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Dick Grayson is three years old when he does his first cartwheel. He is four and landing his first back-handspring, four-and-a-half landing his first back-tuck and taking his first flight with daj. Dick Grayson FLIES! Daj jokes that Robbins aren’t just supposed to be “bobbin around” and now he understands, they are meant to fly! Daj and Dad try to make Dick understand the importance of practicing on the ground with mats before the trapeze, but Dick doesn’t care. All he wants is to go into the air again and again and again. He loves the weightlessness between catches and releases. He loves resisting the momentum trying to pull his body one way when he needs to go another. Dick loves the anticipation as he waits on the platforms for the perfect time to jump, to fall into his deceitfully effortless routine with daj and dad. So no, Dick does not care about practicing on the ground.
Daj says he can’t fly alone unless he has more control over his movements and body. Dick really wants to fly alone. One of the best things about living in a circus is that Dick gets to practice every day, when they’re stopped at least. After an accident with Dick, a moving train car, and a rubber duck, Dad says he has to wait until they are stopped. Dick doesn’t mind, he knows daj and dad will help him no matter where they are. So he practices and practices until his legs feel like jell-o and his head is pounding with blood rush. Daj spots him on anything he asks for. Holding his legs in a handstand, done; spotting an aerial, easy; guiding him through the motions of his first double rotation, harder but of course she did it.
Dick did not realize how disorienting a double rotation would be! He is used to regular back-tucks and he has even started getting better at his front tumbling. Double rotations are so different! Dick thinks he might have better luck learning to twist first but he still needs daj’s help getting fully flat in his layouts. He is starting to agree with daj and dad that he needs more body control. It’s hard barely being five, he still isn’t trusted with a knife to cut his own meat. He trusts daj and dad to catch him though.
Haley’s Circus travels the world, never staying in one city for more than a few days before moving onto the next. The circus does so many shows it’s easy for daj and dad to integrate him into their performance little by little. Dick even gets his own announcement before flying: “Now welcome the youngest Flying Grayson, our own little robin, Richard Grayson!” The crowd loves Dick and he loves performing. He loves performing just as much as he loves flying with daj and dad. It’s exhilarating! It’s so much fun putting on a show for all the viewers and playing up his tricks because most of them don’t have experience with acrobatics. As long as he sticks to the routine daj and dad made, he can show off as much as he wants to the spectators. At the climax of the show, daj releases from the bar while swinging forward, quickly draws her knees to her chest, and just as quickly recatches onto dad’s hands. The infamous Flying Grayson quadruple somersault, Dick’s (and the audience’s) favorite part of the night. The circus is magic. Dick thinks to himself that he might never do the quadruple flip because he is struggling so much with just a double, but then he is reminded that he is literally five and he has so much time to learn.
After show days the circus has a big family dinner. Technically none of them are actually related other than the Graysons and odd pairs of siblings traveling together, but that’s what they are, a family, the only family Dick has ever known. He wouldn’t want anything different. Family dinners are the best nights of the week and the only time Dick thinks about anything other than acrobatics.
Turning six is a big deal for Dick. His birthday present is to finally be allowed to fly alone on the trapeze. Dad gives him a set of rules that he must follow: you must have a spotter, you must be attached to the safety straps, and you must only do tricks you can successfully do on the floor. Dick thinks it’s a little strict but he understands that they only perform without nets because they practice to the point of perfection. That day he does his first solo trapeze routine and it is just as amazing as he thought it would be! So it was less fluid than when he does a routine with his parents, but it felt just as freeing. It was like flying for the first time again.
Daj and dad make a practice schedule for Dick to keep him focused and on track. Dick knows to follow the schedule as consistently as he can because it will be the fastest way for him to get better. Always start with a stretch, always finish with conditioning, and everything in between varies day to day (to keep it interesting). One thing that never changes are the handstand competitions. It’s amazing how long daj and dad are able to hold their handstands, and Dick just cannot wait for the day he blows their records out of the water. He just knows once he gets over the dizzying head rush he’ll be hot on their tails.
They train and practice during the day and have their shows at night all while traveling to new countries and meeting new people. It’s a lot of work for a kid but Dick thinks he’s getting the hang of being a performer.
Growing up also means growing taller and even though it took him months to crack the double somersault, adding a third rotation is a breeze. Well it’s a breeze while on the trapeze where he’s able to catch enough air time, but doing it on the floor out of a roundoff is proving to be tough. Dad is allowing him to use the trapeze as a way to build muscle memory so he doesn’t get the twisties. Because that was scary! Adding twists into his layouts was so disorienting! Daj just told Dick to send it because there wasn’t really a way for her to spot him. Dick doesn’t know how to feel about learning tricks that his parents can’t spot him on…
Dick’s part in the performance slowly gets longer over the next few years. He adds on more flips and twists, different catches between daj and dad, until his first solo pass.
“At just eight years old, our little robin, Richard Grayson!”
He reaches out for daj, completing a double twisting layout before latching onto her. She drops him off on the platform at the peak of the swing. Coming back down, daj builds momentum before releasing and catching the next bar and down to the opposite platform with little fanfare to not take away from her son. As the bar closest to Dick swings back to him, he latches on and swings a few more times to gain speed (it's harder for him ‘cause he’s little). On the next swing up, right before the top, he releases, pulling his knees up into a double somersault. He times opening his tuck perfectly to catch the same bar. While it swings down, Dick carefully climbs to his feet. Having to build momentum again, he plays with the crowd a little by waving and saluting to different audience members. Finally at the top of the swing, Dick lets go of the ropes and propels himself like superman into a half twist in order to catch the next bar blindly, trusting his dad to time the toss perfectly. He makes it over to the next platform right as his dad steps out of his path. His parents take over the rest of the show to do their quadruple somersault. Dick thinks his first solo went perfectly.
Barely a year later, daj and dad are dead and Dick doesn’t touch a trapeze, or even thinks of tumbling for months after. He doesn’t have the chance to. There is no room at the orphanage or in his even smaller room at juvie. Without a physical outlet, Dick starts scheming to get revenge for his parents. Tony Zucco will pay. Dick will make him pay. So Dick puts his leotard on for the first time since that night and sneaks past the juvie guards, out onto the unfamiliar streets of Gotham.
Dick spends most of the night jumping across roof tops in the general direction of where he could last locate Zucco. He thinks about using the momentum from pushing off the edge of the roof to do a flip, but then the thought of falling without daj there to catch him makes him trip. He just continues the pattern of running and jumping after that, making sure not to look down. During one such jump he is snatched out of the air, and for a moment all his worries go away and the past months were a bad dream.
He is back at the circus, holding onto dad as he works his way through a routine. Dick liked to jump onto his dad in the middle of the routine and his dad would just continue on as normal. He’d make small adjustments to compensate for the extra weight but wouldn’t acknowledge his son cackling in his ear the whole time.
Then he touches down on solid ground and he is reminded that his dad is dead and Dick hasn’t flown in a while and doesn't know when the next time will be.
Batman takes him back to the orphanage, which then ships him back to juvie. They do this song and dance three more times before something changes. Batman takes him back to his lair instead. Batman reveals that he is Bruce Wayne, the nice man who helped Dick the night of the accident. Bruce Wayne decides to foster Dick Grayson in his mansion and foster Dick’s anger in the cave below.