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
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