Work Text:
For as long as he could remember, Dick had always yearned to fly.
It would creep up when he least expected it; at night, staring up at the warm circus lights and encircled in the arms of his parents; while he ran around the tents, smile wide and energy boundless.
When he couldn’t be up on the trapeze, he would find other ways to sate his ever-growing hunger. He would stretch out his arms and take huge breaths to pretend the wind rushing past his face was going fast enough to fill his lungs to bursting. When he stargazed, he would hold his eyes open until tears blurred his vision, just so the landscape around him would fade away and he could feel like he was floating up into the open expanse of space.
There was a reason why his parents had called him Robin.
As strange as it sounded, the need to fly had only grown stronger after their deaths. The world, before then, had been his; it had been bright and beautiful. The sun warmed his skin and the people warmed his heart, and the tall grass waving in the wind was music to his ears. He was the sky and he was the earth and he was the ocean. Everything he had wanted had been at his fingertips.
Now, the world was gray and desolate; the smog in Gotham’s sky froze and suffocated him like a nuclear winter, and death trailed closely behind. He wanted to feel the light again. He wanted to listen to the music of the rain colliding with a circus tent. He wanted to feel truly at home again. The need for something familiar itched and ached under his skin like withdrawals.
After countless incidents of swinging on chandeliers, Dick had asked for a trapeze to train on; Bruce had readily agreed and almost immediately had it installed in the Batcave. Dick used it every day, swinging higher and higher, flipping and whooping until his hair brushed against the stalactites and it was time to come back down.
Eventually it was not enough.
He began to grow careless with his grapple gun. He would clamber onto a random roof before shooting it up towards the tallest building he could find. Grins stretched across his face time and time again; the wind was bitterly cold, foreboding in the way only dirty air could be. But up there, in the moment he was weightless, he was well and truly free .
It was never about adrenaline, not for him.
Up in the sky, where the stars reflected in his eyes and the wind carried his parents’ whispers, he was as free as a bird.
As free as a Bird.
He would leap off a skyscraper, twist his body, and dive towards the ground. At first, he caught himself immediately, well aware of the new dangers his little stunt presented. But as time went on, Dick would wait longer and longer, toeing the line between life and death just to squeeze out as much freedom as he could. Just one more second of waiting. One more second of the ground rushing closer. One more second.
Most recently, he’d waited too long, and ended up dislocating his arm when he caught himself with his grapple. It hadn’t been pretty.
But Dick hadn’t been able to wipe the grin off his face for hours afterwards.
It wasn’t that he wanted to die. Of course he didn’t. Life was a beautiful thing; life was a gentle embrace and a grip that felt like fire against his bones. Life was the rustling of tree branches in the breeze; life was the quiet cries of coyotes at night when the moon was waning. He would never want to miss that.
No. When he was falling, that was when he felt most alive.
His ribs cracked and his lungs screamed and his soul cried with the need to fly. His limbs buzzed with the need to be weightless. His eyes always gazed upwards.
He wanted to be part of the sky again.
Now, Dick stood alone on the roof of Wayne Manor. He stood on the very top, on the very edge of the roof, looking out to the horizon. His arms were splayed outwards, and his hands moved towards the blurred, rising sun, aching with their need to be there. He closed his eyes and let the wind swirl around him; he pretended he was floating high up amongst the clouds.
Up this high, he could easily fall.
The thought was as alluring as it was terrifying.
“Hey, Dickface.” Jason’s voice startled him. How zoned out had he been? “Come down, yeah?”
Vaguely, Dick realized that he was smiling widely, although tears brimmed in his eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Dick laughed, looking down at where Jason’s torso was sticking sideways out of a window, twisted around to look up at him. “I’m not going to do anything.”
Jason considered that for a moment, and then he was climbing, up and up and up to the top of the world.
“Why’re you up here?” Jason asked, settling a steadying hand on his shoulder.
Dick hummed and closed his eyes again, splaying his fingers out one more time to try and rid the itching need from his body.
“It’s a free country, Little Wing,” he answered easily. “I like to come up here just to be weird.”
Jason snorted, but said nothing; he stood silently next to him for a little while as Dick absorbed the morning rays of the sun. The wind was stronger now, and it was slowly but surely sating his hunger.
Just for the day, anyway.
“Hey. C’mon. Alfie ‘n I are making breakfast.” Jason grabbed Dick’s shirt and started to pull him away. Dick huffed out another laugh.
“You know I only eat cereal, Jay.”
“Yeah. It’s disgusting. Try an omelette for once.”
Jason hopped down onto the nearest balcony, and Dick followed closely behind. The door to the balcony slid open and Jason stepped inside.
“You coming?”
Dick was staring back at the rising sun, relishing the last of the wind on his skin before he went inside. He lifted a hand just a bit to be an obstacle to the rushing air, reached out his fingers again, and relished in the feeling.
Then he retracted his hand.
“Yeah, sure.” Dick stepped inside after Jason, who clapped him on the shoulder and closed the sliding door. “Alright. I’ll try an omelette—“
“Fucking finally.”
“—but you have to put Coco Crisps in there.”
Jason steered him towards the stairs.
“The urge to shoot you is strong.”
“But you loveee meee!” Dick grinned and threw his arms around his little brother, who groaned and tried to shove him off. “C’mon, some Coco Crisps couldn’t hurt!”
“It could hurt my psychological health, Dickbag.”
“Fine. You’re no fun. A normal omelette it is.”
Jason ducked away from him with a snort, and hurried down the stairs.
Dick looked at the window near the staircase, gazing out at the final beams of rising sun before it would disappear behind the smog of Gotham City.
He turned on his heel and followed his brother downstairs.