could have powered through. Batman waiting for GCPD senior detectives and refusing to let the younger cops into the room, his black cape trailing the ground and filling the doorway with immovable shadow, was another kind of problem altogether. Part of being stubborn and staying alive was knowing when to keep your head down and follow orders. When Batman murmured the command, Duke had nodded and gone home.
The second thing keeping him in the chair was that he was home. Home in a cave beneath a massive house, with a bedroom upstairs that belonged to him, and yet wasn’t his room.
There were long stretches of days Duke did his best to stay busy and not think much about what it was like to be so lost in your own mind that you laughed at everything, face frozen in a grin; to be pumped full of relaxers, because even the pain that curled fingers into fists and knees to chest was funny. Guilt pooled like rancid oil in his stomach that he couldn’t think about his parents for long, without thinking he was going crazy himself, but it was what it was. Briefly, he’d treated their hospitalization as a problem he could maybe solve, like a puzzle in the paper or in one of those game magazines Mr. Bowman used to save for him at school.
The dead ends there were almost worse, so Duke tried not to think about it more than he had to, and tonight his brain was dragging him kicking and screaming into that arena with every twinge of flu discomfort. Being stubborn sucked when it could be used against you, by you.
Duke’s skin felt papery and stinging, irritated by the cotton shirt he’d pulled over his head after a quick post-patrol shower. He wondered if the doctors monitoring his parents could pick up on things like that— if his mother was aware of being sick, or if it was just more white noise in the background of what he assumed was constant misery. Going upstairs didn’t just mean being alone in bed with those thoughts, but having every one of them hammered home by the fact that it wasn’t his bed, in their apartment, and she wouldn’t be just down the hall warming chicken soup or calling his dad to stop for a sports drink on the way home. No familiar hand on his brow, no quiet hush of a favorite voice, no clipping of her favorite pump heels on the hall floor as she brought crackers and medicine.
A year ago, he’d felt like he was probably getting too old for the way she spoke when he was sick. It was a stretching of limbs and self into a body beyond childhood, and now? Duke knew he’d been an idiot. She could have sat on the edge of the bed and murmured, I’m so sorry, baby, every time he was sick from now til he was a hundred and it wouldn’t have been enough times.
The cryptic crossword in front of him on the desk was abandoned. He curled into the chair, the slick ballpoint pen set aside, and wrapped arms covered with goosebumps around his legs. He tried to clear his sore throat, to chase away the lump there, and it persisted.
Weary, he closed his eyes. He’d thought just a couple minutes of focusing on something else would help, but printed squares were making his head swim and leading him down rabbit holes of unwelcome thought, so he focused on a kata Bruce had been drilling him on recently.
The next thing he knew, a dark shape loomed above him, and he blinked up at it while it materialized into the outline of the cape, the cowl. Bruce was looking down at the abandoned puzzle. Bruce pushed back the cowl and grunted vaguely, his attention still on the gray newsprint.
“I fell asleep,” Duke croaked. His voice was raspier than he expected, and just like that, like the flicker of lightning over the bay, that razor-sharp attention went from puzzle to his face. Bruce pulled a gauntlet off and tucked it under one arm, the pale exhaustion on his face hardening into something determined and suspicious.
The wrist on his brow wasn’t his mother’s hand, but it felt good all the same. Duke closed his eyes and leaned into it, with the begrudging admission to himself that he probably should have cleared out of the cave a while ago if he’d wanted to avoid…this.
He wasn’t sure he had wanted to avoid it. He just hadn’t expected it.
“You’re ill,” Bruce said. Duke wondered if it was a good time to tell him he sounded like Alfred when he said it, that inflection on the last word. He left his dry lips pressed together. “How long?”
“Got worse tonight,” Duke said. “I thought it was just allergies.”
There was stubborn and there was stupid and one of those didn’t get him much traction in this house. Finishing patrol was one thing— going out sick was another. He’d listened from the other side of the practice mats while Damian was benched for that sort of thing. He didn’t think his slightly bitter, ‘_at least your dad is around to bench you_’ would have been appreciated, so he hadn’t said anything. It had taken a few hours to even realize how angry he’d gotten over that, because usually, he sort of liked Damian, the way he might like an annoying but fun cousin.
“Hn,” Bruce said. “You should be in bed.”
Duke let that silence hang, not willing to defend himself when just thinking about saying anything out loud brought tears to his eyes. He tucked his chin down and hoped the sniff would slip under the radar as just another symptom.
“Hn,” Bruce said again, but there was something softer in his tone. “Stay there.”
And then he vanished into the shower room. Duke listened to the dripping from the cave, louder than the sound-proofed showers, and stared listlessly at the monitor with its little time stamp in the corner. Seconds went by and with every one he felt worse. It was only a few minutes later that Bruce re-emerged, in civvies, and when he was beside Duke he reached forward and turned the monitor off. The desk was drenched in dim shadow without the glow.
“Don’t you need to write your report?” Duke asked, sitting forward. “I’ll get out of your chair.”
He stood and braced himself on the desk when a rush of dizziness crowded black around the edges of his vision. Then, he wasn’t falling, he was being lifted. He was cradled like a little kid against Bruce’s chest and he mumbled in protest.
“You don’t have to,” Duke said. “I can walk, just give me…give me…”
“I’ve done this for all my boys,” Bruce said, firmly and evenly, already climbing the stairs. Duke didn’t know how he’d made it from the desk to the staircase so fast, but losing that time made him reconsider struggling to get down. “You are one of them, right now.”
Duke gave up, because just the rhythmic climb up the stairs reminded him how many stairs there were, and the idea of tackling them on his own feet was massively exhausting. The arms beneath him were like iron, and didn’t falter or give any indication that he was too heavy or a burden. He let himself relax, partly because he lacked the energy to do anything else.
“Sorry,” Duke said hoarsely, when Bruce nudged the clock flush against the wall with one foot.
“Shh,” Bruce said. “You’re alright, kiddo. You didn’t invent viral illness. You’re a bit too smart for that.”
“I can be dumb,” Duke argued, his head floaty. He barely realized he’d actually said it until Bruce’s chest rumbled with a quiet husk of a laugh.
“You can try,” Bruce said.
They weren’t heading upstairs to Duke’s room.
Bruce settled him on the couch in the den, dragged a blanket over him and tucked it around Duke’s sore limbs. There were footsteps in the hall, a low murmur of voices, Bruce saying, “Some tea, Al, and the thermometer.”
There was a fuzzy scrap of memory now, in the depths of feverish thought, of Damian tucked on this same couch when he’d been sick. Duke had hung in the doorway, wondering if it was okay to intrude on the makeshift sick room, while Damian sucked on a lime popsicle and leaned against Bruce’s side.
That was the sort of thing Bruce did for sons, not foster kids with crazy parents shut up in padded rooms.
All my boys, Bruce had said on the stairs. Duke’s throat tightened. He didn’t need to replace his dad, but he supposed having another one wasn’t the worst thing right now. Especially if it meant not being in his bedroom, alone, fighting back thoughts he really didn’t have the energy to shut down.
The arm of the couch creaked when Bruce perched on it, and then a calloused hand was thumbing gently at the close-clipped hair around Duke’s ear, rubbing circles. “Think you can manage some tea?”
“Mhmm,” Duke said, which was about all he could manage. He should say something grown-up and assured, like, You don’t have to stay or I’m okay now, if you wanted to go sleep.
He didn’t want to.
Bruce only moved to take tea from Alfred, and Duke struggled to sit up to drink it, and held still while a rubbery thermometer was pressed to his forehead. There was medicine to swallow, and water, and then the tea thick with honey that was sweet and soothing on his tongue and throat. He found himself cocooned in blanket, sitting with the tea mug in his hands, and leaning against Bruce’s shoulder while Bruce sat next to him and typed on a tablet. Duke registered bits of phrases, with words like ‘mutilated’ and ‘96 hours postmortem’ and didn’t look at the screen again. The tablet cover was closed before his tea was gone, and a steady hand rubbed circles, this time on his back through the blankets.
“You’re okay at this,” Duke said. “The…the dad thing. For now.”
“I’ve had a little practice,” Bruce said, something wry in his tone.
Duke fought the heaviness of his eyelids even while the tea mug was taken out of his hands. Sleeping meant dreams, and dreams meant nightmares, and he didn’t feel like dealing with the paralyzed grins just yet.
“You can sleep,” Bruce said.
“Nah,” Duke shook his head. “M’good.”
Without pressing for an explanation, Bruce seemed to understand. The tablet was flipped back open and Duke let his cheek rest against warm, hard shoulder while Bruce opened a game of patterned tiles.
“That one,” Duke said, after Bruce had slid three into place. “Goes in the upper left.”
Bruce dragged it into place and Duke directed the next few pieces before sleep didn’t feel like the worst thing, maybe, if Batman was beside him. Maybe that would be enough to keep the nightmares away, and Duke was awake just long enough to wonder if that was a childish belief, and then he was asleep with an arm around his shoulders like armor.