Characters: Dick, Artemis, Wally

Pairings: None

Summary: English wasn't Dick's first language, and Wally and Artemis seem to notice this.


The first time Wally figured out that Dick had an accent was...well...the first time he met the little bird. Wally had recently joined the Flash's side as Kid Flash and was over in Gotham for the night with the Dynamic Duo. Apparently Batman and Flash had decided that it might be a good idea for the two young heroes to socialize with each other. Well, looking back at it, Wally figured it was more likely that the Flash had pestered Batman for several weeks about their sidekicks meeting each other until Batman, to get the speedster to stop talking, eventually caved. But, whatever really. Tomato tomahto. (A.N. I am aware that saying doesn't translate well on text.)

At that point Dick had only been Robin for about a year, and he'd been under Bruce's care for slightly longer. He was hardly a fluent English speaker and his accent was incredibly thick. Wally remembers asking Robin where he was from, only for the bird to respond with, "Batman says if I tell you it could compromise my identity!"

He didn't bring the topic up until a year later when Robin was eleven. By then he had the fluency of a native speaker and, thanks to the elasticity of a child's brain, his accent had decreased significantly. It was also the time when Robin had revealed himself to Wally as Dick Grayson very much against Batman's orders. Wally, though he knew of Bruce Wayne and his contributions to society and that he was fostering a child, didn't really know much about Dick Grayson beyond that. He found video games way more interesting than current events, anyways.

That's when the question was dropped. "So...where are you from?"

Dick bit his lip and looked down before answering, "My family's from Romania but I was born in the circus so I grew up traveling all over Europe."

"Whoa, you were born in a circus?" Wally's eyes went wide. In his thirteen long years of living, he'd never met anyone from a circus before.

Dick nodded excitedly. "Yeah! Pop Haley's circus. They had an elephant named Zitka and everything! It was really cool. I did the trapeze. Well, not by myself of course. I was too young. I had my...uh..." The lights in his eyes dimmed a little as he continued, "You know, my parents. They...they did it with me."

Wally anxiously contorted his fingers on his lap. While he wasn't aware of what happened to Dick's parents or why he left the circus, he knew it must have been horrible for Dick to have had to leave his old life behind and start anew. He could always ask Barry about it later. "I'm sorry, Dick. You must miss them a lot."

Dick stared at his lap. "Yeah," he responded in a whisper.

Staring at Dick through scrunched eyebrows, Wally hesitated. Situations like this were completely out of his comfort zone and he did not know where to begin. He was from a little town outside of Central City filled with small, uncomplicated families. He never had a friend in this position before, a position where he had to leave a wild life in the circus to settle own in a foreign country with strangers. Nope, Wally had never seen that in his tiny town. Thankfully, it didn't seem like he had to do much as Dick made no attempt to want to broach the topic any further. The bird slyly wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and stared at the wall next to the duo to compose himself. He ran a hand through his thick raven locks and let out a final sigh, signaling that he was in an acceptable state to continue with their conversation.

Wally, getting the hint, pressed, "And your accent? Is that Romanian?"

Dick's head whipped back to Wally, his eyes dancing with impish light once again. "No! My family's Roma, so we speak Romani. Though I do know a bit of Romanian for when we would go out of the Romani town and stuff. Because, all the Roma live together, you know? It makes sense to live with the people that have your language and culture and stuff. So there wasn't really a reason to learn Romanian, especially since I didn't even live in the village at all because I was in the circus the whole time. I only ever went there if we had a break between tours in which we would go visit family. So yeah, I pretty much only spoke Romani but my mom was bilingual in Russian also so I would speak Russian with her sometimes. And the go-to language in the circus was French so I'm good at that too. But my accent is Romani."

"Whoa," Wally let out a breath. Dick spoke quickly, hardly pausing to breath between sentences. While Wally had guessed the bird's back story many times when he would lay awake at night unable to sleep, he never had come up with anything close to what Dick was giving him now. He knew that Dick didn't exactly have a stereotypical childhood, but this? This was insane.

"So...you're Romani. Your accent is Romani. And you also speak like four other languages. Wow. Good to know."

Dick's brow furrowed. "Only four? No, you forgot Spanish! I know Spanish too!"

Wally groaned, "Dude, not fair! How come you get to speak like three hundred languages when I only know one?"

Dick grinned, stood up, and bent over backwards until his hands touched the floor and he was in a perfectly rounded bridge. "It's cuz you didn't grow up in a circus, Kid Mouth!"

Wally got up and sat on the protégé's stomach, causing them both to tumble to the floor. "Yeah, whatever. Your accent's pretty cool."

Dick playfully pushed the older teen off him before sitting up. "Really?"

Wally grinned, "Yeah, man! You should teach me some Romani. That way we can talk in public and no one will no what we're saying! It'll be so fun!"

The eleven year old's blue eyes stared at Wally with amazement. None of his school friends showed any interest in his heritage besides average curiosity. And for Wally to want to learn his first language? When Wally had never shown any motivation to learn even Spanish? That was asterous.

Grinning, Dick nodded, "Alright Wall-man, let's do this!"


Artemis prided herself in being good at the details. She had to be, with Sportsmaster as her father and all. He was always so demanding of her as a child, never giving her so much as a water break until she got every detail of whatever they were doing down cold. Her sister was a natural at seemingly everything, and for Artemis her childhood was a game of catch up. If she couldn't keep pace with her sister, she would be punished. So she learned, very early on, to be quick and resourceful. Part of that consisted of paying attention to the details.

When she first met the bird in the cave, she thought something was off about him. And that wasn't even getting at the part where he didn't even trust the team to see the color of his eyes. No–it was something else. Something about the way he spoke.

Her, like everyone else, always assumed the Dynamic Duo was a father-and-son pairing. She figured Batman was married, had a son, something tragic happened to the wife to make him want to become Batman, and then Robin joined his dad's side once he became both old and skilled enough. It was simple and made sense. Batman seemed to be perpetually in a state of gloom, over the loss of his wife, while Robin seemed to be much lighter, which would make sense if he never really got to know his mom. Her death wouldn't have the same hold on Robin as it did with Batman. And besides, only tragedy really ever brought non-metas over to the life of a mask. Hell, her childhood was practically one tragedy after another.

Artemis had met Batman when he and Green Arrow showed up at her house one evening–uninvited, might she add–to convince her mom to let her join the Young Justice League. Or, that's what they probably thought would happen. Her mom needed no convincing, as she was just happy her youngest daughter would be away from the Shadows. Artemis was the one who needed convincing, truthfully. Looking back at it, she realized that maybe she caved a bit faster than they thought she would too. Maybe, deep down, she realized she needed this and took advantage of the opportunity. Hadn't she longed for another family her whole life? Hadn't she wanted to just be, without fear of her Dad or his buddies? Hadn't she wanted to share this part of her life with people her age?

Or she could have just been tired and wanted them to leave her house so she could go to sleep. That could have been equally possible.

So when Robin opened his mouth for the first time at the cave, she was taken aback. She realized that no, Robin and Batman didn't use the same phonetics when speaking. Robin's were different, more forced than Batman's. A sign of an accent, she realized. A sign that Robin wasn't Batman's son, at least not biologically.

She remembered the exact moment it hit her and how her eyes widened for a split second before she casually rolled them only because she could have sworn Batman's eyebrows raised under his cowl. No need to be suspicious of her before she even became a part of the team, thank you very much. She intended to stay here as long as possible.

During their first mission, she was a bit too distracted by a certain someone under that damn Cheshire mask along with an irritating speedster to care about the little bird. In fact, she forgot all about the life-altering realization she had about Robin until later that week when Robin came to the cave to hang out with Kid Annoying. She found herself at the cave most afternoons to train since she didn't have anything close to this gym at her run-down apartment. Robin, however, trained with Batman so he only really came over for missions and, as she was finding out now, to hang out with Wally. They seemed to do everything together but straight up make-out.

She heard the rumors that the two heroes were close. While public viewings of the two were infrequent, due to Batman's displeasure with having metas in his city, they weren't unheard of. Every once in a while someone would snap a photo of the two hanging out on top of a skyscraper or beating up some lowlife together and put it on their blog. However, she had no idea just how tight the two boys were. While it was commonly understood the two hung out more than Tumbler users could photograph them, she didn't realize they hung out every single week before the creation of the team. Now they were together all the time.

Witnessing this bromance for the first time, Artemis was helping M'gann in the kitchen with her cookies. Actually, she was watching the martian baking cookies. She wasn't a huge fan of cooking and baking after having to learn at such a young age when her sister ran away. But even though M'gann and her had gotten off to a rocky start, she found she actually liked hanging around with the green alien. M'gann was sweet, and Artemis wanted to get to know her more. Which is how she got to her position now, in the kitchen watching M'gann bake and stealing chocolate chips whenever the martian turned around. Ten feet away, the two barely-teenage boys were playing a new video game Robin had just got.

Robin whistled, "Wow, KF. I know this game is new and everything, but you're really bad at this."

There! There it was again. Some accent underlying his words. She couldn't figure out what language it came from, though. It must have been a lesser-known one.

Kid Idiot's voice rang out over her thoughts. "Yeah well, how would you like some of THIS-Oh, what? Are you kidding?"

She could feel the evil smirk on the younger boy's face. "Sneak attack!" He cackled. "I'm so traught right now."

What? Traught? What was up with that? Was that...no, that's not a word.

Kid Mouth's hands flew up in the air. His half of the screen flashed red. "How did you get behind me?"

"Because," Robin said flippantly, "You suck at video games."

Keeping her voice low, she tuned out the adolescent boys and turned to M'gan. "What's the deal with Boy Wonder?"

M'gann, startled, looked quizzically at Artemis. "What do you mean?"

"Like, uhh...his accent," she ran a hand through her thick blond hair. "You know where he's from?"

M'gann's eyes fixated on her slowly stirring bowl of cookie mix. She let out a tense breath. "No, no one here knows anything about him. Aside from Wally really. He knows a lot more about Robin than us, that much is obvious, but I don't know how much. I know the two hang out out-of-uniform. I hear them talk about it a lot. But, um, no one else knows anything about Robin. Apparently Batman's ordered him to keep his civilian life a secret from us."

Artemis frowned. "Doesn't that bother you?"

"Not really."

"But how?" She hissed. "How can you trust him if you don't know him?"

M'gann's eyes met Artemis', and the martian gave her a soft smile. "Well, I don't know much about you either, don't I? I know your name is Artemis and that you like archery and that you're good at fighting, but that's it. I still trust you, though. You're good, that much I can tell. And I don't even have to read your mind to find that out! Not that I would read your mind at all–" she backtracked a bit, eyes growing slightly panicked, "–No, I would never do that without your permission. But, um, I know you have my back, Artemis. That's all that I need. The same goes for Robin."

Artemis nodded at the new information, her head swiveling back to the two boys on the couch who were seemingly in their own little world with that video game. Robin, in his slightly accented voice, was antagonizing the red-head next to him, who was trying his best not to die every minute of the game.

True, she was going to trust Robin and she was going to respect his secret ID. But the accent? She was going to figure that out. After all, she was good with the details. And this little detail of Robin was not getting by her.


Thanks to everyone to has favorited/followed this fic! I can already tell this is going to be my favorite one to write. And that's not even because I have about 7 rough drafts for other chapters right now.

Huge thanks to KodiakWolfe13, Smile-I'mTheEndOfAllThatYouSee, Mutiny, Vriska8Serket, and TheDorkQueen for reviewing! Those make my day!

Oh, and to answer a common question from the last chapter: Lex, why didn't you have Dick really delve into the specifications of asexuality with Wally? He didn't even mention romanic attraction and honestly it seemed like you didn't do your research. Well, my kind reviewers, that's because this is a super uncomfortable convo to have! As an ace, it's not something you go into with friends. Especially those friends who are having trouble grasping the mere concept of not liking any gender! So that's why I kept it general. I wasn't dissing aces who do have romantic relationships with people, I just thought it would have been weird for Dick to launch into this huge explanation of every aspect of asexuality with a dude who completely denied its existence.

THANKS AGAIN!