Chapter Text
The smell of candle wax and burnt sugar drifts through Jr.’s memory—sweet at first, then bitter. He’s small again, knees scraping the floorboards, staring up at Jack. The man’s voice is low, careful, curling around him like smoke.
“Watch carefully. This is how the world bends.”
Hands appear—large, warm, guiding—but the warmth never lasts. It leaves too quickly, a cold that slips under Jr.’s ribs and stays there.
Janet’s laugh echoes just out of reach. Soft. Sharp. Broken in places. He remembers her fingers brushing his hair back, the steady press of her hand on his shoulder, anchoring him when Jack’s lessons tipped into chaos. Then she’s gone. Not like someone leaving a room—just absent. And the air changes, smelling thin, unfinished.
The circus came to town in flashes of memory: stripes of red and yellow, the distant clang of a bell, the tang of popcorn mixed with sweat and sawdust. Jr. remembers the performers—acrobats twisting in impossible arcs, trapeze artists launching into air like small, human rockets, and someone small and quick in red and green who moved with a certainty Jr. envied even then. The boy leapt from platform to platform, laughing, untouchable, carrying a confidence Jr. could only ache for. Jr. wanted to move like that once, to feel that certainty. But Jack’s eyes were always near, shaping him, reminding him he was not free.
The memory shudders, skips—light flickers, a shadow of a hand, a whisper he can’t place. Was that Janet? Or someone else? The edges blur.
Jr. tries to speak, to ask a question about what happened next, but the memory stutters and folds in on itself.
Sometimes, in fleeting scraps of memory, he sees Robin. Light-footed, laughing and leaping with confidence. The boy seems untouchable, moving through the shadows of a world that was orderly, precise, the kind of place Jr. might have belonged—if chaos hadn’t taken him first.
Sometimes, through a cracked window or a rustle of newspapers on the floor, Jr. would catch a glimpse of the man in the dark cape. Only once, fleetingly: a shadow moving across the rooftops, a shape that felt too precise, too deliberate, and… awe-inspiring. Jack never noticed. He made sure of it.
And sometimes all that remains is the smell of burnt sugar, the echo of Janet’s laugh too far away to touch, and the faint, impossible promise of the man in the dark cape.