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When light flickers out, it does without a sound. Like a switch. Like right now.
It takes another heartbeat for it to sink into Duke as the dark grips him in the truck, Ishmael somewhere close—he can't see, he can't see. Danger. He scrambles backwards until he hits a corner of the truck, trying to reassess, grasp at any type of light that goes deeper than the human levels.
X-Ray. He can do that, see past the metal bones of the truck, see where Ishmael looms over to end Duke, but he can't. It doesn't work. It doesn't work, and Duke can't see. There's no light, but Duke is light. Duke is the sun, but the clock has struck midnight for him.
Thunk. Creak. Fresh gust of wind roars in his ears. A fight ensuing following the ugly squelch of fist meeting flesh and bone crunching.
For those few minutes, Duke freezes. The dark seeps into him, wrap spindly fingers around his and when Duke moves to shake it off, it moves with him—living and breathing.
"Signal," a soft voice rasps from above him. Cass, he thinks in relief, or Orphan as she goes by now.
"Cass," he requests. He doesn't need words with her which is good because he doesn't have the right ones anyways.
A hand—not the hand of darkness but smaller, bruised, and deliberate—grips his wrist firmly before hoisting him up to his feet. The grip tugs at him to follow out of the truck to a fire exit and clamber onto the roof where the last dregs of rain slick up the chimney.
"What happened?"
"Lady Shiva. Ishmael taking you to Ra's," Cass breathes out though it is shallow, each of her exhales measured the way Duke has seen Batman do when fighting through an injury. "You can't see?"
Duke squints, willing the edges of panic to recede from his eyes and he can make the gold outlines of her suit (though the black overwhelms in a way it would never for Duke). The light that clung to him is gone, the glint of streetlit cars, the beams filtering through the abandoned factory next to them lay unresponsive and dull.
The shadows huddled in the corners skitter briefly, vying for Duke's attention and stilling when Duke catches the movement.
"I can, but it's all dark. I don't—" Duke falters. How does he explain this? In basic physics, vision is processing reflections. No light: no reflections. And when light responds to his commands, when he can trace the past and the present and the future, then there is little he cannot see.
But now. After that fight with Ishmael, he could feel something warped inside that turns towards the absence of light, like he's hollowed out himself to make space for this cold empty thing.
"Some people look at something—someone—and they see more. They become the more," Cass begins, head tilted to examine Duke, "When they lose it…"
Duke finishes for her, "They lose themselves." He stares at Cass again, the bruised lip and swollen cheek, dried blood caking her hair like she's lost a fight (he didn't think it was possible but strange things have happened), always seeing more than movement.
He vaguely remembers her telling him on a rooftop similar to this one, legs dangling over the edge while they wolfed down several burgers on the edge of dawn—the overlap of their shifts—that there had been a price to talk. A magician that had scalpeled a part of her that understood movement more intrinsically than spoken language had ever felt and given her speech.
Like a twisted gift she never asked for.
And now, Ishmael declares the darkness upon Duke, suspends him in this utter hollowness he feels on the edges of his body as every shadow, each gap between the dappled light shrieks at Duke. Like it is more than absence—the void Duke evades.
"How did you get it back?"
Cass shakes her head, a wan smile that is meant to reassure Duke, "I became something else. Found something more. Some of it returns, or it won't. I don't know."
She slumps down to the floor, patting to the space next to her for Duke to sit and takes out to her phone to send a stream of emojis (Bruce has long given up on asking for proper formatting of her reports) and chucking it somewhere in a lonely cob-webbed corner.
Duke will have to fish it out late so some random civilian doesn't have access to Orphan's mission reports. They have Sophia to rescue and the mess with Ra's Al Ghul to resolve, but Cass fixes him with a firm knowing look that he acquiesces.
There's a flash of a purple and yellow that blurs out before Duke can discern what it is, but it leaves behind two electrolyte waters and a pack of gauze. There's only one of them bleeding (Cass) despite the numerous hits and bruises (Duke) and only one person would know Cass to be bleeding even if she would never let them know.
"Thank you!" Duke yells out after Stephanie Brown and hears a faint trill back the Robin way—smug and high-pitched.
Cass huffs softly, tearing the package of gauze with a roll of her eyes and chugs her water, thrusting the other bottle at Duke. "It feels different than before?" She asks.
The first time he got his powers had been a blur. "I don't really remember much," he confesses honestly.
After the confrontation with Daryl (sneering Daryl, taking his parents hostage Daryl) and getting help from his mom who had helped him even under the venomous haze of Jokerization, Duke had thrown up.
Actually, it had gone down like this.
Heat. Sizzling heat like the aftermath of lightning. Light. The whole world submerged in blinding permanent daylight that stretched for eons within seconds with Duke in the epicenter. His parents—mouth stretched horrifically wide to show their white teeth—he had to save them. No suit. No backup. Light filling every part of him like getting doused in the sun until he became the sun.
The next moment, Daryl was on the ground. The ghost of where he used to stand stared at Duke in shock before it dissipated.
There hadn't been much time to process it. With the Nth metal, the Joker, his parents, Gnomon (supposedly his biological dad) creating metahumans in the Narrows, now Ishmael, Duke's training had speedrun faster than Alfred's Cursed Wheel program.
So now he sits, in the pause between fights and tracking Sophia down, to breathe. Imagine light spilling in with every inhale and reigning the darkness to push it away with every exhale.
Inhale. (Breathe, Sunshine, his mom croons in his ear)
Exhale. (the gold of his Robin from long ago winks at him)
Inhale.
Exhale.
He calls out for the darkness and light alike and lets him guide to a now sunny spot on the drying chimney where Cass's phone lies forgotten and fishes it out.
"Time to go?" Cass grins.
Duke grins back, "Time to shine."