Chapter Text
Dick Grayson’s first home is made of silk and air and the space between words. Robin, his mother calls him, and the rest of the circus follows.
The circus is never quiet, or still, and neither is he.
Robin is an exuberant child, and he flits from one thing to the next like his namesake bird over a fresh coat of snow; never staying in place long enough to be pinned down.
Those who know him, though, those who really know him, know that Robin is also an incredibly focused child. He always, always has a goal. He is always working towards something, from the moment he gains consciousness. He will always get there, too, no matter how chaotic his methods look to the outside observer.
Robin can manage a perfect backflip landing before the age of three. His mind and body naturally bend a hundred ways that should be impossible.
He will be something great, someday, but the time for that is not yet.
Robin learns to read palms and cards and the night sky, and then to read the alphabets and emotions of different performers. He learns to understand stories spoken in thirteen languages, and then to tell his own.
Robin loves his parents with everything he is. As he grows, he loves the rest of the circus, too.
He loves the colors and the textures, the darkness of predawn and the easy way that everyone works together, all different, but all striving together. Love flows through him as easily and naturally breathing, he is loved by everyone that meets him, and loves the world right back with a ferocious glee.
Robin is not yet five years old when he learns to fly on the trapeze, and barely six when he joins his parents act. This, too, is something he loves. He loves the feeling of falling, and knowing there will always be someone to catch him. He loves his little solo routine, and the spectacular choreography he shares with his parents.
Robin becomes Dick, or Dickie, in an anglicization that Mr. Halee promises is just for branding purposes. The name sticks. Dick Grayson, boy wonder.
He will be living those words for the rest of his life, but is too young to love the name. Not yet.
Within the circus, he is Dickie, and spoken in his mother’s gentle voice, it feels almost the same as Robin.
Dickie practices acrobatics in a tent under sunlight and blue sky. He reads the stars each time there is a clear night. He falls and catches himself, and when he cannot catch himself, there is always someone else.
Robin becomes a name to be whispered, curled into bed beside his parents. He spends the rest of his time as Dickie Grayson. It is as Dickie, not Robin, that he becomes the first and only person to perform his trademark quadruple summersault.
Dickie’s training gets more intense as he gets older. Still, there is plenty of time for fun. He works through his stretches and balancing and trapeze work easily. Dickie learns to fence and wrestle and put out candles with his hands. He learns to make allies and amends and quick, cheap food.
Haly’s circus travels Europe, Russia, and sometimes the more progressive parts of the Middle East. Twice, they go down into Northern Africa. Dickie loves the contrast of it. Consistency and variety intertwine, the routine of the show meeting the novelty of ever-changing scenery and audience. He loves the thrill of setting up in a new town, and the quiet excitement of taking the tent down, always going somewhere new. Dickie loves the pyramids and mountains, the forest and grassland and cities. He loves the rain and snow and sun, and the endless blue of a clear sky. Dickie loves the people, too. The ones at the circus, of course, lion tamers and clowns and snake charmers and strongmen. But he loves the people he meets only in passing, too. These people are different everywhere they go, but always with the same dreams and emotions and archetypes.
Dickie makes friends everywhere he goes, with children and adults and animals alike, and holds love in his heart for each and every one of them.
When Dickie is six and a half, the circus has one extended tour through Asia, cut short when one of the sword swallowers grows ill and passes away in the night.
That is Dickie’s first experience with death. It will not be anything close to his last.
His mother holds him close, and promises that no one else is sick, and that people’s spirits go somewhere sweet when they die.
Dickie is almost eight when the circus travels to the states for the first time. He learns that in America, his full name is Richard Grayson, a fact which doesn’t seem important, not at first.
In America, he learns, people speak English. They speak it in a strange, flat accent that Dickie dislikes on instinct. When Dickie’s father speaks English, he speaks it with the cool wind of a British autumn, tinged by the warmth of his Spanish and Italian roots. Dickie has never heard his mother speak much English before coming to America, but now that she does, it is in the same warm velvet tones as always.
English is Dickie’s fifth language, after Romani and Italian and French and Russian, and he knows it about as well as he knows Spanish and Hebrew. He knows it better than Arabic or Chinese, and much better than Tagalog and Japanese and Slovenian. Dickie knows English well enough understand it, especially when coupled with gestures and tones and context. He can speak it properly, although without as many words as he knows in his first four. He still finds the language distasteful, but Dickie has never been one to dwell on unhappiness.
He finds that he likes America well enough once he gets used to it. The duality of it is the same as always. Some things change from night to night, but more things stay the same than used to. Lots of people here are pale, which Dickie finds funny at first because in most places where there’s lots of sun, people’s skin is dark enough to tan. The states have plenty of variety, though. There are people with every color of hair and skin Dickie has ever seen, and new ones besides. Some people’s movements and styles are familiar, some entirely new. Dickie speaks English to most of the audience here, but takes joy in being able to speak his other languages to people who are not used to being understood. He revels in their smiles, their relief, their kindness about his admittedly terrible Chinese and Arabic grammar. Languages are not treated as equal here, which is not new. What is new is that America had nothing to do with the creation of English, and yet they act as if they own it. People are cruel here, sometimes. Gypsy , they call Dickie’s mother, in hushed tones or at full volume. Freak show , they call the circus, as if the people themselves are the performance. Bitch, bastard, harlot, they call each other, as if there is anything worth hating when the sky is blue and the world has so much love.
The shows in America, though, are completely wonderful. The equipment is better, the lights brighter, the audiences bigger than Dickie can ever remember. There are so many people here that even with the mean ones, there are always a hundred new and interesting people to strike up a conversation with each time he has a spare moment.
Dickie tries to use his sign language to communicate with an elderly deaf gentleman one night, but apparently America’s overlap with Britain does not extend beyond English. He sets about learning American Sign Language. Dickie has less free time now, with more shows and a longer routine. But he still has the time to talk to everyone, to play instruments and carve wood and paint.
Dickie makes a few real friends in different cities. They talk and roughhouse and tell secrets, but the circus always moves in before Dickie can get really attached. His loyalty, of course, lies with the circus and his parents and the thrill of it all. Leaving a city hurts a little bit each time, gravel scrapes on exposed skin. Still, Dickie loves the moving. He loves the heat and spice of Texas and New Mexico, the endless small towns of California and Oregon, the music and marshland of Florida and Louisiana, and the tall trees and taller cities of the northeast.
Dickie is nine when the circus travels to Gotham. This city is not as easy to love as some, not at first. It rains even more than in England, and there is something unsettling about the skyline. People move like wounded animals. But Dickie loves, with everything he is and everything he has, and he sees how badly these people need light, in this city where the sky is never clear. He resolves to give a good show.
On their first night performing in Gotham, there is a G rand Opening, like usual, and those who pay extra can meet performers before the show. Dickie is braced for the usual snobby rich people, who will side eye his mother and gawk at Dickie’s exposed brown skin and lean, taught muscles. What Dickie does not expect is one of the little boys. The children of the elite are not always as bad as their parents, but many of them are spoiled at best and cruel at worst. This boy, Timmy, is someone Dickie thinks he could have been friends with in another life. He’s six years younger than Dickie himself, but looks as uncomfortable with his parents’ discerning gazes as Dickie feels. Timmy asks quiet, wide-eyed questions with only a hint of baby talk. Dickie does not have to force a smile in the pictures they take together.
Dickie promises the toddler that he will do a special trick, just for him.
Dickie never has the chance to make good on his promise.
None of his fourteen languages contain the words for how he feels as his parents fall. He watches frozen as their bodies hit the floor, bones snapping and blood coating sawdust.
Dickie screams.