The Jest of Robin

16: Two Plus Two Equals Five

Wayne Manor, April 1, 2010, 11:21 EST

Dick sat on his bed, arms crossed as he stared at the screen Bruce had brought in for him. After he gave no response to Bruce as to what movie he wanted to watch, Bruce put on The Princess and the Frog. He didn't understand why he'd been moved from the mountain to the manor, but he was pissed.

He was pissed that he wasn't able to have his friends here with him, pissed that he couldn't take control of this. It wasn't the Team's fault that he was taken and almost became a lookalike of the Joker. It was honestly just his fault. He didn't have the best situational awareness, and he should have realized that. He should have had the common sense to say, 'Oh hey, maybe since I had a panic attack yesterday, and it is so close to the anniversary of seeing my parents fall to their deaths in front of my eyes, maybe it wouldn't be the best idea for me to go to school, even though I have a chemistry lab and a test to take. Especially since both Batman and Bruce think something bad is going to happen to one of us soon.'

But of course he didn't have the common sense to realize that. He was too busy trying to be both Robin and Dick Grayson in the same person, when he knew it was better to keep them as separate. Let Robin deal with all the scary things, the things that would make a normal thirteen year old kid cry and run for their moms, the things that cause internal panic, and let him use that panic to figure out the situations. Robin can't have emotions when he is in those situations. He can't let the panic cloud his judgement, so he waits until he is out of that situation, until he isn't Robin anymore before he lets the panic settle in.

When he is Dick, that is when he is able to let emotions overcome him. He is able to sit in his room alone, letting his mind wander to all the ways everything could have gone wrong, all the things that went wrong with the day, how he could have done things better, how he could have saved more people as Robin if only he'd done this differently, or done this instead of that. He could think of all the happy things that happened, and let his laugh escape his lips, or of everything that made him angry, and use working out as an excuse to punch the punching bag. And once he was done feeling whatever feelings he had, he would go back to being the well mannered, polite boy the public thought of him as, the boy who didn't have panic attacks in his closet after a night of patrolling with Batman, and if he was slightly more clingy with Bruce or Alfred, or Barbara than usual, no one mentioned anything.

Maybe it isn't that he was too focused on keeping them the same. Maybe he was trying to make them different, and that is what caused him to lose the idea of being aware. Maybe he was trying too hard to push his Robin training away from his civilian side. He wanted to be normal, and he couldn't do that with all the knowledge Batman had thrust upon him, so he separated the two personas from each other.

Yeah, that had to be the mistake he made. He needs to realize that he can't be one or the other. He needs to be both, without making distinct separations between the two. But how could he do that if he can't even tell his two best friends about his other life. He couldn't tell Barbara he was Robin, or else she would be able to find out Bruce is Batman, and then she would tell her dad, and either Gordon would take Dick from Bruce, or he would just scold Batman even more than he already did when he first started going on patrols with him.

He couldn't tell Wally about his identity, because Wally wasn't a very good secret keeper. Well, that might not be all that true, but Bruce didn't trust Wally with this information, therefore he wasn't allowed to trust Wally with his identity. Besides, if Wally found out Robin was Dick, he would never escape the taunts of being a billionaire's ward, and he didn't want Wally to think any differently of him. He didn't need to know that he had such a horrible backstory. He already knew that Robin's parents were dead, but he didn't need to know how they had died, or anything else about him. He didn't need to feel worried for him, just because of the amount of times he had been taken by Gotham villains, as both Dick and Robin.