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Drowning, the first time, had been terrifying—this felt honest.
Here’s the secret: Duke hadn’t learned how to swim until he was fourteen. Pool parties meant sticking only your feet in, and his mother never did learn anything more than a doggy kick with a paddle board, so he had always been confined to the shallow end. All his friends, they found their home where they could touch ground. Where they could be lifted upright into the sweet sweet air if they slipped. The dividing buoys at the deep end’s drop off were off limits to them. A drop as sheer as the fall at the edge of the world. They didn’t long for it, they didn’t talk about it—they didn’t even look at it.
He didn’t learn to swim until Tyrell Dowds drowned in the backyard pool of his friend’s mansion. It hadn’t been big news to him, but his mom enrolled him in swim classes at the YMCA the very next weekend. He found himself, neon swim cap squeezed over his waves, sitting on the edge of a pool at the 4ft mark with kids half his age.
He looked ridiculous. Like a splash of paint on a white wall.
(Tyrell lived in his neighborhood. Once upon a time both their moms had been studying in the same classrooms together in a room full of kids who also didn’t know how to swim and knew they never would. So when Tyrell got that scholarship to attend Gotham Elite, the Catholic school with a tuition price tag in the ten thousands, and left the Narrows kids in his shadow, everyone thought that he’d all but been handed the keys to heaven. And Duke hadn’t known him, not really—sure they’d played in the shallow end of the pool together when they were kids, but that was years ago. And anyways, Tyrell didn’t know how to swim either. When the news started making its way through the neighborhood about what had happened to him, he knew that what his mom had really heard was ‘High school freshman, Duke Thomas, dead at age 14 after swimming mishap.’)
So he learned to swim, but maybe the true test of bravery was risking death first. Or at least that was the kind of logic 14-year-old boys subscribed to—so when the boy on the swim team challenged him to a diving competition while he sat outside the pool waiting for his mother’s dark green 2004 Camry to come idling up the block (she was always late, social workers had irregular schedules and he was pretty sure that the pain-in-the-ass route you had to take to get from the Narrows to midtown was designed with the sole intent of keeping everyone in their respective places) he gathered up all the indignation in his 5’6 body and agreed. Nevermind the cardinal rules he’d always been taught about the water: don’t go anywhere your feet aren’t on solid ground, stay five feet away from the drop-off at all times, don’t put your head under, and (most importantly) it can and will kill you.
What added insult to injury was that the boy was two years younger than him, not even a rising freshman in high school. Duke’s pride had been hurt enough that he felt like he had to prove the unspoken assumption wrong—nevermind the fact that the only time he had ever been in water deeper than five feet he’d been wearing a life-vest and the swim instructor was right there beside him, teaching him how to float.
You can figure out how it goes. He makes the two foot climb to the top of the diving board. He looks down into the water below, and though the red letters along the edge of the pool all declare obnoxiously “12 FEET!”, he thinks to himself that it didn’t really look that deep. He thinks that, clearly, everyone was just trying to hold him down. Stop him from flying. Stop him from breaking free. And so Duke does it—he dives. For about two seconds it feels good because it’s just him, the water, and the glowing warmth of his own triumph.
Then he sinks. Of course he sinks. He couldn’t swim.
Sinks like a rock in a cup, down and down he goes, and though he desperately climbs for the surface his long and narrow limbs betrayed him. The truth, in hindsight, is that he wasn’t in the water for more than ten seconds. His swim instructor had seen him dive, was already yelling at the closest lifeguard, and by the time he had hit the water people were calling his name. But truth be damned, in those ten seconds he came to a very simple realization: This is it. I’m dying. There’s nothing I, or anyone else, can do. There’s no way to save me. I will die today—in fact, I’m already dead.
When his head breaks the surface again, when he’s on the side of the pool coughing up chlorine, even when he’s wrapped up in a towel outside the pool he’s still thinking it. I’m already dead. I’m already dead. I’m already dead. That doesn’t stop sloshing around his head until he sees the look on his mom’s face when his swim instructor explains what happened.
(Later, after the verbal lashing that he would receive as payment for his adolescent stupidity, he begged his mom not to send him back to that pool—the humiliation would, surely, kill him. His pleas fell on deaf ears. He learned to swim. He learned the breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, and freestyle. If his mother had had the chance, she would have made him join the swim team too. He supposed he had the Joker to thank for the reprieve.)
But this? This felt honest. Like a promise kept. Like finally getting the ice-cream your parents promised you for good grades on your report card. As Duke sank, he didn’t fight for the surface. He let it happen. His lack of fear was the most frightening thing about this. The distinct lack of human terror suggested the worst—that he wasn’t human, not fully—but even that wasn’t enough to make him fight for the air which his lungs would surely soon start to burn for.
How had he ended up here? Something something about a fight. Something something about a dockyard. Something something about a sheer drop off a dock that he should have known better than to end up on. See, the dayshift had its downsides. Mostly, it meant that there was no one there to help make up for your own stupidity and unbridled arrogance. Talk shit and you better be able to back it up because there was no one there to help you make good on a promise.
Now he knows, logically, that even before the fall the fight had been going south and Red Robin (who as far as he knew never slept) was already gearing back up. He also knows that his emergency beacon will be going off right now, a blaring reminder of all the nitty gritty parts of human anatomy (heart, liver, lungs, the like). He knows that beating the clock was kind of, like, their whole thing—you’d think the whole racing to save the day thing was a dicey business model, but it had yet to blow up in their face (in his father’s words, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ )
He knows, logically , that in about a minute and 42 seconds, when he was no longer able to hold his breath and his feet were finally back on the ground (the bottom of the bay, that is), he would probably regret not doing more to get closer to the surface when the imminent threat of unconsciousness wasn’t right on his shoulders.
He also knows, emotionally , that the synapses attaching his ability to be “logical” to the rest of his brain had short circuited the moment his back broke the surface.
He should have said something. It was absolutely idiotic that he didn’t—all of it was. A swimmer afraid of the water? Please. Last time Bruce had timed him, he could swim the mile in 20.259 seconds. Not elite, but elite-adjacent. So, of course, it would have raised questions if he casually said over the comms one day ‘By the way, throw me in the water without warning and a bottom I can see and chances are I sink like a 3-ton rock. 10-4 .’ But hindsight was 20-20 and Duke was pretty sure the humiliation of such a confession would kill him far faster than a drowning could.
No, this was fine. This was his payment. And anyways, the people he knew didn’t swim. It made sense , actually. A lesson or two about redlining and acid baths and he understood the details of a fact he already knew. Maybe always knew. Fighting for the surface wasn’t realistic, historically speaking. No, he knew how this went.
He’d sink. Of course he would sink.
On his way down he thinks back to Tyrell. He’d died after Thanksgiving, so the anniversary must be coming up soon, if it hadn’t already passed. He wondered what it felt like for him on the way down. How deep that $2.7 million dollar mansion’s pool was. If his feet hit the bottom before his eyes closed. Back in the Narrows, they’d thrown around the idea of naming a scholarship in his honor. Maybe get the funding to put some kids in swim classes at the YMCA. No one had the money (and even if they did, everyone kind of thought the same thing even if they wouldn’t admit it: Of course he drowned. There was nothing we, or anyone else, could have done. How else could that have gone anyway? No. No. This went exactly like it always does.)
They took up a collection for his funeral at church instead.
Duke is down to ten seconds before his lungs give out, maybe twenty if adrenaline kicks in, when a hand grabs the back of his suit. He’s rising. His mask shielded his eyes from the dirty Gotham Bay water, so he’s able to see when he tilts his head upward. A flash of red and then the force of them rising causes his chin to snap back down to his chest.
For a moment, he’s confused. Once the confusion fades he’s impressed with the sheer strength it took to swim in this water while pulling him along. After another second his admiration fades. He’s dead weight. He needs to swim. Can’t help but think that this was a sleep-deprived hallucination as he does, but he swims. Fights against the aggressive tide, lets the hand that’s still at his back do the work he no longer has the strength to do. It’s not much, but he kicks his legs. Even when his lungs have officially given out and the surface has still got to be a good ten feet above them he flutters his legs as much as he can. When he does pass out it’s not before his lips go slack and bay water rushes to fill the newly found cavity in its depths. He thinks: This is it. I’m dying. There’s—
When Duke comes to, when he’s on his side coughing up the brackish water, even when he’s on his knees gasping for air he’s still thinking to himself ‘ Of course. There was absolutely no other way this could have gone. It’s not even a story. Barely even a footnote. There was no way I could have been saved. This ended exactly like it always does.’
He doesn’t stop thinking that until he’s sitting in the Medbay at the cave, gear removed and water still stuck in his ears.
“What happened?” Tim asks, appearing freshly showered with a towel draped over his shoulders.
For a moment (for half of a moment really) he considers telling the truth.
“Hit my head on the way down. I thought I was only out for a second, but when I came to I was already at the bottom.” The boy nods grimly and watches as Alfred goes through the rest of the routine. No fluid in the lungs. Short of breath but that’s probably just the adrenaline.
He knows that when Bruce hears about this he will insist on more training. He’ll break down all the many ways he could have avoided being in this situation in the first place. He’ll crucify Duke on his own stupidity all in the name of safety. But he will take that— welcome it, even—because he knows that in their line of work, the crime of failure was much lesser than the crime of fear.
“Thank you,” he says to Tim, finally, when Alfred is packing up all his supplies. The boy just shrugs, turns away from him now that the spectacle is over with. He knows he doesn’t have to say it. Here, throwing your life on the line was just a given. All of them would dive into a bottomless ocean for him if they had to. Duke’s terrified that he wouldn’t be able to do the same for them.
—
He learns, and he learns quickly. Never the smartest kid in class, he learned to follow the patterns and pass for brilliant. The criss-crossing of behavior and emotion and plain guess work—eventually he found the consistencies.
Ms. Moor brewed a pot of coffee every morning, and he could tell based on how empty it was by 11:30 what kind of mood she was going to be in. News reports and hushed conversations between his parents translated to late pickups from school and early morning drop-offs. Certain clues in the way test questions were written, Mr. Gotts always snuck a trick question in his pop quizzes, the best time of the day to stop by the corner store for a bagel, the system which the ACT was graded on. He was a prodigy in his own right. Pattern recognition was enough to put him solidly in the top 10% of his class which, he thought, was enough. The one problem? He drew the lines but failed to solve the puzzle.
It’s that failing of his, another mark against him in the great hierarchy of heroics, that means he recognizes the pattern but can’t seem to wrap his head around the bigger picture. Like solving a puzzle piece by piece, and sure he knew they fit together but he had no idea what the hell he was looking at. He knows that he could ask Bruce, and the man could probably spell it out for him. Only he knew that Bats didn’t do so well when it came to explanations without criticism, or criticism without shame.
There was always a price to pay for being slow on the uptake, and Duke wasn’t interested in paying it. So he lets it rest. Let it simmer. He lived by a policy that called for inaction. Don’t poke at it and risk awakening some other, more horrible, more disgusting truth (that was the hill he’d die on, he was afraid—he’d always let sleeping dogs lie; he might even lay down next to them).
So he doesn’t ask questions when he sees the pattern lay out before him like the yellow brick road and stays firmly rooted where things were familiar. Somewhere on the other side of the answer was his pot of gold, but first he’d have to ask the question. Conveniently, though, he seemed to have forgotten how to do that.
The facts of the case: it always took a half-beat too long for the police to lower their guns when he was the one who saved the day. When he emerged, triumphant, with the criminal left dangling by a rope behind him, they paused. It was just for a moment, barely even a stutter, but he noticed. When he helped load the offender into the squad car they asked him (they always always asked) ‘You know him?’ It’s the kind of question that’s innocuous the first three times, but around ask number four or five the magic starts to wane and it’s beginning to sound like an implication buried in an assumption smothered with a heavy topping of feigned innocence.
‘You know him?’ they always asked. ‘No’ he always said. And thus was the pattern. The seconds it took for them to drop their guard directly correlated with the degree of skepticism he could spot in their eyes when he denied the people who sat cuffed in the back seat of their blue and white cruisers. (Once asked the same question three times in as many minutes, Duke thought back to Sunday School and the story of Simon-Peter denying Jesus—it made him more sick to consider than he wanted to confess).
He knew there was a larger puzzle there, but still the whole escaped him (or maybe he evaded it, maybe he didn’t want to know.)
Duke knows better than to confess the shortcoming, but he wonders sometimes if they already have him figured out. Not in the whole, but maybe the small parts. His seemingly innocuous wrongdoings added up together to form a RICO case against him. He’s waiting, anxiously, for the other shoe to drop.
It doesn’t. He still braces himself for the inevitable fall.
“You didn’t have to come work this case tonight,” Nightwing says.
“Really, I have it handled. You need to get some sleep. Dayshift ended less than six hours ago.”
He knows better than to be insulted when childlike awe will do just as well in its place. Duke didn’t remember the Dick Grayson Robin days well—too young, too uninterested, too far—but he knew the legend, the stories, the myth. Because Dick was the definition of Robin, and in a sense, the living definition of a hero. It put into perspective things like faith and divine intervention because only God knows how the man was still standing—nothing short of a miracle and an army of angels at his side.
Watching Nightwing work reminded him of his own inadequacies, but it was good. Not at all like watching Batman whose every controlled movement was a harsh accusation—Dick’s acrobatic grace was something more akin to a gentle correction. He leaped from a building, and as he fell it seemed like he was saying ‘Fall? Of course you have to fall. How else can you fly? Have some faith in yourself, Duke—close your eyes and believe it hard enough and you’ll sprout wings’
(It was too much faith, he sometimes thought. Too much faith in something Dick hadn’t been promised but always knew he would be given. The only thing Duke had been taught to have that much faith in was God, death, and taxes.)
“I wanted to help,” he says, praying that his stance doesn’t betray how much he is trying to make this seem as if it comes naturally to him. “Besides, most of the crazies come out at night. You guys get all the excitement.”
Which is true and not true—toes the line of being a flat out lie, but Dick is a nice enough person (when he wants to be) to not poke holes in it. Crazies or not, there was a pattern there too. Maybe a certain degree of fear, not of what Duke would do, but of what he wouldn’t. Gotham was a city under constant threat, but during the daytime the crimes looked a lot less like the work of evil incarnate and a lot more like desperate people pushed to the edge. That kind of perspective colored your crime-fighting, even if Batman wasn’t ready to juggle that kind of moral complication.
“Listen, you want more excitement? Next time Joker breaks out I’ll send you in my place. Then we can talk about who gets the better deal,” Dick says, graciously, but the joke is a little too sweet for Duke. He forces himself to laugh.
Then, it’s quiet. Duke lays out the pattern in his head. A case in the Narrows—usually it was the night shift who found it, it was Duke who did the early morning groundwork, and by the end of the following night not only was he not involved with the operation but his name was barely an aside in the report. The more desperate the crime, the further the wedge (which he didn’t help, because he was always the one taking the sympathetic route to justice—it didn’t mix with Batman’s fire and brimstone method of laying down the law).
Sometimes he worried that he was less of a hero—not even a sidekick—and more of a PR stunt. The yellow, the daytime? He did good things for Gotham, but not life-changing. He directed people down the “right” path when he could, but he couldn’t do anything for them when the overdue rent drove them to a guns smuggling gig—a “one time thing” they always promised, and when a shattered vertebrae (courtesy of Duke’s more direct colleagues) left them unemployed, they always ended up back exactly where they started.
(Back when he started, when Bruce suggested that he be Gotham’s daytime protector, he said, ‘The people need to see someone like you.’ Duke had taken the gear and the training and the bank account with a number that used to be beyond his wildest dreams. The whole time, though, he was ignoring a feeling rustling in his chest. A feeling that kept on scratching out along the walls of his voice box ‘No, they need to see you. What kind of savior shuns the one he saves?’ But that was getting Biblical and downright philosophical—Bruce was an unforgiving atheist with a dislike of the kind of ethical push-and-pull that a philosophical dilemma necessitated.)
This, however, is not what he says to Dick as they wait in the eaves of an abandoned warehouse that’s tucked into one of the inner depths of the Narrows. Instead, he stays quiet. He’s juggling the problem over in his mind, trying to find a way to phrase it that sounds less accusatory and more like a concerned parent getting slightly pushy with an uncooperative teacher. The issue is that he doesn’t have a question to ask, and questions were always more disarming than statements. Duke just isn’t sure what to do with that.
“Hey, Dick I—”
“There’s our guy.” He’s more relieved than he is annoyed. Chooses to take it as a divine sign (or the Gotham equivalent) that his silence could be mistaken for respect in this instance. And he, trained by Bruce Wayne the self-proclaimed moral enforcer of the city, tended towards respect when he could.
He focuses on the ground. Focuses on the men congregating below, searching the sea of faces until he picks out the one that Nightwing was tailing. His name was Rylen Thomas, the head of a new racketeering crew smuggling the less than legal side of pharmaceuticals. It was Nightwing’s problem because Blüdhaven was their soon-to-be new stomping grounds and the last thing that city needed was another dealer. It was Signal’s problem because he was trying to prove something.
He thinks—he hopes— that he can put that pattern-finding habit behind him for the time it takes to save the day and escape into the night. He’d whip through the cool night air and as he faced the threat of the fall he’d be able to comfort himself with the knowledge that he’d done a “good thing.”
That fades when he starts to pay attention to the other faces. And see, Duke didn’t think Dick was the type for mind games and tests that he didn’t even know were tests. That was Bruce’s modus operandi. He’s willing to bet it’s chance that leads Shilo Martion to be dragging in a bag behind Rylen, and he’s willing to bet it’s chance that this is the case that he happened to catch wind of when Dick appeared in Gotham this afternoon, and he’s willing to bet it’s chance he even recognizes the boy whose really no older than he was but trying his damndest to look older.
It’s the kind of emotionally manipulative bullshit that he was more likely to impale himself on than do absolutely anything useful with. So Duke thinks to himself: This is Bruce. It must be Bruce. And this is just another excuse to remind me of another failing—this time a failing of optics, last time a failure of action, next time what is it? A failure of morality?
Not for the first time he wishes he could shed his yellow suit for something darker, better suited for blending in with the night—but he guessed that would be redundant.
He tries to ignore the turning in his stomach as they spring into action. The intel was good, of course. The Bats had a bottom up approach that was twenty years proven: beat it out of the ones with something to lose, use the intel to lock up the ones who didn’t (Duke knew, but absolutely refused to acknowledge, that his father would see everything he was doing now as a particularly insidious type of betrayal).
When everyone’s down and Thomas is in cuffs, when the police report to the scene, even when he and Nightwing stick around to do damage control with Gotham’s finest the pattern stays firmly in place. And of course, because Gotham is a lot of things but benevolent is not one of them, they’re standing by the open door of a police cruiser that Shilo is sitting in.
“You know this guy?” the officer asks him (and Duke can’t help but think to himself that at least at night you couldn’t make out anyone’s eyes well enough to tell what they were thinking). It’s a tired routine, but one that he’s more or less learned to graciously accommodate.
“No.”
This time, though, his denial feels like he’s just sentenced someone to death (and he isn’t sure which one of them—him or Shilo—is the one whose days are measured).
Though Duke knows there was absolutely no way that Shilo could recognize him, the look he gives him as the car door shuts is still accusatory enough that Duke feels like he’s been flayed and bared there for all to see and inspect.
—
The gag of it all was that Duke was actually a really good swimmer. Not Michael Phelps or anything, but once you dug past all the inherited wariness of deep water and disappearing land you would find that he was better than decent. In another life he might have been on the low end of a high school swim team's MVP list.
So, he swims. Keeps swimming. And his time doesn’t improve. The pads of his fingers are beyond wrinkled and he’s pretty sure that the chemical smell of chlorine has burned off the inner layer of skin in his nose. Still, it feels like he’s proving something. It felt like the true test of his heroism was his willingness to die for it. Or at least that was the kind of logic 17-year-old boys subscribed to, so he doesn’t stop.
“You know you don’t have to beat yourself up over this,” Dick says from where he’s tanning beside the pool (and Duke has to try very hard to convince himself that he was not there to watch him).
“We all have close calls. It’s kind of our thing.” Duke bites down on his tongue as he reaches for the water bottle he’d left at the poolside and wonders if it would be worth it to say otherwise (and again was that faith Dick had that made him nervous—and more than it made him nervous, it made something just on the south side of angry well up deep in him).
“I’m not beating myself up,” he says more forcefully than he has to. “This is training.”
And he’s being honest this time, because “beating himself up” required a type of self-analysis that he didn’t have time for and a degree of anger that he knew he would never be afforded. He knew the price on his head. He knew the stakes. And he knew, above everything else, that he didn’t have room for missteps. Faith wasn’t going to get him through this.
“God , who are you? Bruce?”
And he doesn’t respond to that because it was a stupid question and the kind of thing he couldn’t do anything with. This whole thing, he knew, was kind of unfair to Dick because the man was the nicer version of the judge and jury in the cave below and technically he had never done anything to him. In fact, it was probably just the stress.
So he swims.
It doesn’t make up for his fear—in fact this isn't even a good excuse for fear. Duke didn’t even want to call it fear, because that was a little too simplistic and made it sound like something he could conquer with a trip to a therapist. Too much solid ground beneath him, too little on the line, too much left in the air. But it still feels like proof—a guard against inadequacy—so help him Jesus. If he can learn to hold his breath for longer (if he can learn to fight the sneaking suspicion that things were progressing exactly as they were supposed to) then there won’t be any question of what he’ll do next time.
Duke will save himself. Of course he’ll save himself.
When he comes back up for air, he almost mistakes the voice of Dick Grayson for the voice of fate.
“What were you going to ask last night?”
(And Duke thinks, stupidly, that the man would ever be able to understand the half of it. He thinks about telling him about drowning and how simple it was. He thinks about talking about Tyrell and Shilo and the deep end of the YMCA pool, and how simple things seemed in your last moments. He thinks of telling him that he thinks he’d be better off if he worked at night where crimes were just crimes and he didn’t have to grant anyone the dignity of understanding.)
“What if I’m not meant for this,” he says instead, which brushes up against the side of the beast but doesn’t wake it.
When the man takes a beat too long to finish Duke continues, hoping that his doubt wouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of conviction.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m playing catch up with you guys.” He wills the man not to ask him to elaborate, and somehow God hears his desperation.
“We’ve been doing this for much longer,” he says carefully, gently, like he’s talking to a wounded animal he’s scared is going to bolt. It makes Duke wonder just how out-of-place he is. It makes him wonder how obvious it was that the question was deeper than a mild case of impostor syndrome. It makes him wonder if he should just cut his losses while he can, take Gotham at face value, maybe get into politics or something. It’d be straightforward and the moral issues would, at least, be blatant and baked into the nature of the job. No more post-patrol crucifixions and ethical audits for him.
“But Duke,” when he meets Dick eyes he almost feels reassured, “this city needs you. We need you.”
He’s no cynic—in fact, he liked to fancy himself an optimist on his best days and a forgiving realist on his worst—but he can’t help the drop in his stomach at those words. Still, he smiles. He turns and dips his head back down under the water and starts to swim again.
(Yes, this city needed him. He wasn’t sure it needed him like this, though.)
—
Because Duke was good at following patterns, and because knowing your place was akin to godliness in his neighborhood, he knew that being less than perfect was absolutely not (and never would be) an option for him. Mediocrity, for him, was an exceptionally virulent sin.
He must be perfect and irreproachable in every way that mattered.
Which was not what Bruce would ever say to him, but somewhere between the training so brutal it doubled as unresolved anger and patrols where he always finished feeling less convicted in his cause than he did when he started he got the message. He tries to live by it. Emphasis on tries . But daytime makes everything more sympathetic than he wants it to be, and the fact of the matter is that being a hero and being understanding were really a kind of contradiction that was hard to wrap your head around.
He thinks it would be easier to be Superman, or something. Focus on the big bads who threatened the universe and were, down to the core (or at least as far down as it mattered), just plain evil. The Bats practiced a type of street level crime-fighting that made his stomach turn more often than it convinced him that he was doing any good.
But he tries, and it feels a little bit like drowning all over again. He tries, and he tries so hard it leads to hesitation. When this whole thing started he hadn’t been too concerned with legality and optics and moral arbitration, but now every time he’s tasked with saving the day he play the guessing game of vigilante politics and wonders if he would stay off the chopping block during the evening news recap. Probably not.
Another curse of his own glaring visibility—every mistake looked shockingly obvious to the casual observer and downright malicious to anyone with half as much training and “protect the innocent” oath attached to their back (and when he realized, all on his own, that Bruce’s promise had a lot less to do with protecting the vulnerable and a lot more to do with punishing the guilty he couldn’t help but find his faith wavering again).
His exceptionalism precedes him, and so does his humanity. He’s questioned on every decision, and even when no one’s holding the magnifying glass up to his work he knows that it was in his best interest to act as if they were. By the book he tells himself as he punches the recently unemployed Two Face thugs trying, unsuccessfully, to rob a bank in broad daylight.
By the book, he tells himself when a stray bullet hits a gas line (and he doesn’t even start to question why there was an exposed gas line in a bank because this was the Narrows and everybody knows that their tax dollars are floating on the docks of Gotham Bay, probably getting deep-cleaned for some overly indulgent party that would be thrown latter tonight while the peons made due with crumbling infrastructure and the kind of potholes that could knock people right into a coma).
It’s only when he pushes himself up off the ground in a now precariously situated building now ablaze, that he stops reminding himself to go by the book. The robbers are either gone or buried underneath one of the now collapsed portion of the roof and honestly he doesn’t really care who was who right now. What Duke knows is that Gotham’s construction was precarious on the best of days, and when a small explosion was added to the mix a collapse was all but guaranteed. With part of the roof, and the business above, already collapsed he had at most two minutes before the whole thing came down and killed him and everyone else who was in here. And that was generous.
He takes inventory of everyone who’d been in the bank. The three robbers and the bank teller. Behind his visor his eyes sweep over the floor of the building, looking for any sign of the four. He spots one, feet sticking out from the rubble and undoubtedly dead. The other he suspects is under there with him. But the third robber, he’d been close to the counter. Not his bullet that had set off the explosion, but he’d been the most desperate of them all. Half hysterical , yelling about how he needed the money for his kid. Yelling about how his kid was sick and had been sick for years and was probably going to die all because Batman was too good to let a couple of guns into his city. Yelling about how he’d kill anyone who stood in the way of him getting this money. Yelling about how it was his kid —and damn it all, he was ready to die for this if he had to. (And that, exactly, was the type of fallout bullshit that Duke didn’t want to deal with but always had to.)
So if anyone had asked about what he did next (and they did, and they would, and they always will so he is incredibly specific in his report and prays to God, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that it would absolve him of any wrongdoing) Duke would say that he was going by the book, and nothing but the book. Because logically Duke knows that the person he sees unconscious on his side of the counter is not the bank teller. And logically he knows that he will never get to the woman on the other side of the glass before the building collapses on them both. And logically he knows that he is now down to somewhere in the realm of 30-45 seconds before the whole place comes down and they all die. And logically he knows that he wouldn’t be able to save them both and really if he didn’t save the one easiest to reach that no one would be saved.
(And emotionally he knows, but does not allow himself to dwell on, the fact it was this very bank at this very branch that made the loan to his mother’s childhood friend that would ultimately drown her so deep in debt that one summer afternoon she just up and leapt off the top of the office building she cleaned for $11 an hour.)
So he does what heroes are supposed to do, and he thinks to himself that he has done everything by the book and he is blameless in every way. He’s still trying to hold onto this thought when he drags the man out into the cool air where police cars are already starting to pull up (and Gotham’s finest usually had the shitiest response times, so why did it always seem that for him they showed right on time?).
Duke thinks, in the 30-seconds it takes for the first person to cross the distance between their car and where he stands doubled over gasping for air, that he’d gotten more than he bargained for. That this “hero” thing was too much, and if he was supposed to be Batman's personal PR stunt then he was doing a shitty job of it. He thinks that he’s tired of victim politics and rationalizing who the “right” person to save is. He thinks that if he was absolutely anyone else then he could do the right thing and not be scrutinized for his motivations. He thinks that sometimes him saving the day was just saving the day and he wasn’t trying to advance anybody’s narrative.
But all of this is the long way of saying that he chose wrong.
He knows this before his eyes open and he looks down at the unconscious but alive robber laying on the ground (because of course , this happened a deeper, more resentful part of him hisses; of course, there was absolutely no other way this could have gone) .
He knows this before someone helps him straighten up and claps a hand against his back and tells him to breathe. And when they inevitably ask what they always ask it feels even more accusatory this time than it usually does. Faintly, he hears the scream from inside the now collapsed building. Maybe an air-pocket, one that was going to run out quickly because of the smoke.
“Why’d you save him?” the man at his back asks him, and Duke knows that he doesn’t mean for it to sound like an appraisal of his worth. It does anyway. It doesn’t really matter, though, what he says to this. It doesn’t matter at all.
“I couldn’t save them both,” he says and then, as an afterthought, “I had to choose. I chose the one I could reach.”
—
When Duke catches the evening news that night, he gets to hear about his failings on statewide television—Bill Murphie was on the warpath as he ran for governor and tonight he was the topic of discussion.
“For God’s sake—they’re practically bringing that activism bullshit into heroics now. Look at what just happened in Gotham, Miles. Look at who that new guy—Signal—is saving. Jesus! First we get vigilantes, then we get woke vigilantes? Spare me. That’s why we need to get stricter about these heroes. Regulate them. Get them into the system. I mean honestly, you really think Superman would have saved that guy instead of the teller he was trying to rob? No. No, I don’t think he would have.”
(Duke ignores the tightening of his chest.)
(And when he goes to sleep that night, despite himself, he’s still thinking about the man he saved. He’s still more sympathetic than he should be.)
(His greatest sin, he knows, is his empathy.)
—
Here’s the thing: Shilo sat on the right side of Duke at Sunday School for so long that when he wasn’t there he’d spend the whole lesson feeling like he was missing his other half and no one noticed. And Shilo couldn’t swim either, which wasn’t tied them together but since it was a classroom full of kids that couldn’t swim in a church full of adults who couldn’t swim (whose parents hadn’t been able to swim and neither had their parents parents) it was a good enough common thread. Stack that on top of the mothers who always spoke after the service ended, the same apartment block, afternoons after school spent at each other’s barely-held-together apartment buildings and they were all but fused at the hip.
Not his best friend, but maybe one of them, so when Duke’s parents were found giggling and cackling and barely alive in the Gotham sewers Ms. Martin and her husband (not Shilo’s dad, and if you asked him, not even his step-dad) made sure to visit in the hospital room with the money from the church collection and enough food to last the week. The ‘I’m so sorry' and the ‘I’m keeping you in my prayers' all kind of tasted sour in his mouth, but he kept that fact to himself. Just let the woman hug him and wondered if it was a credit to his strength that he never cried in front of anyone.
And Shilo was the one to visit him the most in the hospital. Shilo was the one that kept texting and calling when the social workers started to shuffle him between homes. Shilo was the one who told him about what was happening in their neighborhood and who was pregnant and who was in jail and who was moving and who had a new black eye courtesy of Batman. But distance makes for shallow connection, and each time Duke moved he felt his tether to everything he knew and loved thinning.
Then there was ‘We Are Robin’, and the moral backflips you have to do to navigate Batman-branded vigilantism made it harder to connect and easier to end the phone call with a ‘Hey man, I’ll catch up with you later, alright?’
Duke didn’t mean to lose touch. It just happened. Kind of like cancer and divine intervention. Shouldered with the burden of saving a city, keeping up with your friends got pushed to the side and categorized with the other non-essentials (ie. peace of mind, faith in the system, boundaries, rule of law, trial by jury, mental health, healthy relationship with food, healthy relationship with your own mortality, a consistent sleep schedule, etc. etc.) But he’d remember sometimes. He’d work his patrol route of the day and pass by his old apartment (a place he tried to never stay near for too long) and think to himself ‘I really should call Shilo’ —but in between the prison breakouts and daytime muggings it always slipped his mind.
It takes him a week, and only a week, to crack under the pressure. Some over-righteous version of his pastor screamed at him in the back of his mind “you are your brother’s keeper” when he ended the dayshift thirty minutes early, changed out of his uniform, and found himself standing (guilty) at the Martin’s two bedroom apartment. It was a Saturday, and inside he could hear loud gospel music blaring—a cleaning day, he knew. It took three tries knocking on the door, each time louder than the last, before he finally heard the vacuum cut off inside and footsteps.
He knows—okay, he knows— that his lies were sound and his identity was safe and no one knew that he was now a part of the very group everyone he’d known growing up had mixed feelings about at best. Still, he stands at the door sweating like a murderer anxiously waiting for their sentence. The gavel slams down—and the door swings open. Shilo’s mom looks ten years older than she had when Duke had seen her last, but he’s more concerned with whether or not the light in her eyes was excitement or anger.
“Duke, baby,” excitement he decides as he’s drawn in for a tight hug that smells like Pinesol and bleach, “boy I haven’t seen you in months. Shit—might be a year now.” He doesn’t hug back, not immediately, because he’s trying to quell the guilt and convince himself that he was not asphyxiating. (And really what makes this whole thing is worse is that some small part of him is saying: Of course he went to jail. There was nothing I, or anyone else, could have done. How else could that have gone anyway? No. There was absolutely no other way this could have gone.)
“Hi Mrs. Martin,” he says finally, hugging her back even though the hug has stretched now for about a second too long, “Yeah I… I need to do better about that.”
“Don’t think I’ve laid eyes on you since you went to live with that Wayne man,” when Ms. Martin leans back her eyes are already wet and Duke is really wishing that he hadn’t come here, “Don’t tell me you trying to forget us.”
(Duke could never ever, ever never, never ever ever forget where he came from. Nobody would let him.)
“No ma’am,” he says, but the words feel like sandpaper. The kind of lie of omission that even the most lenient reading of the ten commandments would absolutely label as falling under ‘Thou shall not bear false witness.’ Sure he hadn’t been trying to forget, but he had been trying to ignore. To excuse. To ghost around all the mixed-feelings and outright criticisms of Batman he’d been raised on. He knew there was a pattern here—crime begets crime, and Shilo’s biological dad was in jail. But he also knew that there were more steps in there, and he knew that if this was a cycle, then he was helping to perpetuate it. He knew you couldn’t end a cycle without acknowledging how it started.
“Well come on in, then. When’s the last time you ate? I know that food up there can’t be good—I’ll send you back with something. Give you a break from the cheese and crackers.” It’s almost like Duke is home again. Almost .
He takes off his shoes by the door, crosses the distance to stand in the doorway of the kitchen, and watches as Mrs. Martin sets about making him a tupperware of food that he hadn’t asked for but knew he wouldn’t be able to deny. He thinks about his mom, and how no one could ever leave their apartment empty-handed. She’d told him (and her mother had told her) that letting someone leave your home hungry was just like telling the devil you wanted him to invite himself in, since letting folks go hungry was just the type of evil he designed. (Bruce said, constantly, that criminals were a cowardly and superstitious lot.)
“How you been? I heard your parents were transferred into long-term care. They doing any better?” Duke does not want to talk about his parents with her right now, or really ever, but he’d been raised to be polite to his elders so he doesn’t say this.
“No. No they’re not,” before the silence can get uncomfortable he speaks again, “I was hoping I’d see Shilo. Is he around?” Duke knows for a fact that Shilo was in jail right now—the bail wasn’t even that high but the people they knew didn’t have $3,000 laying around. He knew long before he walked up to the front door of the 5-floor walk-up that Shilo wouldn’t be here. He’d come anyway. It felt like it was the least he could do—it felt like it was the right thing to do.
Mrs. Martin is quiet for a beat, and Duke dutifully plays the role of the prodigal friend. He waits.
“You know, I really hoped the two of you would turn out different,” Mrs. Martin finally sighs, yanking open the fridge to pull out a pot of food, “God knows you started with two strikes against you but I was hoping that…”
She shakes her head, and doesn’t dare to finish the thought—maybe because she knows what most of them know on some level: hope was dangerous. Hope was a challenge .
When she speaks again, her voice sounds weary.
“Shilo’s in jail, Duke.”
He says nothing. He waits.
“And I don’t—” it’s a funny thing when people’s own voice betrays them, “I don’t think he’s coming back home anytime soon.”
When Mrs. Martin starts to cry, deep and ugly because the wound is still raw and because they both know jail is just a different kind of death, Duke walks over and hugs her. Still he says nothing. He waits.
He prays that sometime before she stops crying he’ll figure out what exactly it is he’s waiting for.
He doesn’t.
—
(Duke knows for a fact that if crime begets crime, then looking for crime begets finding it.)
—
“What’d you learn?” Bruce asks, already awake and in the cave when he gets back from Mrs. Martin’s. For a moment, only a moment, he’s confused. But then he notices the mug shot up on the Batcomputer’s screen and suddenly he can’t decide if he’s angry or exhausted.
“How’d you know?” he asks, because he isn’t interested in playing the dumb-sturck bystander confused on why he was getting picked up for manslaughter while holding the murder weapon. There was no point lying to him, really. The man was the next closest thing to an honest-to-God lie detector.
Bruce tilts his head, and it’s almost generous. Because he could pick out the ways in which he was able to piece it together but really it was quite simple. You’re from the same neighborhood, you sat in the same pews, you shared the same shitty central heating. Of course you know him. How else could this have gone?
“Nothing. I didn’t learn anything. I was visiting family ,” he says finally when it’s obvious that Bruce wasn’t going to respond to his question. If he focuses long and hard, he can crystallize the feeling in his chest into something more akin to insecurity, but the ugly truth was that more than he was insecure, he was angry. Angry that half the people he knew were in jail or on their way. Angry that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Angry that Batman fought the criminals and not the system that created them. Angry that he, like an idiotic kid with unchecked dreams of grandeur, was doing exactly the same thing.
He yanks off his helmet and walks straight to the showers, his steps slow and overly pronounced because he is trying his damndest to not give any of his doubt away. Duke knows (and maybe he has always known this) that he wouldn’t be forgiven for his sympathy if he confessed any of it. He knows that his shortcomings were piled up the wall, and at some point Bruce might finally decide to pull the plug on this whole thing—which he’s not convinced wouldn’t be a relief. He’s tired of being a showpiece. He’s tired of being their way of saying to the people ‘Look, we have one of you now.’
He thinks back to Dick’s overwhelming amount of faith that he could turn any fall into flight.
“Duke,” Bruce just as he starts to pass out of view, and he hesitates (stupidly stupidly he always hesitated when it mattered), “Let Nightwing handle this case. Your relationship with Shilo might stop you from being objective.” Which is the nice way of saying: You always choose the wrong ones to save.
Duke keeps walking, and he doesn’t answer.
You want faith? Duke had enough faith in Bruce’s moral noose to move mountains.
—
Duke learns, and he learns quickly. Never the smartest kid in class, he learned to pick out the patterns and pass himself off as brilliant. And so, because of his age old habit of connecting the dots and still not getting the fucking point, he always saves the wrong person and never seems to piece together how to save the right one.
He knew, because Bruce knew and said as much, that this job was always going to be harder for him. He knew that it was never going to be as simple as swooping in and saving the day. He knew that he had two strikes against him and was already on the path to his third. He knew that the politics of who gets to live were up there with physics when it comes to the hardest sciences, and his pattern recognition ability wasn’t going to save him this time.
Top of his class in English, bottom of it in heroism—he wondered if he could articulate any of this into words without coming across as a sore loser. He thinks to himself that this would have been easier if he had drowned in the Gotham Bay. Or better yet, if the lifeguard at that YMCA had just been a few seconds too late to save him.
The assurance that he’s saving the day never seems to make up for the pit in his chest when he sees Gotham’s homeless in full light—dirty, and desperate, and probably strung out on drugs, and probably hungry, and probably tired. When he’s in his old neighborhood, he sees the same faces and they see him too. They don’t recognize him, but they see him. They stare. Sometimes they smile, but the smile always seems forced.
Duke doesn’t enforce the little laws (he doesn’t enforce anything , technically—his Dad never let him forget; Batman is a vigilante, not the police, for him to “enforce” the law, he had to break it, and if they were counting up every illegal thing Batman had done then he’d have a rap sheet longer than most of the frequent offenders). He likes to think of it as benevolence, but he knows it’s actually guilt. He also knows that Bruce would never tolerate it, so Duke never confesses it. Knows better than to hand over another shortcoming of his.
So when he sees the street kids stealing food from the only grocery store in a 20-mile radius he looks the other way. When he spots pickpockets slipping money out of purses of rich tourists on a “Joker Attack Walking Tour” he finds somewhere else to be. When he gets a tip about people selling stolen car tires and alternators he “forgets” to follow up.
It’s his version of penance.
He tries to balance out the crime-fighting with community work. Helps people move furniture, plays basketball for a few minutes with the kids in the park, carries groceries to people’s cars. He spends more time in the “bad” side of Gotham than he does the rich (and he forces himself not to notice the pattern there either) so he does his best to be useful. Still, he knows he’s treating a symptom not a cause. He knows poison dished out with honey was still just poison.
“It’s a good thing they’ve got someone like us out here,” Pastor Knight says when he shows up to help replace the recently shattered front window of the church. Duke thinks back to services spent in the very pews inside this building, and he isn’t so sure about that (he thinks that his mom would call this whole thing out for what it was if she was here—he, disgustingly, is glad that she isn’t).
“Might give some of these kids some hope.” (They both know that hope, for them, was just as wicked as blasphemy.)
Duke just nods, doesn’t trust his voice not to give him away. He doubts (almost as much as he doubts Batman’s whole ideology) that hope was what they needed. Hope didn’t get you to age twenty-one—hope got you a one way ticket to the business end of a gun and the universe’s cosmic wrath. Hope invoked a special kind of indignation in the heart of the city, made it ask “Did I just catch you wanting to be shit?” Hope made you think that you were invincible, that the sky was the limit, that the only thing standing between you and the American dream was your own determination.
(He supposes what he really means is that he didn’t really want to keep these kids at the bottom, but man did he not want to see them fall from the top.)
Later during that same patrol, he’s forced to actually step in and save the day. Takes up the role of judge jury and executioner before someone gets killed —and if some bitter part of him thinks that maybe it would be best if he just let things play out then he would actually feel good about himself for once then that’s between him and his own guilt-complex. It’s an unremarkable crime. A robbery, because when is it not a robbery (poverty, the mother of all desperation)? This time in midtown, geographically speaking not that far from the Narrows, but it might as well be another world. He know—he knows without anyone telling him—where the robbers, now cuffed and sitting on the curb are from. The police know it too, and they suspect the same of him so, of course, they ask. Duke barely even registers it.
He wonders what Simon Peter must have felt like. After denying Jesus. He wonders what sinks in his stomach first—the guilt or the desperate hysterical thought of ‘But what else could I do?’ He wonders if he was left feeling like he needed to rip out his heart and offer it up to the sky in some quest for penance. Plead with God ‘I’ll give you my life if you can help me fix this. I’ll give you more than my life.’
Bitterly, Duke thinks to himself that maybe he should climb up to the top of Wayne Tower, shake his fist at today’s uncharacteristically blue sky (as if it didn’t know the futility of it all—as if it didn’t know that you couldn’t dig yourself out of a hole) and scream ‘This is your fault.’ Scream ‘Why can’t you save us?’ Scream ‘What kind of benevolent God just sits back and watches us suffer for a crime that we were guilty of the moment we were born?’
Duke doesn’t do any of that. Instead, he watches silently as the two man team is herded into the back of two different police cars. An officer stands beside him, asking him about the damage. A few minutes ago he’d asked if he knew the two of them. Duke doesn’t, but when he says it the words feel like a lie anyways.
“It’s good that they’ve got someone like you out in the sunshine,” the officer (Rosen, his tag reads) says, bringing a hand down on his shoulder, “Last thing we need is another one of you going ‘bump in the night.’”
He presses his lips together in a poor facsimile of a smile, but by the crease of the officer’s dimples when his chuckle stretches too wide to be read as anything but malice Duke knows exactly what he means.
—
He thinks, distantly, that he has made a mistake the second he finds himself standing in Shilo’s holding cell, eyes peering into a relentless darkness. For what it’s worth, it’s still the same kid he grew up with. He thinks, maybe, that it’s still his friend. (And if it isn’t, then he’s not sure whose changed.)
“Why’d you do it, man?” he asks, and he wonders what he must look like to his friend now. Wonders if he blamed him—would blame him, if he knew. The mask isn’t for his protection, he knows, it’s so he doesn't have to face the cruel reality. And Shilo is still just a kid . They’re both kids—Duke’s own mortality hit’s him like a tank. They’re kids, and they’re on different sides of the same coin, and Duke is pretty sure he’s tails.
“The hell?”
If he were to somehow time travel back five years and stand in front of his younger self for judgement, if he gave 14-year-old Duke Thomas the power to sentence him, then he knows that he would face an eternity of imprisonment. Betrayal is bad on a normal day, but this kind of betrayal was worse. It wasn’t just betrayal—it was knowing denial.
“Why’d you do it?”
“Man—I don’t have to tell you shit. Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway?”
Duke doesn’t answer. He takes off his mask. Watches the look on Shilo’s face shift through the stages of grief and settle somewhere just short of acceptance.
He opens his mouth to ask again, but Shilo starts talking before he can finish.
“You know how hard it is to say no, Duke?” He’s the kid Duke knows, not the criminal he’s been turned into (he thinks what a shame it is that he’d been put into a no-win situation, where every move was also evidence against you). He thinks about Mrs. Martin, about sitting in the apartment after school, waiting for Duke’s mom to take him home. He thinks about Sunday school, how the two of them had never been paying as much attention to the sermon as they should have.
“Like, you left, and then Tommy and them got arrested for drugs, and then Ma got her hours cut, and I just…” He sinks back against the cement wall, tired and a step away from death’s door. Duke just watches, becuase he doesn’t know what to say. He knows that he hadn’t been trying to blame him, but “You left” felt just as accusatory as “We find the defendant guilty” and he’s half expecting an officer to come to the cell door, gun already pointed, and yell at him to put his hands up.
He thinks about the sum total of both their lives. Thinks about where he would be if the Joker hadn’t infected his parents (he wonders how wicked it is to think that he might have that lunatic to thank for his own emancipation). Between the end days sermons, the PSA’s, the whispered words, the solemn finality that resided in every adult he knew, the warning of ‘Stay far far away from the police’, the promise of an early death, his fathers words: ‘You have to be twice as good to get half as much.’
He adds all this up together. Traces a clear pattern through it all. This time, he can actually tell what the bigger picture is. It’s as plain as day, and he could ignore it if he wanted, but it was still there. Shilo had never stood a chance. Neither did he. They were both careening towards a violent end, and there was absolutely no way they, or anybody else, could save them.
“Fuck man—they didn’t give me a choice for real, and the money was…” Shilo drifts off, looking down at the floor, “Nobody in my family has money like that. Nobody .” He knows. Of course he knows. Nobody in Duke’s family, his real family, did either.
“Shilo…” but his words fail him, just like they’d failed Mrs. Martin. He wants to say something deep and meaningful, something that would assure the both of them that they were going to be alright. But there’s nothing to say, so he says nothing.
“You think I could do it too?” Shilo says, looking back up at him awestruck and eyes wet, eyes jumping between Duke’s eyes and the helmet he now held in his hands.
“Like if I confess and take a plea? I could get out early, turn it around. You think I could do it too?”
What he wants to say is no. What he wants to say is that the game was rigged against them the moment it started and now Shilo had three strikes against him instead of two. What he wants to say is Listen. Listen to me. Anybody can do this—but you don’t want to. It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. It’s the worst thing I will ever do. The guilt—you don’t understand the guilt. And the worst part is that no one gets it. None of them know what it’s like to be afraid the way we’re afraid. None of them know what it's like to live your every waking moment feeling guilty about the one thing you can’t change. Damn it—listen to me, Shilo. Everyone in that house can swim. They have no idea what it’s like to be afraid of drowning.
Duke doesn’t say this. Later, he’ll wonder if maybe if he had it would have changed things, or if Shilo just would have taken it as Duke trying to hold him down—to stop him from breaking free.
(It’s his neighborhood too, so he gives Shilo the only advice he can think of. It’s his neighborhood too, so for a moment he forgets about doing the “right” thing, and tells Shilo to do the smart thing.)
Duke says: “No matter what they ask you, no matter what they threaten you with, no matter what they promise you, don’t say anything. Not a word. Not a name, not a date, not a time— nothing . Get a lawyer and don’t take a plea—call me, I’ll get the lawyer, but don’t confess to shit.”
(It’s his neighborhood too, so even as he says it, he’s not sure he believes it’ll save him.)
—
It’s because Bruce knows about his greatest sin that he doesn’t tell him that Shilo confesses everything to Nightwing.
It’s because Bruce knows about his greatest sin that he doesn’t tell him when he’s shot in the head before the protected witness agreement even makes it out the printer.
It’s because Bruce knows about his greatest sin that Duke only learns the news two days late—overhears it from someone’s car radio while sitting in the traffic that congested the pain-in-the-ass route that took you from midtown to the Narrows. A car blows their horn at him.
—
Duke’s known, and perhaps he’s always known, that there was absolutely only one way this could end (it feels honest, he thinks bitterly, it feels like a promise kept). Long before he had the language to express it, long before he knew anything about Montgomery, or the 3/4ths compromise, or systemic oppression, or microaggressions he knew he was living on borrowed time.
He thinks, maybe, that it was the root of where all that anger came from—the futility of his revolting, the futility of his begging. His mistake was having too much faith in what he had never been promised. Too much faith in his own exceptionalism. Too much faith in his own freedom. He dove in the deep end and refused to swim back out of it, convinced he couldn’t sink—now here he was sinking.
“I didn’t steal anything, man. Look—my wallet is in my back pocket, alright?”
“Look son, I’m going to need you to—”
“Don’t call me son. Look, my wallet is in my pocket, alright? I haven’t taken a thing.”
How did he get here? Something something about delivering some flowers and promising he’d be there for the funeral. Something something about wanting something sweet to distract him from the rising taste of bile. Something something about his eyes blurring by the Little Debbies section too much for him to see properly. He hadn’t noticed the clerk press the silent alarm (but Duke knew that he’d only been in here 5-minutes, which meant they must have pressed the alarm the moment he walked in—which meant that Gotham’s finest, once again, was breaking records with their response times only when it involved him).
“I’ll call you whatever the hell I want. Now I’m going to need you to calm down and put your hands up and we can talk about this.” Pattern recognition—Duke notices the way the cops fingers tense at his waist (even though Duke’s just standing there), he notices the hardness in his eyes, he notices the hostility in his voice, he notices the way that he’s preparing himself to draw, he notices the people around the shop watching, he notices the cameras pointed at him. He can’t help but think Of course. He can’t help but think What else could I have expected? He thinks There’s absolutely no other way this could have gone.
“Now she says that she saw you putting something in your pocket. We’re going to figure out what you took, you get to decide how we do this.”
He thinks back to videos on social media, he thinks back to protests in the streets of Gotham (the kind that brought all the Bats out of the woodworks to watch from the tops of buildings, all seeing and unforgiving of the destruction). He thinks of ‘I can’t breathe’, and contradictory instructions, and Dick shaking his head at the videos (the ones that no one but Duke seemed to flinch at) before saying ‘This country is fucked up. Just absolutely fucked up.’
“Look, man—”
“Put your hands up!”
He does. And in his head he’s thinking: This is it.
“Empty out your pockets!”
He moves, freezes when the gun is drawn, and thinks to himself that maybe if he was better at putting the pieces together (maybe if he stopped letting sleeping dogs lie) he wouldn’t be here right now. He thinks that he’d deluded himself, fell into the myth of exceptionalism, forgot that at the end of the day he was still exactly what he always had and always would be.
“Stop moving, keep your hands up.”
He wonders, briefly, what Dick would say if he saw this video. He wonders if it would make any difference, or if the measure of Duke’s worth wasn’t his ability to save people but his ability to be a scapegoat. They could get another kid from his neighborhood, he knew. They could have some new Narrows-boy work the day shift, smile for the cameras, be the face of an operation they were never more than half-convinced was actually justice. They could find someone new to impale on moral checkmates and legal technicalities. They didn’t need Duke , they needed what he represented.
He knows, logically , that in the time it would take the officer to turn off the safety and fire he could already be halfway across the floor. He knows, logically, that there were about three ways for him disarm the man without hurting him. He knows, logically, that once they checked his pockets and the footage from the security camera that his biggest crime would be resisting arrest (and even that would be a stretch—just the kind of accusation that he wouldn’t be able to shake.)
He also knows, emotionally , that the synapses attaching his ability to be “logical” to the rest of his brain had short circuited the moment he looked down the barrel of the gun.
Duke knows he should have said something. It was absolutely idiotic that he didn’t—all of it was. A hero afraid of the police? Please. Bruce always said that criminals were a cowardly and superstitious lot; and his “irrational” fear he certainly would have categorized under superstitions—in short, if Duke wanted to be a hero, he could not be afraid. So, of course, it would have raised questions if he casually said over the comms one day ‘By the way, take me out of uniform and put me within the sights of a cop and chances are I start shaking like a leaf. 10-4 .’ But hindsight was 20-20 and Duke was pretty sure the humiliation of such a confession would kill him far faster than a bullet could.
“Stop moving!”
He’s sure that he says something more, maybe begs, maybe cries, but it’s all secondary. He’s thinking of what the headlines will read. He’s thinking of how much the collection they take up for him at his old church will be. This is a promise kept—a life he’d cheated the world out of, and now the world had finally sent his debt out for collection.
And so when the officer flips the safety on his gun and screams at him to get on the ground, when his face is smashed against the ground and a knee digs into the back of his throat, when he sitting in the backseat of the police cruiser still gasping for air he’s thinking to himself: This is it. I’m dying. There’s nothing I, or anyone else, can do. There’s no way to save me. I will die today—in fact, I’m already dead.
Even when he’s released from the jail cell into the custody of a butler who won’t meet his eyes and a billionaire who he furiously wishes wouldn’t, Duke’s still thinking the same thing: I will die today—in fact, I’m already dead.