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The call came in just after lunch. They’d been doing equipment maintenance; Dick and Tim had been overhauling all the motorbike and car engines, and when Dick had invited Duke to join them he’d said yes rather than go out to patrol.
It wasn’t something Duke had expected. But Dick had never offered before, and Duke had accepted because it felt like being part of the team.
It turned out Dick and Tim both knew a lot more about engines than he did and they’d been talking him through a tricky disassembly, while Barbara had a laptop hooked up to the electronics of one of the cars and was running tests on some new programs, when the emergency override kicked in and the police radio came on.
246S. It wasn’t a police code that Duke knew, but he could tell it was a bad one, because Barbara immediately pushed off in her computer chair and slid across the room, snagging the computer desk with her fingers to stop. She pulled on a headset immediately, fingers racing across the keyboard, while Dick’s spine straightened and he marched over to stand behind her.
“Where?”
“Cameron Kane High, in Robbinsville,” said Barbara, a map of the area already up on the big screen.
“What’s a 246S?” asked Duke quietly, to Tim who had raced off to the store cupboards and had returned with an armload of medical field supplies, which he dumped on the surface of a nearby table.
“School shooting,” said Tim shortly. He started packing extra haemostatic dressings into his utility belt. Duke gulped, and grabbed a handful himself.
Better to have them and not need them.
Dick turned from the screen. “We’ll take the Batmobile. It’ll be the fastest.” He looked between Tim and Duke. “Are you good to go?”
Duke snagged his helmet from where it was sitting on a nearby bench, and nodded. Tim had already headed for the driver’s seat, fastening his cape as he moved. Duke felt a sudden surge of envy at how smoothly Dick took control of the situation with a casual authority and anticipation for everyone to already be where he needed them.
Dick looked at Barbara. “Cameras?”
“I’m pulling them up now.” The screens around Barbara began to tile with various security camera feeds, as she sorted and rearranged them, narrowing down to find details of the incident. “Get going; I’ll update you enroute.”
As the Batmobile raced out of the Cave, Tim behind the wheel and Dick in the passenger seat, mapping out the situation on the ground and issuing orders, they had a clear run across town. The roads around them were open, every light green on their approach. The closer they got the more vehicles around them were emergency vehicles, lights flashing everywhere.
Tim slid the car neatly into park away from the main coordination around the school’s front gates, under the fire escape of a building overlooking the school. The police on the cordon nearby were all resolutely looking in another direction, talking to anxious members of the public who were investigating all the noise.
Dick - no it was Nightwing now, who was looking grimly at Duke as he pulled out his escrima sticks and prepared to grapple up to their starting vantage point.
“Ready? As we discussed.”
Afterwards, Duke watched from a rooftop as the cops cleared the school one more time, room by room, and cordoned areas off for forensics. Nightwing was out the front, talking to Maggie Sawyer, who had arrived on the scene.
Duke was still concentrating on his breathing as his adrenaline crashed. They hadn’t got everyone out in time.
“Hey,” Tim sat down on the rooftop next to him, pulling a wipe out of his belt and cleaning his gloves. “You doing okay?”
“...Does everyone know?” Duke asked. He didn’t want pity. He watched as parents clung to crying children as they picked them up from the marshalling area in the park nearby.
“That you were at Middletown?” Tim didn’t look at Duke. He was intently focused on cleaning some grit caught on the side of his gauntlet. “Yeah. We know.”
“Is that why Nightwing put me on evacuation? Because he thought I might not cope?” It had felt like an insult. Duke had seen far worse in his time as a vigilante than a couple of teens with guns. He’d coped with bigger threats. Hell, he’d coped with Middletown with little more than his wits and the contents of his schoolbag.
Tim sighed. “He didn’t mean it that way. I think he figured it was better to use our expertise.”
“What?” Duke blinked.
“I was at Louis E. Grieve.”
The world suddenly spun into a different focus. Grieve… “During the gang wars?”
Tim stared at his hands and said in a clinical tone of voice. “It was a targeted attack on Darla Aquista, the daughter of Henry Aquista, a mob boss. She was hit by a stray bullet and passed away before paramedics could get to her.”
“Damn, man.” Duke suddenly felt an additional level of connection to Tim that he’d never felt before. “Nobody ever says anything about that time.”
“We don’t talk about it much, no.” Tim flexed his fingers. “It was a normal day at school and I was next to Darla when she was shot. She was a friend of Bernard’s and mine. So when I say I get it…I get it.”
“Oh.” Duke thought. “It…wasn’t like that for me. It’s not like all the drills they’ve been pounding into us since we were little kids. In that moment, it felt exhilarating, like I could do anything. I was scared, but I was more angry than anything, and I knew I had to do whatever I could.”
“And so being put on evacuation felt like Nightwing didn’t respect that you’d ended a hostage crisis at school before, while being a civilian?”
“A bit, yeah.”
Opening doors to see terrified faces. A teacher who’d almost hit him with a chair. Hands stuffed into mouths to keep quiet.
Flickers of light in his vision, tracing out the movement of where people had run and fallen.
A corridor he’d directed people away from, still slick with blood.
“Sometimes being a hero isn’t about being a hero,” Tim said quietly, still not looking at Duke. “Sometimes the best thing we can do is to act as support.”
“It still doesn’t feel like enough.”
Tim shrugged. “The punching is easier, yeah. But the evacuation was more important.”
“I’d rather have got to punch people and have been the hero,” Duke grumbled, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“One of the things I most remember was the moment that Nightwing arrived and was there to back me up. Look at all of them.” Tim gestured towards the park, at a small gaggle of girls sitting in a clump, holding on to each other as they cried. “Do you think they’ll forget the moment you opened the door and led them out to safety?”
Duke closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the looks of relief and awe that he’d seen as he’d told a group that he was here to get them out. Of how he’d felt at Middletown afterwards, talking to police. When he opened them, he saw two frantic women running to wrap their arms around a teenage boy. From the distance, one of the women looked like his mother.
“Someone came for them.”
Tim looked up at Duke and caught his eye. “You came for them.”