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Walking through the graveyard, Duke once again felt that wave of sadness. The feeling only amplified as he stopped in front of his father’s grave. It hadn’t been long since Doug succumbed to the Joker Toxin running through his body, and Duke hadn’t yet had enough time to come to terms with it.
Sighing, Duke dropped down onto the freshly churned dirt, leaning back against his father’s gravestone. He stared up at the sky, looking at the few stars he could see and counting them. He remembered when Doug used to take him out in the back of the old pickup truck and they’d lay in some far out field to give stories to the little balls of light in the sky.
Some things had changed since then - Doug was dead for one, and two…
“Hey Dad,” Duke said softly, “I’m not your little girl anymore.” He swallowed, hard. He wasn’t scared, exactly. He knew his father would never judge him for something like this, for being who he was. Knowing didn’t help his brain.
“Some things have changed, since the last time we talked,” he continued. “And I’m sorry I could never visit you at the hospital. My, uh, my foster dad, Bruce. He would go every week and update me, though, so even if I didn’t see you, I still worried, you know?” Duke got the feeling that sentence didn’t quite make sense, but his throat hurt and he knew Doug could parse through it anyway. He always had, even when Duke himself didn’t quite know what he was saying.
He took a breath, trying to forge on. “You should know something else. Um, my brother, Tim, he’s a genius right? Well, the rest of my foster family is as well, but Tim’s the one that got the ball rolling here. Anyway, after you-” he choked, the word digging claws into his esophagus and making him bleed. “After you started your permanent sleep,” Duke said instead, “Tim looked at some samples from you - hair, blood, bone, and more - and he managed to figure out what Joker Toxin was.”
Duke shifted so he could press his cheek to the hard cement. If the stone was warmer, he could almost imagine he was pressed against Doug’s chest. “What I’m trying to say is that Tim managed to figure out how to make a cure.” He laughed, somehow, even as it burned his insides in punishment. “You saved Gotham, Dad! Look at you…”
Tears began to trickle out of his eyes, and Duke switched back to staring at the cloudy sky to try and keep his face dry. It didn’t work. He curled up, sobs wreaking havoc on his body, and Duke pressed his head in-between his knees, trying to pull himself together.
When he felt like he could breathe again, he forced his back straight. He put his hand on his sternum, pressing hard until the hiccups stopped.
“One- one of the p-people you saved was Mom,” Duke gasped out, trying and failing to keep his voice steady. “She managed to dig up her old photo account, once she was coherent enough, a-and she showed me a bunch of your old pictures.” He sniffled, wiping his face with his sleeve. Duke could almost hear Doug shout ‘Gross!’ at him, but unlike all the times before, no soft pillow came to collide with his body. It nearly set him off into weeping again.
“The two of us are going to the salon after I talk to to you, so I can get that stupid afro you had in 6th grade,” he whispered. “And don’t get me wrong, it did look stupid, you know.” Once again, he could almost envision the offense Doug would take.
“It’s not the same,” Duke mumbled. “I should’ve visited you, at the place. Even if you weren’t you, I could still have- still have hugged you or came up with a list of jokes or something. Talking to you here-” his voice cracked, as it was so wont to do nowadays. Stupid second puberty. “Talking to you here, where you can’t talk back just isn’t the same.”
His voice dropped until he couldn’t even hear himself, “It’s not fair.”
'I know it’s not fair, baby girl,' his dad would say, and he barely even registered the misgendering his mind had done. Because of course his dad would die before Duke could switch out the pronouns and sayings in his head. 'It’s not fair, the world’s not fair, but you can be, not matter what happens. You can be the kindness the world won’t give you. Carry extra pads in your purse, a taser to give to an unarmed friend. Do whatever you need to do to be nice to people, okay, darling?'
Duke’s pretty sure putting on brightly covered Kevlar isn’t what Doug had in mind, but he also knew that once he convinced his dad why, Doug would be his number one supporter.
He just wished he didn’t have to have that support from beyond the grave. He wanted to scream at the sky, grab whatever gods had decided this was the way it had to be and throttle them until they changed their minds, roll around in the dirt until he could tuck himself under his dad’s arm.
That was all he really wanted. His dad. His number one supporter on every other day, his number two when Elaine had the title. He wanted his dad and his cookies, the way they erased every bit of mental strain and stress. He wanted the man who would do push ups in the living room, a younger Duke on his back. He wanted the guy would helped set up every toy in any color the younger him wanted. The dude who helped him with his math and science homework even when he was exhausted from work. The kind human being who took him to different shelter and food banks and helped out even with his body aching and hurting.
Duke wanted his dad. Was that really such a crime?