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By now the Batfamily was painfully, inescapably aware of just how fragile Danny’s mental health had become.
That was why the psychologist they’d finally convinced him to see had been asked the obvious questions—the cautious, practical ones. Is he stable enough to go back to school? Can he handle the structure? The noise? The looking at other people without flinching? Danny, clever and stubborn and brilliant in ways he refused to name, had already finished high school before he’d even turned sixteen, which made the question feel both ridiculous and necessary.
Danny had once wanted to be an astronaut, he had been a boy with his head full of stars until the stars had turned and taken him.
After the psychologist cleared him for classes, Dick had volunteered—because he wanted, selfishly, to be part of the good things—to sit with Danny and talk about what came next. From that conversation came a small, stubborn victory: enrollment in Gotham University, to follow classes in aerospace engineering. It was the kind of forward motion that felt like a warm thing in Dick’s chest, something to hold onto.
The psychologist, cautious and practical in other ways too, had recommended removing the locks from Danny’s door. Even if Danny could always recreate locks with his powers, the absence of hardware—visible, physical barricades—would make it harder for him to hide. In theory, it would make him feel less able to shut the world out and easier for the family to reach him. In practice, it was supposed to decrease the chance of another attempt, and increase the Batfamily’s sense of security. Both of those things felt paper-thin to Dick now; both of those things were nothing but promises they had made to themselves.
After Danny’s first day back at university, Dick drove the half hour from Blüdhaven to Gotham because he wanted—he needed—to ask, in a normal, awkward big-brother way, how it had felt to sit in a classroom again after months of nothing. It was a small, honest question. The kind of question that could be paralyzing with meaning.
When he arrived at the manor, Alfred opened the door with that sad smile that had lately become too familiar. That smile made Dick worry before a word was spoken.
“How’s he?” Dick asked. He didn’t bother saying the boy’s name—Alfred would know who he was talking about anyway. Alfred always knew.
“Master Danny came home from college with a small smile on his face,” Alfred said, and Dick felt something uncoil in his chest at the news—relief, fragile and quick. Then Alfred’s next sentence landed like a stone. “Then he immediately went upstairs, citing homework, and has not been seen since.” Alfred’s voice was steady but the look on his face said the rest: this was a thing no one liked saying.
“Go up,” Alfred suggested with a soft chuckle that did not reach his eyes, as if trying to punish the growing worry in Dick with a small, dry attempt at levity. “Take a gander.”
So Dick went. He climbed the manor’s absurdly long staircase—each step a beat in his chest—and turned left toward the family wing. The hallway smelled of old wood and lemon polish and the peculiar stillness that hung over houses where storm clouds seemed to gather even on clear nights. He paused at the threshold of Danny’s door, thinking of a few weeks ago, when he’d stood here just like this—the bathroom, the knife, the blood, the green specs of ectoplasm mixed in with the red—and his hands went cold.
He knocked gently, because kindness had become its own violence if applied too loudly. “Danny?” his voice was softer than he felt, a whisper that tried to pet the air into calm. “Danny, I’m coming in.”
There was no answer. The knob wouldn’t turn.
Panic pulled at him like gravity. He could feel it in his palms, in the way his breath hitched. The knob, which should have been unable to be locked, refused to move. The psychologist had insisted there be no lock—no visible mechanism to keep the family out—and yet here was resistance. Ice, he thought, hearing the echo of Danny’s old habit, the way the boy made walls when words failed.
“Danny!” he shouted, louder now; his voice scraped on the rafters. He began to bang, a harder rhythm this time, each strike growing more desperate as the door stayed stubborn. Footsteps echoed below—the household stirring—but Dick couldn’t hear them over the noise in his head: the memory of the rooftop, the sticky note, the wet sound of breath that had been barely there and then almost gone.
The wood finally gave with a crack different from the bathroom door’s final shudder a few weeks earlier. The hinges cried like something torn. When the door swung in, the world narrowed to the shape of a room and a dark form lit by a lightning flash that cut through the curtains and painted everything in a cold, harsh contrast.
Danny was not on the bed. He was not curled in a chair. He was hanging.
From the ceiling hook where mosquito netting should have hung, a rope looped and swung with a merciless, patient rhythm. The sight folded Dick’s knees inward. Time slowed to the particular, clinical way an emergency becomes both an abstract problem and a gut-throat sickening thing: the twitching fingers at the end of limp arms, the slight, wrong movement of legs. He saw the netting, folded neatly on the desk, and then the rest of the room blurred into focused action.
He moved because he had to. This time, the shock made him fast. He surged forward, hands fumbling at Danny’s legs, lifting against the elasticity of the bed as the boy’s weight pressed down on his chest. He heard a soft, awful sound: the wet, high choke of a breath that had been held too long. He tried to ignore the little twitches of the hands hanging limply along his sides. Tried to stop the subtle shifting of the legs now firmly in his grasp.
He tried to find the knot, fingers slick, and started working at it with the kind of focus that flattened everything else. He could hear footsteps now, the sound climbing the stairs like an avalanche.
And suddenly Danny was falling into him, a small body sliding free into Dick’s arms. He lay on the bed beneath them with the terrible, fragile slackness of someone who had leaned over the edge and been caught at the last second. Dick scrabbled for the rope at Danny’s throat, fingers shaking as he loosened the noose. Rope, fabric, skin—an absurd, intimate mess of textures and terror.
Air came in a wet gulp. Danny inhaled like he had been drowned and then given back to the world. The sound—so small, so human—made Dick freeze with a rush of something that was half-relief and half-horror. He thought of the green sticky note—the two words that had sat like a verdict when everything else had been sliding away: He can’t. He had read it with a distracted mind before; now he read it as an impossibly stubborn promise. Clockwork had meant what Dick had thought he’d written: Danny couldn’t die. Or at least not yet.
Dick’s eyes went up, and there in the broken doorway stood Damian, still in the stance to throw a knife—the boy somehow looked tiny, furious, and utterly undone. He looked like a statue that had been cracked by some invisible hammer. Dick had never before seen Damian affected in this way; the boy who wore rage like armor now looked stripped and raw. If not for the horror of the moment, Dick might have called the sight a profundity—something touching, ridiculous, almost tender. But not now.
Instead, Dick rose to feet that felt like lead and crossed the room. He took Damian into his arms and, without thinking, covered his youngest brother’s eyes with an arm so that he couldn’t see the body on the bed. It was a clumsy, instinctive shielding, a grown-up attempt to protect the last small thing left to be protected. Damian sagged against him, legs betraying him, and Dick eased them both to the floor, holding tight.
All around them, the Batfamily converged—the sound of boots and curses and voices. Alfred, small and steady, moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who had always known how to steady storms. Someone barked for medical instruments. Someone else was already checking pulses, always checking, never assuming.
Dick pressed his forehead to Damian’s, breathed in the sharp, teenager-smell of him, and waited. He listened to Danny’s quiet, irregular breathing and the rush of people working; the rain of sound that meant help was happening. He had wanted so badly to be the one who could fix everything, to wrap Danny in something permanent and unbreakable.
He had wanted the locks to mean something. Anything.
The truth was no lock had ever kept what didn’t want to be kept.