Chapter Text
It starts slow, if he’s to be convinced it started at all. There is a cadence to it that he supposes could betray him if looked at in a certain light.
He’s learning about light now, learning the ways in which it is like the truth, learning all the ways it moves to reveal and obscure. It has no motivation, no desire. It just is, and being so, it is a useful tool in the hands of those possessing those qualities. So he understands, looking back, how it came about. He sees all the little things that happened, the little truths that stacked up on top of each other, each one casting its own shadow, stretching further and further, the occlusion growing and growing until finally everything else his life was made of was swallowed in the umbra, as if it never mattered at all. As if all that he was, was the assumptions made about him, the aspersions cast on him. He’s garish in that light, all exaggerated features and distorted visage.
But it takes some time to arrive there. It starts slow, and by the time it comes to a head, he’s in so deep he has no idea how to get out.
It happens on a random Tuesday. At least, he thinks it’s a Tuesday but whether it is or isn’t doesn’t matter. He’s sick and he would be no more or less sick if it was actually a Friday. What matters is this: it’s winter, it’s been a month since his mother last looked at him with any recognition in her eyes, and Izzy is not talking to him right now.
New Jersey winters are milder than what other parts of the country get, but Gotham is as Gotham does, so they’re miserable anyway. It’s not just the cold. They get less snow than they expect and more than they want. Whatever they do get turns to slush and sleet before long, and the rate of vehicular accidents goes up. The sun sets in the middle of the afternoon, it feels like, and half of Duke’s patrol is in the dark because the city never actually has the faulty streetlights fixed in time. He spends half the season walking people home from bus stops in the early evening, and the rest of it leading people to shelters that are overcrowded more often than not.
That Tuesday—probably Tuesday, maybe Wednesday—he can feel his brain sloshing around in its fluid when he swings himself out of bed in the morning. His joints ache and the muscles in his neck strain with the effort of holding his head up. The only reason he keeps his helmet on during his early morning patrol despite its weight is the built-in temperature control keeping at least half his face warm. The N95 mask he’s wearing helps with the rest.
Bruce has floated the idea of a winter variant of his helmet with more coverage but Duke’s tried that before and he hated the distance it created between him and the people he was talking to, the people he was helping. If he can’t show them his eyes, he can at least show them the truth in his smile. More than once, he’s had someone read his lips. He’s learning ASL now but having the lower half of his face bare helps, sometimes. Still, he’s glad for the warmth the helmet provides even though it makes it ever harder to keep his head up this morning.
He knows he’s sick. He knows it’s why Izzy is refusing to talk to him except about work. She’s not his mom, as she keeps reminding him, even though her face hardens the way it does when she feels guilty when she says it now. She’s going to neither nurse nor coddle him. If he wants to drop dead in some alleyway, she’s not stopping him. It's that last bit that's really made things strained between them.
Later, when he really stops to think about it, when his head isn’t swimming and he doesn’t feel like he’s been scraped raw from head to toe, he’ll remember that as she said it, she had a sheen in her eyes, wide and so brown and pleading. He’ll realise that Izzy was watching, too, when he stopped short next to that alley. He’ll remember that she’s the one who he asked whether that bundle of cloth looked like there was someone underneath it or not. Then, he’ll recognise that they discovered that man together, that they saw him and uncovered his body at the same time and worked out exactly what happened to him simultaneously. Probably, their minds flashed to the same images of shelters pushed past capacity since they volunteer at the same ones. Likely, they thought of the previous night’s weather report at the same moment, and the same shame and guilt and horror and helplessness wracked them both.
Later, he will wish that he hugged her instead of walking away so they could mourn together. He'll wish to have said that man's name—Albert Grand, 52, single, no known living next of kin—again and again until he was sure that even if no one else remembered it, he and Izzy always would, a memorial in their hearts instead of just in The Hatch's server, the way they remember every name of every person he's failed. The way they remember Troy's name and countless others.
But in the moment, all he hears is that he’s bound to disappoint her the way he’s disappointed everyone who has ever relied on him. All he thinks about is his father out there, somewhere. Somewhere. In the Gotham winter, with shelters turning people away, and his mind probably incapable of asking for help anyway.
So, it’s Tuesday or Thursday, he and Izzy haven’t really talked for three days, and he’s running late for his second class of the day because the police still don’t consider his calls emergent, and he doesn’t know what his second class of the day is supposed to be anyway because it might be Monday, actually.
It’s obviously easier to sneak in and out of school now that he can be invisible, but he’s usually working with more processing power than he’s got this morning. He’s dosed himself with something he lifted off Tim the previous night and it's making his thoughts and movements more sluggish by the minute. He’s in the middle of debating to himself whether he should be calling off sick instead of darting across rooftops to try to sneak into class through a back window when he bumps into a member of the faculty.
What he has going in his favour is that he’s completely dropped his invisibility since it takes more concentration than it’s worth now that he’s made it onto campus so he’s not half a spectre or something equally conspicuous and secret-identity-revealing. He can pretend to be sneaking off campus instead of on, and he’ll get into some shit but it’ll blow over eventually.
The things working against him are a bit more complicated.
First, Trudy, the guidance counsellor is the brand of well-meaning and pushy that requires the students to call her by her first name to foster a sense of closeness to her that doesn’t really exist. Duke isn’t the kind of person to avoid people. He prefers things laid out plainly, and even when he doesn’t necessarily like people, he can be both honest about that and maintain a working relationship with them. He imagines he wouldn’t have survived the first week as a vigilante otherwise. All that being said, Trudy is a different story.
The long and the short of it is that he has a sketchy school record, something that has remained consistent whether he was a ward of the state or of Bruce Wayne. But he’s been here for damn near a semester and he’d like not to have to move again before graduation. Trudy, as far as he can tell, wants the same thing but she seems to think he needs managing to make it happen. That means calling him in every five minutes for whatever she can think up. He slips to a B+ in one class, he’s in her office the next day to talk about all his potential, about how he's more than just his circumstances and his background. Every tardy slip goes through her. If he winces in gym class, she’s on him three seconds later. He frowns at his lunch a little too hard, he’s called in to talk about how things are at home, and how is his mother doing lately and Trudy heard about the latest relapse, how is Duke holding up? It must be such a relief that Mr Wayne is there to handle the medical bills, right? And if he raises his voice a little too high, she’s there to talk about anger management techniques, and is he sure everything is okay at home? He’s not staying with Mr Wayne anymore, is he? Is there a particular reason for that? There wasn’t a falling out, was there? Did Duke do something? After everything Bruce has done for him?
And he knows why, he knows why, he knows why. But if he said it—
Second, and this part is kind of ridiculous, all things considered but the roof is mostly wet, and the winter sun is kicking up off what remains of the overnight snowfall. It’s in his eyes as he turns and sees her, and for a moment, he’s looking at where she was three seconds ago, walking up to the window, where she is, and where she will be three seconds from now, half leaning out the window, reaching out with a horrified look on her ashen face.
Third is the roof tile that slides out from under his left foot as he twists his body.
Reflexively, he pushes away from the building so he won’t hit anything on his way down before he remembers that, that only works when he has a different way of catching himself. He still reaches for a grapnel-gun that isn’t there as the initial lurch of terror hits his bloodstream. It’s familiar. He’s been here before. Batman isn’t here to catch him this time.
He falls.