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Dick giggled as he bounced into the net. Mom landed on the other side and made him bounce some more as she stepped over.She picked him up and lifted him high into the air. "That was so good! I'm so proud of you!"
Mom bounced up onto her toes so he was just high enough for Dad to grab him on the next pass of the trapeze and fly him away shrieking with laughter.
-
Staring blankly at the broken bodies of his parents, Dick's brain kept insistently replaying an argument from the day before.
"I'm not a baby!" he had yelled when Mom turned down his request to be included in the whole act, not just the part with the net. "I haven't fell into the net on accident since I was like five!"
"This isn't a negotiation, Richard," Mom had said.
"It's not about being a baby," Dad added. "Or about your skill. I wasn't allowed to fly without a net until I was sixteen. That's twice as old as you are now. We want you to grow into yourself a bit more first."
He didn't remember the rest. There was a lot of yelling and begging. He got called Richard a few more times, and it ended when he was Richard John Grayson and not allowed to have dessert after dinner.
It wasn't the last thing he said to them. By morning he begrudgingly accepted that the answer wasn't going to change any time soon and it was a normal day. Their last conversations were the "I love you, you'll be wonderful" they exchanged before every show and the fervent pride and excitement mashed between Dick leaving the ring and his parents going back out. You were supposed to care about the last words you said to someone, not some dumb argument that stopped a whole day before. The last words they exchanged were loving and normal. He shouldn't feel guilty about that.
But he didn't apologize. He didn't tell them they were right, and he understood.
He didn't understand until now. Until he couldn't tell them anything else at all, ever again.
-
"You sure, chum? You don't have to do this."
Dick squared his shoulders, and Bruce's touch went lighter. "Yes I do." He was proud of how little his voice shook. He bounded out from under Bruce's hands and into the air before he could lose his nerve.
The cave was darker than the big top, even with all the industrial-strength floodlights installed to brighten the gloom. The sheer drop to the river at the bottom was close enough to make his stomach flip, even though he knew he couldn't actually fall all the way over there. And the net was right there below him, and there were mats underneath even if it did somehow fail. Bruce took it all seriously. Dick was as safe as possible.
The only thing safer would be to never fly again at all. He couldn't stomach that.
He'd done his best to keep up his conditioning, but Dick's arms shook hard enough to lose the bar and tumble down before long. His breath froze in his chest, and he processed the soft jounce of the net on a time delay, sure for a moment that it didn't hurt because he was dead.
"Dick?" Bruce called down, twitching toward the ladder and shattering the illusion that it had all gone horribly wrong and Dick was about to see his parents again.
Dick forced himself into motion. "I'm fine!"
When he made it back up to the platform to try again, Bruce embraced him. "I'm proud of you, chum." Mom and Dad would be proud, too. He knew that without being told.
-
Batman seemed to fall in slow motion, and Robin was much too far away to help. He hooked his grapple around a few corners so he could swing around to hit the guy who got a lucky shot at Batman's line feet first and send him sprawling. He hammered the button on his gauntlet to summon the Batmobile.
"B, are you okay?" His heart stuttered in his chest as he searched for signs of life.
Batman lolled, not quite managing to sit up. The wave of relief washed all Dick's knowledge of head wounds out of his his head. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
Batman groaned. "I'm fine, Robin." Dick flinched when he tapped his fist against the cowl in the center of his forehead. "Helmet, remember?"
Dick sighed, not entirely satisfied but starting to coming out of the panic of seeing Bruce fall.
Batman made it to his feet just as the Batmobile pulled up alongside them. "Shall we call it an early night and sic Agent A on my head?"
Dick nodded, and let himself be comforted by a stream of assurances that Bruce would be alright.