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His first memory is gripping a trapeze bar. Warm hands on either side of his own. Oranges. Cigarettes. The feeling of safety. The rush of the wind. Flying.
Most of his childhood is remembered in pieces, his memories of being raised in the circus fragmented into puzzle pieces he tries to fit into place. He is the only one left of both his family lines, he needs to remember their stories, his history. The memories slip from his hands like water.
He was too young to have full memories of those years on the road. He doesn’t remember Europe at all.
Even the years they toured in the States are hard to picture.
Flashes of images, feelings, vague senses, bits and pieces of broken memories, and flying.
Flying and cheering and playing with elephants and tag with the children of the town and being lifted and tossed into the air and being tackled and their small trailer and warming their hands by the oven and cuddling under blankets and music and dancing and love and love and love.
Sometimes the only thing he can remember about his parents are feelings, smells, the stories they told him. Their faces and voices and laughter faded away with the years until barely a wisp echoes in his memories.
His mother was dark red lipstick and tight ponytails. Grip chalk coated hands and the scent of oranges from the peels she would rub on her wrists.
In his memories his mother is smiling, lifting him high into the air. She tells him something he can’t hear but understands anyway. Her hand in his is always warm.
His father was belly laughter and a curling mustache. Strong Turkish cigarettes, stale grip chalk, and old-fashioned hair pomade.
In his memories his father is tackling him with bear hugs, letting him pull on his mustache. His hugs are always tight and safe.
Most of their clothes were hand-me-downs from others in the circus. Clothes that grew too small on others or had holes that his mother could stitch up.
They didn’t have many of their own possessions. His parents had only brought from Europe what they could carry.
His mother had guarded the possessions she did have with fervor. She wore jewelry that had been her grandmothers’, clothes that had been her mothers’. His mother’s collection would slowly dwindle as each item was struck cold by the death of the owner. She had no way of contacting her family back in Europe—both she and her family were always traveling and never had a location to send things to—and she would find out that someone had died when the jewelry grew cold. She would take it off and burn it and bury it.
The only piece of jewelry she had left by the time they arrived in Gotham was her wedding ring.
Grief clung to her like the sweet smell of oranges, and only when she was in the air with him and his father did she feel peace again.
His fathers’ only treasured possession, other than his own ring, was his black leather jacket. The jacket had been passed down from his grandfather to his father and then to him, which made it a special case. No spirit could cling onto the fabric and be stuck on this earth, as it was always passed down before death, as it was never just one persons’. His father had nothing else from his family; his entire troupe back in Hungary or Turkey or somewhere in between had burned to death.
Smoke would cling to his father and only sometimes did it smell like cigarettes.
Acrobats shouldn’t smoke.
I told you that you need to quit those; flying through the air requires a good set of lungs, his mother would say as she slapped the cigarette from his fathers' hands.
His father would laugh, a full-bodied one that had him holding his belly and had his mother fighting a smile. I’m Balkan, it’s in my blood, dearest, his father would say back, tugging her into his arms.
There’s nothing that can ground our family of birds, his father would tell him afterward, lighting up another one.
He'd tried to sneakily reach for the pack and his father had laughed, holding them high above his head.
When you’re old enough for your lungs to stop growing, his father promised.
His father never got the chance to let him try one.
The detention center was dirty. Crowded in a way the small trailer hadn’t been.
Most of his memories from that place are blocked out, whether out of grief or from trauma. He tries not to think of that place; the place before Bruce, before Robin, before justice. When all he had was the anger that blinded him and protected him from the grim reality of his new life.
He tries not to wonder how different things would be if he hadn’t followed his anger to its target.
At night he would sneak out into the streets of Gotham. Looking. Finding. Waiting.
During the day he would keep his head down avoiding attention. It didn’t work.
The kids would throw slurs his way and he would get sent to solitary for punching them in the mouth.
The guards liked to trip him and watch his lips split and bleed. They smoked American cigarettes. The putrid stench had burned his nose.
He saved the peels from the oranges they got on Sundays and rubbed them under his nose to chase away the smell.
The scent of his mother soothed and wrapped around him like one of her hugs.
He didn’t cry the entire time he was there.
He thinks it was the oranges.
His father had never passed the jacket down to him.
When he moved in with Bruce, he was handed a box of things rescued from the trailer before it was scrapped. Two wedding rings. The jacket. One poster of their act. Three photographs; his parents with their families, his parents’ wedding, and the three of them.
The jacket still smelled of Turkish cigarettes.
Bruce had told him that he hoped having the items back would give him closure and would help him remember his parents.
He hadn’t taken the words to heart.
He’d seen the memorial Bruce had of his own parents; the pearls and the watch, the way he kept their rooms the exact same as if they were going to come home any second, and had thought that it was no wonder the man was still so affected and driven by their death; they were practically haunting him.
He refused to follow foolish white men down the path of hauntings.
He put the jacket and the rings into fire and let them burn. He buried them.
He had given his parents the proper Rromani burial that they had been deprived of.
And only then did he cry.
He did not need a preserved room to remember his parents. Objects did not hold memories.
He would remember his parents through flying, through love, through laughter, through the smell of cigarettes and oranges.
The first thing he had done when he’d turned eighteen was buy a pack of cigarettes. Drinas. The Turkish brand his father always had in his back pocket.
He could’ve done this earlier, it wasn’t as though people in Gotham checked IDs, but he wanted to do it right; do it the way it would’ve happened if his father was still around.
He wasn’t in Gotham. Couldn’t be.
Even if he had been living there, which he wasn’t now, he would’ve left that city. The ghosts of his parents too fresh a wound and too strong a presence in the city of their death to invite them into his mind with the flick of a lighter.
He bought the cigarettes and climbed to the roof of a nearby building. He stared at the New York skyline. He stared at the pack. At the orange lighter in his hand.
Acrobats shouldn’t smoke.
Was he even one anymore?
He burnt his finger trying to light it.
He felt the ghost of his fathers’ hand cover his and help him get it lit.
He brought the cigarette up to his mouth and breathed.
It burned his lungs and his eyes and he coughed and coughed.
In the back of his mind and in his memories he heard the clicking sound his mother would make when she wanted to say I told you so.
The smoke billowed out from his mouth in a cloud. His father would stand in clouds like those.
The taste on his lips was unfamiliar and harsh. The smell reminded him of the kisses his father would leave on his cheeks and forehead. Of his mothers’ hair that would get in his face when she wrapped him in a tight hug, her hair finally let down and smoke-filled from his fathers’ presence.
Closing his eyes, he let himself fall back to the small trailer that always smelled like mothballs and Drinas, the trailer that got boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter, the trailer that had no running water, the trailer that only had one bed so his father let him and his mother share it and made his own mattress on the floor out of clothes and blankets.
He breathed in.
And out.
He didn’t feel a burn this time.
He wasn’t a smoker. He couldn’t be, with what he did.
He would have one cigarette with a beer sometimes. One when he was particularly stressed about something or when he was trying to remember his childhood. Sometimes he would have one after a fight with Bruce or after a mentally taxing day.
He didn’t light one often, he didn’t think.
The man at the smoke shop by his Blüdhaven apartment knew his name and what brand he always bought. He would need to wash some clothes twice to get the smell out. Sometimes he didn’t even bother and let the smell of his father envelop him.
They focused him. His hands would stop shaking after having one.
Early mornings on his fire escape; watching the sunrise, the sky a burnt orange, hands cold and skin dry, the sudden warmth in his chest when he would breathe in.
He wasn’t a smoker because he could stop anytime he wanted.
He knew this as he refused to smoke in Gotham.
Bruce was always there, judging, watching. Bruce would have something negative to say, would say that his health was important. The man wouldn’t understand that the act, the smell, the taste, was in his blood. Was his connection to his long-dead family.
He forced his hands not to shake there.
He didn’t smoke in Gotham.
He chewed orange gum instead.
Shouldn’t you, of all people, not smoke, his brother asks him one night in Gotham.
He takes in a deep breath and pushes it out, letting the air in front of him fill with smoke. The air is frigid, the night sky clear. He lets the warmth spread to the tips of his fingers and toes before he drops the cigarette and stubs it out on the gravel rooftop with his foot.
He takes out gum and tosses a piece into his mouth to chase away the acrid taste with sweet oranges.
He smokes in this city now.
His own city is a crater of his own making, so he lets himself smoke in Bruces'.
He doesn’t count how many he has anymore. Seems unnecessary.
His father used to tell him that cigarettes wouldn’t harm him; that his lungs were safe and that his flying would never weaken. He told him that nothing could ground their family of birds.
He knows better.
His family line is cursed. He is the last one left.
He’s always known he would die young.
His lifeline is short on the palm of his hand.
He knows this, and yet still, he smokes. He is his fathers’ son, after all.
I’m Balkan, it won’t hurt me, it’s in my blood, he lies to his brother.
And for the first time he realizes that his father must have been lying as well.