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At some point Robin had to start wearing a sports bra.
It didn't exactly come as a surprise. He'd known it would happen. The Robin uniform was, with only slight modifications, the same costume he wore and his mom and dad wore since he was too little to remember. Acrobats had to be flat.
But Dick had always been flat.
The sports bra weekend was the largest fight Dick had with Bruce as a kid. He doesn't really count the one about the Joker, when he was seventeen and almost not Robin anymore. There was also the time Bruce tried to send nine-year-old Dick to boarding school, but that was more of a war than a single battle, and he didn't really wage it against Bruce except in the ideological sense. He only had to bite two teachers (one of them twice) to get sent home. He read the emails from the poor school administrators a couple years after, when he was old enough to hack into them, and they had practically begged Bruce to please keep his money as long as he kept the kid too.
And so Dick went back to Gotham and homeschool, which suited him just fine.
Then he was twelve years old and Bruce told him that he needed to wear a sports bra under his leotard.
Alfred definitely put him up to it. In hindsight, Bruce was red-faced and miserable; Dick didn't see it at the time. He was humiliated, terrified, insecure, and nauseous. He ran away for seven hours.
But he agreed to wear them eventually because, after all, acrobats have to be flat. Being Robin wasn't quite so different from being at Haly's, at least in terms of the necessary aerodynamics.
He's fifteen now, and he needs something more than a fucking sports bra.
"Oh, Raven!" Kori says. "Look, this matches you so well."
She holds up a pair of bright red board shorts.
"Uh-huh." Raven crosses her arms. Kori smiles encouragingly. "Put it away, Star."
Kori huffs and stomps away.
"Is this what you're looking for?" Raven is elbow-deep in table display of athletic shirts.Dick had tried to plan a very secret shopping mission with just him and Raven, but Kori had overheard, and here they all are.
"It needs to be tight." Dick searches a rack for anything labeled "compression."
"Maybe you can get one size small. You're pretty small already, though."
"As long as I can move around in it."
Kori marches back up with a purple Adidas hoodie. "Ra-aven," she sings.
"Oh my god. Here's small and extra small." Raven shoves two compression shirts into Dick's hands and starts to push Kori back towards the Adidas. "If you want something for you, let's get something for you." Raven throws a look behind her shoulder at Dick and hisses, "Try them on, quick."
In the women's changing room, Dick shucks his shirt and tries on both sizes over his old, sweat-stained sports bra. The small helps a little, and the extra small helps a little bit more. He looks at himself from the side, the front, the other side.
He sighs. Maybe this is as good as it gets. He redresses and searches the table that Raven messed up for other extra smalls. He has three of them in his arms when he hears Kori.
"Oh, Robi-in!"
He squeezes his eyes shut. "Yes?"
"Look!"
Kori shoves a pair of board shorts under his nose. They're blue with red and orange fire crawling up the legs, and they're—tiny.
Kori beams. "Double extra small! Two X's!"
Raven staggers up, weighed down by an armful of colorful leggings that look very much Kori's style. "This is going on your card, right, Robin?"
He charges Bruce's bank account for: three extra small compression shirts, the board shorts (though god knows when or where Dick is going to wear them), seven pairs of leggings, and one sterling silver ring for Raven.
"What a wonderful outing!" Kori gushes when they make it back to the Tower. She throws her leggings onto the couch right next to where Vic is sitting and watching TV. "Thank you for suggesting it, Robin."
"No problem." Dick has the compression shirts balled up into a tiny bundle of fabric in his hands. He edges towards the stairs, fighting the urge to hide them behind his back. He feels like thanking God that Beast Boy isn't here. He doesn't really believe in God, but he's got to thank somebody.
"Um, are these stockings? Like, underwear?" Vic says.
"I don't believe so." Kori frowns and starts to go a little red.
"Stop teasing her," Raven says. She walks in front of Dick and puts her hands on her hips. Dick gets that familiar eerie feeling that she knows more about what he's thinking than a regular person would be able to. "They're normal pants, Star."
"Um, normal pants that can stretch." Kori demonstrates with the dinosaur-patterned pants, stretching a T-Rex into an unrecognizable green blob.
Dick takes a step up the stairs, and then another. "I'm going to head up to my room," he announces.
"What, no show and tell from you?" Vic says.
Dick clears his throat and squeezes the fabric between his fingers. "Nope."
He walks steadily up the stairs and into the hallway.
Man, sometimes having a reputation for being an asshole pays off. He'll just offer to play video games with Vic tomorrow, and pretend to eat one of Kori's desserts, and thank Raven in private, and the friendship slate will be wiped clean.
Everyone he left behind in the main living area is mature enough to realize that sometimes everyone needs to have secrets. So he's fine. Just as long as he doesn't run into—
"Oh, hey Robin."
—Oh no.
"Bye, Beast Boy."
"Um, okay then."
Dick launches himself down the hall and into his bedroom at Mach 3.
The layers that work best for him are: a sports bra, a second sports bra put on with the backside facing front, the compression shirt, then the normal Robin uniform on top of that.
He examines himself in the mirror. It looks pretty good: not perfect, but it works. Last but not least, he snaps his utility belt around his waist. He smiles at his reflection, and Robin smiles back.