Summary: Dick looks back on some of his toughest days and biggest injuries as Robin. Takes place around the time of YJ S1 Ep 10 or 11.

Disclaimer: I don't own DC

Dick just got back from patrol with Bruce. Another day, another Arkham escapee. Someone really needs to upgrade security there! If freaking Firefly and Maxy Zeus could escape, then ya know something is seriously wrong. He had changed out of his uniform and headed up to his room.

Dick dropped the cup of water he was drinking, and it spilled over his shirt. "Dammit, I just put this on! Nice going, Grayson." Who'da thought the Boy Wonder's got butterfingers? He took it off to change, and that's when he caught his reflection in the mirror.

The scars were nothing new for him. Heck, he had been doing this for 5 years! He had gotten used to them. But it was still jarring to see just how many marks and wounds riddled his young and relatively small body, and the sad part was that Dick could remember the story behind every single one.

And none of them were good.

His eyes scanned the reflection of his torso, coming to a halt at a blade mark near the center of his chest. He traced the mark with his fingers, sighing as he remembered exactly what happened that night.

It was Dick's first year as Robin. He and Bats had taken on the League of Assassins countless times already, but he had never seen Talia this angry. She had given Bruce an ultimatum, and Bruce had refused without a second thought. She seemed to be a mix between angry and sad. Angry because she viewed Dick as having driven a wedge between her and her 'beloved'. She saw Robin as a vessel for Bruce to be happy, she saw the love Bruce had for the boy, and she was jealous. Dick knew Talia never liked him, but he didn't realize just how much until this moment. They had just saved the hostages Talia had taken, and Bruce and Dick had started to walk away from her as she lay on the ground.

She didn't take the rejection well.

The next thing Dick knew, blood was trickling out of his chest and mouth as he saw a sword plunged through his torso. Bruce yelled before punching Talia off him and picking his unconscious form up, carrying him to Leslie's clinic. According to Bruce, Dick had flatlined twice before being stabilized, and he spent nearly a week resting before he could even move, and another two weeks with intensive therapy and monitoring before Bruce would let him anywhere near a birdarang. He was lucky to be alive. Ever since then, DIck was either not allowed to come on missions involving Talia, or Bruce was incredibly overprotective of him, and for good reason too.

He flinched a bit as he remembered that night. The horror on Bruce's face as he fell to the floor, the bits of yelling he could remember from Leslie and her staff as they tended to the injured boy. He had never seen Alfred so scared or Bruce so angry before that night. If only it stopped there.

Dick's eyes drifted to the gunshot wound on his upper left chest, near his shoulder. He felt the semi-healed scar with his fingers as he remembered how that happened.

Dick had been Robin for about a year and a half, and Gotham had a new threat. Thomas Elliot, AKA Hush, was an old friend of Bruce's who blamed him for things Dick was unaware of. The Dynamic Duo were hot on his case, as he had dropped 6 bodies in 2 nights. He was leaving them a trail, each body having some type of clue. Almost like the Riddler, but 10 times more scary. Batman and Robin had just analyzed his latest victim and had called Gordon for cleanup.

As the Dynamic Duo swung through the sky with their grapple lines, a man watched on. He had his sniper aimed at Batman, but he shifted it to the side before firing. The bullet went clean through Dick's shoulder, and Bruce turned back, his eyes widening as Dick started to lose consciousness. He fell from his grapple, tumbling down to the alley below, and Batman rushed over to scoop the immobilized bird up, praying he was still alive. Dick had not only sustained a sniper shot through the shoulder, he had fallen from his grapple to hit the concrete floor from a pretty high height. Bruce was not a man of religion. But in that moment, he begged to some god out there that the last of the Flying Graysons would not repeat the accident that claimed his parents' lives…

Leslie was used to Batman and Robin's overnight visits. However, this one might've been the worst she'd seen in a long, long time. Dick had a serious gunshot wound in his left shoulder and had suffered blunt force trauma all over his body. Restoring him to full health would be incredibly difficult if not impossible. Bruce left Alfred to watch over him as he left. It was too difficult to see Dick in that state, so he would seek justice for him instead. Less than two hours later, the GCPD found a battered, near-dead Thomas Elliot and rushed him into medical care before shipping him off to Arkham.

Dick woke up the next day, a complete mess. His arm was burning with pain, even through all the painkillers he was on. He had several broken bones and was covered in bandages and casts of different kinds. His head was slightly sore, but not nearly as much as his back. When he tried to move, he would wince in pain. Leslie told him that he would be like this for at least a week, if not more, before he could stand. From there, the casts would stay for at least half a month.

It took nearly an extra month for Bruce to finally allow him to go on patrol, but Dick was never the same. Before then, he saw guns and laughed. No bullet could touch him! But after the sniper, he saw guns and stayed on high alert. He was no longer invincible. He could no longer soar freely, no care as to the lead pellets being launched at him.

He had been brought back to the ground, rather harshly too.

Dick snapped back to reality and looked over his well-toned yet equally well-scarred chest. Dozens more markings, all of which he could remember. Poison Ivy sending thorny vines after him, Ra's Al Ghul hurling a handful of throwing stars at his heart, Penguin scratching his side with his razor umbrella attachment, Scarecrow swinging his massive scythe at him, Catwoman slashing at his hip with her sharp claws, the list went on. He took note of a somewhat nasty looking mark near his left hip. Got that one when Uncle Clark was under Ivy's mind control. Heh. He apologized so much. Gotta say, it was kinda cool having a heat-vision scar. Pretty unique from the knives, guns, and other blades. I'm just lucky most of these marks are ABOVE the waist. He did have a few on his lower body, but they were smaller wounds on his legs and were far fewer in number. The only one of any significance was a somewhat long marking on his left calf. Damn, that one hurt. He got that one from Man Bat's toe talons.

If only the wounds were limited to his body. But no, he had plenty more scars, these ones invisible to all except Bruce, Alfred, and a very few others. They existed only in his mind and his heart. These ones would never leave him, and almost nobody would ever know they were even there. Most assumed Dick was an innocent kid. He was good at hiding his pain behind a smile, because he didn't want anyone to know just how broken he was. Heck, most of the League and Team thought Robin was the happy one and never had to deal with anything serious. If only they knew…

It was one of Dick's first major outings with Bruce. He had stopped Riddler about two months ago, and since then he had faced almost all of Gotham's worst. He was doing great, until this night…

Batman and Robin had tracked the Scarecrow to Ace Chemicals. Dick had faced Crane once before. His fear gas was no joke. Dick remembered when he hallucinated his parents falling. That was not a good memory, but he got past it. This time, it was somehow worse. Crane had gotten the upper hand on him when he was busy with some henchmen, and instead of fear gas, he injected Dick directly with a syringe. Dick fell to his knees, his sanity leaving him.

In Dick's mind, he saw the psychopaths of Arkham surrounding him. He was strapped to a chair, defenseless. Them the Bat appeared, taking them all out swiftly and looking to Dick.

"Pathetic. What is the point of me having a partner if I have to always save him?!"

"...I'm sorry, I tried to stop them, but-"

"But you failed. You're a disgrace, you bring down my legacy. People used to fear the Batman, but how can they do that if I am being shadowed by a pathetic child who can't even keep himself safe? I made a mistake with you, Grayson. You're not good enough."

Once Bruce had taken all the thugs down, he looked around for Crane, not finding him anywhere. But he saw Dick, lying on the floor, crawled up into a ball, trying to shield himself from something Bruce could not see. He ran up to his protege to find him muttering the same thing over and over again.

"I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough for Batman." Bruce injected him with one, two, four antidotes, but it wasn't working. Dick had overdosed. He rushed the boy back to the cave, where he hooked him up to a bunch of tubes and got to work trying to purge the toxin from his system.

Dick woke up an hour later, feeling fuzzy in the head. His face was dry from the heavy streaks of tears that had sprinted down his face earlier, and he could remember his hallucination perfectly. For the next month or so, he would get the same nightmare each night. He didn't know how he got it to stop, but he was beyond grateful for it. Bruce was there for him, of course. He did his best to make sure Dick knew he was more than good enough, Alfred too. But it still took him a while to get past the trauma, and even to this day, he sometimes gets those nightmares.

Dick put on a shirt and sat on his bed, head bowed down, thinking back to the countless other horrors he had seen on the job. He remembered the countless victims of the Joker and Two Face that he could not save. He remembered being at a crime scene, bodies all around him, all with sword marks through their chests. He remembered that night, before Bruce had taken him to meet Gordon, when he snuck off on his own to try and stop the Penguin's gun-running gauntlet. He had been captured and beaten by those thugs for almost two hours before Batman found him. Think I got most of my first scars from that one. He could remember everything. But it didn't matter. That was all in the past, and even if it would stick with him, he needed to get past it. Nobody could or ever would know. Not his team, not his friends at school, nobody. Not even Donna or Wally knew. He may have told Wally about the accident that took his parents' lives, but he would never tell him about this. Because if anyone ever knew, they would see him differently. They would know just how broken he truly was, and he couldn't handle losing their respect and having it replaced with pity. The only people he would ever let through that wall were the people he lived with, and even they would never know just how deep his scars ran.

This honestly felt so refreshing to write after 2 "summary" chapters. Writing the episodes from S1 from Dick's POV is not as fun, so I far prefer these types of stories since I could have free reign. I am kinda looking forward to the second half of S1 with Zatanna since I could add a lot more stuff there, but for now it's honestly harder to make the season recap chapters interesting than it is to make all this stuff up. Anyways, comment thoughts and suggestions. Next chapter will be about young Dick and Bruce on Dick's first Father's Day after the accident. Just a side note, I wrote how Leslie has a staff to help her treat Dick and Bruce, but they don't know the Dynamic Duo's identities. They treat them in-costume, and are only called in if Leslie can't handle it herself. Leslie is the only person at Gotham Hospital who knows their identities. For the most part, Leslie manages them herself so as not to leak their IDs. Anyways, just thought I should clear the possible plothole up. Next chapter will be up soon.