LOSS
It was a cold, blustery evening as Barbara climbed the hill behind Wayne Manor, tugging her jacket tightly around her as she leaned against the wind. It was almost dusk and the sky was a bleak, dull gray—typical November weather in Gotham City. The color of the estate grounds, normally a bright, vibrant green, seemed muted somehow; faded. The trees broke the horizon line, their branches silhouetted against the sky like dark, outstretched arms, already stripped of their leaves. Some might have considered the sight depressing, even eerie, but Barbara thought there was a sort of dark beauty in it.
With the kind of life she led, she had to make herself find beauty in darkness. Unfortunately, it was a little harder to do that nowadays.
Another gust of wind swept over her, filled with the cold bite of oncoming winter, tousling the long strands of her bright red hair. She could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks and knew they were probably ridiculously flushed from the cold. When she'd first started patrolling with Dick, he used to tease her about her ready blushes. You know your cheeks are the same color as your hair right now, Babs. Are you cold or just happy to see me?
They'd been just kids then, still so young and naive, still believing that they alone could purge all the evil in the world.
Back then, of course, Barbara had never thought of herself as a child. She had always been too rational to get caught up in childish games, like make-believe. As a little girl, while her friends had played in their rooms pretending to be princesses or fairies, Barbara would be curled up with a book, trying to understand the world for what it really was.
Now Barbara knew she hadn't avoided the game of make-believe after all. She'd just dressed up like a bat instead of a princess, patrolling the streets and alleys out of the belief that she could bring light to the shadows. She had seen the world in those extremes—light and dark, black and white, right and wrong. It turned out that had been the biggest game of pretend of all.
Because now Barbara was standing in the place where she had first realized that everything she thought she'd understood about the world had been wrong—in front of a small, simple gravestone, marking the place where a young boy had been buried. His name was etched into the stone in plain lettering. But it was also etched into her mind, an image that would be seared into her mind for the rest of her life. Jason. She still couldn't even hear it uttered without a jolt of shock and pain coursing through her, as if she had been just been doused in icy water.
It had been two years. Two years since their world had been shattered. Two years since their family had been broken. Two years since they had each been irreparably changed and scarred in a way that no time would heal.
Barbara had thought she had known darkness. She thought she had known evil. She had known nothing.
The wind started to pick up again, sweeping over the little hill and whistling through the gravestones, freezing the tears that had started to stain her cheeks. She almost didn't hear him as he came up beside her, his footsteps muted on the soft, grassy ground. But she felt his hand grasp hers where it hung limply at her side, and it was impossibly warm, even in the face of the icy wind. That was no surprise, though. Dick Grayson was always warm.
She turned, looking up into his face. His eyes were fixed on her; those bright, beautiful blue eyes that could tell her everything she needed to hear without saying a word. He reached up with his other hand and gently brushed her tears away with his thumb. Barbara closed her eyes, leaning into his touch, and somehow, even though her throat was still constricted painfully and more tears were pooling in the corner of her eyes, she felt herself smile a little.
"You know your cheeks are the same color as your hair, Babs," Dick was saying, and Barbara felt her smile grow wider. "Are you cold or just happy to see me?"
Barbara leaned up and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek. "I'm just happy to see you," she said quietly. He smiled back at her, small and just a little sad, as they turned back to the dark grey stone.
Barbara could feel Jason's presence in the space before them, the way she always could when she visited this place, this hallowed ground. She felt it almost as tangibly as she felt the crisp night air, and as Dick's hand tightened around her own she knew that he could, too. She could still hear Jason's laugh, that taunting, mischievous tone in his voice. A voice that would forever exist in her memory as that of a boy—a child, really—because now she'd never have a chance to hear it grow into a man's.
Barbara glanced over at Dick, her own grief momentarily swayed by concern for him. She tried to visit the cemetery every few months, usually when she'd just finished a particularly trying case and wanted a chance to reflect. As much as the visits pained her, they strengthened her as well. Every time she left, she was more determined, more resolved; ready to return to the mission she had undertaken and give herself to it once more.
She knew that was why Bruce still kept his costume in the cave. For all their differences, she supposed that was one way in which they were frighteningly similar.
But Dick wasn't like them in that way. He had the shrine at headquarters, sure, but that was mostly for the rest of the team. She rarely caught him down there himself. Maybe because he'd never needed any extra encouragement to do his job, didn't need an extra reminder to know his purpose. He had always been the best of them at what they did. Some days it seemed like he'd been born for it. So for him, Barbara knew, the visits were only painful; they didn't offer him the same cathartic compensation.
She guessed it was because he blamed himself. It was one his qualities that both awed and exasperated her: the fact that he took responsibility for everything, even when it wasn't his burden to bear in the first place. It was something he had in common with her father, actually.
In Dick's mind, he hadn't been there enough for Jason. By the time the second Robin had taken his place on the team, Dick had just assumed leadership. At only seventeen, it was easy to see why he'd been distracted with the new duties that entailed and had struggled to adapt to the new role. He'd never shown it, of course—at least not in a way that the others could have noticed. But Barbara knew him better than the others. She knew Dick had still been working out issues of his own.
In a way, Barbara had gotten to know Jason better than he ever had. They'd both been the team rookies at the time, and that had given them a certain closeness. But despite Dick's seeming aloofness, Barbara knew he'd had a special affection for Jason, too. He'd never once considered the boy his replacement, although there had been whispers. Jason had only ever been his brother.
Dick was afraid Jason hadn't known that. Now it was too late to ever tell him. And she knew that tortured him.
Barbara could see already he was starting to slip—disappearing before her very eyes into his own dark thoughts, somehow already miles away even though he was still standing right next to her. She hated to see him like this. Dick wasn't meant for the dark. Not like Bruce. Not like her, even. The night belonged to the bats, sure. But Robins were meant for the light.
So she reached out to him, gently turning his face back to hers and calling him back. He looked into her eyes, and just like that, he was back again. She seemed to have that effect on him. It was a fact that made her insanely happy, especially in moments like this.
The sun was dipping below the horizon, and the sky was already starting to darken, fading rapidly from the world of day into the world of night. Their world. "Come on, No-Longer-A-Boy Wonder," Barbara said. "Time to go."
Dick gave her one of his crooked smiles, the one that both broke her heart and put it back together again all within the space of second. "Not so fast, Babs," he said, and then he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tightly against him with so much force it almost left her breathless. Instinctively she returned the embrace, squeezing him back with just as much intensity.
They held on to each other for what felt like an eternity but could have only been a few moments, each drawing the strength they needed from the other's arms.
As they broke apart, and the last waning rays of the sun alighted on Dick's face before it faded into black, Barbara knew that she would be okay. Even through the pain.
Because as long as she had Dick, there would always be beauty in darkness.