Batman – The War Begins
By BenRG
Disclaimer
Batman, the characters of the Batman and the Justice League universes are the property of DC Comics and its owners. This is a not-for-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web. The author and distributor make no claim of ownership
Author's Notes
First and foremost, this story emerged from some thinking that I did about whether or not Batman really fit in with the Justice League and its philosophy. It also includes some aspects of my thinking of how one could salvage the DC comics' Batman continuity, despite some of the more eccentric recent meta-plot developments without a total reboot.
This story exists in a similar fanon universe as my Teen Titans story 'Futures'. Although there are some differences, it has common characters and the same relationships.
Now on to the wrap-up, with a summary of the Futures-verse Bat Family.
My conception of Selina Kyle, Catwoman, owes much to fellow author Chris Dee's portrayal of her in the Cat Tales sequence of fan-fictions, which you can read on this site. She is not much like the character you'll see in the comics; she's unrepentant of her past and isn't about to lose her thief's perspective on the world. Most importantly, she has never worn those goggles.
I owe a lot to Chris's magnum opus for my overall vision of the Bat-verse; fellow fans of her work may see some other ideas of hers in places. Thanks for the inspiration, Chris.
Censor: T – Not for the younger ones
Chapter 3 – Family
Family.
Bruce Wayne had a family, once, a very long time ago. Dr. Thomas and Martha Wayne; Loving, warm-hearted parents who were gunned down for a less than a hundred dollars and a pearl necklace that was lost in the rush to escape in the aftermath of the shooting.
After that, ten-year-old Bruce never expected to have a family again.
Oh, there was Alfred. More than a mentor and more than a care-giver, the old man was the closest thing to a father that Bruce had from that time on. That said, he wasn't his father and as deeply treasured his wisdom and friendship were, there was always the slight formal distance that existed between any good servant and his master.
No, Bruce did not expect to ever have a family ever again. He never expected to have the warm intimacy of someone who shared his heart. He did not expect to hear the laughter of children fill the manor. All he expected was the icy focus and professionalism of The Mission in the dark, cold crypt of the Batcave and the slow-motion funeral for a boy who only survived his parents in body, not in spirit.
Which made it all the more surprising when he gained a son.
It often surprised him when he realised how like a father and son by blood he and Dick Grayson were. They were so alike and yet so different. They shared so many common experiences and had developed such a bond of trust. It was ironic that this bond would be tested, broken and re-spliced time and time again, not over failure of one or the other but, bizarrely, Bruce's desperate attempt to protect his ward from the danger that a boy so young had consciously and willingly chosen to face alongside him.
It was in the nature of sons to eventually draw away from their fathers and strike out on their own. They would do this, not to defy their fathers but to prove to them that they are worthy of their love and their pride.
Dick should have known that nothing could possibly make Bruce love him less, no matter how frustrating the boy's behaviour could be. "I was ready to die for you, Bruce," he protested more than once. Bruce had reacted angrily. How could the boy say that? Didn't he realise that his death, either literally or becoming entangled with the insane web of his foster father's sick-minded Mission was the one thing that Bruce was fighting against with all his heart?
So it was that Dick went out and proved himself to be his father's son, worthy of Bruce's love and pride as if he were not already the unconditional recipient of such. Jump City. The Titans. Trigon. Slade. Saving Raven, Starfire, Jinx, Terra and innumerable others from both themselves and the vile filth that boiled up out of the sewers of Jump City as in every city on Earth. Becoming Nightwing and saving Blüdhaven, a city as lost in its own way as Gotham had ever been. Saving Barbara from herself when despair threatened to snuff out her flame forever...
Barbara...
Bruce had never made any claim on Jim Gordon's daughter, even though she willingly and eagerly adopted his quest, initially out of a strange quixotic desire to reach for greatness but, ultimately, out of a desire to help and to do the right thing. She became part of his life nonetheless, thanks in no small part to how she loved his son. Watching her and Dick together was like watching two halves of the same soul, even when they were both still pre-teens. Bruce should have guessed that, when their bodies awoke, they would have automatically followed physically where their hearts and souls had already gone long before.
Bruce wanted to protect Dick and Barbara from themselves and chose to do this by coming between them and severing their relationship with all the force at his disposal. This was a misjudgement for which he still bitterly accused himself. If he had not driven the two of them apart, then Barbara would certainly have followed Dick to Jump City. There, she would have been safe amongst the Titans, far away from a pitiful, broken, insane clown and his desperate drive to somehow justify his own evil and madness.
Barbara nearly died. Not simply in body but in spirit too. For a woman who once flew from rooftop to rooftop, being trapped in a wheelchair, unable to even pull herself out of bed without use of special apparatus, was to be trapped in a living hell. Dick saved her. Never once did he see the wheelchair or the numb, useless legs. No, he saw the beautiful, intelligent, courageous and, indeed, nearly fearless redheaded woman who always had been and always would be his first love. She was at all times completely perfect in his eyes.
So, Bruce found himself with a daughter-in-law, and one who was as dedicated to his cause as any blood child could be. The Oracle became as mighty a force for justice as any field agent, drawing together strings and evidence, acting as his invaluable eyes and ears on every street corner that only enhanced The Batman's reputation for being an omniscient force of nature.
But there were the failures.
Jason. Stephanie too, to a certain extent.
Jason Todd was a lost, lonely child. Different from Dick and from Bruce himself in so many ways. A brilliant, inquisitive child from the most unpromising of backgrounds, he proved himself a brilliant natural detective by succeeding where almost every villain, including some of the most brilliant minds on Earth, had failed and learning the true identity of the Batman by pure stealth and guile. The price for his silence was strange as it was inevitable. With nothing to hold him to his alcoholic father and long-vanished mother, he wished to become something more, something greater. Setting aside his reservations, Bruce agreed to train him to be the second Robin.
From the start, Jason was a different soul from Dick. Angry, betrayed, lashing out at a world that he could barely comprehend and without Dick's finely-honed sense of justice and morality. Jason always was a young man with his own priorities and his own goals. Eventually, Bruce knew, those quests and those needs would lead him away and off into a life of his own, for good and for ill.
Once again, a bone-white face with the fixed grin of death and the demented, sobbing laughter of mania intervened. This time, there would be no reprieve. The greatest and perhaps only comfort Bruce could draw from Jason's fate was that he died willingly having done one last good thing. He took a fatal blow to protect a woman that may have been his long-absent mother, even though the woman had cynically betrayed him to The Joker.
After that agonising loss, Bruce swore to himself that there would never be another Robin. As always, his plans did not take into consideration the extraordinary people who seemed drawn to his life.
Tim. His second son. Once again, not the son of his flesh but as great a son of his heart and soul as Dick ever was and in a way Jason attempted but ultimately failed. Tim was a brilliant boy, easily as smart as Bruce and with the same focussed dedication to justice that adorned Dick's soul. Like Jason, he stumbled backward into the mantle of Robin, by worth and dedication in his case. Tim had deduced that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were Batman and Robin when he was still a child. He had kept that secret for half a decade but, after Jason's death, Bruce began to slowly lose his hold on his humanity. So, realising that Bruce's quest was a worthy one and being willing to dedicate himself to it, he approached Bruce and, by his warmth of heart and honour, brought Bruce back from the brink. Bruce recognised his achievement by giving him the third red and green costume of Robin.
Tim's dedication made up for where he lacked Dick's astonishing natural acrobatic and martial skill. By sheer hard work, he made the grade. Lady Shiva and King Snake both called the boy their equal, a claim that could be made only Bruce and a handful of others.
Tim never once doubted Bruce and never once abandoned his quest, even during Azrael's disastrous time as Batman or the innumerable crises that brought Gotham close to total and irrevocable ruin. When Captain Atom's demented wife, Jean Loring, arranged the murder of Tim's father, Bruce simply confirmed in law what was already a fact and took the sad young man in to be his son.
So it was that Bruce found himself with two sons and a daughter-in-law. As the tide of chaos and disaster rose ever higher, he also acquired two daughters, both in the strangest of circumstances.
As the dread horror of No Man's Land settled down on the ruins of Gotham City, Bruce found himself with an extra pair of hands fighting at his side: A silent, supernaturally lethal feminine figure in an all-black approximation of Barbara's old fighting mantle. He came to call the figure 'Batgirl', lacking any other name for her.
It was Barbara, the previous holder of that title, who was to first see the lost, bewildered face behind that all-obscuring mask. Cassandra Cain, daughter of David Cain, with whom only Slade Wilson could possibly compete for the title of the most lethal assassin on Earth. Only slowly and haltingly with the most careful deliberation, dealing as they were with a creature that was programmed to be a reflexive instrument of death, the Bat Family probed into the girl's horrifying origin.
David Cain had committed against his daughter atrocities that only Slade Wilson's cold, contemplative violation of his own youngest daughter came close to rivalling. Instead of teaching her to speak, from the earliest age Cain had instead carefully and with the greatest clinical precision, turned her into a perfect, living weapon. She was able to instantly judge any combatant based on subconscious cues and to know how to defeat and destroy them so fast that it was a near reflexive process. Cassandra Cain, 'Cassie' as Dick, Barbara and Tim came to call her, was mute, physically able to speak but utterly unable to communicate in almost any way except through an astonishingly complex but efficient self-created form of sign-language.
Bruce's children took her in and made her their project. They found and nurtured the child that she had never been permitted to be. They shared triumphs and tragedies, taught her to restrain and overcome her programmed reflexive impulse to kill if touched unexpectedly. They taught her to smile, laugh and, finally, how to speak. Bruce was present the first time that Cassie haltingly, with missing words and mangled grammar, complained to Barbara that Tim was, frankly, too silly for words. He still smiled as he remembered Barbara, Tim and Dick's look of disbelief followed by Cassie's weeping confusion as she was enveloped in three hugs, trying to deal with experiencing a love and unconditional acceptance that had never been offered to her by any of her blood.
Cassie had abandoned the teachings of her father and The League of Assassins. Programmed since birth to be able to interpret tactical situations with perfect acuity, she recognised the evil with which she had been surrounded, even if she lacked the ability to understand it in such abstract terms. It repelled her. Having heard of the Batman and his quest, she had come to Gotham with the desire of finding a war in which she could fight that would lead to the most positive outcome. Bruce could not help but be startled and gratified that anyone could view his hopeless railing against a lost, damned world as a worthy cause for which to fight.
Along the way, Cassie came closer and closer to those who had chosen to share his life. She began to live with Barbara and Dick. Tim carefully and with great patience and kindness, taught her to read, count and write, improving on her speech and sharing every triumph, every frustration and every joy. Probably the only thing that prevented them from immediately becoming the second Dick and Barbara was Stephanie.
Stephanie...
All of Bruce's adoptive children, both in law and heart, had their own reasons to fight. Stephanie Brown's reason was redemption. Her father, Arthur Brown, Cluemaster, was a low-ranking costumed villain, a member of the hopelessly ineffective 'Injustice League'. In truth, Brown was nothing but a petty crook with no more than delusions of importance on any scale. However, Stephanie, a beautiful, intelligent and moral young woman, could not forget or ignore the lives he had casually trampled on during his criminal career. So, she set out to become a costumed vigilante, to… spoil the ambitions of the criminal world of which he was so proudly and shamelessly a part and clearly expected his children to adopt.
The Spoiler first came to Bruce's attention during the aftermath of the earthquake that preceded No Man's Land. At first he tried to dissuade the ill-prepared and ill-disciplined girl from her course. However, she shared one thing that all the Robins had – determination and dedication. With a focus and passion that Helena Bertinelli, Huntress, lacked, Spoiler forced her way into the Bat Family, initially following Tim and Cassie around until she was an accepted part of their group, a friend to both, possibly even closer than just a friend, perhaps even a sister. She was instrumental in solving several cases and always held up her end in a fight. Finally her hard work earned her an interview with The Bat himself.
Bruce most significant impression of that first formal meeting was how Stephanie was so like Jason. Like Jason, she was characterised by a desperate desire to make something constructive of a life that, otherwise, was shapeless and hopeless. There was also the same alienation and need for external validation that sometimes crippled Jason. For all she lacked Jason's rage and enjoyed an open, loving and artistic heart, Bruce feared what might become of her. Nonetheless, at Tim's recommendation and the unspoken but clear endorsement that Cassie gave by being willing to work with her, Bruce allowed her into his team, giving her an Oracle communicator and a place in the Batcave.
Stephanie tried so very hard to be worthy. Bruce would challenge and strike down any man who dared to claim otherwise. She had been given a chance and she was determined to make the most of it. She wanted to be worthy, not only of Bruce's trust, but Cassie's enthusiastic embracing of this new and unfamiliar thing, a 'sister', and Tim's tentative, uncertain realisation that his feelings for her were not those of a young man to a sister.
That was a golden time at Wayne Manor. Alfred loved having the three youngsters around, especially when Bruce was not nearby to restrain their behaviour. Bruce had a whole library of Batcomputer videos of the three of them racing about the manor, laughing and being so indisputably alive, gladly sharing that life with all around them. For a short while it was possible to imagine that Wayne Manor was a living home to a living family rather than the stately tomb paying host to a man whose body had yet to succumb to the death that claimed his soul when he was just ten years old.
Stephanie had proven her worth. She had proven it to the degree that, when Tim felt obliged to be absent from Gotham for a long period, it was Stephanie who wore the red-and-green mantle of the Robin and wore it well. Rarely had Bruce seen such a close and cohesive team as Batgirl, Robin and Spoiler. Three siblings in all-but-blood, united in the pursuit of justice.
It couldn't last. Not in Bruce Wayne's world. It was inevitable that he would bring disaster on everything good and light around him.
Stephanie had one overwhelming Achilles' heel, something of which neither Bruce, Dick and Barbara's tentative acceptance nor Tim and Cassie's love could cure her. She truly did not believe herself good enough. Fear of failure and guilt by association distorted her every choice and slowly led her down a path of more and more disastrously ill-considered actions.
Tim and Cassie were nearly destroyed when they found Stephanie's savaged corpse in the alleyway. Tim took on the composure of oblivion that did not break until all of Black Mask's gang were in Blackgate Prison and the hideously-disfigured master-criminal was in Arkham where he belonged. Cassie lost nearly all the progress she had made in her emotional development and became a mechanical shell again. Only her utter unwillingness to abandon Bruce's worthwhile quest and her good friend Tim kept her in Gotham.
One mounted costume in the Batcave was a memorial to a good young man whose life was tragically wasted when it could have achieved so much. A second mounted costume, of a beautiful young woman struck down when she was on the cusp of happiness, made it feel very much like a tomb.
Bruce nearly drove the children away. He had to protect Tim, Cassie, Dick and Barbara from his insanity, his hopeless quest and the disaster that the simple fact of his existence brought upon everyone he cared for. He probably would have attempted to do so but for one thing.
Selina.
Selina Kyle, the Catwoman, was probably the strangest of all the strange elements that Bruce considered part of his life. Chronologically, their complex interactions predated even his first meeting with Dick Grayson. Yet, she remained a constant, fresh and immediate aspect of his life.
Hey, Stud! If you live out of the ordinary, you've got to expect to be surrounded by extraordinary people!
Vivacious, sexually self-aware, fearless, utterly in love with life in every possible way... and a thief.
It was extraordinary that a brilliant cat burglar, a mistress of security systems and stealth second to none, could be anything to him other than a source of anger and despite. Instead, from the first time he saw her in action, he felt arousal and fascination. She was beautiful and physically perfect. Unlike so many other criminals, she did not feel the slightest fear of him, regarding him, cat-like, as a challenge to her skills.
Bruce refused to admit it at first but she obsessed him. How could such a clearly intelligent and cultured woman be so utterly amoral? He amassed hours of videos and he spent every spare moment assessing her every move, her every twitch, her every sound in a desperate attempt to understand what drove her to this arrant stupidity.
Pffft! You really are a self-righteous prig! Haven't you ever wanted to trip on the wild side?
Selina remained constantly and infuriatingly outside of every parameter that Bruce had assembled to assess and categorise the "Rogue's Gallery" that he regularly faced in Gotham. She seemed to sway back and forth between hero, vigilante and villain seemingly at will, changing alignment at a whim and never, ever being predictable.
Hey, read the name back, Handsome. Cat. Woman. Cats do their own thing when they want to do. Women do too.
Catwoman would one week be stealing a fortune in gems and next week fighting alongside Bruce against some plot of Ra's Al-Ghul or stopping Joker massacring half the population of Gotham. She was... infuriating. She had been there through every Robin, through Azrael's ill-fated tenure as Batman, through the Contagion and through No-Man's Land. She had idly referred to the younger members of his group as his 'kids' long before Bruce had the courage to admit to that definition himself. They, in turn had recognised the mutual fascination and interest between him and her.
Those kids are smarter than they look, Lover. Was that because of you or despite you? Meow!
It was in that dark time leading up to and immediately after Stephanie's death and the gang war that her death inadvertently triggered that Selina really came into her own. About a year previously, she had finally given up the criminal life. Betrayal by Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn had cured her of any lingering romantic attraction to a life as an outlaw.
Meh, I probably would have given it up anyway. I mean, you can only steal the same damn Jade Bast from the same damn museum so many times before you find yourself hanging upside-down in a vault and thinking "Same old, same old!"
Selina Kyle had no job history and no past; this made starting a legitimate life difficult at best. Bruce couldn't help but admire the chutzpah that led her to ask Batman, of all people, for a character reference. It was foolish of him, but he couldn't resist the chance to get to know the woman that had haunted his most fevered fantasies for years. She was everything that he hoped for. Fun, mischievous, artistic, cultured and with a surprisingly strong (if somewhat feline-like) sense of morality. Finding her desire to start a new life strong, Bruce utilised her skills as a security analyst in a few of his cases and, with her sincerity proven, arranged for her to gain employment as a consultant at Wayne Industries.
Selina became an invaluable sounding-board for Bruce. Her unique and different world-view ensured that she almost never saw a problem from the same perspective as he did. It was she whose advice helped Bruce work through innumerable trials of caring for Cassie, dealing with Stephanie's sometimes taxing behavioural issues, helping Tim through his father's death and handling what was, even now, his somewhat-problematic relationship with Dick and Barbara.
Bruce soon realised that he was just as useful to Selina too. The fact was that she had fears of her own and shadows in her past that she was fighting hard to conquer. He knew things that he took for granted but that were mysteries to a woman who had lived a nearly-rootless life for two decades. He helped her gain a sense of permanence and belonging that she had never, ever really had before.
Hey, every cat needs to find a home eventually! Besides... um... did I ever thank you...? For the plumbing thing? I mean, electronics and security systems, yes, but I really don't know one end of a monkey wrench from another and...
Yeah...
And the holding me and telling me that it's okay to call a place 'home'? Yeah, I liked that too. Purr.
Without realising it, Selina taught Bruce something that he had never realised or allowed himself to hope for ever before. He was alive. He wanted to live, to love and to be surrounded by life and those he loved. He was not an empty shell fighting a meaningless war for the sake of revenge but a man who was attempting to make all the losses and sacrifices meaningful by trying to ensure that it would not ever happen again.
When Stephanie, in one of her foolish gestures, seduced Tim and allowed herself to fall pregnant, it was Selina to whom Bruce turned to for advice. It was a good thing, because she understood what needed to be done with startling clarity.
She had willingly taken in Stephanie and Tim's illegitimate daughter and was raising the child as her own (Selina had once mischievously referred to her as 'My Catgirl in training'). Wayne Industries-developed gene therapy changed the girl's hair from blonde to black and added enough of Selina's gene markers that the finest forensic lab on Earth would show her as Selina's daughter. It was the least Bruce could have done to protect the child of a young woman whom he had failed so very terribly. One day, he would tell Abby Kyle who she really was and he hoped that she would understand why he did what he did and perhaps even forgive him.
It's nice to be appreciated. I mean, was it really that hard big guy?
As for Abby? Well, the kid needs an adoptive parent and yet you don't want her to be so far away from her real mama and papa that there is no chance of her knowing them! You knew that I was a caring sort from all the cash I spent on the Catitat over the years so... Well, it was a no-brainer. Besides, I was glad to help out Steph and Tim.
It was a pleasure.
Seriously.
No, I mean it. Abby and me? We're a team. Abby, tell your Da Bruce that we're a team. See? She agrees! That babble means yes!
So it was that, when Stephanie died and all seemed bleakest, that Bruce Wayne turned to a woman that he had come to trust as a counsellor and helper in all things. It was Selina who told Bruce something that he didn't want to hear but knew that, if it came from her, it had to be true. She told him that Dick, Barbara, Tim and Cassie loved him and that driving them away would only hurt them far more terribly than any other calamity that could befall them. It was Selina who told him, absolutely and beyond doubt that his small band of followers was more than like-minded fellow soldiers. They were his support structure, the ones for whom he was doing this. They were his family.
Two sons. A daughter-in-law. A daughter.
And a wife.
That was one thing neither he nor Selina had expected. Somewhere along the way, all the trust, the attraction and the compatibility in so many ways had blossomed into something more. Selina and Abby were spending more time at the Manor than they were at Selina's East Side apartment. Selina's cat suit was dusted off and found a place in the Costume Vault in the cave. The user name 'KITTY_09' started appearing in Batcomputer log entries. Suddenly, a lot of feminine stuff was in Bruce's bedroom and its associated en suite bathroom. Bruce had stopped dating random society bimbos and the same black-haired goddess accompanied him to every function.
"I will make a companion for the man as a helper and a compliment to him." And a lover. Someone who completed and perfected Bruce's life in a way that both terrified him and made him wonder how he had functioned for so long without her at his side.
Aww! Stud! I love you too! It's been a wild ride to date and I know things are just gonna get better!
Thanks Selina.
There were two more faces that were late and recent additions to this family. Two innocent children, created by evil but set free by hard work and taken in both as a duty and as a willing gift to prove that no one should pay the price for another's decisions.
She wasn't really Stephanie Brown, for all she had some faked memories of her life. She certainly felt no connection to the Brown family and had no desire to cause them needless pain by approaching them with either the true story of her origin or the rather unbelievable one that was programmed into her mind. Where else could she go? Bruce would not drive her out. How could he when her existence was entirely due to Ra's need to bring destruction upon his family for his own ends?
Stephanie Wayne, adopted daughter of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle.
He truly was the son of Bruce's flesh. Although he was created without Bruce's consent, he was nonetheless his son. The evil of his mother's side was not in any way something for which Damien could be held responsible and it had no power over him anymore. Damien was a happy, vivacious boy who had no greater desire than to prove himself part of his father's family and fight against the sort of evil that created him to be its tool.
Damien Wayne, son by blood of Bruce Wayne, son by adoption to Selina Kyle.
Willingly, they had accepted their father's quest as their own, not in a desire to affirm their connection to him but, rather, to deny their connection to Ra's Al-Ghul. To prove that it is one's choices, not one's origins or blood, that determined your destiny and fate. A determination that no man should ever wield such power for evil ever again. So it was that a third Batgirl and a fifth Robin had appeared in the skies of Gotham.
Bruce stepped out of the elevator onto the top level of the six-story cylindrical cave that was the Batcave. All around him were the tools of his chosen vocation, and the memories of a decade and a half of struggle that sometimes felt like a lifetime.
"So, you finally finished chewin' the fat, Stud?"
Bruce looked over at Selina, who was just finishing dressing in the modified version of her purple-and-black Catwoman costume that Bruce had helped design. This new form of her costume included pouches around the top of the long gloves and boots, the extra armour in several areas and the 'Caterangs' attached to a pseudo-leather bandoleer with a purple cat's-paw-marked belt buckle, curving around those sensuous hips.
Selina snapped her fingers in front of Bruce's eyes. "Enjoying the view?" she asked with a sensual smile.
Years of association and the emotional health that Bruce had fought hard to win allowed him to smile unrepentantly. "Oh yeah, Kitten. You know that I am!" Selina 'meowed' and laughed in approval.
"Master Bruce?" Alfred announced. "Everyone is here now, sir."
Bruce nodded and, with Selina slinking jauntily along behind him, he descended to the Cave's bottom level.
The first thing that he saw was Stephanie, clad in her black-and-lavender Batgirl costume but sans the cowl, playing with Abby. For all she was genetically the little girl's mother, Stephanie had already made it clear that Abby would never be allowed to think of her in that way. A clone, artificially programmed with a facsimile of Stephanie Brown's memories, Steph considered herself only a strange, younger identical twin sister of Abby's dead mother. She would be Abby's adoptive older sister and, when the little girl was old enough to comprehend the complex interplay of blood and law relationships, her Auntie Steph, nothing more.
Abby was laughing as she and her 'aunt' were playing pat-a-cake. Bruce immediately noticed the little girl look up and grin. Steph, focussed on her 'niece' didn't notice until she saw the change in the shadows as Damien, perched on one of the logic towers of the Batcomputer, somersaulted over his adoptive sisters' heads and landed with a silent cat-like grace behind Steph. "Will you stop fooling around, Dee?" Steph groused.
"Hey, got to keep you on your toes, Sis!" Damien shot back with an unrepentant grin. Oh, there was tension between these two youngest; Bruce hoped that time would, if not smooth it out, at least teach them how to function together.
"You two need to get your heads around using your codenames when you're in uniform," declared a strong voice. Dick Grayson, Nightwing, had used every piece of stealth skill that his foster father had taught him to come upon the youngest Waynes without a hint of warning.
"Ai!" Damien protested. "Grayson, are you trying to break my sternum with my heart?"
"Just keeping you on your toes, Baby Bro!" Dick mocked, roughing up the boy's black hair and earning a dangerous scowl in return.
"What keeps you on your toes, Dick?" Steph asked with fake innocence.
Dick turned to look over at his wife, who was finishing programming tonight's patrol routes and monitoring routines into the Oracle network. Barbara turned her chair around, stood up and performed a perfect gymnastic somersault to land beside her husband and grin down at her brother and sisters-in-law. "You have to ask?" Dick asked with a grin.
Ra's's cloning and other related technologies were now firmly and safely in the hands of Wayne Industries. Under other circumstances, Bruce's first task would have been to find some way to regenerate Barbara's spine but that was not necessary. Three years ago now, cybernetic technology perfected by Dick's friend, Victor Stone, Cyborg of the Titans, had replaced Barbara's severed spine and given her back the ability to walk, to run, to tumble, to fly. After completing extensive physical therapy with terrifying single-mindedness, she decided to once again take a more active role in what she easily referred to as the "Family Business". Cassie had indicated that she was more than willing to surrender the name 'Batgirl' to her but Barbara wouldn't hear of it. Instead, she developed a new costume, mirroring Dick's black and blue Nightwing costume but replacing his blue eagle with a red and gold firebird. Appropriately, she adopted a new codename.
"Phoenix, is everything ready?"
"All set, Batman," Barbara replied. "We can access the full network from the mobile terminals on the Batmobile, the Roadwing and the bikes."
Bruce nodded in satisfaction. Selina looked over her shoulder towards the practice gymnasium. "If you two can stop flirting and get your butts over here?"
It was impossible to tell whether Tim and Cassie were blushing, given that their current costumes included near-full face masks. Although they may not have been flirting, it would certainly have been unusual if that were the case. Since Cassie's return to Gotham, she and Tim had been making up for lost time. Steph had been a fairly typical infuriating younger sister, according to Selina, by 'practising her tracking skills' and ensuring that the two rarely had any privacy.
Bruce understood that the children had wondered if Selina would start to use the name and mantle of 'Batwoman', as she was the matriarch of the clan (something that made Selina blush and mutter something about 'being made to feel old'). However, Selina was resolute. She had begun her costumed life as the Catwoman. She had embraced felinity in all its forms and she wasn't about to become 'a flying mouse' just because in all but a piece of paper she was the wife of Batman. Catwoman she was and Catwoman she would stay.
So it was that Red Robin was not accompanied on his patrols by Blackbird, as had been a possibility. Instead, he was accompanied by someone who had, by dedication, loyalty and courage, had earned the title of Batwoman.
Bruce looked around at the people dear to him as they stood around him. Bruce Wayne had a family, once, a very long time ago. He had not ever expected to have a family again.
He had got one anyway.
Dick Grayson... Nightwing... Son...
Barbara Grayson... Phoenix... Daughter-in-law...
Tim Drake... Red Robin... Son...
Cassie Cain... Batwoman... Daughter...
Stephanie Wayne... Batgirl... Daughter...
Damien Wayne... Robin... Son...
Selina Kyle... Catwoman... Wife...
They would be enough.
He had allowed himself to be distracted by Clark and Diana's naïve fantasies for too long. The time for half measures was over. The war began tonight.
Bruce Wayne, Batman, pulled up his cowl to cover his face and watched as his family donned their cowls and masks in response. "Let's go to work," Batman commanded.
The End
