An orange sky was lazily splashed with splotches of gray clouds as Barbara and Bruce trudged their way down the last block. Bruce was in the rear, walking alongside Dick and using himself as a support for the weakened boy. Their staggered pace forced Barbara to slow herself down, though she kept in front of them and pinched her brow the whole way.
"Look, I'm sorry!" Dick groaned. "How was I supposed to know taxis won't carry bleeding people?"
"They do." Barbara corrected him. "Just not ones that look like they walked out of Fight Club!"
"Hey, you do not talk about—"
Bruce cut off Dick's retort by casually waving his wallet in the air. "In his defense," the Wayne boy added. "I really didn't expect him to turn down $200."
"Oh for the love of god…" Barbara turned on her heel, stepping back to Bruce, snatching his wallet out of his hand and shoving it into her own back pocket. He apparently couldn't be trusted with it. "How many times do I have to tell you to stop parading that thing around? We're lucky nobody's tried to mug us without knowing you're loaded!"
The young miss Gordon was at her wits' end. They'd been walking for hours now; and as Dick had continually brought up, every attempt to catch a cab just wound up with the terrified guy fleeing when he got a good luck at the two stooges she was stuck with.
That may not have been the worst part, though. This Grayson kid was far closer to Bruce than she'd ever begun to fear was possible. They'd been trading quips, references, and boasts about their little brawl with the goons in the alley since the moment the acrobat was back on his feet. It was like being stuck between a rock and a hard place, only both of those had smart mouths on them.
"So, wait." Dick said, glancing over at Bruce. "I don't think I'm getting it; why's she so uptight with your cash? Are you wealthy or something?"
Bruce's mouth twisted into a confused frown as he examined the honest expression on the boy's face. "You're telling me the name Bruce Wayne didn't tip you off?"
He shrugged, demonstrating that no, it did not. "Should it?"
Barbara explained, "The Waynes are pretty much the family that built this city. They're stupid rich, and Bruce is the only heir."
"Ah." Dick closed his eyes and nodded, jotting the information down in his mind. "Well, I guess that'd make you a name in Gotham but, as you've figured out, I'm more of a rail-rider myself. I've never been in a town long enough to learn the locals like that."
"By the way..." Bruce muttered. "You're sure we're going the right way this time?"
Dick scrunched his face up, crunching the numbers in a situation that very definitely shouldn't need numbers to get involved. They'd wound up going miles in the wrong direction on their first attempt to find the circus. And the second.
After a moment, he pointed at a corner. "Yeah, it should be right around here. I'm, like 80% certain this time."
"It was 85 last time." Bruce groaned.
The groaning was unfounded. What they discovered the next street over was a stupendously large gap between the infrastructure of Gotham City. A giant, empty lot on any other day, but tonight it was the site of one of the greatest shows on Earth.
A massive tent, multiple stories high and striped red and yellow. Festive little flags stuck out from the high points, flapping in the cold Autumn wind. Warm light was drifting out from the interior, a welcome change from the ever-darkening streets of the city. Hardly believing their luck, the trio picked up their pace.
It was clear that the show wasn't ready to start quite yet. The parking lot in front of the tent was barren, save for several trucks unloading equipment, and trailers full of various handfuls of exotic wildlife to be incorporated into the act. Workers from the show were flitting back and forth, transporting everything they could move at a frantic pace. Everything had to be set up just perfectly. Dick, Bruce, and Barbara found their way into the middle of this crowd, weaving back and forth to avoid any painful collisions. If they'd had any doubts to Grayson's identity, they were alleviated by the friendly, mocking calls sent his way by the workers.
"Yo, Dick! Found some new hellions to roll with, eh?"
"Who'd ya piss off this time, Grayson!"
"Ah, wait'll Mary gets a load of you, kid!"
"Grounded for life, or eternity, ya think?"
THUD
Barbara had been so caught up watching the verbal assault, she'd barely been paying attention to where she'd been walking. His cost her when she strode straight into one of the workers, falling flat on her butt and nearly toppling him as well. She looked up at the man and spat out "Oh, jeez, sorry! Wasn't looking where I was going!"
As Bruce chuckled at her own klutziness, the man she'd bumped into looked at her oddly. He seemed like an average sort of guy. Brown eyes, brown hair neatly parted to the left, and a well-groomed tuft of a goatee. After a moment's hesitation, he reached down to grab her hand and helped her up.
"Uh… think nothing of it, ma'am." He said in a slow drawl, eyes lingering a little too long on her group. "Just be more careful next time; next time it might be a horse ya hit. Don't want them getting spooked."
He hefted a large duffel bag, full of some kind of equipment, and marched back towards the main tent. Barbara shrugged her shoulders, not feeling questioning enough to consider how weird the exchange had been until she caught Grayson's expression. Dick was still staring at the man as he walked away, something like a faint scowl forming.
"Dick, you all right?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said. "but that guy… I've never seen him before. Thought I knew all the workers here."
"The Ringmaster probably hired some local hands." Bruce chimed in. Dick nodded, satisfied with that answer, and pointed to the side of the tent. A long row of trailers was set up there.
"Come on, my parents should still be back there."
The trailer of The Flying Graysons wasn't particularly easy to miss. The side was painted sky blue, with an abstract representation of the family—a trio—posed in mid-swing upon the side. The door had three gold stars in a triangular pattern placed in the center. On them read the names John, Mary, and Dick. Barbara stepped up to the door, being the leader of this bleeding parade. Her knuckles rapped three times against the metal door, which triggered a commotion inside as somebody struggled to reach the door.
The sound of a lock being twisted moaned from within, and the door gently opened to reveal a woman dressed in spandex. The pattern was primarily red in the torso, with green limbs and just a touch of yellow trim. A garish thing, but Barbara supposed being easy to make out from a distance was the point.
The woman herself was just a bit taller than Barbara, looking down at her in confusion. She looked a lot like Dick, with his dark and messy hair obscuring her emerald eyes. A few lines from age were impressed on her face, but she looked remarkably well for a person that had to be at least forty.
"Hello." Said Mary Grayson, trying to recognize Barbara as some sort of circus worker. "Is there something I can…"
The woman stopped to take in a gasp of air as she recognized the battered boy behind her. "Oh my god, Dick!"
She rushed out from the trailer, shoving Barbara out of the way as she attended to her child. Bruce eased away to let Grayson stand on his own: a misjudged action, considering he almost instantly toppled into his mother's arms.
"Oh, my baby!" she nearly sobbed as she clutched him, only pushing him back as far as was needed to look at his face. She cupped a hand against his cheek, eyes fixated on the crusted blood around his lips. "What happened to you?!"
"You know me, mom…" he joked, faintly laughing. "I'm a sucker for punishment. Hey, do you have any water? I'm really thirsty."
Dick's rambling was hardly acknowledged by his mother, who was already calling back into the trailer. "John! John, hurry, Dick's hurt!"
John, apparently the Grayson patriarch and Dick's father nearly stormed out of the trailer, sticking his head out in confusion. Barbara noted that while Dick had his mother's face and hair, he had his father's eyes. John Grayson had closely-shaved brown hair and a handlebar mustache, and his bright blue eyes were glimmering with something between terror and the kind of rage that could only be born out of parental instinct. He was dressed in a similar outfit to his wife, and hopped down the steps from the door in a single bound, patting the sides of his boy.
"Dick, is anything broken?" he asked in a deep tone that, in a way, sounded remarkably similar to the Grayson she already knew. "Does this hurt? What about this?"
Dick shook his head, repeating "No" in the same, slightly amused tone every time his father checked another bone. "C'mon, dad, you're embarrassing me."
That seemed to be the first time John noticed Bruce and Barbara were even present. He turned their way, a thousand questions on the tip of his tongue. He seemed to restrain himself, though, and only asked "What happened to my boy?"
"A fight." Bruce helpfully elaborated. "He wasn't doing so well, so we stepped in."
John eyed Wayne for a second, taking note of his extensive injuries—probably worse than his son's. He frowned, clearly not particularly happy to see all that blood, and stood up, picking his child up as he did so. He talked over Dick's particularly loud protests.
"OK, everybody inside. This isn't a discussion that we need to have in the open air."
Judging by the clock, about fifteen minutes had passed. Barbara sat inside the Grayson family's trailer on a somewhat ratty red sofa, comfortably snug with a steaming mug of cocoa in her hands. She took a sip, appreciating the warmth on a night that was steadily growing colder. To her left, Dick and Bruce were on the couch as well, wrapped in blankets and covered in bandages and gauze. The Gordon girl had been surprised, at first, at the extensive first aid capabilities and supplies of Dick's parents, but on further thought it made a lot of sense.
Acrobats worked a very dangerous profession, and any strange combination of injuries could occur on any given night. They had to have the means to treat those injuries, as well as the knowledge to do it. One never knew how long it would be before proper doctors got a look at them.
Across from the three of them, in a pair of folding chairs, were Dick's parents. John was rubbing his mustache, deep in thought, and Mary's arms were folded and her face looking downwards, trying to restrain herself. Barbara, with a little help, had just finished recounting the entire incident. Dick had added in how it all began, and Bruce had corrected her on a few things she'd missed in all the chaos.
Mary Grayson was the first to speak after the long silence. She sounded rather distraught. "Dick, it is always the same with you. Every town we come to, you find some people you don't like, and you get yourself beaten within an inch of your life for it! You're lucky you made a couple of friends this time or… or, I don't even want to think about what might have happened to you then!"
She leaned forward, her palm supporting her forehead as she let out a heavy sigh. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. What do you think, John?"
He gave a heavy groan of his own, still scratching his facial hair. "What can we do? I'm not even sure Dick did anything wrong."
"What are you talking about?!" she asked, bewildered as she turned to look at him. "He could be killed doing things like this—hell, he nearly was! We have to—"
"Have to what?" John asked, shutting her up with his stronger voice. "Have to tell him stopping a robbery is a bad thing? Mary, I don't want him hurt, but you're telling me to yell at my boy for fighting an injustice! How do you expect me to do that? I'm just proud the boy has some kind of moral compass!"
Bruce and Barbara exchanged a glance, both feeling rather awkward viewing this marital impasse between a couple they barely knew. Mary seemed to pick up on the nervous air, and rubbed her temples for a moment.
"…All right. Dick, your father and I are both proud—"
"Very proud." John added.
"—that you did the right thing. But these people you've been fighting, they're not just kids like you. They have weapons, a-and experience doing these kind of awful things! You got lucky that these wonderful people were here to help you," she stopped to gesture at the visitors, who nodded and smiled graciously. "but next time they won't be there. You're just not strong enough to do this kind of thing by yourself, that much was proven today."
"To be fair, it sounds like he's getting better."
"Not helping, John."
"Right, shutting up."
"So please," Mary pleaded, reaching forward and grabbing her boy's hand. "please just promise your mother you won't keep scaring her like this."
The woman had a look so earnestly fearful that even Barbara felt a few tugs at her heartstrings. She couldn't imagine that Dick wasn't affected by it. Sure enough, he grinned and let loose a defeated sigh. "All right." He agreed. "It's just hard, you know? You see jerks like that, you just kind of want to pound their faces in."
Mary gave a rather unhappy frown at his aside, but his father actually laughed at it. "Oh, I know the feeling, bucko. But now that we've got that taken care of, we have to talk business. Tonight's show."
"Right, the act." Dick said, brightening up as he thought of his upcoming performance. Barbara could have sworn she saw him grow at least three years younger right on the spot, some precocious kid sitting between her and Bruce as he asked, "What routine are we going with tonight?"
John and Mary shared a sullen exchange of looks, and with a nod agreed. John leaned forward, rubbing the back of his head and averting his eyes as he said "Well… there is no 'we' tonight, sport."
Dick's childlike demeanor shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. "What?" he asked, flabbergasted. After a moment's thought, he seemed to grow angry. "Are you punishing me or something?!"
"No, no, god no!" John exclaimed, waving his hands in rejection of the thought. "You know I'd never keep you off the trapeze if I didn't have to, Dick; your mother wouldn't, either. We're just worried. We don't know what kind of injuries you've got, beyond the flesh wound. You could have a concussion, for all we know, and we just don't think it's safe for you to be up there with us tonight."
"I feel fine!" Dick insisted. "Just let me go out there and I'll prove it!"
"We just can't risk it." Mary told him. "I don't know what we'd do if anything ever happened to you."
"It's just until we get to the next town; Gotham's hospitals are insanely priced."
Barbara mused on that for a moment. Her father had mentioned, once, how the Falcones had dipped their fingers into the local medical staff. Higher prices to kick the mob's way. She'd always considered certain public services to be incorruptible as a child. As she learned with age, nothing was incorruptible.
"We'll get you checked up on the next stop, and the stop after that you can rejoin the act."
Bruce's brow furrowed, and he silently gestured for Barbara to hand him something. Huh. I guess that's right.
She corrected herself as she pulled his wallet from her pockets, and handed it to him. Nothing was incorruptible, except for Bruce Wayne.
"I don't think there'll be a need for that." Bruce told them, opening up his wallet to reveal a number of credit cards that was higher than the number of bills most folk carried. "I can pay for any of Dick's medical bills."
The Grayson's faces dropped so far that Barbara genuinely feared that they might fall right off their faces. John whispered, as if mouthing his thoughts on reflex, "You're that Bruce Wayne?"
Mary stammered for a moment, seemingly unwilling to believe the words she was hearing, before bowing her head towards him. "I… I… oh, yes, please! Thank you so much, Mr. Wayne!"
She sounded nearly hysteric, and Bruce retracted with a rather shocked expression. "P-please, ma'am, it's just Bruce! And please, don't think anything of it! I can't think of a better use for it."
John paused, hesitating as he weighed the options. "Are you sure about this, Bruce?" the man asked. "It could end up being a lot."
"What else would I spend it on?" Bruce asked, cheerfully placing one of the cards in John's hands—more symbolic than anything. "You're talking to the man who has everything. The only thing I can keep paying for to make me happy, is other people's happiness."
Mr. Grayson chuckled a bit at the cheesy line, but Barbara caught the shine in his eye—a tear he barely kept back. He smiled broadly and admitted, "I'm glad Dick managed to meet people like you, Bruce; and you too, Barbara. I've always prayed our little Robin would turn out like you."
Barbara snorted as Dick's face turned a shade of red even deeper than his parent's spandex, groaning as he buried himself between his knees as he drew them close to his face. "Dad…"
Unable to hold back her curiosity, Barbara asked, "Robin?"
Dick's ears were already tinged pink as Mary giggled and explained, "Oh, when he was just a little baby—couldn't have been older than five—we let him dress up with us and do some simple tricks with us. Needed to teach him the family business, you know. And when we got the suit on him, he looked at it and said that looked 'like that red bird.'"
"I told him he meant a robin," the patriarch of the Graysons continued. It was apparently a well-rehearsed story. "and he said 'Yeah! Robin!' So from then on, he'd always be our Little Robin!"
Dick leaned back long enough to slam his forehead into his knees and moaned, "You said you'd stop calling me that when I turned sixteen!"
His father laughed at his son's distress, finding the torment he gave his kid highly amusing as it seemed. "Ah, lighten up, Dick! I'm bound to slip up every now and again—only human, right?"
He glanced up at the clock, and nudged his wife. She checked it as well and nodded back at them. They stood up, clasping hands with the injured boys and helping them up. All five of them began to walk out of the trailer. The sun was almost fully set now, and the darkness was only broken by the bright lights of Haly's Circus. The signs had been erected, the show was ready to begin; cars were beginning to filter into the lot, and the dull roar of distant voices was wafting over, by way of the cold breeze.
"We have to get ready for the show now," John explained, gesturing towards the circus. "so we'll talk more later. Bruce, Barbara, did you have tickets to tonight's show?"
They nodded, which got a beaming smile from the Grayson couple. "Wonderful! In that case—"
John cut himself off, suddenly noticing a possibility he'd neglected. "I suppose I should ask first. Was this supposed to be a… private evening?"
Barbara's face was the one to flush red now, her expression faltering for a moment as her heartbeat took off like a rocket. She opened her mouth to try and explain.
"Oh, not at all!" said Bruce. "We're just here as friends."
The Wayne boy was oblivious to the glare with all the force of the devil himself coming from the girl to his right.
You didn't have to brush it off THAT quickly!
No one else seemed to pick up on the venomous stare either, as John continued unimpeded. "Well, in this case, would you mind keeping an eye on Dick for us, make sure he doesn't get in any more trouble?"
"That'd be no trouble at all." Bruce responded. John and Mary quickly stepped away, heading for the rear of the tent. Not a moment later, the pair of Gotham natives lurched forward as the weight of a sixteen-year-old boy slammed into them. Now squarely between them, Dick threw his arms around both of their shoulders and beamed.
"Guess we're circus buddies!"
He glanced over at the red headed girl and curbed his happy grin for a second. "Hey Barbara, you don't have a fever or something, do ya? Your face is kind of red."