Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Family

Mount Justice; February 14th, 2011, 16:53 EDT

It was Valentine’s day; there was no scheduled sparring or training session with Canary, yet somehow almost the entire team had found themselves at the Mountain. M’gann and Conner had initially opted for a night out on the town, but when they discovered that Wally and Artemis planned on staying at the Mountain and watching a movie, both couples decided to spend their first Valentines together in the cave.

Although Valentines wasn’t exactly an Atlantean custom, Kaldur had also opted to stay at the Mountain as returning to Atlantis and seeing Garth and Tula together would be too painful with the meaning of Valentines swirling around in the back of his head. Zatanna had, of course, also decided to stay at the Mountain both due to her current living situation and the fact that she hoped to see a certain Boy Wonder who was unfortunately absent from their impromptu team gathering. Both had retreated to different parts of the Mountain upon seeing the two couples cozied up on the couch with their partners.

They were watching, after much consternation and arguing, a movie Zatanna had suggested, some laughable chick flick that M’gann was heavily invested in, Conner was attempting to understand, and that Artemis and Wally were poking fun of the entire time. For the most part, they were talking more with each other, M’gann trying her best to explain romantic concepts to Conner, Wally and Artemis arguing over most of the movie in general, Artemis occasionally taking pity on the two non-humans and explaining earth customs, and Wally laughing at every other word coming out of the main character’s mouth, than they were actually watching the movie.

Artemis and Wally were locked in yet another debate about the practicalities of the love interest’s advances when the zeta tube called out Robin’s designation. All four teens looked up just as a harried and disheveled Robin stumbled out of the tube, his skin paler than usual, his hair frazzled, and his shades shoved haphazardly onto his face to match his wrinkled jacket and mismatched shoes. He fell forward a few steps before turning to look back as if he expected someone to chase after him, then breathed a sigh of relief and slumped forward.

Wally raised his eyebrows as he took in his best friend’s state, removing his arm from around his girlfriend and leaning over the couch to get a better look. “Dude, what happened to you?”

Robin turned around quickly, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise before he tried to smooth over his face as best he could. It was a losing battle, something he quickly realized as he threw up his hands and face planted over the back of the couch, smothering his face into the cushions. Wally turned back around and patted Robin’s back, and Artemis leaned forward, interested to know what had their resident Boy Wonder so distraught.

The teen started to mumble something into the back of the couch, and a soft scream was muffled by the cushion all while Wally kept patting his friend’s back. Conner’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion at something Robin said. “Rob, honey, I won’t know what you’re saying until you stop screaming into the pillows and talk to me.”

Robin heaved a heavy sigh just as Kaldur and Zatanna walked into the cave, having heard Robin’s zeta tube announcement and intending to greet the young boy. Robin lifted his head up just enough to turn to look at Wally, who reached out to fix the shades on his friend’s face. “Wally, I think I’m scarred for life.”

Wally frowned a little bit, and Robin pushed himself up before vaulting easily over the back of the couch and fitting himself in between Conner and Wally. Shoving his head into his hands and scrubbing furiously at his eyes. “I want to burn my eyes out, Walls, it was so– bleughh,” he gagged as he shuddered.

“What happened? Condiment King again?” Wally guessed

Robin shook his head violently. “Worse!” he cried, and tore his fingers from his eye sockets to look at his friend. “There I was, minding my own business and getting ready to head up to the cave, when I caught–” Robin cut himself off for half a millisecond before plowing forward. “–my dad and my aunt making out in the–” Robin groaned loudly and shoved his face further into his hands.

“Your dad and your what?” Artemis croaked, and Robin looked up, his face still pale and a bit on the green side.

“My– yes! It was awful!” Robin flopped forward across Wally’s lap, and the speedster rubbed his friend’s while turning a helpless gaze at Artemis, who was currently freaked out and trying to line up all of the things that she knew about Robin’s life so far, which, admittedly, wasn’t much. Just that he had a cousin named “J” who may or may not be “Bluejay”, and that he’d been a vigilante since he was eight. And now that his dad and his aunt were– yeah, no, she was trying not to think about that.

“Wait, which side?” Zatanna asked, and– well, that was actually a really good question. Like, the different between incest and just really weird family dynamics and a maybe dead family member.

Robin mumbled something into Wally’s leg, which Conner translated as, “He said it’s on his mom’s side, but that it’s still weird.”

Zatanna nodded sagely, and Artemis– well, it was slightly less weird, but that was still wrong on so many levels to her. “Wait, so is he cheating on your mom?” M’gann cried, all interest lost in the chick flick that was still playing in the background. Artemis had to agree that Robin’s life was now at least ten times more interesting than Chad, Kellie, and their meet-cute turned slow-burn romance, especially since getting information from a willing Robin was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Robin shook his head, but didn’t say anything else on the matter. Which meant either dead or divorced, Artemis surmised. “Is your mom still. . . you know . . .” Zatanna waved her hands around in the air, but when she remembered that Robin was still trying to suffocate himself with Wally’s jeans, she weakly finished, “around?”

Robin slowly raised his head, and it only occurred to him right then and there that he’d probably given them far too much information on his personal life, traumatized by walking in on Bruce and Selena in the Bat Cave or not. He needed to give some sort of explanation or else they might just connect Batman and Catwoman’s buddy-buddy friendship to Bruce and Selena’s blossoming relationship on the news. “Uh, no. . . she’s–” Dick’s mom was dead, but they didn’t know that Robin’s mom wasn’t. “–alive,” he choked, “But things are kinda complicated with– yeah,” he said, his determination falling off. Well, that could have gone better, but at least Bruce wouldn’t kill him for letting them connect Batman and Robin and Catwoman to Bruce and Dick and Selena. But even if they did, Robin thought agitatedly, it was just what he deserved for making Dick see– nope. Not going there again.

Robin shot a helpless look to Wally, who was really the only member of the team who somewhat had a grasp on the situation, seeing as Robin had complained to the speedster about Catwoman (whom he’d admitted he thought of as a really cool aunt) and Batman’s rooftop dalliances several times over the years. He’d sort of gathered that Robin had stumbled too close to Batman and Catwoman doing . . . stuff on a roof, and seeing as Robin had already admitted to Wally that Batman was basically his father figure, it wasn’t too hard to figure out that Robin was having trouble separating his vigilante-family from his civvie-family in explaining the situation to their other friends.

Everyone else, on the other hand, thought that Batman and Robin only had a mentor-mentee relationship after Robin had admitted to Zatanna (after her father had been taken by Doctor Fate, Robin had talked to her about her confusing grief) that Batman wasn’t actually his dad, and word had spread quickly after. Which led to Artemis’s and the others’ conclusions that Robin wasn’t actually talking about Batman or Catwoman (they didn’t even know the two were in a not-relationship for the past few years) when he said he’d walked in on his dad and his aunt, which meant his claims about his mother were not, in fact, needed to defuse the situation at all. Because they all thought he was talking about his real family. As a civilian.

Artemis, in particular, wanted to use this information to sate her curiosity about the Boy Wonder’s past while she still had the chance. “What does your cousin think?” Artemis asked, remembering Robin’s mention of a Bluejay (obviously a codename for J, potentially, possibly?) that past Halloween, and Zatanna looked her way in understanding.

Robin, who still thought that his team thought he was talking about Batman and Catwoman, furrowed his brow in confusion until he realized she was probably thinking about Tim, though he hadn’t thought that his new pseudo-baby cousin (brother, if Dick was being honest, with how quickly and comfortably Dick had taken the younger kid under his wing) had accrued any sort of reputation yet, either in or out of Gotham. “Stray? He knows.”

“Stray?” Zatanna mouthed to Artemis, who shrugged when Robin turned his attention back to Wally. Artemis was just surprised that she’d gotten information on yet another one of Robin’s family members. Which meant she now knew of his dad, his aunt, his mom, a Bluejay, and a Stray. Where previously all she knew of was a cousin, and that was if Bluejay and J were even the same person in the first place.

“From the comms?” Zatanna asked, interrupting Wally’s placations to the still-traumatized Robin.

Robin shook his head. “No, the stalker,” he said offhandedly, referring to a conversation he’d already had with Wally about the matter of his growing family.

“The stalker?” Conner asked. “Isn’t that illegal?”

 

Robin shrugged, already having pulled himself upright again. He didn’t see what the big deal was with Tim being a stalker since he was the accomplice to the most skilled thief in the world, and already an accomplished thief in his own right. “Yeah? Not that big a deal seeing who my aunt is.”

Artemis blinked in surprise. Not that she was judging, because who was she to judge, seeing as her entire family were assassins, but she hadn’t expected this from Robin of all people.

Wally just shook his head in understanding of Robin’s plight. “What the heck is your family, dude?”

Robin sighed and flopped back against the couch. “You’re telling me.”

Chapter Text

Mount Justice; July 28th, 2011, 13:42 EDT

“Thanks again for helping me practice,” Zatanna said, a faint blush coloring her cheeks as she turned to Robin, who’d just plopped down beside Conner on the couch as the two of them prepared to be Zatanna’s guinea pigs.

For the past few months, Canary had been working with the team to develop skills other than the ones they tended to use in sparring. Earlier that day, she’d wanted to assess the team’s communication abilities, which had led to other topics about language proficiency and how important it was to know more than one or two languages. After that, she’d asked after the number of languages each team member knew.

Kaldur knew Atlantean, English, and Latin; M’gann knew Martian, English, and was learning Spanish in school, but could also translate for others using her telepathy; Artemis knew English, Vietnamese, Spanish, several curse words in select languages, and was learning Arabic; Wally knew English, Spanish, and a bit of Latin; Conner was taught English, Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, and some Korean by Cadmus, and Robin was fluent in fifteen languages, and learning eight more, the second most in the League after Batman, who knew twenty-seven.

Zatanna, on the other hand, only knowing English and a bit of Latin, had felt out of her league and decided that she needed to practice spells for translation and language capacity. She’d roped Conner and Robin into being her guinea pigs, seeing as they knew the most languages out of their little group, and M’gann had tagged along as well because she could mentally translate and monitor the situation. The others were all sitting around the living room and loitering in the kitchen (Wally, mostly) just for the fun of it.

“No problem,” Robin grinned, pulling one leg up onto the couch to rest his chin on his knee. “So, whatd’ya need us to do?” he prompted.

Zatanna scrunched up her face in thought. “Hold on a second. . . Okay, I’ve got it,” she said, smoothing her features and flexing her fingers. “Just start talking in another language or something. I need to figure it out as I go.”

“Well, does it matter which one?” he asked.

The magician shrugged. “Probably not. But maybe a language Conner already knows?” she suggested.

“Hindi okay?” he asked, and when both she and Conner nodded, he chirped “Cool!” before diving right in the middle of a thoroughly-thought out dissertation on the exact velocity a pigeon would need to reach when flying into a window for all of its feathers to explode off of its body upon impact.

Conner and M’gann stared at Robin in horror as Zatanna flung forth her hands and exclaimed, ‘Etalsnart idnih!”

Robin was in the middle of discussing the impact of bone density, blood fluidity, and the squishiness of bird muscle on his mathematical computations when Zatanna’s spell went into play. “Stop! Stop it! I did not want to know that!” she cried, slapping a hand over Robin’s mouth. He shrugged sheepishly.

‘I guess it worked, then?’ He continued in Mandarin.

Zatanna nodded and took her hand away. “Unfortunately. Now let me try something else.” She backed up and wiped one hand on her blouse. “Conner, Robin, can you both start speaking in a language you both know? But don’t tell me what it is this time,” she added.

The kryptonian nodded, then looked to Robin to ask a question. “Just pick one,” Robin said before the clone could ask and spoil it for Zatanna.

The two of them began an awkward conversation in Mandarin about the new television show that M’gann had finally convinced Conner to watch with her. It wasn’t too long until Zatanna called out, ‘Kaeps rouy eurt egaugnal!”

Robin and Conner paused mid-conversation, each suddenly realizing that they didn’t fully understand the other. Or know quite what was coming out of their own mouths. Conner understood bits and pieces of what Robin was saying, and vice versa, but neither knew what was going on.

Conner, for his part, had suddenly begun speaking in a pidgin of English, French, and Kryptonian, the last of which he’d never had programmed into him by Cadmus, seeing as only Superman and other kryptonians had access to that knowledge.

Robin, however, had descended into an unholy fusion of Romani, Romanian, Russian, French, German, and Italian, words of different languages and dialects blending together in a weird sort of word salad consisting of the languages his parents had grown up speaking around him and had taught him.

Everybody in the room stopped as Robin and Conner’s conversation mushed together in a clamor of ill-fitting sounds, Kaldur looking up from the textbook of Atlantean magic that he was studying, Wally and Artemis pausing their conversation in the kitchen to figure out what was going on, M’gann pressing her fingers to her forehead as nine different languages all fought to be understood in her head, and Zatanna freezing as she realized something had gone wrong with her spell.

“Uh–” Zatanna began, and Robin’s eyes flew wide as he spun around to face the magician.

‘Why am I–’ he stopped, his brain fizzing as he realized he was speaking in Romanian and French. ‘Why can’t I– I can’t stop,’ Dick tried, the words coming out in a weird mash-up of Romani, German, and Russian. ‘Not speak . . . English, stupid brain– augh!” he cried out in frustration, jumping up from the couch in horror.

Conner stood as well, Kryptonian and French spewing from his mouth, parts of his sentences understood as a word or phrase of English slipped in. ‘I can’t

speaking

and. . . why am I–

I don’t even

of these

is!’

Artemis flew from the kitchen, Wally speeding next to Robin as his friend turned to try and talk to him. ‘Wally– please tell me– gah, you don’t know what I’m saying, do you?’

“Robin, slow down, I can’t– I don’t know what you’re saying, dude!” Dick’s shoulders slumped.

Zatanna’s hands flew to her mouth before falling back down, and Kaldur had led M’gann to a nearby seat as her headache worsened. “I’m so sorry– I don’t know what went wrong, I just–”

Kaldur laid a hand on the magician’s shoulder. “We will figure it out, but we must remain calm,” he intoned, and Zatanna nodded, mentally running through what went wrong with her spell while Kaldur returned to M’gann and led her through a meditation exercise. Wally and Artemis looked on in concern.

“Why can’t they speak English?” Wally asked.

Artemis half-turned to him. “Conner can speak bits of it, I heard him. But I don’t know what–”

“If. . . I concen–trate,” Conner began, closing his eyes intently for a few seconds, “I can focus. . . on only speaking English. But . . . it’s difficult. Like . . . my brain is crowded, and ‘parts of–’ parts of,” he repeated, “me are . . . fighting to speak . . . something else?” he tried.

‘Conner, do you think it’s Kryptonian?’ Dick asked, all of his words still mixed up in different languages, but Conner only looked at him in confusion. And he realized that, if Conner could speak in only one language if he concentrated, then he might be able to, as well.

Conner, in the meantime, had also figured out that he had understood parts of Robin’s speech, and he turned to the younger boy, forcing himself to concentrate on his exact words. ‘Can . . . you . . . speak only . . . French?’ he managed, his brow furrowing in intense thought.

Dick lit up, and nodded his head sharply. ‘Yes! Thank God!’ he exclaimed, the singular language coming easily to him after he’d realized he had the choice. ‘I don’t know what went wrong with Zee’s spell, and– why were you speaking so slowly? Cadmus taught you French, right?’ Conner blinked and waited for his brain to finish translating what Robin was saying, but it was a slow process, as the only knowledge he had of the language was what Zatanna’s spell had recently endowed him with. ‘Right?’ Robin repeated more hesitantly.

Conner shook his head. ‘Not . . . French. That part . . . is Zatanna,’ he admitted. ‘I think that’s what. . . is making it so hard . . . to understand and only speak . . . one language.’

Dick nodded. ‘English, French, and Kryptonian?” he guessed, and Conner sucked in a sharp breath of hope at the last word.

‘Kryptonian?’ he repeated. ‘But I don’t know–’ Conner paused as he realized that he hadn’t known French, either, before Zatanna’s spell. Which meant . . . it was possible. But he hadn’t ever really dared to hope that he could– Conner focused on English and turned back to Wally and Artemis, catching Zatanna’s attention as he began to speak. “I’m speaking Kryptonian, too,” he said.

“What? I didn’t know you knew it,” Wally said.

Conner crossed his arms. “I don’t. But I am half-Kryptonian,” he added.

Light dawned on Zatanna’s face. “Oh! I said, ‘speak your true language,’” she realized, “because I just assumed that it would be English.”

‘Damn,’ Dick cursed quietly in Russian, catching Artemis’s attention. Her eyes widened as she realized that the language was a clue to Robin’s ethnicity, and, having quite the repertoire of foreign curse words herself, she easily recognized the Russian.

“I know how to fix it, now,” Zatanna promised, before flaying her fingers wide at Conner and Robin and exclaiming, ‘Keaps lamron!’

Robin felt something settle in his throat, and when Zatanna turned to look at him in anticipation, he said aloud, “All good now?”

Wally pumped a fist in the air as he lunged at Robin to pull him into a one-sided hug. “Oh yeah! All better now, Rob,” he grinned, and Zatanna heaved a sigh of relief of her own.

M’gann had calmed her brain down, by that point, and she and Kaldur returned to the group, the martian intertwining her hands with the kryptonian. “What’s wrong, Conner?” she asked.

Conner looked at her. “It was. . . nice, I guess. Speaking Kryptonian. I didn’t know that was something I wanted to know,” he admitted. “It feels like I’m missing something, now.”

Dick looked over at the clone in understanding. He knew what it was like to not feel entirely himself, to feel like a fraud when he spoke English so often instead of his mother’s and father’s tongues. Bruce had learned a bit of Romani with Dick’s permission, but. . . he thought that he wanted to share that part of him with Jason, and maybe Tim. “A piece of your identity,” he added, and met Conner’s eyes. “I get it. You should ask Un– Superman to teach you,” he suggested. “It would be a good way to get to know him.”

A dark cloud passed over Conner’s face before he remembered that, recently, Clark had seemed more open to spending time with him. Their relationship still wasn’t great, but. . . there was something to hope for.

“Okay,” Conner agreed.

Chapter Text

T
Gotham City; March 20, 2012, 12:30 EDT

It was a testament to how far Artemis had come since the days her father spent training her that she didn’t immediately snap Bette’s arm in two when the supply closet door opened and a hand reached out to drag her out of the school hallway. Artemis caught half a glimpse of Bette’s face and the brief shine of bright red hair before the door shut behind them and they were left in darkness. She blinked as a chain was fumbled around and a light suddenly clicked on above them to brighten up the room.

Barbara was leaning against a shelf of cleaning supplies while Bette finally released her iron grip on Artemis’s wrist. She stepped back, her foot banging against an empty bucket as she faced Barbara and Artemis, all business in the way she stood pin-straight and purposeful in the way she folded her arms against her chest. A commander facing her small army.

Artemis wondered what, exactly, she’d let Bette pull her into this time. Ever since she became friends with the girl, Bette somehow knew exactly which buttons to push to drag Artemis, or whoever she wanted, really, into whatever scheme she had planned. Usually, it was some sort of Robin-watching, which Artemis found weird at first because she was stalking her teammate, but after Dick had gotten roped into it as well, for Artemis it became more about proving the kid wrong than anything else.

And, of course, once Dick had admitted that it was about pulling the wool over Bette’s eyes, Artemis was more than happy to be a willing co-conspirator for all of the times that Bette had inconvenienced the archer with her plans.

Barbara went along with Bette’s Robin-watching about half of the time, having her own reasons for doing so; Bette, of course, could usually rope her into some newfangled scheme or another most of the time, but Barbara had an uncanny ability for figuring out when Bette would get her into trouble. Artemis tried to listen, but she couldn’t quite discern when Barbara was getting out plans to stay away from trouble or because she actually had plans of her own. Which resulted in it usually being just Bette and Artemis. And sometimes Dick, though the kid was slippery and great at escaping in his own right. So, again, it was usually just Bette and Artemis unless Dick took pity on them and included them in his Houdi-ness when they dodged the police or authorities or gangs or the few well-meaning adults left in Gotham.

So the fact that Barbara was here meant that either the plan wasn’t going to be one of the ones that left Artemis climbing up fire escapes in Gotham in the middle of the night, or Barbara just hadn’t heard what Bette was planning yet.

“What’s this all about?” Artemis hissed at Bette. She still had ten minutes before her next class (eugh. Arabic, the required language class she’d picked solely because the League of Shadows mostly operated in the Middle East and she liked to be in the know whenever they (Jade, her dad, etc.) started talking in a language she couldn’t decipher.) but in all likelihood this was going to make her late again and her teacher was going to get on her ass about it. She could not afford another letter sent home to her mom.

Barbara sighed and slumped a little further against the shelf she was propped up against. “I already told her it’s a bad idea,” she told Artemis, huffing a little in indignation that she was still forced to be present for their impromptu and totally not inconspicuous secret meeting. If Barbara was still forced to be here, Artemis realized, then she likely wasn’t going to be able to get out of it, either.

Bette flashed an annoyed look at Artemis. “No, it’s a great idea. You told me–”

“I also told you it was a bad idea,” Barbara reiterated, rolling her eyes but standing upright to inch closer to them. “But since you’re going to go through with it anyways, I might as well do damage control.”

“Wait, back up. Go through with what?” Artemis asked, resignation already settling in her stomach. Though, she did wonder what Bette was cooking up this time. No matter how often going along with Bette ended in either disaster or complete and total embarrassment, she couldn’t help but want to be involved anyways. The girl was like Mars, sucking everyone around her into orbit.

Bette looked over at her. “It’s Dick’s birthday today,” she finally admitted. “And I just found out!” she said, an annoyed tone leaking into her voice as she shot a glare at Barbara, who she obviously blamed for that oversight.

“It is?” Artemis asked, at the same time Barbara argued, “You don’t know him as well as I do!”

Bette crossed her arms. “It is,” she told Artemis, “But the only way we would’ve known was if someone,” she said meaningfully, leveling another Look at Gordon, “Had told us.”

Barbara’s face warmed. “Well, you haven’t seen how he gets every year,” she retorted angrily. “Don’t think I haven’t tried for his birthday or anything, he’s just always in a mood.”

“Mood?” Artemis hummed questioningly.

Barbara turned to her. “You haven’t noticed? He’s always so . . . down. I don’t get it, and he won’t tell me anything. I think he just hated his birthday, or maybe it’s this time of year,” she said, shrugging contemplatively.

Artemis furrowed her brow, trying to recall Dick’s behavior from Monday and earlier that day. He had been a little . . . quiet, she realized, which wouldn’t be weird if it wasn’t for the fact that the kid basically never shut up. He was a bit like Wally in that way. She mentally shuddered, briefly thinking what it would be like if Dick met her boyfriend. “I guess he’s been a little quiet,” she agreed. “But, again, why are we here?” she asked, trying to get them back on track.

“Like I said,” Bette began, “It’s Dick birthday. We need to do something for him.”

“So get him a birthday present,” Artemis shrugged.

“No,” Bette groaned. “Like, go out or something. We’re kidnapping him after school today!” she exclaimed happily, her eyes lighting up briefly with either mischief or excitement. It was hard for Artemis to tell sometimes.

Barbara’s eyes widened. “Oh no. That’s a terrible idea. Let’s just do what Artemis said and get him a birthday present or something.”

Bette shook her head furiously. “Don’t you get it? This is the perfect way to get him out of his funk! We’ll take him after school, leave a message with his butler or something, and then go out to eat. It’s perfect! Besides, he loves getting kidnapped,” she said, waving a hand. “Right, Artemis?”

“I don’t know. . .” she began, but Bette was always better with people than she was. And Dick never seemed to mind their impromptu kidnappings as long as Alfred knew it was planned by a bunch of high schoolers and not some two-bit gang. “I guess,” she agreed.

“Perfect! Then we agree,” Bette said, clapping her hands together. “Meet up at that Oak tree after school, you know the one?”

Barbara sighed. “Yeah, we know it,” she said, earning a bright smile from Bette.

“Fine,” Artemis agreed, her hand already on the door knob. She slid out of the room, Bette and Barbara tugging on the light chain as they followed after her.

Artemis slid in the classroom door just as the tardy bell rang, her teacher flicking a warning look at her as he stood from where he’d been organizing his colored pens at his desk. She winced at the judgmental glare that followed her to her seat, but when she sat down, the desk beside her was only devoid of the usual teasing giggle that followed any evidence of Artemis’s rivalry with her Arabic teacher. She looked over at Dick only to find him resting his head tiredly on his desk, face turned her way but hidden behind the arm of his suit jacket.

Odd, but after her conversation with Bette and Barbara in the supply closet, not totally unexpected now. It still bothered her a little bit to see her normally upbeat friend so . . . dejected and tired, like a deflated balloon. It was weird.

Dick spent the rest of class with his head on his desk; when the bell rang, he got up from his desk and packed up in a sluggish pace, the bags heavy under his eyes and his feet moving like cinderblocks. Artemis didn’t see him again until lunch, when he showed up without a tray, laid his head down on the table, and promptly ignored every effort to draw him into the conversation. Barbara kept shooting both Artemis and Bette pointed looks as if to say, “See? I told you this is going to be a bad idea.”

After lunch ended, Artemis didn’t have any more classes with him. She did manage to leave her last class of the day two minutes early, however, in order to meet Barbara and Bette at the tree before Dick walked out the door with the rest of the school. Barbara was in charge of telling Afred of their plans to “kidnap” Dick while Bette and Artemis were to catch Dick’s attention.

The bell rang just as Barbara returned from making a call to the butler, and the three of them kept an eye out for Dick under the shade of the oak tree as a crowd of students flooded out from the sets of double doors. “There!” Bette pointed, and Artemis looked in the direction she indicated to see Dick just walking by. “Dick!” She waved her hands in the air, and he looked up, his gaze instantly locking on them. There seemed to be a war of indecision in his eyes, but it didn’t last long before he turned in their direction and made his way over.

His face was carefully blank as he regarded the trio of girls, no easy smile lighting up his features like usual, and Artemis’s stomach sank a little at the sight. Because maybe Barbara was right, and they should have left well enough alone. But, no. Bette was usually good about these things, about people. And Dick did look like he needed cheering up.

He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. Artemis decided to speak first. She held up the well-loved and not-as-well-washed-as-it-should-have-been bag in one hand. “Alright Boy Hostage,” she said, forcing a grim smile on her face, “You know the drill.”

A flash of what looked like panic crossed Dick’s face, and he backed up half a step before his eyes flicked over to Barbara in a pleading glare. “Babs, can’t you–”

The red head shrugged regretfully. “Sorry, I tried,” she apologized.

Bette shook her head and huffed playfully. “C’mon, Dick; it’s not the end of the world,” she smiled. “Now,” she said, waving a hand toward the bag Artemis was still displaying. “If you would be so kind as to let us kidnap you, we won’t have to resort to more drastic measures,” she threatened.

“Wait! Mgh–” Dick barely had a chance to protest before Artemis gripped both ends of the bag and pulled it over Dick’s head. “Really, girls, can’t we do this some other day?” he tried. But the three teenagers had already fallen into their usual positions: Barbara and Bette in the lead, Artemis guiding Dick with both hands on his shoulders after looping her extra hairband around his wrists.

Bette half-spun, her plaid skirt twirling around her legs, to glance back at Dick. “Nope! Sorry, Birthday Boy. Got approval from Alfred and everything!” she grinned.

Artemis patted Dick sympathetically on one shoulder. She knew what it was like to contend with Bette when she had her mind set on something. A sigh escaped the younger teen, but he followed, his steps only a bit unsure due to the amount of times that the girls had “kidnapped” Dick after their first expedition from Artemis’s sophomore year.

“So, where to this time?” he asked after they went about a block, his voice a bit muffled under the bag, which Bette had happily labeled ‘official kidnapping sack’ with a sharpie.

“That would spoil the surprise,” Bette tutted. Barbara cast an uneasy glance over her shoulder at the younger boy, one that Artemis almost missed. “But don’t worry, we’re going to get you out of your funk,” she promised.

Dick huffed something under his breath that sounded much more suspicious than it probably was and stayed mostly quiet for the next few minutes of conversation, which was mostly taken up by Bette, as usual. Barbara tried to fill in the gap that was left by Dick’s silence, but Artemis could tell that she still had her reservations about the whole situation. Which really shouldn’t have been as big of a deal as they were all making it out to be. They kidnapped Dick all the time; it was bound to happen on one of his off-days. In fact, they often planned their somewhat impromptu kidnappings around their friends’ moods: Bette when she got a bad grade on a test, Barbara after a weekend with her mom and brother, Artemis usually after a bad mission or particularly irritating day at school, Dick after . . . well, actually, they could never usually get a real reason out of the youngest, come to think of it.

Artemis was still musing over that fact, her friends’ voices humming in the back of her mind, when they turned a corner and a small yelp sounded. Bette had bumped into an older man, and Artemis had accidentally steered Dick into Barbara’s back, causing both to stumble.

“Sorry, sir,” Bette smiled, straightening her uniform jacket.

The man ran his eyes up and down the younger girl’s figure, and Artemis noticed the small shiver that racked her friend’s spine, instantly straightening in response. “No problem, honey,” he grinned, the smile lop-sided and his gaze disgustingly leering.

Artemis let go of Dick and shouldered her way to the front, a frown quickly forming on her face. “We’ll just be going, now,” she said firmly, grabbing her friend’s wrist and nodding with her head for Barbara to do the same with Dick, who, she now noticed, had tugged their makeshift hood off, his gelled hair sweaty and sticking up.

The man’s eyes had snagged on Dick, who had allowed himself to be tugged ahead by Barbara, and his gaze followed their backs as they forged ahead of Bette and Artemis, who tailed right behind them. But the man thankfully didn’t do anything, and simply turned his attention back to the phone he’d had in his hand, likely what he’d been doing when Bette ran into him, and continued around the corner.

“Pedophile,” Artemis snorted under her breath, and Bette nodded beside her, still clearly disgusted by the encounter. It wasn’t the first time the girls, or Dick for that matter, had run into someone like him while they wandered the streets of Gotham. At least they had a system, however. Though their system was more like Artemis puffing up and using every bit of her naturally aggressive nature to scare off whoever their problem was, and then either running away or having Artemis or Barbara kick them where it hurt.

“Gross,” Barbara agreed, her face pinched. She still gripped Dick around the wrist, who had fallen silent but was taking in their surroundings with unusual vigilance.

Oh, right. He was trying to figure out where they were going. Bette seemed to have realized the same thing, because she raised a pointed eyebrow at Dick. “Forgetting something, Boy Hostage?” she called teasingly, and Dick’s gaze flashed toward her somewhat sheepishly.

“No?” he tried, but Bette wasn’t having it.

“Yeah, nice try.” She ripped the sack from his hands and pulled it over his head, and Dick’s shoulders slumped as he sighed exasperatedly once again.
“Do we have to?” Artemis could very clearly hear the pout in the boy’s voice. She passed over another rubber band (her long hair was a hazard she was too attached to to get rid of) to Bette, who snapped it over Dick’s wrists again.

“Yep,” Artemis said. “Sorry,” she shrugged, and shoved Dick forward again.

“No you’re not,” he grumped, but followed Bette and Barbara again, his shoulders still tense from what Artemis assumed was the encounter with the creepy man.

“No,” she agreed. “I’m not.”

Artemis paused as her gaze snagged on a brief flash of movement in the nearby alley. The lack of movement coupled with one hand still holding onto Dick’s shoulder caused the boy to stumble back into a stop with her. “Artemis?” he asked, but she didn’t say anything back, watching as three men stepped out of the dark of the alleyway and approached them.

“Dick–” her voice cracked a bit in her worry, and Bette and Artemis turned around at the sound. Their eyes widened as they saw the three men, but as Artemis risked a glance their way, she noticed that another man and a woman had stopped just behind them. She turned around, her stomach sinking a bit as she saw the man that they’d run into earlier standing two meters behind her.

Dick heard the concern in her voice and ripped the bag from his head, his eyes quickly taking in the scene. “Official kidnapping, huh?” one of the men in the alley said, clearly referencing the sharpied words on the bag and stepping closer.

“We’ll be the judge of that,” the woman behind Barbara added on, reaching with both hands towards the red head. And with that, the other five thugs moved in as well.

Artemis instantly stepped into action, settling into a defensive position in front of their youngest as she faced the three men in the alley. She didn’t have her bow, but she kept a really sharp pocket knife in her waistband, which she really didn’t have time to retrieve because all three of them were rushing her at the same time.

She dodged a wide-swung blow at her jaw and returned one in kind, landing a heavy kick at the man’s gut and knocking him groaning to the ground. One of the other two men managed to get a hit in at her shoulder as she did so, however, but she took the blow in stride as the other man headed toward Bette and Barbara. She punched him twice, once in the jaw and once in the nose. He recovered, but Artemis noted with satisfaction that the bone was probably broken.

Behind her, Dick had somehow managed to incapacitate the man they’d run into earlier. Artemis was glad that his self-defense lessons (which he’d told them he’d taken just for this purpose, luckily) were coming in handy. Barbara was trying to fight off the woman who’d stepped toward her, and being the athlete that she was, she’d gotten in some good hits, but she was quickly being overpowered. Bette had managed to kick the man after her in the groin, but the goon who’d left Artemis pulled out a gun and pulled Bette to him while she was distracted, leveling the weapon at the side of her head.

Bette squeaked, and Barbara was distracted for long enough that the woman she’d been defending against had twisted her arms behind her in a painful position. “Alright, stop!” the man with the gun growled out. “Or the girl gets it,” he threatened.

Artemis paused in her fight to watch the confrontation, keeping one eye on the thug she’d been fighting as she tried to think her way through the situation, but she’d turned her back away from the man that she’d first taken down. He’d recovered and lunged at her back, tackling her to the ground and settling his heavy weight on her.

Artemis let out a pained breath as her face was ground into the concrete, and felt a flash of fear at the thought of the man on top of her like that. He’d locked her arms behind her, the man much too large for Artemis to fight from such a weak position.

“Let me go!” she snapped angrily, trying to shrug the man’s weight off of her, but he didn’t budge.

From the corner of her eye, she watched as the man she’d been fighting went for Dick, grabbing at the struggling boy. The kid managed to elbow him, hard, in the nose twice before he was completely subdued, like Artemis, by the sheer size of the man. It didn’t stop him from trying to headbutt the thug in the nose for the third time, though, which led the man to lock Dick into a hard strangle-hold, the boy’s face quickly turning red as he struggled to get out. After a few minutes, Dick slumped against the man.

A black van pulled up beside the alley they’d been shoved into. “Load ‘em up,” the man with the gun said, jerking his head toward the vehicle as he retrieved a syringe from his pocket. He tossed it to the man on top of Artemis, who’d snapped it out of the air before plunging it into Artemis’s neck before she could do anything about it.

The drugs were fast-acting, but she managed to watch as Bette and Barbara were restrained, gagged, and tossed into the back of the van with startling efficiency. Or maybe that was the drugs. She thought she might be losing time. And at some point she’d been zip-tied and gagged, too, and she thought she might have been pulled up?

She barely registered being thrown into the back of the van with Dick, two of the thugs climbing in behind them before everything went black.

-x-x-x-

When she came to, the first thing that Artemis noticed was someone muttering quietly and angrily in another language. It was . . . vaguely familiar, possibly recognizable in the distant part of her brain that was recovering from the influence of the drugs.

She tried to get her bearings, but all she could tell was that someone’s head was on her lap, and that her ankles and wrists were tightly restrained with some sort of painfully thin rope. Artemis decided to try and open her eyes, since she wasn’t learning anything by pretending to be asleep while listening in on a language he couldn’t even translate.

She was in a small, square room, dimly lit by a singular bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. Bette was the one whose head was in her lap; her drugs must not have worn off as fast as Artemis’s, thanks to her own . . . less than superb upbringing and slightly concerning nightlife that allowed her a decent resistance to a variety of drugs. Barbara was also collapsed on the floor nearby, similarly restrained to the others, her red hair falling from her ponytail and splaying across the gray concrete floor.

Dick was, surprisingly, also awake, and bound to a chair, though his face was flushed red, and evidently the one who’d been talking to himself in another language while she’d been coming to consciousness. He was working on his bindings, which were. . . significantly more complicated and painful than what Artemis and the others were restrained with, seeing as he was tied up with twice as much wire instead of the rope the thugs had used on the rest of them.

“Dick?” Artemis groaned, pulling herself up and ignoring the twinge of pain as she supported herself with her bound wrists. She was nursing a bloody awful headache that she was doing her best to ignore.

His head snapped up as he looked over at her, his face brightening slightly. “Artemis!” he smiled, which was honestly a welcome sight for Artemis after the glum blankness she’d been faced with all day. Though she had to say that the fact that it took an actual kidnapping to lighten his mood was somewhat insulting after all of the effort they’d put into cheering him up. “You’re awake,” he said.

She nodded, instantly regretting it as the movement caused her head to spin and her headache to flare up. “Yeah,” she said with a grimace, “The bastards drugged me.”

Dick nodded. “Same, but I think I’ve almost got these ropes . . .” His voice trailed off as he continued to manipulate his wrists, which Artemis noticed were rubbed raw with a thin metal wire and tied to the chair arms.

“Stop that,” she snapped, “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

He looked up at her with an affronted look on his face, the movements paused. “Come on, Arty,” he said, a trace of some sort of accent coloring his tone that she’d never noticed before, “I’m a professional.”

“A professional,” she intoned sardonically.

He nodded, his eyes flicking over to her for only a second before they rested back on his wrists, twisting again, the wires red. “Yeah, professional kidnappee, professional escape artist . . .”

“Huh? Oh yeah, Boy Hostage,” she remembered. Artemis decided to take a look at her own bindings, focusing a careful eye on the rope already burning into her skin. She tried twisting them as Dick was, but very quickly gave up on that plan after a sharp gasp of pain involuntarily escaped her lips from the tightness of the bindings. She cursed loudly and decided to instead finger the inside of her skirt waistband for the knife she was pretty sure was still there.

“And circus kid,” Dick added. He cursed again in that language she vaguely recognized before admitting, “I think I’m going to have to pop my thumbs for this one.”

Artemis looked up. “What? Wait, I think I have a knife!” She only barely managed to stop Dick from popping his thumbs out of place (what the heck?), and he looked up in surprise and not the slightest bit of guilt. “Idiot,” she grumbled, but managed to somehow dig the small blade from her waistband after a fair bit of painful maneuvering with her hands.

“Here we go.” She awkwardly manipulated the small blade with her fingers so that she could dig it under the rope, wincing at the pain as she sawed at the cord. It was a slow process, and she looked up to see Dick watching her impatiently. She could barely see the depressed friend she’d been dealing with all day, his sadness mostly gone in the face of this new danger. Mostly. She could still see it in his eyes, clear blue and just . . . sad. “So,” she began, not really knowing how to bring the topic up, but hoping that he’d be willing to talk. Actually talk, and not just easily deflect all of their questions and steer the conversation away to happier matters like he usually did without them noticing, like she’d recently realized he had the habit of doing. Really, she realized, the only time she’d succeeded had been the one time she hadn’t meant to, back on the rooftop before their mission at Haly’s circus. “Why the sad face today?” she settled on.

Dick looked up at her in surprise. “What do you mean?”

Artemis rolled her eyes at him before focusing once more on cutting the rope without injuring herself. That would be a pain with drawing her bow. “Don’t play stupid. You’ve been acting weird all day,” she said.

Dick shifted uncomfortably, or at least as uncomfortably as he could being very tightly restrained to the chair at his wrists, ankles, and waist. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and Artemis was starting to think that maybe her usual bluntness wasn’t the best way to go about getting Dick to talk to her. But then he flicked his eyes over at Bette and Barbara, which was weird considering he and Barbara were like peanut butter and jelly, and spoke. “Bruce wants to adopt me,” he said.

And Artemis paused and looked up at her friend, that same sorrowful expression on his face from earlier. He was eerily still for someone she could’ve sworn had never stayed in the same place for more than five minutes in his life. “And that’s . . . bad.”

He looked over at her. “Yes, no. . . I don’t know,” he sighed, and then started to work at his bindings with a vengeance despite Artemis’s earlier protests. “It’s more the fact that he suggested changing my last name. And– I mean, yeah, it’s just a hyphen, but . . .”

Oh. Artemis thought she understood, now. “You’re a Grayson,” she finished.

He nodded. “Yeah. It doesn’t help that I hate my birthday, and he knows that, but he still asked me, and. . .” He groaned and popped one of his thumbs out of place, but she got the feeling that it wasn’t a cry of pain but rather one of exhaustion or exasperation. It reminded her a bit of Roy.

“Dick–” She wasn’t sure if she was going to scold him about popping his thumb out of place when she was close to cutting the rope, or what, but he just plowed on and ignored her protests, doing the same to other (and, yeah, no cry of pain for that one either, the freak) and then proceeding to maneuver both of his hands in ways that were most definitely not normal before he slipped them free of the now incredibly red and slick wire. “Wow, that’s creepy,” she said, just as she cut through the rope. She tugged at it, twisting her wrists until the cord dropped to her lap, or, rather, on Bette’s hair.

He grinned at her, a small, wild thing. “Thanks.” He rubbed at his wrists a little before reaching inside . . . somewhere in his jacket and pulling a small blade similar to Artemis’s knife. He started on the ropes at his waist and Artemis leaned over Bette’s head to work on her ankles. “You pick up a few things,” he said, accompanying the sentiment with a half-hearted shrug.

“At the circus,” Artemis said.

“At the circus,” he reiterated.

She’d almost gotten through the rope at her ankles–much easier to cut through without hurting herself through the material of her socks–when she spoke up again. “And I’m sorry, that was a really shitty and sweet thing for him to do,” she said.

Dick didn’t look up. “Yeah, it was,” he agreed. “I know he means well, but,” he sighed, “he still should’ve known.”

“I have a friend,” she began, thinking of Roy, “Who doesn’t get along with his dad either. Caretaker, adoptive dad, or– whatever they are. I’m not even sure if they’re friends, to be honest,” she said. “But . . . I think it gets better. If that helps.”

Dick didn’t say anything, only nodded. He heard her. For as much as he liked talking, Artemis also knew he was a really great listener. She’d talked with him a couple of times, about her father. They didn’t exactly have very similar situations. What with Artemis’s dad being her real father, an assassin, and not wanting anything to do with her other than to get her to follow in her family’s footsteps, and Dick being the orphaned ward to a well-meaning but awkward playboy billionaire, but. . . they sort of just . . . got each other.

Or they were both able to just listen. Maybe it was the fact that their situations weren’t similar. Not at all. Maybe that’s what made it easier to listen and not pretend to understand or have any advice to give in a situation you wouldn’t know what to do with.

She thought that might be why he’d opened up to her. Even if it was just a little bit. And why she’d opened up to him, just a little bit. It wasn’t much, could never be much with the life she lived, but . . . it was something. They were friends, and that was something. She thought it was enough.

Dick didn’t expect her to share her life story with him. Didn’t pry, didn’t judge from the little he knew, or what he surmised. Because the kid was smarter than she knew most people gave him credit for, behind the goofy grin and lightheaded small talk of the newly-dubbed “Richie Wayne” that the public knew of.

She knew that Dick probably thought she just had a complicated relationship with an abusive father. And, really, that’s what it boiled down to, wasn’t it? And she knew that Dick loved Bruce, was grateful to have a second chance at a father, but that it wasn’t as simple as that, what with the Grayson name and Wayne legacy.

So, yeah, maybe they didn’t know everything about each other. And they couldn’t completely understand one another. But there were bits and pieces. Small cracks that the other could see. But they listened, even if they didn’t really, really talk. And that was enough to be the good sort of friends they were.

They managed to wake Bette and Barbara up after they freed themselves from the ropes, and after that, it surprisingly wasn’t much work for the four of them to slip out of the warehouse, considering who Artemis was and the fact that Dick was apparently an expert escape artist/hostage, and the fact that Barbara was way too competent at a lot of weird and different things for her own good.

They called the police, or, rather, Barbara called her father, and soon, the four of them were safe and tucked away in their own homes.

But Artemis couldn’t help but think about what Dick had said in the warehouse. She realized she’d forgotten to ask him why he hated his birthday in the first place.

She wondered if it mattered. She knew it did.

She also knew that she’d have to wait until next year to ask him if she wanted a real answer.

Chapter Text

Malone

Mount Justice; June 15, 2012, 6:30 EDT

It was the second month after Kaldur had passed leadership of the team over to Robin. At some point in the last few months, their youngest had turned fifteen (Artemis couldn’t deny that she’d added this small, vague fact to her growing list of things she knew about Robin over the last two years. It was a frustratingly small list.) and was deemed old enough to take on that role.

Artemis could admit that she had her reservations at first. Sure, this was Robin. The first sidekick, hacker and planner extraordinaire, master of disguise and martial arts, the first of an entire generation of superheroes, and he did it all without powers. He was a legend, more hero than vigilante, regardless of who his mentor was. But he was still fifteen.

And she could tell that he was still nervous about being leader despite the fact that almost two years had passed since the disastrous failsafe situation. She hadn’t been as. . . affected as the other members of her team, seeing as that she’d died before everyone else, but she’d felt the aftershocks of that experiment in a way that the others couldn’t quite understand. All of the others had seen at least one other teammate (her) die, and had felt the grief of their deaths and suffered the consequences of their decisions. But all she remembered was this . . . blackness. It was dark, and it reminded her of the times her father would lock her in her closet as a young girl.

But it just meant that she very clearly could see the abrupt change in her teammates’ behaviors before and after the simulation. She hadn’t seen the transition as they were happening in the team’s minds. It had been abrupt, shocking, obvious.

She’d seen how M’gann had withdrawn into herself, blaming her own lack of control (She was so young, they’d all been so young, still were, weren’t they? Even though Artemis would be a legal adult in just a few months, a senior in high school.) for the disastrous training simulation.

She’d seen how Connor had drifted away, locking himself away with his anger. She still hadn’t found out why, but after his talk with Canary, he’d been . . . better. He’d grown so much in the last two years.

She’d noticed how Wally’s eyes had drifted her way when he thought she wasn’t paying attention, an anxious look in her eye that she hadn’t known how to feel about at the time. She’d been offended, for being pitied, until she’d realized that it was concern. Because he cared, because he valued her. Now she looked back on her memories of that look in her eye with fondness, because it was the first of many that she still received to this day.

She’d noticed how much Kaldur had blamed himself. She knew that he’d died, had chosen to sacrifice himself as a warrior instead of carrying himself on as a leader. Had surmised as much from the other’s brief explanations in the early hours after the simulation when the team had filled her in with the bare bones of the situation. She’d seen the hard, guilty look in his eyes, and the way he began to subconsciously defer to Robin after the disastrous experiment. It was then, she thought, that the transition had truly began in the change of leadership that was only now fully fulfilled, a year and a half later.

But those four had moved on. They’d been changed by the simulation, yes, but that change had turned into a sort of armor, seeping into their blood and fueling them to be better. M’gann had an iron grip on her abilities now. Connor had this sort of inner peace and understanding that she had honestly thought he’d never achieve. Wally had realized his feelings for Artemis (thank God). Kaldur had grown into his new role as right-hand man, rather than forcing himself to be the leader that he’d never wanted to be in the beginning.

But Robin? Robin had taken the lesson, and instead of taking it to heart, he’d wrapped himself up in his guilt like it was a second skin, an armor. He’d learned from it, grown from it, been changed by it, yes. But he hadn’t . . . let it settle within him, like the others had.

The wounds were still fresh for him. And she often wondered why. Why he still had this fear of being leader. Sure, he’d sent half their team to their deaths. But they’d accomplished the mission. And that was what mattered, wasn’t it? He’d done good, as good as he could have in a training scenario that was literally designed to fail. And that mission in Bialya? She hadn’t even been there, but she’d heart from the report that he’d led well, thought like a leader, compromised between the team and the mission and what he knew was right like a champ.

But on every mission that he’d ever led since the transition between Kaldur and Robin had begun, Artemis was able to see this sort of . . . tightness to Robin. One that hadn’t been there before Failsafe. Like his skin was stretched too thin. The only reason she’d noticed it was because she hadn’t seen him grow through the grief and the guilt during the simulation like the others had, hadn’t seen a slow transition, only the abrupt change when they’d woken from their comas.

And now that he was officially leader? Robin was working himself to the bone. He was more prepared than she’d ever noticed Batman be, though she couldn’t imagine who else he would have gotten it from. He spent hours before missions reviewing every fact, thinking of so many contingencies and possibilities that it made her head spin. He worried over every detail, memorized everything that he could, planned with a steel trap of a mind, and never seemed to lose his cool when the initial plan, as always, failed. Because he always knew what to do when that happened.

It didn’t mean that he didn’t still beat himself up over it, but he was always just so . . . prepared. Worried. Anxious. Stretched thin.

It worried Artemis, sometimes. And she knew that Kaldur saw it, too. The worry. It didn’t look . . . right on Robin, regardless of the fact that it was all she’d seen on him in the past few years. It was scarier how well he covered it, too. She only knew because of Failsafe, and Kaldur only knew because he, too, had held that same position.

Artemis thought that was why it happened, how they found out. Or, rather, how she found out and everyone else knew about it only after she’d accidentally discovered it. It was because he was so tired. Stretched thin. Worn out. Like he’d lived half a dozen lifetimes in the two years they’d known him.

In part, anyways. The other half was by pure coincidence. Artemis worked in Star City with Green Arrow, yes, but she still lived in Gotham. It was her home. She and Robin would sometimes patrol together in the beginning, but now, whenever she felt too small and cramped, and Oliver was away on business or she just didn’t want to see him, she would slip out of her window on her own, dressed in black with only her bow and her quiver. She’d take on the night, the gangs that Batman and Robin were too busy with the Rogues to pay as much attention to anymore, like they had in their early days. Before the Joker and Ivy and Killer Croc and . . . well, yeah.

So she’d picked up a bit of their slack. Ruffled the feathers of the Falcones, gnawed at the edges of the Triads. Just caused trouble for them, put off their plans until the Dynamic Duo could pay better attention to them. She knew they knew about it. Of course they did. But since they’d never confronted her about it, she’d kept doing it. She thought that was some sort of stamp of approval that they were ignoring her. Not meddling in her business.

She dealt with gangs and crime families all of the time, so she recognized their names. Would have known even just from her time in Gotham. There were a few well known ones. The Falcones. The many Triads, of course. The Malones.

It was just a coincidence that she’d been dealing with the Malones the night before a training session at the mountain. The head of the rather well-known, albeit new, Russian crime family was some elusive brute of a man named Matches, his son the boy whose identity Robin had assumed for their Juvie infiltration shortly after the crime heir had first come onto the scene. There were also other members of the family, a woman only known as Anna, two other boys called Jenson and Alvin, minor characters who hadn’t yet accrued the same level of fame as Matches and Robbie.

She still wasn’t exactly sure what kind of following or type of empire the two of them had amassed, to be honest. She just knew that in every other one of her interrogations, the names Matches and Robbie would come up and press the criminals into silence. They had something on everyone, fingers in every dish of the criminal industry, but at the same time, she couldn’t find anything on them. For as dirty as they were, they were also one hundred percent legally and for all intents and purposes clean.

She’d been venting to Wally about it, half-collapsed on the couch, her face pressed against his leg as he ran his still-gloved hand over her hair. She wore her usual workout clothes, of course, but Wally, seeing as his powers tended to burn off anything that wasn’t his specially-designed suit, was in his uniform.

Conner and M’gann were conversing in not-so-low tones in the kitchen, where Robin had spread out a plethora of papers over the free counter space in anticipation of . . . well, something. She could never tell these days. Sometimes it was Gotham things. Sometimes it was team things. Sometimes it was even League things. (And wasn’t that the surprise of a lifetime, when Robin had offhanded mentioned one day that he needed to update the Watchtower’s servers, because apparently he’d been the one to help Batman design it back when he was ten or eleven.) He was muttering under his breath about something, clearly intimately focused on whatever he was working on, Kaldur leafing through a few of his discarded papers like the considerate soul that he was. (Though they both knew that Robin was going to go over them again, the paranoid bat that he was.)

Robin had been so intently focused on what he was working on that she hadn’t thought he’d be paying attention to her conversation with Wally. And maybe the point was that he wasn’t, she would later realize, and that was the importance of it, what made her realize what she later came to realize.

“–and his kid? Just as hard to find. Not that I’d target him. He’s like, just a kid. But still!” Artemis had lifted her head in exasperation, intending to find sympathy in her boyfriend’s eyes (or a slight crinkling of his eyes in a way that foreshadows laughter at her expense. . . . it was coin toss at this point). “Robbie sh–”

Maybe it was the way she’d been a bit out of breath after pressing her face into Wally’s leg, causing her voice to hitch on the name the slightest bit in a way that might would suggest emphasis. Or the way that Robin had been so deep into paperwork that he hadn’t been in his right mind. Or how tired the kid was after who knew how many sleepless nights. It could have been nothing or everything.

But Artemis caught the way that Robin’s entire self had just . . . changed. Completely and wholly. He was an entirely new person. Pure Gothamite trapped in an iron cage of skin. His posture shifted, became meaner, tougher, his voice twisted into a old, familiar accent, his face transformed into a snarl as he shot a glare in Artemis’s direction that she swore she could feel through the domino mask.

“Whasit t’ya?” Robin– Robbie?–snarled, his features almost unrecognizeable but also . . . not? Because she could faintly remember how Robin as Robbie Malone had looked, and this expression stood out ot her far more than the different features, and there was still something distinctly Robin-Robbie-something else that she had seen both times. And Robin still had that something.

Artemis’s mind blanked for a second, but Wally had spun around in surprise, and Kaldur, Conner, and M’gann had all looked up in confusion.

Robin had seemed just as confused as the Team for a moment, before a flash of (terror? Artemis couldn’t tell) passed over his face, and he . . . morphed, tranformed? (again, Artemis didn’t really know) back into the Robin that they all knew. “I, uh–” His domino eyes had flown wide open in realization.

“What the heck was that?” Wally asked, choosing to voice exactly what the others were all thinking.

Robin blinked. And Artemis suddenly felt like a complete idiot. “Wait, you’re not actually–”

He’d literally told them his name.

Robin. Robbie. It wasn’t much of a leap. She’d just thought it was joke for his undercover name, at first, to have it be so similar to his superhero name. Something that an eight year old Robin probably would have gotten a kick out of, she thought. And then at Juvie, he’d not only gained a reputation in less than a day, but Artemis realized that Robbie Malone had only started showing up on the crime scene a week before Robin went undercover. The night after they got their mission.

“No! No! Of course not,” Robin protested, his hands flying up in defense. The kitchen stool wobbled a little with how frantic the motion was.

Not to mention the cursing in Russian. A dad who wasn’t Batman, a complicated relationship with a mother/aunt figure who could very possibly be Anna. His two cousins, Stray and “J” which she now realized were probably Alvin and Jenson.

If Batman found an eight year old Robbie being mixed up with the mob, it wasn’t that much of a leap to assume that he’d taken the kid in to keep him from a life of crime. The only problem was that Robbie was still considered active. His name was certainly still known on the streets. And Robin was a hero, right?

“Robin, you literally just responded to the name,” Artemis argued, sitting up now with the full force of her revelation backing her up. “And you went undercover as him, remember? Not that hard to do if you actually are Robbie Malone.”

Wally grinned. “This is great,” he laughed, his head knocking back against the couch cushion.

Artemis looked over at him. “I’m not joking,” she frowned as she realized her boyfriend wasn’t taking her seriously.

Robin rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure, Artemis. In my downtime between high school, vigilantism, leading this team, the League–” he listed off before huffing. “Sure, I’ve also got time to be an enforcer for the fourth most influential crime family in Gotham.”

“Then what do you call that whole–” Artemis waved her hand in Robin’s direction, flustered. “–shtick you did earlier?” she questioned.

Kaldur looked over at Robin with interest, even as Wally re-evaluated everything he knew about his best friend, which wasn’t that much, he knew, even though he knew it was far more than anyone else on the team knew. It was possible. . . the speedster thought.

Robin caught Wally’s re-appraisal and raised an eyebrow behind his mask in his best friend’s direction. “You aren’t seriously considering this, are you?”

Wally shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe? You did pull off Robbie Malone really well,” he mused. He pulled up both hands and used his pointer and thumb fingers to frame Robin’s face in a distant recollection of the day that Robin had first become Robbie Malone in front of the team so long ago. “I could see it,” he hummed. “You did look enough like him to fool all of juvie,” he reminded them.

“And Robbie is still an active Malone,” Artemis inputted, not missing the opportunity to have someone back her up.

“You did scare off those boys,” M’gann remembered, “with your reputation,” earning Robin a satisfied smirk from Artemis. He sighed exasperatedly.

“Robbie’s just an act, you guys. In fact,” he decided, thinking he would take advantage of the situation to get Artemis off of the Malones’ backs so they could gather information on the underworld more effectively again without her meddling, “the whole Malone family is an act,” he finished smugly.

Artemis furrowed her brows. “What?”

“An act?” M’gann questioned.

Robin nodded. “Yep. B thought a good way to get information in the criminal underworld would be for me to keep up the Robbie Malone character after Juvie,” he explained.

And, oh. Okay. That sort of made sense, Artemis thought. Robbie became Robin to get out of the criminal world, but during their stint in Juvie, Batman had Robin/Robbie start working for his family so they could have leverage for their mission, then keep up the character to get more information on criminals.

“So you’re not actually a criminal,” Artemis tried to clarify.

“Ehh–” Robin shrugged. “I mean, technically as a vigilante–” he grinned, but Artemis scoffed and cut him off with a glare. He sighed. “You’re no fun. No, Artemis,” he said, holding one pal up like he was taking an oath, “I promise that I am not a criminal except for the fact that I am a vigilante and secretly undercover as a member of the Malone crime family. Except for the fact that I committed identity theft,” he added after a moment of thought.

She narrowed her eyes at that. “Gee, thanks for telling me after I spent two weeks trying to track your stupid butt down.” Yeah right. She didn’t believe for one second that Robin wasn’t actually Robbie Malone. It all matched up too perfectly. The Russian. The look. Juvie. The family. The timeline.

“You’re welcome,” he smirked, not realizing that Artemis had already come to a conclusion on who she thought he was. That she thought he was actually Robbie Malone behind the mask of Robin.

“So, do you do that often?” Wally spoke up, and Robin looked his way.

His brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

Wally waved his hands around before settling his arm back behind Artemis’s head on the couch cushion. “The whole undercover thing. You switched to Robbie pretty quickly,” he explained.

“Oh.” Robin thought for a second. He didn’t think that he did, but he supposed that he did have a handful of identities that he switched between. Dick Grayson with his family. Richard Grayson-Wayne for school. Richie Wayne for galas. Robin for criminal and other heroes. For his parents. Robbie Malone for Juvie and criminals. His yet-unnamed identity for his secret excursions with Selena. Not to mention the several other minor variations of characters he would often slip into if Bruce needed him for some other sort of undercover work. John. Rick. Nathan. (names to remember his family by, it made it easier to remember the names, the people) “Hmm. I guess so,” he conceded, though it sort of made him uncomfortable to think of it as going undercover. Because it didn’t quite feel like being undercover. It was performing. He was someone else. Pulling on another skin, flipping over another part of his brain or personality. They were all . . . him. He wasn’t becoming someone else, not quite. He was still Dick, underneath all of them, wasn’t he? Because if he wasn’t, didn’t that make him a liar?

“And the rest of the Malones? How’d you get them to go along with it?” Wally asked, his brow furrowed. “Surely they’d notice if another son just sort of. . . popped up a couple of years ago,” he reasoned, and Artemis turned toward in in expectation and . . . was that satisfaction? What did she think she knew, Robin wondered.

And, crap. What was Wally thinking? Because his best friend knew about Batman not being Robin’s father (he was very adamant about that fact, a sort of anger that could not be faked rising when Wally had asked him about it. He knew his best friend would never disbelieve him on that front.). He also knew that “Jay” (now known to Wally as Bluejay after Dick told him about the Halloween debacle) was Robin’s little brother. And that he had a pseudo-brother-cousin in Stray, Catwoman’s foster son. And that Catwoman and Bruce were . . . involved together. He knew the most about this entire situation.

Which also meant that he sort of knew nothing at all? Because did he think that Robin bribed the Malones and everything else that he’d told Wally was true, or did he think that Robin was lying and was actually a Malone? Which was the least harmful? Most truthful? Because to an extent, everything was true and everything was a lie.

He didn’t want to hurt his best friend.

Could he tell them the truth, that the entire Malone family was a front? But would that put Jay and Bruce and Alfred and Tim and Selena at risk if they connected the dots about the few hints of Robin’s family and the Malones together.

Or could he let them think that he was actually Robbie Malone? Put them that much further from his family’s real identities if they thought they were someone else.

Because, technically, they were the Malones. And wouldn’t this let him talk about his family all the more often, get to share his favorite part of his life with the team? Sure, he couldn’t include Bruce as Matches. But that was such a minor detail, and they already knew Batman. This way he could talk about B as his fake-dad and share that part of his life with them.

Wait. This was a great idea. He should just run with it, he thought.

“They don’t know,” he quickly covered up. “They don’t know that I’m Robin, just that I didn’t want in until a few years ago. But I still love them, so B and I worked out a deal,” he reasoned. “We’re the good side of crime, I guess you could say,” he said, chuckling a little at the reference to their vigilantism.

“‘J’-” Wally began.

“Matches, Jenson, Alvin, Anna. Grandpa Fred,” he added as an afterthought. “They’re my family,” he affirmed, a small smile warming his heart. He looked over at Wally with a promise of as much of an explanation that he could give, and he knew his best friend would forgive him.

Kaldur laid a hand on Robin’s shoulder. “Thank you for sharing this part of your life with us, Robin,” he said.

“Yeah,” Artemis agreed, something like understanding burning in her eyes. “Sorry we found out this way,” she said, but really she was saying, ‘I get it.’

And maybe Robin felt a little bit guilty when she looked at him like that. Like this was something they shared when he’d half-lied to all of their faces.

But maybe he didn’t regret it, if it meant that they could know his family and how important they were to him.

Yeah, maybe he didn’t regret it at all.