Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“ By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. ”— Franz Kafka

September 3rd, 11:36 A.M, Gotham City High

Autumn begins in people before it begins in things.

The third of September marks nothing more than another hot summer day followed by its rain shower. On the trees are no discoloring or falling leaves, nor yet in the air that vague anxiety we naturally feel when we see death all around us. 

Surrounding Duke is none of that damp sadness that characterizes the weather. All things dance, servants of the wind which churns them without hands, and there is no sound but what it sweeps forward, nor silence except for what it abandons. Still, it's announcing itself— a sorrow dressed for the journey— in his hazy awareness of colours being smattered and of the wind's different sound. 

The tall trees just outside the classroom send their branches whipping back and forth against the windowpane. Duke shifts his weight from foot to foot. 

When he had made a tardy slip into Physics class, all the girls had lifted their heads like a herd of deer sensing danger. Then, the second they saw it was him, they looked away as if he was never there at all.

“I already marked you absent.” Mrs. Turner sighs. He shifts again. Even if no one is looking at him anymore, Duke can’t stop thinking that his hair is getting too long and his uniform pants are too short and his jacket is too small and everything he's wearing is too tight and unflattering.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” She slumps, her posture weary. Duke knows the new online attendance system is stressful for her, because she tells them almost every day. Mrs. Turner is probably even older than Alfred, with hair that might have once been blond and eyes that might have once been bright blue before she faded away like a photograph. 

“I’m sorry.” he says.

“It’s fine.” she replies, "I’ll take care of it.” 

While Duke walks toward his seat, Mrs. Turner announces that they have to complete an assignment in groups. Everyone shouts the names of the people they want, and they pull their desks into circles. He's probably the only person in the school who hates it when the teacher lets them choose their own groups. Duke lowers his head to his desk and closes his eyes. 

He used to think that if he focused, he could make himself disappear. He doesn't exactly believe that anymore, but sometimes he still has to try.

“Duke,” Mrs. Turner breathes, “you are really pushing it today. Find a group.” He glances around at the ones that have formed, a tight anxious knot in his stomach, the shape of a gray ball with spikes cutting his insides like spears in some European battle. "Just join the group closest to you.”

Closest to him is Juliet, an Alpha girl who looks a little bit like a goldfish with her orange hair and bulging eyes. Duke has known her ever since he was three, but they never got along well. She sends him a bruising glare, and Duke feels like he's wearing a defective invisibility cloak, a device that worked perfectly until he did something stupid. 

The wind outside howls with a restless force once again; Autumn is definitely here, but it seems too soon.

Almost like he skipped over the last three months because there are certain things that are supposed to happen every summer.

He's supposed to go to the beach with his parents. They're supposed to see fireworks and buy sparklers and find seashells. He's supposed to stay up late and sit on the front porch eating popsicles while his mother plays the guitar and his father draws. Then as he’s tucked into bed, he’s supposed to be asked, "How many stars?"

On a great day he’s supposed to say nine or ten. But if it was amazing, the best day he ever had, he's supposed to cheat and say something like ten thousand stars.

But they didn’t get to see fireworks or eat popsicles or do any summer things, and Duke has this ache inside, like he's slept through Christmas.

September 3rd, 3:00 P.M, Gotham City High

The final school bell rings and it looks like somebody has kicked over a beehive. Teenagers are swarming and flying in a thousand different directions. There’s a sudden explosion of noise— talking and cell phones beeping. But Duke stands frozen at the top of the steps just outside the building.

His father is leaning against a tall tree across the street. 

When he was little, Duke's mother was usually the one who would pick him up, but every now and then, Dad would get off early and surprise him. Instead of joining the pickup line of cars, he’d meet Duke on foot. His hands were always blotted with ink, like a child’s after finger painting, and he’d say, "It’s too nice a day not to walk."

He’d say that even if it was raining.

But of course, the man across the street isn’t actually his father. It’s just some trick of the sunlight filtering through the branches on a jogger who stopped to catch his breath. 

Duke stands there, heavy now. So heavy that the few steps outside of the school become a mountain to climb down. So heavy that it takes a while for him to summon the energy he needs to start the walk back to the manor.

The same heaviness Duke felt after class reappears the minute he walks inside the empty house. Every inch of it is dark, glossy, and neat. Every piece of furniture is strategic. Every color coordinated by someone trained to do it. It’s exactly the sort of home he thought he wanted… until he got it. 

Duke couldn’t explain the despair his surroundings inspire in him, even if he tried. Though he suspects, given the circumstances and his disposition, that he would’ve been unhappy anywhere—in Santorini or Cartagena or the Isle of Capri. It doesn't change the fact of the matter. The conviction now that his unhappiness is indigenous to this place. While to a certain extent Milton is right— the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth— it is nonetheless clear that Wayne Manor was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city. 

Duke sees his dirty Vans entering his room with its polished wood floors, desert-brown walls, and heavy furniture. But his eyes are pulled almost immediately to the only thing out of place—the big steel trunk at the foot of the bed. His parents got it for him to take to camp the summer he turned nine. They told him he was brave to go off on his own, but Duke got so homesick he couldn’t even make it through the first night. 

His backpack drops to the floor and he lifts the trunk’s heavy lid, heart squeezing as he looks down at all the things he loves: photo albums, his mother’s spiral notebooks, the plushie he won at the fair, and his dad’s hopelessly bad Christmas tree topper.

During freshman year, Duke had spent dozens of hours studying this statue of Marie holding Jesus, as though if he stared at it long enough and longingly enough he would, by some sort of osmosis, be transported into the clear and pure silence of its presumed manufacture. Even now, when he remembers the icon’s sculpted, almost tiny mouth, her washed-out skin, and those black eyes of hers that stare at him with enormous sorrow, he does so like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. 

But in human eyes, even in sculpted ones, there’s always something terrible: the inevitable warning of consciousness, the silent shout that there’s a soul there. Those sad eyes of the whole of life—of the metaphysical that he observes from a distance—look at him with none of the normal cheeriness associated with Christmas decorations.

Her hands are stained red with blood. Simply by giving Jesus life Marie has already killed him. 

The thing cradled in her arms is not a baby, it is a sacrifice: born amongst the other bleating animals whose blood will one day be spilled in the name of what demands it. 

A God must feed. 

A God must be fed. 

Mary Who’s-Womb-Is-Also-A-Grave will not be the one to save any of them from that hunger, least of all him from the sordid monotony of its consequences.

Duke leaves the bust, trying to pay it as little mind as he can, though he knows le mal est déjà fait, and fishes around for his own notebook. Writes in his quiet room for what could be hours, or for what could be days. For what is, surely, long enough for him to start feeling this religious force within him he sometimes gets when on a writing high; this species of a prayer, this kind of public outcry. The type to make him wonder if his apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls, resigned, like his own, to their daily lot, their useless dreams and their hopeless hopes.

A door slams somewhere in the hallway and Duke jerks like a puppet yanked by its strings. He glances up from his half-written page to his bedroom door, to the way the light from the hall shines around the perimeter of it like an entryway to another dimension. 

It’s a minute before the automatic light in the corridor flickers and dies. 

The moment dies along with it.

It was probably just Damian, whose room is next to his. But the sound has been enough of a threat to remove Duke from the place wherein which he felt what great men probably feel their whole lives.

He can’t help but take a drowsy look at himself in its wake— at all of the things that put him in his place, from the sheets of paper— now futile and without beauty— to the cheap pen that’s about to run out of ink, and to his mere existence on the first floor of Wayne Manor.

Duke lets his mind wander to the source of the noise rather than its impact in an attempt to smother it down: Damian. Duke thinks of the soul itself and the body that holds its name— scared and unripe. The Doomed Son. The boy who the Greeks would have called Δαμιανός . To tame. To vanquish.

To overcome , was it? Or to subdue ? Duke flips through the pages of his spiral notebook until he reaches the compartmentalized list of everything he knows about Damian. His numb fingers skim the page.

Ah! To master .

Duke taps his index over the word. The paper’s fibers are so thick they feel like goosebumps. 

To pay attention— this is his endless, proper work. Not out of some sordid plan, not even for the cold satisfaction of observing people like specimens, but because of the fundamental precepts of subatomic science.

Taking into consideration the principles of Newtonian mechanics, it has long been postulated that if one were to ascertain with absolute precision the position and velocity of every particle in existence, it would be possible, in theory, to predict the future with unwavering accuracy. Such is the dream of determinism: a grand mechanism whose every motion can be plotted along a fixed trajectory, some sort of testament to the certainty of cause and effect .

And so— and in accordance with these fundamental precepts of sub-atomic science — Duke has had the suspicion for quite a while now that there is more to his photonic capabilities than ever Mr. Wayne realizes. There is a quality to them—a mutable, almost capricious nature—that speaks to something far older than good ol’ Newtonian determinism.

The enigma surrounding his… powers— for the lack of a better word — has never been lost on him; he has held onto the faintest, most instinctual comprehension of them for what seems like ever, but did so like a man peering into the flickering shadows behind a door.

That being said, dwelling amidst this new… curious assemblage of individuals , he has become increasingly attuned to some subtle patterns. The slight variations in the ambient light during moments of heightened emotion, or the minute distortions in the air during missions fraught with peril are no mere accidents of the senses. They speak to something more profound. 

For most people, unaware of the extent of their influence as they may be, their very words and actions seem to ripple through the subatomic ether. In some instances, Duke has perceived that the light itself—the photonic lattice that permeates all things—alters imperceptibly in hue and texture around people. Sometimes, this alteration extends even to the objects they touch, as if their will alone was sufficient to impress itself upon the fabric of reality.

It is here, in these glimmers of possibility, that quantum theory offers an explanation. In the realm of the subatomic, the universe is governed by probabilities rather than certainties . The wavefunction of a particle— or at least its probabilistic essence— collapses into a single state only when observed. This collapse is not merely an act of measurement; it is an entanglement of the observer and the observed . It is conceivable, then, that the human mind— rooted in the quantum interplay of neurons and synapses— might influence or be influenced by these same subatomic structures.

Perhaps all of these colors Duke perceives are not delusions, but a glimpse into this fundamental truth; consciousness exerts a pressure upon the world around it . 

Whatever the veracity of these conjectures, Duke has resolved to treat them as hypotheses worthy of rigorous examination. He chronicles his observations in another spiral-bound notebook the same kind as the one that is illuminated by the tremulous light of a single lamp now. Spiral notebooks upon which he records his studies of human nature through the prism of photonic interplay.

Damian, who shares both his wall and his school, is a particularly intriguing subject. The boy’s presence seems to warp the very air around him, like the gravitational lensing of a distant star, in mostly shades of blue. The letters Duke knows Damian sends back to Hindu Kush— because he intercepts and reads them— and in which Damian speaks of Gotham like Norse sagas with claims that if a frigid hell exists, the entrance is hidden somewhere in this city— tend to be stained blue like with juniper berries.

That being said, Duke has never been able to see any colors from some people, though, like Dick for instance, whose presence radiates no color, no pattern, no discernible signature of light.

Dick, who is the one that had confessed to Duke his worries over Damian the other day. Over how the boy’s fierce pride had only sharpened since the new school term began. How the violence that simmered beneath his surface had grown more insistent. It was this concern that had prompted Stephanie and Dick to propose that the team spend more time together, in order for Damian to feel more surrounded. 

The amount of effort Dick puts into trying to get Damian to warm up to Gotham— to America in general— is not lost on Duke. He sees it plainly, in the careful way Dick’s words bend around the boy’s silences and the gentle urgings meant to draw him out. Yet for all this, Duke cannot help but think that the scheme born of that earlier conversation—somewhere in the muddled corridors of last week—to take Damian to the zoo of all places is, at its heart, a misstep.

It seems a trivial pursuit. The boy already has a cow, a cat, two dogs, and doubtlessly other creatures he has been self-charged with minding. Damian has likely seen every form of beast imaginable over the course of his tumultuous life. To present him with the spectacle of captive animals behind iron enclosures seems a hollow gesture, a playacting of normalcy that will do little to soothe the boy’s restless spirit.

They are all going about it the wrong way, Duke believes. Not only in the matter of the zoo —which is merely a symbol, a distraction to mask the deeper disquiet that coils beneath the skin of their chosen life. No, the misjudgment lies in the super-hero pursuit they have all sworn themselves, and Damian by extent, to. 

Maybe Damian has already endured enough violence to last a lifetime. Maybe all he longs for in the dark hours of night is peace. Learning how to make friends will not come from drawing blood at night like a vampire compelled to it by monstrous hunger. 

Life is not a lesson in combat. 

If they are to help him, Duke thinks, they should not force him into a rigid mold of their own design. They must let him be what he is: a boy shaped by a thousand sorrows and yet capable, still, of being remade in gentleness through different means than those he’s been taught. 

When Duke thinks of Damian’s current circumstances, he is immediately reminded of  the first time he went to Canada—his only sojourn outside of the United States to this day, in fact—where he had been struck by the strange compulsion of the locals to fashion their world into an echo of America’s familiar shape. They had meant well, of course; there was a generosity in their desire to accommodate, to make him feel at ease. But Duke and his mom had not crossed a border merely to find America transplanted whole into another clime. She had taken him in search of something different— an adventure is what she had called it—something that could never be glimpsed if one’s view was forever confined to the comforting familiarity of home. 

Though it's true to say that comforting is far too nice a word to describe Gotham City, or New Jersey as a whole.

Grant Morrison Stadium. Dixon Avenue. Washington Boulevard. These words alone conjure up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. 

Duke’s years in the foster system —tossed between Sprang River and Park Row, the sewers of China Town, the grim streets of Otisburg— created for him an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which he supposes is a very great gift, in a way. On leaving Somerset, he was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers. 

The dazzle of this fictive end of childhood— full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz adoptive parents has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when Duke thinks about his time between homes, he is unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers he wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket; little of interest, less of beauty. 

He was quiet then, because he was mourning, tall for his age and he didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance he does not now know.

He honestly can’t remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that he associates with watching The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day even when with his real parents— early to bed, school the next morning, he was constantly worried his homework was wrong— but as he watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, he was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to him at least, presented sound empirical arguments for gloom. 

Mendez was mean, his house ugly, and his wife didn’t pay much attention to Duke; his clothes were cheap and his hair was constantly scratchy and no one at school seemed to like him that much; and since all this had been true for as long as he could remember, he felt things would doubtlessly continue in this depressing vein for as far as he could foresee.

In short: He felt his existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

Duke supposes it’s not odd, then, that he has trouble reconciling his life to those of the other people of the house, or at least to their lives as he perceives them to be. Dick is an orphan, but at his youngest was reared by his parents in a constantly changing house in Virginia: a childhood Duke likes to think about, with horses and rivers and sweet-gum trees. 

And Damian.

His mother, when she had him, was only twenty-four— a thin-blooded, capricious girl with black hair and a rich daddy, who ran off with the first billionaire C.E.O to cross her path.

She was home in three weeks, and the marriage was annulled in six; and, as Damian is fond of saying, she brought him up in such a magnanimous style that even Ra’s Al Ghul was impressed— English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France. 

Consider even bluff old Tim, if you would. Not a childhood of reefer coats and sword lessons, any more than Duke’s was. But an American childhood. Son of a Clemson football star turned businessman. No brothers, no sisters, in a big quiet house in the suburbs, with sailboats and tennis rackets and golden retrievers; summers on Cape Cod, boarding schools near Boston and tailgate picnics during football season; an upbringing vitally present in Tim in every aspect, from the way he shook your hand to the way he told a joke.

Duke does not now nor did he ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a room in Mr. Wayne’s estate and the months of his life he spent in their company. 

And if faith is a thing held in common, Duke supposes they have that in common, too.

September 3rd, 7:43 P.M, Wayne Manor

Dick broaches the idea to Damian that very night, seeing the latter’s ever-growing bad mood is at an all-time high. And, to be completely fair, Damian does seem intrigued. And maybe it’s because Dick said everyone would be there, and everyone includes Mr. Wayne—who’s the boss—and whose taciturn approval is the lodestar around which so many in this house seem to orbit.

Dick and Stephanie even call it a productive team-bonding exercise , because they know Damian is all about efficiency and shit. Duke has a role of his own to play. He is to appear modest and unassuming—“ Coy , Duke, act coy!” —as though this entire charade had been devised for his benefit , to better integrate him into the team. 

Perhaps Duke should have refused, since he never  believed it to be a good idea to begin with but he has been bribed with the promise of unlimited ice cream at the park and— hopefully —whatever other small indulgences one can coax from Dick Don’t-Worry-I’ll-Pay Grayson.

“That’s—” Damian begins, but Alfred The Cat leaps from his lap. At that, Damian makes a face that reminds Duke of an Amedeo Modigliani painting: all droopy and long-faced. Then he looks up at Dick, chin superglued to his neck like a live version of Human Centipede . 

Duke’s teeth grind together. 

The room is bone-chilling, the A.C. turned to its highest. Persian cats like it most that way, and that’s sacrificial for someone like Damian, who dreams of the pleasures of sunstrokes all night, only to wake up each morning to the alien sight of his breath suspended in the cold city air— which is what Damian had said word for word in his last blue letter.

“Ok.”

And at that, Stephanie rightfully beams, her eyes alight with an almost incandescent pink glow, so palpably proud that she seizes Duke in one of those fierce hugs she normally only gives to Cassandra. The door clicks shut behind them when they leave, and in an instant he’s surrounded by the usual lukewarm air of the Wayne Manor hallways.

They are set to go on Monday; Dick flashes Duke his veneer-looking teeth and Duke feels the same sort of accomplishment he does after resolving a hard riddle.

“Family hangout operation is officially on!” says The First Robin, and Duke has to tilt his head because—this isn’t how it was pitched to neither Damian nor him. 

“You mean team-bonding exercise?” Duke says, and Dick falters a little.

“Same difference.” He answers, looking caught in the act of wanting something he’s aware he cannot have.

“Right.” Duke crosses his arms and looks away, suddenly feeling very tired.

That evening, he goes to sleep early, only to toss and turn. His brain sleeps all that he feels. In the air and in his soul is that unsmiling light whose lifeless yellow tinges the irregular, rounded edges of the sunset’s clouds. He can't quite place why he's so tired but when Monday comes, Duke pretends to be sick and doesn't go. 

Damian ignores him for days after that, his cheeks a shade of blue Duke had never seen before.

It's true; Autumn announces itself in people before it does things. And all that Duke’s thought, all that he's dreamed, all that he has or hasn't done will go to it. 

To the leaves and to the clear awareness, in limpid hours, of the anonymous inadequacy of everything.

September 13th, 3:33 A.M, Wayne Manor

Stephanie's lips turn bright red when she lies. They are wine-dark, however, when she's mad. The color is foreign to her body; her rage doesn't belong to her. It must be her father's, or his father's before that. An inherited creature, owed to the number of times they had placed her squarely within the jaws of death while on their ways of becoming men of this world.

September 15th, 7:24 P.M, Wayne Manor

There are times when each detail of the ordinary interests Duke for its own sake, and he feels a fondness for all things, because he can read them clearly.

But there are also moments, such as the one that oppresses him now, when he feels his own self far more than he does external things. In those, his heart beats faster because he’s conscious of it.

A sword of faint lightning darkly whirls in the large room, and he senses it underneath his skin like a real, tangible thing. Duke’s fingers drum against the tabletop, each tap quick and precise, a staccato rhythm that echoes soundlessly amidst the conversation. The rumble that follows trails off into the distance.

Duke can feel Jason’s body heat from where he’s sitting two chairs over. The prodigal son is flexing his long hands around nothing, food left untouched in front of him, and it’s the sudden halt of the ongoing movement that snaps Duke out of his daze.

Maybe—most probably—Tim just said something clever, because Mr. Wayne is smiling, and Tim is preening under his validation.

Stephanie wears that small, rueful smile of hers—the one that always dances at the corners of her mouth when she is about to say something funny. Her shaggy blonde hair forms a halo around her tomato-stained face, and at that alone Duke feels the corner of his own mouth lift up. What makes him smile proper, though, is the way the light catches her braces, gleaming in pristine reflection. She’s balanced precariously on the two back legs of her chair and bears scrapes on her knees, probably from tree-climbing. Her jorts are tinted with the green hues of grass stains, and dinosaur Band-Aids are haphazardly plastered here and there, making her look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful.

Duke somewhat suspects it is no mere coincidence that this impromptu dinner is occurring precisely nine months to the minute after his birthday. It’s the typical time frame within which it’s safe to assume he’s settled into his final form. Without a rut or heat, it’s clear: he’s a Beta. It's what has always been expected from him by doctors so it's no surprise but still, it brings him some measure of happiness because that’s what Mom and Dad would have wanted for him.

(In Duke’s admittedly very theoretical eyes, it has always seemed like a somewhat tragic evolutionary misstep. This whole thing. One he didn’t want to be a part of, the same way he doesn’t want to have cancer. It’s merely a letter next to your name and age on your driver’s license, and Duke understands that—recognizes it, even; the shift to a predominantly Beta population happening before the Neolithic era bypassing a small segment of the population and leaving them with rather menial consequences in every aspect of life but socially. Physically, there is little to no differences between Duke and Mr. Wayne, who’s an Alpha—aside from the rutting cycles and perhaps a slight increase in strength and muscle mass. No one would have been able to tell if Duke had turned out to be something other than a Beta, but he would have had to be careful to keep it that way. And so he feels relieved not to have to carry this additional burden on top of the whole meta issue.)

Even Jason is present, despite his tenuous relationship with Mr. Wayne—which has seemingly reached a boiling point.

It feels like a cold war. Judas dining at Jesus’s table with no grander scheme than the meal itself. 

Alfred is here too, meticulously slicing his beef and chewing it without a sound. His shoulders are taut, and his spine is straight in a way that must’ve been drilled into him. This scene is unusual, for Alfred deems it improper —that’s the word he uses, improper — for a butler to dine at the same table as his employers. Witnessing him engage in such a simple task as eating had left Duke destabilized at first, as though a barely acknowledged norm had been abruptly shattered.

Damian seems thrilled—or perhaps merely appreciative—of Alfred’s presence. His shoulders are unusually high, and he eats at the same measured pace as Alfred, almost bite for bite.

Duke rolls his own shoulders. The crisp fabric of his T-shirt moves along with it. It sticks to his skin in places.

Falling headfirst into the Gotham River was not, by any measure, on his list of things to do—nor had he ever imagined it would be on the one of what did . The memory of it remains etched into the marrow of his bones with a chill that refuses to fade. He remembers the way the water crept between his shoulder blades, needling his skin like pollen. The violets that edged the riverbank, their blue faces open to the sky, petals like small dark lanterns. The pebbles surrounding the body of water turning into fine sand in patches. The inky water staining everything it touched.

Upon his return to Mr. Wayne’s house, Jason had greeted Duke with a wry smile that could have been compassion or that could have been mockery. Either way, he had tossed Duke a shirt, the latter of whom had fumbled with it, a question half-formed on his lips. But when Duke lifted his gaze from the offending piece of cloth, Jason had already vanished into the quiet halls, leaving Duke to puzzle over what, precisely, he was meant to make of it.

Duke keeps some his size down at the cave for such occasions—for what Mr. Wayne asks of him to be if not prepared—and he would’ve much preferred one of those. But perhaps Jason is extending a gesture of openness toward Duke, and declining not to wear it might be seen as rejection.

Reluctant to risk disturbing the delicate, fleeting accord that seems to have settled over this afternoon, Duke dons the shirt despite its loose fit.

“—t’s how I got fired from Taco Bell, basically,” Stephanie finishes. There’s a Wonder Woman Band-Aid on her collarbone that Duke only sees now that she has tumbled back down, the air flowing through her soccer jersey.

Damian rolls his eyes in an exaggerated gesture of disapproval and then glances at Alfred.

Duke remembers when his dad had told him he was probably going to get fired from his job. Duke had cried all night long, thinking they were going to light Dad on fire and away from the Ghost Crew that Dad worked with part-time. The memory floods Duke's mind now instead of the cold dirty water of Gotham’s dock, and it’s like he’s nine all over again; Mom’s coming home and Duke’s asleep on the couch, fingers sticky from red-white-and-blue firecracker popsicles. The window is ajar, mosquitoes coming in. Dad is nearby, half-dozing in a plush chair. The movie is long finished, and the DVD logo is hitting the borders of the TV frame without ever touching the corner. The static is blending into the hum of the fan like a background tune, and Duke stares at the ever-incoming insects; nothing bad has happened to him.

He feels his cheeks tense with the effort of suppressing a smile again. Turns around to remind Mom, but all he sees is Jason, arms crossed, brows raised in Stephanie’s direction—and all of a sudden, as if the surgical hands of guilt had operated on a short-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results, Duke lifts his gaze from the table to the clear recognition of where he is.

The gasp that escapes him is more reflexive than it is shocked. It catches him in the middle of the chest, somewhere between the ribs. It's like a microscopic planet becoming bigger and bigger whilst keeping its spherical structure. It doesn't explode, just expands, and Duke feels incoherent enough to wonder if he's drowning. Duke looks at his past life as at a field lit up by the sun, and he notes with metaphysical astonishment how everything he’s used to is gone. 

His exhale comes out stuttered. His nose feels clogged like he’s lying on his side while having the flu. He glances around again; Barbara is twirling her hair. The light reflects on her bracelets in a blinding way.

The sound of rain weeps loudly, like mourners in between their chit-chatting. Here inside, each tiny sound stands out clearly, nervously.

The warmth from the fireplace does nothing to help the cold, impending darkness that has filled Duke with a warning so absent that it could have paralyzed the wills of Achilles.

Mr. Wayne’s varsity ring creates hollow noises as he moves his hands.

Every object casts a reflection against the walls of the room, and it’s one of those moments when he’s not sure whether it’s the powers or if everyone else can see how the light distorts so strange. Mom would have been able to tell, hadn't she lied to him his whole life. 

Some tiny spark of anger that he still can’t really feel—just like how he doesn’t really feel the grief that wracks his body—jolts in his chest. The numb rage spills out of his pores as freely as drool. He can smell his important rage, the way it marries to the food on its way to his nose. The band shirt, thin enough that he can feel the cold wind of wrath scraping his biceps.

Duke’s chest moves up and down faster and faster, and his only tie to the here, to the now, is how Cassandra is staring at him, mouth agape and eyebrows shining so white Duke has to squint. The tale of a headache is blooming on the side of his temple.

Duke’s jaw clicks, and when he gets up, the space around him is empty of noise. Of will. He’s staring at himself from the summit of a mental rooftop. Around him there is only air. He is so isolated that he can feel the distance between him and his clothes.

He is a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge, empty house. Living shadows surround him—only shadows, offsprings of the stiff furniture and of the light he carries. Here, in the light, they surround him, but so are people. Duke understands on a subconscious level this last part—and he should find a polite way to excuse himself out. Wants to say he’s going to the bathroom—the excuse even dances around his tongue long enough for the words to lose their meaning—but he doesn’t. Just leaves. Throws the shirt where perhaps Jason will find it. It is futile and insensitive; he’s going to feel bad about it later.

But Duke is self-aware enough to admit to his capacity to indulge in violent and consuming impulses—both to the good and bad, both noble and vile—and to the fact that they are never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of his soul. His mind is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. 

He’s two, and both keep their distance—Siamese twins that aren’t attached.

September, 16th, 5:29 A.M, Bidwell Street, Financial District 

Everything is sleeping as if the universe was a mistake. All night, high, strong gusts of wind ripped through nothing at all, and the window frames shook their panes to make the edges rattle. 

Only after the last drops of rain began to fall from the rooftops and the sky's blue began to spread over the street's paving stones, did the vehicles start to sing their cancerous songs and—a few moments later—store windows could be heard opening up to the no longer forgetful sun. 

It is an ambiguous moment of the day, official but not strictly observed. Work and repose coexist while Duke is cold and has neither to do. 

After he left Wayne Manor to wander around the streets of Gotham, he had paced for hours from one side of town to the other, dreaming loud, incoherent and impossible things— deeds he’d forgotten to do, hopeless ambitions haphazardly realized, fluid and lively conversations which, were they to be, would already have been. 

Seen from the outside, his human figure was probably ridiculous in its intimacy like everything human is. Over the pyjamas of his abandoned sleep, Duke had put on a thin over-coat and those old slippers of his that were falling apart at the seams. Mr. Wayne had wanted to buy him new ones about a month ago, but Duke had refused. A week after that, Duke came back home only to find a new pair awaiting him anyway. He still wears the old ones— though if he were asked why , he wouldn't be able to answer. 

Under his slim, posthumous coat, he can easily feel the somewhat moist and cool post-rain weather. It’s cold enough to make Duke’s breath appear in light, smoky crystals. If he were a list, it would just be numbers. One. Two. Three. A list of proof that he exists.

He goes to sit at a nearby bus stop and, when he leans into himself and looks down at his shoes, he somehow feels like one of those damp rags used for housecleaning. The ones taken to the window to dry but that are forgotten on the sill where they slowly leave a stain.

November 1st, 3:33 P.M, The Hatch

Mr. Wayne—the boss. At times Duke is inexplicably hypnotized by Mr. Wayne. What is this man, to Duke, besides an occasional obstacle, as the owner of his time and the director of his life? 

He treats Duke well and is polite when he talks to him, except on his grumpy days, when he’s fretting about something and isn’t polite to anyone. But why does he occupy Duke's thoughts? Is he a symbol? A cause? What is he?

Mr. Wayne—the boss. Duke already remembers him in the future with the nostalgia he knows he’s bound to feel. He’ll be peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere, enjoying a tranquillity in which he won’t do the work he doesn't do now, and to keep on not doing it, he’ll come up with even better excuses than the ones he used today to elude himself. Or he’ll be in an institution for paupers, happy in his utter defeat, mixed up with a rabble of would-be geniuses who would be, in fact, nothing more than beggars with dreams. 

Mr. Wayne—the boss. Duke sees him from that future as he sees him today from right here: Tall in height, stocky, a bit coarse, affectionate, frank and savvy, brusque and affable. A boss not only in his distribution of tasks but also in his unhurried hands, in their thick hair and veins that look like small coloured muscles, in his full but not fat neck, in his taut cheeks and their dark, always close-shaven whiskers. 

Mr. Wayne—the boss. Duke looks at his energetically deliberate gestures, his eyes thinking within about something outside. It displeases Duke when he’s somehow displeased Mr. Wayne, and Duke's soul rejoices when he smiles, with his broad and human smile, like an applauding crowd.

Perhaps the lack of some more distinguished figure in Duke’s immediate world explains why Mr. Wayne— an uncommon and even brutish man— sometimes gets so enmeshed in Duke’s thoughts that he forgets himself.

Duke believes that there's a symbol here.

Believes that somewhere, in a remote life, this man is someone much more important to him than he is today.

November, 7th, 2:33 P.M, Gotham Cemetery

The day Duke buries his parents is sunny.

Bathed in the clean brightness of the afternoon sun, he feels somewhat mocked by the cynical choice of God for the weather.

The priest leads the modest procession through the cemetery’s neat, squared rows. Duke follows, entombed in his tuxedo like a relic encased behind glass. The fabric clings to him like a second, stifling skin. His tongue is a dry patch of glue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Sweat trickles down his spine, gathering in warm, uncomforting pools beneath his arms. He tugs at his collar, desperate to release some of the stagnant heat.

The religious figure— a Japanese man in his late fifties whose robes swish stiffly as he moves— halts before a freshly installed gorin-tō. The five-tiered Buddhist gravestone stands sentinel over a patch of dry earth that's cracked like the back of a turtle's shell. In one hand, he holds a battered sutra book from which he begins to read a prayer like a scrupulous scholar presenting a paper. 

A thin veil of incense smoke curls around him and the stones, smudging the air with a thick, suffocating scent. The humid air is home to out-of -season crickets that hum happily as if the world hasn’t ended. The heat and death and absurdity of it all are probably lost on them.

“May the attendees form a circle around the mortgage .” the priest intones, his voice thick, and accented. 

“I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.” He goes on to say, and then starts chanting sutras. 

Soon enough, they are all guided into doing the same. Their subdued whispers ripple out into the heat, blending with the sound of the rustling leaves. 

The chimes. 

A dog barking. 

An airplane flying overhead. 

A murder of crows. 

Ambulance sirens. 

Pick-up trucks beeping. 

Teeth grinding. 

Wind blowing. 

Pebbles shuffling.

Time stretching. 

Contracting.

Looping.

Slipping. 

Rewinding.

There is something obscene in the current sphere of movement within which Duke is confined. In the choreography of bowing heads. In the murmured syllables. In the sanctified distance. It’s the composition, Duke thinks. It’s merciful by nature. The dichotomy between how he feels inside—scattered, anguished—and the serene surroundings is unsettling. 

He digs his nails into his palms and hopes it leaves angry, torn crescent marks so that he can care for them later.

When the ceremonial chant is complete, each mourner is invited to bow deeply before his parents’ portraits. The ritual calls for offerings: gifts for the afterlife, tokens of farewell. It’s more for his father’s sake than his mother’s— Dad was the Buddhist one. They had made a pact long ago, the three of them. Said that they’d be buried side by side, but in accordance with their own religion, and that Duke would be in the middle no matter what he ended up picking.

Of course, them dying at the same time had never been part of the agreement. Duke purses his lips. 

The funeral is fake anyway.

It’s all Mr. Wayne’s idea. The boss had said that, if it became known that Duke’s parents had been Jokerized and were now recovering under Batman’s protection, the connection between Duke’s vigilante identity and his civilian self would be dangerously easy to draw. Said that it was better for the world to believe they died in a freak accident so that they could pretend Bruce Wayne’s guardianship of Duke was a charitable whim—which was, in fact, the case. The Gotham Gazette would probably print it on this week's third page, somewhere between Scarecrow’s disappearance and the new library opening on Murphy Avenue and Third. Duke can already see it in his mind's eyes; Charity or Strategy? Bruce Wayne’s Latest Adoption Raises Eyebrows, an article written by Vicky Vale.

He passes his tongue over his teeth. 

When it’s his turn, he doesn’t donate anything. Barely looks at the picture he took of Dad on a beach day without knowing it’d become a photograph. 

Mom had been very happy that day. She was freshly out of her heat, and always had a day or two where she was in such a good mood after it that the whole house breathed with it. She had said she wanted to see the sea on a whim, and Dad had made it happen. On the beach, she had taken off her shoes and Duke his, and they had played catch, chased Dad into the water, swam with their clothes still on and danced to no tune at all. At the end of the day, Duke had had a lump in his throat from how much fun it’d been. When Dad put him to sleep that night and asked, how many stars? Duke had said one hundred.

He stays in front of the photograph for a moment, suspended in between the past and the unbearable present. 

Stays as the scent of saltwater slowly gets replaced by hot dust and autumn leaves. 

As the sea falls far behind him.

He’s hushed to the side after a few minutes, and a woman he’s never seen before takes the next turn. She doesn’t bow so much as fall to the ground, sobbing, her body spasming as though possessed by an electrical wire.

She pours sakē in a small cup with the kind of exaggerated care associated with ancient artifacts and newborn babies, crying all the while.

She looks so sad it feels gross. It feels wet. It feels nauseating.

It leaves a strange ache in Duke’s chest. Makes him wonder about the interiority of his parents' life. The people they must've known who Duke's never met. The friends they had that are just names in his mouth. Duke's bones are suddenly straining— grinding—under the weight of all the other people they could have met. All of the different lives they could have lived, all of the other experiences they could have lived hadn't they spent their life breathing air into his tiny universe.

Duke worries at his lips. Looks at the line of people waiting and spots red hair on the other side of the itatbi. 

Juliet is there, standing about thirty feet away.

If Duke tries hard enough, he can picture a younger version of her. The one he met back in kindergarten. He remembers when his mom picked him up that first day of school. He told her there was a very mean girl in his class. Juliet pinched kids when the teacher wasn’t looking. She scribbled on everyone’s watercolors with black crayon. She knocked down their towers in the center block. His mom listened, nodding, then she said:

"There is no such thing as a mean child, only an unhappy one."

"But you don’t know" he told her, "you didn’t see."

“I don’t have to see. I know.” She wouldn’t tell Duke how she knew, but she swore Juliet deserved nothing but his sympathy. The next day, when Juliet kicked down Duke's tower, he put a sympathetic hand on his classmate's shoulder. “It’s okay,” He said. “I know you’re just unhappy.”

Then Juliet punched Duke in the eye. 

After school, he told his mom she was wrong. Juliet was evil—she’d hit him. Duke waited for her to be angry, to tell him she would call her mother. Instead, she repeated that no one is evil, only unhappy, and unhappiness festers inside like a sore. Later, as he watched Juliet on the playground, hanging out alone or hiding under the wooden beams of the jungle gym, he’d worry. Imagining festering sores under her skin where no one could see. 

But he could see. 

He can still see, and he can feel all the sympathy his mom told him he should feel. 

But that never made him any less afraid of Juliet.

He makes eye contact with her dead blue eyes. It was to be expected; He’d been staring, caught in the morbid gravity of his memories like he gets more often than not these days. 

The instant their eyes lock is a shock nonetheless. 

The world stills with the chilling precision of fate fulfilled, and it’s crystal clear, this moment. Resin poured and chemically frozen. The defective cloak leaving him completely naked and completely flawed once again. Duke sees himself as clearly as he sees her. He is nothing but apocryphal and beggarly, even now in his thoughts.

Their staring match lasts until she parts her lips like she's about to say something. Then, her mouth closes again, forming a line as thin and final as a blade. 

After that, everything moves too fast. 

It's like zipping through a movie.

The line moves. Juliet moves with it. She's getting closer. Panic rushes through Duke like an old high, accompanied by a familiar wave of despair.

He blinks. Forces himself to breathe a weak and shallow breath. The air feels like mud, slow and pungent. It blocks his arteries, fills his mouth and lungs until he feels like puking. Duke smoothes down his tie with the palm of his hand. Something under it reverberates through like the echoing beat of drums. Grief and impotent rage beating right where his heart used to be. 

Her being here is the last thing Duke needs right now. He’d loathe to have to make small talk with someone he knows he’ll have to pretend he doesn't know tomorrow in class. 

He is afraid he'll start pouring in front of her, for he knows he'll never stop. Dreads becoming a river, especially in front of the mountain that gave him such shame.

Fears to say— I came from her. She made this body-thing I hate and love so much. I resent her for creating it; I'm mortified I have to make use of it. 

Fears to say— I never felt more free. It was terrifying morphing myself into something he could stand to look at.

Everything he doesn't want to stutter his way through, he swallows, and closes his eyes.

October 11th, 4:09 P.M Undisclosed Location

There is, in Wayne Manor, a room only Duke knows. If he could teleport, that's where he'd be right now. Maybe, if he just concentrates—

"You're not an Omega are you?"

Duke lets the question hang into the fetid air, the lone sentence echoing into the silence, while the cadence of his own breathing flutters like a moth against the four narrow walls. The ropes that bind him bite into jacket and skin alike, but they are not the Gordian knots Dick and Mr. Wayne use during training sessions. Given will and leisure, he might slip them; but will and leisure are two absent gifts of tonight.

He has been taken as Duke Thomas, ward of Bruce Wayne—not as The Signal. That truth, for some reason, stings more keenly than the solid cord attached to his wrists, for he has worked harder than he’d admit, if asked, to keep his civilian identity as far removed from Mr. Wayne as he could. He doesn't know when exactly the whisper of his newborn association with Gotham’s most infamous philanthropist has started to paint a ransom‑mark upon his back. Had he known, he’d have changed haircut, or would have become the type of man who wears sunglasses indoors.

His captor—a statuesque blonde whose presence fills the room with a pressure that has nothing to do with her height or breadth—paces like a restless dog. She reminds him, in the slant of her stance and the spark of her eye, of Stephanie way back when she was Duke’s Robin. Stephanie, who was the first to ever break the pattern of blue eyed Alpha male Robins.

She was not only a female but also a Beta just like Duke had been expected to become. It'd be a lie to say he wasn't disappointed in finding out her Robinhood had been a lie and that she, too, was an Alpha. He told her exactly that, once, during one of those late nights when the line between honesty and cruelty thins. She’d looked away, and abstained from saying anything at the time, and Duke remembers having regretted voicing his thoughts. 

The memory ties around him now as he studies the woman who reminds him of her in that haunted, fragile way people do when they’re almost—but not quite—like someone else. 

"Hey, answer me." She says, watching him with an appraising glance, up and down, like she’s reading an inscription half-faded from a flyer. 

He looks back to her through lowered lashes, measuring her silhouette like one might an object about to fall. 

Duke should say nothing. Mr. Wayne drilled it into him— never speak, never give a kidnapper leverage they didn’t already have. But the words “I’m not.” slip past his lips before wisdom can bar them.

And he should add something snarky to that, at least, but he is not Jason Todd, and this isn't the beginning or the end of a fight. 

There are a few reasonable reasons as to why she could be asking, and none of them are making him comfortable right now. This frantic movement about her, that thin sheen of sweat, the loud breathing — all of that lets him believe she’s one of those people with a meta gene that’s only manifesting when they are around him. But she mustn’t know that. They can’t possibly know about his powers and not about his secondary gender. And maybe she thinks he’s in heat or something— and that it’s affecting her. Or she could have had a sinister plan created out of sheer boredom, had he said yes. Maybe she’s nervous about something she’s planning on doing.

Superheroism and the dangers of gender-based violence only occurred to him a few months ago, when he had chatted with Barbara about any and everything, and the conversation turned into stories of the many things she has been through as Batgirl, and then Oracle. She talked about the Joker shooting her in the spine, talked about being with and without Dick, about how once Lisly Bonner had saved her from a man when Barbara went in heat unexpectedly, and he had wanted to hurt her. She had said being a female superhero was hard—and Duke had never doubted that—but in that moment, being an Omega was worse, still.

Hadn’t it been for Lisly’s power —named 3.38— Barbara said she didn’t know what would have happened to her. At that moment, she couldn’t deny being an Omega, like she usually would, and that had put her so close to danger that she put the cowl down for half a year.

That’s when Duke first thought about it. About how maybe growing up as a male who was expected by doctors to become a beta was shielding him away from some aspects of the job. Was keeping him in the kind of safety you don’t notice until someone else shows you the cost of its absence.

Symbolic power works insofar as it is misrecognized as such.

It’s similar to when Tim says he doesn’t really care how some of his friends are poor, and happily pays for their meals and entertainment and shopping sprees when they all hang out. And Tim says and does those things with a nonchalance that must be real— that must be what not worrying about something, to the point it doesn’t affect your perception of others, does.

But the tricky thing about the societal structure as it is, is that it fails to take into consideration how the people at the bottom of it might see themselves — though Bourdieu probably told it best when he said that domination counts on the interiorization of an individual of its rules as innate.

That, more than anything, is what prompted Duke to choose Omega as his false secondary gender.

Most of the Bats have a different secondary gender when they are civilians than what they imply themselves to be when in costume. It’s very subtle, and made to be seen by the people investigating — the cops, the villains, or the people who have blogs and who theorize, like Duke used to do. A slightly visible scent patch when one bends their neck on camera for a millisecond, or the lackluster of any. Pheromone perfumes to let it be felt they are from a certain dynamic when they know they’ll have to deal with investigators while on a scene — even if that rarely ever works — or visiting a bathroom aligning with what they pretend to be while on a public relations event, if there is a six-bathroom system.

“It’s optional anyway,” Mr. Wayne had said, but Duke got the feeling it was one of those highly encouraged things that were, in fact, obligatory.

So then, if only to understand further how it feels living in someone like his mom’s or Barbara’s shoes, he chose to be an Omega. He had told Mr. Wayne first, who hadn’t really had a reaction and started to list out how they were going to imply it to the public. And then Stephanie, whom he felt he should tell everything to first — his hero worship of her had faded, worn away by the slow revelation of her simple humanness but there are still traces of it hard-built into his very self— and then Tim, because he’d have felt sad if left out of the loop. Fourthly, Duke told Dick, who would not have said anything upon learning he wasn’t in on it, but would have made a joke about being Duke’s least favorite — a joke that was, in truth, self-deprecating and at least eighty percent not a joke — and Duke would have had to stop himself from rolling his eyes, because self-deprecation hidden in humor greatly irritates him. And lastly Damian, who had stopped reading the Shoujo manga Duke had gifted him Eid past — and which Damian had bought the whole series of a few days later without even knowing if he’d like it past the fifth tome.

“I don’t care,” Damian had said, but the tip of his nose turned tile blue, and Duke was reminded suddenly of Pinocchio, who too was a puppet before becoming a person.

That’s what Duke thinks about now — his own nose brushing on top of his lip in an attempt to block out the scent of damp oxygen characteristic of basements — marionettes, self-deprecation, and gender-based violence.

October 11th, 6:22 P.M Undisclosed Location

Something terrible is about to happen.

Most days, Duke wakes up with that thought at the forefront of his mind—like he’s blind, and there’s something lying right next to him that he could only escape by seeing. Today, that something takes the shape of a tall woman with hair like wheat.

It goes against Duke's training to even take a nap in these kinds of circumstances but here, in this dulled-out room, it seems hard to follow the protocol. His limbs are heavy with a tiredness that’s all-encompassing. Fluorescent hums flatten the air. Concrete leaches warmth through his sneakers. His whole body is drawn toward the ground in what feels like a gravitational pull.

He’s jostled awake by a tap on his cheek.

Is nudged again after a second, a little more firmly this time, and when Duke doesn’t react, his head is forcefully lifted by the chin with a full hand. The blonde woman is hunching over him so that they are face to face, their noses almost touching. Her breath smells of instant coffee. After staring into his newly opened eyes for a moment, she shakes a zip bag of small pills with her free hand.

“Feel like starring in my next little movie?” she drawls in a thick New York working-class accent.

Duke’s eyes nearly burst from their sockets. “Absolutely the fuck not,” he says, before he even has time to think about what the smart thing to say once again.

She lets go of his face and rises to her full height to laugh, so genuinely amused she snores a little, like a piglet.

Duke wants to kick her.

“Not that type of movie,” she says, and Duke hates that the reassurance makes him release so much tension that he slumps with it.

She opens the zipper bag and pulls out three fat pills.

“Open wide,” she says. When he doesn’t, she tries to pry his mouth open by pressing each of his cheeks with her hand. “Don’t make me work for it.” She frowns, mean, and pinches them bruisingly.

Duke glares. His lips staying a steel line.

Eventually, she grows tired of his resistance. Without a word, she pinches his nose shut, forcing him to open his mouth for air. The moment he gasps, she slips the pills in, then clamps a hand over his lips, sealing them shut. Trapped, he’s left with no choice but to swallow or choke as the dissolvable pills melt on his tongue, bitter and burning like battery acid.

“What was it?” he asks, breathless, after she lets go of him.

“You ’bout to find out,” she says—and Duke worries that the terrible thing has already happened.

It’s a blink. Just a second. And then Duke is somewhere else. Sometime else.

There’s a click. There’s a boom. And the world is spinning. 

October 11th, 7:04 P.M Undisclosed Location

Stars detonate behind Duke’s eyelids; the world tilts, coughs up dust, and swallows him whole. Grit rasps in his throat, coats his tongue like ashes from a funeral pyre. Somewhere close boots scuff, fists crack, a grunt unspools into a scream. He tries to turn toward the sound, but his limbs ignore him, heavy as sandbags nailed to the earth.

Darkness crowds in until even the dust disappears.

Dad’s laugh is the only thing Duke hears. Rusty and bright. The laugh he used to have when Duke would leave a Lego set on the stairs and Mom would walk on it, or when Duke would jump on their bed on Saturday mornings—but sharper now, aimed like a telescope. Duke fumbles to call out at him, but suddenly he is facing a mirror and he watches his reflection as all of his teeth fall out.

A stairwell materializes right where they hit the ground and when Duke tilts his head up, Daryl is on the top of its steps and he tells Duke “You are nothing”. The yellow glint in Daryl’s eye as he pronounces those words captivates Duke and next thing he knows, the color yanks him down and shifts into the yellow mask of the man from the Solar Project Observatory, voice oozing between the balusters, and says “Your mother lied to you—every day of your life.”

The mask’s jaundiced glare gutters out, flaring back as candlelight. Duke stands beside Wayne Manor’s long dining table, silverware gleaming like scalpels. Every chair is filled, and there are no additional seats for him.

An orange juice goblet spills on the tablecloth and the liquid streaks across the linen. The color transitions into Juliet’s hair. She is on top of him and is putting her hand down his pants with the same force she’d use to push him around with back when they were kids. 

The ground he is pressed into is black and chalky and suddenly it's the center‑stage of a theatre, velvet curtains roaring shut behind. Izzy stares up at him from the front row as Juliet touches him everywhere. 

Izzy’s face distorts into disgust. 

Above, on the balcony rail, The Riddler lounges on a cherry-red seat, impossibly green against it.

“I walk with you when none will stay,

A silent shadow, night or day.

What am I?” The Riddler sings. “Answer, and I’ll make her stop.”

But Duke doesn't know the answer and he has no Lizzy with 3.38 and—

Where is God, even if She doesn't exist? Duke wants to pray and to weep. To repent for crimes he didn't commit, and enjoy the feeling of forgiveness like a caress that's more than maternal.

A lap in which to weep, but a huge and shapeless, spacious like a summer evening. “I’m so sorry Mom.” Duke would say, as he weeps in it over inconceivable things. Failures he can't remember. Poignant things that don't exist. Huge shuddering doubts concerning he doesn't know what.

“Please forgive me.” He’d say to everything during this second childhood. To the nursemaid, to the tiny bed where he'd be lulled to sleep by tales that his flagging attention would hardly follow— stories that would run through his infant hair, brown like topsoil— the part with all of the good, life-giving stuff.

A lap or a cradle or a warm arm around Duke’s neck. A softly singing voice that’d seem to want to make him cry. A fire crackling in the hearth. Heat in the winter. Duke’s consciousness listlessly wandering.

Who is Duke, when he is not surrounded by his Mother's love?

A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy. 

Izzy recently told Duke that his mother is now called God, but the name means nothing to him.

Duke lifts his eyes and looks at the stars, which are hazy and not numerous, no more than two. All that remains of this is him, a poor abandoned child that no Love wanted as its adopted son and no Friendship accepted as its playmate.

I'm so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind.

Take me, in the night, to the house I never knew. Give me back my nursemaid, O vast Silence. My crib and the lullaby that used to put me to sleep .

October 14th, 4:21 P.M Batcave, Medbay

When Duke comes to, he’s staring up at an unfamiliar, tiled ceiling. There’s a moment of blankness, then a spike of fear. Panic grips him, and he bolts upright, ready to fight.

“Whoa—slow down, Narrows,” says a voice. Duke snaps his head toward the sound and finds Jason sitting casually beside him in a folding chair. Duke looks around, heart still racing.

Oh. This is the med bay, Duke realizes.

Jason, after a minute of silence, proceeds to explain to Duke that he had been taken—grabbed sometime after his last known location pinged—and Jason just happened to be in the general vicinity, so Batman redirected The Red Hood to investigate while Bruce pretended to go the legal way and called the police.

Jason had found Duke in an abandoned property on the edge of the Narrows, in a crumbling building with a basement that had a locked steel door. In front of it, Jason had found two small-time opportunists. Amateurs. Jason says they didn’t have the brains or backing for anything big, and they’d planned to ransom him off, just like Duke had suspected. 

The door wouldn’t open, so Jason rigged the wall next to it with charges. When it blew, the last person standing inside got taken out in the shockwave—and Duke had been thrown across the room by the force of it. Jason says he found him curled up and gasping for breath, unresponsive except for the panic.

Duke tells Jason the girl who was down there with him gave him some pills and that he doesn't remember what happened after that. 

Jason’s expression tightens for a second, but he shrugs it off. “B didn’t mention there being anything in your system,” he says. “Nothing weird came up in the scan. You’re expected to make a full recovery.”

Apparently, Bruce was with Gordon now, filing a report. The G.C.P.D. would be stopping by later to take Duke’s official statement.

“Couple hours, tops,” Jason says. “They’ll want the rundown. But after that, it's over.”

They would ask him if he wants to press charges, Jason says, and Duke nods his head but keeps to himself that he probably won't. If those people needed money and felt it was their only means to get it, the system probably fucked them over in some way. And Duke isn't about to make it more difficult for them. He’ll analyze their files later to see if they were just people who struggled and who saw, in Duke, an opportunity or if they were serial kidnappers with multiple offenses.

The medbay lapses back into silence. Duke sits upright on the sort-of hospital bed, the blanket neatly folded over his lower half.

“You called me Mom ,” Jason says with a breath of a laugh.

Duke lets out a polite chuckle. It’s not a funny joke—but Jason isn’t a funny man—and Duke isn’t bold enough to meet a bad joke with a deadpan stare the way Tim does.

"No, I'm being serious. You called me Mom ."

Duke frowns. There’s nothing worse than someone clinging to an unfunny joke. Duke forces a smile anyway, hoping Jason takes the hint that this one’s a flop.

“Why are you smiling? You really did.”

Duke doesn’t get the angle. Is too tired to keep pretending this is his kind of humor. “Yeah, OK.”

“Don’t yeah, OK me. You did.”

“Right.” Duke squints his eyes.

Jason glances around, incredulous—throws his arms up like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. He looks around the room like he half-expects hidden cameras and a prank crew to jump out.

“What?” Duke barks. “Stop moving your arms, it’s making me dizzy.” His voice flattens with irritation—now more than mildly annoyed.

“Well, why did you call me Mom ?”

“I didn’t call you Mom.”

“Yes you did.” Jason replies, fast like it's a Yes-No-Yes-No race.

“No I didn’t!” Duke exclaims. “Why would I call you Mom?! Cut it out—I’m not laughing.”

“Well I’m not fucking laughing either!”

There’s a beat.

“Stop trying to get a rise out of me,” Duke says. “I just got out of some traumatic shit. I’m literally still on my deathbed.”

Jason looks smug and self-satisfied at that, “This is not a deathbed.” He says.

And that tone just makes Duke so angry.

“Oh OK, Mr. Look-at-Me-I-Died-Once-and-Made-It-My-Whole-Personality , leave me the fuck alone! I have never called you Mom in my whole entire life!”

Jason smacks his lips. “Why won’t you just believe me? There’s no reason for me to lie about it.”

“Well, that’s a question for you to answer, since I didn’t call you Mom. ”

“Unbelievable.”

“No, you unbelievable!” Duke snaps, pointing a finger at Jason for emphasis. “There’s no universe where anyone calls you Mom.”

At that, Jason actually looks a little hurt. Taken aback, really. His face twists and Duke feels sorry. Doesn’t know why he feels sorry. Waits for the feeling to shift back into the familiar comfort of irritation.

“Well, you did,” Jason says into the silence.

Duke sighs, guilt swimming just beneath his breath. “Okay. Then prove it.”

“What? Prove? How?”

“I don’t know. What about your body cam? In your helmet?”

“I didn’t have it on.”

Duke rolls his eyes and crosses his arms. “How convenient.”

“Fuck you mean, how convenient ? I had to take it off so you’d see my face.”

“And it stops recording when you take it off?” Duke says, instead of Why would I want to see your face?

“Well… I think?”

“You think?” Duke cocks an eyebrow.

“Yeah.”

“That’s not a smart design decision,” Duke says, very glad that it’s now his turn to be the Know-It-All.

“Well, it’s not a big helmet,” Jason mutters—Duke would go as far as to say it's a pout— and mimes a box with both hands about the size of his helmet. “It can’t have that much storage. I had to make concessions.”

Silence.

"You know, if you said, like, that I thought you were my Dad or something maybe I'd have believed you.  But Mom ? You don't look like my mom, you don’t sound like my mom, you don't make me think of my mom… I don't see where the line of thought would have begun.” and then, because Duke is petty like that, “Grown ass man."

Jason scoffs. "Whatever."

The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets continues, the curtain falls on what didn't happen.

Bibliography

• Row, Robin. A List of Cages. Disney-Hyperion, 2017.
• Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. Vintage Books, 2004. (On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history." “ I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way."  "I don't think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me.")
• Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Translated by Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, 2002.
• Neutral Milk Hotel. “King of Carrot Flowers.” In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Merge Records, 1998.
• The Slit Verses, Transcript One.
• The Holy Bible. Authorized King James Version, Thomas Nelson, 1987.
• “Bathroom Division.” The New York Times, [How did the division of toilets by gender come about? A brief history from ancient times to today. sanitario.eu].
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice, Stanford University Press, 2001.
• Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by John Leonard, Penguin Classics, 2000.
• the_moon_girl. “Safety Pin.” AO3 – Archive of Our Own, fanfiction based on The Boys (TV 2019)
• Sjoo, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. HarperOne, 1987.
• Hall, Dr. Jerry, and Dr. Yan-Ling Feng. Fertility Research Institute Reports, [Institutional Publication; 2018].
• Yammz. “Thine is the Glory; Mine is the Shame.” AO3 – Archive of Our Own, fanfiction based on The Falcon And The Winter Soldier
• Special thanks to my Betas; FallingStarSsS on Ao3 and Andyworldstory on Tumblr
• Further Worldbuilding
• Further Context

  ---

17 U.S. Code § 107 — Limitations on exclusive  rights:
“Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work […] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”

French Intellectual Property Code — Article L122-5:
“Lorsque l’œuvre a été divulguée, l’auteur ne peut interdire : […] Les analyses et courtes citations justifiées par le caractère critique, polémique, pédagogique, scientifique ou d’information de l’œuvre à laquelle elles sont incorporées.”

Chapter Text

"Every wounded being is forced to undergo metamorphosis.” Franz Kafka

October 19th 2:33 P.M, Gotham City High

Today, in one of the pointless and worthless daydreams that constitute a large part of Duke’s inner life, he imagines himself being forever free from Wayne Manor.  From Alfred The Butler and Alfred the Persian Cat. From Damian The Blue and from Mr. Wayne The Boss. 

In his dreams, he experiences freedom, as if the South Seas had offered him marvellous islands to be discovered.

It would all be repose, artistic achievement and the intellectual fulfilment of his being.

But even as Duke is imagining this, during his miniature holiday spent eating lunch in the Gotham City High bathroom stall, an unpleasant thought assaults his dream:

He realized he would feel regret. Yes, he feels it now as if confronted by the actual circumstance. Alfred The Butler, Alfred The Persian Cat, Damian The Blue, Mr. Wayne The boss—  all this has become part of his life. And Duke wouldn't be able to leave it without crying, without feeling that —like it or not— there is a part of him which would remain with all of them, and that to separate himself from them would be a partial death. 

Besides, if tomorrow he were to bid them all farewell and take off his Signal suit, what other activity would he end up doing —for he would have to do something— or what other suit would he end up wearing —for he would have to wear some other suit—?

For starters, there is always a Mr. Wayne Who's The Boss no matter where one goes. Duke’s Mr. Wayne simply happens to go by that very name, and he's a hale and pleasant man, occasionally two-faced but never short-tempered, self-interested but basically fair, with a sense of justice that's lacking in many great geniuses and human marvels of civilization, left and right. 

Other people answer to vanity, or to the lure of wealth, glory or immortality. For his boss Duke prefers the man named Mr. Wayne, who in difficult moments, is easier to deal with than all the other abstract bosses in the world.

October 25th, 2:30 P.M Gotham City High

Walking down the school hallways, Duke sees in those who pass by him, not the facial expressions that they really have but the expressions that they would have if they knew what kind of life he leads. Or if his face and his gestures were to betray the shy and ridiculous abnormality of his soul. There's a sleepiness that Duke can't explain but that often attacks him, in those moments— if something so hazy can be said to attack. 

He’ll be walking down a street as if he were sitting down, and his attention— although alert to everything— will have the inertia of a body completely at rest. He would be incapable of deliberately stepping aside for an approaching passer-by, and would be even more incapable of responding with words, or even with thoughts to a question asked to him by said stranger. 

This spiritless state—which would be natural and therefore comfortable in someone lying down— is singularly uncomfortable, even painful, in a man walking down the street.

It's like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness. It's a sickness with no hope of recovery. It's an alive death.

October 30th, 7:52 P.M Wayne Manor

The thing is, Duke knows Jason lies. He had lied when he told Mr. Wayne he was done with killing. He had lied when he told Barbara he wasn’t going to try to take on Penguin on his own. And he had lied the other day during that ridiculous take. 

But Duke doesn’t know why Jason lies. And maybe that’s why he can’t stop thinking about it. Can’t stop his thoughts from wandering to Jason every time he starts to feel that sleeping-awake feeling expanding and eating at his body. 

Can't stop thinking;  Why is Jason the way he is? Thinking; Why does Jason does the things he does? Thinking;  Where did his corruption begin? 

The skin, maybe. The wanting. The fear of being torn apart and found unsightly.

December 1st, 9 A.M East Narrows

Duke was born in a time where the majority of young people had lost their faith in God for the same reason their elders had had it —without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgments based on feelings instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. He, however, has always been the sort of person who is on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he's a part of but also the wide, open spaces around it.

Duke reasoned that God— while improbable— might exist, in which case She should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species he belongs to, is no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. 

That is why Duke never gave up on God as completely as they did, and he never accepted Humanity. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality , always struck him as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, he, along with other people on the fringe, keep a distance from things, a distance more commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. 

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

December 11th, 7:52 P.M, Wayne Manor

Duke has stopped going to the cemetery. There are no bodies here. No reason for him to stay and mourn people who are alive. Instead, Duke thinks about Jason. 

Jason, who was probably in one of those Necropolises at one point. 

Jason, who probably had to crawl out. 

Were maggots already eating his body? Was he decaying, in places?

What did his dead body look like? 

Whenever Duke sees a cadaver, death seems to him like a departure. The corpse looks akin to a suit that was left behind. Leftovers from someone who went away and didn't need to take the one and only outfit they’d ever worn.

December 16th, 11:24 A.M Gotham City High

Duke doodles in his math notebook. Jason , he thinks. Clicks his pen. Such a boring name. 

Does he have any other? Is it even his real name?

It must be. Duke can’t think of anyone choosing such a name on purpose. What nickname can one have with it anyway? Jay? Does Jason have anyone to call him by a nickname? Duke has heard Dick call him Jaybird , and at the time he had noted it in dull interest, but now, Duke wants to know. 

Jay-Bird. 

Jay. Bird.

Is it some sort of passerine? Or is it an inside joke? Is Jason fond of that nickname? Would it annoy him, if Duke said it?

Jay-Bird.

Jay. Bird.

Duke wants to sound it out. See how it rolls off the tongue.

The bell rings, and the blur of daily life fades behind his thoughts. When Duke gets to the manor, he sits at the corner of his bed—which he had thought about doing all day, to think clearly in the quiet. 

Now that he’s there though, he finds he has already ruminated about everything he had wanted to. Now, his thoughts transform into anything but Jason. Duke thinks about school. About homework. About patrol, tomorrow. He lies into his bed and his shoes are off, though he doesn’t remember removing them. Duke taps the pocket of his pants for his phone, so used to it being broken and cracked he only remembers it’s not supposed to be that way when he uses someone else’s.

He scrolls through the internet, reads a few emails, and then wanders through social media.

Does Jason have social media? Or is he the old-school type? Duke clicks on the search bar.

Types Jason and is overwhelmed by the number of possibilities. He needs to filter it out. 

How? Duke thinks a bit. Propels himself up on his bed. Goes to Dick’s page and searches his following list. Dick follows so many people . So many Pilates trainer pages. So many celebrities, some of whom probably follow him back. A few profile-pictureless accounts too, like Duke’s one. He types in “J” in the following search bar. Jumanjii05_ and 345 other accounts appear. Duke huffs. It’s not even sure Jason put anything with a J in his username. The pool is still too big. There is no certainty that Jason has an account on this specific platform, either.

Plus, wouldn’t it be too risky for Dick to follow Supposedly-Dead-Jason-Todd ? Duke flops his phone on his bed and lies on his side. 

Whatever. Who cares?

Duke stares at the window. At the naked branches of Wayne Manor's front garden which is so big it could be a park. There are no stars above them. They look depressing, without any leaves on. Grayer, too. 

Dead, almost, or maybe merely sleeping. 

Dick has a private account too. Maybe he follows Jason there. That would be safer. Duke gets back up on his elbows. Searches Dick’s private account—which he knows he couldn’t search through if Dick hadn’t accepted his follow request a month ago. Private my ass , Duke thinks. 

Who has a private account with a thousand followers? Duke clicks on the following area that’s smaller by a few hundred. Scrolls through and finds a few accounts he thinks could be it but has no way of knowing for sure. He goes back to the picture feed. Scrolls all the way down to Dick’s first post.

January 3rd of 2012. 

It’s a picture of Dick in a ski mask, gloved hand in a thumbs-up. It has 39 likes. Duke clicks on them.

Is Jason the type to like every post? No one Duke knows has liked this picture. He scrolls up. February 14th, 2012, a plate at a restaurant. A person is tagged. When Duke clicks on the mention, the user’s account is deactivated. Who was it? Valentine’s Day, 7 years ago. Barbara? Duke scrolls up. February 21st. February 29th. March 4th. March 12th. March 25th. April 1st. 

A picture of wooden floors drenched in water. Captioned “Got him!”. No one is tagged. No one Duke knows or profile pictures he remembers from before has liked it. There’s a comment “Lol”. From April 1st, 2012 at 9:04 P.M. 

Duke clicks on its profile, a little hopeful. 2012. Jason was still alive and kicking then, right? 

It’s a public account with 19 followers and 19 following. It only has one grainy picture of a kid’s face taken from under their chin. One comment by Abhb_112 asking if it was published on purpose. It’s a dead end. The kid is a redhead. Duke exhales in frustration.

He goes back to Dick’s account and keeps on scrolling up, up, up like nothing else matters.

Dick went everywhere in the world, it seems like. Italy and France in 2014, Japan and China in the summer of 2016, which prompted an onslaught of pictures in July. Kenya in December of the same year and then Brazil. Duke feels a little envious—he’s only ever been out of the States once.

One thing stays the same though, throughout the years. Every April 1st, Dick posts a picture of what seems to be the aftermath of a prank.

That is, until 2018. 

After that, no April 1st prank.

The behind-the-scenes of a photoshoot. Some beach at the end of the world. A wannabe-artsy black and white picture of a Haussmannian building.

When Duke looks up from his phone, his under-eyes feel moist and the room is dark. Outside the window, he can’t even see the trees anymore. 

He gets up. Stretches. Goes to the kitchen, taking the main stairs to get himself water. 

Duke's not even hungry, despite missing lunch and dinner. He sits on the high stools and his mind is devoid of any thoughts. After drinking two glasses, he begins wandering through the living room and back to the kitchen again and again.

Stops. Takes a few steps back. Waits. Those floors. They look…

Duke drowns the rest of his third cup of water in the sink and marches up the stairs two by two. He’s careful not to make too much noise. Tuesday is the only day Damian doesn’t go on patrol. Duke takes his phone. Scrolls down and down and down Dick’s profile, to April 1st, 2012. Goes back down to the junction of the kitchen and the main living room. Puts the screen next to the wooden floors in his view. 

It’s this place!

Dick pranked someone here 7 years ago. It could have been Alfred, or Bruce. But the caption says the prank was successful. Would Alfred or Bruce really miss this? Duke takes a step back. The prank was probably Dick putting a bucket of water on the edge of the kitchen's door. Duke looks around,  takes the closest chair in hand, places it just under the small flat area of it and gets up on the plush surface. The gap between the door frame and the wall is bigger than it seems from down there. It can probably fit a very big cup, though certainly not a bucket. 

Duke gets back down. Studies the picture. There's a big amount of water on the floor. A bigger amount than would be if it was soaked into an adult-sized person. That’s a very good lead. Duke feels the familiar High-Of-Great-Men. Starts to go into his room. Turns around. Puts the chair back in its place. Turns away again. Throws himself in the bed. Searches every April 1st publication up to 2018 and studies its common points. It all looks like it’s been taken inside the manor. How did he not see it before?! Granted, this place is so big he probably would not know where each place is on its own, but they are all united by a similar style. Though the style is not unique enough Duke could have picked it up from all the places Dick has been to.

Maybe Dick invited someone over to prank them? That’s a possibility, also. He checks the likes and mentions on these posts, which he had stopped doing because it wasn’t fruitful and too time-consuming, as most like mentions were always by different people with few consistencies. Abhb_112 has liked all of those prank pictures. Duke clicks on the profile after noticing the consistency. It’s a private account with a blue, cloudless sky as a profile picture. 12 followers. 5 following. Dick does not follow the account. The account doesn't follow Dick. Why? 

It must have, at one point, in order to like it since this is a private account. Or maybe it hasn't always been private?

Duke goes to the redhead kid’s account, Leeroy52__. Checks its followers and following. He follows Abhb_112, who also follows him. As well as 18 other accounts, including one called Leegreen___ that has a story. So, an active account then? Duke clicks on it. It’s a public account with 245 followers and 564 following. It doesn’t follow Dick’s private account nor his public one. It follows Abhb_112, though. It has 9 publications. Duke scrolls through them. One from a year ago has a mop of black hair on the bottom left corner, with a bit of white at its top that could really just be due to the lighting. But when Duke clicks on it, Abhb_112 is tagged.

Bingo.

December 6th, 2:22 A.M Batcave

Duke can’t access the Instagram page as it is private. Still, he refreshes the page as if it’ll help. 12 followers. 5 following. 3 publications. Duke wants to know what Probably-Jason has published.

Selfies? Group pictures? Landscapes?

Duke has never been a very good hacker, unlike Riko. That's never been his thing. The advantage of being with his Robin Group was that they could all contribute what they were good at and have their lacuna be filled by someone else’s talents. Duke was the guy on the streets. The one down there, taking orders. The one who would never back down from the fight.

He doesn’t have the nerves to just request it. They aren’t that close, Jason and him. Aren’t even friends, let alone the type of people to be on each other’s private accounts. He could ask Barbara for help, without specifying whose account it is. She would probably say no, even without knowing it’s to see what Jason is up to.

There’s probably something in the cave that could help him.

Duke will check it out tomorrow. He needs to sleep. He has school and patrol soon. He can’t afford to be tired, to make mistakes that could cost the lives of others.

Duke throws the covers over himself and shuts his eyes, determined to sleep—but the silence stretches too long, and his thoughts circle back, louder than before. He shifts onto his side, then his back, then his stomach, but no position feels right. Finally, with a quiet sigh of defeat, he reaches for his phone, screen lighting up his face in the dark like a secret he isn’t supposed to have.

He refreshes Jason’s page again and again. Next thing he knows, he’s in front of the clock that’s the access to the cave.

It’s not a bad thing to do. It’s training, if anything.

Curiosity is a good trait. An important trait to have. Especially in this line of work. A trait he already had and is now just being put into practice because he has the means to the end. He sets the clock at  10:47. The clock-door opens. He closes it behind him.

The cave is cold. Chilly. He gets down the long flight of stairs so clean it feels like his socked feet are going to make him slip. When he reaches its bottom, his they too are cold. He jogs to the main computer in an attempt to warm up. When he reaches the big chair, he flops down on it and puts his feet under his thighs. It’s perfectly lukewarm. He can’t relax, though, scared someone will get in. It’s just him, Damian, and Alfred here tonight, and if any of the others get in, they’ll do so through the car entrance, and the garage door will open all the way here in preparation, so he’ll know to leave. If anyone already in the house gets down through the elevator, it’ll make noise, and so he’ll just hide under the desk until they go back up. He only needs to keep an eye on the stairs, which he does as he boots the main A.I. in.

The computer does so softly through a sound of air whistling in. The screen goes bright white, then blue, then completely black save for a little green square in the middle. Duke taps his profile’s password, and the square expands into a rectangle. He looks at the stairs nervously.

It’s not the first time he’s used this computer. Not even the first time he’s used it alone. But it’s the first time he does something he can’t justify doing if caught. The thought makes him anxious to the point he’s about to shut down the computer and go back to his room. But the A.I. says, a bit too loud for Duke’s liking, “Hello, Duke Thomas. How can I be of assistance today?” Duke asks her to lower her voice a little, please, and she repeats the same greeting, lower.

Duke warms up his voice through a cough. “I need your help to access a private social media page,” he says, low in his throat. Glances back at the stairs. The computer’s A.I. asks him for more information, which Duke gives, and asks him to wait.

“Beginning data transcription,” she says, and a percentage bar quickly fills in. 

Then, just like that, Jason’s feed is unlocked. Duke gets to his feet, a bit surprised. He had expected for it to be harder. For the computer to ask a reason as to why he wanted to breach someone’s privacy. For Jason to have hardened the security around his account, maybe. Something.

As it is, Duke just gets closer to the screen. Looks back to the stairs. And then to the screen again. He sits back down. Scrolls. The oldest picture is from 6 years ago. It’s of a mountain taken from across the top of another mountain. There is no information on where it’s been taken. It has 2 likes. One of them is Dick’s private account. So Dick did have access to this account at some point. They have unfollowed each other. Why? Duke picks at the dry skin on his lips.

The second picture is of Jason as a kid, or a young teen, back to the camera and facing a brick wall with a Chinese character painted on it. He’s sporting a well-worn red hoodie with a gorilla on its back and has his hands in his pockets. Duke doesn’t understand the point of it. 12th of April 2016. Was it around the time Dick was in China? Were they there together?

The last picture is from January 2018. It has multiple slides. The first is of the sea. The second is of a cat. The third is a group selfie with Jason at the top right of it, smiling. He looks so young. There’s a redhead, who looks a bit older, a woman at the center of it with a garçonne haircut and high cheeks, and Dick holding the camera in the left corner. The fourth is of a thin kid with cornrows playing chess on the ground. The fifth is a Lego set. The last is a stained-glass window that looks like it’s from a church. Is Jason a Christian too? Was he in the past and not anymore?

Duke reviews the pictures again. Then goes to Jason’s following list. It has Leegreen__ at the top of it, a pictureless account, a bodybuilding account, AC/DC’s official account, and a Wonder Woman fan account. His followers seem to be real people he just didn’t follow back.

Duke leans back into the chair.

That’s disappointing, for some reason. Duke doesn’t know what he was expecting, but now that his curiosity has been sated, he feels dirty with it. Like his whole body has been covered in grime and it’s getting inside. He shuts the computer down after having asked it to permanently delete the request history and takes the elevator up. No matter how much noise it makes. It doesn’t matter if he gets caught now.

December 8th, 6:33 P.M, Cousin Jay’s House 

It's not the cracked walls of Cousin Jay’s rented apartment, nor the shaggy school desk I sit at, nor even is it the poverty of the same old downtown streets in between— which I’ve crossed and recrossed so many times they seem to have assumed the immobility of the irreparable. 

No, none of that is responsible for my frequent feeling of nausea over the squalor of daily life. 

It’s the people who habitually surround me, maybe. The souls who know me through habit without knowing me at all. They’re the ones to cause the salivary knot of physical disgust to form in my throat. 

It’s the sordid unpredictability of their lives, outwardly parallel to my own, and their keen awareness that I’m their fellow man. 

December 13th 01:31 A.M, Cousin Jay’s House

The best thing you can do when you've stumbled into a trap is push deeper.

December 16th 04:03 A.M, The Hatch

[WAYNE NETWORK | BATCOM OPERATING SHELL v4.89]  

>>> SECURE TERMINAL ACCESSED  

>>> USER: SIGNAL_004  

>>> ACCESS LEVEL: CONDITIONAL — FAMILY OVERRIDE   

>>> PULLING RECORD...

>> QUERY: "Jason Todd"  

>> MATCH FOUND [POI-082JPT]  

>> OPENING DECLASSIFIED RECORD...

────────────────────  

  [PERSON OF INTEREST FILE]  

  — CODE: POI-082JPT —  

  — SUBJECT: TODD, JASON PETER —  

────────────────────  

NAME:            JASON PETER TODD  

ALIAS(ES):       RED HOOD | ROBIN [2ND]  

                 NIGHTWING [IMPERSONATOR]  

WINGMAN [PAST]

                 RED ROBIN | BATMAN [UNAUTHORIZED]  

STATUS:          ACTIVE (UNAFFILIATED)  

ALIGNMENT:       NEUTRAL / LETHAL TOLERANT   

CITIZENSHIP:     U.S.  

BASE:            GOTHAM CITY  

CLEARANCE:       TEMPORARILY REVOKED  

RELATIONS [CROSS-VERIFIED | REDACTED]:  

   ▸ WAYNE, BRUCE [ADOPTIVE GUARDIAN]  

   ▸ GRAYSON, DICK [ADOPTIVE BROTHER]  

   ▸ DRAKE, TIM [ADOPTIVE BROTHER]  

   ▸ WAYNE, DAMIAN [ADOPTIVE BROTHER]  

   ▸ CAIN, CASSANDRA [ADOPTIVE SISTER]  

   ▸ TODD, WILLIS (BIO FATHER)  

   ▸ HAYWOOD, SHEILA (BIO MOTHER — DECEASED)

────────────────────  

PHYSICAL PROFILE  

SEX:            MALE  

DYNAMIC:     CLASSIFIED [ENCRYPTION — ALPHA 7]  

HEIGHT:         6' 2"  

WEIGHT:         225 LBS  

EYES:           BLUE  

HAIR:           BLACK (DYED  — INTERMITTENT)  

HEALTH:         VITAL SIGNS UNMONITORED  

MENTAL FLAG:    EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY [PRIOR TRAUMA]  

                UNRESOLVED ANGER | POST-MORTALITY DYSREGULATION  

SURVEILLANCE:   COMPROMISED — SUBJECT KNOWN TO SPOOF TRACKERS  

────────────────────  

SKILLSET // VERIFIED ASSETS  

 ▸ MARTIAL ARTS: ADVANCED / GLOBAL STYLES  

 ▸ MARKSMANSHIP: EXPERT / LETHAL CLASS  

 ▸ EXPLOSIVES & DEMOLITIONS: CERTIFIED  

 ▸ SURVEILLANCE & INFILTRATION: HIGH  

 ▸ AVIATION (ROTOR): TRAINED  

 ▸ MULTILINGUAL: ENGLISH, SPANISH, GERMAN, ARABIC, PORTUGUESE [LOW FLUENCY]  

 ▸ DETECTIVE RANK: HIGH 

 ▸ INTELLECTUAL RATING: 94.8 / STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP  

 ▸ KNOWN LIMITATION: UNMANAGED EMOTIONAL RESPONSE  

────────────────────  

EQUIPMENT LOG  

▸ RED HOOD HELMET [ACTIVE — FULL MASK, HUD, COMMS, OPTIC LENSES]  

▸ ALL BLADES 

▸ MODIFIED BAT-ARMOR [CHEST + GAUNTLETS + STORAGE UNITS]  

▸ TWIN HANDGUNS — HIGH CALIBER (CUSTOMIZED)  

▸ STOLEN BAT-GADGETS [SOURCE: KORD INDUSTRIES VIA AG.LOA]  

▸ UTILITY BELT (VARIANT) W/ LETHAL LOADOUT  

▸ EXPIRED ACCESS — BATMOBILE | BATCYCLE  

▸ ADDITIONAL GEAR: THROWING KNIVES | DETONATORS 

FORMER COSTUMES:  

 ▸ ROBIN (GRAYSON LEGACY)  

 ▸ BATMAN (UNAUTHORIZED | “DEVIL” SUIT) 

────────────────────  

THREAT ASSESSMENT  

+ENGAGEMENT RISK: MODERATE-HIGH  

+SUBJECT OPERATES OUTSIDE BAT ETHICS  

+VIOLENCE LEVEL: VARIABLE | OFTEN LETHAL  

+INTERPERSONAL: VOLATILE | DETACHED  

+STRATEGIC UNPREDICTABILITY: EXTREME  

[NOTE: MULTIPLE FAMILY MEMBERS EXPRESS DISTRUST OR UNEASE]

>> MONITORING FLAG: ACTIVE  

>> UPDATE INTERVAL: EVERY 48 HOURS  

>> PRIORITY WATCHLIST — AURORA CHANNEL

────────────────────  

END FILE // POI-082JPT  

[LOG CLOSED — USER SIGNAL_004]  

[DISENGAGING TERMINAL FEED...]  

[DELETING REQUEST…]

December 18th, 3:07 A.M, Wayne Manor

There are pigs so repelled by their own filth that don't draw away from it because the feeling of repulsion is so strong it paralyses, as when a frightened man freezes instead of fleeing the danger.

There are pigs like me that wallow in their sadness, not drawing away from the banality of daily life because they're so enthralled by their own impotence that they’re like birds captivated by the thought of the snake.

December 20th, 5:32 P.M, Batcave

The Cave is too quiet. Just the low hum of the servers and the static tick of the cooling fans. No Alfred. No Damian. No Stephanie. 

Mr. Wayne had passed through an hour ago with nothing but a nod— not even the standard Good Work or Fix your stance . He just came and went, leaving after him the type of silence born of human absence, which —Duke realizes— is the type of silence that doesn’t flow. It accumulates.

Its abstractness produces a fatigue that’s the worst of all fatigues. It doesn’t weigh on the flesh like bodily fatigue, nor does it disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It’s the weight of consciousness. A shortness of breath in our soul.

Duke opens up the Bat-computer now that he is done freshening up in the Batcave’s utilitarian showers, which water is always a sterile and cold cascade that smells faintly of copper and bleach, like everything down here does. 

The playback window stutters to life: helmet cam from two hours ago, grainy daylight, rooftops, alley mouths, and civilians blurred by motion. He’s in it for maybe fifteen seconds before his focus starts to slip. His own voice in the feed sounds distant— higher, breathier. Greenhorn edge. Duke hates it.

It’s unnatural, that monstrous incarnation of non-being. Seeing and perceiving something that time has left behind— no longer only made visible as long as he turns around to look at it, but constant, and with a truth real in its profound horror.

The comms bar flickers in the corner of the screen. One dot pulses red, then yellow, and a text overlay from Oracle pings from the corner of the monitor: Red Hood intervened in Burnley District last night. Solo. Two arrests, one injury. Mild.

That’s all it says. No timestamp. No detail. Just… there. Duke stares at the blinking cursor in the system’s feedback box and starts typing: What happened?

He stares at the the text for a few more seconds and ultimately decides to press the backspace until it’s gone.

“None of my business,” Duke mutters under his breath, and leans back in the chair, digging his thumbnail into the cut from an injury he sustained during patrol. It stings. 

That’s fine. That’s good. The pain is sharp and simple. Clean. “Nothing I can do about it,” Duke says, despite the feeling of being suddenly imprisoned in an infinite cell of his own making which he can not even begin to think about fleeing from, since the cell is everything.

Duke shuts the computer down. The screen goes black, and Duke sees himself in the reflection. Everything about him belongs to a glossy, old album of little boys who died long ago. 

He rubs his finger over the cut again.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, as he presses it deeper, keeping his wound fresh and open as evidence for a trial that would never come. 

“It doesn't matter.” He says. To the Cave. To himself. To whoever might still be watching.

December 21st, 9:04 A.M, East Narrows

Ok. So. Here’s the thing: Jason operates in Crime Alley during the night. It’s his turf. His time. Except for Batman himself, nobody crosses that line. And Duke? Duke does the Narrows during the day. That’s his place. His time. 

So why are there more and more Red Hood-themed graffiti in Duke’s turf than ever before. What happened? When did this start? The graffiti Duke observes now is well-integrated into the wall. Probably a few months old, at least—though Duke could swear on everything he holds precious that this exact tag wasn’t here last week. 

Odd. Investigation-worthy odd. 

Is Crime Alley swallowing the Narrows up? Is the public identity of the place changing? Is it because of the power vacuum left by Two-Face’s retirement and Scarecrow’s disappearance? Are housing prices in the Narrows dropping, allowing the population of Park Row to move up? Is Jason going where his people are going? If Crime Alley expands, is Jason going to consider the Narrows his turf too? Propagate his laws? His killing sprees?

Duke can’t let that happen. Should probably talk to Batman about it.

But Batman always tenses up at the mention of Jason these days. Alfred and Dick—whom he usually turns to— all seem sullen and sad as well. Duke knows Jason died around this time of year. Though Dick, Alfred, and Batman’s discomfort probably isn’t just about that, since Jason is alive now. What else could it be? Does it matter?

Is Red Hood bad again? Is Red Hood colonizing the Narrows?

That’s why Duke has linked the Cave’s computer to his phone—to stay alert as to where Jason goes. Duke needs to be prepared, if Jason goes rogue again. He needs to know how Jason fights. Who Jason fights against. What his weak points are. How he moves through the city. Is Jason susceptible to weather? To the news?

Certainly, he’s susceptible to his emotions. His file says so.

But how does Jason kill? Why does Jason kill? Who does Jason kill? What’s the tripping point? The tipping factor?

December 22nd, 2:34 A.M Cousin Jay’s House

Deeming that Duke earns too little, Izzy had said two weeks ago: “You’re being exploited, Duke.” And Duke remembered that, indeed, he is. But since, in life, all must be exploited, he wonders if it’s any worse to be exploited by Mr. Wayne and his protocols than by vanity, by glory, by resentment, by envy, or by the impossible.

Exploitation has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself, anyway. Even those who would critique individualism and its capitalistic roots end up reinforcing it instead.

Some are exploited by God herself, and they are the prophets and the saints of this vacuous world.

December 24th, 3:45 P.M, The Hatch

In any case, Duke found nothing that illuminated the nature of Jason’s affliction, or the reason behind his relentless lies, kills, and other assortment of sins. So Duke goes back to the source. He may not want to speak with Jason, but he’s fine with observing—watching him the way men watch animals, to come to a deeper understanding of their behaviors. And as Duke watches, he becomes more and more sure of it: there is something happening there. Jason’s face is like the page of a book written in a language Duke doesn’t understand. But Jason isn’t mindless. He has his reasons. He is like someone whose virtues have been driven to such an extreme that they became sins. And Duke is now possessed with knowing what those virtues are .

Duke begins spending inordinate amounts of time watching both old and new footage of Jason. He eats his lunch in the garden, or in a bathroom stall at Gotham City High to the music of grappling hooks. He reads the history of Gotham, does he hear sword battles? No—he hears Jason’s guns. Mr. Wayne drones on about the safety of civilians, and all Duke thinks about is Jason.

And he still can’t figure out why Jason does the things he does. Tells the lies he tells. Kills the people he kills. And Duke has to know—because it’s horrible, that all these people should be dying for no reason.

December 25, 9:04 P.M, Wayne Manor

Hanukkah happens over the span of eight nights. The dining hall in Wayne Manor looks like it’s trying to impress a lifestyle magazine—or maybe Duke just isn’t used to seeing how the rich celebrate anything. The long mahogany table, polished to a mirror shine, stretches almost the length of the room and is overflowing with food: roasted brisket, latkes stacked high with crisp edges, delicate canapés arranged like florals, bowls of roasted vegetables, sufganiyot dusted with powdered sugar, and small towers of pomegranate and sugared citrus. Blue-and-white porcelain plates and navy napkins are folded with military precision. Every centerpiece is a miniature world: silver dreidels, sprigs of olive branches, bowls of gelt scattered like coins across the table, and white candles flickering gently in polished silver menorahs.

The fireplace is roaring, its mantle trimmed in blue velvet ribbon and fresh eucalyptus.

The menorah in the corner gleams beside the window, tall and striking. Each of its branches holds a candle of white or blue; tonight, five are lit, burning steadily. A few hand-painted decorations, clearly older, lean against its base—some glittering, some childishly drawn. Duke thinks a few must be Damian’s, because they are blue, though it being paint or not, Duke doesn't have a clue. The soft golden light fills the room without overpowering it. Beside it, a modest pile of gifts has been exchanged throughout the week—wrapped in parchment blues, silver ribbon, matte white with handwritten notes tied on with twine.

It’s warm with color, quiet with tradition, and a little surreal—exactly the kind of thing Mr. Wayne pretends not to care about and Alfred insists on doing anyway.

Since, in the morning, everyone but Duke is tired from the previous day’s patrols, the Bats exchange gifts after dinner. Duke narrows his eyes. Damian is seated across from him, as always. Next to him is Tim, then Dick. On Duke’s left is Cassandra, next to whom is Bruce, seated at the head of the table. The two chairs on Duke’s right are empty. It was supposed to be Jason’s and Kate’s but they are no-shows again.

Dick is sitting straight and animated, going on about what he thinks he’ll get from each of them.

Having to buy a gift for each and every one of the Wayne's was harder than Duke expected. Before, he’d only buy something for Christmas for his mom and dad —usually homemade. And they’d get him something from the wish list he taped to the fridge. Now, he has to guess. What kind of gifts do rich people appreciate? He knows they’re not the superficial type to care about the price, but still—how can he tell the difference between the right kind of inexpensive and the wrong kind?

A gust of wind breaks through the warm hush of the manor. The faint hum of chatter drops. Mr. Wayne tenses like he’s expecting the walls to cave in around them. The front door clicks shut. Barbara reaches for something in her wheelchair.

“Hello?” echoes down the corridor into the dining room.

Duke recognizes the voice instantly. So does Mr. Wayne, who visibly relaxes in his chair. Duke, on the other hand, tenses. He saw Jason yesterday—on his phone. But Jason hadn’t seen him. And that’s entirely different.

Duke doesn’t remember how he used to act around Jason. What’s their normal? He’s never been particularly interested in him before. Never cared about being seen, or judged positively or negatively.

“We’re here!” Mr. Wayne calls back, and there’s something in his voice Duke can’t place. Anticipation maybe. Or hope. Dick wears a soft smile, the kind he saves for memories or moments that haven’t happened yet. Tim isn’t looking at the hallway at all. He’s looking at Dick. His face is a mix of green and yellow that Duke doesn’t know how to interpret.

Footsteps approach the threshold. Barbara’s face changes—recognition. Duke doesn’t turn around. His pulse hammers in his throat. He feels it in his temples, in the heat behind his eyes. 

Everyone else turns, but Duke stays still, as if rooted to the spot, and counts eight seconds before finally turning, too.

“Hey,” Jason says. He’s holding gifts. Loosely wrapped. Dick gets up immediately—giddy. Walks over and pulls Jason into a hug.

“Whoa there,” Jason says, awkwardly juggling the packages.

Dick pulls away, but places a hand on Jason’s shoulder. He lets it linger for a few secondsb. Looks directly into Jason’s eyes, searching for something. Maybe finding it. Maybe not. Then he gives his shoulder a firm tap and walks over to a different seat—two chairs to Duke’s left—leaving his own.

“Come here,” Dick says, motioning with a wide gesture. He’s inviting Jason to sit between him and Duke.

Green and yellow. Tim looks green and yellow. 

December 25, 11:43 P.M, Wayne Manor

Jason was made privy to the gift code, apparently—maybe because it’s not his first Hanukkah with the Bats, or because someone told him it would happen like this this year.

Jason chews with his mouth closed and waits to have swallowed before talking. He smells like outside. Petrol and polluted air. He says things Duke can’t hear, too focused on the motion that makes his Adam’s apple bob. Jason has a mole on his neck. 

It’s not even round. It looks like a sideways heart, with small bumps.

“Got a problem, Narrows?” Jason says, his face in Duke’s direction, way closer than Duke remembered it being a second ago. Why is Jason in his personal space? Duke reels back, mildly disgusted now, only to realize he was the one in Jason’s personal space. He sputters, “Sorry,” embarrassed now that he’s been caught—that he’s been seen by something that’s supposed to be passively looked at.

Jason frowns, dabs at his neck like he’s afraid to find something on it. Frowns again in Duke’s direction when he finds nothing. 

Cute.

December 26, 00:24 P.M, Wayne Manor

Duke is a bit nervous when opening his gifts. He’s even more nervous knowing how they’re all going to react to his gifts for them. Back with Mom and Dad, they’d all wait until one person was done to watch them react to their gift. Here, though, they all open them at the same time.

Duke waits, still—wants to see how Dick is going to like his small hand-made Discowing figure, how Cass is going to like her pre-broken ballet flat. Is Damian going to like Duke’s attempt at calligraphy of Urdu poetry?

He sees Tim, taken aback after opening Duke’s Treasure Hunt Book of Gotham Anomalies. He watches Tim open the journal, skimming through it to the last page, announcing the prize for finding the source of each of those mysteries.

It’s thick with pictures, tickets, printed article entries, hand-drawn things Duke has seen firsthand, small samples, letters without any receiving address, and a napkin from a discontinued fast food chain that’s disappeared out of nowhere and that Duke can't find proof of the existence of outside of this  very piece of paper. The spiral notebook has mud on it from where Duke accidentally dropped it in the sewers, and it smells from when Duke had tried to clean it—to no avail—which only served to make the pages distort in small waves.

Tim looks around, and then when he finds Duke, he mouths a very genuine “That’s so cool."

Duke hasn’t seen Mr. Wayne open his gift, but he sees him wearing the ring Duke bought him at the thrift store.

He pretends not to but watches as Jason opens his gift. It’s an XXL version of the sweatshirt he’s wearing in the second picture on his Instagram. Jason turns it around to see the monkey on its back. Picks back up the wrapping paper he had thrown carelessly to the floor and seems to be looking for the name written on it. When he sees it, he looks straight at Duke and gives him a thumbs up. He looks weirded out. Shaken, maybe.

Duke observes his expression closely. Wishes he could capture it in a bottle to analyze it again later.

It’s not to try to coax nostalgia out of Jason, or even out of respect for him, that Duke has gifted him this. Duke wanted to see what color Jason would make.

Would he turn frightened brown? Giddy pink? Forgetful gray? Would he snap at seeing something from before his death? Would he make a scene? Gaslight himself into thinking it’s just a coincidence?

December 27th 04:32 A.M, Batcave

Jason has deactivated his Instagram account. It feels like rejection, and Duke laughs.

January 1st, 5:34 P.M, Wayne Manor

“In middle school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules. 

Then I would walk like a zombie to the bus station, and take the first one I saw. I wouldn't even get out of the car at the last stop, just sit with my hands on my lap and stare at the sky and the yellowed winter grass until the sun went down and it was too dark for me to see.

Though I had a confused idea that my dissatisfaction was bohemian, vaguely Marxist in origin, I couldn't really begin to understand it; and I would have been angry if someone had suggested that it was due to a strong Puritan streak in my nature, which was in fact the case.

From the memory of it, hadn't I joined the We Are Robin movement, I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction. I remember reading about Pythagoras around this time, and finding some of his ideas curiously appealing — wearing white garments, for instance, or abstaining from foods which have a soul.”

January 3rd, 1:34 P.M, Wayne Manor

Duke wanders through the hallways of Wayne Manor, wrapped in a blanket that is more amulet than insulation. The fabric is heavy with comfort, with warmth borrowed from the dryer and from memory, though neither reach him where it truly aches. The fever he caught the other day—the one that made Mr. Wayne insist he stay home from both school and patrol—is still simmering low in his blood, curling behind his ribs like a coal not yet gone cold. But it’s not enough to keep him pinned down. 

The air in the manor— usually still and muted by its own enormity— feels, tonight, as if carved out of glass. His thoughts don’t move within his brain the same way noise doesn't echo between the walls. Duke cannot rest, cannot read, cannot listen. He is suspended between exhaustion and unrest, like a string too tightly wound.

The ache in his chest remains—not the kind fever brings, but the sort left behind by old griefs that refuse to be filed away. It’s a slow-blooming bruise, invisible, sort of like a page so thin it disappears sideways.

The library receives him like a cathedral does a mourner: with silence and with dust. The air is cool and dry, smelling faintly of leather bindings, wood polish, and something older—crumbling paper or old ink, preserved rot in velvet. He walks between rows of books with the inertia of ritual, passing shelves of legal codes, forensic tomes, Gotham’s dark biography written over and over in cold analysis. None of it calls to him. These books were not made to soothe.

But then he reaches a forgotten corner, its shelf slouching slightly under the weight of what the rest of the room has chosen to overlook. Books lean haphazardly, some even backwards, as if they’ve been shoved there by someone in a hurry—Duke would have thought this was the sort of thing Alfred cleaned up. But it's not, apparently. There is no pattern to them.

He drags his fingers along the spines—some cracked, some stiff—and they pause on one that is colder than the rest. Denser. Shining black like a collapsed sun despite its white paperback.

The Art of War.

Its title is ghosted at the edges, the ink faded like breath on a window. He opens it without thinking. The first thing he sees is a name.

Jason Todd.

Pencil. Jagged. Scrawled with the angry finality of a boy who needed to mark something as his own, even if only a book. There’s no flourish to the handwriting, no pretense. Just a stake driven into the page. Duke stares at it, his thumb hovering just beneath the curve of the J. 

He flips through it, and the underlining begins immediately. Sentences slashed in ink, thoughts scribbled in the margins in impatient bursts. Some words are crossed out entirely. Some notes end mid-thought. Blue ink on yellowed paper. Clarity pressed into old pulp. Duke reads them all instead of reading the book.

One says Hard? Try being an orphaned Omega in Crime Alley.

Duke’s body locks around the words. His stomach pulls in tight, as if something inside has dropped without warning. The sentence is underlined twice. The handwriting is still Jason’s, but messier here, like the pen had slipped or his hand had trembled.

The air inside the library thickens. The silence becomes oppressive again, but now it has a shape, a presence. Something watchful. He reads it again.

It doesn’t make sense. It makes too much sense. 

Duke stares at the sentence until the letters blur into phantoms. He feels it—the thread of understanding pulling taut, winding itself around his ribs. He doesn’t want to follow it. Doesn’t want to believe it. Not because it’s horrifying, but because it’s too intimate. Because it makes sense in a way that hurts.

Because if Jason was—if he is—

He closes the book slowly, fingers trembling just slightly. The weight of it feels symbolic now. Not meant for him. Only meant only for him.

He slides it back into the shelf, spines it in with practiced care. The same crooked angle. As if he could undo the moment. As if returning it to its hiding place will erase what he now carries.

He stands still. Long enough to feel the sweat cooling on his neck, the burn behind his eyes starts to throb. The silence wraps around him again. 

To go from the ghost of doubt to the phantom reason is merely a change of cells.

January 7th, 3:44 A.M, Cousin Jay’s House

It doesn’t seem so far-fetched then, that Duke might have once, in a moment thick with pain and panic, called Jason Mom instinctively. With something raw in his throat and something older in his blood.

Because whatever it is that threads all Omegas together—through every variation, every contradiction—must have moved between them, in that moment, like a current. And maybe it wasn’t logic that sent Jason hurtling toward him that day. Maybe it was destiny. 

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

In that moment, Duke had needed a mother. And Jason, despite everything, had become one.

January 8th, 2:42 A.M, Park Row 

The circumstances of Jason's life appear to be marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon— perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives— of being tailored to the images and likeness of his instincts, which tend toward inertia and withdrawal. He wears on his pale, uninteresting face a look of suffering that seems born from the indifference of having already suffered a lot. Dejection— the stagnation of cold anguish— so consistently covers his features that it’s hard, for Duke, to discern any of his other traits. But perhaps it's too much to see in his more violent counterpart, and Duke's relating to an assumed personality rather than what's in front of his eyes. Be this, or that, these predicaments were strangely favourable to Jason, for they brought him somebody of Duke's character, who could be of use to him.

January 9th, 6:34 P.M, Cousin Jay's House

To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo Da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we've understood it.

Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.

January, 23rd, 2:00 P.M, The Hatch

It’s only because Duke is watching that he knows it’s happening.

Barbara—ever-vigilant, ever-neutral—logs things like she breathes: efficiently, precisely, with the cold steadiness of someone who has long accepted that proximity and emotional investment rarely mix well in their line of work. She doesn’t take sides. She doesn’t involve herself in the petty rivalries or heavy silences that pass like storms between Bruce and Jason. She simply monitors. Keeps the cameras rolling, keeps the feeds clean, keeps her distance like a surgeon with gloves on. She exists in every comm line and system alert, always a half-second ahead of disaster. Her control center is omnipresent. Not because she’s nosy. Because she has to be. Because they all rely on her.

Duke respects that. He does. But respect isn’t the same as trust.

To him, Oracle’s impartiality feels more like detachment. Useful, yes—essential, even—but cold in a way that makes his skin crawl. A friend to all is a friend to none. And Duke’s never put much faith in people who remain untouched while watching others burn. He doesn’t think she’s malicious. Just… remote. Observing from a place where nothing can reach her. 

Still, she’s the reason he sees it—Red Hood’s name pinging in the system at 2:04 P.M. 

A quiet little alert, tucked into a corner of his interface, logged as low-priority engagement by Oracle herself. Jason had apparently reported in—something about a drug den near Crown Point, easy takedown, no backup required. Standard behavior. Jason has always been reckless like that. Bold. Self-contained. Suicidally stubborn.

For twelve minutes, everything is quiet. At 2:17 P.M, though, Barbara sends a second ping. This time with coordinates. It reads; Just to be safe—can someone check?

Duke doesn’t move at first. Watches the message hang in the air like a dare. Waits for someone to respond. But there are no answers. No read receipt. No "On it"  ‘s . Duke checks the time again and feels something coil tight in his chest.

It’s Thursday. Daylight. Duke’s shift. No one else is on duty.

So why the hell is Jason out there? Jason’s a night guy. And he shouldn’t be in Crown Point at all—let alone in the middle of a bust that doesn’t fall under his hours, doesn’t concern his usual turf. It’s not like they coordinate much, but there’s an unspoken rhythm to these things. Boundaries. Rotations. Duke watches the timestamp again, sees the truth in it: 5:20 P.M. Broad daylight. Duke’s daylight.

“Fuck.” Duke says, as he hits the key for the motorcycle to unlock. He doesn’t text the group chat. Doesn’t answer Barbara. Doesn’t check protocol or ask for backup. 

If something’s wrong, if Jason’s hurt, if this becomes another mess no one else is paying attention to, Duke needs to see it with his own eyes.

January, 23rd 7:03 A.M, Undisclosed Location

The warehouse smells like rot and chemicals—mildew steeped into concrete, piss drying in corners, the burnt ozone tang of discharged ammo still hanging in the air.

Duke moves through it in silence, his boots soundless on the cracked floor, the echo of distant dripping playing tricks on his ears. He can feel the tension building beneath his skin with every step, nerves humming with static. His visor flickers, registering half-dead heat signatures and the ghost of a fight already ended. There’s blood. Not just spilled—fresh. Oxygen-rich. Hot. It paints the air with urgency.

The first sign of what’s gone down hits him like a warning. Two men down near the back of the room, bodies sprawled where a table of narcotics now lies in ruins, glass crunching under their limbs. Duke doesn’t stop to check if they’re breathing. What he sees next makes his chest clench. In the far corner, in the deepest pocket of shadow, there’s movement. Two men are standing. And one on the ground.

It’s the red helmet that tells Duke Jason is the one losing.

He’s slumped against a wall, one legs stretched out as if he collapsed mid-crawl. Even from within the dark Duke can see the tremor in Jason’s hands, his shallow breath and his twisting frame.

The two men still standing don’t see Duke yet. They’re too focused on Jason. One of them drives a boot into Jason's ribs with a particularly solid, echoing thud. Jason coughs, wet and sharp and the sound has something in Duke’s chest twists violently. There’s no thought, after it. No calculation. Just motion.

Duke slams into the first man from behind like a launched battering ram, his elbow catching bone with a crunch. The man staggers, mouth open in a gurgle, before Duke grabs his collar and drives him face-first into the wall, once—twice—three times. The guy slides down, no longer making noise. The second man catches Duke in a chokehold before he can pivot, arms like steel around his neck, locking him back against a sweat-slick chest. The smell is overwhelming—sour breath, blood, smoke.

Snarling, Duke bites it. His teeth sink into flesh. The man screams, flailing, and Duke turns into the movement, slamming his knee between the guy’s legs with all the force he can muster. The man folds in half with a retch, but Duke doesn’t stop. He pummels him again and again, fist meeting face, ribs, gut. There’s a noise in his throat he doesn’t recognize, not until it echoes back at him, feral and ragged and ugly. Duke realizes then that he can’t stop. That he doesn’t want to.

The second man finally goes limp, face a pulpy mess, and still Duke keeps on hitting him. His own pulse is so loud it’s like it’s in his teeth. He only stops when the room goes completely silent again, except for the sound of his own breathing—fast, jagged, half-shattered inside the helmet. His hands are trembling. 

Duke tells himself it’s just adrenaline. Just instinct. But there’s a part of him that knows he went too far.

When Duke turns around, it's only to find that Jason hasn’t moved. His chest rises in short, unsteady breaths, the kind that don’t match a healthy rhythm. Kneeling, Duke presses two fingers to Jason’s throat and feels the weak throb of a pulse beneath too-warm skin. He shifts into triage mode automatically, checking vitals like Mr.Wayne drilled into him: respiration, responsiveness, wounds. His voice catches when he speaks. 

“Jason,” he says, low, almost inaudible. “Hey. You’re hurt. I need to get you out.”

Duke's hands are shaking as he tries to get Jason up. It slips. Jason is too heavy and there's blood on Duke's gloves. Blood on Jason. Blood on the floor. Everything's red.

“I’ve got you,” Duke murmurs, soft still. “I’ve got you.”

January, 27th, 8:05 A.M, Batcave— Medical-Bay

Cold water feels warm when your hands are freezing, Duke thinks, as he scrubs the grime and blood from beneath his fingernails. 

His hands are pink from scrubbing, skin raw, fingers trembling slightly as he rinses the last of the night from his knuckles.

Jason had been as heavy as Duke expected. Not dead weight—he was breathing—but close enough that Duke’s arms were already aching by the time he’d dragged him out of that warehouse. Duke's gloves had been slick with blood, useless against the grip needed to pull someone twice your muscle mass across ice-slick concrete. So he’d torn them off and used bare hands. Dragging Jason out of that freezing tomb was like hauling a corpse. 

It had taken Duke to get Jason near the bike to realize he couldn’t get him on it. The angles were wrong, the balance too precarious. Jason’s limbs wouldn’t bend right. Duke had tried twice—gritting his teeth, shifting his weight, muttering curses under his breath—but each time, Jason had nearly slipped. So Duke called Oracle, voice low but urgent, and told her that he had Jason, unconscious, beaten and unable to be moved, right there with him.

I’m sending a Batmobile as we speak. She had said.

But even loading Jason in a Batmobile had been a mess. As if Jason wasn't heavy enough already, he kept sliding from Duke’s arms, sloshing with every movement. It was a hassle, but Duke managed. 

Alfred was waiting inside the Batcave when they arrived. Grim-faced, professional, silent in that way that felt empty and full of words unspoken.

The medical assessments were routine. Concussion. Bruised ribs. Internal bleeding, but not critical. A hairline fracture in the right radius. No spinal injury. Vitals steadying after fluid intervention. He’ll wake up soon , Alfred had said. Just needs time.

So Duke stayed.

For two full days, Duke lingered beside Jason in the med-bay, chair pulled close. Duke showered there, ate there, slept there. Tim came two times and played cards with Duke. 

Mr. Wayne met Jason and Duke three times a day and made small talk with Duke as they both watched the monitors, watched the way Jason’s breath hitched and slowed, watched the twitch in his fingers as he dreamed. 

They both knew every detail of every injury: the busted cartilage in Jason's left knee from being kicked sideways, the jagged line across his temple where a fist had split skin to bone, the bruising patterns on his right arm.

Jason stirs as Duke looks at it. First, it’s only a grunt—small, barely-there—but soon enough, it becomes eyes opening and head turning and legs moving.

“Hey,” Duke says “hey, you’re up!” He continues, with a cheer to his voice like he hasn't slept only two hours a night for the past two days.

Jason’s head turns slightly, eyes blinking out of sync.

“What happened?” Jason tries to sit, slow and groggy, but Duke is faster and he moves to stop him, palm flat against Jason's shoulder, gently pushing him back against the mattress. Then, Duke activates the medbed controls and adjusts the elevation—half-lying, half-sitting. 

“Well, what happened is that I found you getting beaten up by goons in a basement, Jason.” Duke says, as he goes to sit back down on his chair. “Goons, Jason! Not even good goons. Just…average goons!” Duke shakes his head. “How did you even lose that fight?”

“They had nasty tricks up their sleeves.” Jason winces as he shifts, one hand going to the side of his neck where a bruise blooms beneath gauze and wrap.

“Okay, but why weren’t you prepared for them? You’ve been in this line of work for, what, fifty years?”

“I’m not that old.”

“You were out for two days, dude.” Duke holds up two fingers. “Two days! I don’t even know what they did to keep you in a coma for two days .”

That's a lie. Duke knows every inch of it. 

Jason doesn't say anything. Just looks at Duke with that kind of long, unreadable stare that makes Duke’s shoulders tense. Something about Jason's silence feels wrong. Like Jason is missing a page in the script Duke had written in his head. Jason isn't panicking. Isn't shocked. Isn't surprised.

“Well don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” Duke asks, the words pressing forward too fast.

“I have nothing to say for myself.” Jason’s voice is slow, like he is trying to decide what to feel in real time. “I just—yeah, I think thank you? I guess? If you’re the one who rescued me?”

“Yeah, I’m the one who rescued you.”

“I guess we’re even, now.”

Duke doesn't even wait for the sentence to fully tumble out of Jason's mouth and says “What would you have done if I wasn’t there and something bad had happened?” He hates how casual Jason sounds about this whole thing, like what happened was just a bump in the road, not a bad beatdown in an ice-cold basement.

“I would have managed like I usually manage.”

“What do you mean manage? You got killed like twice in your life!”

“Wow, that’s a low blow. First of all, I died, like, once and a half times.”

“That’s once and a half too much! Seriously, dude, you need to look out for yourself. Stop getting in plain suicidal situations all of the time . I mean, did you even know those two goons were Alphas?”

There's a beat of silence. Jason’s expression doesn't shift.

“Yeah, I checked their file!” Duke stares at Jason, incredulous. “Didn’t you?”

“What’s them being Alphas have to do with anything?” Jason asks, eyebrows drawing down.

“ What does it have to do with anything? ” Duke scoffs, “Are you kidding me? What if they knew about you and wanted to hurt you? You don’t even have 3.38—”

“3.38? What’s a 3.38? What are you talking about? What do you mean found out about me ?’”

Duke’s throat tightens. The words dry up behind his teeth. He takes a breath.

“Look, Jason, there’s no good way to put it but…” Jason stares, waiting. “I know what you are.”

Jason blinks once, slow. “And what am I?”

Duke looks away. Avoiding Jason's eyes. “You know...”

“No, I don’t. Please enlighten me.”

“You're an Omega… and stuff.”

Jason stiffens, then sits up more sharply, eyes gleaming with sudden clarity. “Ah-ha!” He points a finger at Duke like he’s Sherlock Holmes having just found out who the murder was. “I knew it!” He says “You stalker ! That hoodie you gave me! It wasn’t a coincidence! You stalked me!”

“Don’t call me a stalker, God—that’s a joke. I’m not a stalker.” Duke pinches his lips, averts his eyes. “I was looking for intel.”

“Intel?” Jason repeats, scandalized, then jabs his thumb at his own chest, surprisingly energetic for a man who just woke up from a two days coma. “About me? Why would you need intel about me?!”

“Well, you are suspicious!” Duke snaps.

“How am I suspicious?! You’re suspicious!”

“No I’m not! I don’t go around killing innocent people, that’s you! I’m not cannibalizing your territory, that’s you! ”

Jason looks taken aback.

“First off, I haven’t killed anyone in five months, Duke ,” Jason raises five fingers. “five months! That’s almost, like, half a year! And I barely even step foot in the Narrows ever since you appeared!”

“Liar!” Duke shouts. “Dirty liar! I saw graffiti of your fat fucking face on my turf!”

“Then they were there before!” Jason exclaims. “They’ve probably been there for years! I used to do the Narrows as well as Park Row before you were even born!”

“No, they weren’t here before you…” Duke scrambles for an insult. “Liar!” Is the best he manages. “I would have seen them!”

“I’m no liar, you just never believe anything I say.”

“Well, I read your file. I know you are prone to lying.”

“My file says that?”

“Yes.”

“Harsh.”

“Harsh truth!”

They stare at each other. The air between them is sharp. Still. The kind of stillness that presses down on your ears until they ring.

“How did you find out I was an Omega anyway?”

“None of your business.”

“It’s literally me we are talking about! It's the literal definition of being my business !” Then, “Dude, you can’t just go around stalking people!”

“Pot. Kettle!” Duke yells, embarrassed. “It’s not even relevant to the current conversation!” He says, sitting back down, realizing only now he got up at some point. “You need someone to watch your back, is the point of it. You can’t be trusted on your own, is the point of it !”

“I can watch my own back! I am grown. In fact, I am more grown than you !” Jason points his finger at Duke.

“No, you can’t be trusted! You can’t! I just found you unconscious under two Alphas! Do you even care what could have happened?!” Duke throws his arms up, “Why are you always sabotaging yourself?” His breath stutters. “It’s like you’re not even trying to be rehabilitated.”

“I don’t need reab—”

“You are 36—”

“22.”

“With no pack, no proper life outside of the mask, no friends, no job, your girlfriend left you, your best friend is dead, half the people who know you don’t trust you! Last I heard you used yourself as bait to lure out this weirdo Black Mask out of hiding—which is basically suicide!”

“Okay, that’s just you lashing out at me at this point.”

“I’m not lashing out at you!” Duke says, even though he is. “This is the truth , and someone needs to tell it to you!” Duke’s voice cracks. “Look, I know you had a fucked up life, but that doesn’t mean you should do fucked up shit and make your situation even more fucked up than it already is !” He moves his hands about again. “And worry the people who love you in the process!”

“The people who love me? You just ranted to me about how people don’t love me.”

“I didn’t do that! Stop putting words in my mouth! That’s so annoying!” Duke exhales, shaky and loud. “I know there are people who love you. Bruce and Dick and Alfred…” and me . “They grieve you as we speak!”

Jason looks like he’s been hit, at that. His face twists into something ugly and unreadable.

“You’re being mean,” he says, quietly. The words are childish. The tone is not.

“I’m telling you what you need to hear to kickstart your metamorphosis!”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to metamorphose!” Jason yells, and the words echoe. “Maybe I’m perfectly good as I am!” Another beat. “Seriously, I don’t even know why you’re being so rude to me right now.” He leans back into the half-up half-down bed. “It’s not like you.”

“You don’t know what’s like me !” Duke says, because it’s very much like him. “You barely even know me !”

“Then if we barely even know each other, why do you care?!”

Duke freezes. The words ring like a gunshot.

He’s breathing too hard, and can't even look at Jason anymore. “You’re right.” He says, pointedly. “I don’t even know why I tried.”

And before he gets up to leave, Duks spits, voice venomous, “You’re nothing like her.” 

Duke turns around quickly enough to only see Jason’s face crumple like broken glass for a second.

Duke doesn’t even know why he  attempted to help Jason to begin with. Maybe it’s just that even cold water feels warm when your hands are freezing.