Work Text:
There are good days.
☀︎
On particularly stressful weeks, Duke’s life has a certain rhythm. School; patrol; investigations. School; patrol; investigations. On the weekends: patrol; volunteering; making time for his loved ones; investigations. He sees his mother every day, incorporates it into his patrol route, right at the end so he can watch the sun go down with her and recharge before he has to head to the cave for his daily check-in. Sometimes, he’s lucky and Bruce is pulled away at that time so he gets to report to Oracle from The Hatch. He imagines that one day, Bruce will put his money where his mouth is when it comes to trusting Duke and therefore the day team The Signal’s putting together. But until then, he has to show his face to Bruce at the end of his days and the start of the night shift. School; patrol; proving himself, always proving himself; investigations; do it all over again the next day and the next and the next. Head down, blinkers on, focus and make it work.
He knows that historically, this hasn’t always worked out well for him in the long run but he’s figured it out now. He knows how long and how hard he can push before he needs to reassess. He won’t let it get that bad again. Besides, when it got to be too much before, he didn’t have everything he has now. He wasn’t everything he is now. He has his mother, he has his friends, and he’ll have his father back someday soon, too. He’s got it, and if his muscles ache more than usual, if his temper flares a bit quicker than the world has patience for, if he’s always fighting off a low-grade migraine… Well, he manages. Takes more frequent ice baths, raids Steph’s medicine cabinet when he hangs out at her place after self-care days he spends mentally working through The Penguin’s latest scheme. He laughs a little harder and jokes a little more.
He makes it work. Things are good.
☀︎
There are good days.
☀︎
Elaine’s fingers tremble where they lay on Duke’s head, in the middle of a series of gentle strokes that, to Duke’s eyes, scatter photons to the rhythm of her heartbeat. She’s using the hand not connected to the EKG to pet his cornrowed hair while the other holds her cards low to the table pulled over her hospital bed. Sunlight streams into the exposed parts of her body, and she expels it as something different, something more muted but still golden. It shines out of her face, her arms, her toes. He’ll get up to pull the blanket over her feet again in a moment but they’ll be bare again soon thereafter. She’s restless, now, even when she’s calm.
Her lips are pursed in mild displeasure as she asks, “Doc Sherwood’s girl been doing your hair?”
Duke hesitates for a brief moment. There’s so much, so much he needs to tell her. He feels like he’s been slowly re-introducing her to her own life. Sometimes she mentions people and places that were just there, radiant and lively when she last looked but that haven’t been around for years and years. He never knows when he should say something.
“Naw, Izzy’s been doing it.”
Her face smoothes out comically quickly as she gently drops her hand with one last pat. “It looks great, baby.”
They stare at each other for one moment of perfect silence then burst into simultaneous laughter.
Within the levity, Duke feels a familiar throb of grief and terror as Elaine’s face changes. Her mouth opens wider than it does when she speaks. Her laugh lines deepen into full relief. She throws her head back as her shoulders shake. For one moment too small to measure, Duke is thirteen and terrified, but then his mother’s voice is joyous and her eyes are alight with love. He reminds himself, as he often has to, that she’s always laughed with all her being. She used to laugh so hard and for so long that tears would stream down her face, her breath would hitch and his father would have to hastily get her a glass of water, and that was joyous, too. They used to laugh together and they will again.
“It’s not her,” he says when they’re through. He finally gives in to the urge to tuck her back into her blankets properly. She’s already twitched one foot back out before he’s dropped back into his chair. “She’s good but you know I’m tender-headed.”
Elaine gives him a knowing smile and pulls her knees up so her feet are under the covers again. He can see the blankets moving as she taps one of her feet on the bed. “That’s true enough. No one could ever get you to sit still so they could work.”
“No one but you,” he corrects. His mother’s hands are gentling. He used to fall asleep with his head resting on her knee while trying to solve the mystery of what shapes her hands were creating where he could not see. She made art out of him, shaped symbols on him to read even when she wasn’t around so he would know who he was and who his people were. “I’ve been growing it out again since we found...” He sighs, drifting off because talking about it gets to be a lot sometimes. “It’s a little difficult because my new school has all these stupid rules about us.”
Elaine catches his hesitance. Of course she does. But she doesn’t press. He knows that it’s even more difficult for her than it is for him. They keep having to give themselves grace. “I can come down there and talk to somebody.”
“That’s okay, Mama,” he says, allowing them both to keep pretending she can walk out of here whenever the mood strikes her. “You’ve got a lot on your plate, and they can’t stop me anyhow.”
She lays a heavy hand on his over the covers. “Never too much to be there for you, too,” she murmurs. Her eyes, trained on the place their hands meet, are misty and her voice is thick. He’s opening his mouth to say something even though he hasn’t decided what but she shakes her head, clearing her throat. When she looks back up at his face, the sadness he saw blooming in them is put away again. “Had a visit from your… friend.”
Duke’s heart shoots up his oesophagus. He’s not ready for this. They’ve given up on the card game by now. Their hands lay scattered on the table, too mixed up to pick back up. Duke busies himself with gathering them up to put away so he doesn’t have to look at her. “Which one? My little black book’s pretty full.” It’s a paltry diversion but it’s all he has.
She lets him get away with it. “Little infant son of mine, what do you know about a little black book?” The humour in her voice isn’t false but it is a little put on. They have to perform for each other sometimes now. Sometimes, he pretends not to be hurt so she won’t worry. Sometimes, she pretends not to be hurting so he won’t worry. There are other times, too; when they strip themselves bare and they talk and they talk about it all until their throats hurt and they have to grasp onto each other to keep each other afloat. But also this. Little demonstrations to comfort each other.
“You know Brittany Murphy’s my girl,” he laughs. He’s run out of cards to straighten up. They go back inside the box easy as anything, still so new that they haven’t bowed out of shape.
“Atta boy,” his mom returns, cuffing him gently beneath his chin. Her smile turns rueful a second later and he braces himself for the conversation to come. “Batman came to see me, Duke.”
“Which one?” He’s talking before the words are fully out of her mouth, rude as that is, because he still isn’t ready. His mom, his dad, his family is everything to him. Everything. But Gotham’s also his family and he can’t just leave the city, the world and all of humanity to fight battles he knows he can help with. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right but is there more than one now?” Her confusion is real, and her patience is boundless.
He takes her out with gratitude even knowing it’s only a stopgap. She’ll let him stop and start as many times as he needs to, to get through it. “There’s one out in NYC now. You’ll like him. He reminds me of Auntie Bea’s little cousin from Michigan, remember her? And there was another one here a little bit ago, but he put the cowl down when I brought the old one back, kinda. Well, I mean, the train really did the—” His eyes go wide as he realises what he’s saying, and that she’s caught where it was going even if she doesn’t know what the words mean, exactly. She’s let him stop and start because she knows it trips him up enough that he’ll usually stumble back on topic without realising.
“Mama, whatever he said to you…” He trails off because he can’t claim it’s untrue or exaggerated without knowing what was said. He feels a momentary surge of white-hot anger at Bruce for it. Why he’d go behind Duke’s back to talk to his mother to begin with is beyond him, but it is very much in line with Bruce’s brand of boundary crossing. Usually he’d be halfway across the city by now, ready to ask Bruce what he’s trying to achieve but his mom’s talking so he stays put.
“Little bird,” Elaine whispers, her voice soft and so tender that Duke feels himself tearing up reflexively. She takes his hand in both of hers again, this time bringing it up to her face to press it to her lips and then her forehead. He can feel her own tears washing down the back of his hand as her body bows over their hands as if in prayer.
“I’m sorry, Ma,” he rushes to say. He tries to put his free arm around her. When she realises what he’s doing, she surges back up and pulls him into her arms instead. He’s small again, in the safety of her arms. She’s sunshine warm and he can smell what’s unquantifiable but distinctly her underneath the chemical smell of medicine now that he’s this close.
Her voice, when it comes, is resonant in the chamber of her embrace. “You don’t have to worry about what he said either way but I have my own mind. Fought for it, too. Still fighting for it. I’ve always fought, and I’ve taught you to fight, like you fought for me and stay fighting for your dad. For your mind, for your heart, for what you care about. I read your letter explaining who you’ve become and I… I know we haven’t been talking about it but that’s only my fear. I get scared for you. Always have, always will. The world isn’t kind to people like us, baby. But you wanna make it better, you gotta keep fighting for it.” She takes a deep breath, and he can hear how she’s still crying, too. “You be careful when you’re out there, you hear? Stay safe for me, and keep fighting.”
He gingerly lifts his head to look at her. Her face is serene but her eyes are fierce. She carefully dries his tears even though her hands still tremble, even though she’s still struggling to get her strength back and to exist in her own body again. His heart swells with equal measures of sorrow and relief.
“I will. I promise.”
☀︎
Good days.
☀︎
Duke’s father used to work dangerous jobs regularly. Even when they weren’t obviously so, when every consideration was taken to protect the labourers on a given project, there was some danger in how people like him used their bodies and the machines and materials they worked with. He would come home with aching muscles, and sometimes with new lacerations and bruises. Most of the time, when Duke or his mom voiced their concern, he would give them a big smile and say, “What, these? These are marks of living, honey. Marks of living,” and that would be that. At least, where Duke could see.
But there were times when Duke would find him sitting on the couch with his limbs held strangely, eyes closed, perfectly still and a look of intense concentration on his face. When he was like that, then he’d say, “Listening to the pain. Just… have to listen for a bit. Get to know it some.”
Duke didn’t know what that meant, not until after the Joker ripped through his life and left him raw and bleeding. He’s learned how to listen to the pain now. How to sit in it for a while and let it wash over him so he can see its exact shape. So he can map out its boundaries and gauge its depth. So he knows that even when he’s in the thick of it, it will pass, and he’ll be better prepared for the next wave.
☀︎
Good.
☀︎
He finds himself having to stop fights often. Sometimes, it’s between pockets of warring gangs, and he’ll end up limping his way back to The Hatch having barely prevented mass casualties.
Other times, while he’s volunteering, he’ll overhear one six year old say something like, “Don’t laugh!”
With a dramatic gasp, and sounding for all the world like something precious has been taken from them, another will respond, “Even though it’s funny?” followed by the screech of tables and/or chairs being shoved and he’ll need to leap into action to prevent skinned knees.
☀︎
There are.
☀︎
He’s in the thick of it, sitting in the passenger seat of the Batmobile while its owner barks orders at Oracle or someone through its radio. He should be paying better attention, and would be if the danger hadn’t already passed, but he’s half-listening to the conversation well enough that he’ll be able to recall it later if he needs to. Right now, he’s content to give more of his focus to holding pressure on the slowly healing hole in his leg using the seat and getting to know the pain oscillating through him as he knits himself back together.
He can feel his phone vibrating against that same leg as texts from what he has to assume are his crew stream in. If Dre wouldn’t dropkick him for the thought, he might long for the brief period of time when most of them were taking a break from the vigilante business, voluntarily or otherwise. It would take them at least a couple of hours to find out about him getting shot and/or otherwise torn up then.
“You’re upset with me.”
Maybe he’s not paying as much attention as he thought because it takes him a few seconds to realise that Bruce is talking to him. He blearily opens one eye and side-eyes Bruce’s blurry form.
“Man, what?”
“The silence,” Bruce says. He’s using his Batman voice even though they’re alone. As if it distances him from interpersonal relations if he’s putting on a performance. “I assume this is about my conversation with your mother.”
“And not the fact that I have three new holes in me?” Duke would throw something at him if the Batmobile wasn’t obsessively uncluttered. And if his limbs didn’t feel baby weak. Or if he wasn’t using them to plug up the holes in question. “Sure, Bruce. I’ve only been pretending to be straightforward with you for the last few years to lull you into a false sense of security. Now I’m pivoting to your tactics to fuck with you.”
Bruce clears his throat. There’s quiet for exactly seven seconds. “That’s… fair but consider that I have witnessed you laughing off injuries like this.”
Fair is damn near an apology from Bruce so Duke closes his eye and settles back down. “I don’t hold your youthful indiscretions against you, Brucie.” He doesn’t have to look to know that the noisy exhale Bruce lets out is accompanied by a smile that would terrify half the occupants of Blackgate. “I’ve got my mom to think of now,” Duke admits a moment later. “Can’t laugh things like this off anymore. I think Cass has a point about needing to treat fights seriously even when they’re not. I’m trying to change my perspective on that. Do better.”
The considering noise Bruce makes at that is his ‘you couldn’t waterboard this information out of me but I’m proud of you’ one. While that’s never the motivation for anything the young hero does, it doesn’t hurt to hear it, even though he can’t prove that it’s not mainly because Bruce wants everyone to be more like Cass.
“As far as you going to see her…” His sigh is more aggrieved than he means for it to be. A fresh surge of pain is running through him as if to remind him to stay on task. “She’s her own person before she’s my mother. She chose not to tell me what you talked about so I respect her decision, whether it's your privacy she's choosing to preserve or her own.”
The silence that follows is loaded but it’s skewed towards Bruce. Duke means what he’s said, or else he would have brought this up to Bruce in the days since he’s talked to his mom about this. He probably lost Bruce the second he brought up privacy because he knows the Bat still thinks it’s a privilege.
When Bruce breaks the silence again, he’s speaking in his ordinary voice, and at first, Duke isn’t sure if that means he’s not distancing himself from what he’s saying or if that is in itself a different kind of obfuscation. Then he hears what he’s saying and he knows it’s the former. It couldn’t not be. “Your mother saved my life, Duke. I lost my chance to thank her the first time. I would have been remiss not to take that chance now. Especially when her son has saved me time and time again in the intervening years.”
Duke turns his head to face Bruce fully now, his eyes open. The man isn’t looking at him but neither his profile nor his cowl hide the tension on his face. Right, of course. Sometimes Duke forgets but all the personas Bruce takes on are still just him. His mom said Batman came to see her, and Duke took that to mean that he came through the window in the thick of night and emerged from the shadows to make it obvious to Elaine that Duke was putting himself in danger daily, but Elaine figured out who Batman was a long time ago. She would use that name to cut to the heart of the conversation she needed to have with Duke but it doesn’t mean that Bruce Wayne didn’t walk past security and the nurse’s station in the full light of the hospital’s fluorescents with flowers in hand. And now that he thinks about it, there was a particularly elaborate bouquet in Elaine’s room a few weeks ago but she dodged his questions so effortlessly he assumed they were from Jefferson.
He squints at Bruce suspiciously. “She’s married and I know for a fact that you’re not her type.”
Batman is too stoic to sputter but he does turn his head towards Duke in disbelief. “Is that what you think I—”
“I’ve been trying to train you to communicate for years. One conversation with my mom and you’re suddenly broaching conversations without prompting? You?”
He gets a proper laugh this time, and this? This is good. Bruce is talking for once. Duke is listening. The pain has made itself known. It will pass.
☀︎
There are.
☀︎
Jason’s across the cave from Duke, crawling around underneath a car he’s never seen before when he calls his name out in a conversational tone. At least, Duke thinks Jason’s called his name. He might have called him ‘Narrows’ or some variation of ‘newbie’ again. Whichever it is, the parts of Duke’s brain that aren’t either idly composing an essay for one of his language classes or keeping track of how quickly he’s filling a blood bag draw his attention to Jay. He makes a sound to indicate that he’s listening and glides his eyes over to him past the sparring mats, where Cass and Dick are either fooling around or genuinely trying to kill each other, it’s difficult to say. Steph is sitting just next to them, not at all at a safe distance while she reads a book. Every so often, she reads a passage out for Cass that earns her a bark of full-body laughter and inadvertently proves that Dick lost before he even got started.
Duke and Damian are in the med-bay situated a level above the rest of them but close enough that he doesn’t need to project for Jason to hear him. Dami’s shaking the tube he used to get a sample from Duke before hooking him up to the collapsable bag for his regular donation. If it were anyone else asking for tubes of his blood semi-annually, or even anyone else collecting it in case of emergency, Duke isn’t sure he would be so comfortable with it. Of all of them, he’s the one least likely to need an emergency transfusion to begin with since he can heal himself but he can understand Damian’s requirement for preparedness. The last time he took a sample, he came back to Duke a few days later with iron supplements and a carefully worded demand to amend his meal plan.
“Heard you told Bruce he’s not good enough for your mom,” Jason says. His tone suggests that he greatly approves.
Damian slowly puts the sample down. His face is the picture of neutrality when he says, “Give me an itemised list of Father’s deficiencies and I will work on them.”
“Do I have to tap the sign?” Duke asks at the same time as Dick calls out, “What did we say, little Robin?”
Damian gives a long-suffering sigh. “I am not responsible for him, even in jest. I am a child.” He spits out the final word with the kind of malice some people save for their worst enemies.
Dick glances up at Duke with what looks like a grateful smile for just a split second. It’s enough for Cass to sweep his legs out from under him and have him hit the mat in an undignified sprawl. Cass taps one of his own eskrima sticks against his throat. “Unfocused,” she tells him. “And dead.”
“So, did you?” Jason prods.
Duke rolls his eyes. He checks again and finds that he’s only halfway done filling the bag up. “Tell Tim that if he and Bruce wanna gamify spying on each other, that’s fine but if he wants to involve me, I’ll learn how to send targeted EMPs with my mind just to ruin his day, every day.”
Everyone goes quiet for so long that Duke considers walking it back just so he doesn’t have to spend the next twenty minutes in it. He’s not ashamed of his powers, and he’s working with The Power Company to try to move the needle on meta policy reform so he knows that how he talks about them is significant and always will be but… This is still Gotham. They’re one bad day from being forcefully expelled from the rest of the country. Being blasé about potentially being able to take out entire networks isn’t necessarily smart. But in the back of his mind, he thinks, damn, man, even though it would be funny?
“Y’know,” Steph starts, a smirk steadily growing on her face, “That might actually teach them something for once. Wait, hey, Cass, you have to listen to this.”
Her words break the tension in the room and time seems to start flowing again. Everyone returns to their respective tasks. Cass takes Dick down again. “Boring and dead,” she informs him this time before leaving him to join Steph. She takes his sticks with her as if she intends to keep them for her trouble.
“Damn, Narrows. You’re not here to play,” is the last thing anyone says about it. Jason sounds just as approving of that as he did earlier.
Damian, brows furrowed at a tablet he’s reading from, comes to stand in Duke’s eye-line. “How is it possible that you don’t get enough Vitamin D?”
☀︎
Days.
☀︎
Some days, he’ll make it all the way to his mother’s door before someone is able to stop him. Some days, he’ll catch her laughter in the wind as he approaches and he’ll know, he’ll know that on the other side of the door, the tears on her face are falling from bloodshot and unseeing eyes. Some days, he’ll know from his blood going cold in his veins that if he opens the door, she’ll look through his skin and into the core of him where she’ll find something she finds so abhorrent and contemptible that she won’t be able to hold her shrieks in.
On those days, his hand will freeze on the door handle, tears will fill his eyes and dread will cloud his mind. Someone will say something about him coming back later, when the sedatives kick in. He’ll shake his head and say, “She’s just having a bad day, is all,” as he opens the door.
☀︎
There are.
☀︎
“She really wasn’t my girlfriend,” Duke implores. He’s not doing a good job of defending himself because he’s consumed with the logistics of juggling three million feet of cloth and a bunch of clothespins in an actual woven basket like he’s going frolicking in a meadow later. What with all the meadows in Gotham and all.
The responses he gets make it apparent he shouldn’t even be trying to defend himself. From somewhere behind him, Dre scoffs, “Lover-boy Thomas over here, with the irresistible cologne.”
“It worked on you, didn't it?” Duke replies without looking over at him. He gets a something thrown at his back for it but he ignores it in favour of the task at hand. He’s almost got a system, if he can just keep the ball of cloth from pushing the basket in a way that upends it every five seconds. It was easier when Dax was carrying it for him a few minutes ago but he hooked the basket handle onto Duke’s wrist five minutes ago with a claim about needing to check that the kids who were arriving early were being adequately entertained elsewhere in the centre so they would have enough time to get ready. Why a youth centre would suddenly be unable to entertain a small group of children for an hour without his intervention was not explained.
Next to Duke, Izzy laughs, “No, but really. You got jumped on a basketball court like The Fresh Prince, Duke. Wait, and then you had to go live with a rich family in the ’burbs. Your life’s a network TV sitcom.”
They’re kneeling on the waist-high cubby-holes lining two of the walls in the room they’re repurposing for today. Izzy bites at the hoop she has through her labret piercing as she tapes recycled cardboard and newspapers to the windows. Duke is following after her with thick fabric that Riko sourced from the theatre department at her school. They tested multiple set-ups days ago and confirmed that a combination was the best bet for making the room dark enough with the materials they could get. Well, aside from Duke himself but The Signal’s not invited and he’s not sure he could keep it going for that long anyway.
Behind them, Dre is doing an abysmal job at arranging pillows on the floor. He’d have an easier time just throwing them haphazardly but he’s decided to be meticulous about it since Dax accused him of only being involved for the clout. What clout he’s likely to get from being tangentially involved in a casual movie day is still unclear but Dax always knows how to get the best out of Dre somehow.
“The Fresh Duke of Bristol,” Dre adds, so quick Duke almost thinks he’s had this thought before.
“In Central Gotham born and raised,” Izzy raps. Her Will Smith impression has no business being as good as it is, and that just adds insult to injury.
“Abandoned subways are where I spent most of my days,” Duke continues, to cheers from the rest of the room. “Yeah, yeah.”
They don’t talk about anything else that went down with Smiley. You learn how to talk around things. What gets mentioned casually and what’s only brought up to make a difficult point. They’re giving him shit today but they’ve earned the jokes by surviving Smiley together. They save anything else for late night conversations when one or more of them can’t sleep. Duke hasn’t been sleeping well for a few days. This is going to help. Just planning it is helping.
“So does that mean the rest of you have Gotham Public Access TV lives?” Duke wonders instead of letting their efforts to keep the mood light go to waste.
Izzy throws a wadded up bit of newspaper at him. Dre kicks a pillow so that it sits just so and says, “I don’t wanna hear your opinions about media, glow-stick. Didn’t you suggest we play Jackie Brown for some middle-schoolers?”
“You’re losing a fight with a pillow, Andre,” Duke retorts without missing a beat. “And keep her name outta your mouth. Besides, I suggested it for our movie night, not for the kids.”
“Yeah, well,” Dre starts, and he’s clearly working himself up now because he actually is losing to the pillows. One that he’s trying to make a back rest for another keeps flopping over instead of defying the laws of physics for his sake. He’s interrupted by the door opening and Shug bouncing in, in that permanent half-jog that the springy soles of her athletic sneakers encourage.
“Delivery for Robin? You gotta sign for this but we only accept little kisses on the forehead.” She bounces around the room and, getting a kiss from each of them, she bounds up to Izzy’s place on the cubby-holes and jumps up to sit next to her, putting the three bags of snacks she had dangling from one hand down on her other side. “You’re not sick of them flirting badly yet?”
“Fuck off, Shug,” Dre says, mildly.
Duke just flips her off. She laughs when it makes him nearly drop the length of the fabric he’s clipping to the curtain-rail.
Izzy nudges Shug’s hip with her knee. “You here to help or just make cute comments and be in the way?”
Duke’s heart jumps into his throat when, upon looking away for half a second, he hears Izzy yelp. When he looks again, ready to lunge into action, he sees her sprawled across Shug’s lap where she’s obviously been dragged down.
“I’m here for the snacks,” Shug says, giving Izzy an exaggerated leer before planting a comparatively chaste kiss on her cheek.
“Is this what you meant by ‘sooooooo busy, ask Duke to help you’?” Riko’s voice cuts in. She drops a box full of what look like the guts of a spaceship in the doorway and kicks it in their direction.
Shug looks unrepentant. “I was getting snacks, hon.”
“Wait, did you text me? I didn’t get anything,” Duke says. He would pull his phone out to double check but he’s drowning in polyester and Izzy’s progress has halted. Even the aborted motion he makes toward his pocket tilts the basket for approximately the one hundredth time today, sending multi-coloured clothespins raining down. He curses under his breath and prepares to do the dance of pinning the cloth against the window with his hip so its weight doesn't rip what he's already attached to the railing down while he collects them.
Riko gives him an assessing look. “I didn't bother ’cause I was almost here anyway. Why don’t you have those pinned to your shirt instead of whatever it is you’re doing?”
Duke’s body goes stiff with realisation. “God damn it.”
Dre joins in with the general laughter at his expense but he’s apparently feeling generous enough that he comes over to help him pin them to the bottom of his shirt for easier access. Duke almost hurls the basket across the room once he’s free to do so but he doesn’t wanna risk damaging it for the gag.
Riko turns her eye back to the others. “At least help me hook this up, Shug. You can feel Izzy up later.”
It takes them another hour but when Dax falls through the door with three children hanging off him and another group pretending to attack him while he plays up his shrieks for help, they have the room set up and Wendell & Wild lined up.
By the time the sun starts going down and the kids have all been picked up, they’ve migrated to the back of the room. Duke’s done a better job arranging the pillows for the six of them. He’s got Dax half across his lap and half hanging off Shug, and Izzy’s curled up between him and Riko. Dre avoids eye contact as he pulls up Jackie Brown. They love it just as much as he thought they would. Even if he thinks their favourite part is his commentary. That’s good, too.
☀︎
There will be again.