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“What happened, exactly?”
If any of this is going to make sense to you, you first have to understand why it happened. If you take anything away from this, let it be this: Duke’s life is ridiculous. Maybe you’ll figure that out yourself as you go along but he would be remiss if he didn’t start by saying that. His life is no-holds-barred, costumed shenanigans, six impossible things before breakfast ridiculous, sometimes with thematically appropriate villains in tow (although, not so much anymore because Mad Hatter and the Tweedles are still vying for control of the Wonderland Gang). You’ve gotta be on board with that for the rest of this to make sense. Hell, he has to re-board every other day so the boat doesn’t take off without him when he inevitably steps back long enough to acknowledge how Looney Tunes it all is. Lewis Carroll got to separate the nonsense and his work as a serious man of science but Duke doesn’t get that option because statistically speaking, being a child genius or a meta-human in Gotham aren’t for the weak and being both is plain hazardous.
“Oracle will debrief you. Right now, I need you to focus on—”
Right, sorry. He’s having a hard time with that. Focus. But really, he was getting to it. ’Cause there’s no point in going over the minutiae of the situation he’s in if you don’t understand why he’s in it. And honestly, the thing with Gotham is that the what is usually less interesting than the why anyhow. An exercise to illustrate his point: What is happening to Duke right now? A multitude of things, chief of which is that his brain is trying to split itself in two. There, you know a what. Did it give you the answers you wanted?
“No, wait, B—”
Exactly. So why is that happening? Because Killer Croc tried to break concrete with Duke’s skull, and he guesses that his brain is just trying to finish the job. But that’s not all of it, not really. Why was Waylon wailing on Duke? He couldn’t entirely help himself. Duke ran out of time disarming the auto-release on a capsule of some unholy amalgamation of fear gas and Venom and Waylon was caught in the resulting noxious cloud. And Duke only ran out of time because he had to prioritise getting it away from Amusement Mile to avoid gassing people, most of which were children, both there and in Gotham Zoo across the road, so he’d retreated to the sewers. And further, Waylon was only hanging out under the zoo because he was laying low after getting unwillingly caught up in a Riddler scheme to try to kill Batwing. More to the point, Waylon was free to lay low because even though it turns out that Luke Fox is somehow the less cool Fox brother (…and Duke’s feelings on bloodsports are a lot different now that he’s been on the other side of the ropes than they were when he was a kid and just excited to see someone that looked like him and his father competing), Luke has a view on rehabilitation and restorative justice that’s probably a bit closer to Duke’s than Bruce's and that means something, even if it backfired for Duke this time. Waylon needs help more than he needs to do any more time. See, now, that gets at something more than the what did, doesn’t it?
But fine, he’ll sprinkle in some events for the sake of clarity. The short version is this: Waylon, in his fear-and-Venom induced rage, broke part of The Signal’s helmet, and apparently, having the blood of an immortal in him doesn’t make Duke immune from needing to breathe.
“God, you always—”
No, not capital-G-God. Just a god, and even then, only if certain sources are to be believed. But really, between the old gods, the new gods, the mythological gods and Bruce knowing the actual Santa Claus, what the hell does that even mean anyway? Duke knows words, he likes words, and even he knows they only have the meaning people agree on so whether it applies or not matters less than what was meant by it. Another instance of that what vs why question he keeps coming back to. What: Gnomon or someone who knows about him called him a god once. Why: fuck knows but the theory he’s working on is that the guy just has a god-complex. He figures that the worst case scenario is that he both is a god and has a god-complex. At the very least, he seemed to want to give Duke a god-complex. What the fuck was he supposed to do with an army or a city?
“Shut up, all of you. I don’t care what you—”
Rude.
“This is a distraction no one needs right now. We have to—”
Oh, right. He’s straying from the point again. OK. Where was he? Right, the Scarecrow-wannabe that got him into this mess. By now, he’s made his point about why the events that led him here aren’t important, and really, do you wanna get into a long conversation about the Bane-inspired death cult that Dr Parrot splintered off from? No, right? ’Cause you get it. You’ve boarded and you’re trusting him to steer the ship. The reward for your trust is that he’s finally come to now, and you get to know what no one else in the world knows.
To start with, he can hear everyone looking for him. Superman has been mentioned but that’s a last resort and it’s been less than an hour. Can’t pull other heroes off protecting the entire world just for Duke unless the situation becomes dire. In any case, he’s not exactly safe for other metas to be around when he’s... not himself. The last thing anyone wants is a Duke-powered Superman losing control, too. Unlikely but, you know.
What you get to know that they don’t is this: he hasn’t left Pennyworth Manor since—wait, you’re familiar with Pennyworth Manor, right?
“I don’t know, Father. I don’t… I don’t kn—”
It’s all right, neither is he, really. Maybe he should start there. The thing with Pennyworth Manor is that it’s made up almost entirely of Bruce Wayne’s intentions, and Duke wants almost nothing to do with it. From the second he first arrived with a gaggle of Bats and Birds to find a dilapidated mansion with Bruce casually doing manual labour outside, he’s known that he wants nothing to do with the house, and his feelings on the matter only deepened from there. He can’t speak for anyone else but having been through the system, Duke has a healthy distrust of people who throw the words “family” and “home” around without consideration, and bless him but Bruce’s ever-fluctuating definitions of the words have not helped him in that regard. But words only mean what we all agree so Duke’s just been trying to get his own definitions in there somewhere without feeling like he’s the crazy one for not buying into the Waynes’. And look, Bruce has been trying to get Duke to live with him since they met, not dissuaded by the fact that Duke has turned him down three or four times compared to the exactly one time he said yes. So, if he’s being honest with you, part of the reason why he’s as unfamiliar with Pennyworth Manor as he is, is just that he doesn’t want to send mixed messages, even if he unironically enjoys Izzy’s jokes about him collecting father figures like Bruce collects kids.
All that being said, however, “unfamiliar” in this case does still mean that Duke knows the place inside out, Victorian-era hidden servants’ passages and all. He helped to rebuild it. It’s all the stuff that came after that he doesn’t know all that well. Half the time he spends here, he’s just fought off a hostile invading alien presence and his gauntlet is partly fused to his wrist or something so he’s not in the position to drive home or pay attention to Bruce’s interior decorating. The other half, he’s here to draw Damian out of his own mind so he breaks into the kid’s room directly instead of going through the front door. What he means to say is, he’s used to both navigating the house while impaired and breaking in and out without Batman finding out about it. So, okay, everyone’s looking for him everywhere between here and Wayne Memorial, in the cave and the surrounding tunnel system but it’s gonna be at least another quarter of an hour before Damian or Cass realise he’s still in the house. He hasn’t really discussed the shadow-walking with anyone else. Shadow-moving? Shadow traversing. Whatever, he’s still figuring out what he can do with it and he’s not going to bring it up to the other detectives in the cave until he’s got the answers he wants first. Like whether he can one day bring anyone else with him because... he’s getting distracted again.
He’s not anywhere in particular. Somewhere in the pocket dimension in the shadows between the cave and Damian’s room. Not even his own but Damian’s, because when you really get down to it, Dami’s the only one who has actually claimed his own space here. Jason didn’t even show up when Bruce called them all here the first time; Babs and Dick live in Blüd; Tim has his own apartment (he thinks? Duke’s certainly never been there); Steph has never dignified Bruce’s offer of a place to live with a response; and Cass comes and goes like the wind so Duke’s not really sure if she considers this home, really. He should ask. And really, how ridiculous that he and Cass have had each other's backs around the world several times and across the solar system at least once but he has to psych himself up to bring Alfred Pennyworth up to her even now. Regardless, he gravitates to Damian’s room because he has no particular attachment to the room Bruce set aside for him. If he gets down to it, he didn’t have an attachment to the room he used at Wayne Manor either. The walls remained bare from the moment Alfred showed him in the first time until Vandal Savage bought the place and presumably immediately covered them with anti-Bat conspiracy boards.
See, now he’s thinking about Vandal Savage and how they still need to figure out what to do about him alongside a million other things he should be doing instead of spiralling inside a shadow. He’s been working on a plan based on something Superman said about the Vandal he met in the future, when the immortal had broken the world and been left alone for an eternity to learn regret, but he can’t think about that right now. It’s only a few steps from Vandal Savage regretting causing the end of the world to Duke Thomas at the end of all things, trying to make peace with the deaths of not just everyone he loves but the world he loves and all of its history and potential, and then it’s heat death and what the hell does immortal really even mean anyway? What is eternal life? Just so long that it’s not worth measuring? Or does it mean surviving when nothing else does? When he really looks (and right now, he can’t help but look), he can see stars that are already dead, and he’s been meaning to bring that up with a Kryptonian or someone: how do you live with the fear of outliving everything when you can already see so much more dying around you than other people can? He’s never met Supergirl but he thinks if she walked in right now, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from asking an unforgivable question. So, you see, he just can’t think about Vandal Savage or any other responsibilities he has right now, or who he might be letting down, or who will still be there when he runs out of time.
Again, where was he?
“We’ll find him, Dame.”
Of course. He’s in a shadow or between two shadows or nowhere at all, however you want to look at it. There could be a difference between the blood of an immortal and immortal blood, if he let himself think about it. But the only way to be sure is for the end to come, isn't it? His or everyone else's and he doesn't want to think about this either.
“Do you see anything?”
He just said he can’t think about that. That’s why he’s in the shadow to begin with. And the what doesn’t matter, remember? You’re supposed to let him steer the ship. So, he’s—
“...at the hospi—”
Fine. He supposes that he's the one who brought it up to begin with so he might as well. He sees everything. Or at least so much that the difference between what he sees and everything is the same as the difference between being immortal and being so close to it that it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Which is to say that the difference is both vast and negligible. He sees more than he cares to, anyway.
He’s going to have to explain something that he’s only barely touched on thus far: the shadow place both is and isn’t a real, physical space. Like he said, he’s still investigating, but what’s important for you to know right now is that no light escapes it. What he means by light is different than the most typical definition, but it’s how he’s learning to think of it now. The entire electromagnetic spectrum is all just light if it’s all visible to you. No sense in following distinctions that don’t apply to him. None of it escapes the shadow, not the colours of his suit, not the glow of his eyes that he can’t turn off, not the signals from his tracker or his comms. None of it leaves, but light is still making its way inside, and Duke sees all the light. Thanks to Scare-parrot and thanks to Scarecrow and Bane and thanks to Gotham being what it is and thanks to Lewis Carroll being a featured writer in his life-story probably, Duke can’t make himself stop seeing it. Through the house and the bodies moving around inside it and past its roof and beyond the pre-dawn winter fog and above the ever-present Gotham clouds into forever. Duke is holding on desperately to the concept of up because there’s no floor in the shadow and if he gets turned around, he’ll be looking through the rest of the planet, too. And that will really fuck him up because he has to introduce new concepts now. What, and why, but also where and when.
The way he sees light, he sees where it has been going back into forever, possibly (not right this second, but he thinks he could learn; seven impossible things before breakfast, now) and where it will be at least a little bit toward forever (and this sounds even more impossible but make it eight. Is that where he gets his god-complex from?). The way light works, though, that where that it’s been is also a when. And he sees all that, too. Past, present, future. All happening to his eyes at the same time, or not at the same time but close enough to it that it doesn’t matter. And it’s almost enough to do him in as it is just looking through Pennyworth Manor, with the Joker doing cartwheels just in his periphery. He just can’t look through the rest of Gotham and the world to see everywhere and every-when. He especially can't look south-west to Wayne Memorial and see all the last twenty four hours all at once.
“Wherever he is, he’s hurt. Have we thought about that, Cassie? He’s hurt and hurting, too.”
It isn’t even really about the head trauma (he walks around with a mild headache for a couple of hours every few weeks when Izzy’s just done his hair. She’s what his auntie would describe as heavy-handed but he likes the ritual of it, and he doesn’t want to use his rapid healing on it because he likes the reminder that someone ca... well, because he likes it). It isn’t about what’s burning through his veins right now, either. And it is burning because he’s actually trying to metabolise it faster. He’s not an idiot. The longer he’s like this, the harder he pushes to fix himself instead of letting his body do what's natural, the worse things are going to be. But living in Gotham means constantly being exposed to something through the course of the day, even if it’s only residual or in harmless trace amounts, so being one of her vigilantes, Duke has been exposed to his fair share of drugs, poisons, toxins and even magics (he once saw Tim lick what he thought was cocaine that had spilled out onto the ground in an alley) so like he said before, he’s not new to traversing life while impaired. For him, life includes having eyes that can zoom, as someone once described it, so if he couldn’t handle seeing everything at the drop of a hat, he wouldn’t have made it this far. He’d definitely never touch anything ever again. You ever been stuck in ultra-violet mode chasing someone through a pay-per-hour hotel? Right, and neither has Batman so Duke can make his own decisions about what his body can handle.
So, you’ve got your what, he’s been through why, and now you’ve even got a bonus where and when. What else? Who and how? As for how, he’s still trying to figure that one out. He’ll get back to you. He didn’t have a particular interest in quantum optics before all this but he’s composing a thesis on hard light for nobody but himself in the spare minutes between getting punched in the head. What is he really going to do, publish something as The Signal because Duke Thomas can’t explain having had the unique experience of both having photokinesis and getting to use a Lantern ring? He hadn’t even been able to explain it to Hal Jordan properly. Maybe that’s another question for Superman. He sees light similarly to Duke and he’s used a Lantern ring (even if he and Batman had to share a body to do it), so maybe he also didn’t experience the ring lag that Hal had tried to tell Duke about. But he’s getting away from himself again. When he figures out the how, you’ll know. And who? Well, where did he lose you? He’d go back to the beginning but he only has so much time left. Like he said, he can’t stay here forever. He has somewhere to be.
“Why today? Everything went wrong. Over and over.”
He’s been through this. He’s explained why. Because it’s all ridiculous.
“I can’t believe it either… Today of all days. He was looking forward to it for the first time in years.”
All right, so maybe he needs to explain about today, since the conversation can’t seem to end without it.
What you need to understand is that unlike what everyone he knows seems to think, he was not any more vulnerable when he woke up today than any other day. His parents sharing a birthday is something they jokingly like to claim proves that they’re soulmates but it doesn’t make the day any more magical than their birthdays would have been otherwise. He doesn’t spend the rest of the year dreading this day, doesn’t get night sweats in the days leading up to it, and he doesn’t get especially morose about it despite how everyone reacts when he first makes the mistake of telling them about it. It’s not a day like any other, how could it be, but he gets through it same as any other day because the truth of it is this: his parents are going through what they’re going through every other day too. Every other day, every hour, every second. And the thing he’s most aware of, that no one else is bringing up, is that discounting the first four or so times he’s lived this day, which he was too young to remember, he’s now had more birthdays without them than he had with them.
So, really, all else being equal, this would have been as bad if today had happened tomorrow or next month, and he doesn't need coddling over today's near-death experience any more than he's needed it for any other. But the fact remains that it has happened today. He’s made this point to you ad nauseam but it bears repeating: his life is ridiculous. Everything is. It’s all. A joke.
Duke steps out of the shadow and into Damian’s path where he’s wearing a hole into his bedroom floor, obviously contemplating whether the situation is dire enough to justify giving away Duke’s secrets. His surrogate little brother twitches towards him with a sheen in his eyes, and Duke can’t help but feel guilty about that. He’s still covered in his own blood but he’s all healed now (and he didn't even break his brain irreparably in the process, Bruce), so he knows Damian will forgive him for the hug he tugs him into.
“He’s back online,” Babs gasps in his ear. “He’s in the house? What the hell? Signal, you copy?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I'm okay now,” he says to the Bats at large. Switching his transmitter off, to Damian, he whispers, “It’s gonna be okay, Dami. I’ve got it. I'm okay.”
“You died. Twice. You—”
Duke kisses Damian’s hairline and nods. “It’s okay. I'm okay, but I have to go.” He can hear a cacophony of footsteps approaching Damian’s room, even though he knows the people they belong to can be quiet if they choose.
Damian doesn’t seem to want to let Duke go when he tries to pull back, which is unheard of but he relents fairly quickly. “I’m coming with you.” He says it with all the stubbornness of a child, and that makes Duke glad, somehow. Like he’s still got time. It’s not the end of all things yet. Dami’s still so young, and even letting himself be young sometimes. Duke has time.
He looks over at Izzy, Steph and Cass in the doorway. Iz and Steph are talking over each other, equally angry and relieved. They trip over each other to get to him. Cass gets there first, and he supposes he's earned the punch she aims at his arm. "Stupid," she admonishes.
Izzy squeezes his tacky, bloody face between her hands to make sure he's looking into her eyes. “I’ll kill you, you ever try anything like that again.” There's a chorus of agreements. He can just barely remember hearing each of their voices and everyone else’s while he was gone but it all seems so far away now. He remembers that they were concerned, which makes him feel guiltier but. Well, they’re relieved now. It’ll be okay. He'll be able to laugh about it someday.
“I’m coming with you,” Damian re-iterates, even as Duke returns hugs and murmurs promises and apologies.
“OK, yeah,” he says to Damian, but he’s looking at all of them. “We can all go.”
He’s sure his mother doesn’t expect to see an entire contingent of Bats when she wakes up a little while later, and truthfully, he didn't actually mean all when he said it. He just knew that it was asking a lot of them to let him out of their sight, but now he’s got damn near every Bat-related Gotham vigilante with him, all holding some combination of flowers, balloons and gifts. Bruce Wayne is lighting birthday candles like he's not plotting ways to try to bench Duke for a month. The sun is coming up. The smile on his mother’s face is soft and sweet as the dawn.
“Happy birthday, Mama,” Duke says. “I’m sorry I’m late.”