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Dick wakes up one morning, groggy from a dream that he thinks might’ve been about the circus and also about his favourite car and also about how lonely he is, and realizes that he can’t remember what his mother’s voice sounds like anymore.
Most likely, it has been this way for a while now. Grief works differently for everybody. When he was younger, he had read every thesis and study on it available, terrified of what it was that lay in his future, trying desperately to quantify the dark void inside of him. It hadn’t gotten him very far, but it did give him the knowledge that forgetting would be inevitable. What, where, and when were hairs to be split. But every day he would wake up, and everything that made his parents people as opposed to memories would slip away a little more.
Most likely, he had forgotten a long time ago. It just took him until now to notice. So terribly damning. He hadn’t even realized. He had lost something so crucial, and he didn’t even know.
Mama, he thinks. He cannot conjure what the response would’ve sounded like. Her dulcet, bright voice: my Dicle. Was it bright? Was it sweet? Did she smoothen her syllables, like he does when he’s tired, or did all of her words sound out clear and precise into the air?
He can’t remember. He thinks of her voice and he thinks of reassurance, of a stream running through rocks, but he cannot think of the sound itself. That’s it, then. It’s gone.
He’s never going to hear her call him robin again. My little bird. My springtime robin. The whole fucking reason for any of this—
It’s gone.
Dick jiggles his leg. He stops, fidgets for a bit, and ends up sitting with his hands tucked underneath his thighs. He pulls his left hand up, curls it into a fist. Lets it go. Digs his nails into his knee.
“Dick,” Fiona, his therapist, says. He releases a breath at all once and feels himself shudder as it goes.
“Right,” he says. “Yes. Okay. I, uh, need some advice.”
Fiona nods. “Okay, I’ll try my best.”
The thing Dick likes most about her is that she is under no illusion that she is here to fix him. Whether this is because Dick is in denial and thinks he doesn’t have any problems he can’t fix himself or that all of Dick’s problems are so ingrained in himself and his lifestyle that there’s no coming out unscathed is a question both of them politely refuse to touch. What matters is that being here doesn’t make Dick feel like he’s a science experiment or a maths equation.
He breathes in deeply. He says, “So. If you had a secret that you’d been keeping for a while—” He pauses. He crosses his legs. “Okay, not really a secret. More like—a misunderstanding? That you just never corrected. Or, like, somebody made an assumption, and you never said anything to disprove it. Is that a secret? Or a misunderstanding?”
Fiona raises her eyebrows at him. “Is that what you want me to give you advice on?”
Dick slumps into the chair. “No,” he replies. “I— okay. So it’s like… a very long-standing assumption. About you. One that’s become central to a lot of your interpersonal relationships. And a lot of conflict has been created over it, but mostly in the past. And most of you have like, come to terms with the reasons for the conflict, and have been able to gain some closure and move on, right?”
“Okay,” Fiona nods.
“Like, the issue hasn’t really gone away completely, and there’s probably some lingering resentment left, but everybody has, y’know. Worked through it. It’s steady ground, now. Yeah?”
“Yes, sure.”
Dick uncrosses his legs, and crosses them the other way. He moves both of his hands to the arms of the chair and begins to drum an unsteady rhythm with his fingers. “But the assumption—the thing that started it all—is. Wrong. And you’ve never corrected anybody over it, or told anybody, or even hinted at it because. Um. A lot of reasons, but right now the main reason is that you think it’ll revive a lot of old conflicts, and essentially destabilize a situation that’s finally stable after years of fighting. So you kinda don’t think it’s worth it. But at the same time… it feels wrong to let people keep thinking it. Because it’s— because the truth is— because— um. It’s important to me.”
Fiona blinks at him. “Okay,” she says, calm and measured, “that was a very confusing statement.”
Dick puts his face in his hands. “I know,” he groans.
“You can’t give any more context?” she asks. “Just so I can advise you to the best of my ability.”
Dick grimaces. “Will you be mad at me if I say no?”
“I won’t be mad at you for anything you tell me during these sessions, Dick,” Fiona tells him. “I just want to have as much to work with as possible.”
Pursing his lips, Dick thinks. How to tell this story. How to unearth this history. He’s never said it to anybody: not even people outside of the issue, not even people who should know already.
He exhales. “In the past,” he says, “I owned something.” It’s silly. It’s reductive. The issue is so large, lodged so close to his heart, that the only way he can process it is in the most juvenile of terms. That’s mine. You can’t have it. I had it first. So, so stupid.
Fiona nods.
“And it was mine from my parents. My mother. She gave it to me.”
Fiona’s face softens fractionally. Dick tries his best not to squirm under the mere implication of her pity. He looks down at the ground.
“And one day I… left the house.” It’s like he’s explaining it to a child. Not Fiona. Himself. This is yours. It’s not yours anymore. It’s gone far, far away. Or maybe, this is why this hurts. You lost something. It was yours and it shouldn’t have been taken away. That’s why you’re upset. Stop your crying, now. “And when I came back, it had been given to somebody else. I didn’t have a say. It was given to another person after that, and then another. Nobody knew that my mother gave it to me. Everybody thought that it meant the same to them. That they had as much right to it as I, or anybody else did. And—well, they do. They made it their own. I’m not saying it didn’t mean anything to them, or that they shouldn’t have had it. But— my mother gave it to me. And that’s important.”
He looks at Fiona, a little desperate, after he says that. He doesn’t know what he wants her to say. He doesn’t know what he thinks she should say either. Those two probably shouldn’t be distinct, but they are. He can’t make them not. He can’t change himself.
Fiona looks at him for a long time. “That is important,” she says. It’s a relief to hear it, as much as it’s terrifying. Of course it’s important. He shouldn’t need anybody else to tell him that. It’s his mother, and his memory. Of course.
She says, “You want to tell them about the origins of this thing, because it’s important.” Dick nods. “It’s important that your mother gave it to you, and it’s important also, in the sense that all of your siblings consider it important to themselves. You all share it. It is meaningful that you all share it, and would become even more meaningful if you all understood each dimension of it.”
Very softly, Dick nods. He cannot argue against that. There is nothing to say. The velocity with which Fiona has cut to the core of it all is brutal, and Dick feels breathless in the aftermath. It’s a strange way to put it—in a way, a dilution of everything that the situation is—but not incorrect. Sharing and understanding. Is that all it is?
He keeps his eyes downcast. “But I’m not sure it will be received that way.”
Fiona hums. “You think it would bring up old conflicts and reopen healing wounds. That it would be interpreted as a claim of ownership, instead as an act of sharing.”
Dick nods.
Fiona sighs. “That is a tricky situation.”
Helpless to do anything else, Dick nods again. He swallows around the lump in his throat. “I don’t— I don’t want to hurt them. It’s already caused them so much hurt. And I can’t help but think, if I tell the truth about this: I’ll only be hurting them more.”
Fiona gives him a sad look. “You’ve been hurting, too, Dick,” she says. “You’re still hurting.”
In a sequence of events he truly could not recount, only partially because he was knocked out for some of it, he ends up telling Rose Wilson first.
They find themselves sitting in a dungeon together. Rose is already halfway through breaking him out of his handcuffs, having broken out of her own through dislocating part of her hand.
As she works with the lockpicks, Dick says, “You wanna hear something fucked up?”
Rose doesn’t look up. “Obviously yes.”
“You know Robin.”
“Might’ve heard of it.”
“It was my mother’s name for me. I made it to honour my parent’s memory. Remind myself of what I was fighting for.”
Rose looks up. Her hands still. “Wow,” she says. “Are you sure you should be telling me this?”
Dick snorts. “Nobody else knows. Well, B does, but I don’t think he’s ever given it more than two seconds of thought.”
“That is fucked up.”
“Fathers, huh?”
His handcuffs click apart. With a laugh, Rose says, “You know, it amazes me that you haven’t tried to strangle him before.”
Dick laughs too. He feels so weird. Weird and sad and light, sitting in this dungeon with Rose Wilson of all people, telling her his deepest secrets.
“It amazes me too,” he says, and then: “Don’t tell Red Robin.”
“That you want to strangle your dad? I think he might enjoy that.”
Dick laughs again. What the fuck, he thinks. What has he been doing, holding onto this all of his life?
Obviously, Rose Wilson-induced realizations about the inherently ridiculous nature of trauma aside, he’s still not going to tell anybody. Absolutely not. He sits and listens to his brothers bickering about replacements and legacy, and he smiles along. None of it comes with bite anymore, which is good, because that was driving him mildly insane, but the way it’s become an inside joke does feel like a different type of insanity-inducing. Nothing he can’t handle, though. He’s learned to accept that this is just how it’s going to be. Dick Grayson and the ever-present ringing in his ears.
It is a little funny though, when he thinks about it. The knowledge that he’s sitting on what’s essentially an unexploded landmine. The harmony and understanding that they’ve all come to as a quasi-family isn’t so fragile as to fall apart if he put his foot down, but they would all feel the shockwaves. Nobody would be spared. He has, at any moment, the ability to throw a wrench into all of his relationships with his family, and most of their relationships with each other. Most of the time this information makes him sad. Sometimes, it’s so hysterically funny that he has to hold back a grin when he’s hanging out with his brothers.
“What the fuck are you smiling about?” Jason asks, as they watch Tim and Damian spar.
Dick lets his smile turn indulgent. “Oh, you know, cruelty and sabotage. The usual.”
Jason raises his eyebrows. “Everybody thinks you’re so fucking normal,” he says, but he’s smiling.
Everybody thinks a lot of things about Dick Grayson. Everybody thinks that they have a piece of him. It is freeing and terrifying to realize that this is simply not true. Nothing of himself that he hasn’t given out exists in the world.
So he gave out Robin. Or he didn’t. Or he did, but not through Bruce, not through that debacle. He gave out his love for his parents and his belief in the light and his hope for better, and now he has a family to show for it. Robin means family. Robin means springtime, beginnings, rebirth; it means I was loved and I want to do better and I want better for you. As much as the mantle is soaked in blood, he can’t let himself think that it changes what Robin means. Tragedy will follow him. Follows them all, but he won’t let it take over, won’t let it win, for a single moment. His mother’s voice crooning him to sleep. His father laughing as he tumbles to the ground after another failed acrobatics trick. Falling. Being caught. Little bird. My robin.
Robin redbreast, soaked in blood. Triumphant in flight despite it all.
In the end, the pin-drop moment is so mundane that Dick feels a little cheated. He would’ve maybe liked a bit more fanfare for one of his hardest kept secrets getting brought to light, even though fanfare in his circles generally equates to property damage. A boy wants to feel special sometimes, sue him.
Instead, he gets this:
Wally walks into his hospital room. He’s followed by Donna and Roy. With Damian, Jason and Bruce here as well, it’s a tight fit. Dick’s in a public hospital, because this time around, instead of during his very dangerous nighttime activities, he had gotten injured teaching gymnastics to twelve-year-olds in his low-risk daytime job. He’d already informed everybody of this when he told them he was in hospital, so he knows that nobody is really here out of concern. They are here, because they’re all awful people, 100% only to make fun of Dick.
And so they do.
Putting a hand over his mouth, Wally affects a gasp. “Oh, my poor little baby!” He runs over to Dick’s hospital bed and collapses onto the side. It is of no consequence to him that several other people are in the room watching this. “My flightless bird! My grounded Robin! How could this tragedy have occurred?”
Dick has a sprained wrist. Grinning, he says, “I hate you so fucking much, and you aren’t funny.”
Wally throws an arm over his face. “Already the trauma is affecting our relationship and muddling your judgement! You would never call me unfunny if you were in your right mind!”
Damian asks, in that primly bitchy way of his, “Should I call security?”
Roy crosses his arms and says, “That’s a good call, baby bird.” Damian bristles at the nickname, but he doesn’t throw any sharp objects. Peace among the lands.
Wally grabs Dick’s uninjured hand. “They’re trying to tear us apart, Rob!”
Standing in the corner as he believes is his freak prerogative, Jason groans. “I’ll drag him out myself, if I don’t have to hear any more of the hysterical mother schtick.”
Damian and Roy smile. Donna rolls her eyes and pulls Wally away from the bed. Dick huffs a laugh.
Bruce Wayne, standing closest to the window because he’s also a freak, drops his cup of coffee.
Immediate commotion.
“Father?” Damian says.
“What the fuck?” Jason says.
Wally, Donna and Roy all trade looks. The board of directors seems to settle on polite concern.
Bruce stares at Dick, eyes wide. Dick stares back. He runs the prior conversation through his mind, trying to place the growing horror on Bruce’s expression, analysing every sentence and coming up empty until— until—
“No fucking way,” Dick says.
Bruce opens his mouth. He closes it. He looks down at the puddle of coffee around his expensive Italian leather shoes. He looks back up, lost.
Dick says, “There’s no fucking way,”
Everybody else catches on. The questions are immediate; most directed at Dick, because Dick’s generally better at offering relevant information. He’s not going to this time. He’s too busy trying to process the fact that— that Bruce— for fuck’s sake— he cannot believe this—
He bursts into hysterical, inconsolable laughter.
“You’re not allowed to tell them,” is the first thing Dick says to Bruce once he’s calmed down. He ignores the looks from the Titans—he’ll deal with them later, and finds that he wants to tell them—and the looks from his family, he receives with a shrug and a grin.
“If that’s what you think best,” Bruce replies, quiet and miserable. It makes Dick laugh again, even though he feels bad for it.
He reaches out and pats Bruce on the shoulder. Injured hand. His cast scrapes against the fabric of his ridiculous fancy suit.
“It’s okay, B,” he says, the laughter still in his voice. And it is. He’ll always be hurt by it, sure, but he’s not going to accept anybody else getting hurt over it too. That’s his as well. His pain. His feelings. “Seriously, it is. I promise.”
Bruce sits, disquiet. “I hurt you.”
Dick grins at him. Like talking to a child. “Do you know what you did wrong?”
The look in Bruce’s eyes tells Dick he knows exactly what’s going on, but Bruce still replies, “Yes.” Guilt is an incredible thing. Dick’s going to hold this over Bruce forever.
“Are you very sorry?”
A bit lip. “Yes.”
“Do you promise to never do it again?”
There’s definitely a smile hiding behind Bruce’s mouth now. “I swear it.”
Dick pats him with the uninjured arm. “Then it’s fine. That’s what matters, B. I’ve dealt with it already. No need to dig up old dirt for everybody else.”
“Grayson, stop being vague this instant!” Damian demands. He’s climbing onto the other side of Dick’s bedside and glaring down Bruce with impressive ferocity. Dick will probably tell him too, one day. When he’s a bit older. He can’t imagine it would go down well right now, if only because Damian and Bruce are finally developing an actual relationship and Dick would like to ensure that Bruce at least has the chance to be a good father who wouldn’t forget crucial parts of his son’s lore. When Damian is capable of making his own decisions and is within his rights to wage war against his father, however, all bets will be off.
Maybe he’ll tell Jason. Maybe he’ll tell Cass. Maybe he’ll tell everybody—maybe he won’t. He’s given out so much of himself already. He chooses whether he wants to give more. And just because he’s predisposed to giving, doesn’t mean he has to every time.
He sees her in a dream. The memory worn by age, her voice dulled by time. Regardless, Dick sees her. He feels her, and he hears her.
“My little robin,” she says, smoothing a hand down his cheek. “You won’t forget me. You don’t have to worry.”
Dick throws his arms around her. “I won’t,” he says.
How could he? He’s made sure his parents live on forever. A hero’s legacy. He has turned into legend the love between him and his parents, and kept it sacred in his heart. He flies. He hurts. He lives.
“I’m so proud of you,” his mother says. She presses a kiss to his forehead.
Dick wakes up that morning with tears on his pillowcase. He looks at the beautifully rendered robin drawing on his cast. Damian worked a miracle with it, despite it being done in marker.
He breathes through the hurt a little bit easier.