She's so new. New to the plan, new to the game, and new to the experience.

So of course she doesn't understand. Can't understand, really. Understanding is something that takes time—years of time—to really get down. But Dick's had those years of time, all tracing back to one little moment.

One little moment.

He shakes away the thought.

There's another explosion from behind them, and he feels Artemis flinch, her leg accidentally smacking into his. He focuses on the strips of copper that they're climbing through, ignoring the water that's dripping from his bangs and down his face. It's just another mission. Just another game.

Artemis is breathing too heavily, and following him too closely. Her hands get caught on his boots, causing her to slip and bang her elbow against the copper. He can hear her curse quietly, in an angry, shocked whisper. He ignores it. They've got to keep moving.

Finally, she asks. Dick knew she would.

"How can you be so calm?"

The words are frustrated, exasperated, but said with such jealousy that he knows she's desperate. She wants to steal his composure like a bag of gold, swiping it away from underneath his nose. Play her own little game of Robin Hood. Steal from the practiced rich boy, give to the shivering apartment tenant.

He lies. "Practice." Then he tells the truth. "I've been doing this since I was nine."

"What good is that now?" she almost shouts at him, her blue-grey eyes narrowed and her muscles all tensed. "Huh? What good is that now?"

Dick almost stops.

That. That right there. Her line about time meaning nothing. That's how he knows that she doesn't understand. Because if she did understand, she would know how time—years—can make all the difference. Because when you have time, you have the ability to slowly push things away. Distraught can become "traught". You forget the old and settle with the cold, calm—

The image hits him quickly, before he can stop it. Bright, twinkling lights, strung from seemingly endless wires. They decorate the Big Top with such grace that they're a show all in their own. They illuminate the stripes of the circus tent, yellow and red. They cast glittering shadows upon the ropes and trapezes, upon Zitka and the other elephants.

But one string slips, cracks, falls. He can hear the shattering glass. One gunshot. He hears Zitka's giant feet pound into the sand.

He squeezes his eyes shut.

Focus, Dick, he tells himself. Traught. I have to be traught now.

Get traught or get dead. Isn't that the way it always works?

Artemis is muttering something, but he hardly hears her. There's another explosion and he feels a burst of heat from a nearby air vent. He clenches his teeth as Artemis shouts again. The Red with the fire is moving closer, trying to find their position. Wally and Conner are six minutes from having their lungs filled with water. Kaldur's trapped in what may as well be called a furnace. M'gann is unconscious and slowly dying. Batman isn't here.

"What chance do we have against unrelenting machines?" Artemis snaps at him, still crawling behind him as he forces himself to keep moving. Keep moving, keep thinking. Light on your feet. With all the grace and precision of an acrobat.

Machines. He stops as her last sentence registers in his mind. The Reds are simply machines, no different than the Batmobile or Red Tornado himself. With a burst of electromagnetism, they'll drop dead like wasps sprayed with insect repellant.

Busy. Destroying the machines will keep Dick's mind busy. Good.

He turns around, racing towards the nearest exit and instantly contacting Wally with the Birdarang he so perfectly placed. The strange, overwhelming calm settles over him and forms a weird pit in his stomach. A constant reminder that something is indeed wrong, but he's choosing to ignore it.

The same weird pit that—

"Go left," he blurts out, ordering Artemis without really meaning to. The words just fall out of his mouth like a defensive mechanism. Keep the mind active. Stay active. Or else it'll go back to that one moment, that one moment of true distraught, and that's the last thing Dick wants.

Artemis does as told and soon they're in the control room, and Dick's hands are busy, blissfully busy, rewiring circuits and slipping back tubes. Wally's voice in the earpiece keeps him on task. This wire here, that button there, this clips here, that attaches there.

Science. Easy science, that makes him forget.

He stands up, wrapping his hands around the thick glass tube that'll attach to the generator, starting the ripple effect of electromagnetism. Protons, neutrons, electrons, positive, neutral, negative. It all thrums underneath his fingertips. Explainable. Easy. He learned this in fourth grade.

"Distract them," he tells Wally through the mouthpiece, and Kid Flash instantly begins his mocking game. The Reds fixate their attention on Conner and Wally, who throw out ridiculous lies as teases and jokes.

"I can vibrate my molecules outta' here before your binary brains can count to two!" Wally jeers, and Dick can imagine the water circulating around his neck.

"You can't drown a Kryptonian, dumb-bots. We don't breathe air," Conner shouts, and Dick figures that, underneath the water, he's struggling against the stone holdings with all his superhuman might.

It's insane sometimes. How easy it is to lie.

Dick jumps down onto the platform with Artemis staying up near the air vent. He moves swiftly, leaping over to the other edge and pulling a line out of his utility belt. Swing, land, stop. Mechanical motions, ones he's been through again and again.

He slides the glass tube into place, typing in the necessary calculations, focusing all his attention on the numbers in the formulas, in the pass-codes, on the screen.

"Rerouting power now," he whispers to himself, for no particular reason other than to reassure the situation. It's working. The plan is working, and the whole time he's remained traught.

He glances over at Wally and Conner, chin-deep in water and caught in twisted formations of rock and steel. They have three minutes before they're killed, along with M'gann, Kaldur, Artemis and himself. A good-old death trap, no different from Killer Croc with his giant jaws or Two-Face with his crowbar. Get traught or get dead, it's as simple as that.

But Dick understands why it's hard for Artemis. Because traught is like wrapping your hand around a hot iron and trying to ignore it. The whole time, you're completely aware that everything hurts, everything burns, but you can't let that get to you.

That's why it takes practice. Years.

Dick's eyes flit back to the screen and he grits his teeth. Nothing is happening. The little bars aren't rising, and there isn't enough conduction to start the electromagnetism. His eyes scan the whole structure of the glass tube, and he finds the flaw.

There's nothing at the bottom. No connector. Incomplete circuit.

"Circuit's incomplete," he reaffirms, as if this will somehow help the situation. He turns around, grabbing at his utility belt. "I need something conductible, a…a piece of metal—"

"ROBIN, LOOK OUT!"

He hears Artemis' scream but it's too late. The waves of water rise up in front of him like shadows, hit him with such ferocity that he loses all track of what's up and what's down. Forget traught. Every one of his defenses fall away, and he comes back to that one moment. That one moment where distraught was the only thing he knew.

Circus music fills his ears, the happy-go-lucky tune that was once so familiar. Bum bum bada buda bum bum buda. Everyone's favorite clown song. The lights twinkle and dance and his hands grip around the steady framework of the trapeze. Flip and dive. Sweet, simple freefalls with that beautiful rush of adrenaline, and then his mother's hand clasps around his own. Soft, peach skin slips around his fingers, pulls him up and he jumps onto the ladder. It's magic and it's flying. Dick's always yearned to fly.

He has to sit this next act out. It's the Grand Finale, and the net is slowly pulled away, revealing nothing but stark, hard ground. The crowd is in an uproar, as they always are during this part of the show. Cheering, screaming, clapping. Dick's lips stretch into a grin, as his family prepares. There's Mom and Dad, his aunt and uncle, and John over in the corner. Mom blows him a quick kiss, her cheeks flushed and happy. Then they jump, and Dick watches from the best seat in the house as everything changes.

The rope doesn't hold. It snaps in two, for a reason that Dick only finds out later. Zitka raises her trunk and roars, the gunshot cracks, the air is sucked out of the tent, the ringmaster yells, the string of lights shatter and fade, the bodies tumble. Down, down, down, and there's nothing to stop them because everyone knows about gravity. It's science. Easy, simple science.

Water fills Dick's eyes and mouth and he surges back into the moment. He feels his body being flipped around and around by jets of liquid that stings his skin. And yet that dull thrum remains in his stomach, because he knows that no matter of time, no matter of science, will ever completely change distraught to traught.

He has to hold his breath. Hold his breath and simply wait, pretend like he's drowning and maybe Artemis will know what to do. Maybe she's figured it out now. Get traught or get dead, and the only way to do that is have a little faith. A little faith that the arrow's gonna fly, and when it does, it's going to stick.

He remembers the night spent in Juvie, with the tears and the calls and the other guys all jabbing and jeering at him, a nine-year-old acrobat from a travelling circus, with nothing to his name. He remembers that awful feeling of everything being distraught, of there being no science that can save him because there's only so much that it can explain. His parents fell because of gravity. They're dead because of force, because of bones and breaks and the brain stopping its commands. Dick goes to Juvie because he needs a place to stay, because science decrees that the body can't survive without shelter. Dick eats the moldy bread because his stomach orders it, and he rubs his legs the next morning because science delivers lactic acid. Science explains it all, but it can't really change distraught to traught.

So when the last little flicker of faith almost goes out, he forces himself to hold his breath. Hold his breath and let Artemis work, because, God knows, if anyone can do it, it's her.

And as darkness slowly falls over his mind like the wings of a Bat, of a Bat that rescued him from Juvie Hall four years ago, he knows that there's one last arrow on the way. The scientific probability of it ever hitting the circuit is wildly low. But Dick's done with science.

The circus music fills everything and the wings envelope him. Just like he always knew they would.

Author's Note:

So, this is me absolutely adoring "Homefront" and deciding that I'm going to do a quick analyzation of Dick Grayson. Because, God knows, I love the kid. So please feel free to leave me a critique and some thoughts! They're always much appreciated. :)