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It is easy to be a child, to be Robin.
To be Robin is to be born, to be a seed emerging from the dark earth, singing. Robin wakes all from their slumber. He is alive with sun, the first teacher of budding. His song lengthens the day; his dance melts the snow. The trees learn from him the brightest of greens, the fruits learn from him the richest of reds. He perfumes the earth. Savior, the people call him, Bringer of Fruits.
Robin, the temples pray, Robin.
Robin laughs their gratitude up, all fluttering wings and wind-blown petals.
This is his first name and Dick wears it effortlessly.
If joy is the absence of hardship, then there is so much joy. There are no injuries in the time of Spring. In this form, Dick can roll and tumble and never get dirty. The flowers weaved into his hair are a part of him, eternal blooms. His first crown. The vines that hug his arms and legs are cherished friends. He is small and quick-footed. Hands tiny enough to breathe life back to the most hidden seed. He is young enough to soar.
If joy is the presence of love, then there is so much joy. The Wind dances beside him, red-haired and grinning, racing him across the world. He creates entire forests with his twin, The Roots and The Branches. At night, she counts all the stars for him. Robin follows The Stones to a town of people. He has taken the form of a human teenager, sharpening flint. Robin plays pranks all day until The Stones give chase, an avalanche that sends Robin falling down the cliffside and into the waters. There, the Waves lap at Robin gently, smiling up at him with amethyst eyes. He tells Robin tales from the darkest parts of the ocean kingdom, the places where not even the sun touches. Robin laughs and laughs. Dick will always laugh at the dark.
There is so much joy in the mortal world for Robin. Even Superman, King of All Gods, descends from the Heavens to take him flying. They rise high above the clouds – higher than Robin could ever fly alone – Robin squealing with delight all the while. His father washes the world in rain, illuminates the skies in lightning. All to hear Robin laugh.
And he does.
Robin is a child. He is loved, loved, loved.
But he is not desired.
As Spring grows into Summer, so too grows Robin. He is a young boy at the cusp now. In adolescence, everything is a blooming. His footprints leave flowers bursting into fruits in his wake. Fields and fields of wheat grow where he sleeps. The Maiden, the people call him, Robin.
To be Robin is to be untouched by death. Robin was born from the sun. His father, the thunderer, kissed him with it. And then he dropped from the sky to the flowers, to the warm embrace of his friends. They finished making the Earth so that they could play together. All the world is designed to protect him from every struggle. His friends teach him that love is a warm hearth, a hot spring, sunshine on your back.
But desire. Dick learned that himself.
There is a chill to desire. Dick has tasted death; he knows this now.
The bird that named Dick saw in him a kindred spirit. Robin, always bopping around, always singing, always soaring, always first. This restlessness, gods and mortals alike love Robin for it.
Dick would never tell his friends, but he is restless in this form because it doesn’t suit him. Not for eternity, anyway. From the moment he fell from the sky, Dick’s nature has been one of change. In these seasons, he can give so much life because he longs so sweetly for death. But eventually he has no more fruits to bring. His nature is to fall. His nature is to choose to fall.
At the zenith of summer, a cold wind will blow, his lover’s bite. And that’s how Dick knows. It is time to start falling again.
He says goodbye to The Waves, The Wind, The Stones, The Roots & Branches. They weep and curse and rage for him. Robin can offer them only smiles. His power is limited that way. He asks them not to mourn him too hard, begs them to please be kind to the world in his absence. But he knows how the story goes. All the pretty blossoms he created, all the sweet fruits, none of them will return until he does. There’s only so much he can do. Their grief is not his domain. And soon, sympathy won’t be his domain anymore, either.
The change is happening in him already. Fruits ripen and then rot. That is the way of things. Dick is eager for sadness. His friends curse his husband for this, this sorrow that will carry him away. Evil, they call it, His stain. The mark of death.
As if only the dead can long for rest.
Dick is not the sky. He cannot stay in flight forever.
There is a grief in that, yes, but a cherished one.
What do you call melancholia that makes you happy?
Homesickness.
Robin travels across the lands, bringing harvest and plenty to each corner of the Earth. There are festivals in his honor, but he never stays long. He has already done his work for the people. This journey is for him. The God of Death taught Dick selfishness; it is one of Dick’s most treasured lessons.
Dick walks until the greenery of the Earth gives up, until he comes to a coast that is only stone and rock and lava. The gates of Hell itself. This is why he has journeyed. To see this familiar wasteland, to breathe in this familiar soot. It infuses his being. Not a stain, but a becoming. A return.
He is ready to be with the shades and the spirits and their resistless King, his beloved husband.
Dick exhales brimstone.
He is ready to come home.
The gates of Hell are a cavern. Massive and dark, a wide-open jaw that eats everything, even daylight.
He and his beloved are reflections of each other. If he is the seed that grows up through the earth, then his husband is the cave that tunnels down. If he is a sun drop, then his husband is what swallows the sun.
Dick enters the deep cavern of his beloved and hopes that, soon, he will be entered in return.
His eyes adjust to the dark. It is a slow adjusting and Dick savors that pain. It feels good, earned. The steady music of the stalagmites dripping serenades him. Up above, the creatures that named his husband watch him. Dick greets the bats as his precious kin. This place is as much a part of Dick now as are the meadows and fields above ground.
His friends wouldn’t agree. None are foolish enough to call this place by its true name. Instead, they call it Robin’s prison.
Dick is not a prisoner, although everyone tells their story like it was a kidnapping.
And, alright, it was a little bit of a kidnapping.
Dick remembers that day better and brighter than any other. He had been just a child back then, delighting in talking to the lilies and painting their faces. He made them so beautiful. Too beautiful. The nearby bushes, thorny and reeking of death, grew jealous. So Robin embraced them in a tight hug and from his blood, he gave the bushes red berries as beautiful as rubies.
To be kind to death is to call death to you.
Robin was careless with his own blood and when it dripped to the ground, the ground opened its mouth to devour it. Wider and wider the hole in the world grew, until out leapt six black horses. They were creatures unlike anything Robin had seen before, made from shadow, they danced and flickered in the wind like candlelight. Their eyes were blood red. They pulled a chariot of gold, big enough to eclipse the sun.
In the chariot stood the Bat.
Broad-shouldered and grim faced, his long cape a tapestry of shadows, a strip of living night across the sky.
He Who Carries All Away.
Robin knows only joy.
When Dick looked up at the Bat then, magnificent and terrible, he felt for the first-time longing.
The Bat longed too. Not for a wife, not right away, but for a companion. Someone who would treat death kindly. The Bat reached for Robin, pulled him tight into the crook of his arm. And then a new world, dark and ancient, opened up to Dick.
It was a kidnapping, but Dick wasn’t stolen in any way he understands.
Robin sang and The Bat answered.
But will he answer again?
That is always the question, the dance.
Dick smiles, the anticipation getting the best of him. He races down the last leg of his journey, deeper and deeper down into the heart of this realm. The cavern opens up to a wide lake, its waters the most cursed and blessed of all creation. There is but one vessel that dares to cross these waters. It is crowded with the newly dead, traveling to eternity.
Dick greets Alfred with a kiss to his cold cheek. The steadfast ferryman offers him passage, but this is a journey Dick must make himself.
Dick is not a mortal. He walks above the water. Power flutters through him, the flapping of bat wings. The vines along his arms and legs are blooming asphodels. These will be his last flowers under his old name.
He is ready for his new one.
He is ready for his husband to speak him into being, once more.
The mist off the lake rises and tickles his feet. It reminds him of his first journey down here, that sudden chariot ride.
How large everything loomed over him back then. Especially the Bat.
The story goes that the King of the Dead is cruel.
He is greedy, he is stubborn, he is cold. But he’s never been cruel.
Even when Dick was but a small Robin, wide-eyed and terrified, even then Dick knew the Bat wasn’t cruel. There was such a loneliness in his eyes, a paler blue than ice, blue that was the cold itself. It made Dick want to touch his face, to see if he could not bleed on that hurt there and make it beautiful, as he did with the bushes.
The story goes that the Bat imprisoned him. And the Bat did shut him in his castle, did pull him back with his long arms when Dick tried to leave. But Dick only ever tried to leave once, and even that was just to see what the Bat would do. Back then, he could never fully figure out what the Bat wanted.
The Bat is an old god. One of the oldest. Dick didn’t know it back then, but the Bat abhors impulse. He plans everything in millennia. The nature of the dead is a stillness.
But his kidnapping had not been slow and it had not been planned.
The Bat saw Robin, and in that instant of sight, he longed for a companion. Dick doesn’t think the thought was ever crystalized more than that. The Bat is the richest of all the gods, he has domain over all jewels and wealth. Dick thinks the Bat saw him, took him, and placed him alongside all his other riches.
The Bat just intended to have him.
He never expected to be loved.
But how could Dick not fall for him, when he was such a loving host?
The Bat did everything to keep him entertained. He gave Dick his finest diamonds and sapphires to play jacks with, spun him dresses from pure gold, created a vast garden that Dick alone would tend. When the flowers that crowned Dick’s head withered and died so far from the sun, the Bat replaced it with a crown of black pearls.
That first journey with him, every day was different. It delighted Dick to no end. His mission was to make the Bat smile. He would perform stunts and tricks for the heroes in the blessed fields, just to feel the Bat’s dark gaze on him. He would spend lifetimes in the garden, creating new plants that could bloom without sun. Mushrooms, henbane, hellbore and nightshade. He bundled them together into a bouquet for the Bat. Soon, they had both given each other all the gifts that could be given.
All that was left to give was companionship. Dick would shadow the Bat on his throne, watching as he ruled the dead. Coldly, but never unjustly. Ruling was a way to help people that Dick had never thought of before. He listened eagerly to the dead’s stories and chirped his advice when appropriate. The Bat’s smiles were hard won, but his eyes grew warmer and warmer.
If Dick sang, the Bat would hum beside him.
If Dick danced, the Bat would always applaud when he was done.
If Dick cried, the Bat would make the whole kingdom mourn with him.
Crying was Dick’s favorite because then the Bat would touch him. Back then, Dick was still a child and the Bat was still a giant with no equal. A thumb the size of Dick’s face would brush his tears away. It made Dick giggle.
He giggles again, at the memory of it.
Dick is so ready to touch and be touched again. So ready for the feel of his husband’s hands, as cold as silver against him, as large and all-consuming as the night. Dick longs to be the stars again.
The lake is vast, but the coastline nears. Dick can see the enormous door carved into the obsidian come into view. For the dead, the door is awe-inspiring, more ornate than life itself.
His husband likes to make an imposing first impression.
Sometimes, Dick wishes that just once at the end of his journey, he would find his husband waiting for him. Smiling, in the way that the Bat does, with a stern mouth and a twinkle in his eye. An open door.
But that’s not how the story goes. This, too, is part of Dick’s becoming. The seduction.
It is the pomegranate seeds that bind Dick to this walk, but no seeds could force the King of the Dead to open his realm to Dick. Open his heart. That is earned every journey.
Love is always a choice.
Dick’s bare feet touch the sharp rocks of the shore, a good hurt. His hand presses against the smooth obsidian door. He can feel his husband’s heart beating on the other side.
“You, to whom all things return,” Dick announces, his voice echoing across the cavern of Death. It’s as though a flock of birds chirp his song alongside him. “Beloved, I have returned to you.”
He cannot keep the dreaming out of his voice, it washes away into a bedroom whisper. “Make winter of me.”
When Dick returns to the Earth, he is greeted with parades and festivals.
His husband greets him with a sliver of an open door.
Dick cannot pretend he’s anything other than charmed. He fell in love with the Bat for his contradictions. All that power in need of so much tenderness, it calls out to Dick. It makes him want to be patient, be gentle. A branch for a bird to land on.
A crack in the door is all Dick needs. It is a rush to see his husband again, a flurry of wind and roses and wings inside of him. The Bat is as large as the door. Armored again. His cape consumes his form, shadows curling and writhing at his feet. It’s like meeting him once more for the first time. There’s a timidity his beloved is desperate to hide. His King’s vestige might be of a man, but they were both children when they met, and they are children when they are apart.
His husband’s eyes bore into him, a darkness seeping in. And yes, there it is. That chill. That bite.
His beloved’s gaze is unceasing. All knowing, all seeing, as imposing as every nightmare.
It makes Dick feel small. It makes him want to grow.
“If I am to be loved by you,” Dick tells him, voice wet with want, “I must have a new name.” This is part of the changing.”
His husband scowls. Lesser men would faint at the sight, but all Dick sees is a pout. It makes him giggle, though he hides it behind his hand. His husband darkens the world around him.
“I would have you as you are.”
The Bat’s voice is gravel itself, magma cooling. It’s rougher than normal, which speaks of its disuse. The King of the Dead has only one equal. He doesn’t speak much when Dick’s gone.
Dick’s fondness turns to pity. He knows how much his beloved hates change. Even now, even after all these homecomings. His husband still hasn’t quite understood. Dick never leaves him, never stops loving him. His leaving is just as much part of his love as his return.
Love is a nourishing, a changing.
Change is not in the Bat’s domain. He rules over eternity itself. When he took Robin from the world, he cared not that the world cried out daily for Robin’s return. His nature is greed and Robin was the thing he wanted most of all. But his nature is also unchanging perfection. And Dick changes. All that he touches, he changes.
It was a slow change. The Kingdom of the Dead became more beautiful, dotted with these new strange flowers, more fragrant. And then change touched the Bat, put more color in his eyes, in his cheeks. All that was survivable; it mostly passed by without his beloved’s notice.
And then Robin changed. His limbs lengthened. His voice deepened. Instead of his eyes sparkling like the scattered sunshine between the leaves, his eyes gleamed like precious sapphires.
“I wouldn’t be enough as I am,” Dick reminds his husband.
The Bat loved Robin and by doing so, he changed him.
Robin is not a bird for the dead. If Dick was to love the Bat, he needed to be someone else. Older, stronger, an equal. Robin is for the realm of lilies and this was the realm for nightshade.
Dick wants to be that person again.
“Name me.” It is both plea and command.
There is pause. There is always a pause.
The Bat is a miser. He hoards his riches, he counts his denizens every night, he covets all those who are not yet under his rule. This God who invented selfishness, once he first realized Robin was changing, he tried to send Dick away.
But, by then, Dick had learned cunning from the Bat.
Dick asked for a party for his farewell, a great feast fit for the largest kingdom in creation. He had never once eaten during his stay. Dick was too busy to bother with such a boring task. And perhaps part of him remembered that he did want to return to the Earth, someday. Unlike the Bat, Dick couldn’t ignore his friend’s cries, and he missed them too. Never enough to leave right then, but enough to dream of leaving, in passing.
But the Bat was not letting him go for a visit; the Bat was banishing Dick from his heart entirely.
Dick held in his hands a pomegranate. His dark red heart. Back in the realm of the living, pomegranates were his favorite fruit. It had been a wonderful challenge to figure out how to grow them here, in such cold and hostile lands. But now that he had, Dick was certain they would be the most delicious fruit of all.
The Bat sat at the head of the impossibly long table, a dark King on his throne. A marble statue. Unapproachable. Lonely.
Dick could not let that be his story.
Pomegranate in hand, Dick walked towards him. The Bat watched him. He always watched him. It made Dick shiver with desire.
Dick swung one leg over the Bat’s lap. He was bigger now, big enough for the Bat to hold, but slim enough to fit perfectly between his thighs. If the Bat was his prison, then Dick locked himself away willingly. He closed his cage by wrapping the Bat’s arms around him.
The Bat frowned. Dick ran a hand across his brow, smoothing away the stress. He cut open his heart for his beloved. He did so gleefully, savagely. Dug his finger straight into its sweet juices. Pulling out the first seed felt like ecstasy, a great roaring.
I want to stay with you, Dick said when he ate the first seed, I want to be like you.
One seed. The juices ran down Dick’s lips. Two seeds. He licked it up. Three seeds. The juices ran down his fingers. Four seeds. He sucked his fingers dry. Five seeds. The juices ran down his arm. Six seeds.
That’s exactly how long the Bat, King of the Dead, the Infernal, the Unconquerable, lasted.
The sixth seed his beloved stole right from Dick’s mouth. Greedy and wet, his beloved devoured Dick right there, just as Dick had done the fruit.
Dick had been right. No pomegranate had ever been so delicious.
The memory leaves Dick’s body humming with longing.
But his mind remembers the lesson. Cunning and honesty. Those are his most powerful tools.
Dick runs his hand along the open seam of the door. He strokes it gently, as if it were his beloved’s harsh brow.
“I must become something more,” Dick explains. Through the door, Dick can see his husband opening his mouth to refute him, but Dick shushes him with a smile.
“I like that about loving you,” Dick reminds him. He bats his eyes, blushes. This is the last of his maiden coyness. It is all for his husband. “I like that you ask me to be more.”
His friends would be content to keep him a little bird forever. And Dick likes being a little bird, some of the time. But he cannot be one thing eternally. He cannot belong to the whole world all of the time.
Right now. Right now it is the season of belonging to just one person.
Dick kisses the crack in the door.
“Free me from this form, my beloved,” Dick whispers. “My Bruce.”
His beloved’s true name. In all of creation, Dick is the only to ever speak it. Because while the Bat may be the Host of Many, only Dick knows where he keeps his heart. He keeps it in Dick’s chest, in Dick’s throat.
Bruce has Dick’s heart, too. They ate the seeds together.
“Name me.”
The door opens like a volcano erupting. Two seasons of smothered desire, fear, anger, and longing. So much longing. All for him. Dick soaks it up. This is all the sunshine he needs now.
His beloved sweeps out of the door, as swift and powerful as his dark horses. By the time he pulls Dick – laughing and beautiful – into his arms, he has changed already. Not a giant, but a man. A handsome man. A man whose eyes gleam like sapphires.
Their kiss is a transformation. His beloved’s great impatience hands bury themselves in his hair. At his touch, the flowers fall from Dick’s head, decaying into dust. Dick kisses back just as fiercely. The vines around his arms and legs turn into ornate gold jewelry. He ages once more, feels the changes on his face. Gone is the roundness of youth. He is sharper now, the beauty of angles, the hardness of pearls. His dark crown is heavy and perfect on his head.
His beloved breaks their kiss but never leaves his skin. Bruce mouths at Dick’s neck, making his own long journey now, from Dick’s collarbone to his ear. He bites at Dick’s earlobe and, finally, he speaks.
Finally, Dick is named.
One name for love and a second name for power.
Dick awakens with it. He is lightning in the night sky. He is the seed that grows from the rot and the rot itself. He is the nightingale’s cry and the nightshade’s poison. Those who know his name know to invoke it in their curses. If Death is a type of vengeance, then Death’s wife is justice personified. They will pray to him for deliverance, for mercy.
Their kiss is an epiphany. An earthquake so powerful that it awakens the dead. Deep in the underground of creation, they shout.
The dread Queen Nightwing has returned to his ebony throne.
All hail!