Dick sat in silence, thinking. How can they be so superficial?

He was only eight when it happened. Death is a difficult thing to deal with for anyone, but when you're young…

He had lost both his parents in a mob hit, right in front of him.

And now? Now, all these people with their fake smiles were telling him it was okay.

"You'll be okay," they said. "It gets easier. Everything will be fine."

Didn't they understand? Nothing would ever be fine again! Nothing would be okay. His parents were gone, and they were never coming back.

He could see the cracks in their smiles. The chips in the cover that showed the despair underneath. The bigger the smile, the harder the loss. It made him wonder how he hadn't seen it before.

And Bruce Wayne had the biggest smile of all. The man who was supposed to adopt him, the only other person in the world who understood what it was like to have your family ripped away from you before your very eyes. Bruce's smile was far bigger and brighter than that of Leslie, the woman who helped him, or the cops who handled his parents' case.

What really stunned him was that people seemed to think Bruce's smile was genuine. He couldn't see how they came to that conclusion- it was so obvious! But everyone was oblivious to that. Everyone except the little boy who'd lost his parents. Hell, Bruce might as well have been the Batman, with a smile like that.

Dick learned to deal with the painted smiles. Learned to smile back, cover it up. It was all a great game, really. Who can be the happiest? Who can smile the widest?

As he got older, painting his smile became easier, almost second nature. Perfectly normal. He wasn't a boy who had lost his parents, he was the son of the richest, most famous man in Gotham City! And he was happy. Mostly.

He saw himself as a sort of artist, his emotions the colors in his palate, his blank face the canvas. What he put there was his choice and his alone, and he only let people see what he wanted them to see.

No one knew the value of a painted smile more than those who had lost it all. No one knew the value of a steady hand and a blank face. Few appreciated the value there was in that sort of art.

And Dick Grayson, when it came to painting smiles, was one of the best artists there ever was.