He'd always hated Gotham. For the first few years after it had happened, he begged Pop Haley to avoid it, to stay away from the city and the people that had taken his family. But it was no good. Gotham brought too much business, too much money for the struggling circus to take it out of the circuit. There was nothing he could do.
They'd hired a new troupe of acrobats, nice enough, but skittish around the brooding young boy. They billed him as "The Last Flying Grayson" and paraded him like he was royal blood. And he hated them for it. He would tolerate the title in every other city, force a smile and bow to the adoring fans, but not in Gotham. Never again in Gotham.
His teenage years were angry. Angry at the world for taking his family and, slowly, his circus. Angry at the new troupe who flew in his place and didn't feel the ghosts of his parents. Most of all, angry at Gotham and everything it came to represent. He never cried in Gotham.
When he was old enough, he drowned out Gotham in liquor and beautiful people, each one a small spark of real life in such a dead city. They existed only in the moment for loving and fucking and then they were gone again. No one was expected to call. No one was looking for a second whirl. No one was interested in the past.
"I was there, you know," Bruce said, lounging on the bed watching Dick dress. "The night they died. I was there. You looked so alone. So young." He leaned against the headboard of his stupidly large bed. "I almost adopted you. Or, well, took you in, you know. I wasn't much older than you are now. I guess that would've made this night awkward."
Eleven years of Dick's suffering and sorrow and anger and hatred brushed off in some rich airhead playboy's idea of a joke.
Whether Wayne was sluggish from the booze and the sex, or whether years of acrobatic training had just given Dick such an advantage, he'd never know, but he knew one thing. He would never come back to Gotham again.
When the headlines hit the news--Last Member of Gotham's First Family Found Murdered--Dick was already in the French countryside hiking his way to nowhere in particular. He tried to forget that pompous bastard's last words. I almost adopted you.
How different a life he would have led. But Gotham would have won, he told himself. The circus would have been lost forever.
He could never go back to the circus of his youth, though. That family, that home was gone. Among the street performances and the charms into hotels he couldn't afford, the odd jobs and the coaxed meals, he never gave a thought to the tragedy he already knew deep down.
There would never again be a Flying Grayson in the sky.
