“And remember to keep your legs straight, or else it looks dumb,” Dick finished as he swung gracefully to a halt on the platform beside Angel and Red.

Angel looked somewhat apprehensive. “I think I can do it,” she said uncertainly.

Red’s jaw was on the floor. “How can you--” Angel touched his arm gently with a pointed look. He rolled his eyes, then sighed. “All right, let’s do it,” he groaned reluctantly.

Dick’s face lit up even brighter. “Sweet!” He was enjoying every second of the lesson. Red and Angel had told him that they had a bit of experience in the trapeze; they just needed some refreshers before they got good. So he was more than willing to see how much they actually knew.

It took him all of five minutes to realize that they had no idea what they were doing. He’d told them, despite their protests, to give it a shot and do their best. Their best, to put it lightly, was trash.

So he taught them the basics. How to hold the bar, how to build up momentum. Once he'd done that, he could clearly see that they had potential. With practice, they could actually perform at shows.

Dick decided that the best way to go about that was to work them to the bone. Once they were sufficiently sore and exhausted, he let them take a break. He found Apollo and Diana watching from the edges of the tent.

"Hello, archers! Your fellow troupe members are pretty good for noobs." Dick was met by stony silence from both of them and a glare from the redhead. "Oookay then. Moving on."

Since the archers were no company and he wanted to give his trainees a better break, he wandered off to entertain himself. Soon he found himself sitting in the shade of one if the large trailers in the parking lot, staring at the ants crawling across the asphalt.

“Hey,” he said to them. Naturally, they didn't answer. “You carrying that dead wasp to your colony?” He could only hear the quiet breeze rustling the distant circus posters and banners. “That's cool.”

“It's cool?! It's not cool at all!” someone yelled. Dick leaped to his feet, then realized they weren't talking to him.

“We've got to get this loaded up before anyone sees it, dum dum!” they were saying. Dick crept toward the corner of the trailer and peered around it. He saw a small, wiry figure reprimanding two other, larger men. They were carrying crates of some sort, and based on how they were acting, their contents were expensive, fragile, or both.

“Now get your sorry butt over there and get loading!” he continued.

Dick looked at the containers. As he stared, he could start to make out what they contained.

His jaw dropped. People were smuggling drugs? In a circus?

Although the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

Without really thinking it through (which was his first big mistake), he stepped forward and challenged them, “What are you guys doing here?”

They just looked at him. “Who're you?”

Dick curled his lip disdainfully and replied in an extraordinarily important-sounding voice, “I'm a Flying Grayson. And you're toast.” He leapt at the closer of the two strongmen.

Before any of the three men could react, Dick had grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it slightly, then pulled. The large figure found himself staring at the blue, cloudless sky, suddenly with a pounding headache and a dislocated shoulder.

Dick had already moved on to the second big guy, figuring that by taking down the big guns, he could intimidate the smaller man out of fighting. He kicked the man’s belly hard, sending him staggering back, bent over, then Dick smashed his closed fists once into the back of his unprotected head. The man fell to the ground, groaning.

In retrospect, he supposed that with how cocky he had been, he only got what was coming to him.

As he caught his breath and enjoyed the adrenaline rush he had absolutely become addicted to, he heard a click that he knew well enough, despite only having heard it a few times.

He lifted his hands slowly and carefully turned around. And, just as he’d suspected, the barrel of a pistol was pointed right at his chest.

He warily eyed the gun in the man’s hand, contemplating how best to disarm him. There was a sudden presence behind him, a large one, and he glanced back to see the first man he’d struck down standing directly behind him, glowering at the small boy he had so quickly come to despise.

Dick laughed nervously toward the smaller of the two. “Hey, man!” He paused, then added, “Nice gun you’ve got there.”

“Shut up!” the man with the gun snapped finally. “What did you think you would do by coming here?”

Dick looked toward the sky thoughtfully. “Optimistically, I was going to stop whatever the heck is going on here. Pessimistically, I figured I would get killed. Realistically, I figured it was going to south eventually, no matter what I did. So I guess no matter what happens now, I was right.” Despite the precarious circumstances, he grinned.

The man was clearly confused by the acrobat’s confidence. “You do realize I’m about to shoot you, right?”

“Mm-hm!” He nodded emphatically. “Absolutely. But the question is: where?”

“Right between your stupid eyes.” The man positioned his gun thusly.

“Are you sure you want to shoot there?”

The man blinked. “What?”

“That’s the thickest part of the skull right there, and you’re aiming for one of the least vital parts. Come on, man! Step up your game!”

The man put it to Dick’s temple. “Wanna keep talking?”

Dick pressed his luck. “If you fire it at the wrong angle, it could completely miss all my vital brain parts. I could come back and testify against you for the drugs and attempted murder.”

“Unless I put a few bullets in there.”

“But then what’ll you do with my body?” The two men looked at each other. “Yeah, what’re you gonna do with me? Even if you found a good place, people find bodies all the time. You’d have an hour, tops, before people start looking for me. And when they do that, everyone will be looking. One of the benefits of being a big part of the circus. And the more people looking, the faster they find the body.”  He wondered how long he would be able to stall. He could see his brashness was starting to make the man lose confidence. The question was: How long would that work?

“Is that it?” the man with the gun asked, clearly irritated.

“Not even close. There'll be blood spatter evidence, too. My brains’ll be everywhere.”

“Just shut up!” the man screamed. He went to pull the trigger.

Whoosh.

It wasn't there anymore.

Dick’s jaw dropped, but he pressed the advantage, slamming his elbow into the chest of the man behind him. The man who'd held the gun to him was already on the ground, clutching his (for some reason) profusely bleeding nose. Three arrows found their way, whistling slightly, to each of the three men, expanding into huge masses of pink foam that audibly solidified around them.

Dick followed their paths back to none other than Diana and Apollo.

He gave a tiny laugh of disbelief, but he wasn't surprised. “Of course. How did I not see this coming?” he asked in an almost monotonous voice.

Then he saw Red suddenly appear beside them. Anthony and Cole ran over and halted beside the three of them. And as the cherry on top, Angel shimmered into existence beside them, her eyes glowing green.

As any normal person would, Dick staggered back, sputtering unintelligible nonsense. The six performers looked at each other for a moment, then Angel extended a hand and closed her no-longer-glowing eyes.

Dick was plunged into his own mind. He didn’t know how he knew, but he was sure enough that it was. He could see his memories playing out around him. It was surreal, but at the same time, grounding.

As he adjusted to the terrifyingly weird feeling of literally being inside his own brain, he noticed he wasn’t alone. Angel smiled at him from beside a particularly vivid memory of dropping paint-filled balloons on Jack.

“Hello, Dick,” she said gently.

“Wh- what’s going on?” he stuttered.

“I figured this would be the easiest way to tell you. And the fastest.”

“Tell me… what, exactly?”

Her eyes glowed again, and faster than he could question any of it, he knew so much.

The “troupe” was actually a covert team of sidekicks (sorry-- not sidekicks) that worked with the Justice League to do what they couldn’t, completing stealth missions that the League would be too high-profile to complete themselves. They were here on orders from Batman to stop the drug shipment, which was actually a new form of a super-enhancing drug called Venom disguised as normal street drugs to make it less conspicuous. The men that Dick had confronted only knew that the drugs that they were shipping were worth much more than what their label said, but not their use. Angel was actually Miss Martian, the apprentice and niece of Martian Manhunter. Diana was Artemis, Apollo was Red Arrow, Anthony was Aqualad, Cole was Superboy, and Red was Kid Flash. Underneath all that information, Dick noticed another underlying fact that Miss Martian didn’t hide, but he could tell she was drawing his attention away from it: This Team was told to keep a special eye on him. Apparently the Big Bad Bat thought that the acrobat might get in their way.

All this played in the span of a few seconds. When Dick found himself no longer inside his own brain and in the real world-- well, first, he fell over backwards. But once he got a grip on reality, he could see that the team had barely moved since Miss Martian had first invited herself into his mind.

He could hear Angel’s voice in his mind (because that was who she was to him) saying, I’ve brought Dick into the mind link.

So you can hear my thoughts? he thought in their general direction as he stood up, brushing himself off.

Only the ones you direct towards us, she answered.

And thank goodness for that, Diana, or Artemis, or whatever her name actually was, announced.

Dick made a face at her.

“Now what?” Red, Flash Boy, whoever the heck he was, asked aloud. It was then that Dick gave up on trying to keep their hero and troupe identities straight.

Anthony, his personality suddenly contrasting with his outlandish costume, answered with, “Now we contact the League for them to take the Venom for safekeeping.”

Dick glanced back at the large, numerous crates containing the drug. “Shouldn't you, like, hide those somewhere until they get here?”

They all looked at Anthony.

“Do you know somewhere we can hide them?” Anthony asked him.

Dick thought for a moment. “I have a few ideas."