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Tim watches from about fifty feet back as Barbara uses her powerful wings to keep herself level with the lowest gliding platform at the flight range. From this distance, he can just make out the bright blue of Ellie's hair and the dark grey of the fluff on her wings. Jim is on the platform with her, her Aunt and Granddad acting as her moral support at the top of her fall while Tim and Danny wait on the ground to catch her if she needs it.
She learned how to fall correctly long before she even knew how to walk (Thank you, Dick Grayson), but this is different. Normally she doesn't really need to worry about hitting the ground—her ghost flight is an instinctual power that she's been using practically since she was born—but today is special.
Flight is of utmost importance to most of the world due to the fact that ninety-nine percent of people develop fully functional wings during childhood. The muscular structures needed to support them are the last thing to develop pre-birth, but the actual limbs don't start to grow until after. The process starts around age one to three, and by age six to eight, most children have finished the initial growth and are at a point where they can start learning how to use their new limbs.
Much like running, flying is a skill that most people are able to learn but only some actively keep up with. Despite this, the ability to fly is considered integral to society such that anyone who can't is pitied and ostracized about as much as anyone with any other disability. Ellie doesn't fall into that category, but she does fall into an equally ostracized category of people who can fly "unaided".
Ellie's wings—fluffy and soft and dark grey that look exactly the same as Danny's do in the few baby pictures of him that Jim and Barbara have—have finally grown strong enough to allow her to learn to use them. She's on the older side for it at just under eight, but considering she was a nicu baby it's unsurprising.
She's been flying since she was an infant, but ghost flight is worlds away from wing flight.
Today is her first time gliding for real, her soft down feathers aren't meant for real flight just yet, but they're good enough to start learning.
Tim sees her shift slightly, wings lifting defensively. He can't make out the intricacies of her expression, but he knows she was worried about this in a way they haven't seen from her since she started school. Since her ghost flight is instinctual, they've worked with Frostbite to find a way to cancel out that ability for a little while at a time. The problem with that being it's an area effect, so Danny can't fly either.
Tim wishes desperately that he could be the one on the platform with her, encouraging her to make the jump and ready to fly along beside his daughter as she takes this first step towards growing up. He's been there for pretty much every first so far–first word, first snow, first steps, first day at school, all of them. She and Danny came into his life a few months before she was born, and he couldn't be more grateful. Tim was still hurting over the loss of his wing, still desperately searching for a way to stay in the air, still trying to pretend he wasn't irreparably changed by what he'd gone through while trying to find Bruce. Danny had been wrestling with the sudden change in living situation and parents that deliberately walked away from him. Introducing the two of them was the best thing Barbara had ever done, each of them struggling with something the other was uniquely suited to understanding and helping with.
And now Tim is here, with a daughter of his own, having to watch as her Aunt and Granddad coax her into learning to fly.
He isn't usually bothered by his inability to fly much anymore, but this is different.
Ellie shifts again and Tim can recognize the way her back straightens and her shoulders shift because he does the exact same thing to prepare himself to do something scary, and suddenly it doesn't matter as much anymore that he can't be up there with her.
He may not be capable of joining her in the air, but she trusts him to catch her and that might just be more important.