The torture of small talk with someone you used to love.

"Are you sure?" Bruce tried insisting one last time, digging his heels into the ground as his ward put every ounce of strength into pushing him out of the room. "It would only take a second."

"I don't need nets," Dick huffed, looking up through his eyelashes.

He pushed insistently on his guardian's arm despite not budging the man more than a few inches. They stared at each other for a matter of seconds, a conversation in a silent language they had both mastered, and then Bruce gave a breathy laugh and unplanted his feet. He seemed to have taken his surrender and made his way out of the room, lingering just barely in the doorway. He lifted a hand as though to argue, but Dick wasn't having it.

"The mats will be fine," Dick added, and he made a show of hopping on the cushioned floors a few times to demonstrate the support they offered. "I just won't fall, if it comes down to it."

Bruce rolled his eyes on his way out the door. Dick didn't move until he couldn't hear footsteps anymore, and even then, he waited a moment longer fully knowing his guardian. While he waited, he looked around the training room with a small smile, taking it in.

Just recently, Bruce had surprised him by installing two towers on opposite ends of the room. He had claimed it was to expand their athletic range, but when he had put in two trapeze bars and a tight rope, Dick had had his suspicions. The most prevalent one was that Bruce was anticipating the anniversary of the Flying Grayson's fall, a day in which Dick was understandably shaken, and had taken this approach to try and brace the young acrobat for the day.

Whether or not he was braced Dick couldn't say, but he had a grin on his lips as he scaled the nearest tower. He was essentially in his Robin costume, but he had unfastened the Kevlar vest, cape, and gloves, and had toed off the boots a few rungs up the tower. When he reached the platform, he was a short-sleeved ninja. He had never felt more free.

As he began to stretch, he realized he had left his utility belt on, and regarded it with a little smile. Old habits, after all. He kept it on and resumed his stretching, eying the tightrope as he did. It was maybe fifty feet across, and very impossibly thin. From where he sat, he couldn't follow it to the other tower. The challenge was presented as only that to him, and the tremor in his fingers was only from excitement.

He was on his feet, just about to set himself across the room when his utility belt rang. The glimmer instilled in his eyes thinned as he was broken from the stance and glanced down at the belt with a little huff. It took some rummaging to fish his phone out of the pocket he had tucked it in, but the glimmer was back when he saw the caller.

Accepting this further challenge, Dick accepted the call and held his phone to his ear as he stepped out onto the tightrope. From the moment his heel touched the thin wire, he was dancing with gravity, and it wanted to lead. Dick was stubborn though, as most acrobats tend to be, and he slowly guided himself out away from the platform with baited breaths.

"Hey, Wally," he said without a hitch.

Wally's first attempt at a response was a set of panicked breaths that echoed heavily on his half of the call, and some stuttered gibberish that went right over Dick's head.

"Breathe," he spoke loud enough to cut over the breathing, and when it stopped, he added, "What's wrong?"

Dick raised his other arm up to mimic the hand he was using to hold his phone to his ear to better balance himself, trying not to swear as he very nearly didn't catch himself on a misstep.

"We're dissecting cats in Anatomy," Wally got out after he managed to recover for the most part, a heavy strain in his voice. "They're... skinning them right now."

For a moment, Dick thought he had tuned out of the part that had his best friend so worked up because he had tried focusing better on the wire supporting him. When the thing to follow came only in shaky breaths, he figured he hadn't missed anything. It wasn't that he didn't care, but he had a good distance beneath him that was much higher in his priorities than a dead cat.

"So?" he asked, sounding maybe a little more than disinterested.

"It's a cat!" Wally yelled, as though volume would make his point make more sense.

"It typically is, buddy. Can't dissect a cat without one."

Wally gave a pitiful little groan on the other end and Dick couldn't help but breathe a laugh.

He was nearly a fourth of the way across the wire at this point, and the last three fourths of the way didn't seem all that far. He was getting used to the adjusted footsteps, and balance was getting a lot easier to manage. It wasn't like it surprised him. There was a spotlight in his bloodstream. He ruled the skies.

"Sympathy?" Dick tuned in to the last bit of whatever his best friend had been saying.

He hoped he hadn't missed anything too important. With a little sigh, he shifted his phone to his other hand and brushed his hair back from his eyes.

"I don't know what you want me to say," he shrugged, carefully watching the wire under his feet. "Don't cut too deep... cut away from yourself... wash your hands?"

Wally gave a disgusted noise and Dick had a hard time not rolling his eyes.

"You've literally seen dead humans and been less affected," he reminded his friend.

"This is different!" the volume change was enough to very nearly stagger the acrobat, so he took the initiative to pin his phone between his ear and his shoulder, keeping his arms out for balance.

"How?"

Dick poked his tongue between his lips in concentration and tried not to psych himself out. The distance wasn't anything new, so he figured it was the nostalgia that was making his steps uneven. It was the only answer he could come to that he didn't mind.

"I havea cat!"

"No, you don't."

The acrobat hadn't missed a beat, and it had been enough to catch the older teen off guard. He stammered in his silence and Dick couldn't help but smirk.

"Well, I could!" Wally tried defending himself, and then in a huff added, "Wipe that smirk off your face, Grayson. I can almost feel it."

"You don't, though."

Dick kept the smirk on all the same, but the reason changed as he found himself roughly halfway across the wire. With a distraction, he had made it over twenty feet in no time. When he started practicing, there would be no telling how fast he would get.

"Try and be supportive!" Wally whined over the line.

Whether it was from being snapped from the little world he lost himself in every time he found himself recreating the past or just lousy footing, Dick fell from the tightrope. One moment he had thin footing, and the next there was just air.

"Hold on, I'm losing you," he said flatly, and held his phone in a fist as he made his way towards the mats below.

With only one hand free, Dick reached for his utility belt and fished out the grappling hook. He quickly took aim at the opposite tower across the room and curled his tongue in so he wouldn't bite it off as he was jerked upwards in a quick motion. When the line stilled just below the platform of the opposite tower, Dick put his phone in his mouth without another thought and pulled himself up onto it. He spit his phone out onto the platform beside him and leaned over the side to dig the hook out of the wood.

Once it was secured again, he tucked it back into the utility belt and unfastened the belt from his waist. He laid it out next to his phone on the platform and laid himself back against the wood with a tiny sigh of relief. He had always hated his habit of keeping the belt on him, but it saved him just then, and if he weren't on the video cameras Bruce had installed throughout the house, he would have kissed it.

It wasn't until a distant voice sounded that Dick seemed to remember that he was on the phone.

"Right, sorry," he scrambled for it, putting it back to his ear.

"You alright?" Wally asked.

Dick carefully tested his arms, but the slack in the line didn't seem to have done him much damage. He laid back comfortably with that information, and managed to close his eyes.

"Yeah, just fell," he said nonchalantly. "Anyway, sorry about the cats, man. If you want to duck out, I say go ahead. Your choice. You have partners, right?"

"Yeah, but-"

"Just ask them to do it for you, KF. Don't stress about this."

"Thanks, man," Wally said after a moment, and Dick managed a smile. "I guess I'm going to head back to class. Ah, I'll talk to you later?"

Dick gave a little hum, and Wally hung up. The acrobat laid there for a few minutes, eyes closed and lost in thought, until a text alert sounded in his ear. Curiously, he opened the message.

Bruce: "I don't need nets"

Dick rolled his eyes with a little laugh and shook his head, setting his phone down beside him again.

"I don't," he said to himself, and then glanced at the edge of the platform. "I didn't."

Another text alert sounded, but he didn't bother opening it. He just smiled, and folded his arms over his stomach.

-F.J. III