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There’s little in the Wayne Family that is as tense as dinnertime. It’s never a quiet affair, the food is always good and Alfred does everything to make sure it goes over smoothly. There’s an underlying tension though, a tension that is seldomly addressed at all and when it is, then never head on. The issue, of course, concerning the Robins and food. As in, they have a love-hate relationship with it. Bruce certainly didn’t intend for them to share more than general appearance, but well, it seems the Robin title comes with more inheritance than just smart quips and a traffic-light-suit.
- Dick
It starts with the first Robin, like so many other traditions that find their way into the Manor with his arrival.
By all definitions, Dick has the best relationship with his body, his self, and subsequently with food. That doesn’t say much though.
Dick had an acrobats physique, he was small and lithe and strong and he projected this image as a vigilante just as much as a performer. He’s used to attention pointed at him, to scrutinizing looks and applause. Only the applause seems to be sorely lacking these days, leaving behind nothing but scars and a boy who’s slowly turning into a man.
And for him, the problem has really nothing to do with his body. He liked his body, he was proud of it. He liked to show it of. Only, with the accumulation of responsibilities, becoming the titans leader, supporting his own city at night, he starts to see the cracks and faults where before all he’d seen was himself.
It’s fine, he tells himself. He needs to train more, he knows. He should probably cut back on burgers and milkshakes, pick up some salads. He needs to be ready to help. And then comes Jason, who’s so tiny, who goes out filled with anger, who needs so much help. And Dick is going to help. He knows he fucked up, at first. He’d been so pissed at Bruce and all he could see in those baby-blues was more responsibility, another person to worry about. It was silly, childish. As he got to know Jason his worry grew. Because someone needed to look out for the kid, he needed to step up.
Jason dies.
The less said about that, the better.
Dick gains another younger brother, just as tiny as Jason, but with a sharp mind and a detectives intuition. He promises to do better. And then he’s just the slightest bit bitter because this is more pressure and fuck Bruce, don’t you see we’re both shattering under it?
He resolves to train more. He stops eating cereal. He can’t risk being sloppy in the field, weighed down by unhealthy crap. He takes up green-smoothies. He hates them. He drinks them anyway.
Dick had always been bendy and quick and light but he’s never been better than now, physically speaking. He’s been taking more shifts at the precinct so he can afford better meat, better vegetables. He’s absolutely shredded, or so Wally tells him when they shower after a particularly gruesome mission. Dick can’t say he agrees, really. Had eh been a bit faster tonight, Garth probably wouldn’t have sprained his wrist. He resolves to train more when he’s back in ‘haven.
He keeps telling himself if he just trains more, stays healthier, cuts back on sugar and fat and anything that could slow him down, maybe the people around him will stop getting injured. It doesn’t help much.
He takes Tim out for milkshakes and nearly barfs it all back up as soon as Tim leaves. He resolutely ignores that Tim also seems slightly green in the face.
Damian is the light of his live, somehow and still, everything goes wrong. Bruce leaves, dies, and now Dick has more responsibility than he ever wanted. He can’t take another death, he won’t. But he’s also supposed to bulk up, to closer represent Bruce. Dick stares at his plate and wants to laugh at himself. This is ridiculous, who wouldn’t he just eat a goddamn chicken parm? He used to love it. The chicken stares back at him as if it’s his arch nemesis. He feigns sickness and resolutely tries not to think about it.
There’s so much pressure, he feels like Atlas holding up the sky and threatening to buckle below its weight. He just has to get stronger, that will fix it.
His issues are never addressed but Bruce does look at him weirdly when Dick mentions not having touched his favorite cereal in two years. Well, who’s he to judge? Dick knows he starved himself after Jason’s death. Tim told him. It’s just fucked. One day, he promises himself, he will be strong enough to stop the tragedies. The day is not today.
2. Jason
Jason’s issues with food are a whole lot more obvious. Hell, when he came to live with Batman, he’d been emaciated, small and shivering. Food was not something that was readily available to him. It was sacred, it was good. He gorged on dinner that first night and regretted it. His stomach couldn’t hold it and he got terribly sick. Alfred stayed with him and the next morning, a meal plan was made to restore Jason’s appetite.
They had a lot of soup that first year.
He stays thin but he bulks up considerably, and with it comes a growth spurt. He’s nearly insatiable right up until a few days before his death. He sometimes wakes up in the kitchen, long after everyone else went to sleep, standing in front of the pantry, hand still in a glass of peanut butter. He cannot remember how he got there but he feels uncomfortably full.
Jason hoards food, which turns into a problem when he keeps a stache of it under his bed and in his cupboards until a colony of ants find the half-rotten sandwich. Alfred lets him take non-perishables instead. It’s a habit Jason never shakes, the insecurity around his next meal. He learns to cook in the manors kitchen and enthusiastically makes meal plans for the week. It helps, to know what they’re gonna make next.
Batman stock’s protein bars in his belt, just for him. He tells himself that doesn’t make his heart flutter and beat warmly in his chest.
In any case, he cannot stand the feel of a rumbling stomach and often gets to a point where he stuffs himself until it hurts.
His resurrection changes him, mostly physically, he emerges from the pit a good head taller than before, he’s packed with muscle and broad shoulders and he sees Bruce when he looks in the mirror. At least it’s an excuse to buy food in bulk. All of his safe houses are always fully stocked. He cannot imagine going another night hungry. He cooks with a passion, he cooks for his friends, for the fellow outlaws, eventually even for his brothers.
Nobody mentions the panic attack he had when they’d been forced into one of Tim’s safe-houses instead and the kid didn’t have food. He’d blow their cover just so he wouldn’t have to go hungry. Tim had looked so disturbed by the thought that he might have something against hunger, Jason had barked out a laugh. A rich kid with hunger and a poor one with more food than he could ever need. The irony.
3. Tim
Tim might have the most problems with food out of all of them. He was also likely the most insecure one. These facts related. Just like his two older brothers, Tim had been a small kid. Unlike them, it had nothing to do with food scarcity or a professional need and it had everything to do with his parents.
His mother, Janet, was a very petite woman and she very much disliked most things to do with eating and food in general. She made sure he had the best table manners in all of Bristol, that he knew how to behave, how to look. She did not believe in sugary-sweet snacks or juice packets. Tim could have a few nuts, if he absolutely had to, other than that he should eat at meal times.
Of course, this only happened when she was home. But every time she returned, Tim shrunk under her razor-sharp gaze, tutting when she thought he turned to chubby. This, combined with the fact that he had no clear adult supervision, a lot of free time and rather exhaustive hobbies, meant that Tim just never really developed a sense of what a normal amount of food was.
He was praised for forgetting meals, a clap on the back when he looked regal next to the pudgy children at a charity auction. But under his pristine suit, Tim was nothing more than a kid with knobby knees and a crooked toe fro m when he broke it climbing a building and didn’t dare go to the hospital to fix it.
And the media, the media loved the shit out of him. Every time he went out with his parents, a new magazine would cover the event. And at first they’d just cooed over him, but gossip rags are seldomly kind and so, when he turned 13 they started talking about his looks. At 17, he was declared one of the most eligible bachelors in the country. Tim shied away from the attention but he also couldn’t help but bask in praise, which in turn fueled his insecurity.
The Robin suit was tight and unforgiving and Tim knew how he looked in it. He’d learned skipping breakfast early, never did anything but drink coffee in the morning. It helped, at least until lunch. Then he either had a protein bar or a salad. The only meal he never ended up skipping, though not for a lack of trying, was dinner with the Waynes.
The hunger had become familiar to him, comforting. And he watched his brother eat, eat, eat, and couldn’t fathom ever doing the same. With food always came the slight lilt of disgust, being improper, and it was to be treated as an indulgence. He guessed Jason had starved enough in his live though, so he said nothing.
It’s not even that he doesn’t like eating, more that he doesn’t like the effects of it. He tells himself he can think clearer on an empty stomach. He tells himself his short height was genetics and not systematic underfeeding since childhood. He doesn’t say anything when all his brothers, even Damian, grow taller than him, muscled more broadly. He’s good for stealth missions, anyway. He doesn’t need to be a battering hammer.
His collar bones poke out from under his t-shirt. Damian’s sweater now slides off his shoulder. He needs to take in the Red Robin suit. It’s fine, everything’s fine.
It looks good on him, anyway. He has that whole sickly-victorian-child thing going for him. Steph says so.
Once, Dick picks him up because he broke his leg and he swears Dick expected about double as much weight. He clearly overestimated by the way his grip tightens and he goes up too fast.
He notices that his brothers notice, but they keep silent and he keeps silent in turn. He likes it. To be in control of his body, of the food, of everything. He still looks aristocratic in photos. He sees his mother in himself and wonders why no one ever told her that it was okay to take up more space. That she didn’t need to be so proper. Why his father never stepped in. Some disorders are more likely to be inherited, this is one of them. Wether nature or nurture is up for debate.
4. Damian
The last of the Robin’s is Damian, the blood son. They conveniently talk very little about his live before he came to his father. Damian was taught to be suspicious of his surrounding, that everyone could be out to get him. He had to kill three of his teachers the first year he was being taught and his taster was poisoned a total of 46 times during his stay with the league. What else could you expect from a place that was literally called the League of Assassins?
So anyway, his trust in the people closest to him is minimal at best. He doesn’t trust Grayson at first, less his other brothers. He doesn’t trust Alfred either and resolutely will not eat any of the food he makes that first week.
Grayson, who seemingly understands his problem, goes to the supermarket with him and lets Damian buy prepackaged goods that he can et in his room, untouched by the servant.
In general, things get better after a while but there are some instincts that he cannot hold back. The lack of a food taster makes him nervous. In fact, it unnerves him so much he doesn’t understand how nay of the can just trust the food they’ve been given. He makes do with a compromise. Damian does not eat first. He watches all the dishes being arranged and then waits until one of the others have tasted their food. Only when they do not react does Damian himself eat at all. He never tells his brothers about his habit but he doesn’t have to. They know anyway. They are a family of detectives and Damian has never cared if others saw him watching.
He’s concerned once, when Grayson disappears after a meal, to be sick in a bathroom. He fears his own food was tempered with. Grayson assures him of the opposite. Damian does not get why one would try to be sick without reason. He also sees the way he battles with training, how he’s often there before all the others and leaves after them. It does them good as Batman and Robin but. Grayson can never seem to stop. Todd mentions that Grayson’s favorite food used to be cereal, Grayson gets a distant look in his eyes, smiles and tells him he does not eat most things sugar anymore.
But Grayson, he observes, is not the only one with such habits. When Todd deigns to grace them with his presence, he shovels food into his mouth like he’s afraid someone will steal it. He eats all the left overs and if he can’t he will take them home. He looks faintly ill after a grand Thanksgiving festival. Damian goes to question Grayson who quietly tells him that Todd was starved as a child and now cannot waste food. It seems stupid to Damian who knows that you can survive without food for over a month if you try hard enough but he cannot eat without another person with him, so he refrains from judgment.
Drake is perhaps the most concerning of all.
The on he’d been most worried about, his perceived competition. Now that he has found a new title for himself, Damian is slowly warming up to his presence. And so, he notices a peculiar habit of Drake that he cannot explain. Anyone can see that he is skinny, gaunt even, and yet, he does not try to eat more, does not try to build up his figure. He’s made of muscle, like all of them. Yet he’s the lightest since Damian’s fifteenth birthday. He looks extraordinarily dorky in all the borrowed clothes he seems to live in. He was worried, not for Drake, of course, but rather that he was slowly, systematically poisoning all of them, which was why he was eating much less than them. He accuses Drake of such actions and he gets a rather pinched look, hunched in shoulders. Drake quietly tells him he’s never eaten a lot. That he likes it like that.
Damian researches this, later that night. He learns about eating disorders, something so foreign to the league he’d never thought about it. He thinks Drake is being stupid, he could never be fat. He tells him as such, Drake smiles tiredly and says it's not about that.
Damian resolves to pry more food into his brothers mouth, if only because he’s a liability in the field.
(He resolutely does not care about his brother’s well being. He doesn’t!)