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Duke has been a(n honorary?) member of the crime-fighting Wayne family for all of four months when he first meets the Cuckoo. Which is a rather unfortunately unintimidating name for someone who really is quite intimidating, but hey, Duke didn’t come up with it. He’s of the opinion that he should address people how they prefer to be addressed, even the bafflingly goofy, unless it’s outrageously offensive or something.
Since Signal is the only one who patrols by day, Duke is also alone when he meets Cuckoo. Considering everything they come to learn about the Cuckoo, it’s probably for the best that Duke didn’t know anything at the time. If he had known, he probably would’ve run away, given his lack of experience. No sense in fighting a losing battle when he has about a dozen friends/allies/whatever the hell you call a recent adoptee or temporary ward’s family members that could, working together, definitely kill God.
“How’s settling into the new family going?”
So Duke’s patrol is ending with him meeting Gotham’s latest crazy. He counts himself among the crazies and fond of the crazier, so he isn’t too fazed when a masked man emerges from a fire escape and starts talking to him as if they go way back. He’s dressed in all-black, practical, utilitarian protective clothing. It’s not the hodge-podge, cobbled together costume that Batman’s earliest suits were, all police boots and kevlar vests. The masked man wears sleek, custom-made black armor, a black metal mask for his lower face, the kind that Jason wears, and another mask for his eyes so that only white lenses shine at Duke. The kind that all the Bats wear.
“I won’t be offended if you don’t want to answer,” the masked man continues. “Just curious.”
He has a strange modifier on his voice, one that’s still clearly recognizable as a human male, yet completely disguises it. He carries no visible weapons, yet wears the armor of someone with no special invulnerabilities. Duke doesn’t know what to make of it. Probably the other vigilantes in the Wayne family could immediately determine which crazy assassin cult or radioactive sewer this guy crawled out of, which brings Duke to the answer of the man’s question.
“It’s going,” Duke replies, just barely on the friendly side of cautious. “I’m Signal, by the way. You got a name?”
The Bats are all trying very hard, in their own unique ways, to make Duke feel welcome. It’s not their fault that the weight of all their legacies and experiences is so intimidating. It’s not their fault they share years of traumatic bonding experiences that only people who have fought gods, monsters and the banal evil of humanity together have. But it’s not Duke’s fault they have a Robin-shaped hole in their family.
The masked man shrugs. “Call me whatever you want.”
That’s not a good sign. Gotham’s Rogues always pick out flashy themes and wack-ass names for themselves. Someone unassuming who dresses like he knows what he’s doing but hasn’t even bothered to pick a name? Now that sets alarm bells ringing. And what does he want with Duke?
“And what about Robin and Red Hood?” The masked man asks, terrifyingly casual. “They don’t seem like the type to open up to newcomers so quickly.”
And there it is. Half of Gotham’s villains are obsessed with Batman, Barbara had told him during one of the many newbie-orientation lectures he got. And half of that half are obsessed with Robin. They probably won’t bother you as Signal but when they do, they’ll ask about us. Us meaning the Bats. Batman, Robin, and whatever else the villain in question happened to know about. Usually Batgirl, sometimes Spoiler. The fact that Signal is part of Gotham’s vigilante family is an easily-guessed secret. The fact that Red Hood is an older member of the same family is one of Gotham’s best-kept secrets.
“Hey man, I’m new here,” Duke says, falsely chipper. “If you’ve got a grudge against one of them go take it up with them, I don’t know what’s going on.”
The masked man leans against the fire escape railing. “That obvious, huh?”
The voice modifier makes it impossible to tell whether he is rueful, darkly amused, or pissed off. Cass would be able to tell, though, reminding Duke once again that there’ll always be someone better than him at every individual skill.
“It’s a common trend,” Duke points out.
“So it is,” the masked man acknowledges. “Well, then, pass on a message for me, will you?” Without waiting for agreement, he decrees: “Tell them if they don’t want a repeat of the last Robin they better get their act together.”
With that suitably vague and ominous warning, the masked man disappears. Duke had thought only Bats could vanish into the sunset like that.
“Robin or Red Hood?” Barbara muses when Duke reports the encounter to her. “That’s a strange duo–you’d think he’d have figured out which one of them he’s mad at.”
Jason and Damian, once they got over themselves, get along pretty well. Duke was there for the tail end of that. Damian hates not being taken seriously, Jason loves riling him up. But Jason is completely unfazed by all of Damian’s insults, and Damian seems to appreciate that Jason does not treat him gently. Both are extreme tsunderes from diametrically opposed backgrounds who politely ignore each other’s squishier emotions. Sometimes Duke is still shocked that they worked it out, but they did.
Only their entire brotherhood happened out of costume. There’s no way that a stranger could know that Gotham’s littlest vigilante and most moral crime lord are brothers without knowing their real identities.
“Or have a very specific reason to be mad at both,” Dick adds.
They’re meeting in the Belfry, which is basically, as far as Duke can tell, where the cool kids hang out. Founded by Barbara and the third Robin, he was told by Steph, as another centrally-located safehouse/headquarters since the Clocktower was girls-only and included an alarming number of former villains. Eventually Belfry membership expanded to include Steph and Cass, after the Clocktower was destroyed, and Dick, Jason and Damian after the third Robin died. And now Duke. Though speaking of:
“Or he doesn’t know which Robin,” Steph suggests. “I mean, he knows Red Hood’s one of us, maybe he knows Red Hood used to be Robin.”
“But he must know the current Robin is a foot shorter,” Barbara objects.
“Yeah, but maybe he doesn’t have a problem with Damian,” Steph argues. “Maybe he’s got a problem with, you know.”
The Robin that died. Correction: the Robin that is dead. The One Who Must Not Be Spoken Of. That’s unfair of Duke, actually. Steph will tell Duke stories about her best friend and all the trouble the two of them got into together. Barbara will tell Duke which parts of her programs were coded by the former Robin. Cass, when he asked, said nothing. It’s the first time she’s ever grieved someone, he’s been told. She used to talk, he’s been told. Now only Barbara can get a word out of her on bad days; Steph and Bruce on good days. She still expresses affection non-verbally and she still dances, but Duke still feels like he missed out.
That’s one more legacy Duke still tiptoes around: all the dead Robins. The general rule that Duke has figured out is that those on good terms with the Robin in question will talk about it, and everyone else would not say a word even if they were being tortured. Jason will joke about his own death until the sun rises but has not so much as breathed a word about his successor. Steph will recall Tim’s embarrassing moments fondly but gets uncomfortable when Jason says something like this cake tastes worse than the concrete floor of that warehouse.
“Tim,” Steph elaborates.
Everyone nods heavily, eyes on the floor or the not-so distant past, which means it’s up to Duke to play the asshole.
“Um, maybe I’m dumb,” Duke begins, and rushes to finish before Dick can says you’re not dumb! While it’s usually nice that Dick acts like a walking, talking safety commercial, sometimes it’s also distracting. “But how could–”
“Don’t say that!” Dick protests. Looks like Duke didn’t rush fast enough. “You’re not dumb, you’re new! You give us a fresh perspective!”
“Uh-huh,” Duke agrees, resisting the urge to scratch the back of his neck. “Yeah. So. How could he have a grudge with Tim? Tim’s, well, gone.”
“You’d be surprised,” Dick says darkly. When he lifts his head and smiles wanly at Duke, his eyes, still burning with the memories of more death and horror than Duke ever wants to know, look right through him.
“Right, well we’ll all keep a lookout for this guy,” Barbara decides. “And someone needs to keep an eye on Damian and Jason.”
Everyone mentally winces at the thought of asking either of them to stay at home.
“I’ll keep an eye on Jason,” Dick volunteers. He already sounds exhausted.
Damian has the privilege and curse of the youngest to always been looked after. Alfred and Bruce, on a permanent basis, and of course Dick, who still patrols with him often, and an assortment of family members who sometimes pick Damian up from school.
There’s no need to suggest a minder for Damian anyways. They all know that nobody will react stronger to a potential threat to Robin than Bruce.
And then Robin disappears.
“The school says he was there in the morning but didn’t attend fifth period,” Bruce reports.
Duke has never heard Batman sound so distraught before. Everyone else is just as tense, but later they’ll tell him that’s what Batman is normally like when one of his kids goes missing. That he’s worse when he knows something terrible has happened to one of them, because he can’t prevent it and blames himself for allowing it to happen. All the things Duke could guess but has never personally witnessed.
“So he went missing during lunch,” Bruce concludes, “but we cannot rule out the possibility that he was taken earlier and the disappearance was covered up until fifth period.”
“We have a lot of ground to cover,” Barbara says. “I’m running simul searches for Damian and the man in black–”
“Since he’s so desperate to get to Robin,” Jason sneers, “let’s call him the Cuckoo.”
Since cuckoos will lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and throw out the original eggs. The man did say to call him whatever. The name sticks.
It’s not even 2 pm, yet everyone has dropped whatever they were doing and joined the call Oracle set up to talk strategy. Nothing screams emergency like Robin going missing. Even Jason, the most likely to ignore calls and avoid teamwork, grunts in agreement when Barbara starts handing out assignments.
“Signal, Nightwing, you’re on patrol,” Bruce orders. “Stay together.”
Nightwing nods sharply. “Any sign of Damian we’ll let you know.”
“Red Hood, Spoiler, you’re looking for Cuckoo.”
The one with the most criminal connections and the most underestimated one. Red Hood will blow all of his credibility with the criminal underbelly of Gotham if it means Damian returns safe and sound. Bruce and Cass patrol separately, combing the skyscrapers and the sewers for any trace of Robin. Oracle scrapes the web for any online tracks. And even though Duke is worried for the kid, he can’t help but feel a little bad for Cuckoo. The man clearly has no idea he’s swinging far above his weight class.
“Got him,” Oracle announces, just before 6 pm. “Cuckoo’s scrambling cameras on the corner of West Elm and Fulton. Cracked the scrambler and it’s a man in all-black. Must be his hideout.”
“On it,” Jason says immediately. He’s out for blood. No one will argue with that.
“Nightwing, Spoiler, backup,” Bruce orders.
All of a sudden Duke is racing across the city while everyone else keeps looking for Damian. He’s not sure his help is even needed when Jason and Dick have murder frothing in the back of their mouths. When his inexperience may prove to be a liability. He’s supposed to provide a fresh perspective, but this is Duke’s first conflict with a serious villain. What can he do but step back and let the experts handle it?
Cuckoo is waiting for them. Still dressed in the same all-black outfit, but armed to the teeth with more knives than teeth, staffs, swords, etc. He watches them break into his safehouse without getting up from his swivel chair. Duke sticks to the walls, searching for traps beyond the obvious “he was waiting for us” trap. Even Dick, vibrating with the need to confront Cuckoo, makes some cursory attempts to survey this second-floor lair. But not Jason.
“Where’s Robin?” Jason growls as soon as his boots hit the ground.
“Which Robin?” Cuckoo replies calmly.
Jason pulls out a gun and shoots him. He aims for the leg and grazes it, but a direct hit still wouldn’t have been too bad. Duke has learned by now that Jason usually uses his 9 mm handgun–notoriously bad at killing people, as far as guns go–as a warning shot. (“I fired two warning shots,” Jason said gleefully once. “Into his head.” Which was a reference to the musical Chicago, but Duke won’t admit to recognizing that on pain of death).
Cuckoo doesn’t do more than rub his leg. Bulletproof, then, and definitely bruised, but not bleeding. There’s something uncanny about how unflustered Cuckoo is about all of this. Duke is used to hanging out with vigilantes who reveal less than 5% of their facial expressions, but Cuckoo hasn’t even gotten out of his chair.
“Where. Is. Robin?” Jason repeats, deathly quiet, matching Cuckoo’s calm with an eerieness of his own, voice modifier against voice modifier, rasp for rasp.
“It took you less than four hours to respond,” Cuckoo notes. “Much better than last time.”
A high-pitched whine escapes either Dick or Jason. Duke ghosts across the far wall and watches as Dick fucking loses it. He launches himself at Cuckoo with a ferocity that Duke hasn’t seen from him in, well, ever, chasing Cuckoo around the room when the man plays defensive. Not that Duke blames him; he’s also playing defensive, sticking to his hunt for clues left out in Cuckoo’s bunker.
“Tell me,” says Cuckoo, somehow keeping his voice level in the midst of a backroll, “what makes Robin worth all this?”
Jason’s fist smashes into the wall where Cuckoo’s neck was a split second ago. “Tell me,” he counters, “where Robin is and I won’t blow out your kneecaps.”
Somehow the threat only makes Cuckoo laugh, a weird chuckle distorted by his voice modifier. He drops to the ground as Nightwing comes leaping across the room to flatten him into a pancake and rolls as Red Hood tries the same. The fighting lulls as Cuckoo backs up and Dick and Jason spread out, trying to corner him.
“Nothing but solid wall,” Duke notes, eyeing the corner that Cuckoo’s walking backwards into. Meanwhile Duke has his hands full trying to get through Cuckoo’s computer set-up. He swears it’s almost like taking a peek at Barbara’s security.
“Was it the charming classism?” Cuckoo spits. Static growls and rasps screech out of his mask, a self-demonization Duke has never seen before. Intentional ones, yes, but someone’s costume turning against them like that, not until now. Such is the effect that Duke doesn’t process Cuckoo’s question until moments later.
“The way he thinks he was born superior to everyone else? The adorable baby misogynist energy?” Cuckoo hounds.
Duke joined at the tail end of Damian’s “horror years,” as Steph refers to them, but he knows exactly what Cuckoo is talking about. Damian hasn’t stopped insulting people, after all. The comments about his heritage have been toned down, he’s stopped calling other people peasants, stopped making fat jokes whenever he sees Steph, and, well, the less said about Duke the better. It’s ‘cause he thinks he comes from a better background than us, Steph explained once. It’s what he was taught. He’s just a kid, he’ll grow out of it. Personally, Duke thinks that “raised by an assassin cult” is not a better background by any stretch of the imagination, but at the time all he’d said was hey, you don’t need to explain it to me.
Damian has grown out of it by now. So how does Cuckoo, a stranger who to Duke’s knowledge first showed up less than a month ago, know scarily accurately what Damian used to behave like?
Nightwing closes in. Arms spread and crouched in case Cuckoo tries to make a run for it. But the man is still playing defensive, even when Dick tries to punch him through the wall, even when Jason pistol-whips him across the skull while he’s distracted by Dick. Usually people as calmly confident as Cuckoo tend to react with some extreme emotion when beaten by Nightwing and/or Red Hood, both superpowerless. Once again Cuckoo defies convention by not reacting all that much when Dick finally forces him to the ground.
“He’s just a kid.” Nightwing wrestles Cuckoo into Bat-handcuffs, which can keep down everyone but maybe Superman and Wonder Woman with ruthless efficiency even while his voice stays somewhere in between fierce and pleading. “With a family that loves him and misses him. Where is he.”
Jason rolls Cuckoo over, trapping his hands between his back and the concrete floor. He sits on his legs, gun aimed at his gut. “Last chance.”
Nightwing clamps Cuckoo’s head between his knees, holding it in place while he attempts to remove the masks.
“Could be booby-trapped,” Jason warns.
“Welded,” Dick says shortly. He leaves the mask alone and flicks his mic on. “O, we have Cuckoo. We’ve got some DNA for you to test too.”
“Cuckoo,” cries Cuckoo, then bursts into hysterical laughter, made even more disturbing with the voice filter.
Duke gives up with the computer (for now) and approaches the trio, arms crossed. “You said call you whatever,” he reminds the guy, feeling oddly defensive considering Cuckoo kidnapped a whole ass child.
Cuckoo howls with laughter until he chokes on his own spit. “You wanna know where Robin is?” Malicious glee seeps through his double black mask set up. “I gave him to the League of Assassins. They wanted a Robin to train and since they’re so replaceable–”
Jason shoots him again.
“Shit, man.” Duke crouches next to Cuckoo’s restrained body and presses a glove to his torso. “Did it go through?”
A long, high wheeze escapes Cuckoo’s mask, but his armor holds up. Just very bad bruising for him, then. Despite Duke’s mostly calm response, he is getting a little scared. Jason has always been the one with the guns but he’s never been so trigger-happy before.
“Stand down,” Batman orders. “Bring him to the Cave.”
“Maybe after a year,” Cuckoo rasps, as Dick and Jason force him to his feet, “if you still care, you can go look for him.”
This time Jason punches him in the stomach, right where he got shot. “Shut the fuck up,” he snarls.
But though Cuckoo doubles over in pain, he forces more vile condemnations out between labored breaths. “Didn’t make it for the second one,” he accuses, “or the fourth. Didn’t even try with the third. Why’s this one so much better?”
In unison, both former Robins stop trying to force Cuckoo out of the hole in the wall they created to get in. They make eye contact over his head, and without looking once at Duke come to some unspoken agreement. Usually it leaves Duke feeling a little left out, but right now he mostly feels apprehensive. Their silent communication comes from a decade of vigilantism and right now, Cuckoo is pricking the biggest sore spot of the family with a white hot needle.
“O,” Jason says calmly, “turn off the comms.”
“Do not,” Batman counterorders. “Take him to the Cave. Finding Robin is our first priority.”
Jason tightens his grip on Cuckoo’s neck. “Mine too. But you won’t like what we’re about to do.”
“We’ll keep looking,” Spoiler says suddenly, her usual cheer taken down ten notches into grim determination. “You get answers.”
Duke had thought her more reasonable than to jump to torture. Sometimes he forgets just how many of these people were tortured and died, scared and alone, and even though they came back cannot bear the thought of yet another Robin sharing the same fate.
“Disconnecting trackers,” Oracle informs them. “Bring him back.”
“Oracle, don’t,” Batman snaps.
But the comms disconnect. His arguments are lost to the vigilantes standing over their captive, brimming with enough fury to charge a nuclear reactor. All the while, Cuckoo cackles like a madman, sounding like no one so much as the Joker and further infuriating his captors. It’s left to Duke, then, to rein them in and offer them the perspective they cannot see from this close to the issue.
“Uh, guys,” Duke says, “let’s think about this. Statistically–”
“Save your breath,” Dick snaps. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Oh, so that’s how it is. His opinion is valued when he agrees with them. The moment he disagrees, then he’s an outsider and the newcomer who doesn’t understand.
“Snitches get stitches,” Jason says flippantly. He threatens people with violence often enough that Duke doesn’t believe he’s serious.
Dick brushes past Duke, captive in hand. Jason follows, guarding his rear, watching Cuckoo for any signs of an escape attempt, and giving one last indecipherable look at Duke.
Duke shuts up.
Batman doesn’t know about the Belfry. No one with access to the Belfry has breathed a word about it to Bruce, and it is entirely funded on their own dime (and the Batarang budget, Barbara once told Duke, an escapade pulled off by the third Robin who once built a second Batmobile in secret by hiding the funds Batman gave him for other gadgets). All this to say that Batman absolutely knows about the Belfry, but probably doesn’t know where it is. He definitely will after the stunt they’re pulling, but for now they should have enough time.
A single pigeon escapes to the rafters when they enter. Barbara pulls a single chair into the large empty space between the rafters and the wooden floor. Dick shoves Cuckoo into it, arms pulled over the back. Jason pulls off the blindfold and one of his gloves so that Barbara can get his fingerprints and take a DNA sample. Duke slinks in last and sticks to the shadows, unsure of what his role is here. They allowed him in but they don’t want him here.
“Signal, you and Hood should go search,” Dick commands. “Oracle and I can handle this.”
“Hell no,” Jason says immediately.
Cuckoo’s head rolls back. He must be looking up at Nightwing from his seated position but there’s no way of telling what he’s feeling.
“I’d rather stay,” Duke says, as mildly as he can.
“Fine,” Dick snaps. It’s not just Duke they’re yelling at tonight. Patience is running thin across the board. Even their set-up is pretty low-tech for the Bats, but nobody is in the mood to waste time.
In the back of the Belfry, Oracle gets the DNA they swiped from Cuckoo into the machine. While it’s running, she rolls over to their smithing station and searches around for a tool that can get Cuckoo’s mask off. When she returns to the chair, she hands it over to Nightwing. Still, Cuckoo is nonreactive. Duke is no closer to guessing whether that’s a very bad or a very good sign.
Jason grabs a fistful of Cuckoo’s hair to keep him in place. Nightwing braces one finger-striped glove on the left side of Cuckoo’s neck and starts cutting from the right.
“Really, I’m curious,” Cuckoo insists while Nightwing gets to work on cutting the mask off. “What makes Robin worth all this? You didn’t like the last one all that much.”
“Stop talking,” Dick says tightly. “Or you’ll get cut.”
“In fact, if I recall accurately,” Cuckoo continues blithely, “you despised him.”
Jason pulls his fistful of hair taut. “Shut up. Last warning.”
“But you hated him, Jason,” the mechanized voice drones on. “You hated him so much. Couldn’t stand him as a brother or a co-worker. Took your place, right? Privileged little shit didn’t know what it was to suffer, bullied his way into the team…bet you celebrated when he got taken.”
No one so much as tenses at the use of Red Hood’s real name. Cuckoo is revealing far too much about what he knows about them for an identity slip to be important. Most vital, in Duke’s opinion, is the use of got taken. The last Robin was not taken, he was killed. Murdered, by the League of Assassins, and Duke knows one of the Bats has his body preserved somewhere because that’s exactly the sort of lovingly gothic horror act they’d get up to.
“Who are you?” Jason demands hoarsely. Luckily his own voice modifier hides the hoarseness and gives only harshness, but Duke knows the nuances by now.
Cuckoo rolls his head to the side, stares straight at Jason with those soulless white eye lenses. Nightwing sets his jaw and keeps his head bent over the task at hand. Sparks fly, battering the masks of those around them. The electric shears noise, high and whiny, carries into the rafters.
“Someone who wants to understand,” Cuckoo answers, as annoyingly vague as before, “why you’ve claimed the current Robin as family but not the previous one. That’s all I want. Just a real answer. And then I’ll tell you where he is.”
Here’s the point where either Nightwing or Red Hood should start threatening Cuckoo, should start actually getting some answers. But Nightwing is no good at that role, and Red Hood is otherwise occupied.
“You’re a shitty fucking liar,” Red Hood sneers. “Real answer my ass. You want a reaction. You’re an obsessed little fucker just like every other fuckin’ two-bit goon in this hellhole city.”
Cuckoo laughs again, some demented crowing sound from the back of his throat that explodes as a shriek. “Right on all accounts! Bonus points for creative use of language. God! I missed this.”
“Got it,” Dick announces suddenly. He pulls the metal mask to the side. It swings open like a hinge. With the metal mask off, all they have is the mouth and the bottom half of the nose. But the voice modifier doesn’t work anymore, so the next accusation Cuckoo makes will have to be with his real voice.
Jason applies the removal solution for the eye mask next, and it peels smoothly off, revealing a pair of blue eyes that Duke does not recognize, but something about the reveal, be it the nose bridge or the eyebrows, makes Dick step back and drop his electric shears.
Across the Belfry, Barbara lets out a strangled sound, half-gasp and half-scream. The DNA results are back, as are the fingerprints. There’s a match for both from the Bats’ very own database. Both belong to the specter that haunts this family.
“Was it the assassin cult?” Rasps Tim Drake. “That why you liked him, Jason? Honestly, it didn’t do anything for me.”
With the masks off, he looks so much worse. Mouth curled into a garish smile. Blazing blue eyes roving around, accusatory, boring into their victims one by one. Jason’s hand drops from his head, a post-shock afterthought.
“Tim?” Dick asks faintly.
“Or was it the attempted murder?” Tim muses. His eyes haven’t left Jason. “Really bonded with him over that, huh? Try to kill me, become your little brother, is that it? Is that it, Jason?”
“Tim?” Dick asks, in much the same way as before. “Are you really…you?”
“When I was fourteen you took me to your favorite pizza parlor,” Tim says blandly, “and said that no matter what any paper said you’d always see me as a little brother. Then last year I got kidnapped by the League and you decided I wasn’t worth the rescue effort.”
“We didn’t know,” Dick says quickly, horror slowly sinking in. A year with the League of Assassins. A mask, welded to his face. “We didn’t know, I swear to you we didn’t know. You really think we wouldn’t have done anything to get you back? Tim, I thought you were dead.”
“No, you knew,” Tim insists. “He said you knew. You all knew. I know you knew.”
“He?” Jason jumps in, bloodhound on the scent. “Ra’s al Ghul? Tell me you didn’t believe a word that idiot said.”
“You knew.” Tim’s voice wavers. “You knew and you left me to rot. YOU LEFT ME TO ROT!”
Barbara crashes into the back of Tim’s chair and wraps her arms around him from behind. “God, Tim, no. No. Never. We thought you were dead.”
“Then why?” Tim cries. “Was Damian welcomed with open arms? Why was I not good enough?”
“‘Cause he needed it.”
And finally, finally, Tim looks at the newest edition to this rag-tag bunch of assholes.
“Damian needed a home and a cause,” Duke repeats. He steps out of the sidelines and takes center stage, between Dick and Tim. “Just like they did with me, and everyone else. Even though I’m an outsider and they have no idea what to do with me.”
This time instead of his usual high-energy protest, Dick smiles sadly at him. “You’re not an outsider, Duke. You’re–”
“Don’t say fresh perspective,” Duke warns him, with no consequences in mind but his perception of Dick as a person. “Don’t say fresh–”
“I’m sorry,” Dick interrupts. “I was…stressed.”
Duke holds up both hands. “Listen, I get it. All you damn Robins are like that.”
Barbara releases Tim from her hug. “We need to tell the others.” She smooths back Tim’s hair with both hands.
“They’re probably already almost here.” Jason’s hand flickers up, level with Tim’s head, like he wants to mess up Tim’s hair but doesn’t dare.
Twenty minutes ago, he shot Tim. Not for the first time, Duke reconsiders the craziness of this family he is now part of.
“If I promise Damian’s fine, am I allowed out of this chair?” Tim interrupts their planning, peeved.
“Oh, God.” Dick jolts into motion. He sweeps Tim out of the chair and into the tightest hug of his life. Behind them, Barbara works on getting the Bat-cuffs off. “Tim, I missed you. I’m so sorry.”
Tim buries his face in Dick’s shoulder, so his voice is totally muffled when he asks: “Where do we go from here?”
“You come home,” Jason says roughly. “And for the record. I’m sorry.”
Another partly hysterical laugh as Tim pulls away. “God, who would’ve thought,” he marvels. “Jason Todd. Apologizing.” He totters up to Duke. “Hi. I’m Tim.”
Duke bobs his head. “Duke.”
And they don’t hug. As of now, Duke and Tim don’t know each other. But one day they will.