"Robin? Robin, wake up. You're okay."
A gasp, loud and surprised, followed by frantic glances around his room. It took several seconds for Dick to realize that the weight on his bed was not his mentor nor his butler, and that he was not, in fact, in Gotham. The hand on his shoulder was too soft, the voice too feminine, and when he noticed the green hue of her skin, he realized immediately who had come to his aid this time.
"Megan."
It started with nightmares. Bloody, gruesome, long and paralyzing, gripping him with fear he hadn't felt in ages and causing him to wake up with Alfred or Megan at his side, depending on where he had slept that night. He'd be in some sort of hell, but they always seemed to end the same, his teammates dying around him and nothing he could do to stop it, and then he'd abruptly be woken up.
He hated being this weak, this fragile, this thoughtful; he spend hours on his computer going over the report that Megan had logged, meant to be for archival information, berating himself and trying to figure out what he could have done right to save the operation. He knew it was futile - the whole thing had been conjured up in Megan's mind, and none of them were meant to live. It was just how it happened. He'd worked with Raven before back in Jump, and he knew how easily powers effected by emotion could take over and change the game faster than even Wally himself could.
And, sometimes, all it took was to love someone as much as Megan loved her team to unlock a power she hadn't known was so strong.
"Do you want to talk about -"
"No." the word was solid, harsh, the boy's attempt at being intimidating to the sixteen-year-old.
"Robin..."
He didn't have any superpowers or extra abilities; he was just Dick Grayson and he couldn't even protect his own team from an enemy attack. Maybe he'd gotten too soft from being under Batman's wing; maybe he hadn't been trained properly, but damn it this was his job, to save lives, and if he couldn't even save his team, why was he doing it at all?
"Please, Megan," he tried, his back curling, turning into himself and pulling a hand through his hair. He looked up; it was dark in his room, but the light to his adjoining bathroom was on and the door was open, flooding a soft light onto the floor and their faces. She hadn't moved from her spot on his bed, legs crossed and eyebrows knitted together, concern on her face.
"Robin..." She repeated his name, weak and soft. Out of anyone, she would be the one person to understand what he was going through, and Robin knew this. If she was Canary, it would be different. If she was Artemis, it would be different. "If there's anything I've learned from Superboy... it's that it's not good to keep things bottled up. It'll just hurt more later."
But she wasn't. She was too soft and too forgiving, too compassionate to be Black Canary or Artemis, too domestic and too strong all at once.
"You're only thirteen," she murmured, a hand reaching up to smooth down his hair. Dick tried, he really did, trying not to crumple and break in front of one of his teammates, but it wasn't working with her; he could feel his lip begin to quiver, shoulders shaking. He never was this way around Artemis, or Raven, or even Starfire. "You don't have to act tough. Out there, you're Robin," she said, and it was then that Dick realized why the girl had such a lasting effect on him: she reminded him too much of his mother, the only woman who had the ability and enough of his trust for him to break down in front of.
"Out there... you're a hero. You have to be strong. But you're not a hero all the time," she said. He looked up, gazing at the girl through watering eyes, and he wished he hadn't; Her eyebrows were still knitted, her hand still smoothing his hair, head tilted a little to the side. "You want to get stronger, right? To be the leader?" A croaked noise, not even a word, but Megan took it as an agreement.
"Sometimes... you have to be weak before you can get stronger, Robin."
He doubled forward, covering his face with his hands, and sobbed.