Chapter Text
Duke had been awake for verging on forty-eight hours. Stressed for the back half of those. His hands had started shaking a few hours ago and it took conscious effort to get them to stop -- conscious effort he wasn't about to expend if it meant taking it away from the effort to find his family.
He'd gone over the facts a couple dozen times already but in the absence of any new information, he reviewed again.
At a quarter past two in the morning the night before last, Tim reported Damian missing, somehow vanishing in the seconds that Tim had taken his eyes off the other. Twelve minutes after that, Tim himself stopped responding to comms. Dick had been in Bludhaven, but he continued answering calls and texts until 2:30. His bike was found right on the outskirts of Bludhaven, near the bridge that spanned the bay between the city to Gotham; it was unclear if Dick had parked the bike there or if it was dragged over later.
Duke had been woken up by the time Tim disappeared off the comms, and he and Alfred spent a tense night down in the cave, desperately trying to find any of the boys or getting in contact with Jason, whom nobody had seen or heard from all night. Jason still hadn't surfaced. Duke very much hoped he was actually taken by whoever had taken the rest of his siblings, or he'd never forgive him for not responding after the fifteenth frantic text.
Most terrifying of all, Cass had been taken as well. She and Steph went dark last: Cass's last communication to the cave was 2:58.
Something had taken his siblings but left Bruce unscathed. Whatever it was, it had left almost no clues. There were no fingerprints on Dick's bike. Security feeds were wiped at every single location. Tim hadn't even caught a glimpse of anything, and it had come near enough to him to grab Damian, barely a few feet away.
"Master Duke," Alfred's voice came at his elbow. "It would be futile to ask one of you to get some rest, wouldn't it?"
Bruce, clicking away at his computer, didn't acknowledge the barb. Duke ran his hand over his face, letting the warmth of his palm linger over his scratchy and tired eyes.
"Maybe," he said before taking a deep breath and opening his eyes, the map of Gotham he'd been staring at already so burnt into the back of his eyelids that it was hardly necessary for the visual aid to be placed. Still, the four spots of light glared balefully back at him.
Tim and Damian had been abducted twelve minutes apart and only a couple miles from each other, but Dick had gone dark fifteen minutes later -- and fifty miles away, on the other end of the bay. Unless their abductor had been breaking speed limits with reckless abandon, which the log of traffic cops that night did not support, this was almost certainly the work of an organization. More disquieting still, an organization that knew exactly where to find all of them. Only Duke was spared by virtue of working the day shift, and he was quickly yanked off that.
On the other end of the cave, Bruce suddenly stilled. Duke didn't register that the sound of the keyboard had suddenly stopped until he heard his foster father make the hum he translated to "I think I have something."
Then, Duke got out of his chair so fast it nearly was knocked over. He rushed over to the massive monitor, leaning over Bruce's shoulder to squint at the pop up in front.
"What do you have?" Duke asked, completely ignoring personal space.
"I don't know," Bruce said. "It's encrypted. Needs a password. I think it's from Jason."
"Lead with that, holy shit," Duke said, nearly shoving Bruce out of the way. "What's the password?"
Bruce shook his head. "I tried the usual combos, but none of them worked. He still hasn't answered any usual channels."
"How long will it take to decrypt this, then?" Duke asked. He was nearly vibrating out of his skin, the sheer relief of their first clue in two days warring with his renewed fear over the fact that they still didn't know what happened to Jason.
"It should be cracked in an hour," Bruce said, in the tone of voice that said for him that he was fully prepared to simply sit motionless in front of the screen until it was finished. Duke hesitated.
"Can I try a password?" He asked. "Will that do anything?"
Bruce gave him a long, measuring look. Duke tried very hard not to fidget.
"If you enter another password in and it's wrong, we'll be locked out. It'll increase the amount of time before the software can crack the encryption, possibly to three hours. Are you very sure about this password?"
Duke hesitated. Then, he nodded decisively. "I'm sure," he said.
Bruce moved to the side, freeing enough space for Duke to stand at the keyboard and, with shaking hands, key in: NightAtTheMuseum.
It worked. Duke exhaled, long and slow, and felt a little of the tension leave his posture, enough that he was somewhat worried his knees would give out.
"Good job," Bruce said, which was easily the most Twilight Zone thing about the whole night.
In front of them, the pop-up expanded out into a map of Gotham, a twinkling red light blaring from Midtown.
"It's Jason's current location," Bruce said, reclaiming his spot in front of the computer. Duke let him, stumbling back over to his right arm and mentally push-pointing in the other four spots where his siblings had been abducted.
"Gotham General Hospital," Duke said, the distinct desire to throw up clawing its way up his throat. His hands were still shaking. He had to tell himself to stop, to not think about it, to push down the memories of his parents with their mouths frozen in rictus grins and raw fear in their eyes -- at least, fear before they went empty for good.
"Are you okay?" Bruce asked, far more gently than he would have assumed. Duke wasn't in the mood to appreciate it.
"Do I look okay to you?" He asked. "That must be where whoever it is is keeping them."
"Duke-" Bruce started.
"If you say something about benching me, you know I'm just going to steal one of your cars and leave to help anyways," Duke said.
They stared each other down. Duke would later deny the thrill of vindication when Bruce looked away, but he also had just gained a very good understanding of exactly why all his siblings were so dead set on disagreeing with him all the time.
"Get in the batmobile," Bruce grumbled, "and don't do anything impulsive."
"I'd never," Duke said, which was a bald-faced lie. Bruce shook his head and didn't respond, the tension seeping back into the clench of his jaw and the stiff posture of his shoulders. Duke got in the passenger seat, glancing back over his shoulder at the baleful red light blinking out from the labyrinthean tangle of Gotham Streets up on the monitor.
He wanted to tell them all: We're coming . But it was only a one-way connection.
They were a block away when the world went red for Duke.
They were out of the car. Approaching the target location on foot. It was close to four in the morning -- minimum foot traffic. Downtown area.
Bruce had been ahead by a few footsteps when Duke felt the shock first, like a railroad spike going full Phineas Gage through his head. Right between his eyes, burning out the full breadth of his vision. Red for all of it.
Duke dropped to his knees, clutching his head, hoping to dig the tips of his fingertips into the back of his skull in an effort to distribute the pain or keep his brain from leaking out through his nose through sheer force of pressure or whatever he thought he was going to do. It took maybe a couple seconds, total.
He blinked back the explosion, letting his vision come back into focus. He was still kneeling, palms against the gritty Gotham streets, when he looked up and registered that he was alone again.
"Batman? What was that?" he called. Bruce wouldn't have abandoned him, not now and especially not when all of Duke's siblings were missing as well. "B!"
Duke pushed past his pounding headache to tap into his comm. "Agent A, what happened to B?"
"His communication system have just fallen off. Something must have broken it."
Duke scanned the area, bouncing from surface to surface, his breathing picking up in speed just a little. He tried to stop himself from hyperventilating, but it was getting a little hard.
"You can't tell where he is at all?" Duke asked. He hoped he was just imagining the squeak in his voice.
"I'm afraid I cannot," Alfred's calm voice came back through.
"Shit," Duke said. He stumbled against the side of the concrete walls of the hospital, his head still pounding. "Shit, shit, shit. What about Hood's tracker?"
"Still within the hospital."
Duke took a few deep breaths, enough for the briney taste in his mouth to subside. He looked up at the sign, several stories up, block letters illuminated from within.
"I'm gonna have to go in and get them, huh," Duke said.
"Signal," Alfred said. He trailed off midway through; Duke didn't notice, too busy trying to regulate his breathing. "It is very likely that the perimeter of the hospital is secured by an EMP field. The Red Hood's signal is protected by a Faraday Cage, but your communications are not."
"So," Duke said. "I'll be on my own, yeah?"
"It seems so," Alfred said.
"Then," Duke said, pushing off the wall. "I better not mess up, right? Don't want you waiting too long with no response."
"It would certainly be better for my poor heart."
"Don't worry," Duke said, heading for the entrance. "At least one of us have to be looking out for your health."
"I commend you for the thoughtfulness."
Duke stopped in front of the double doors.
"Bye, A," he said softly. Then he crossed the threshold. There was a sharp sting and then a buzzing noise that resolved itself into the faintest sound of tinnitus. Duke pulled his now useless comm out of his ear and dropped it into a pocket.
"Cool," he said, surveying the completely dark lobby of the hospital. "This doesn't look like a slasher set-up at all."
Something down the hallway rattled. Duke swallowed very nervously, inching forward. Unusual disappearances, a flash of bright red light, and a hospital. Duke didn't have good experiences with hospitals as a general rule.
Still, he had no choice. He pushed past the doors barricading the lobby from the rest of the hospital, letting the dark fall away. His powers rendered each surface curiously flat, no highlights or drop shadows to give a sense of perspective, but it was better than blindly stumbling through the dark.
It also helped him notice a certain powder strewn across the ground in a distinctive trail. Duke knelt down and swiped at the fine white powder, so well-milled that he couldn't even feel the texture through his gloves. Or rather, ever so close to white that anyone else would have mistaken it for the same shade as the linoleum floor below. Anyone else but Duke; this was as blaring and easy to pick out as a stop sign for him.
Maybe Tim's obsession with those different white powders was useful. He had no doubt that this trail of highly unusual breadcrumbs -- or perhaps a string for a labyrinth -- was all Tim's idea.
Duke cracked his head from side to side before walking the line, turning where it turned and following through the rooms it followed. All throughout, he felt tension gather between his shoulderblades at the eerie silence. He turned over that flash of red light, the sudden disappearance, the EMP at the doors, in his mind over and over again.
The only explanation had to be a meta-human, but that meant nothing without any other clues. Duke had no idea how he was supposed to fight something he didn't even understand.
He couldn't tell what it was that made him pause before yet another turn down yet another bland, beige, lookalike corridor. Maybe it was his powers, some kind of spidey-signal sense, or one of those detective instincts Bruce had tried to drill into him. Maybe it was just plain apprehension. Duke paused at the corner and before turning, he let the future come to him.
Immediately, the blinding pain and flash of red light overwhelmed him. He dropped to his knees again. Working on instinct, Duke flooded the hallway with shadow, the inky black pouring out of him like an inkwell.
Something violently flew over his head, right where he had been. Duke panted against the ground, turning back over his shoulder. Nothing. In either the darkness or beyond it.
Cautiously, he extended the shadows as far as he could make them go; instinctively, he felt that he'd be safer in them, and whoever was on the other side wouldn't come for him through the black. From somewhere else in the bowels of the building, he heard an angry shout. He didn't understand the language, but the intent was clear.
Slowly, Duke got back to his feet. He eased back, inching to the room where the trail ended. He reviewed the facts.
The doppler effect was the change of frequency in a wave in relation to its motion to the observer. Put plainly, when objects moved towards a viewer while emitting waves, those waves compressed. Duke's old high school physics class put the concept in sound waves, the frequency of a car horn or the blare of an ambulance as it rushed by -- sounds familiar to any Gotham kid -- but it was also a concept in astrophysics. Light could compress too, a redshift from objects big enough and luminous enough to change.
Or, objects moving fast enough.
Redshift.
Duke scanned the area, but the speedster -- he was wracking his brain for which ones were active and also villanous -- must have disappeared to another part of the hospital. He drew closer to the door, noting the card-activated lock and rattling at the handle before banging the door, still nervous to draw this much noise and attention to himself when under threat by someone who he would never see coming. Rather, someone he couldn't quite figure out how to see coming.
"Are you guys in there?" Duke hissed against the door. It was thick. He tried again, thumping out R-U-OK in morse code against the door. Someone thumped out Y-E-S back, and each pound against the fake wood sent Duke's heart racing anew.
There was another shout, closer this time.
"Fuck," Duke muttered, fist against the door. He leaned against it and let his future-vision engage one more time, waiting braced against the door for the splitting headache and the drench of his vision in red. The red-shift. The shadows remained over them all, though Duke was starting to feel the strain of keeping it all up, like a soreness making itself known in his back and a pulsing headache behind his eyes.
Then, like an arrow through the temple, Duke felt the red and threw himself to the side, seconds away from being pulzerized by the speedster who blew through his shadows. Duke held his breath, barely a few feet away from a tall, broad man in a ridiculous outfit. He held the advantage, so long as he didn't make a sound.
Sure enough, after a few seconds, the man blinked away, reappearing at the end of the hallway. Duke slowly moved to a different position, sweating in the muffled heat of his own shadows. The hospital was probably evacuated by now, judging by the empty halls Duke had passed through, so he didn't feel as bad as he probably should have about extending the shadows even further, shouldering the burning ache and tapping further into the building's power supply.
Unlucky for him, this was a hospital. He'd need extra time to induce a power failure.
"Hey man!" Duke shouted, stalling. "What's your name?"
His shadows had extended to the whole hallway and then some, and the man was clearly unwilling to try to navigate the entire length of the corridor in total blindness. Score one for him.
"I am Savitar," the man said, a strong Eastern European accent to his words. Bulgarian, or Yugoslavian? Duke couldn't quite place it. "The god of motion."
"I don't think that's right," Duke shouted back, backing up behind another corner. Speedsters had a hard time with turning, right? Should be even harder in the dark.
"You question my skills?" Savitar asked.
"Maybe your recollection of mythology," Duke ribbed back. No response. Everyone liked it when his siblings quipped, but when he did it? Tough crowd.
Duke's shadows receded back, following him slightly. Like fish to the bait, Savitar followed.
He sprung his trap, letting shadows crash down the hall and envelope the other man, who stood stock-still. That was the floodgates opening with a resounding crashing in Duke's own head. He didn't think he had it in him to do that one more time; luckily, it was all he needed. The generators in the hospital had had enough, sputtering and dying with that one last yank on their energy.
The lock on the door, hooked into that same electronic system, broke open. That was his family taken care of. Now the villain.
"Hey," Duke rasped, talking past the shattering migraine taking up residence directly behind his eyes. He badly would like to lie down after this. "You know what Savitar was really the god of?"
He swayed forward, swallowing past the pulsing in his head. With a shaking hand, he went for the bat on his chest, smacking it until it turned on in a blinding display of light, made even more jarring with the sudden vanishing of the shadows.
"The sun," Duke finished, knocking Savitar's disoriented ass out with his escrima.
"Wow," someone rasped behind them both. "Good timing with the quips. You're a natural."
"Is'sat Dick?" Duke asked, stumbling against the wall yet again. He screwed his eyes shut in an effort to stop aggravating his sore head. "You all okay?"
"We're fine," Bruce's distinct deep voice, free of his characteristic Batman gravel, resonated down the hallway. Duke felt familiar arms wrap around him -- almost definitely Cass's.
"You did good," she whispered in his ear. Duke smiled, even as he slumped against her, weighing her down.
"It w's like with the basketballs," he slurred. "All the lights. Y'helped."
"No," Cass said decisively, slinging one of his arms over her strong shoulders and pulling them both up. Duke could blearily make out the forms of his family, huddled around Savitar's prone and unconscious form. "This was all you."
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End