Maybe this isn't as fake as we think(Birdflash)

When a nightmare's a memory

Believe it or not, there was a time when Dick slept easily.

He'd always been able to remember his dreams, and when he was a kid travelling with Haley's Circus and his parents, he'd dreamt every night of flying. He'd be running in a field or around the ring and he'd just, sprout wings. He'd lift off and soar through the air and it had been magnificent. It had felt just like trapeze.

Then his parents were murdered.

Dick had watched the ropes snap, watched them fall from the sky they'd once flown through, and his dreams had changed.

Instead of flying, he fell. It didn't matter how the dream started, sometimes he was back at Haley's or on patrol or in any one of a million other places, it always ended with him free falling- the good ones did anyway.

The bad ones were much worse. In the bad ones, he wasn't the one falling.

He was frozen, unable to do anything but scream, and he was forced to watch his parents fall all over again. Not just his parents though- no, that would be too kind.

As he'd come to see Bruce as a father, and his team as a family, it wasn't just his parents falling. Sometimes it was Bruce or Alfred, sometimes it was one of his team members, sometimes it was Wally.

At first, he'd woken up screaming. Alfred had been there to make him hot chocolate and watch stupid cartoons until Dick fell asleep again.

Dick had gotten better at hiding it as time wore on. Between bat training and practice, Dick figured out how to wake up quietly and leave those nightmares in his bed so he could live without them. Maybe that's why he had always been so reckless with the way he flew over Gotham's roof tops. As a direct defiance of his own PTSD.

Of course, no one knew any of that. Once he'd figured out how to hide the nightmares, he had told Alfred they stopped.

So, Dick wasn't too worried about Wally figuring it out.

Tonight was one of the nights where he was the one falling. Black Canary might have told him that was because of all the anxiety he was feeling yesterday, but Black Canary wasn't there.

It started out normal. He was at some sort of gala, waltzing with some old lady- but then her mouth stretched in an impossibly wolfish smile just like the corpses of those infected with Joker gas except she was still waltzing, holding him in an iron grip. She opened her impossible mouth, and said, "Young boy like you, it's a shame you're taking after him. Tell me a lie, Boy Blunder."

"I-" Dick cut off stumbling backwards and ripping painfully out of her grasp.

"Sing for me little birdy. Say something." The light in the ballroom around them bleached away, leaving only darkness and the old ladys increasingly wide and impossible smile.

Dick scrambled backward.

Her hair began falling out in clumps, bright green hair growing in its place. Her dress dissolved to reveal a purple suit. The skin visible on her hands and face turned white as a sheet and her thin lips filled in red.

Dick's eyes widened in horror as the woman took a step forward, forcing him even further back. His foot hit empty space and he toppled backward off the edge of the dance floor.

He fell through open space like he always did, images passing by faster than he could really take in, a familiar melting pot of fear, dread, and panic welling in his chest.

Then something new happened. Something that had never happened before. A strong pair of arms wrapped around Dick's middle, lifting him up and stopping his fall. The dream faded away and Dick fell into a deeper sleep than he had in years.