Archive of Our Own ^beta

noun. the changing of a word to express it with a non-standard meaning, by way of some inflection.

Here is something: 

• He had known from the start that he would not like America. 

•••  

Circ d’Haleé is a traveling European circus. It is based in Andorra. Its tours ‘abroad’ are in west Asia, not in America. 

He’s heard all the stories. 

America is the place that people laugh at. When adults hear stories about it, they cringe and do an odd movement of baring their teeth, like the mere mention pains them. Or they scowl. 

No one from the circus has ever been there, of course. Not even his parents. His father is Rom, through and through, born and raised in Cadíz; he never even left Spain once until he joined the circus. Now he’s been everywhere: Europe and Eurasia and the Middle East. 

His mother is from Turkmenistan. Her father, Rasit Levri, for whom he is named, was the son of the governor of Ashgabat, and he was studying in Iran for his PhD in 1989 when he was shot by an American soldier. 

His mother does not laugh when she hears about America and she does not cringe, either; she does not even scowl. She takes a deep breath straightens her shoulders and says, “It’s what they deserve, Dicle.” 

She calls him Dicle, not Rasit. Everybody else does too. He’s alright with this. He’s not sure that he wants a dead man’s name anyway. 

She says, “It’s what they deserve,” because all the news that comes out of that place seems bad. Bad elections or a bad economy or bad wars. He wouldn’t really know; he’s never been there. 

But the day before he turns eight, they arrive in America, and he keeps his expectations low. 

Their first show is in a big-name rich city somewhere on the Eastern coast of the country. The city’s pin on the show-map is black; black pins mean that the show will be dangerous. More dangerous than usual. No nets. No cliches. Pure, unabridged risk — undiluted danger. 

They take a lot precautions; their names are Americanized, Grisijo to Grayson. There is yelling outside the tent while they set up but he pays no mind. 

There is yelling during the show, too. He figures that American crowds are either very rude or simply very, very loud. 

•••  

Here is something: 

• His parents’ ropes snap. His do not. 

•••  

And then Dicle is loud too, just like the American crowds. 

His throat is scraped so raw from screaming that he cannot find words. 

When the screams have faded out and the crowds have cleared, he is left in the center ring with two corpses and a split rope. 

There is a man with heavy eyes and pale skin that places a hand on his shoulder and tells him something in English, low and gentle. 

There are police arriving now, pulling him away. Bastards, he thinks, bastards. Their hands are rough and angry and their grip will leave bruises all up his arms. 

Haleé is standing, motionless, pale, eyes glassy. He does not move as the bastards drag him. 

He is eight years old; they do not care; Haleé does not care. Or at least, he has lost the ability to care. 

But Madame Tsetvanya, the fortuneteller, slaps their hands away from him, gets in their face — snarls at them. Her hold on his wrist is gentle, and she drags him out of the tent, into the winter air. He shivers; the sting of the winter air wakes him up. His eyes burn. His chest feels like it’s collapsing. His breath comes in wet gasps. 

“Listen,” Tsetvanya says harshly, eyes flicking wildly. She is a harsh woman, white, but she cares, which is more than he can say for anyone else. She's not a real fortuneteller. There's no such thing. “Listen to me before it all falls apart. Listen to me. They are going to take you. They are going to steal every part of you, darling, they are. Do not tell them your name. Do as I did to survive. I lied. I have always lied. Make one up. Do not let them have you. Say your name is...is…is…Richard Grayson. Or something. Do not speak to them: all of them, bastards. They are going to steal you; do not give them anything to steal.” She presses her forehead to his, shaking with fury. “It will keep you alive. It kept me alive. I knew what was happening and I know what is going to happen and I know it will be hard and dark. You are strong and you will get even stronger but there is nothing this country loves more than to rip the strong apart. Give them mercy, darling, but don’t give them you.” 

He trusts Tsetvanya; the fortuneteller is — was — his father’s best friend. 

His mother once called her a pathological liar. And she is. She lies a lot. She’s not even from Latvia like she claims. She’s from Portugal; her real hair is blonde; her real name is Mariana — she is a liar. She likes stories and she likes sad ones. She lies about what she can do and what she can see. She has told Dicle this; she just makes it up like everyone else. So she is a liar, but she has never lied to him. He trusts her. 

She tells him the truth about what there is, even if she doesn't know anything about what will be. Right now, what there is is blood on his hands, all the way to his arms. 

“How does it end?” he whispers, wanting a lie. His fingernails rush over his arms, long angry pink trails following them through his parents’ blood and a policeman’s bruises. “Do…do I ever come home?” 

Her eyes are shiny like a doll’s. She crushes him to her chest, and the scratchy blue fabric of her robe is familiar in a way he hopes he never loses. It’s already wet with his tears. “Darling. Darling,” she says. “Your home is in your blood, your home is in your veins. The circus is in your blood. But I wish that I—”

He smothers a sob; he can’t stop himself from shaking. 

“I wish...darling. Your bones are too good for Gotham.” Her fingers scrape roughly through his hair, like she’s furious. “You will grow up but you will never grow old. I’m so sorry.” She pulls away, and grabs him by the shoulders. She seems to jolt back to herself, forcing some life back into her eyes, like she’s steeling herself. “Do you understand what I’ve said?” 

He is never coming home. He can’t cry anymore. 

“Lie,” he recounts between trembling breaths. “Have mercy. And be strong.” 

“No,” she says, hand heavy on his shoulder. “You are too good. You do not belong here in this city. You already have mercy and you are already strong: you must —” 

“Is that the boy?” one of the bastards hollers in English, already jogging over. 

“Fuck,” says Tsetvanya. She turns to him, looking wild. “You asked how it ends. It ends when you are too young and too brave and too good; you are loved by so many; you are happy; but it ends soon, and it ends where you began — at the end of a rope.”

Her eyes are wide, like she’s expecting him to understand something. His vision is blurry with tears but he remembers this moment — remembers these words for as long as he lives. 

Then the bastard interrupts and the second last time he ever sees Tsetvanya is here, in indigo gauze and in tears, in the lightning-white snow. 

His parents are dead. 

He wails. 

•••  

Tsetvanya is right. She is piercingly, perfectly right: they steal him away. They take him to their police station. The floors there are green and filthy, and people in handcuffs jingle their wrists to loosen the bonds, and Dicle is covered with his parents’ blood. 

They say, “What’s your name, kid? Where you from?” 

His throat is bloody now. He cannot speak. Too much screaming. 

They say, “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be, boy.” 

He’s shaking. His hands are bloody. His parents are dead. 

They say, “Don’t you speak English? Huh? Or are you just dumb?” 

His eyes burn. He physically cannot cry anymore, but he doesn’t even want to cry anymore; he is angry. 

Bastard, he thinks. 

“I do. I do. I speak English,” he whispers, forces out through the way his throat feels like it’s made of knives. 

“Not well, clearly,” the officer says, a skinny blonde woman. The man next to her snorts out a laugh.

“Looks like a mini terrorist.” 

It feels like his ribs are blades against his chest. 

He wants to say to them: I hate you. You are evil. You are a devil in skin, you are a shame to humanity, you are a sinner in blue, and you are going to decay everyday of eternity in the flames of hell. 

He means to say to them: Please, my name is Rasit Grisijo, and everyone calls me Dicle, and I have family in Ashgabat, please, just take me there. I want my parents. I want my grandmother. I want my parents. Please. I have a grandmother who is alive. My grandmother, my Nine, her name is Havva Levri and she lives in Ashgabat. Please. 

Neither comes out. He does the impossible: he cries again. 

•••  

Here is something: 

• Dicle half-knows nine languages. He knows his father’s Spanish, his father’s Calo. He knows his mother’s native Turkmen and Russian. He knows the crusts of Jacques Haleé’s French and he knows scraps of Raya Vestri’s Polish and he knows Madame Tsetvanya’s Portuguese. He even knows Georges’s Arabic. He knows Russian and Turkmen especially well; he only actually knows how to write in the Cyrillic alphabet. He speaks these eight very, very well, especially for an eight year old. 
• But...English. Hardly anyone at the circus spoke it. They rarely toured so far West that they could be in England, and this trip to America was completely unprecedented. He knows greetings, colors, the basic verbs, the way to say ‘please.’ It is his ninth language; it is his worst; there was simply never any need for him to learn it. 
• But now he is here. And now they are talking about him as if he is stupid, as if he is a criminal, for not knowing their one language. He can tell by their tone. And he is already picking up on some words, some cognates. 

It is awful; it feels like they are stealing even more from him. He wants to go home, and speak something he knows. 

•••  

They deem him uncooperative. But it’s the officers who are rude. 

“Proof that delinquents start this young,” one tsks. “Sad.” 

“Well, we found a good place for him then, didn’t we,” another, with cigarette-stained teeth and an eyebrow notch, says. “Bristol’s own Juvie for the little —” 

He bites the side of his cheek; blood fills the left of his mouth. He curls his fists at his side. He knows that word. 

The policeman doesn’t stop talking, but Dicle stops listening there — nothing he could have to say will bring his parents back anyway. The man’s words are pointless. 

His gaze is sternly fixed on the window, showing miles of blue-dark. There is a figure there. It is a sharp black shadow of a thing, sitting on a ledge. 

The figure is decadently dark, fleshy. Nothing about it could possibly indicate its focus being on him; still, he stares it back, dead on, transfixed.

“The circus isn’t cooperating either. Gordon doesn’t think we’ll get anything more than maybe a name out of them. Certainly not any papers. And the kid’s clearly not going to say shit,” the policeman is saying. “When’s Ashburne comin’ to take him?” 

He’s raptly watching the window. Finally, finally, the dark figure shifts, lightning-fast, and it seems to be gazing straight at him. He wonders if it has eyes. He can’t see any. It presses a hand silently to the window, and then turns around and is gone. 

Slowly, even though the figure is already gone, he raises his own hand, palm-out, to mirror what the dark thing had done. 

The officer in suspenders gives him an odd look. 

Quickly, he tucks his fingers back into a fist, and lets his hand fall to his lap. There’s something out there. 

•••   

There is absolutely something out there but he doesn’t know what it is because the bastards put him into jail. 

Jail. 

“It’s a Juvenile Detention Center, and it’s only for a few days,” says Poznan, who is the temporary substitute of his new social worker, Ashburne. He has a large, decorative belt buckle and a red keychain that says, Don’t Mess With Texas. The Latin letters on the keychain are as intelligible as white paint on a plain canvas, which is to say: not very. The man’s name sounds vaguely Polish, but his accent is thickly American — something regional with a drawl that obscures his vowels. His hair is a thinning blonde and his suit is old. “Given how much trouble the police said they had with you, it’s where you belong.” The man casts a look at him, nose wrinkling. “A week in here, and you’ll think twice about this whole act, all right, ‘hermano?’ ‘Ese?’” 

“Do you actually speak Spanish? But not Polish? Or is this just some American thing where they try to throw out words?” Dicle replies, in actual Spanish. He tries to think about what his Nine in Turkmenistan told him about Americans; Poznan is looking confused all the while. He takes this to mean the man only speaks English. Typical American. “My grandmother says all your soldiers are terrorists. All you Americans do everyday is get brainwashed. She said America is a place for the damned. This place killed her husband. I didn’t believe her but now your country killed my grandfather and my parents and put me in jail and made me speak to you. So it is cursed; it is damned.” His voice cracks a little bit on the ‘my parents are dead’ but it feels so good to take out his anger that he doesn’t take heed. 

Poznan snaps his fingers under Dick’s nose. “This is America,” he says, voice bored, as if it’s a perfunctory action, “you’re gonna have to speak English.” 

Bastard, he thinks, I know this is America, feeling something akin to humiliation, to fury, coil in his stomach. Between that and the ringing, aching sadness, his chest feels too full. 

He says nothing. 

•••  

Jail is awful.

He is barely eight years old and he is little and he is brown and he doesn’t talk like anyone else — this makes him quite the target. 

He has a black eye and a twisted wrist by the end of the first day. 

It’s wicked, still, no matter how rough the other boys are. Children shouldn’t be locked up, he muses, kicking the puce leg of the jumpsuit. 

The food is awful. The bed is a sheet of metal on skinny tin stilts with a mattress the approximate width of a razorblade. 

The good parts of it are limited to two things: his acquisition of many new English swear words via immersion, and his positively kingly bunk mate, Sirhan. 

Sirhan is sixteen and a half, and speaks Turkmen, and even has some books. He’s in Juvie for shooting his stepfather when the man had taken a knife to his little sister’s throat instead of the usual fists; he’s in for attempted murder. 

“You don’t belong here,” Sirhan tells him, a crease between his eyebrows. “You haven’t even done anything.” 

Sirhan’s Turkmen is a little stilted; his mother — who was Uzbek, not Turkmen — had stopped speaking it at home after she’d remarried to the aforementioned stepfather, some New Jersey Italian guy. He speaks enough though. It’s enough. 

By the third day, Sirhan starts a fight with a boy who’d barely shoved Dicle. 

Sirhan ends up winning. He grins at him. “We’ve got to stick together, right?” Sirhan says, in Turkmen, and he could cry. 

“What’s your name, anyway,” he asks. 

Lie, lie, lie, he thinks. “Rasit,” spills out honestly. 

“That’s definitely Turkmen. It’s also, like, a lot of syllables,” Sirhan tells him, grinning. “It’s only two,” he insists. 

“Still,” says Sirhan. They’re in their room. They’ve both got books in their laps. “Got, like, a nickname or something?” 

“My —” he starts. My mother used to call me Narbülbülü, my father used to call me Robin. But they’re dead. His tongue tastes bitter, his mouth tastes sharp. It’s like dropping a brick onto wet tissue paper, like a bullet — the way that the grief tears through him. It’s not like he’d forgotten 

that they were dead. He’s in a prison because his parents are dead. But somehow to say it, like the fact that it is, brings it all rushing back hard. 

His parents are dead. They’re never coming back. He’s stuck here forever. 

“My grandmother always called me Dicle. Everyone else does — did too,” he says finally. It isn’t precious like Robin or Narbülbülü — it’s precious, sure, a petname passed through generations — but at the end of the day, his grandmother is still alive, somewhere in Ashgabat, unaware that her daughter and son-in-law are dead. His grandmother is still alive and his parents are not. But maybe...maybe if he survives this place, he can go back to her. Maybe he can compromise with the police, and tell them about her, and he can — he can — he can go back home. Or at least

something like it. 

“Dee cluh?” Sirhan asks, crinkling his nose. “Dee cluh. Dicle? You should probably steer clear of that one. Sounds a little like d—” Sirhan stops abruptly, eyeing him carefully. “Sounds like a word you don’t need to know.” 

“What word?” 

“It’s not — ugh. Don’t give me those eyes, kid. No. Stop.” Sirhan sighs. “Fine. …Dick.” That’s odd. His grandmother’s name for him has a long ‘ee’ sound, not an ‘ih’ sound. “Dick,” he echoes. 

“Don’t —” Sirhan starts. 

“Dick,” he says again. “What’s it mean?” 

“— say it,” Sirhan finishes lamely. He sighs. “Well, it’s a. Uh. It’s a word you shouldn’t use. But I think it’s also a shorter form of, like, Richard. Like, the Vice President? His name is Dick Cheney, short for Richard.” 

“It’s only one syllable,” he says. “…Short for Richard?” ‘Richard.’ ...Tsetvanya told him to use that name. 

Sirhan gives him a look out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah.” 

“Alright.” 

“…Alright,” agrees Sirhan cautiously. 

He throws a beaming smile at the older boy. It feels really, really good to speak to someone kind. To speak to someone in his language. 

Sirhan laughs. “You’re a good kid, Rasit. Weird, but good.” 

“Lights out,” one of the guards barks. Sirhan sighs. The lights flick out. 

He hears the older boy climb into his bunk resignedly — hears the crinkle of the cheap sheets. “Get some sleep, okay,” Sirhan says. 

“Okay,” he says. 

He doesn’t think he’ll be able to. The first night he’d sobbed until he passed out. Black — dreamless. In the morning, waking up to a literal cell, instead of a warm caravan in Europe with his parents, he’d sobbed again. Last night, he’d stayed up. Counting new bruises and replaying back Tsetvanya’s every word and crying. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to stay up a whole night again. 

His eyelids are already falling. 

His dream is—it’s— 

•••  

Strange. Horrifying.

He watches, alone in the stands, the crowd vanished, as the rope snaps and his parents fall mercilessly to the ground. He watches, alone in the stands, the crowd vanished, as the ground smacks into them, their bodies contorting crisply into corpses. His mother’s neck is turned too far to the right, like an owl. His father’s eyes are slick. The rope slithers. 

The carnival music still churns out; Haleé’s booming voice with their Americanized names: Flying Graysons. 

The crowd is absent. 

There is the black figure from that very first night, a mass of fleshy shadows creeping toward him. 

He can see no eyes. The creature is all decadent darkness. Nothing could possibly indicate its looking at him. He stares back, unflinching, dead on. 

The dark obscures the bodies. The music grinds to a halt. 

The figure is all sharp edges and unforgiving lines. 

He tries to move. The creature steps closer like a nightmare. 

“You have eyes,” Dick says, terrified, breathless, curious. “You do have eyes.” The creature’s eyes are heavy; Dick cannot see his parents’ corpses. 

•••  

He wakes up gasping. His chest feels like it’s subducting itself. 

His eyes are hot with tears. 

I want my parents, he thinks. 

•••   

Here is something: 

• He does not have parents anymore. 

•••  

And here is something else: 

• There is no point in wanting for impossible things. It only makes you more miserable

•••  

He digs his nails hard into the heel of his palm. The skin gives like butter. He’s breathing hard in the dark, his heart pounding at his wrists, at his neck, in his head. 

Think something helpful, he tells himself miserably. If you change who you are, you can run away. Tsetvanya did it. You know she did it. 

Tsetvanya’s real name is Mariana; everyone only ever called her Tsetvanya though. She completely reinvented herself, virtually nothing left of her old self, just thick white bones and whiter skin. He doesn’t know if he wants to leave himself behind — he doesn’t mind having a

dead man’s name anymore, because his parents gave it to him. 

Of course, running away from Portuguese boarding school to join a circus as a “Latvian” fortune teller isn’t really in the cards for him in the first place. He doesn’t even know what sort of information that the circus gave the police. 

Besides: running away? Absurd. 

That’s your only choice; you can’t stay here — in prison. Tears tease at his eyes. No. No, he thinks, furiously swiping at his eyes. He’s never going to cry. Not here. Not anymore. 

•••  

The white parts of his fingernails are painted with red, from having slid so far and so hard into his palms. 

•••  

Dick misses his parents devastatingly. 

He especially misses his dad. He wants him here. He wants his father to lift him up and hold him and protect him from the Americans — from the police and the social workers and the child prisoners. He wants his dad to say, Te amo, mijo. Te protegeré. He wants his dad. He wants his father to hold his hand and he wants his dad to be here. 

But then he thinks about the last time he saw his father. With his skull caved in, more blood than skin. Shiny, shiny eyes. 

•••  

There is a corner in the cell where the shadows are especially dark. The darkness is probably half the wall, maybe two meters tall. It is a sliver of black that is shaped like it could be a person. 

If it was a person, the head would be grotesquely misshapen, and the neck would be broken. 

Dick sees it out of the corner of his eyes while he is gasping and he has an awful terrible heart racing thought that it is his father. 

“Baba?” he whispers. “Baba.” 

A wave of relief and love and...emotion crashes over him, until he catches himself, refutes himself. 

It is stupid and irrational. The realization that it is not him hurts almost as much as the next realization: that Dick will never ever see his father alive again. 

This shadow is not his father anymore than the night is his father. 

•••  

The next day is the funeral. 

It has all been paid for, Poznan tells him. Dick should be grateful, Poznan tells him. Dick’s learnt fast. Three days in America has forced him to. He understands what Poznan is saying. “Grateful that my parents are dead?” he hisses, in Polish, which Poznan doesn’t even know.

Poznan grabs him by scruff of his neck. “I’m watching you.” 

“Dicle!” Tsetvanya cries, and Dick breaks free of the man to run to her. The social worker’s fingernails claw at his neck like jaundiced talons. 

She scoops him up, spins him around. 

He buries his face in her shoulder. 

“I hate it here, I hate it here, I hate it here,” he tells her. 

She kisses top of his head and cards her fingers roughly through his curls. “I know. I know. We’ve missed you, darling.” 

He’s with her again, but he already misses her so much he wants to cry. 

“Did you tell them about my grandmother?” he asks. 

Tsetvanya’s look is unreadable, but her eyes shimmer. “No,” she says confidently. “Something else will happen.” She glances over his shoulder like she’s watching someone. He goes to turn his head, but she catches his chin with a hand. “You will see soon.” 

“Rasit,” gasps Haleé, coming up to him and seizing him into a hug. The Frenchman’s big arms are tight around Dick. He only comes up to the man’s ribs. It’s cruel, really, that he has to force himself to hug back. And yet. Where was this passion when his parents were freshly dead? Why would Haleé just let him be taken? He feels bitter; he feels cold. 

But Dick also knows that the circus is doomed to leave Gotham soon. He knows that he will not see them for years if — when they leave. 

He is bitter, but at the end of the day, the circus is in his blood. These people are in his blood. He hates his bones for stealing him away from them. 

So he wraps his skinny arms around Haleé’s neck. 

It’s a functional funeral: it is not what his parents would have wanted, but it is what they have gotten. 

He feels dreadful thinking about them trapped in Gotham’s dirt — not in Cadíz or Ashgabat where they belong. 

Haleé and Tsetvanya and Georges and the Buraydah twins and Kiev and Pierre and Guillermo and Emilie and Raya and Raymond and Anastazja and everyone else he’s ever known is wearing white. 

•••

Here is something: 

• You wear white to a funeral. 
• Dick has only ever been to one other funeral in his life, but he knows this. 
• It was for his father’s mother. It was in Cadíz. Everyone only spoke Calo. Everyone only wore white. His father was not crying, but his eyes were heavy. Dick’s mother wore black, and people looked at her badly. Someone told his father that his wife— 
• There was wailing. Dick was four, clanging to his father’s hand. People cooed at him. They said: What an absolute darling, what a beautiful child, Juan. He looks just like his grandmother. 
• There was a man, who gave something like a sermon, in which he said: Putrav lesko drom angle leste te na inkrav les mai but palpale mura brigasa. 
• The meaning of that is this: “I open her way in the new life again and release her from the fetters of sorrow. She is free, and I as well.” 
• Dick’s father was not crying then. But after the ceremony, he cried. He took Dick’s mother and Dick into his arms and cried. Wailed. 
• Dick was four, and said to his father, “Te amo. Te protegeré.” 
• He was wearing white. 
• Everyone was wearing white. 

•••  

Not everyone is wearing white now. 

There is a — there is a man, a stranger, there, too, with heavy eyes and pale skin. He is broad and tall and young, and he is wearing all black. Familiar. 

Tsetvanya is staring at the man, unblinking. Her stare is not hard or soft or even appraising. It's not lying or making anything up. It simply is. 

Georges tells him that it was this man — a rich man — who paid for this funeral. Georges does not tell him to be grateful. And it is for that that he is grateful. But at the world ‘funeral,’ someone behind him lets out a sob. 

Dick feels angry. He is not sobbing and these are his parents being buried. How dare anyone have more grief than him. They have not suffered. They are not trapped in America, in a children’s prison; they are free. 

He is not crying, and he will not cry afterwards. He has promised himself that.

••• 

Here is how Dick knows that he should not cry: 

Dick’s father had not cried at his own mother’s funeral. He cried after. But Dick will not: He cannot. His father could not weep until much later because he had lost his mother; Dick cannot weep at all because he has lost both parents. He should not cry. He cannot cry. 

•••  

But this one sob sets off a chain amongst the attendees. 

Somehow, this grief is even more stifling. It is befitting, it is earned, but it feels wrong. Still, the thought that these people are going to leave him here is so painful that he can’t bear it. He drifts first. 

The coffins are already in the ground. 

He stands in front of them, very, very alone, as if the crowd is vanished. 

There is him and there are two expensive coffins nestled in dirt. This constitutes the entire universe.

And then there is a hand on his shoulder. 

It’s the man. The rich man. He has these soft, haunted eyes, gray like cinderblocks. 

Dick means to look up at him defiantly, but the man’s expression is so wholly empathetic that he falters. “Hello,” he says weakly, trying to tone down the obviousness of his accent, to sound more like the boys at the Center. It doesn’t work, not even a little — his voice is too hoarse and too tear cracked and too unfamiliar with American accents and American words. 

The man nods in acknowledgment. His hand is still on his shoulder. 

Silence caws between them. It’s not awkward, somehow, but Dick still breaks it. “Thank you,” Dick says, looking up at the man. “For —” 

“Of course,” the man says. He meets Dick’s eyes. “I. I remember how it was. How it felt.” 

Dick casts his gaze back on the closed coffins — lifeless, expensive, lacquered wood. Everything else is still. It feels like they’re going to be here forever. “You lost your parents as well?” 

“Yes,” says the man in one short exhale, as if the words taste like ammonia on his tongue. “When I was your age.” 

“How is it?” he asks, carefully tracing his words out. “…Does it heal?” 

“Never,” promises the man. “But there is closure to be had — for you.” The man’s demeanor doesn’t shift, exactly, but his whole form changes somehow. His eyes are wide and fervent; he looks like a zealot. “The man who murdered your parents will be brought to justice.” 

Dick stiffens — he is ice-washed, he is slathered with fire. Lightning curdles in his chest. “Murdered?” he asks, quiet. “They were murdered?” 

The man’s eyebrows furrow. “They’ve not told you? The police haven’t told you?” 

He balls his hands into fists and looks up at the man, shaking with rage. Dick is half his size, maybe less, but the man looks at him like they’re equals. “The police have told me nothing. They have done nothing. They will do nothing.” 

Murdered. Murdered. Dick grits his teeth. Murdered? No one had said a word to him, not even the circus. 

How stupid can you be, Rasit? he asks himself. It should have been obvious. Why would he even entertain the idea that it was an accident? 

His father checked the ropes before every single show. His mother double checked. They never made mistakes. Because mistakes could get them killed. Did get them killed. At least, Dick had assumed that a mistake had gotten them killed. 

“By who?” he demands. 

“‘Who?’” echoes the man. He is quiet for a moment. “The police don’t know yet, they’re investigating still.” 

Of course. Not only are Gotham’s police corrupt, they are also incompetent. “But you know,” Dick presses. He conjures up every English verb tense he knows. “You know

who murdered them. Who murdered my parents. You said, ‘The man who murdered your parents;’ you knew it was a man, and you could not be so sure if you did not know who the…the murderer was. I do not know how you know and I do not know who you are, but you know who murdered my parents. Please,” he begs. “Please, tell me.” 

The man looks shocked, for a half of a sliver of a fraction of an instant, before he schools his expression into something sober, solemn. The man says nothing, mouth pressed tightly. 

He says nothing and he does nothing and Dick is so fiercely angry in that moment that he could cry. His fingernails slide easily back into his palms, the skin giving effortlessly again. It stings, and his eyes sting, and he hardly even knows this man, but somehow he trusted him, and so this betrayal stings as well. 

He opens his mouth to say: If you will not tell me, then you are just as bad as them. Then you are a bastard, too. 

The man says, “Tony Zucco.” 

That is tangible. He has a name. The syllables roll like thunder from the man’s mouth. Tony Zucco: murderer. 

“Thank you,” Dick says primly. 

The man hesitates again. “…He’ll be caught. I promise you that. He’ll rot in prison for what happened.” 

No. 

No, that is not what he wants. 

Dick says, as sharply as he can, “I do notwant him to rot in prison. I am rotting in prison. He should not be. I should not be.” I want him dead, he does not say. “Your American justice is not justice at all.” 

The man turns abruptly. He kneels in front of Dick, and he can read the embroidered name on his pocket square: Wayne. “What do you mean that you’re in prison?” Wayne asks quickly, seizing him by the shoulders. His hands are so large that they engulf him almost entirely. “You’re eight.” 

“Ask him,” he jerks his head at Poznan. 

Wayne’s eyes dart over. He starts to get up. He pauses, returning to Dick’s height. “I was planning on waiting until I got custod—” he cuts off. His expression is oddly awkward, oddly earnest, for his dire face. “Never mind. Rasit, my name is Bruce Wayne. I…I know you hardly know me, but I’m interested in adop—” 

He is interrupted by Poznan telling him it is time that they leave. 

Bruce Wayne’s expression gets aggressive then, and he is pulling the man away, already saying something in a rough, low voice. 

He’s going to yell at Poznan. Dick could almost smile. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t smile. This is a funeral: a time for white clothes and wailing. 

“Mister Wayne?” he says, before the tall man can pull his social worker aside. He meets his gaze dead-on. “Thank you. For this. And for telling me the truth.”

“I,” the man begins. 

Dick runs away to say his goodbyes before he can finish. 

•••  

Here is something: 

Nashti zhas vorta po drom o bango. 

•••  

Haleé tells him, We love you, Dicle, you are so loved, and don’t forget that. It will only be ten years; ten years, and then you will be with us again. 

Georges tells him, You — and then Georges the Strongman breaks into tears and just hugs him, because Georges, despite his absolutely massive appearance is nothing but a giant softie. 

Kiev tells him, Be strong and be brave and be as much like your parents as possible. No matter what they would be proud; no matter what they are proud. 

Raya runs up and simply hugs him, holds him, for as long as she can. She presses a soft kiss to his cheek. 

He says goodbye to the other acts and the roustabouts and all the people he’s known his whole life and then there is Tsetvanya. 

The other goodbyes are painful; the other goodbyes are bitter-tinged. Something in him still tugs at the thought that they all stood there idly as he was being dragged to America’s child prisons. 

But this is Tsetvanya, who fought for him. Tsetvanya, who was his father’s closest friend and his almost-aunt. Tsetvanya, who ran away to the circus, who lies about seeing things, who is tough and kind and resilient and everything he wants to be. Tsetvanya, who is here. 

The other goodbyes are tearful; Dick does not dare cry for Tsetvanya: he loves her too much. “How does it end?” he asks her instead — one last time. 

Tsetvanya does not answer; she is staring dazedly at the rich man in black, Bruce. “He’s a little bitch, isn’t he?” she says absently. “Hm. Don’t become him. Learn from him, better him, help him. Don’t become him. Too much darkness. I don’t like that. He’s kicking your ‘social worker’s’ ass, though. I approve of that.” 

“Dayza,” he says. It’s the Turkmen word for Aunt. It gets her attention, though she doesn't speak it. How does it end? He wants a nice story this time. It will be a lie, but he wants one he can hold in the soft part of his hand when he wants comfort. He wants one he can hold onto. 

“Yes, yes, darling,” she says, only a little distractedly, craning her neck to look at the rich man. “I have told you. Uh, at the end of a rope. Age twenty-five; very sad.” 

“Did you know? That they were murdered?” he asks. 

“I know that you will get justice,” she says. 

That is not a lie.

But that is not what he asked. 

Dick feels something in him darken and wither. He feels something in him die.

••• 

Poznan’s car is this old Sedan. It’s blue, and faded, and it’s chipping paint, and there’s odd waterstains throughout the interior. 

The seatbelt is frayed. 

“I can’t believe you would just lie to Mr. Wayne like that,” says Poznan, looking thoroughly embarrassed. “‘Prison.’ It’s a Juvenile Detention Center,” he scoffs. 

“For what crime am I being detained?” he asks sharply, and the car swerves. 

“‘Four vat cream em eye bee-eeng deetawned,’” Poznan sneers, mocking him. “I thought I told you to speak English. ENGLISH,” he says slowly. “Inglés, where you’re from.” 

They say that…‘where I’m from?’ he thinks, a little incredulous. I speak some English; why doesn’t anyone listen? 

Poznan sniffed. “Although I don’t suppose your accent’s going to get any better in there.” 

It all stings somehow, somewhere, and he presses into himself. He can’t…he can’t help that he’s got an accent. Everybody’s got an accent. Especially Americans. At least other places have pretty ones; American accents are so slimy, so brutal, so hard to understand. 

And if he does have an ‘unusual’ accent, then he picked it up from his parents, who are — are — 

His parents are in dirt now, in Gotham’s dirt, and he’s never gonna to hear their voices again. He’s never gonna — 

His heart stammers. His vision swims. 

He’s never gonna hear their voices again; he’s never gonna see them again; he’s never gonna be with them again; never gonna fly again, live again, feel warm again, be good again. Never. 

Here is the grief he has been crushing down since that night. 

He is devastatingly sad, yes — but more than that: he is still angry, always angry. It’s Tony Zucco’s fault for killing them. 

The sedan rolls to a fast stop. “Fucking Gotham traffic,” Poznan mumbles. 

They’re in Newtown. Close to the Bristol Juvenile Detention Center, but still far enough away for him to — to — to — 

He looks outside the window. There’s a Haleé’s Circus poster, pasted big and wide and blue. There are three figures twirling through the air. 

It is a sign, Dick decides. This cheap poster is his burning bush. 

So he slips off the frayed seatbelt, and opens the creaky door, and runs as fast and as far as he can. He runs past the poster. He runs past the people. He runs past the sound of his name in Poznan’s

slimy brutal accent. He runs in his funeral clothes and he runs in the cold American air and he runs in the dark. 

He runs and runs and runs. 

By the time he stops, it is night. The funeral had ended at six, and the winter had eaten up the light. 

There is a nice looking woman who kneels down with wide, kind eyes. “Are you alright, sweetheart? What were you running from?” 

He is gasping for air. He can’t breathe, he can hardly think, he must’ve ran for miles. “A man,” he wheezes in Turkmen, too winded to go through the effort of translation in his head, to try and find the correct English verb tense and word order. “There was a man.” 

“Was he following you?” the woman asks urgently, cupping his face protectively. “Sweetheart, was the man following you?” 

It hits him then, that she’s speaking in Turkmen. Do that many people speak Turkmen in Gotham? he wonders. 

“You know Turkmen?” he asks, still breathing hard. He doesn’t wait for her to answer before telling her everything. 

When he mentions the Juvenile Detention Center, her eyes glass up. 

“Sirhan,” she says, with an accent he can recognize as Uzbek now. “Did you know my son? Sirhan? Did you know him?” 

“Yes,” he cries. “Yes.” 

He tells her everything. 

“Oh, sweetheart,” she says. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” 

It’s so kind and compassionate that, for the first time since that very first night, he allows himself to cry. Talking about the rope and the police and the Center. About the funeral and the rich man and the car. 

She wipes at his tears and gives him a hug. 

“And I ran,” he finishes, gasping. 

Her lower lip is trembling and she looks like she’s going to cry. 

“Well,” she says wetly, “they can’t get you here. How…how old did you say you were again?” 

“Sekiz,” he tells her — eight. 

Her resolve seems to strengthen at that. Her fists curl at her sides. “Oh my G— you’re not ever going to have to go back there ever again. An eight year old in Juvie. I can’t believe this.” Her eyes flick up to the building in front of them. “Would you like to come in?” 

Yes, he would love to, yes. But he thinks of Sirhan, and why Sirhan is at the Center: his stepfather. “Your…husband —” he starts, and her whole expression shutters. 

“Oh,” she says, eyes on the ground. There is a bruise on her jaw that Dick had not seen before. She

looks — sad. “Oh. Oh, dear, I hadn’t even — he’s not — it’s —” 

She is too kind, Dick thinks, and she should go. She gave this city too much of her, too much mercy, and it gave her nothing in return; it only gave her bruises. 

He squeezes her hands in his own, the way his mother had always done when he was upset. Her hands are bigger than his, and much softer. He gives her a sad smile. “Thank you. Thank you. For listening.” 

And he is grateful. He is so very grateful. His parents are dead and he is running from jail and he is eight years old but he is grateful to have met someone so kind. Like a wildflower or a weed in a tornado. 

“Maybe I could —” she starts, a little desperately. She’s desperate to help him. There is a pang in his chest. 

“Adiba!” a man’s voice calls, rough and loud. Impatient. “Adiba!” 

Sirhan’s mother — Adiba, apparently — startles, eyes wide. She digs abruptly into her purse, fishing out a fistful of American cash. She presses the money into his little hands, his calloused hands, and wraps her soft yellow scarf around his neck, and says, “Run, sweetheart, run.” 

“Thank you,” he whispers again. And then he runs. 

He doesn’t go as far this time — as soon as he turns the corner, he sees the bright lights of police cars, like blue and red lightning, and his heart beats hard and fast. His hands get shaky. 

One of the policemen sees him. “Hey, punk, what y’got there?” His eyes are hard, cold. He frowns, jerking his head at the crumpled bills Dick is clutching. “You steal that shit?” 

“No,” he promises, tongue bitter and cottony. “…Sir.” 

The man narrows his eyes, and turns around to say something to his partner. It takes maybe three seconds. But by the time the man turns around, Dick is already safely on the rooftop of the closest building. 

The building’s roof is covered in gravel. It’s rough under his palms, digging into the khakis he’d been allowed to wear the funeral, along with a sweater. 

It’s cold. It’s cold in a way that reminds him of winter shows in Vitsyebsk, where the big top’s bright blue was covered in white. But Gotham obstinately isn’t snowing. 

Adiba’s yellow scarf flares out like a cape, and he has to jump up to catch it from flying off his neck in the wind. 

His fingers are stiff against the fabric. That’s concerning. 

It’s time to recalibrate. He needs — he needs to — figure out what he’s gonna do. He needs to figure out what he knows. What he’s gonna do: what he can do. 

My name is Rasit. I have eight years. My parents are dead. Tony Zucco murdered them. And I’m going to find him, he thinks. And then startles. 

Is that what he’s going to do?

He wants Zucco, whoever he is, to — 

Well, what does he want to happen to Zucco? 

He wants the man to hurt. To hurt like he is hurting. Prison seems like too much, like not nearly enough. You cannot simply steal someone’s freedom — that is wrong. And certainly if they threw Dick into American prison simply because he was an orphan, it is not strong enough for Zucco. 

At the same time, though, he wants the man dead. 

But — what if Zucco has a child; what if Zucco has a child and then he dies and his child, who is completely innocent, is orphaned and has to go to the Center? He doesn’t want to make any more orphans. 

…Would killing Zucco make him just like Zucco? 

Something else then, he decides. Justice in some new way; that’s what he’s going to get. The thought of him being like Zucco sends his skin crawling. He can’t think of it anymore. He has to focus on something else. 

He takes inventory. 

He has the clothes he’s wearing; thirty-two dollars, fifty cents; and Adiba’s yellow scarf. It’s not much. It’s not much at all. 

Where’s he gonna stay tonight — what’s he gonna eat? How’s he gonna survive? 

The thought is more than daunting — it’s terrifying. What if he starves? Or dies of hypothermia? Or gets killed sleeping the street? 

At least at the Center he had the basic necessities. But — no. He cannot spend his life in a cement building or in a jumpsuit or in constant fear. 

He’ll die before he goes back there. 

“Sorry, Sirhan,” he whispers to the night air, truly apologetic, leaning over the edge of the rooftop like it’ll make it easier for Adiba’s son to hear. 

At that same moment, there is something. 

It is the merest rustle of fabric in January air and it is an almost silent crunch of gravel and it is the slight shift in the harsh wind that he feels on his skin. 

There is someone there. He whips his head around. 

It’s a figure; it’s the figure. Decadent darkness and stretching shadows and heavy, heavy eyes. 

“What are you doing here,” the figure growls, voice a grotesque sort of rasp that’s deeper than anything Dick’s ever heard. It’s meant to be intimidating. 

But this big man dressed in black isn’t intimidating. 

Intimidating is a complicated new routine you’ve never practiced before. Intimidating is being orphaned and abandoned in a country you don’t know.

Intimidating isn’t some rich white man running around in leather and playing with his voice. 

“You’re Bruce Wayne, aren’t you,” he asks. The figure says nothing, but that’s an answer in itself if he’s ever not heard one. “…Have you caught Zucco yet?” 

“Zucco will be apprehended in time by the proper authorities,” the man growls. 

Dick doesn’t flinch; he stares straight on, dead on, unafraid, into heavy, heavy eyes. “Who are the proper authorities? The police? No. I told you, they’re not doing anything. I respect you for telling me the truth. But if you’re not going to do anything, I will.” 

“…Tch,” the man says. 

•••  

There are a lot of things that happen after that. Dick tries to keep track of them in his head but it’s so much that it gets jumbled and a little out of order. 

• The man that is Bruce Wayne is also known as ‘Batman.’ 
• Dumb name. 
• Even dumber costume. 
• He gets taken back to this place, this weird place, a cave. 
• Is it a kidnapping? Yes. Does he kick and scream and resist? Yes. Does he know why Wayne kidnapped him? No. 
• But it’s better than the streets and it’s better than the center and at the very least Bruce Wayne has never lied to him, never deceived him like everyone else. 
• There is another man, called Alfred, who works for Wayne — a servant, or something similar. 
• Alfred shows him to this large, expensive room with a large, expensive bed. Against his instincts, he falls asleep almost immediately. 
• (It’s a nice bed. A very, very, very nice bed.) 
• The next morning, there are crêpes. They’re not good at all, rubbery and hard to eat, but Dick eats them anyway because Alfred specially requests that he eat as much as possible because he apparently “looks so very much like a skeleton that it’s alarming.” He respects Alfred quite a lot; thus, he obeys. 
• No one really tells him why he’s there, but there are many papers signed and he is asked a lot of questions by a lot of people and apparently Bruce has been and/or will be appointed as Dick’s permanent guardian. Bruce had apparently been petitioning for this since the night when his parents had first fallen. 
• So for now — 

Just for now — 

He’s a rich man’s ward. A rich man’s hostage, essentially. 

Alfred is amused when Dick expresses this to him. He doesn’t laugh, per se, but he’s visibly stifling a smile. They’re speaking in French; Dick doesn’t know half so many aspects of the criminological vernacular in English as he does in French — and he only knows the French words because of some very old French crime films Haleé had shown him. He’s mildly impressed that Alfred speaks so much French, but something about the older man’s lilting accent is different from the other Americans he’s met. Alfred tells him that he’s British (uninteresting) and that he was… formerly…a spy (extremely interesting). 

“While his manner of obtaining you physically may be qualifiable as such,” the man tells him poshly in accented French, “Master Bruce, veritably, took every possible legal precaution to persuade Gotham’s Social Services to transfer your care to him. If it had been up to him, young sir, the master would have taken you home that very first night.” 

“So my kidnapping was premeditated,” Dick says plainly, and Alfred actually snorts. Yes, Dick likes Alfred quite a lot. Which begs the question: “…Why do you call him ‘Master?’” 

“It’s only proper,” Alfred opines. “He is my employer. I defer to him on most every matter; it only makes sense that I’d refer to him as such.” 

“He doesn’t own you,” Dick insists. “You shouldn’t have to defer to him. You’re older than him; you know more; you were even a spy. Where I’m from, that first one alone would make you his superior. He should be calling you sir.” 

Alfred cracks a small, fond smile. “While that notion is appreciated, Master Dick, once you’ve been here a while longer, you’ll understand that he doesn’t have quite the command you think he does over you or I.” 

“Don’t call me that,” Dick says. “‘Master.’ I should be calling you that. And I don’t think I’ll be here that much longer. My kidnapping,” he emphasizes, “was either a rich man’s whim or a calculated move to retrieve an important piece of evidence for the case: me.” 

“Oh, dear boy,” Alfred says, eyes unbearably soft. “He, as you would say, ‘kidnapped’ you because he understands. He saw himself in you, and he saw something even better. Surely you must realize that.” 

But that’s the thing. Bruce Wayne does not ‘understand.’ 

Bruce Wayne understands the thunderstorm of being orphaned. 

But he does not understand the typhoon of being ripped away from his home; the thunder of being lost in a new country with a language he barely knows; the wildfire that is a small cement room and violent, ravaged, desperate children in jumpsuits. 

Bruce Wayne knows the crimson of dead parents. 

He does not know the purple of a policeman’s bruises on his arms; the mahogany of coffins someone else paid for; the yellow of a stranger’s mercy. 

Dick doesn’t say any of this. He does not want to fight, not with Alfred. 

What he does say is: 

“Is that why he does this? Why he goes out every night?” 

“To get justice,” Alfred says. “To stop crimes before they happen. To crush the superstitious and cowardly lot — criminals.” 

Criminals. ‘Criminals.’ What an awful word. 

Sirhan is a criminal; Sirhan is a good person. Sirhan doesn’t deserve to be crushed or beaten or stopped. That’s not justice. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be. 

Dick, himself, had considered killing Tony Zucco for revenge. That would make him a criminal. And Dick — he’s — he’s not a bad person, is he? No. No. He’s not.

Therefore. That word: ‘Criminal.’ It’s not the whole story. 

“Is that what justice is?” Dick asks. 

Alfred stares at him searchingly, curiously. He is silent. He says nothing. 

Dick’s — well, he’s rather sick of adults never answering him directly. 

He wants an direct answer, a straight answer, a dead answer, even if it’s heavy. He wants the truth. 

•••  

He feels useless. There’s nothing for him to do in the Manor. 

The library is interesting, but not that interesting. And only a few of the books are in Cyrillic. His room is ostentatious but bare. 

Apparently, they’re signing him up for ‘normal school.’ But he can’t even go there until he’s enrolled and ‘emotionally and psychologically recovered from his recent trauma;’ so really, he’s stuck here. 

He helps Alfred with chores around the house. 

The man reluctantly shares stories from his spy days. He doesn’t tell all of them, and quite a few have redacted endings that Alfred can’t tell. But they’re daring and adventurous and interesting. 

That’s more than Dick can say for anything Bruce Wayne does. He hardly ever sees the man — he sleeps in all day and spills out to the streets at night. He’s working Dick’s parents’ case, supposedly, and for that Dick is…grateful, honest. 

But it’s not enough. It’s not fast enough — it’s not good enough. 

Dick huffs. Maybe it would have been better to take things into his own hands after all. 

“Master Dick,” calls Alfred from the foyer. It’s frustrating, the way he insists on calling even Dick ‘Master.’ 

He has half a mind to call him Master Alfred. But any reply is stifled by what he sees. There’s a giant box — practically a trunk. 

There’s no return address, and Dick is still unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet, but the handwriting on it is unmistakably Haleé’s. 

For the first time since he’s gotten to the Manor, Dick grins. “May I take it up to my room?” he asks, bouncing on his heels. 

“I daresay it’s too heavy for you; it must be twice your weight,” Alfred says. Dick is already — slowly but surely — dragging the behemoth across the floor. It takes almost twenty minutes, but he gets it up the stairs and into his room. There’s at least a dozen different letters on top: one from Raya and Raymond, one from Haleé, and Kiev, and — and his family. 

His eyes are hot again, and he swipes at them. He can’t cry right now. He can’t mess these letters up with tears. He just can’t. 

He reads every single letter twice. 

And then he folds them up perfectly and sets them aside. 

In the actual trunk, there’s a lot. 

But most importantly, there’s a big scruffy stuffed elephant that Havva, his Nine, had made for him when he was four. The ears are a little too big and the tail is a little weird because Nine had only ever seen an elephant once when she’d made it, but it’s his favorite thing in the world. It smells like strawberries, like their caravan, like his parents. He hugs it tight to his chest, closing his eyes, feeling very, very small. 

“I missed you so much,” he whispers to the elephant, Zitka, in Turkmen. “So much has happened. It’s just us now. Just us and Grandma — Nine.” 

If he keeps his eyes closed really tightly, and only breathes in Zitka he can pretend it’s still two weeks ago — that his parents are still alive. 

He doesn’t even want to unbox the rest of the things, maybe doesn’t need to, now that he has Zitka. But he reluctantly sits up and opens his eyes. Alfred is in the doorway, eyes very, very tender. Strangely, he’d never heard the butler’s footsteps. 

“Go on then, dear child,” Alfred tells him, standing rather stiffly there. 

Dick bites at his lip, still feeling very soft and sad and vulnerable — and more that than angry, for the first time in a long while. 

“Would you sit with me?” he asks, glancing shyly at the carpet next to him. 

“…It would be my pleasure,” Alfred says. 

Even sitting down, Dick is barely to the man’s ribs. But the butler’s presence is warm by his side, and Zitka sits in his lap, and he takes a deep breath. 

There’s his two show costumes: one shimmery blue and black, one shiny red and green. There’s most of his clothes. There’s his mother’s books. There’s his father’s leather jacket and cologne and favorite poetry anthology. There’s his parents’ wedding rings, skinny silver bands with a pearl. There's all the pieces he needs to play chilik-hekgal. There’s a yellow envelope with a thick stack of slightly bent photos, ordered with a wide rubber band. 

His hands are shaking as he looks through the photos. 

“Who is that?” inquires Alfred gently, when they’re looking at a picture of his mother in the hospital. His grandmother, his Nine, is beaming next to her, holding a newborn — him. 

He doesn’t answer, is too busy swiping at his eyes. 

This is what’s left. What is in this trunk is what is left.

The rest of it is probably burned, just ashes. 

His parents are dead and their belongings are burned and he is here. 

He has what is left; he is what is left. 

It seems selfish to say, but he cannot share what he has left with Gotham, even with Alfred. His hands shake around the photos, and he cries. 

Alfred wraps an arm around him tightly, and Dick squeezes Zitka, tight as he can. 

•••  

Here is something: 

• If someone dies, you are supposed to burn their belongings. 
• And if you don’t, bad spirits and ghosts and Death will flock to the belongings. Will swarm your house and your treasures like wasps, like angry, vengeful, eternal wasps. If you don’t, your life will become miserable and haunted and short. 
• Dick knows this. There was a great roaring fire after his grandmother’s funeral. His father had tossed in blankets and books and perfume, clothes and photos and trinkets. A tea set. Photo frames. It is simply what has to happen. He does not begrudge the circus for burning most of his parents’ possessions. He would have done the same. 
• He doesn’t even want his parents’ things, really; he just wants his parents. But he has to let go. 
• He’s never heard of any gayo doing it. Bruce Wayne certainly hasn’t. 
• And he looks at Bruce Wayne and he knows that there is a reason that tradition persists. Bruce Wayne has never burned anything of his parents’. He has never let go. He has never had to. He lives where he was born, and he lives as if his parents will return any day and expect to see everything as they left it. 
• But death is dazzling; death is permanent. Death walks the halls of Wayne Manor amongst the things of the dead. 
• Maybe Bruce Wayne’s life is already miserable and already haunted. Dick only hopes it will not be short. 

•••  

But if Bruce’s life isn’t short, then it will be uneventful. It has been three weeks — twenty-three sober days — and still, Tony Zucco has not been brought to justice. Whatever that means. 

Somewhere around the twentieth day, Dick decides that if he must take things into his own hands, he will. 

•••  

“Have you caught him yet?” Dick asks. 

“No,” Bruce — Batman, right now — says, emerging from behind the grandfather clock fully now. “It’s four AM. Why are you awake.” 

“Running away,” Dick answers honestly. He’s got his father’s jacket on his shoulders and Adiba’s scarf around his neck and a too-full backpack stuffed with Zitka and a few bottles of water. 

“Go back to bed,” Bruce says. “That’s an order.”

“…Fine,” he bites out. 

•••  

“What. How. Are you running away again,” a voice comes from behind, startlingly. “No backpack this time?” 

“It only slowed me down last time,” Dick says, in Arabic, annoyed, turning around slowly. The clock is right by the stairwell that one must go down to enter or escape the Manor. Bruce is standing there, butterfly bandages on his forehead, arms crossed, forehead creased. “Have you caught him yet?” Dick asks. 

Bruce has absolutely no body language at all. His body is absolutely silent, which is to say, impossible to read. “You’ll be the first to know when I do.” 

“Why haven’t you already?” Dick asks. 

“Stop trying to run away,” Bruce says. 

Don’t tell me what to do, he thinks. 

•••  

Don’t tell him what to do. 

•••  

He does stop trying to run away though. For a little bit. 

•••  

He finds a long stick outside one day. He brings it into his room, and that night, after Bruce returns to the Manor and slithers back into his bedroom, Dick enters too. 

Bruce is already asleep, sprawled out on the bed, the sheets wrapped around his calves like helices. Dick sits on the dresser and pokes him with the stick in the face. 

He doesn’t wake up. 

Dick pokes him again. 

Still nothing. 

Dick hefts the stick over his head and strikes down hard on Bruce Wayne’s back. Bruce makes a mumbling sound and rolls over, still not stirring. 

“What,” whispers Dick. “How.” 

“Ghdghs,” Bruce says. 

“HAVE YOU CAUGHT HIM YET,” Dick yells.

Bruce doesn’t physically move, face still smothered in a pillow, but he says, “No. And stop hitting me.” 

Dick hits him again. 

•••  

Clearly, this isn’t working. 

Dick assesses, and reevaluates, and adapts. 

You can’t fix the problem if you don’t know what the problem is. 

“Why haven’t you caught him yet?” he asks, sitting in the chair in front of the computer in the aptly named Batcave. He asks it in Russian. 

Bruce understands Russian, but he always responds in English. ‘Immersion is the best way to learn,’ he always says, but Dick doesn’t want to learn another stupid language without declensions; he hates using articles. He hates English too. And he certainly hates this awful country. People always talk about how stupid Americans are but they never mention how murderous. 

He kicks at the console to spin himself around. 

Bruce is getting out of the Batmobile, bloody and confused. “How did you get down here.” 

“Answer my question,” he demands. He holds up the stick from last night threateningly. 

Bruce’s expression reads as, as the boys at the Center would have described it, very what the fuck. He pulls his cowl down, and looks even more confused. 

Then he sighs, and says, “The circumstantial evidence is extremely compelling, and Zucco has a motive. But the police’s physical evidence was conveniently lost, and there’s no doubt that he has men on the inside.” 

There is something in Bruce’s face then. He looks vaguely satisfied, which means — “You needed ‘physical evidence,’” Dick summarizes. Russian, again. “Have you got it?” 

Bruce holds up a heavy looking glass jar with twine around the top. There’s some sort of liquid inside, blue and translucent and shiny. 

“What is it?” Dick asks. 

“Acid,” says Bruce. “A compound I haven’t seen before. Completely untraceable, with a slight delay allowing the user to leave the scene. It can make it seem as if a rope had broken entirely on its own. I found it in the office of Tony Zucco. It’s proof he murdered your parents, used their deaths to try to collect protection money.” 

“Are you going to kill him?” Dick asks quietly, in English, eyes fixed on the jar. “No. I don’t kill.” 

“Oh,” says Dick, still looking at the acid that killed his parents. He is angry again. He is burning like the rope that snapped.

He feels small. 

•••  

Here is something: 

• He is small. 
• He is all hard bone and whipcord muscle, skinny arms and jutting cheeks and hands that hurt to hold. 
• He is also half of Bruce Wayne’s size. 
• He is small — he has always been small. But here he feels it. 
• He has never felt like that before. 
• The circus is a place for bravery. For wonder. It is dauntless; it’s indomitable. It is place for his parents. There is something about it that makes your eyes wide and your shoulders straight; it makes you feel big. 
• Or, at least, it made Dick feel big. 
• It means a great deal to know that you have parents catching you when you swing, when you fly, when you fall. It means something big. 
• But Dick does not have that anymore. 
• And Gotham is no place for wonder. 

•••  

“Why not?” he asks. Why don’t you kill? 

“I watched a man kill my parents. I watched him walk away. It wasn’t his problem anymore. That’s the way it is,” Bruce says, voice hard like a rock. “You kill a man and he’s gone forever. You kill him and you give up your responsibility for him. You wash your hands of it. My father taught me never to give up my responsibility. He was a surgeon. He didn’t mind a little blood on his hands.” 

•••  

“My father,” Dick says, “worked the rope. It cut him. His hands were never clean.” ••• 

So that is why Batman goes out every night. 

Dick looks at his hands in the dark. He is in bed. In a large, expensive bed. 

His hands are small; his calluses are slowly healing. 

His hands are clean. 

•••  

“Have you caught him?” 

“He’s going to skip town tonight, I’ve heard rumors. I’m going tonight, when he won’t expect it. You’ll have justice.” 

“Is that a promise?” Dick asks. 

“Promises aren’t worth anything,” Bruce says.

“Oh,” says Dick. 

•••  

Here is something: 

• The appeal of the Flight of Death is that it is dangerous. 
• There were never any nets. 
• That is — was — the draw. 
• People like danger. People like to see other people put themselves in danger, because their own lives are full of order and law and boredom and easy malevolence. Pure risk is like a diamond to starving coal-miners. 
• The circus was founded on the innate human desire to see the impossible. 
• The idea of acrobatics is to defy gravity and odds and death. 
• There had never been a net. Not as long as Dick could ever remember. 
• Dick knew that acrobatics — that the trapeze — was dangerous. But he never expected his parents to die. 
• He never expected any of it. 
• Tsetvanya might have. She probably knew the whole time. 
• It’s scary, the way that something he loves so much could have killed his parents. But it doesn’t make him love the trapeze any less. He isn’t afraid of falling either. Falling — downward momentum — is a vital part of acrobatics. 
• Any physicist knows. It is not the fall that kills you.
• It's the impact. 

•••  

At the end of it, at the end of all of it, will his hands be clean? 

He slides on his father’s leather jacket, colored red brown with age. Then he stuffs Batarangs into the deep pockets. He ties Adiba’s yellow scarf around his head, sort of like a cowl. 

He drops to his knees and retrieves the acid from under his bed, where he'd hid it. 

He looks at the acid. It would be poetic ending — a holistic conclusion to all of this, to use this to end Zucco. 

But it won’t fit in his pocket, and using a backpack would only slow him down again. The acid feels heavy in his hands. 

He imagines feeling the heat of the acid’s burn through the glass. 

The acid feels heavy. He feels heavy. 

•••  

It’s no good to use the dead’s things. That’s why you’re supposed to burn them. The circus was being merciful when they sent him these things, soaked to the bone in memory. 

He’s grateful, really. The jacket smells like his father, like cologne, and the fact that it belonged to him is a comfort. 

But it’s no good to use the dead’s things.

Using a dead person’s things attracts misfortune and it attracts misery and it attracts death. 

He needs to burn it, but he can’t bring himself too. He thinks that he’ll just take the misfortune and the misery and the death it gives him if it means he can have something of them. He’ll be cursed for them. 

He’d do anything for them. 

Bruce’s parents’ thing are ubiquitous — everything in the Manor is theirs. It’s no wonder that Bruce is so miserable, so full of existential dread. 

Dick should really, really burn it. He should burn the jacket, burn the books, burn the spirits clinging to the leather and the paper and the tragedy. 

But he hugs the jacket closer to himself and accepts the misery. 

•••  

He runs away. 

•••  

Well, not away, precisely. Not forever. But he does run of . Dick has to be the one to get Zucco. He just has to. 

He chases the Batmobile from the rooftops as long as he can. But it’s alright when he loses it — he knows where he’s going. 

He also knows who he’s chasing. 

The things Dick knows about Anthony Robert “Tony” Zucco are this: 

• He weighs 72.5 kilos and stands 1.8 m (or 160 pounds and 6 feet respectively, according to the Batcomputer, but Dick has absolutely no frame of reference for the Imperial System because literally every other place in the whole entire universe uses the Metric System—but. That’s not important. Not right now, at least). 
• He killed Dick’s parents. 
• Caucasian male with gray hair and green eyes. 
• 55 years, 7 months. 
• He killed Dick’s parents. 
• Racketeer, focusing mostly in the Newtown-Albany-Gotham tri-city area. 
• Dangerous. Extremely dangerous. 
• He killed Dick’s parents. 
• Arrest records dating back from when he was just sixteen, ranging from petty theft to profiteering to weapons dealing. 
• He killed Dick’s parents. 
• He killed Dick’s parents. 
• He killed Dick’s parents; he made Dick an orphan; he stole everything Dick had; he stranded him here in this hellish city, in this hellish country; he carved away every last ounce of mercy that Dick had in him away with a few drops of acid. 
• He killed Dick’s parents. 
• He deserves…something. 
• He killed Dick’s parents; surely, he deserves something — whether that ‘something’ is death or loss or getting pummeled into the ground by the Batman. 
• But he has no influence on Judgment, and he has no means to kill; only one option remains. 

•••   

Here is something that he knows: 

• It feels good, in a very wicked sort of way, to have Tony Zucco writhing at his feet, purple-red and utterly at his mercy. 

•••  

Here is something else that he knows: 

• It feels wicked, in a good sort of way, to have that sort of dominion over another human being. To know that this is the man’s end. That this could be the man’s end, and then people will wear white and wail because of something that Dick did. 

•••  

It is exquisite; it feels like a rush of shame down his spine, to know that Dick could do it. He could touch revenge, he could have justice, he could — 

“Why?” asks Dick simply. 

“Please, please, I have a,” Zucco gasps, green eyes turned amber in the yellow streetlights. “I have a wife. Ad-Adiba. I have a daughter. I have a, a stepson.” 

“Why did you kill them? The Grisijos. The…‘Graysons.’” Dick whispers. His voice is soft, but the way he smashes his foot into the man’s ribcage is not. 

“Please don’t kill me, please, please, God, please,” begs Zucco, shuddering with fear and guilt and the effort it takes to breathe. He looks different than Dick expected somehow. Greasier hair. Skinnier. He is scared. More human. More alive. 

Dick would not know how to kill Zucco if he wanted to. He has only seen two people killed, and there are no ropes that may be snapped here. 

“Answer me,” he demands. 

“M-money,” moans Zucco. “That French fucker, Haleé — he wouldn’t give me the money. I needed to — I had to, to enforce — please.” 

“You killed them for money,” Dick says. 

•••  

“He killed them for money,” Dick repeats numbly when the Batman has beaten Tony Zucco into something that resembles a blood-soaked sponge cake more than an actual human being. 

But Tony Zucco is still breathing, which is more than anyone can say for Dick’s parents. 

The man is taking gasping, ugly breaths on the ground, hands tied behind his back. He is whimpering about demons — about mercy.

•••  

“Greed drives people to do awful things,” says Bruce Wayne. Says Batman. 

“I don’t understand,” he whispers. Avarice only goes so far. Greed drives people to do ‘awful things,’ but this was more than merely ‘awful’ — there must be something else at play here. 

Debt, perhaps. 

But then he thinks about the name Adiba. 

This is a man who beats his wife. Who beats his children. Who kills people’s parents. Maybe it is awful people who drive themselves to do awful things. 

Greed is only a seventh of the story. 

•••  

Dick puts his hand in Batman’s, and looks up at him. The hand in his is covered with leather, the fingers coated with a rubber-like grip mechanism. The knuckles are covered with sharp metal spikes. This hand is wet with Zucco’s blood. 

•••  

But Dick’s hands are clean. 

•••  

“Thank you,” Dick says to Batman. To Bruce Wayne, the man who paid for his parents’s funeral, the man who is honest. “For this. For everything. Thank you.” 

They are back in the Manor. Dick is sitting on the ground by the Grandfather clock, knees pulled up to his chest. Bruce is emerging from the cave. The gloves are off; the hands underneath, as far as Dick can see, are clean now. 

Bruce looks down at him. His mouth is a tight line. His eyes are heavy. There is a silence. Here is something that he is learning: 

• Bruce Wayne does not speak very much. He thinks a lot, but he rarely says a single thing. Certainly he says nothing emotional. Trouble expressing himself maybe, or perhaps just years and years of having no one to speak to. His thoughts are almost impossible to guess. Dick decides to try anyway. 

The rich man takes a deep breath. His whole being loosens, and his eyes aren’t quite so heavy. They’re light and very, very fond. His mouth quirks up. 

“You know, in American English,” says Bruce seriously, “you say ‘thanking you’ instead of ‘thank you.’” 

That might be as close to an Of nothing that he will ever get from this man. 

“...What?” he says. “That’s not true.”

“It is,” the man insists seriously. “In British English, it’s ‘thank you,’ you’re right, but in the US, it’s different.” 

“Are you lying?” Dick asks. “Do you lie?” 

“I would promise it,” Bruce says. That on its own makes Dick think that the man really is lying about ‘thanking you,’ because Bruce does not promise anything; he made that abundantly clear. But then Bruce says, “I would. If I believed in promises.” 

“Oh,” says Dick. It’s probably true, then. It’s not like Bruce has been dishonest with him before. Dick certainly does not know enough about the English lexicon to demur. He is, it seems, going to be here for the foreseeable future. The foreseeable future is a long time. He does not want to be in America for a long time, but he does not have a choice any more than he has a family. Knowing the correct words for casual conversation in America will be useful. “Thanking you for telling me,” he says reluctantly. 

Then Bruce Wayne gives him a startling smile, eyes light like a cloud. They crinkle at the corners. He says, “Of nothing.” 

•••  

Here are some things that he knows: 

• His name is still Rasit Grisijo. 
• He is still eight years old. 
• His home is still in his blood. 
• His parents are still dead, still murdered. 
• He still has Adiba’s yellow scarf, and her thirty two dollars, fifty cents. 
• He still speaks nine languages. 
• He is still him. Maybe. His hands are still clean.  

•••  

He still knows that he will get justice. Has gotten justice. Maybe he will still get justice. 

•••  

However: 

• The papers start to call him Richard Grayson; Alfred called this an ‘Anglicization,’ an ‘Americanization.’ It always feels foreign and ugly on his tongue, but he submits, and introduces himself as Dick. 
• And next year he will be nine. And then he will be ten, and then eleven, and so on, until he is twenty-five, when he will meet his end at the end of a rope. 
• And the circus is in his blood; it is not in his bones. At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, his bones belong with his parents’ bones: in Gotham. His bones are Wayne Manor’s now. 
• And his parents will not be like Jesus. They will stay dead. People always stay dead; that’s the thing about death. It is dazzling, it is inevitable, and it is very, very permanent. He does not have parents anymore. Instead of parents, he has a jar of acid under his bed and a rich legal guardian. That is something. A legal guardian is not the same as his parents, who were as dazzling as death itself. It’s not even close to the same. But it is something. And the yellow scarf makes him think of a yellow cape, and the thirty-two dollars and cents is not much compared to the millions poured into the Martha Wayne Foundation for Women and Children’s recovery programs for women like Adiba and children like Sirhan (whose case is appealed and thrown out). 
• And he thinks, and will always think, in Turkmen or Rom first. English will always be his ninth language (and his least favorite), but it will not always be his last. He already knows minutia, like what Bruce taught him. 
• And his hands are clean; at the end of it, they will not be. 

•••  

This is where it is hard for Dick. He does not want to be an orphan. He does not want to be here, in this country, in this city. 

He wants his parents back. He wants his father to hold him, he wants his mother to spin him around and make him do math and play with him. He wants to fly. 

But those are perfect, impossible things that he will never have again, and that makes his chest ache in a way that feels like swallowing seawater. 

That is his grief: seawater. It is befitting, it is earned, and it is stifling, somehow. And you cannot hold water of any kind; it will always slip through your hands. 

But his father had a saying. Or maybe his father’s father had a saying. It was Rom, anyway. “Nashti zhas vorta po drom o bango.” 

The saying meant this: You cannot walk straight when the road is bent. 

Dick’s path is bent. And it will not unbend, it will not heal any diaspora. It led him to Gotham, and it led him to the sea. 

Maybe now it is leading him inland, away from the salt and the waves and the grief. Maybe it will even lead him to the sky.