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When he was a young child, he was told of how his mother was born from the wind.
That it blew and it blew, until one day its gusts coalesced into the shape of an infant, one with eyes blue as the cloudless sky. The wind cradled and rocked her, carrying her off to their court. There she grew up, among her people, all of them spun and woven, beautifully, carefully, from the very fabric of the world. They passed their nights dancing and singing with each other, and spent their days causing mischief among humans. Once, while she was out exploring the world, she met his father. She loved the way he flew, and he taught her how to do so herself. When she flew above the crowds, it was as if gravity had no hold on her. The wind wrapped around and buffeted her, so that she hung suspended in it. He gave her a name to call herself by, and their performance drew audiences across the globe. After a significant enough time had passed, she decided to remain permanently with him, and left her people for good.
When Dick was born, it was with his mother’s eyes. Everyone noted how captivating they were, almost hypnotically so. Perhaps his mother’s eyes were the reason he got away with so much more than all the other children, or perhaps the entire circus had simply come to an unspoken conclusion: that mischief was his nature, and could not be contained.
They knew, of course, that Mary Grayson was not quite what one would consider normal. They knew by the way she spoke, eternally polite and with careful wording. They knew by the way the music quickened when she danced, when her presence put them under a lazy spell and made time imperceptible. They knew when her pupils seemed to flash with the burning gold of the sun, but only in photographs, or under certain lighting. They knew when she could inexplicably charm her way through anything, and when she couldn’t, when the wind would come roaring through until she had her way. The circus knew that she was not normal, but it wasn’t their place to speak of it.
So when her son’s eyes flashed the same way, and when the wind howled in harmony with his wails, they didn’t bat an eye. When he made impossible leaps, they smiled and congratulated him, and never asked how he managed to make them. When they woke up to find that their shoes had been glued to the ceiling during the night, they merely asked if he could please take them down for them, all the while his father scolded and his mother laughed.
The other children delighted in his wiles, instead of resenting him. On the off chance that one of them did become upset by the quiet awe and adoration the rest watched him with, he just gave them a grin and convinced them to love him again. Never malevolently, his mother always claimed that she wasn’t that sort, and neither was he. Everything he could do to help, he did. He just had a propensity for helping in whatever way he deemed best, or more fun.
When John and Mary fell, the wind pushing up to the tops of the tent, but unable to grasp them, he ran. They found him, hours later, his costume torn and his shoes worn through. A bright, rosy flush colored his cheeks, and his eyes shone more brilliantly than ever. He told them he had been with his family. The ones who found him, the fortune teller and the magician, made eye contact, and silently agreed not to speak of it. They took him back to Mr. Haly, who was eventually forced to hand him over to the police. After that, they didn’t see him for a long while.
Juvie Hall was built to keep in the average teenage boy. It was not built to keep in the average eight year old acrobatic prodigy. When Dick decided he had had enough of the place, he ran with the wind at his back, pressing him forward. Over and up the wall he went, and he ran with it across the rooftops of Gotham. It took him to a man in a strange, dark costume, and whispered in his ear. He remembered a man from that night at the circus, and again at the funeral, but he did not say anything then. When the man caught sight of and recognized him, however, Dick ran. At least, he tried to. As he was taking his fifth step, preparing to leap, the wind blew up through the alleyway, blocking him. Instead of continuing to run, he turned back to the man, and faced him head on. The man seemed greatly surprised, and unsure of what to do with the situation. Once he suggested Dick go back for the night, the wind returned and he ran again. If anyone had bothered to look up that night, they would have witnessed quite the sight. A strangely cloaked figure making chase after a small, barefoot boy. His laughter echoed through the night, a strange and puckish giggle.
The Batman was not the only shadowy figure he met that night. There was another, dressed even more absurdly, in liquorice-black armor, with gaudy gold accents. The wind did not push him toward this man, nor yet did it push him away. It fell back, silent, as if telling him to make a decision. Before he could do so, however, raised voices began to rouse from the street, and a woman a building over flung her window open to holler at them. The figure seemed to spook at that, and quickly absorbed into the inky blackness of night.
The darkness of the sky seemed to pervade every part of the city, and Dick yearned for the stars of the open fields, for fires and music and dancing the night away. If he closed his eyes, he felt he could almost hear a lilting tune carry through the mist. It brought to his mind images of his mother, when she sang and danced with him. He ran as fast as he could after it all through the night, but the harder he tried to follow, the more the music seemed to drift away from him, like an old and worn out memory. When the sky began to lighten, he didn’t know what to do, and so he returned to the juvie the social worker had left him at. He collected his shoes from where he had left them beside the wall, and returned to his “room.” That morning, they didn’t notice the dirt smeared across his clothes, nor the blisters on his feet.
Shortly after Bruce Wayne took him in, he was made to attend a gala. It was full of horrible people pretending to be good, but that didn’t matter to him. Whatever punishment they received for their insult to him was their own fault, and none of his concern. Instead, he spent hours playing the perfect ward. He charmed everyone who spoke to him with near immediacy, inviting ladies to dance and inquiring after gentlemen’s prospects. At some point in the night, Bruce realized he had lost track of him. He made his excuses as the foolish, new parent, and they departed from the hall. Dick was sad to leave, but Alfred placated him with milk and cookies upon his return to the manor, and so he let it go.
Alfred was good about that, knowing exactly what he wanted. Bruce had yet to figure it out, and when he asked Alfred what the secret was, Alfred looked him in the eye and told him it was quite obvious, but if he hadn’t realized it yet, he should stop trying to.
The first night at the manor, Dick disappeared into its bowels. Alfred left some bread and cheese, as well as tea with cream and honey on the counter, in case he wandered back in search of food. That morning Dick was at breakfast, and the milk and honey were completely gone. Alfred seemed to have worked it out after that, between Bruce’s account of him and his own personal experience, the conclusion was, indeed, quite obvious.
As he grew older, Dick continued to take his tea with copious amounts of cream and honey, and always favored the sweeter side of any cuisine. His sweet tooth never seemed to surprise anyone, it fit right in with his boundless energy and general mischievousness. Clark always acted mildly offended when Dick preferred the petit fours Alfred often served to a warm, fresh pie, but it was generally in good fun, and he still taught Dick to make one.
That wasn’t the only thing that remained the same as he grew older. He somehow found it in himself to become even more endlessly charming, every day rolling out of bed with more charisma. At galas and school dances he became the center of attention with a carefully timed wink and a flourishing bow. Somedays, his eyes seemed inhumanly bright, although he had long since learned to avert them in such a way that they did not catch the light. Everywhere he went, people loved him and his brilliant grins, to the point where Bruce even encouraged him to dabble in modeling, in order to maintain their cover of carefree minor celebrities.
When Bruce took his name and gave it to someone else, Dick swore he had never felt a betrayal that cut so deep. Every time he saw the new child, wearing his clothing and owning his name, he felt struck to the core. Robin hadn’t been his true name, not like the one his mother murmured to him in a strange language when they were alone, but it was still his name, and one that she called him by. He still heard her voice in his dreams, alternating between telling him to fly, and joking that he was a regular Robin Goodfellow.
When he had taken up the name in order to fight alongside Batman, it was with both of those in mind, but also along with the stories of Robin Hood his mother had told him, a man who was a pioneer in the career of vigilantism. Dick hoped to embody all of them.
Unfortunately, that was taken away from him, and while he didn’t wish to bear any ill will towards the man who had taken him in, he also couldn’t help the burning ire that filled him every time he remembered all the ways he had been slighted.
So he avoided Gotham, and hid away with the Titans in New York, or otherwise spent time working to establish himself in Bludhaven.
Some nights he grew restless, and longed for something he could not remember. On those nights, the wind would pluck at his limbs, at a faint melody would play just out of his reach. He would chase across rooftops, running, leaping, spinning through the air, not knowing why. Dick was certain that if he could one day find the source of the music, he could remember everything he had forgotten about it, every fading memory of his childhood. But it was never anything more than a far-off trill, reaching out to him, inviting him to come, to dance, to drink and be merry. He laughed as he plummeted off the next roof and towards the ground, the wind whispering mysteries of time and the world in his ear. Everywhere the wind took him, he followed, although he could not understand why.
Those nights, he would return to the tower or his apartment with flushed cheeks and golden eyes, sometimes finding that hours had passed without his knowledge, other times it was as if time had gone backwards between one moment and the next. He generally disregarded these occurrences. There were enough strange things in his life, and he had spent enough time living with this one, that it seemed best not to question it.
But if he ever stopped to consider it, really and truly, he would find that it was, as Alfred had put it so long ago, “Quite obvious.”