Work Text:
Duke Thomas. Fourth son of billionaire Bruce Wayne. Only son of middle-class Elaine Thomas. He didn’t remember that much about his mum and what he did he remember was spotty at best. He remembered it being summer and the house being so hot they sat outside in a park and she gave him a orange popsicle to cool down with. He remembered her spending ages washing his hair and then watching a movie as she put small twists into his curls. He remembers her telling him that she loved him.
When he first came to the manor at six years old he had naively held onto the belief that it was temporary. After all that was what his case worker had told him when he was five and freshly told that his grandma didn’t want to take care of him, his mum and step-dad were both in a coma and he had to go into foster-care.
Bruce was nice, he didn’t cook but he had a butler who he treated like a father who did. The other kids all treated him like a brother rather than like a competition and he never had to ask for anything; and yet he still asked Bruce, the universe, his case worker, anyone who would listen for when his mum would wake up. All of them always looked at him with such pity and sadness that by the time he was eight he stopped asking.
He still saw his mum frequently. At first it was every week as his caseworker held out hope. Then every month whilst he was at the first foster home. With Bruce he went every fortnight, but as he got older he stopped getting ready on Sundays to see her and the visits cut down from an hour to half and hour to barely ten minutes as he ran out of things to say.
When he was twelve he’d broken down into Bruce’s - his father’s - arms as he told him his deepest wish and his deepest fear. He was selfish because he was jealous of all his siblings, his foster siblings, who had no family waiting for them. He was jealous because they were permanent and he wasn’t. His mum could wake up any day and take him away and he’d never see them again; and he wanted that more than anything but he also wanted to stop waiting for bad news, to stop waiting to grieve someone he’d already lost.
Bruce had told him he wasn’t selfish for wanting closure, but he also knew that Bruce was an orphan just like the rest of them and he’d probably jump at the chance to have his parents alive even if they weren’t really there.
He never talked about his Mum to any of his siblings - to any of Bruce’s other children. It was an awkward conversation to have and one where he didn’t fully know what to say until he was a teenager and the most of the others had moved out.
“Duke?”
A knock at his bedroom door accompanied the voice of his father.
Even though his mum wasn’t something he could talk about with the others, it was something he frequently spoke about with Bruce. When he was little it was about finding the boundaries of their relationship - fostering whilst the others were all adopted, parenting whilst it was only ever meant to be temporary. As he got older it became about finding time to visit his mum and see what little of his birth family he had left.
Ten years after first meeting Bruce it was steadily becoming a lesson in learning how to grieve someone who was still living and needing support whilst he did it.
“Come in,” Duke called out.
“Everything alright?”
Duke shrugged. Most of the time he was alright. Sometimes he remembered how thin his Mum looked in her hospital bed and he wasn’t.
“Can we talk about my Mum?” He asked instead of anything else.
“Of course,” Bruce stepped further into the room and made his way over to where Duke sat on his bed.
Duke leaned his head onto his father’s shoulder and tried desperately to ignore the tears that pricked his eyes.
“She’s not getting better is she?”
He hadn’t held hope in a long time but it was never something he asked out of fear that he would be right.
“I don’t think so.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“I miss her.”
“I know.”
Two weeks later he signed the papers to take her off of the life support that Bruce had been paying for the entire time. Distantly he was disappointed that he wasn’t more grief-stricken over her loss. Still, he was grateful as his siblings all dressed in black and held him as he cried during the funeral. He was an orphan like the rest of them and yet for the first time in his life he could say that he had a father since there was finally clearance for Bruce to sign the adoption papers.
-
“Oh my god.”
Duke’s eyes widened and he turned around slowly to find his little brother staring at him with his mouth open.
“You’re meant to be at school,” Duke hissed panicked.
“Oh my god,” Damian repeated stepping further into the room and staring at him with a barely hidden glee.
“Why are you here Damian?” The elder demanded as he desperately looked around in case Bruce or Alfred were lurking near by.
“Teacher-only day at school. I wanted to see if you would watch a film with me,” the fourteen year old explained in an almost manic state.
“You need to get out,” Duke groaned.
“You need to explain,” Damian retorted.
“No, I don’t.”
“You were making light come out of your hands.”
Straight to the point as always.
He had been making light come out of his hands, but that didn’t mean he could explain it.
It had first happened when he was at school staring absent-mindedly at this girl in his class (he may have also been daydreaming about asking her to the school dance but that was neither here nor there) when he realised that she had a spotlight on her like what one would see from a teenage soap opera. Luckily nobody else saw and the second he realised the light had broken back out.
Then a few days later he’d dropped the TV remote and the back had popped off, allowing the batteries to roll underneath the couch. He had squinted underneath and tried to spot them, sliding his hand underneath to feel for them when light seemed to filter out from underneath his finger-nails, highlighting the batteries.
He’d trialled it out a few times, trying to find if it was just his imagination or if he was actually creating light. It wasn’t his imagination. He could create shadows where there were none and take shadows from where they should be, in the same sense light bent to his will. It would be enough to make him cry if he wasn’t fascinated by it.
He’d been practising summoning his powers or whatever it was that was going on when Damian had burst into his room.
“You can’t tell Dad.”
His little brother frowned, his nose wrinkling in distaste.
“Why not? He’d probably pay for you to get superhero mentorship.”
Damian was always the one out of the six of them who was most blasé with their father’s money, maybe because he was never raised away from it or given the choice to be anything but the heir of a massive fortune.
“I don’t want to be a superhero!”
Although, not necessarily accurate he did mean it. Duke, like pretty much every kid ever, grew up wanting to be a hero. His siblings had their favourites, Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman. Duke? He’d always liked The Flash because he could run faster than anybody else. He also had simple, understandable powers. That was the part he liked. He never really liked the fighting bad guys or being in danger parts though, that felt too real.
“Okay, don’t be a hero, but they could help with your powers so you can control them more easily.”
Duke narrowed his eyes at the younger boy and put his hands on his hips.
“Why are you so insistent on helping me?”
Damian shrugged.
“I’m never the first to know anything, and half the time everyone forgets to tell me anything because you think I’m too young.”
Half the time it was because Damian was too young. It was too hard to explain things to him he never even knew were happening. Like why Cassandra didn’t speak to reporters because of the one that followed her around after school for a month, or why Tim never posted photos of Jason online because of a fight that they’d had when Duke was ten.
The other half of the time it was because no one wanted Damian to know when they were fighting; and since there were so many of them they ended up fighting more often than not.
“Sorry,” Duke said. Then, “Want to see me make shadow puppets?”
Damian nods eagerly and Duke forms loose dark shapes which he pinches and pulls at until they form what he can only semi-confidently call cats. He’s glad that his skin is dark enough to cover his blush that he had no doubt is covering his entire face. Damian doesn’t seem to mind how awful they look if the awed look he has is anything to go by. He reaches out with trembling fingers and strokes over the back of one of them and gasps as his finger falls through and into the shadows.
“This,” Damian says in the same serious tone he always uses, “is awesome.”
When Bruce found them hours later, freaked out and promptly panicked his way through convincing Duke to let him pay for the Justice League to assess and help him, Damian laughed manically. Duke sighed and agreed if only to stop their Dad from looking like he was going to pass out.
When Alfred found out he only sighed and requested he didn’t use his newly found abilities to prank his siblings. Before that Duke hadn’t even considered the pranks that naturally wrote themselves with his powers.
His other siblings, for what its worth, thought he had an unnatural advantage in whatever their overly competitive minds had come up with. He disagreed, but secretly he was glad that they had all accepted him and weren’t anything like the horror stories he had found during a deep dive on the internet about mutants and Metas.
-
Sometimes Duke wished his siblings were more helpful. Or that they at least lived at home. Tim had moved out after high school into an apartment on the other side of Gotham which meant that whilst he was close by they didn’t see him aside from weekends and when they stormed his penthouse. Dick was in Keystone, Jason was in Canada finishing with University and Cassandra was travelling the world. Stephanie was… somewhere, he was never really sure but he had a hunch that she was probably in New York living a bright and wonderful life that was only mostly funded by Bruce.
Having all of his siblings so spread out made it difficult to turn to them for help especially when the only one living at home was a fourteen-year old with enough angst to down a horse. However, the current situation called for sibling back-up from all fronts, so he sent a message to their group chat calling for all of them to ignore the various time zones they were stuck in and join a video call. Naturally that led to lots of complaints and suspicions from all of them.
“I could be sleeping right now, Duke,” Jason grumbled.
“You’re like three hours behind us right now, Idiot. It’s barely two p.m. for you.”
Jason rubbed his eyes and flipped his middle finger at the camera in spite of Damian’s comment.
“Stop,” Cass told them sternly, a European night sky behind her as a reminder of which of them should be tired.
“What did you want to talk to us about Duke?” Bernard asked.
Bernard wasn’t necessarily invited to join the videocall but these days where Tim was invited often meant Bernard was invited by extension and it wasn’t as if Duke was about to complain. If anything the blonde man may be more helpful than his actual siblings.
“I need your guys’ help,” Duke sheepishly explained. “There’s this girl -”
He couldn’t tell if it was Jason that started yelling loudly or Damian who insisted on joining on his phone despite being in the same room as him.
“Dukey has a crush!” Tim cackled.
Through the noise of his siblings he thought he could hear Dick sighing loudly and Cass giggling, but it was hard to tell over the top of their more excitable brothers.
“What’s her name?”
Bernard, the growing voice of reason in their family managed to interrupt. Duke was incredibly glad that his older brother had pulled his head out of his ass and gotten such a wonderful boyfriend.
“Her name is Isabella,” He started. “She’s Puerto Rican, she’s in that kickboxing class that Dad signed me up for and she’s great.”
She was great. She was always teasing him for being slower than her and helping him learn new moves and she had the same sarcastic sense of humour as him. The problem was that she was undoubtedly out of his league and he was left to pine uselessly. However, the majority of his siblings had managed to enter successful relationships, hence why he had decided to ask for their help.
“~Duke and Isabella sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I -”
“Oh my god stop. You’re so annoying.”
Jason burst out laughing at Duke's annoyance whilst Tim kept making kissing noises like the absolute five-year-old he was. Duke could feel his neck steadily getting hotter and hotter until Dick finally interrupted and told them to stop.
“You want our help asking Isabella out?” Their oldest brother asked and Duke nodded his head shortly.
“Cass asks ‘What does she like?’” Damian piped in.
“She said that she used to really like gymnastics as a kid, and she likes those new Grey Ghost movies. She likes spicy food?”
“You should take her to the cinema; there’s that new detective movie which she should like if she likes grey ghost.”
“No,” Jason tutted. “Going to the cinema on a first date never ends well. 1. You can’t talk so it’s awkward. 2. There’s always that awkward handholding over the popcorn so the money you spent on that goes to waste 3. If you didn’t feel the vibe during the movie you feel obligated to have dinner afterwards and it’s weird. Movie first dates never work out.”
Tim disagreed.
“That’s not true at all. Bernard and I had our first date at the cinema.”
Duke sighed as they started bickering over the in’s and out’s or movie theatre dates. They were always so argumentative but always more so when it came to giving advice to their other siblings. Neither of them wanted to be wrong and both of them wanted to be the better older brother. Unfortunately for them and fortunately for everyone else, they already had a better older brother.
“Boys, no arguing. Duke take her into the city walk around for a while, go to Gotham Gardens, get dinner afterwards. You two are already friends so treat it like normal and the connection should still be there. Tim - the movie First Date worked for you because Bernard is an angel who can look past the awkwardness you ignore. Jason - stop antagonising both of them.”
A wave of relief flowed through Duke at the assurance from Dick and he could perfectly envision him and Issy walking around town as they often did after kick-boxing at the gym. The others kept arguing despite Dick’s warning, Cass and Damian talking via sign language at the bottom of the screen whilst Bernard put a filter over Tim as he and Jason sniped at each other.
Quickly, Duke exited out of the call, keeping it open in the background as he clicked on his messages with Dick. The older man was generally pretty bad at answering messages but when Duke sent him a quick,
Duke: ‘thank you’
He responded almost immediately.
Dick: ‘no problem'
Dick: ‘lemme know how it goes
–