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Dick loves the gymnastics studio. He loves helping kids get their first cartwheel or round off or chin-up pullover. He loves working with the older ones to nail down their routines for regional and state competitions. He loves the camaraderie with the other instructors, most in their teens or early twenties, who live and breathe this the same way he does.
But his favorite time is after the lessons end and everyone else goes home. The couple who owns the studio — nice people, they remind him of his parents, even if remembering John and Mary hurts — lets him stay after, as long as he locks up behind him. He puts on music, powders his hands, and gets a little bit more flying in before going home.
He missed this, the weightlessness. The moments in the air, heart swooping inside his chest. The precision it takes to catch the trapeze. The absolute control — of his body, his time, his energy. Nobody can hurt him up here, nobody can make him hurt anyone else. If he closes his eyes, he can almost hear the cheers and smell the popcorn. It’s as if he’s still young and small and innocent, under the red-and-white big top that used to be his home.
It feels like the life he could’ve had, once upon a time. Sure, maybe he’s lying to himself — but Dick’s always been a good liar.
By the time he calls it for the night, he’s sweat-soaked and smiling. He throws a sweatshirt over his workout gear and flicks the lights off on his way out.
He leaves through the main entrance, the way he always does. He locks the door behind him.
There’s a woman waiting for him, her wheelchair parked next to the stairs. She has red hair and glasses and knows things she shouldn’t. Dick stops in his tracks — his past is catching up with him, once again. He feels like he's always scrambling to stay one step ahead, to keep him and Jason safe, to keep his skeletons under lock and key.
Dick takes out his phone and shoots Jason a text. He’ll be home late — if he’s not back in two hours, start evacuation plan C. He slides the phone back into his pocket.
Then, he sits down on the stairs. Side by side with Barbara Gordon, the woman whose spine he severed five years earlier. His first target under Bruce Wayne’s tutelage — and his only failure.
“Robin,” she says, her voice cutting through the summer air. Dick wishes people would stop calling him that. “I was the only person you ever spared. Why?”
Dick flinches, ever so slightly. He used to be better at keeping still, at suppressing his fear. Amazing what a year away from Bruce Wayne does.
Dick looks far away. Somehow it’s easier like this, not looking at her. He can pretend he’s talking to Jason, or his therapist, or the ghosts that haunt him at night. He fidgets with his hands, picking at his cuticles. “It was — it was so bad. After. He — he didn’t take failure well. I couldn’t do it again.” Dick shakes his head, trying desperately to escape the memories. Like always, it is an exercise in futility. “I wasn’t strong enough.”
Bruce had taken Dick’s failure out of his hide, despite the fact that he too hadn’t succeeded in killing his target. The Gordons lived, and Bruce punished Dick, and Dick knew better than to pull his punches again.
“I haven’t felt safe in years, because of you.” Barbara’s voice is no-nonsense, stern. It’s not an accusation. It’s just the truth.
Dick shrinks into himself. He feels so much younger than her, so small, though he knows they’re the same age. That the both of them grew up too quickly. That they had both been kids in a world that didn’t care much for things like innocence or justice.
“I wouldn’t — I won’t hurt you again.” It’s all Dick can offer her. He can’t turn back time, no matter how dearly he wishes he could.
“You’re working with kids,” Barbara says abruptly. She doesn’t say anything else — she doesn’t have to. Dick understands what she’s saying, the accusation. Cycles of violence, and all that.
Dick flinches. “I wouldn’t hurt them,” he says. His voice is rough, hands worrying at the hem of his sweatshirt. “I’d rather die than hurt them.”
Why didn’t you die instead of hurt me, Barbara doesn’t ask. She knows there are things worse than death. She knows some of those things were done to him.
Still, her unorthodox interrogation is far from over. She had been pissed when her routine hacking of the Justice League servers showed that they had found Robin, the boy who haunted her nightmares, the surviving half of Batman-and-Robin and then let him go.
Sure, she trusts the League. They helped her and her dad, hid them after Bruce Wayne and his protégé-victim-Robin tried to kill them. Still, she’s checking their work. It’s like a mathematical proof — will the same questions elicit the same responses? Can Barbara catch him out in a lie or is he, against all logic, really teaching gymnastics and going to parent-teacher conferences and trying to put Robin behind him.
“You have CPTSD and severe anxiety.” Barbara says, no intonation in her voice. If she lets herself pity him, she will never be able to go through with this. “So does your ‘little brother,’ Jason Todd-Grayson. Kidnapping isn’t a good look, Robin.”
Dick presses his hands against his knees in a clear effort to keep still. “You hacked our therapist’s records?”
“You severed my spine.”
She’s read his therapist’s notes, yes. And Jason’s therapist’s notes. And the Justice League’s internal report that took Robin off the list of active threats. And every school record she could find about Jason Todd-Grayson. (He does theater after school. Apparently, he’s quite good.)
At the library, Jason takes out books by Jane Austen and ones with titles like “Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death.” Dick takes out books about child abuse and raising younger siblings and recovering from sexual assault. A lot of work to put into a cover story, if that’s what this is. But it seems less likely by the second.
“I didn’t kidnap him,” Dick whispers. “At least, I wasn’t the first one to kidnap him. I tried to track down his family, after…”
After he killed Bruce Wayne. After he got him and Jason out, running from a nightmare a decade in the making. The boy has a lot of blood on his hands, Barbara’s included. But she can believe he cares about Jason.
“I am doing my best with him,” Dick says to his knees. “I don’t think my best is very good. I don’t know how to be an adult. He had to teach me how to use the stove. I can’t even help him with his homework — he’s so smart and I never learned what they’re teaching him. But he is the first good thing that has happened to me in a long, long time.”
Barbara says nothing. Dick, who still hasn’t really looked at her this whole time, breaks apart. He cries into the soft fabric of his sweatshirt — Barbara realizes it says “Bludhaven Middle,” the school Jason goes to.
“I’m sorry,” Dick whispers. “I am so, so sorry.”
Barbara remembers the same boy, much younger but just as scared, whispering the same thing as he drove the knife in.
Absolution is not something she can give him.
“Someone’s going to put it together eventually,” Barbara says softly. She’s not going to burn his life to the ground, tempting as it once seemed. They have all suffered enough, Dick and Jason and her. “That you’re the missing Grayson kid.”
Dick sniffles. “Let them.”
“Why didn’t you change your name? You’ve faked enough other records.” It was impressive actually — the Justice League and then Barbara had been thrown for a loop when trying to track him down.
Dick wipes his face with the palm of hand. “I considered it. But I couldn’t. Robin was — was my mom’s nickname for me.”
He shakes his head, sits up a little straighter. For the first time, Dick looks Barbara in the eyes. “He already took one of my names. He couldn’t have the other.”
Barbara doesn’t say anything else — there’s nothing else to say. For a couple minutes they sit there in silence, two hurt kids on a stuffy summer night.
Then Barbara wheels away, leaving Batman and Robin behind her.
(If she writes a program that reroutes people who get too close to putting together Dick-Grayson-Flying-Graysons-Jason-Todd-Bludhaven-Batman-Robin, that’s no one’s business but hers.)