Title: Enchantments and Illusions
By: Xmarksthespot
Disclaimer: I don't own YJ
Note: Truthfully, I'm not a Chalant fan. It's not that I have anything against the characters, it's just not my OTP. With that said, I'm not sure if my plot is original or repetitive, as I've only read one or two chalant fics on this site. However, I hope you enjoy it because I definitely enjoyed writing this, despite it not being my norm. Characters may be OOC.
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"Happy Birthday, Robin!"
It is mid-June when Robin celebrates his birthday with the team, and he assumes that the next time they celebrate it, it will take place on a different day, in a different month. He knows how cautious his mentor is with their secret identities, but even the Bat couldn't deny his adoptive son a birthday party with his closest friends.
And so, three months after his actual birthday, Robin finds himself at the mountain, scurrying through balloons of various sizes, and buried in a plethora of presents – not all of them are from Bruce, surprisingly.
He does what Bruce and Alfred teaches him to do, behaving like a good party host, and attends to a crowd of his friends and their mentors for a few minutes at a time, before making his way to the next group of colleagues.
His chats with them, however, contrasts that of the conversations he has at Bruce's parties – they are not fake and he genuinely laughs at their jokes. He thanks them for coming, and once more for the gifts, if they brought any, which most of them have.
Wally doesn't bring a gift, but that's only because he's one of the two people on his team that knows of Robin's secret identity, and had given the Boy Wonder his birthday present on his actual day of birth: the first day of Spring.
Zatanna is the second person to know who Robin really is, and he's still in disbelief that Batman agreed on revealing their identities so easily. He guesses that it was due to one of the three choices: that Bruce finally saw how mature he was, especially with his relationship with the magician, or that it had something to do with the promise he made to Zatara, and this would be a better way to take care of her, with her knowing who they were. The third option, of course, would be Alfred.
Robin doesn't realize that she is the last person to give him a gift until later that night, when the party crowd begins to dissipate, and all there's left are its inhabitants. Even Wally and Artemis leave early, due to the high school juniors having exams the next day.
But both he and Zatanna had gone out to dinner on his actual birthday, and so to Robin, that was enough of a present from her. It wasn't until she lures him away from cleaning duty, telling M'gann to leave the mess and that she could fix it up with a quick spell later on, that Robin begins to wonder what exactly she has planned for him.
"If you want your birthday present," she whispers in his ear, "then I'm afraid I'm going to have to kidnap you."
Her words are enough to leash him and start a game of Follow the Leader.
He asks her if sparring was her idea of fun, because she takes him into the training room. She laughs, but Robin still makes up at least three different combat moves in his head that ends with his lips planted on hers. He is in the middle of strategizing the fourth move when Zatanna shuts the door behind them.
She smiles gleefully, and he can tell she had been anticipating this moment all day. Her movements are graceful when she walks up to him, and her touch is soft when she reaches for his face, slowly taking off his sunglasses. His bright blue eyes pull the corner of her lips once more.
He grins cheekily, and nods his head to the side with a curious expression. "Is this the part where we make out, Zee, cause I gotta disable the cameras first – you know that," he says with amusement in his voice.
The girl lets out a giggle as she folds the sides of the sunglasses, and tucks it into his pocket. "Actually, I have something even better in mind," she says before turning her back to him, and steps to the end of the room, leaving him standing in its center.
Dick raises an eyebrow, but obeys when she signals for him to stay in his spot.
"This is for you, Dick," Zatanna says, dropping her arms to her sides. "For helping me through the hard times, especially after what happened to my dad, I thought I'd return the favour. I know how important family is to you, after all."
Before the boy questions her once more, he sees the girl in front of him close her eyes, and begin to wave her arms. It isn't how she normally uses them whenever she casts a spell, as she opts to hold her arm out straight, but in this case, with each fluid movement, golden swirls of bright light trails her arms. It is as if her hands were shooting stars, with its sparkling tail following behind, until she is almost blinded from his sight; Dick watches, spellbound.
She lifts her hands up above her head, the glitter circling her, and then to the sides, bringing them together immediately after. Like a dance, each move is fluid and consecutive, and it's quite clear that whatever it is that Zatanna is doing, whatever spell she is conjuring, it is powerful, and beyond what the team is used to.
Finally, her eyelids flutter open, and her pale pink lips curve into a faint smile. She whispers her spell, because it's become a game between the two of them ever since her permanent addition to the team. Zatanna would give her usual backwards speech, and Robin would try to guess what words she was actually saying. And so, to tease him, she became accustomed to whispering her spells, so that he could not hear her, and this includes the strong ones that usually require a much more vocal chant. It helps considering they are supposed to be covert.
Her spell is long, much lengthier than usual. She casts the soundless spell, and despite its length, and heavy concentration, she focuses her sight only on Dick. She stares into his entranced eyes, cherishing the way he looks at her.
An impish grin to his face, the sparkle in his eyes with a hint of inquisitiveness, Dick parts his lips slightly as he watches the glow around her swirl throughout the entire training room.
Zatanna is pleased at the results, and the flutter in her heart begins to calm itself down as she had originally been worried her new charm would not work for him.
There is a flash of bright light that covers the walls like wallpaper. And although there is no artist, aside from the magician herself, a scene is painted, starting from the floors of the training room, making its way towards the ceiling. It appears as if it is raining upside down, droplets at a time that turns the bright light into bolder colours.
Dick turns a full three-sixty, and he continues to wonder what it was that Zatanna has done. He can see stripes of red appear, some whites and yellows as well. Then, before he notices a patch of pink nearby, a whiff of cinnamon reaches his nostrils, tugging at his nose until he follows it. He is taken to the corner of the room, but he doesn't realize he's approaching the walls because the image in front of him takes the form of a never ending dirt road. The cinnamon grows stronger, the air around him warmer.
Before he realizes it, the cinnamon is overtaken by a sweeter scent of caramel, which melts and swirls in an old contraption that is unravelled in front of him. Out of nowhere, a spoon appears and scoops a cupful of the golden liquid, drizzling it atop of ruby-red and jade-green apples.
Dick is tempted to reach for one, but before he could grab hold of the candied fruit, he hears the pitter-patter of familiarity. He turns and on the opposite side of the room, masked in a sunset-yellow glow are beads of corn, expanding in size and ready to be buttered. Next to it, clouds of baby pinks and blues are twirled onto a cone, ready to evaporate the moment it is bitten into.
He is still somewhat shocked at the sight, too surprised to even notice that Zatanna has gone behind the scenes, still waving her arms back and forth for the images to develop and moving her lips to create new masterpieces.
Suddenly, the sides of the room begin to expand in size, and black dots scatter across the floor. But the dots start to spin and grow, both in width and in height as it reaches for the ceiling. With it comes a blanket of dominantly red, but with some whites and blacks as well, striping the cloths in a consistent pattern.
In front of the tents – some opened, some closed, and some adorned with decorative beads – grow old wooden signs with golden cursive writing scrawled on them: fortune teller, illusionist, fire-eater, contortionist.
The last one to appear draws him in faster than any other booth.
Acrobats.
Dick doesn't realize that the images are tangible until he unknowingly reaches out for the tent's entrance, and a rush of nostalgia swims through his veins as the material is kept in between his fingers, his thumb grazing over the candy-cane striped cotton that was once so easily pulled aside in order for him to enter.
Zatanna had built him a circus, he realizes.
His circus.
All he sees inside is a dim yellow light, focusing its attention on the center of the room where a family of three are stretching and going over their routine for the night. He watches them contently, unable to hear what it was that the young boy said, but the rhythm of his heartbeats quicken when the parents laugh. Except that their laughter isn't the same as he remembered them to be, and it is in that moment that Dick remembers he is watching a spell.
It surprisingly doesn't bother him, however.
He takes a step forward, just to get a better view of the trio. Suddenly, the parents turn and face him, and Dick isn't sure what to do. That is, until they smile and wave at him, and he grins as well. He pulls his arm up and waves to them, in an all too familiar greeting.
The young boy stays behind, cartwheeling in circles as his mother and father walk towards Dick. The man, muscular in built, and waves of dark hair, ruffles his hand through Dick's hair, startling him. He is equally alarmed when a softer hand touches his shoulder – the hands of the woman smiling at him.
"Happy belated birthday, son," the man says, in a deep nurturing voice. It isn't that of his own father's voice, but it is enough to add some weight into Dick's throat and to the pit of his stomach.
"We're proud of you, our baby Robin," says the woman, who kneels down and pulls him into her arms.
Dick remains still, even when he feels another set of arms encircle them – the man's arms – and it's when he feels them pulling away that he lifts his own arms to hold them back.
Tears are easily drawn out from cerulean blue eyes, but his parents don't question them. They keep him in their arms until he is ready to let them go, and he doesn't do so until some moments later, when he murmurs a soft, "I missed you, mom and dad."
They only smile in return and their features remind him of the photographs he has of them at home. And within an instant, he is outside of their tent. The reds and whites begin to swirl into a small black hole and glittering crystals of gold and silver accompanies the illusions' departure.
The booths fade out into the background, and another gust of stardust washes the remnants of the spell away into nothingness.
When Dick looks up, all there's left is the training room, and a magician.
She looks exhausted, he could tell, just from her heavy breathing. He catches her before she falls onto the floor, and holds her close to him.
Dick is grinning all the way through, feeling just as content as he was moments ago, bewildered that for once, at the thought of his parents, no unsightly memory resurfaced, but rather, every cherishing fragment from his childhood is collected in his heart.
He asks Zatanna if she is okay, and when she confirms that she will be, after a bit of rest, he wraps his arms around her.
Dick is a talker, a conversationalist, and is usually the one joking throughout the majority of their dates. But on that night, he holds the dark haired girl in his arms without breathing a sound, because her enchanting spell has left him speechless.
He knows for a fact though, that despite his lack of words, she understands how much he's already saying.
.
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A/N: Zatanna creates these illusions based on what she's learned from Dick and saw in his photographs of his parents and his circus, but everything she makes isn't an exact replica since she can only get so much information from him. She's never heard his parents' voices either, so again, she has to create them based on what Dick's told her. I'm skeptical as to whether her character can actually do something like this, or how much strength and energy it would require, but I wanted to make something magical between the two.
Please review :)