Okay. I have made an apron. Did I accidentally leave an iron on overnight and not realize until 10 am the next day at work and then ran home from the office to turn it off ( no less than three people on my walk home asked why the heck I wasn't at work, all wanted updates on the iron situation) and only just finished it after getting totally sidetracked making pizza? Maybe.
"Hiraeth" is a welsh word that doesn't have a direct English equivalent, but it more or less means "homesickness or longing for a place to which you cannot return"
I don't know how much of Alecto's pov we'll get when the last book comes out, but that will be a very relevant concept for her and likely for everyone in the book what with the whole "to love and be loved is to be fundamentally and irrevocably changed" thing.
It's finally happening! The final part! A fic that was supposed to take two weeks and be 2,000 words long turned into a two and a half month 8,000 plus word project. @devondespresso thank you so much for bearing with me as I wrote this, I hope you enjoy it!
divider from @thecutestgrotto
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Ao3
“Hey babe, sorry I’m late. We couldn’t decide what ice cream to get. We ended up just getting both. God knows between you and Dustin it’ll be gone by the week anyway.” He doesn’t look up as he’s coming through the door, too focused on juggling his five bags of groceries and toeing off his shoes at the door.
When no response comes, he stops. Eddie is never quiet, nor is Dustin.
“Eddie? Dustin?” He calls out, his mom coming through the door behind him.
“Oh honey, don’t be so anxious. They’re probably upstairs going over those books Dusty loves again. You know how they get absorbed in those things.” Steve does know. It’s one of the things he both loves and loathes about the little family unit they’ve got going on, not that Steve would ever refer to them as such in front of Eddie. It would be too much, just like he always is.
He’s getting ready to take his mom’s word for it, drop off the groceries and let himself ignore the strange feeling tickling up the back of his neck, when he sees the absolute mess of their kitchen table. Newspapers and glossy picture printouts that he knows he’s going to find charged to his own card because his brother is a little shit.
“Jesus fuck Steve, you didn’t tell me Eddie did track! I couldn’t even get close to him before he was gone.” Dustin says as he comes in from the back door, clearly a little winded. Steve doesn’t even tell him to watch his language because…well because what the fuck.
“Dustin, dude, what the hell is all of this?” He asks, completely ignoring his brother as he goes on. He picks up a particularly unflattering close-up of Eddie, only to be met with a sight he truly did not want to associate with his sibling. “Is this a fucking Playgirl? What the fuck Dustin?” The mention of illicit materials is enough to summon their mom in record time.
“Dustin Michael Henderson, your brother better not have said what I think he said,” she chimes in from the doorway.
“Mom, mom, no! It’s not like that, I swear, it’s research!” Dustin bellows way too loud for the small space of their dining room.
“Honey, it’s perfectly natural to be curious about women, but I would appreciate it if you kept your research in your room and off the dining room table.”
Steve tunes them out, too used to the ebbs and flows of their family dynamic to be concerned, not with the Beautiful Minds, 1920s detective shit taking up space in his third favorite room in the house. It takes him longer than it probably should to realise what he’s looking at, and almost no time after he does to get a sinking suspicion of what Dustin has been sneaking around about for the past few weeks while giving his boyfriend the cold shoulder.
Normally, he wouldn’t interrupt Dustin getting a lecture from their mom, it’s always so well deserved, but he needs answers. He reaches a hand back without looking, using what he likes to call his ‘brother sense’ to give Dustin a good couple of smacks in the shoulder to get his attention. Mom usually has something to say about bones and medical conditions when he gets the slightest but rough, but she’s a little preoccupied at the moment.
“Seriously Dustin, what the hell his going on here? What did you do?” Dustin sputters indignantly from behind him, as if he isn’t clearly guilty of something.
“I didn’t do anything Steve.” He says crossing around into his brother’s line of sight, crossing his arms in a clear mockery of Steve’s ‘this is serious’ pose. The kid really needs to get his attitude in check.
“I was just performing my brotherly duties of making sure Eddie knows to be careful! This was just research to make sure he knows that I know how to bury him, if need be. Me and the girls, of course,” he continues. “The guy’s got a wild life, I’ll tell you that.”
As he wraps up his defence, Dustin picks up a newspaper to wave around like evidence, and that’s when the final pieces slot into place.
Local Teen, Eddie Munson, Arrested in Connection to Murder of Chrissy Cunningham.
The picture makes his heart clench painfully. Black and white and yellowed with age but still so clear. It’s Eddie, fresh out of high school. Hair shorter, ears sticking out sweetly, dirt on his face, eyes past full of deep fear. His Eddie.
“Dustin where did you get that?” He asks, severe in a way he never is. It’s enough even to stop Dustin in his tracks. “Dustin!” He snaps when he doesn’t say anything. He can hear their mom gasp and start to chastise him, but he doesn’t listen.
“I went to the library! I just asked them to give me everything on Eddie Munson and they gave me a bunch of stuff. It’s not like I broke any laws of anything!” Dustin is getting man now, too, which is never a good combination. They’re both too stubborn for their own good.
Steve pinches his nose as hard as he can to stave off the impending blowup he can feel building under his skin. Their mom relies on him to be the more level-headed one. “It doesn’t matter where you got it, man, you shouldn’t have it in the first place,” he grits out.
“Why not?” Dustin asks like Steve is being dumb. “It’s like, public knowledge. It’s out there for anyone who wants to know. You should know. I know Eddie’s a great guy but this is a big deal and you should-”
“I already know about this crap, dipshit! I didn’t need you digging around in my boyfriend’s private life for me!” He’s officially lost his cool.
“Well, how the hell was I supposed to know that? I’m just trying to look out for you!” Dustin yells back. “Besides, why shouldn’t we know about it? It’s not like I hunted down his old classmates or something; it was in the newspaper! A bunch of newspapers!”
“Boys, this really isn’t-”
“BECAUSE IT’S NONE OF OUR BUSINESS DUSTIN! JESUS H CHRIST.” He’s breathing hard, like he just ran a marathon, as silence descends around them. Steve never screams, never raises his voice. Not like that, but he’s done.
Steve runs his hand through his hair. Twenty minutes ago, he was thinking about whether or not he would have enough time to style it before their reservation at Enzo’s. Was thinking about if his red sweater was clean and if the ice cream would survive the car ride and if he should have the pasta or the pork at dinner tonight and if Eddie would invite him back to his house at the end of the night.
He takes a deep breath. “I don’t give a shit if it’s public knowledge or not, Eddie deserved to tell us this kind of shit when he was ready. If he was ever ready.” Too late for that, an unhelpful part of his brain supplies.
Steve watches as the fight slowly drains out of his brother, and the weight of the skeleton he just dragged out of the closet registers. The thing about Dustin is that, no matter how badly he pushes your buttons or calls you stupid to your face, he’s a good kid. The best, really. He just gets ahead of himself, so far in front he can’t see the consequences.
He looks down at the paper still clutched in his hand, staring hard at the same picture Steve had, and frowns. “Shit,” he says, elequent as always.
“Yeah man, shit is right,” Steve responds.
No one seems to know where to go from there. Time is ticking past, and with every second, Steve feels a burning building in his feet, telling him to go looking for Eddie. Dustin said he ran out the back door, which doesn’t bode well. He hopes he went back to his apartment, but there’s no saying for sure.
It’s his mom who gives him direction. She’s always been the wisest of any of them, the strongest too, always able to handle any situation the world throws at them. Dustin isn’t ready for a full apology, and Steve sure as hell isn’t ready to offer any forgiveness, so there’s only really one thing to do.
She places a warm, soft hand on his arm and gives it a squeeze. “You go find Eddie, I’ll take care of things here,” she says, shooting a meaningful look at a visibly cowed but silent Dustin. He squeezes her into a hard hug, suddenly violently grateful for her presence in his life, and runs out the door.
He’s got a rock start to find.
Eddie is not wearing shoes for this kind of walking. In all honesty, he probably doesn’t even own a pair of shoes designed for support anymore. Everything he buys nowadays is for the vibe.
God, he feels like a poser all of a sudden.
Two miles probably shouldn’t be that big a deal, but after the night he’s had, the pain building in his feet is draining every last bit of his energy to the point of debating just calling Steve tomorrow. The only thing stopping him is the knowledge that Steve probably, definitely, saw him run out the door and is probably worried sick.
Despite the little demon in his brain telling him that after he takes a good look at all the skeletons in his closet he won’t care to look for him, Eddie knows that Steve is too good a guy to let even the lowest of low lives get lost in the Hawkins woods.
The good thing about the walk is that he gets to rehearse every imaginable scenario for how his impending interaction with Steve will go.
“Hey babe, sorry about running off like that. Now let me explain about those murders.”
No.
“Wild about those Playgirls right? I don’t know how they even got those pictures!”
Also no.
“Please, please don’t leave me. I swear half this shit is made up anyway. Please.”
Well, maybe.
The last block of his walk passes in a blur, like his brain can’t process that the walking is almost over. Consequently, the sight of Steve sitting on his front porch feels like a mirage. Something distant and perfect that could slip right through his fingers if he’s not careful.
He stops, his fashionable but painful boots finding purchase in the dewy, patchy grass of his rented front lawn.
Steve is always stupidly beautiful to Eddie. The guys say he has rose-tinted glasses on, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’ve only seen Steve through grainy photographs that don’t do him justice. They see him like the placid lake in a pleasant but static panorama that hangs in a high-class office, while Eddie sees the bubbling, splendid life hiding beneath.
Steve is good at presenting an unflappable, calm facade. He acts like he’s above it all, and Eddie, so far, has let him think that the people closest to him can’t see that his heart is perpetually stuck in the trenches.
All of that veneer is stripped from Steve in this moment.
He looks tired.
He looks scared.
Eddie feels like his heart is going to shrivel up in his chest. Wayne must have been wrong. All that time Eddie spent telling himself it would work out on his walk here was just him selling himself a fairytale. Steve is scared, but he’s being brave so he can let Eddie down and leave him behind for good.
Eddie takes a deep breath, tries to ignore the breath stalling in his throat and the burning behind his eyes. He can do this. Good things rarely last for him, he shouldn’t be surprised this is how it’s going to end.
He closes his eyes, letting himself have one more moment of peace before his heart splinters in his chest.
Which means he doesn’t see Steve make his way towards him, his vintage Nikes soft enough in the soles to muffle his soft footsteps. It’s not until he feels warm, slightly calloused hands cupping his cheeks, that he even realizes that Steve has come closer.
Eddie flinches on instinct, too wound up to expect the gentle, insistent kindness Steve reaches out with. He doesn’t let it deter him, just curls his fingers so his ring and middle fingers cup just behind the curve of his ear, teasing the baby hairs found there.
“Eddie,” He breaths out. And, oh, that’s not the voice of somebody who’s getting ready to break his heart, not at all. Eddie opens his eyes, and that’s not the face of someone who’s afraid of him, maybe the opposite.
Maybe he didn’t see them, then, the skeletons in his closet. Maybe Eddie will still have to tell him and watch the fear bubble up and the care drip out. The thought makes his breath hitch, but he doesn’t look away.
“Eddie. I know, it’s ok.” Steve’s voice is rough and soft at the same time, a beautiful contradiction that obscures the meaning of his words for a moment. Eddie scrunches as the answer comes to him. That can’t be right. He must be talking about something else. Maybe the rehab, maybe the overdose that preceded it, because Steve wouldn’t be looking at him like that if he were talking about Chrissy.
“You don’t know, I-I” He needs to say it, but the atoms in his body are resisting. They want to stay in Steve’s orbit for as long as they can. Let his beautiful eyes and his beautiful hands and his beautiful voice cradle him into the long night, and they know that everything they touch goes ugly.
Steve deserves anything but the ugly of Eddie’s life.
“I know Eddie. I have known. The entire time. Since we met.” The words don’t register, not fully.
“Wha-”
And now Steve is the one who looks guilty, which is absurd.
“Fuck, this is so stupid.” Steve pinches his nose, a tell Eddie has learned to mean anything from Steve feeling mild exasperation to Steve pushing down tears. He hopes it’s not the latter, he doesn’t think he could handle seeing Steve cry on top of everything else. “Robin got really into those true crime radio shows for a while, like…three years ago?” Steve starts, not looking Eddie in the eye, but clinging tight to the back of his shirt, not letting go.
“She made me listen to them all the time, would just change the station whenever she got in my car like I wanted to listen to a bunch of washed up 30 something act like they know shit about fuck.” Which…Eddie is aware that people talk about what happened. They like to bring it up every anniversary, every album drop, every birthday, every time there isn’t a better headline to print, but radio shows?
“You knew?” It seems impossible that Steve could have known, really known, what happened before he agreed to let Eddie take him out. Not the full of it, anyway.
“I don’t really give a shit what Jim, or John, or Jerremy with a microphone or Jan and Josie on the morning news have to say about my boyfriend.” There’s that little bitchy furrow of his brow that Eddie is learning to love. He kind of wants to bite it, which is really not an appropriate thought to have during what feels like one of the most important conversations he’s had in the last five years.
“I ran, Steve.” Because that’s always been the sticking point, for him, for everyone. He ran. He got locked in a closet, listened to the nicest girl in his school get mangled to death through the other side, and ran before he even knew she was gone.
Ran and didn’t look back.
Ran until the soles of his feet bled and the sirens caught up.
Ran and didn’t even try to help. Didn’t even try to save her.
And then he ran again tonight. Nothing changed. Nothing new. The same Eddie he was on the worst night of his life.
The same Eddie that only an uncle could love.
But maybe, impossibly, he’s wrong again. Because they haven’t said the words, and it feels too fast to be something he can recognize on sight, but Steve is looking at him with eyes full of love and understanding.
“It sounded scary.” It was. By god, had he been scared.
“I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m sorry about Chrissy.” So is he, every day.
“I would have run, too,” Steve says.
It feels like a lie—or, no. It feels like Steve is telling him what he thinks is the truth, underestimating himself with full confidence. Eddie knows, somewhere deep in his bones beyond his rational thought, that Steve would stand his ground in the face of even the worst monsters—in the face of Henry Creel.
But it’s enough, somehow, to hear him say it. To hear Steve say that not only does he know, actually truly know, but that he understands.
I love you, the thinks. “Thank you,” he says.
Steve smiles, slow and charming and tilting up on one side. Eddie lets himself wrap his arms fully around him, still a little unsure of his welcome but willing to try just about anything to get a little bit closer to that smile. “Of course, baby. You know you’re not the only one with a couple of demons hanging around. I’m just sorry you didn’t get to tell me in your own time,” Steve says.
Steve is running a hand through his hair now, settling flyaway hairs from his mad dash like he has any hope of getting them to stay.
Maybe it’s better this way, Eddie thinks to himself. For all the drama, all the fear, Eddie doesn’t know if he would have ever been brave enough to say it himself. He might have gone months, years, with this secret eating him alive, wondering if Steve would leave him when he found out, taking their little burgeoning family with him when he left/
At least this way, Eddie knows. It should have been his choice, Steve is right, but at least he doesn’t have to live with the ‘what if?’ anymore.
Eddie takes a deep breath, and lets it go. The worst as passed, the storm has moved on, and Eddie would really, truly like to sleep for at least twelve hours straight and take these boots off before his feet bleed.
For now, though, he lets himself tuck into the safety of his boyfriend’s neck and close his eyes, just for a moment. Steve continues to pet his hair, carefully detangling the strants, and lets out a low humm of contentment, like he’s completely happy to stand with Eddie in the patchwork grass for as long as he’d like.
A beat passes where they just listen to the crickets sing and the cars rumble in the distance.
It’s Steve who speaks first.
“And hey, maybe when you’re feeling a little better, we can look through that Playgirl together.”
Eddie smiles.
How the hell did he get so lucky?
Tag List: @warlordess @shoujo-wizard @thewickedkat @phiauniverse @estrellami-1 @awcere
One of the major recurring themes (and in my opinion THE major theme) in Duke's story is perception. Whether it's being perceived or being the perceiver, Duke's character is steeped in motifs of vision, perception, colour, and light, which often relate to his various identities. This post explores Duke's story through the lens of perception, tracing how it manifests in different areas of his life.
This is really just a collection of thoughts about where perception crops up in his story, it's not really a cohesive argument or anything. Also this will dive into a lot of Duke's history so spoiler warning if you're reading him!!! VERY SPECIAL THANKS to @stephexmachina for inspiring this one, particularly the opening section and for getting me on the track of perception in the first place!! And happy @dukethomasweek2025 , this is for Day 4's theme of 'character study' :).
Self-Perception and Control
In We Are Robin, one of the main things about Duke is how self-aware he is. This isn't the same as being self-conscious - Duke isn't a person that bites his tongue and stays quiet. But he is always aware of how others perceive him.
We Are Robin #1 sees him modifying how he speaks to not "talk like an idiot". He's overtly aware of how others will see him as a Black kid talking non-Standard English, so he adjusts himself accordingly. He does this again when facing a disguised cop Alfred in WAR #2:
He's honest and direct ("Don't wanna be a cop. Don't trust cops") AND being careful ("That ain't... isn't me" "No offense"). Though Duke values honesty above all, he's responding here to the very real threat of being Black in a police holding cell, and is balancing his obvious distrust of Alfred with his survival instincts too.
It might seem contradictory to be both honest and adapt his speech, but ultimately what Duke wants is to control his self-image. He's extremely aware that other people will project their beliefs onto him, and a lot of the times his haterisms stem directly from rebuking other people's perception of him:
Robin War // Batman and the Outsiders #1 // DC Rise of the Power Company
Duke is particularly sensitive to being perceived as child needing to be coddled. In all these instances, he's reacting to "superior, dismissive" behaviour from an older adult - Duke perceives Dick, Jefferson, and Jace as treating him like a kid who can't make his own decisions. He rejects any perception of him that reduces even a bit of his agency. It's very important to Duke not only to have control over his image, but to be perceived as someone with control.
This is, as I mentioned earlier, tied to his understanding of his racial and gendered positioning.
Robin War // DC Rise of the Power Company
As a Black boy, he's hyper aware of other people's biases. Duke's grievances with the jailing are almost all about how they impact his perception - he resents Dick thinking of him as a child, and is bitterly aware of the stereotypical image of a boy like him in jail. I like that the statistic he thinks about is beyond his age range. It plays into the way Duke likes to adopt older responsibilities, and also nods to Black child adultification. These are both parts of Duke's thoughts: he knows he's more likely to be held to a higher standard than non-Black children (see the Power Company quote), but he also genuinely holds himself to those higher standards.
It's a super interesting dissonance in his character. Duke believes wholeheartedly in the power and agency of youth, yet he also dislikes people seeing him as young. He is also aware of the privilege non-Black children have, which sometimes manifests in an overly judgmental attitude against Dre (whom he judges for being a "mob kid") and his friend Danny in Gotham Knights #8. The Danny incident is really key to Duke's character:
Danny, a Chinese kid Duke knew from the Narrows, has joined a gang. Duke confronts him on it in a somewhat patronising way, and Danny yells to "Stop calling me "kid"!" This incident mirrors Duke's rebuke of Dick in Robin War. Duke is a deeply empathetic person, but he can have a one-track-mind - he's constantly on guard about controlling his own image, so he can miss how he's not letting other people control their image. This confrontation with Danny reminds Duke that he's not only fighting for his own self-perception, he's also fighting for the kids of Gotham - particularly kids of colour - to take control of how they're perceived.
Robin and Signal
What this means is that perception is the crux of Duke's vigilante philosophy. In Robin War, right after thinking about the statistic for Black men, Duke thinks "Stats look even worse for Robins under eighteen". He connects being Robin to being a Black boy - his vigilantism is inseparable from his everyday lived experience.
We Are Robin #1
Alfred himself, when creating We Are Robin, connects kids of colour to the Robin colours. The future is "a place... of color," he says, while staring at the Robin uniforms and hiring mostly minoritised teens. The weirdness of Alfred doing this aside, diversity is the core foundation of We Are Robin, and thus a tenet in Duke's philosophy (since Robin is where he began and influences everything after).
WAR is defined by visuals, from the R logo to the outlawed red colour in Robin War. Robinhood and being a minoritised kid intersect in visibility - to be either of those things, but particularly to be both, is to be seen.
We Are Robin #12
Duke even phrases his decision to be a hero in visual terms. "They say that when you have your whole life in front of you, it's impossible to see all the angles. I think there are really two angles that matter... hero or villain." For Duke, who believes so much in truth, what you are seen for is who you are. His vigilante self isn't a persona or a secret identity, but another way of presenting his true self. He doesn't wear a mask to hide, he wears it to amplify his visual presence.
This emphasis on sight follows him into the identity of Signal.
Batman and the Signal #1
Duke's decision to work in the day is influenced by his mom in two ways. First, his mom says "it's the best time to see things clearly. To see them in a new light." I love this line because it harkens to two of Duke's biggest beliefs, truth (see things clearly) and redemption (see them in a new light). The daytime is a metaphorical and literal way for Duke to 'see', to perceive others correctly and kindly. Both him and his mom are aware that their people, people from the Narrows/the Black community/People of Colour/Gotham as a whole, are often perceived without either accuracy or grace.
Secondly, his mom considered herself "the first knight on the battlefield[... the] signal." Signal's role is not only to see but to be seen, to inspire. Like the first knight, Signal 'signals' help and the turning of the tide. Duke's community-oriented belief system means this is his most important role - to show people they are not alone.
Batman: The Brave and the Bold #10
This is a really insightful tidbit from Batman: The Brave and the Bold. This villain (Nameless) has felt unseen for ages. Duke recognises his fear, and says "it wasn't until someone gave me a little help that I felt like I wasn't invisible anymore." For Duke, "powerless[ness]" is the same as "invisib[ility]," and therefore being seen = gaining power. So when Duke goes out as Signal, when he sees others and is seen by them, he is essentially giving and receiving power - his strength comes from his community, and their strength comes from him.
The Cursed Wheel and Colours
Robin and Signal are identities steeped in sight and vision. It's no wonder, then, that Snyder makes Duke's training arc about colours.
All-Star Batman #1
The Cursed Wheel is a kinda confusing training program surrounding different colours which each symbolise something. Bruce doesn't name any of the symbolism except black, which is "about evil". The colour black being associated with evil is a tale as old as time, and has obvious anti-Black implications. It's interesting that not only does the Cursed Wheel associate black with evil, it's the only colour that gets a named theme.
Black is supposed to represent 'pure, unmotivated evil'. Yet when Bruce tries to say Joker is evil, Duke responds like this:
All-Star Batman #4
Duke's time in the Cursed Wheel is not really about learning from Bruce, but about redefining what the colours mean for himself. He highlights that nothing is 'just evil', and he applies this to his parents: "that's the motivation behind the blackness". He rejects the notion that black represents something evil or irredeemable. Instead of accepting Bruce's definition of black, he is forging his own understanding of colours rooted in his love for his parents and community.
But the other colour Duke wears is, of course, yellow! Yellow harkens to the sun, which ties back into Elaine's comments about seeing things in the daylight/being the first knight out. I like that his costume is yellow and black - an outfit of contrasts, where both light and dark are used in heroic ways. His journey with colours (from the banned red in Robin War to black in the Cursed Wheel) is often about reclamation. Others may perceive his colours negatively, but he wears them proudly, and in doing so redefines what they can mean.
Powers
Speaking of light and dark, Duke's powers are also a rich site of analysis. For the majority of his existence, his light powers were centered around perception:
All-Star Batman #9
The first time he awakens his powers, Bruce's narration states "It's an outsider puzzle. You have to see it differently." Duke's powers were not initially about manipulating light, but about seeing light differently. I think it's highly suggestive that he gets his powers after his mom saves him. When Duke is rebuking Bruce's request to move his parents, he says "every horrible thing out of their mouths? They're actually telling me how much they love me" (see above). Now, when his mom temporarily breaks free from her Jokerised state, she does use the horrible words to tell her she loves him!
I can't describe how good this moment is but basically she's been saying "nothing... no one... not special" this entire time, but when her eyes begin to glow and she saves Duke, she says these final lines where she ends with the word "special." She manages, for an instant, to use an echo of an insult to tell her son she loves him. Duke's trust in her love is proven correct. His ability to see her love for what it is, his belief in her kindness and goodness, is what unlocks his powers.
His powers are born out of seeing people for who they really are - not as they are at their lowest, but as they can be given support and trust. In the actual All-Star Batman storyline, which runs concurrently to Cursed Wheel and is really important to understanding what Snyder was doing in those back-ups, Bruce and Duke have this conversation about Harvey:
All-Star Batman #4
I tear up every time I read this it's so important to me akjfbsb. This is Bruce speaking, but it's clearly about Duke too (he says, "I get it"). I think Snyder made Duke's powers perception-based because that is Duke's power, meta or not. This "force of will" to see people as they can be. It's not optimistic or naïve but idealistic. Duke isn't purely believing everyone's good intentions (he is critical of Harvey in this same storyline), but he does believe that everyone can be good. And he doesn't just believe it, he sees it.
If you can't tell I'm a little annoyed they made Duke's powers light manipulation instead of keeping it like it was. It was so cool that his powers were sight-based, and I haven't really liked the additions they've made since (rapid healing, shadow powers, photokinesis). However thinking of his umbrakinesis in Batman and the Outsiders, it could fit into a reclamation angle (similar to Duke's journey in the Cursed Wheel). Despite Duke's focus on the light, he has never been averse to the darkness. His whole thing has always been looking at things as they wholly are, and believing that people will ultimately choose their better nature. His ability to so quickly accept his shadow powers and learn to use them alongside his light powers could be a nod to that.
The Future
But I haven't touched on the main use of his powers, which is his 'ghost vision':
Batman and the Signal #1
What makes him see light "differently"? It's his ability to see into the past and the future, "where it's been" and "where it's going". Duke is a character steeped in both heritage (his parents, the legacy of Robin) and the future (We Are Robin, the creation of Signal). He often stands at the precipice of change; the first knight on the battlefield, a herald of things to come.
Batman & The Signal #1 // Dark Nights: Death Metal Robin King
Duke's ability to forge a new future is what Bruce admires about him ("a new way to be a hero in Gotham. Something independent of the past"). In Robin King, Duke leads the next gen of Bat heroes (Cass, Tim, and Steph) to beat up an alternate universe combo of Bruce and Ra's, who both represent the status quo - Ra's because he's immortal, and Bruce because he's a patriarchal figure for all of the heroes present (which is reinforced by Bruce associating himself with 'the past' in the B&TS quote). The Robin King panel is a great encapsulation of what Duke represents both in and out of text.
From the beginning Duke has been a vision of the future. From the promotional WAR art asking "Are you ready?" to Alfred calling WAR the future to Bruce saying Duke will be "better" to Robin King, Duke represents radical change. Not only can he literally see the future, and not only can he see the possibilities of the future in other people, but they also see the future in him. And this is wrapped up in Gotham, with Duke being a Gothamite to his core and representing the city's future, but it has wider implications that that too.
Batman: Urban Legends #9
Brandon Thomas in particular highlights this Duke-as-future aspect, and the future figures in a lot of his stories (like the cool Future State Outsiders). In Urban Legends (which is kinda the same future as Outsiders), Duke is the representative for the entirety of humanity's future - the monster says "your future is ours," but Duke and the Outsiders stand against that. Duke's desire to control his self-perception is ultimately a desire to control his future. Nobody can tell him who he is now, and nobody can tell him who he will be.
But it's also about his vision of humanity. It's like the conversation Bruce and Duke have in All-Star Batman: "they will be heroes". Duke looks at people and believes they can be better. They will be.
Conclusion
Finishing off with this panel from Detective Comics #982 that actually has nothing to do with Duke but he DID cameo and I will always read it through a Duke lens. Watching the sun come up over Gotham - there is actually nothing more Duke Thomas than that. He represents a vision of a new, brighter day for Gotham City, one that only needs to be seen to be believed.
If you managed to read all that, thank you and have a happy Duke Thomas week!!! Every week is Duke Thomas week if you perceive it that way :).
