When he'd first moved in with Bruce, Dick had smelled like the circus.

The circus smelled like wet hay and burnt cotton candy and elephant manure and burnt diesel as you peeled out of the fair grounds and headed toward a new city. Dick's childhood had smelled like life to him. A gallon of everything horrible cut with everything wonderful. It was his in hair and under his skin and caked in under his fingernails. When it was so gloomy in Gotham that it seemed to sneak up on him at night, Dick could press his hand against his face and remember every night he had ever spent in the air with his parents because they had been just as doused in the smell as he had been. He smelled like the circus. He smelled like home.

But Wayne Manor was different. It smelled like dusty rooms that they never used and old books that they never opened and tall, pungent oil paintings of people they never talked about. Luckily, the kitchen always smelled like lemons and leather polish so during the time between school and patrolling, Dick would sit in there with Alfred and drink Coca-Cola from smooth glass bottles. But once Bruce got home, he always had to leave the safe, sufficiently smelly confines of the kitchen and wander away to the dining room or the Bat Cave, which no matter how you looked at it always smelled like moss and guano.

Eventually, after enough months and enough showers, Dick stopped smelling like a Flying Grayson and started smelling like Robin. When he brought his palm up to his nose, all he could smell was lemons and dust. By then he was old enough to shrug it off for the most part.

You couldn't live in a mansion and expect to smell like a circus.

But that didn't mean that somewhere, deep in a drawer filled with dark suits that he didn't really need and expensive shirts he didn't really want there wasn't a folded up Haly's Circus t-shirt two sizes too small that still smelled like Friday nights staring up at the daring couple on the flying trapeze.