Chapter Text
Richard John Grayson has always been aware he is a charming kid. It’s a talent, he thinks, knowing exactly how to smile and talk to other people to get them to like him or to do things for him. It was easier as a smaller child, with big eyes and the innocence associated with his age, but as the years pass, he accommodates to his age and finds other ways to make people soften to him.
He never does it to his parents or his family in the circus, he has never needed it to make them love him. Their love is a given.
Their love is a constant that he has never doubted.
The people that come to see them are different. Some of them are nice, that’s true, but most of them see his family with disdain and only mildly morbid curiosity. Dick has taken their attitude as a challenge to entertain himself when he is bored, it’s difficult but not impossible to make them like him and buy him things on the stands under the watchful gaze of his family. It doesn’t always work, but he learns new things always.
His first twelve years are full of bright memories and laughter. Even when his family goes through rough patches, he keeps feeling safe with them.
His first twelve years taste like freedom, love, and adventure. His family, in his eyes, never make a single mistake raising him, apart from their first and last one. Coming to Gotham.
***
Gotham is supposed to be a quick stop. It’s not planned on their itinerary and it’s a rushed and impulsive decision, only driven by the promise of money from the elite people from the city who wants to watch them perform. At that point, they just had been in the United States for just a couple of months and planning to tour the country for longer than they have ever stayed in one nation.
Dick peaks through the window of their trailer when they begin to enter the city. They leave behind bright lights and glamorous establishments and enter unknown territory.
His first impression of the city is that is definitely not safe. Gotham is full of shadows and trash, and even the light of the morning looks gloomy there. The streets are full of graffiti and the people on the sidewalk look cold.
Dick has been multiply times on risky cities, but none of them reek of danger like Gotham. Or maybe he is wrong and it’s just his mind playing tricks on him thanks to the common knowledge that Gotham is bad news. Whatever is the case, Dick can’t wait to leave the city behind already,
“Cute, uh?” his mom’s voice startles him.
Dick turns to see his mom smiling jokingly at him. Her dark hair is on a loose ponytail over her shoulder and her blue eyes -the same shade he has- softens when he doesn’t immediately answer.
Dick shuffles on his place for a moment and lets the curtains of the window fall from his hand.
“I don’t like this place,” he tells her quietly, not wanting to get the attention from the others, “I have a bad feeling.”
His mom sighs a little tiredly and draws him close, one hand on his shoulder and another on his hair, letting him hide his face on her sweater. She was one of the few people in the circus that didn’t want to stop in Gotham.
“I don’t like it either,” she confesses in a whisper, “but we’re just going to be here for a short time, will you be strong for me, my little Robin?”
Dick relaxes on her hold and closes his eyes.
He nods. She kisses the crown of his head.
“Before you know it, we’re going to be on our way, I promise,” she tells him.
Dick hugs her and lets his mom’s smell wash over him. She smells like the dry lavender she crushes between her clothes with a scent of honey from her homemade shampoo and a hint of the smell of the body wash his dad uses. She smells familiar.
She smells like home.
***
A tiny child takes a photo with him the night of their first show. He has bright blue eyes that look up at him with wonder and parents that smack his hands when the tiny child tries to hug them. Dick hugs the toddler and wishes that people who don’t like children would stop having them in the first place.
An hour later, the only thing he can remember is the blood of his parents on the floor. Their bones crack at the impact, their bodies fall in strange positions like broken dolls. Dick smells the metallic odor of blood almost immediately and gags.
(He heard the threats against the circus. He saw the wire snap just before the fall. He didn’t warn his parents. He let them die.)
He can’t remember what was the last thing his parents told him but just that morning his mom kissed his forehead as good morning and his dad tousled his hair. Just that morning he sat beside his other family and ate sandwiches bought on a shady establishment and laughed with them. Just that morning he spent an hour petting Zitka.
Dick breaks into pieces that night. What he has left of family -the circus- takes him away from the scene and hugs him until he cries himself sick in their arms.
He wishes the night would end just that way. A broken child in the care of people who are going to try to put him together with love and who are going to take him away from Gotham in the morning.
The night doesn’t end that way.
Police come to them while he is crying, some of them are sympathetic but Dick can tell just by their body they don’t care much.
Dick is still trying to grasp English. He’s not from the country and he’s learned a lot of languages, but English is not one he’s still comfortable with.
Dick doesn’t make an effort to understand them, placing his trust in his left family to handle things.
(It’s a mistake. Everything that can go wrong that night goes wrong.)
***
His family cries when he gets taken away for Social Services.
“There’s nothing we can do,” they say.
Later, It makes Dick wonder if they even tried and if, maybe, they didn’t care about Dick as much as he cared about them.
He is forced to say goodbye to everyone and to follow a tall woman that introduces herself as his caseworker. He doesn’t understand her much, but the hostility on her body and her fake smile tells him enough to know she is not going to help him.
He lefts everything he knows with a couple of pictures and a change of clothes on a ratty backpack that he has.
He is forced to leave the warmth of the circus for the scary unknown that Gotham is.
***
Richard John Grayson has always been a charming kid, but Gotham is full of harsher and colder people than he has ever met. On the system his charm falls flat, they’re a tough audience and he is still reeling from his parents’ deaths.
He gets chewed up and spitted out again and again. He gets beaten up on his short stance on the juvenile service system when he fails to get a room in another place and gets more hurt once he gets placed in a Catholic orphanage, where they see him as less for not looking like them and his difficulties understanding English. He has never learned a language as fast as he does so he can survive and know what is going on.
Dick has grown up with love and support, he knows he is soft and caring just like his parents wanted him to be. He’s good at being likable to soft people. Nothing of that is going to help him to survive to Gotham.
He does what he best does. He adapts.
He’s two entire months on the system, and it’s enough for him to twist onto something he’s sure his parents wouldn’t like. His smiles turn sharp, the way he gets things change for tactics less savory. He learns to make others cry with words, he perfects the look of credible innocence when he steals food from the kitchen, and learns to cry at command when the adults running the place scold him when he does something they don’t like. He learns when it’s time to back down and to bite his tongue at scatting comments at his persona.
He learns how long he can disappear before they notice and where he can hide. He learns to throw the blame on someone else.
Dick Grayson was broken when he was thrown on the system, and now he has put his pieces together in the wrong places. He still feels frail, but in Gotham, it seems there’s no time to heal.
Gotham takes the happy child he was and spits him on something twisted.
***
Bruce Wayne comes to the orphanage after a while.
Dick just knows his name because a nun whispers it as they hurry him to a room to prepared him. It seems like he is a local celebrity or something, but he is not even from the States, so how should he know about him?
“But why does he want to talk to me?” he asks softly to the nicer nun he knows in the room, sister Amanda.
He sits still in his place while another nun brushes aggressively his hair -they have slapped him for moving too much in the past, and he would prefer to talk with the guy without a blooming bruise on his face- and another draws nicer clothes from a closet on the room.
Sister Amanda is going through some papers on her hands at his side.
“I dunno,” she tells him on a flat tone without raising her head, “but If we are lucky enough, he will take you out of our hair, God knows we need less mouths to feed.”
Dick hums. The nun working on his hair is getting frustrated and pulling his hair too much, it hurts. He knows better to whine, though.
“Change onto this.” The nun in the closet throws clothes at him.
The one on his hair inspects him with a frown and raises a hand to put it on his cheek to erase what he supposes it’s a dirt spot. Then she buries painfully her nails on his cheek.
“Say or do something wrong and you’ll regret it,” she hisses at him.
Dick doesn’t doubt her. He has met nuns before, gentler women that used to pinch his cheeks and coo at him when he was smaller. Gotham’s nuns -at least the ones running the orphanage- are rougher, a little violent, and believers that hitting and inflicting pain are valid parenting tactics.
Dick avoids her gaze and nods.
***
After changing clothes Dick is walked to the only room that looks decent on the building. It’s a big room with soft-looking couches and neatly looking shelves full of books, trinkets, and some candles and religious imagery. It has a nice coffee table. The other kids had told him that the room is the only warm one on the winter and the place where the nuns hide candies. The nuns call it the “break room” and neither Dick nor the other kids are allowed inside it.
Bruce Wayne smiles when Dick comes in.
Dick watches him warily while he speaks with Sister Amanda. He has a vapid expression on his face and overall looks like he’s not very bright, but when he gazes at him his eyes freeze him on the spot. His eyes don’t match his face nor his corporal language. They’re a darker shade of blue than his own and have a sharpness that softens when he sees him.
“…be okay,” Mister Wayne finishes saying to Sister Amanda, breaking eye contact with him to face her better.
Sister Amanda smiles back at him and puts a hand on Dick’s shoulder, tightening her grip to squeeze him painfully. It’s a threat that, judging by the way Mister Wayne’s eyes darken, doesn’t go unnoticed nor welcome.
“We’ll be close if you need us,” she says to the man before turning to Dick. “Be nice, Richard.”
And with that, she gets out of the room, letting them alone.
Dick sits on one end of the couch carefully and watches the apparition of a spark of hesitation on the older man’s eyes when he imitates the movement at the other side of the couch. Mister Wayne shifts in his place stiffly, all the smoothness from before gone. It makes Dick want to laugh at the awkwardness of the man.
Dick summons a tentative smile at Mister Wayne.
“Hi,” he tells the man.
Somehow, the moment feels important. Life-changing. The same way his parent’s fall felt at the moment but without the horror, the shock or the blood.
The room’s quiet, it smells a little bit like dust and cheap scent candles.
Mister Wayne smiles back at him, a little stiff at the corners of his mouth.
“Hello, Richard, right?” he asks.
Dick bites his tongue, so he doesn’t correct him, and nods.
Outside, far away from the orphanage -without his knowledge-, a butler prepares a room for an extra guest humming, a kid watches his mom lose herself on drugs, and a lonely small toddler cuts with round scissors a small section of a newspaper talking about the death of the flying Grayson.