Chapter Text
Starfire and Raven were the two newest to the world—growing up in another dimension or another planet entirely was definitely a pretty good way to avoid TV news and pop culture.
While Raven put effort into getting to know her new world, it was a rather localized affair. She made a point of knowing what nightclubs and cafes had open poetry mics, an overview of the governmental systems currently in place, how to obtain a library card, and other such things that directly affected her day-to-day existence. Starfire seemed to enjoy the thrill of discovery and the inevitable subsequent sharing of culture that would occur whenever her teammates discovered something she had not previously encountered, and likewise enjoyed telling her teammates of similar practices on Tamaran, or the lack of them, as the case may have been.
Usually, their lack of connection with Earth culture (and very specifically, urban, Pacific Coast, United States culture) meant very little in the grand scheme of things. If they were caught off balance, most civilians gave them a pass because slightly strange faux pas were hardly the worst or strangest thing costumed heroes had done, and the Titans at least were sanctioned. Someone would explain things, get it all cleared up within a few minutes, and any destruction of property was written off and paid for in the cash pool specifically set aside for the inevitable accidents a group of superheroes would cause. So long as their mistakes didn’t cost anyone their lives there was compensation, and the lack of Earth knowledge was an eternal work-in-progress.
All things considered, it should have been expected that neither Raven nor Starfire knew about Nightwing.
After her trip to the possible-future, Starfire had been so eager to explain and the rest of them spent the whole tale so rapt that the detail of Robin’s future identity was dismissed until the Boy Wonder himself sat back on the couch, fiddling with his Blorthog necklace, and said, mostly to himself, “So… ‘Nightwing,’ huh?”
“Oh! Yeah! I wanted to ask about that, Rob; isn’t Nightw—mmph!”
Cyborg froze midway through completing an online pizza order for the Tower and clamped a hand over Beast Boy’s mouth.
“Uh,” Cyborg said, “’Scuse him. I think he’s still a little weirded out that he’s gonna be bald at thirty-one.”
Beast Boy gave Cyborg a flat look, morphed into a goat, and bit his hand. “Yeow! Not cool, BB, not cool.”
“Enough,” said Raven, hair swaying ominously around her face despite the utter lack of wind in the tower. “It’s Blorthog. We’ve already fought enough today.”
Starfire nodded empathically, looking very pleased as Beast Boy shifted into a small, guilty-looking dog. Cyborg muttered an agreement, even as he nursed his slightly dented hand.
Robin’s lips twitched upwards just a bit, watching them. Situation successfully diffused, he said, “Cyborg, finish up that pizza order and I’ll go pick it up. It should be ready by the time the commute’s over. Anything else I should get while I’m out?”
Robin left the tower a few minutes later, stowing a Blorthog necklace and a laundry list of snack food into one of his many utility pockets.
Only once the R-cycle left the garage and reached the mainland of Jump City did Beast Boy dare to speak again. He turned to Cyborg, eyes wide. “Okay, but dude. You don’t think?”
“We shouldn’t be having this conversation,” Cyborg said, shaking his head but not covering Beast Boy’s mouth again. “You know Rob don’t like talking about home.”
“Uh,” Raven said, looking up from where Starfire had her weaving together a few more necklaces with her telekinesis. It was a surprisingly soothing task. “Is there something we should know about?”
Cyborg and Beast Boy exchanged long looks again.
“Dude,” said Beast Boy, “Literally everyone knows. It’s not like it’s a secret.”
“Is something the matter?” Starfire said, floating in closer to their conversation.
Cyborg groaned and shook his head. “Naw, no, it’s nothing wrong, or dangerous, or any of that. It’s just about—”
“—Nightwing,” Beast Boy said, leaning off the couch and splaying his fingers wide on either side of his head. “Robin becomes Nightwing? And you’re totally sure it was our Robin?”
“Of course!” Starfire said, nodding firmly. “Why would it not…?”
When she trailed off, Cyborg sighed and said, “Because the name ‘Nightwing’s already taken.”
000
Robin didn’t talk about home.
None of them did, really. They all just sort of assumed that whatever had forced them onto the streets of Jump City that fateful day months ago, it wasn’t anything they wanted to talk about all that much.
No one was really surprised if Starfire would rather talk about the parts of her life on Tamaran she enjoyed rather than explaining how she wound up on a slaver ship and why she didn’t feel like going home was an option.
Cyborg had half his body replaced with electronics, including half of his face and all four other major limbs, and no story with that as its conclusion was a particularly happy one.
Raven, for all they knew, might’ve just emerged out of a particularly dark and grumpy shadow one day, fully formed with the complete works of Edgar Alan Poe already memorized.
Beast Boy was similar enough to Robin—he’d arrived on the hero scene young enough that no one really questioned who he’d been before he were a hero, but no one really split off from their team, their family, without something having gone down.
The difference between Beast Boy and Robin was this:
Beast Boy told stories about his time in the Doom Patrol. For the first few weeks of their acquaintance, all he could do was make and explain inside jokes, retell adventures and victories, stumble through anecdotes, describe places he’d been.
A kid. That’s what Beast Boy was. A sad, lonely kid, away from his family for the first time ever, and feeling entirely that it was his own fault. He kept talking about them as if it would bring his old family a little bit closer. He kept telling those stories, making those jokes, until his affection for his fellow Titans became more genuine than a desperate bid for companionship. Then he made new jokes, started retelling their own victories, and settling into something like a routine, as haphazard and chaotic as it might have appeared from the outside.
Robin did not talk about his old team, despite being at least as well known if not more famous than the Doom Patrol. Despite his name being attached so heavily to a city on the other side of the country.
It was almost a policy in the Tower by their sixth month together—to the point where, once the Titans East was being formed and Honorary Titans started being a thing they wrote up reports about, guests in the tower were specifically told that the topic of Batman and his allies were strictly off limits.
Robin occasionally received mail from the East Coast, but no phone calls. There was only an emergency contact number. Robin’s standard emergency contact number was Titan’s Tower itself, but his emergency emergency contact was apparently connected to a very secret phone that they all liked to imagine as a bright red dial phone on a pedestal with a spiral cord connecting it to the wall.
That emergency contact number was, of course, to only be used in a suitable crisis. The Titans understood that by ‘crisis,’ Robin meant that by the time he admitted some of his allies from Gotham might be useful, all telecommunicative technology, satellites, and electricity must have been down for at least several weeks.
It didn’t seem to be out of malice, and that was the strangest thing about it.
“Maybe it’s pride,” Cyborg offered up one day, cooking in the kitchen with Beast Boy sitting on the counter, watching him.
“There is no shame in reliance upon one’s k’norfka,” said Starfire, fidgeting with her hands clasped in front of her chest. She hovered on the steps midway between the kitchen and seating area, unsure of where to settle.
“No,” said Beast Boy shaking his head, “But sometimes you gotta… you know.”
“No,” said Raven from her place on the couch, not looking up from her book and her voice monotonous, “we don’t know.”
“Okay,” Beast Boy said, looking down at his own kicking feet. “Maybe you don’t. But I get it. Sometimes you just… gotta do it alone. To prove you can. You know.
“Why must he prove such a thing?” Starfire looked horrified. “Robin’s k’norfka should know best of all Robin’s capabilities! He should have the most faith in him!”
“Maybe he’s not provin’ it to Batman,” Cyborg said, blinking like someone walking into a room and not expecting the lights to be on.
“Who, then?” Starfire said, a faint green glow encircling her in a way that threatened great harm to whoever had the power to hypothetically make Robin feel he had to prove himself.
“Well,” Cyborg glanced towards Beast Boy, “We shouldn’t be talkin’ about this. It’s his life. But there are rumors. You know. About Gotham’s vigilantes.”
Beast Boy nodded enthusiastically, a smile splitting his face the way it always did when they stumbled upon topics he had a particular interest in. He held up two fingers. “Gotham’s hero team is famous for two things: being reeeallly secretive, and infighting!”
“Uh,” said Raven, “What?”
“Not in front of other heroes when they can help it,” said Cyborg, quickly raising his hands like he had something to protect. He glanced around a bit, maybe in paranoia that Robin would be watching the video feeds, but considering no birdarangs flew through the room and no grumpy shortstack appeared in the doorway, it appeared they hadn’t yet been discovered. “They’re really, really careful about presenting a united front to the outside hero community and their villains, but Nightwing and Batman’s fights are legendary. There’s shadier rumors too, about… Joker? I think? That this mass murderer called Joker’s somehow connected to ‘em, or someone connected to Joker is connected to them? Like I said, secretive. If you get an answer out of one of ‘em, assume they’re not even giving you the whole truth. Probably only original-staff Leaguers know half of what’s going on in that family. But that team? They’re close, and they play stuff close to the chest.”
“That’s why Robin leaving was such a huge deal,” Beast Boy said, still grinning wide. His swinging legs had really gotten out of control, and his ankles banged excitedly against the counter. “It was all over the internet for months. There were TV reports about it! And he’s ours.”
“Yes he is,” Starfire said with pride, perhaps because she wanted the reassurance, and perhaps because the thin strands of information she’d been given thus far only made a cold weight settle in the pit of her stomach, and she found her feet drifting inch by inch closer to the floor.
000
Starfire started paying closer attention to news reports— and if Raven quietly showed her how to pick out truth from lies, and Cyborg printed out relevant articles for her, and Beast Boy showed her how forums worked?
Well. That just meant they were becoming closer as a team.
It was a low energy pastime. The sort of thing she enjoyed when she wanted to hang out with Raven, and Raven simply wanted to meditate, and as peaceful as it was to meditate, Starfire had a horrible time calming her thoughts. So sometimes, when she wanted to be around her dear friend and still respect Raven’s wishes for quiet, Starfire pulled out news reports. Usually, she found very little worth to them, but they passed the time, and felt better for trying. She thought they all feel a little better for trying, but if reporters in the exact city of a vigilante couldn’t keep track of their local heroes, what hope did she have, clear across the country?
Especially if she had more pressing things to attend to.
Robin never behaved rationally around Slade. It began with the same sort of frustration that Starfire felt over her useless news articles, but grew fully out of control within the first month of contact with the mysterious masked man.
Robin has a temper. They were all very aware of that—he tried to control it, but even little things like messing up a maneuver with Cyborg or a few repetitive jokes sometimes set him off. It was something he’s visibly worked on. Something the Titan have learned to understand, that they must learn to work around to be a functioning team just as much as Robin tried to work at controlling it.
Nothing compared to his temper around Slade.
Nothing compared to the way he exploded when Slade called him that name.
Raven looked more startled than any of them, for some reason having assumed Slade was speaking to her—perhaps she had been the target of such cruel words before?
But there was no need for a break in battle to explain the culture surrounding the word. Starfire had learned her English from Robin.
Each human had a personal vocabulary built up over the course of their life. A vocabulary of words whose meanings were not necessarily inherent to the rest of the world. The quirks of an individual person’s vocabulary would fade the more people learned from, and the more complete an understanding of language a Tamaranean could obtain, but Starfire had learned her English only from Robin, and Robin’s personal dictionary had a horrendous amount of emotion informing Starfire about the phrase, ‘demon spawn.’
Between her borrowed fury and the original source, the sladebots didn’t stand a chance.
Robin didn’t kill—he stuck to that rule viciously, regardless of the damage a criminal had caused. It was something Starfire didn’t quite understand, but it was a limitation she could admire. He did not kill, but he certainly could, and that was most apparent when he was fighting enemies he knew he was in no danger of causing mortal peril to.
The sladebots were the most common victims of this. There were so many of them that day, and Slade already had him worked into such a state—
He moved like a surgeon. He wielded his bo staff like a sword. Explosions followed him like echoes of his battle cry. He didn’t endanger anyone’s life but his own the whole time, or if he did, it was unintentional.
He carried the hurt personally when he endangered another’s life, as if he considered his skills so honed he should no longer be capable of making mistakes.
000
Raven said Robin’s aura was yellow like a sun, once. Flickering. Bursting. Starbursts. Full of energy and desire, and he pouts. And does a backflip.
He practiced flips in a different way than he did the rest of his training regimens. He trained himself hard enough as it was, but the flips were—set aside, somehow. He kept mostly to the ground, but when he was stressed or had an arm injured, or somehow in a state where his typical training patterns of pushups, and katas, and shadowboxing did not soothe him, he practiced flips.
“He’s so not made for air,” Beast Boy, whose mouth had just finished emerging from his hummingbird beak, helpfully informed them.
“Shut up,” Robin said, with the sort of clipped fondness that had long since stopped sounding threatening and verged far more into exasperation at this point. “So I’m not Nightwing. We can’t all be— ridiculous.”
But he huffed and dropped back into handstand pushups, and Beast Boy looked sorry he said anything.
If nothing else, Robin seemed to like flipping. Liked being able to do it.
000
“Popular opinion says Nightwing is Robin’s older brother,” Cyborg said. “No one really knows anything about him. Not where he came from, what his real name is; nothing ‘cept that at some point he trained under Batman, same as Robin did. If he’s not in Gotham, he works a city called Blüdhaven nearby.”
“Wait, dude,” Beast Boy said, brow suddenly furrowing. “How long has Robin been active?”
Cyborg paused to consider that. “…well.”
Raven frowned, looking up from her book. “Please don’t say something stupid.”
“Dude,” Beast Boy said, eyes growing wide. “What if there’s, like, multiple Robins?”
Raven groaned and buried her head back in her book.
000
It was months later, after Raven coaxed a hallucinating Robin out of the ventilation shaft, that they spotted the poster hung on the wall in his room.
They kept it quiet, but they were all moments away from using his emergency contact number that night.
Never before had they been so close to using it. Not when he was being blackmailed into apprenticeship, not when Terra nearly killed them all and leveled the city, and not when any number of other crises came and went. But that night, when Robin was shivering and hyperventilating and jumping at the shadows he usually blended with amicably—if Raven had not been able to enter his mind, they had only one other plan. Because any other plans they could think of were too extreme to even consider.
Raven didn’t tell the other Titans about the things she saw in Robin’s mind—a breach of trust that great would never be reparable, and they understood that. So she said nothing about the dark, tense cave filled with whispered oaths of justice. She said nothing about the light always at his back. She said nothing of the shoreline, long, sandy and tropical, with a warm breeze that both smelled like ocean salt and tasted like tears, though the face worn in the memory was dry.
She helped carry Robin to his room once it was all said and done, once the toxin was out of his system, once they knew the only other thing they could do was let him rest.
His room was impersonal, to say the least. Robin had done very little decorating. He’d brought very little with him to Jump. It was hard to miss the poster, under such circumstances.
She had seen a circus tent in his mind, yes, and the shadowed silhouette of a memory that was more sketch and imagination than the vivid trauma it would have been had it been his own—the folds of the tent matched exactly to what she recalled in the mental pantomime.
She asked Robin, privately, quietly, once he was conscious. Asked if she could ask about that poster.
Robin shrugged and looked askance, but smiling as if he’s trying hard to not let her in on some private joke. “It’s nothing. They’re just—the Flying Graysons. They’re some of the few people as worthy of admiration as Batman.”
Something tugged at Raven’s lips, because it sounded like a joke. It felt like a joke. It would taste like one, if she said it to herself. She’d only gone as shallowly into Robin’s mind as she could while still managing the connection, but it was enough to identify the golden flecks of emotion curling off his shoulders as private, warm laughter.
The bond was there, now. It wouldn’t ever be removed, but she’d done her best to skim over things as lightly as possible, not that minds and memories were particularly simple things to comprehend at a glance. She could spend hours going through a simpler, organized mind. Should could spend days trying to piece out one part of a person.
But there were somethings that shown brightly in his might. Bright enough they couldn’t be ignored. Splashes of blood off a sword. A small, red monster. A year of atonement. A whisper for the best you that you can be and a hand on his shoulder, turning into a hug, and tears, and—separate, distinct from that last memory?— the silhouette of a Batman whose a voice, made wispy by memory but still bright and sweet, laughed, and talked about flying.
000
It was Beast Boy who broke the silence. It was Beast Boy who, seeing Robin seize up about Slade one winter night, said, “Dude, no, we will actually call Batman this time if you do something crazy again!”
Robin’s mind left Slade immediately, which was good, but no one was immediately sure if the cost was going to be worth it. “’This time?’”
Beast Boy stuttered once and turned into a clam.
Robin rounded on the rest of the Titans, all looking away and whistling, distractedly twiddling their thumbs. They all knew when he arched his eyebrows. “This time?”
It was very hard to keep looking away.
“Friend Robin,” Starfire said at last, turning to fidget badly and finally made eye contact, “We have been… concerned. And very curious over where you come from. But very much concerned. And somewhat confused.”
“She’s sayin’ that sometimes we gotta ask questions, dude, but it’s hard to know when you really need help if you never say anything,” Cyborg said. “We all keep worrying about if it’s just gonna make stuff worse!”
Raven spoke just a moment after him, her usual monotone perhaps a slight bit faster than usual. “We understand that it’s a hard topic, and you have a lot of reasons for not wanting to approach it. But we’re your team now, and with how often this has come up, we can assume it won’t be a one-time thing. It’s natural to be curious, but even though we want to respect your privacy, there are some things that would be much easier if we knew what you needed before a crisis arose.”
Cyborg nodded. Beast Boy’s clam turned into a crab which clattered its claws vigorously.
Robin sighed and looked down at his shoes. Fingers curled in his cape. “Fine… maybe we should…. Talk.”
000
It wasn’t easy to decide how to approach the topic.
Robin’s caginess about Batman was something that had lived in the tower as long as they’d had a tower, and he’d gone to some lengths to distance himself from his mentor. Jump might’ve been the only place on Earth where his name didn’t come after, ‘Batman and…’.
That meant something.
It was hard to break down the barrier that had been erected between Jump’s sanctuary and the rest of the world, where people still asked Robin where his mentor was whenever their missions took them outside city limits.
Eventually, after about a week of toeing around each other, Raven lost her patience. They were having the talk, or they were going to sit down and talk about how to have a talk, but some progress would be made on the tension running through the building or she would hex them all into oblivion.
(They were all fairly sure she wouldn’t, but no one was willing to call her out on it right now.)
So, after sitting down together and having a talk about how to have a talk, they figured out how they were going to do this: over pizza.
Everything worked out better over pizza.
The team would ask questions, and Robin would answer (or censor himself, if necessary), and that way, the Titans would get their questions answered without Robin having to talk about Batman more than necessary or reveal too much accidentally by just not knowing what to say, since there apparently wasn’t really a ‘standard Batman and allies information briefing’ that he’d been trained to give. They really didn’t get out of Gotham much except to hang around the JLA, which was already so integrated to them that a briefing wasn’t necessary.
For that world, Robin breaking away from the family to go work elsewhere without connections to anyone but his other young heroes really was… new territory.
Some might say there would be an issue of eavesdropping or security cameras, having a talk in such a public place, but—well. The regulars at their favorite pizza place were fairly used to ignoring the Titans, or at least giving them a wide breadth, and Raven’s mere presence could do a pretty good number on security cameras, so they weren’t all that concerned.
Still, despite all their worry about how are we going to do this, despite the relatively viable plan they’d come up with, it was still hard to get started. Hard enough that by the time their pizzas arrived, they were still fidgeting and glancing around the table, waiting for someone else to start.
They were still being awkward and quiet when Robin paused, a slice of pizza half-dangling in his hands and his mouth partly open. “You know. Nightwing, was the first person to do this with me, actually.”
“’This’?” said Beast Boy, eyes suddenly alight as he rolled up his slice of pizza like a burrito and struggling to chew through three layers of crust.
“Pizza,” Robin said, setting his slice back down on the plate and shrugging. “Eating pizza. Going out to eat pizza. In uniform. Out of uniform. After patrol. He was the first person to do that with me. Ever.”
“Dude, ever?” Cyborg said. Then he paused, his face falling thoughtful before he leaned forward over the table, pointing a finger. “Wait, no, this is a misdirection thing, isn’t it? How old were you at the time?”
“Ten.” Robin grinned.
“No pizza until ten,” Cyborg said, breathless. “Seriously, man?”
“Very seriously,” Robin said. “I think we made the papers when we did it. Robin and—well. Him. Caught eating in a pizzeria after patrol. Still in full costume. I think we were banned from the premises after I broke the plate, but I don’t think the owner could’ve stopped us from coming back if we’d wanted to. The next place we found liked us better, though. I think they enjoyed the publicity.”
“Can I look it up?” Cyborg said. “I mean, not to invade privacy or anything. I haven’t looked anything up before! Like. Just to clarify. But you made the papers?”
“We might’ve,” Robin said, then hesitated again. “….I doubt you’ll be able to find it.”
Cyborg took the hint and closed his arm screen.
“Why not before?” said Starfire. “You seem to enjoy the pizza very much.”
“I do,” he said, finally taking a bite and swallowing quickly. “And that is very confidential.”
“Oh,” Starfire said, before shaking off the slight frown on her face and pulling out a bag of her personal condiments brought from the tower to start adding to her slice of pizza.
“Why did you leave?” Raven said. “I think that’s what everyone really wants to ask. Why come to Jump?”
They all expected him to say it was confidential as well. Instead, he sighed a bit and leaned back in his chair, abandoning the pizza once more. “…I needed to leave.”
“Needed?” said Beast Boy through his mouthful of burrito-pizza.
Robin nodded. “…It’s complicated. There were too many voices in my head. I had to get some time for myself. Sort myself out. Become my own person without someone hovering over me all the time.”
“So you came to Jump of all places?” Cyborg said at the same time Beast Boy said, “Voices?”
“Well, Batman actually suggested a monastery,” Robin said, his eyeroll audible in his voice as he propped his head up on his palm. “…which I might’ve spent a little time at when I was thirteen. But no, Nightwing suggested just going out, finding somewhere that needed me, and settling down. That’s what he did. I just don’t think he expected me to go quite so far. His rebellion still left him in a thirty-mile radius. Obviously, I had to one-up him.”
Robin was grinning, relaxing whole table some as he finished speaking. “So I discarded everywhere on the East Coast; wanted somewhere warm and bright so I traveled around some, and when I came here, I… ran into you guys.”
“Voices,” Beast Boy repeated again, before anyone else could comment. “Expand on the voices.”
Robin’s second eyeroll was just as pronounced as the first. “Not literal voice, BB.”
Beast Boy narrowed his eyes. Robin huffed. It might’ve been a sigh.
“Look, ever since I became Robin, I’ve had people telling me what I am and what I’m not, proving myself, and… it was a lot. G—Nightwing and Batman got some warning so they wouldn’t panic and think I’d regressed or something, and I left.”
“Dude, did you just say G’Nightwing?” said Cyborg.
Beast Boy picked up another piece of pizza and giggled, “G’Nightwing.”
Unfortunately, Starfire adopted his one-word questioning tactic and asked, voice full of concern, “…regressed?”
This time, Robin shifted uncomfortable and twisted one of his arms around, trying to think of how to answer. “Let’s just say they don’t call Hood ‘the mean Robin’ anymore.”
He really wasn’t sure what to make of the slow-spreading grin on Beast Boy’s face. “I told you there was more than one Robin!”
For a moment, the whole table was silent. Then, Robin started laughing.
Which was alright at first!
And then he kept laughing.
And then he fell out of his chair.
Whatever respect or camaraderie kept the citizens of Jump from eavesdropping was severely tested as the few tables filled around them glanced over nervously at the boy wonder rolling breathlessly on the floor.
“Grayson’s well into his thirties!” Robin gasped out once he could crawl back into the chair, still gasping out laughs in the face of his friend’s stunned silence. “My predecessor’s finally reached the twenties—”
“I told you so,” hissed Cyborg as Robin’s laughing tremors finally died down somewhat.
“Did you…” Robin said, still regaining his breath from his laughing fit and clutching his stomach. “…did you really mistake me for the first Robin?”
“Uh,” said Raven, “I think he mistook you for all Robins.”
“You gotta admit, dude, Batman hasn’t exactly announced that he took in a lot of partners,” Cyborg said. “…or, well, I guess he has a lot of allies. But not partners.”
“All his allies are his partners,” Robin said, grinning, and climbing back up the table to try and get into his seat. “It’s awful. You really mistook me for the first Robin?”
“Your costumes are confusing!” said Beast Boy, throwing his hands up.
“Our costumes are totally different,” said Robin, leaning in over the table. “Cyborg, find some footage of Robin from two decades ago. You’ll see. People just haven’t noticed because the change is always so gradual, and unless you’re in Gotham watching, no one really comments. Though the GCPD always threw a fit, apparently.”
Starfire made a curious noise.
“They never liked how young we were,” Robin said, still grinning.
“You are warriors, though,” she said, cocking her head.
“I am,” said Robin. “But most ten year old humans are just kids.”
“Oh, wow, he looks nothing like you,” Cyborg said, staring at his arm computer. Robin snorted.
“Thanks.”
“I meant it in a good way!”
“So did I!”
“He lacks Robin’s bo staff,” Starfire said, leaning over to watch the footage with interest.
Robin nodded, looking away from the footage to address her instead. “He can use it, but he prefers escrima. My predecessor used the staff, mainly. I took it up to piss him off.”
Raven huffed in what was probably repressed amusement. Robin grinned beside her, saying, “Never underestimate the power of infighting.”
“May we see him, as well?”
“There’s not much footage of him as Robin, as far as I’m aware,” Robin said, pulling out his phone and flicking a video hosting website. “He was way too camera conscious. But… ah. Yes. He was too emotionally compromised when he started out as Red Robin and got caught on camera several times.”
He turned his phone over to the center of the table and began to play the video.
Cyborg winced as a particularly loud thwack! sounded from the footage. “Oh, geez.”
“Like I said. A little emotionally compromised,” said Robin, not sounding sympathetic in the least.
“…what was goin’ on at the time?” Cyborg asked, hesitant but clearly dying to know. Robin pressed his lips together and thought that one over again.
“Ah… I… had only just become Robin, and… it’s confidential. Just. Something bad had happened to Batman and no one was handling it particularly well.”
“Right,” Cyborg said, nodding, and clearly trying to find a question that wouldn’t be quite so volatile. “So you all… you’re Robin and then, one day, you what, graduate? Like a weird substitute high school?”
“Er,” Robin said, tensing again and struggling to find an answer. Cyborg’s teasing smile faded as the rest of the Titans glanced at each other. “That’s… complicated enough to be called confidential, but… no one’s left the Robin position in happy circumstances.”
“Oh,” said Cyborg. Then, deciding he wasn’t doing too well with asking questions and watching his friend get upset, said, “Sorry, man.”
“It’s fine. I plan to be Robin for a long time yet.” He paused and glanced down at the table. “Though they did, too.”
No one was really sure what to say to that. The conversation fell into silence, and they ate their pizza.
Alternate Ending: Immediately after ep 61, “Revved Up,” where Ding Dong Daddy steals an attaché containing something secret that is “extremely precious” to Robin, and challenges the Titans to a race with the case as a prize. Red X arrives before the call to villains even goes out, spends the first part of the race trying to defeat Robin. However, he crashes due to sabotage, but after being saved by Robin and reassured that whatever is in the case is “extremely personal/important” X disables the other villains competing so that Robin can face DDD alone. He vanishes soon after. At the episode’s end, Robin opens the attaché, allowing the Titans to see what is inside.
“All of you took a risk to help me protect this. It’s only fair that I show you what’s inside.”
“You don’t need to do that, Robin. Sometimes, secrets aren’t meant to be shared,” Raven said from behind him.
“Even with your best friends,” said Cyborg stepping closer.
“I used to think that,” Robin said. “But not anymore.”
He opened the case.
Then, just as he was about to let go of the top half of the case, he hesitated.
“I trust you,” he said, still partly blocking what was in the briefcase with his body. “I can only hope you’ll accept this, but I’ll accept responsibility for showing you.”
“Is it really that big of a secret?” Cyborg said, leaning in closer. Despite his words, he was very clearly curious about the ‘personal secret’ that had so upset their leader by its absence.
“It’s the most important secret I have,” said Robin, and then he stepped aside.
In the briefcase, shattered into three parts, was a sword.
It was cushioned by papers. Photographs. Newsclippings. But the sword lay above those all, drawing the attention of all the Titans. It was curved slightly, with a woven handle and diamond hilt.
“Dude,” said Beast Boy, “That’s it?”
Cyborg elbowed him in the shoulder.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Starfire said, kneeling down beside Robin, not looking at the sword, but at the Boy Wonder himself. “Can you explain?”
“This was my sword,” Robin said, voice flat and harder than it had been since the early days of the Titans. It wasn’t an angry tone, but it was very serious, and what he usually defaulted to when his emotions were running high. Starfire sent a worried look towards Raven, who shook her head. “I wasn’t always a hero.”
Hesitantly, Cyborg put a hand on his shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze. “What d’you mean?”
“Slade wasn’t the only one who wanted me to be an assassin,” Robin said. At the name, all the Titans stiffened. “Before I met Batman, I was raised by a man called Ra’s al Ghul.”
Of all people, it was Beast Boy who gasped at that, eyes widening in understanding as he said, very quietly, “No…”
“Ra’s al Ghul?” Cyborg said, glancing between his two best friends, concern growing on his face. Robin nodded to Beast Boy when the boy’s wide eyes met his own masked ones.
“Ra’s al Ghul is the head of the League of Assassins,” Beast Boy said, his voice a whisper.
His eyes were wide and afraid.