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When people asked, Tim always explained that he was there during the Graysons’ last performance, which was true. Most people didn’t bother to do the math to realize that Tim was barely two years old that day.
Tim explained it this way because it was both simpler and less embarrassing than admitting that he’d formed a deep parasocial relationship with a boy who’d been in one episode of a French children’s edutainment series that ran reruns for some reason at three am on Spanish language television.
Let’s back up a second.
Tim has vague, fond memories of his first nanny. He’s pretty sure she was the first and only person before Bruce to ever show him parental affection, and she was fired immediately when Tim’s parents came home to find that he had learned to speak Spanish almost exclusively.
See, turns out that if you leave your three-year-old to be raised by a Honduran woman who only knows a handful of words in English for the better part of the year, your kid ends up not speaking much English either. Funny, how that works. It had certainly come as a shock to Tim’s parents, who seemed to have been under the impression that language acquisition was somehow genetic.
Said firing happened about a month after Tim turned four. His parents had promised to be home by his birthday, and his nanny had made a little callendar for him to mark off the days with, but of course they were late. The reason his Nanny was fired then, rather than the year and a half or so previously, was simply that after missing his fourth birthday, his parents attempted to engage Tim in conversation for what was quite possibly the first time in his life.
For about a year, Tim’s mother hand-picked English speaking nannies to look after him, but none of them lasted long, and the less said about them the better. By the time he was five, his parents figured he was capable enough to keep himself fed and watered without dying if left to his own devices, and so they stopped bothering with nannies at all.
Tim was capable of feeding and watering himself, given working pipes and a prompt delivery service, of which fact he was extremely proud. In lieu, however, of any sort of authority figure to tell him when to go to bed, his sleep schedule became rather dramatically skewed.
This led to Tim, small, lonely, missing the only person who had ever shown him what love might feel like, as her memory slowly faded from his mind with each passing year like ink leaching away from an old photograph left unattended in the sun, watching Spanish language television at three am.
Tim was seven when he saw Dick Grayson on tv.
Let’s rewind again.
It wasn’t that Tim’s night at the circus wasn’t significant. It would be untrue to say that he did not remember it, it would not entirely be true to say that he remembered it either. It might be most accurate to say that he remembered remembering it.
For as long as Tim could remember he had had a memory. The memory was bright-colored, like legend, and it went like this:
Once, when Tim was very small, his parents took him to a land where people could fly. The people were colored brightly in green and yellow and red, and they danced in the air, and they were happier than any people Tim had ever seen.
Before they took flight, Tim had gotten lost from his parents, and the smallest of them had found him. The boy had taken Tim’s hand and smiled like it was Tim that put the smile there, and chattered at Tim in bird language. Tim remembered the boy’s face, and he remembered the boy’s hand holding his, and he remembered that the boy told him that he would teach Tim to fly too.
By the time Tim was seven, he knew that the memory wasn’t true. There weren’t any people who could fly, not even in the exciting far off places that his parents were always running off to, and his parents had never taken him out of Gotham. And anyway, if the bird boy could only speak bird language, how did Tim even know that he had promised Tim grace and freedom too? By the time Tim was seven, he knew that the whole story of it was only a dream.
But then, one lonely three am, there was the boy, smiling out at him from the tv. There was the boy, smiling at him from one episode of some French show for children, telling the grown-up host all about what life was like for a kid in the circus. He didn’t speak bird language, he spoke French dubbed over in Spanish. And he could fly, he didn’t have wings, and he flew on swings and wires, but he flew.
“ My family are the best trapeze artists in the world, we’re the only people who can do a quadruple somersault,” The boy said, casually boastful, matter of fact in his assertions, “I just learned how, which makes me the youngest person to complete a quadruple somersault ever.”
Tim stared, entranced, as the boy bounced all over the behind-the-scenes of the circus, introducing the show hosts to other performers and even an elephant that he said was his best friend. Even on the ground, he moved like gravity had no hold over him, like he had some joyous magic that made the world brighter all around him.
The episode ended in barely twenty minutes, not counting commercials, and the world was dark and ordinary again. Tim had just learned that his dreams were real, and that there was so much more to them than he remembered, and now they were gone again, and it was almost enough to make Tim cry.
But then, a few days later, in the small hours of the night, there was the episode, rerunning again, there was Dick Grayson with his bright eyes and warm laughter and fearless, seemingly effortless flight. Tim rushed to record the episode, to hold it close and never lose the dream again.
And so, after that, whenever Tim was lonely, whenever he felt small, late at night in the dark, Tim would watch Dick Grayson in his glorious world that Tim could never touch, and Tim would listen while Dick told him what a family was.
Dick Grayson, the real one, the one that didn’t live in Tim’s TV or a dream of a memory, was older now, and he lived just next door. Sometimes, when Tim’s parents were home, they would take him to Wayne galas. Tim would see Dick there, wearing a dark suit and tie like everyone else’s, and his feet would be firmly on the ground in their shiny black dress shoes. Dick smiled like someone who was good at it, like someone who felt comfortable smiling, someone who could make it feel genuine even if it wasn’t. But he didn’t smile like he did on French tv when he was seven, a smile bubbling over with joy, like there was so much joy in him that his soul couldn’t contain it, like it spilled over into everyone he touched, even through a tv screen. Tim wondered if he still had light in him, somewhere. He wondered if he still knew how to fly. Tim wondered if Gotham ate up light and goodness, and took away everything bright and beautiful and free, leaving everything she’d gotten her claws into dark and dull and heavy. He wondered if that was why his parents never stayed, if that was why Tim himself was never worth staying for.
So then Tim was eight years old, and he could keep himself fed and watered, and he even went to school on time most days, and he did at least half of his homework. Tim had access to a computer and a library, and he learned things in his free time, which was all his time. Sometimes he thought about how he wanted to make his parents proud, but he didn’t even know what that would look like, apart from standing up straight and not getting his clothes dirty and staying absolutely quiet on the rare occasions they were home. Six months after his eighth birthday, Tim’s dad gave him a fancy camera as a birthday present. Tim had no idea what he would do with it, but he was determined to use it, because his dad gave it to him.
Tim was a boy who had no one to tell him when to go to bed, and he lived in a city of nighttime vigilantes and he had a new camera. He hadn’t really thought much about Batman before, but going out to find him seemed like the obvious thing to do.
Tim went looking for Batman, but what he found was Robin, and Robin flew.
Robin danced over rooftops as though gravity had no hold over him. He wore a uniform of yellow and red and green, and he seemed to glow as though he could bring light to all of Gotham’s dark places. When he smiled it was like joy was bubbling out of him, too much for his soul to contain. Tim watched him, and it was like he had found that spark of magic again, for the third time in his life, each moment as unexpected as the last.
And then Robin jumped and somersaulted in the air, one, two, three, four times. “We’re the only people who can do a quadruple somersault,” Dick had said, seven years old and bursting with pride. Tim had every one of his words memorized.
Dick Grayson was Robin. Tim felt that knowledge solidify in his heart. Dick Grayson was Robin, and he flew. Dick Grayson could fly, and he was magic, and he was kind and free and bright, and Gotham had not changed that, Gotham could not change that.
Robin flew, and Tim scrambled after him, camera clutched in his hand, taking pictures to hold close to his heart, capturing moments of brightness to light his way.
Robin flew and Tim followed, clinging to shadows. Because once, on an edutainment show in France, Dick Grayson smiled right at the camera and said, “I can’t wait to introduce you to my family!” Like he meant it, like another lonely seven-year-old could be part of it. Because once, in a dream of a memory, a bird child held Tim’s hand and told him he would teach him to fly. Because Robin was light and magic and freedom, and Tim thought that maybe, just maybe, he could be too.