#red robin headcanon
the thing about art is that nobody cares. tim’s got a trigger finger from capturing whatever shots he could, as soon as they happened. he’s got chemical burns on his hands from when he was still learning how to develop film. he’s got boxes of photos, not just of batman and robin, but of gotham. gotham late at night, messy pictures of a smog-filled sunset, grimy alleys, cruel eyed people. gotham in the evening, the chandelier of a gala, the crowds of blurry-faced people, diamonds sparkling on necks and fingers. gotham in the morning, faraway shots of wayne manor gardens, of the forest behind the drakes’ house, of leaves and flowers and trees. and nobody notices them. jack and janet knew about his hobby, of course they did. it certainly cost them enough money. but no one asked to see his pictures. no one asked him why he liked photography. the teachers at school brushed him off when he talked about his hobby, the maid asked him to stop leaving his camera around, and bruce saw him as nothing but a threat with those photos the first few months. so tim stopped asking. stopped telling people about his little hobby, stopped vesting so much time and interest in it, only ever got out his camera when he was feeling sentimental. but he couldn’t always help himself, snapping a quick shot with his phone when he saw something particularly beautiful. pictures littered his phone, and as long as tim had anything to say about it, they’d stay unkown forever. because nobody cared.
the thing about art is that everybody cares. damian’s got fingertips permanently blackened from charcoal pencils, skin rubbed raw from scrubbing paint off his arms. nothing went unnoticed under his grandfather’s watchful eye, however. damian, innocent as he could be, told ra’s it’s just art. ra’s had laughed, then with a tight grip on the back of damian’s neck, led him around the main base of the league. this is art, ra’s had told him. the arc of a blade, the cry of a warrior. the bulge of muscles, the blood of the victorious dripping on the body of the defeated. there is no need to look for beauty beyond that. the next time ra’s caught him with a pencil and paper, he was not so forgiving. damian trembled in the aftermath, fighting to stay quiet as talia harshly set all ten of his broken fingers back in place. she hissed at him to be careful, then threw his paper in the trash. damian learned a lesson that day. his careful depictions of the league base, ink spills of animals, quick drafts of his mother were rushed, hidden, disappear as soon as they’d been set on paper. because his hobby was foolish for someone of his status, unimportant for his eventual role in life. his grandfather’s entire league cares so much about exactly what he does, how he traisn, what he spends his time on. and he cannot afford anything less than his usual hypervigilance to cause misstep, one that would end with a punishment far more brutal than broken fingers.
i love the idea of the entire batfam being hypercompetent. just like. good at stuff.
because yea, they’ve all been trained extensively by a variety of teachers and mentors and various learning experiences. they all have their skills that they’ve honed to perfection for years. but there are just some things that they’re a natural at, things that make the unique, things that give them an edge just enough to rise to the top in a world full of gods and monsters.
yes, damian’s a trained assassin, and has been since birth. yes, damian works hard to keep his skills up. but the weapons training? it comes to him almost naturally. maybe it was something passed down from both bruce and talia, both deadly fighters in their own right. maybe it has something to do with the al ghul bloodline. either way, damian is absolutely deadly with a weapon in his hand. a blade can arc through the air faster than the human eye can see when it’s in his hand. he can work horrible wonders with an unbalanced sword, and turn combat into an art with a balanced one. tiny fingers wrap around the rough handle of a whip with surety, and he can slip batarangs into his palms and up his sleeves without them ever being seen.
tim’s got one of the most analytical minds of any vigilante alive. he’s not a supergenius or anything, and he leaves the higher-order computer skills and tech to barbara. but to him, the world is a puzzle after a puzzle, and tim never fails to solve them. figuring out dick and bruce’s identities. taking apart a grapple gun and fitting the parts together to make a beartrap. knowing exactly what to say and what to do to get bruce to break and bend and let him in. catching patterns in the chemical formulas of crane’s various toxins. reading through the lies that fell from his family’s lips like raindrops from the sky. everything and everyone tim knows are made of jagged pieces, but tim figured out early on how to put them together, step back, and take a look at the bigger picture.
people say cass doesn’t have any people skills, due to the years spent in isolation, spent alone. but the reality is, she has too many. reading people has always come easy, body language is an open book to her. but what many didn’t know was that there was a big difference between reading a book and analyzing it. it’s easy to see the insecurities of each of her brothers. it’s much harder to know exactly what to do or say to let them bring down their walls for just a moment, show their affection and prove their love in the smallest but most important of ways. it’s easy to see the poison of a smirk on a reporter’s lips, to catch the probing gleam of their eyes. it’s much harder to turn the reporter around, chasing their own tail until the story they were searching for in the first place was lost. it’s easy to pinpoint teammates and other heroes’ strengths and weaknesses, to see them play out in the field and plan for them the way every bat did. it’s much harder to make the others aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, and to convince them to put aside their ego and work on bettering themselves. but cass seemed to have a knack for it.
jason may like playing up the role of the blustering, bull-headed wild card of the family. mafia-don-from-movies meets muscled brawn. but he’s got a literary mind at the heart of it all. he’s real good at codes and decryptions, because he’s read about them before. he’s lightning fast a nygma’s riddles, because he’s poured through the books from which riddler gets his inspiration a hundred times over. life and art turn into one in his mind, and overlaying his family’s stubbornness and trust issues with novel style analyzations and character assessments that help him understand their interactions a little better. words float off the page and wind their way inside his head, and some may call him dramatic when he can’t force himself to speak so he uses quotes instead, but never say echolalia wasn’t useful.
each member of their worn out and sewn together family had their niche, their own particular area in which they excelled. but dick was brought up in a world where there was only two protecting gotham, two partners working together to keep an entire city from falling apart. jack of all trades, master of none, but better of master than one, dick always said, eyes twinkling with mischief. because sure, his acrobatic prowess was unchallenged. but he grew up on the road visiting city after city, country after country, and it gave him a head for languages. not even dick is sure how many languages and regional dialects he actually knows. his darling little smile was honed to perfection, and interrogations with him never lasted that long. you could drop him in the middle of nowhere and he’d always find his way to civilization, or you could toss him in the middle of a bustling but unfamiliar city, and he’d always make his way back.
