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He wants to tell them.
It’s been years. They don’t ask him, they don’t pry, but that’s not what they’re like, that’s just not what they do.
He loves them. But how do you tell your best friends (your family) (your second family) that your first family died, was killed? How do you bring that up in a normal way, in a normal conversation?
So this is where he stays, stuck, for a very long time. For years, actually.
He sits on the roof, watching the sun rise, sipping on his first cup of coffee of the day. Beside him, about a foot away, Raven is hovering serenely, palms resting against her knees, eyes shut, brow unfurrowed.
He smiles vaguely, for no particular reason, and takes another sip of his coffee. Maybe he’s just happy.
The sun crests the horizon line, the birds soar. He wants to tell them. He just doesn’t know how.
“You’re quiet.” a dry voice says.
Raven’s violet eyes have opened, and she’s lowered to the ground, all signals that she’s finished with her morning meditation and therefore now willing to converse with him. He sighs.
“Yeah.” he says, swirling his cup. Raven pauses, thoughtful, and then comes to sit beside him.
“You should tell them.” she says. He smiles at her. “Yeah?” he asks, and it sounds lighter than it actually is. Her eyes are soft, a gentle sort of caring on her ashy, lilac face. “Yeah.” she says.
He shrugs vaguely. “How do you even…tell someone something like that? And should you? I mean, it’s my thing, my…burden. I don’t even know if it’s right to put something like that on them. You know?”
She smiles dryly at him. “Would you want them to tell you, if it were them?” she says, throwing his own words back at him.
He laughs into his coffee mug. “Yeah, yeah. You’re so funny.” She grins, smiling slightly.
Raven knows.
She’s known everything for years, ever since she went into his mind, ever since their bond formed. She knows the indigo pain streaked through his soul, that he’s worked for years to tamp down, to bury. She knows the way he felt, the night his parents died.
And he’s glad.
It’s a relief to have someone know, the way that Bruce always knew. But he didn’t have to tell her, to say it out loud. That’s the part where he’s struggling.
And Raven knows it too, and so she isn’t being super hard on him, Robin knows. Even though he knows that she is personally on the team of tell them, (rather hypocritically of her, Robin thinks, since she herself is infamous for keeping secrets).
Finally Robin exhales.
“I’ll try.” he promises her. She pats his shoulder, and smiles. And then she gets up. “Good luck.” she says. He grins, and rolls his eyes.
As it turns out, the right time finds him, he doesn’t even have to go looking for it.
For not even a week later he walks into the living room to find his friends watching what looks like some sort of old gymnastics youtube video on the tv. “Hey Rob.” Cyborg says, without looking up at him. “Come check this out. This is somethin’ you’ll be into.”
Robin watches silently as Beast Boy gasps as the man in the blurry, poor quality youtube video does a backflip.
He comes into the room and leans against the back of the sofa. “Cool.” he says. Cyborg gestures at the screen. “Look, look, did you see that?” he says, glancing behind him at Robin. Robin nods vaguely. “That’s pretty impressive.” he says, nodding.
Cyborg doesn’t seem impressed by his mild comments. “I know you’re like, the gymnastics guy, but that’s still pretty neat, you gotta admit.”
Robin can’t help the grin that threatens to pull at his mouth. “Wow, so now I’m the gymnastics guy?” he says dryly.
Cyborg aimlessly swats at his arm, and misses. “Aw you know what I mean.”
Robin snickers. “Yeah.”
Starfire, sitting beside Cyborg on the sofa, nods empathetically at the screen. “It is amazing what human beings are capable of, even though they are possessing of such weak, fragile bodies.” she says, face full of awe. Beside her, Raven has yet to look up from her book.
“And they even did it all without a net.” Beast Boy says.
Robin is mildly entertained that his superhero friends are this easily impressed.
Cyborg nods. “Oh yeah, it was insane. My dad took me to see them years and years ago, and it was even more impressive than this crummy video.” He turns around to look up at Robin, looking vaguely put out. “I just can’t believe with all the backflipping and martial arts stuff you do, you don’t know these people.”
Robin smiles, biting at the edge of his lip, fiddling with his hands, indecision overwhelming him slightly. And he nods, slowly. “I know them.” He nods up at the screen, smiling, feeling far away from his own body.
“Those are my parents.”
There is a long pause, and then three heads turn to look at him, wide-eyed.
Raven, at least, puts down her book, in what Robin guesses is an attempt at being supportive.
Cyborg looks at him, human eye wide, but careful. “Dude, I thought Batman was your dad.” Beast Boy says. Robin feels himself shake his head slowly. “No.” he says, beginning to waver.
This is hard. Harder than he wants it to be, harder than it should be.
His fingers tighten ever so slightly, his body clenching up. And then he feels a featherlight touch against his mind, like a quiet sound.
Raven.
She looks at him, silent, and he knows that she’s quietly urging him to continue.
Fortunately he doesn’t have to, because as always, Cyborg has something to say.
“But they-they, died.” Cyborg says, almost in disbelief, as if any child with loving, living parents would put on a brightly colored outfit and go out to fight supervillains.
Robin vaguely wonders if his friends were just that hopeful, hopeful that maybe Batman really was his father, his birth father, and he was just- some product of Batman and a lapsing love affair. He’s vaguely touched by the idea, and again he’s reminded of just how much he loves his friends, annoying though they might be at times.
They’re still watching him, and he realizes that he’s spacing out, that he’s letting the world fall away like he always does.
Slowly he nods, and finds that his voice is dry.
“Yeah. They- did.” he says, fighting to keep the pain from his voice.
“Was it- I mean, were they-” Cyborg fumbles. “It was big, in the news. I remember it. It was such a terrible accident.” Cyborg continues, awkwardly.
Robin glances up at the ceiling, letting his eyes trace the corners of the room. Sunlight pours in through the glass windows. He takes a breath, lets his fingers lace together. “It was in all the news. But it wasn’t…”
He twists his fingers, and he’s so glad for his mask.
“Someone took the bolts off of the wires.” he says finally.
If he could look at his friends' faces he knows what he’d see, a sick, sympathetic sort of horror. But seeing that would cause him to break into pieces, and this is his one chance, to say it, to share it, and then to never speak it aloud, ever again.
“Why…” Cyborg says quietly.
Starfire and Beast Boy are silent, and Raven, he knows, isn’t going to speak unless to protect him.
Robin takes another breath. “It was Gotham.” he says with a wry smile. He shrugs. “My dad wouldn’t pay the protection money. Batman even came…chased the gang away. We, my parents, even Batman, thought that they had gone. But they…we, everybody was wrong.”
Even speaking it, it all comes back to him, young and safe, the glow of before.
The hard line in his life. The before, and the after. The uncrossable chasm.
The no going back.
“But you weren’t-there, right?” Beast Boy says in a small voice, ears drooping.
Robin smiles, but only because he’s so close to tears. He snorts, almost laughing, but it’s not funny. “If-if I had gone on- the wires broke just before I would’ve gone on. If they had broken five seconds later then I would’ve fallen too.” he says carelessly, because being callous is the only way that he can get through the pain.
Now he does look at his friends' faces, and he does see the horror there now.
Maybe he shouldn’t’ve said that. Maybe he should’ve just-
His thoughts are broken off as he’s pulled almost off his feet into a hug by two huge metal arms. Cyborg almost never hugs people because they hate it, because he’s all cold and metal.
He is all metal and cold, Robin thinks slowly, standing there numbly. But he shuts his eyes anyway.
Finally Cyborg lets him go, when he’s deemed Robin as having received enough comforting, and then he’s pretty much dragged by the metal teen over to the sofa where he’s wedged in between Starfire and Cyborg.
He sniffs.
“So if Batman isn’t your dad, then how did you get to be Robin?” Beast Boy asks after a little while.
Robin smiles. “He was there. He ah, he took care of me, and everything.” He fiddles with his gloves. “I…can’t even remember what happened, right after. I was up, on the platform. But I-I don’t even remember how I got down.” He leans against the back of the sofa. “Someone might’ve had to carry me down, I think.” he says tiredly.
He’s vaguely aware of Starfire’s arm, heavy around his shoulders.
“So, Batman, adopted you to be his sidekick.” Beast Boy says.
Robin shakes his head. “Oh, no. He just adopted me. Or, you know.” He looks at Cyborg, who he knows keeps up with the gossip train, who he knows quite enjoys a good piece of gossip.
“You mean, Bruce Wayne is Batman?” the metal teen says incredulously.
Beast Boy snorts. “You mean you got adopted by a billionaire?”
Robin grins halfheartedly. “Now you know why it’s no big deal that we go through two sofas a year.” he says dryly.
Cyborg pats him on the shoulder. “Okay, so Bruce Wayne, or Mr Batman adopts you, Dick Grayson.” he gently throws the name towards him. Robin nods slowly.
“Yeah.” he says quietly.
“How many gossip magazines do you even read to know all this.” Raven butts in dryly. Robin smiles over at her. Cyborg shrugs broadly. “I like to be caught up.” he says lightly, an easy grin on his face.
“We still don’t know how you started being Robin.” Beast Boy says.
Robin shrugs. “Bruce took me home. But he was never around. Eventually…I started looking around. I had fallen asleep in a chair, when someone came out of the Batcave.”
“Who?” Starfire asks.
Robin thinks that his friends are playing up their reactions for encouragement; are leading him with questions so that he doesn’t have to figure out what to say all on his own.
“It was the butler.” he says. “He..didn’t see me. So I went to go see what was going on. And then I found everything.”
Beast Boy grins. “Did you get in trouble?”
Robin shrugs. “No. He told me that he was trying to find the gang that had murdered my parents. I told him that I wanted to help. He told me to stay home.”
Cyborg’s eyes gleam. “And you listened to him.” Robin grins faintly. “Nope.”
“And the costume?” Beast Boy asks. Robin shrugs again. “Minus the mask and cape, it's literally a circus costume.”
Cyborg snorts. “And that’s why it’s so bright.”
Robin nods. “Oh yeah.” He looks down at his red and green clothes. They’ve become clothes, no longer a costume. “I had no idea that I’d be wearing it for this long.” he says dryly.
Starfire hugs him tightly. He wishes that he could fully reciprocate, but he’s still numb, numb from the pain of wading through…all of this. “We appreciate you telling us this.” she says against his head.
“Yeah man. Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Cyborg asks. Beast Boy nods. “Did Batman ask you not to tell us or something?”
Robin shrugs, slightly sheepish. “Ah…no. Not really. Actually…he’s said that I should tell you guys. For years. Raven too.” He nods over towards the lilac haired girl, sitting primly at the end of the sofa.
“You knew?” Beast Boy cries. Raven shrugs, face completely uncaring. Robin smiles.
“When she went into your mind.” Cyborg guesses. Robin nods. “Yeah. She’s known for years.” He hesitates.
“I…would’ve told you. I just didn’t know how to tell you. Like, I didn’t have to actually tell Raven. I just didn’t know how to talk about it without…having a huge pity party.”
“Wow, you’re super secretive and introverted, we had no idea.” Cyborg says dryly. He shakes him ever so gently by the shoulder. “But man, we wanna know this stuff.”
“Yeah.” Beast Boy chimes in.
“Yes.” Starfire says from his shoulder.
“I already knew.” Raven says.
Everyone looks at her.
She sighs, uncrossing her arms. “But if I didn’t, I would want to know, too.” she says, softening.
“I just. I lost my family. My first family. Completely. And I just…” he stops, not knowing how to continue. Starfire’s voice is soft and quiet. “You’re not going to lose us, Robin.” She tells him gently.
“Yeah. I mean, isn’t that what you’re always telling us?” Beast Boy says. Robin smiles faintly. “Yeah. I guess so.”
He’s vaguely aware of his friends touching him, once, twice, gently. Starfire’s arm draped around his shoulders. Cyborg’s metal hand, clapping his shoulder. Beast Boy, squeezing his elbow. Raven, fingers brushing his hand.
And he knows. He’s come home.
Piece by broken piece.
The sunlight comes pouring in through the windows like a golden wave. And something in his soul lifts.