So I recently wrapped up writing Angel of the Bat III: Da Pacem Domine, the longest singular piece of fiction I've ever written and what I'm pretty sure is going to go down as my fanfic magnum opus. It's my intention to be done with fanfic writing now, but I am writing little post-mortems on my old, unfinished stories. My opus was, after all, an adaptation of an idea that never came to fruition. If anyone else feels inspired by this or any of the other post-mortems I'm going to write, I only ask that you let me know, because I'd love to read whatever you come up with.
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If I'm not mistaken, this is the very last one of these I have to write. Real big end of something in that, I suppose. Da Pacem Domine ends up finally bringing about the post-mortem on its unfinished elder sibling. So here's what could have been for Beware the Batman:
There were a couple different versions of this story that I've started and stopped and tried to retcon over one another over the years. Most of the changes had to do with a change in plans for the main villain, but sometimes it was bigger stuff. This was also a piece in which I was intentionally keeping elements of several years a secret from the reader. I'm going to talk about those first, then talk about where things diverged and a few of the stories I could have produced.
A lot of the backstory has already been revealed- We had Bruce's death, we had the Road to Nowhere incident (that's what my notes call the Prometheus-inspired riots), we have the Bat family members retiring, getting married, and, in 2/3 cases, having children. At the time I first wrote this, I thought Cassandra and Sadie would be comfortably childless, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to conclude Cassandra may want to adopt some, which they did in Da Pacem Domine. But, in this particular unfinished timeline, happily child-free.
The only major remaining question I set up was why Tim and Dick seem to have such bad blood between them. Eventually, we were going to get a flashback in which Tim was off on what he believed was a business trip when he was kidnapped by Hush. Hush then revealed he had a young patsy working alongside him who he surgically altered to look like Tim so he could steal both the Drake and Wayne inheritances. Tim manages to escape and digs up his old Red Robin uniform and equipment to hunt down his fake. The Gotham police get wise to this and, seeing one of the city's young billionaires endangered by one of its outlawed vigilantes, sets out to stop him. Dick, still working alongside the police, eventually begs Maggie Sawyer to back off when he discloses why this situation doesn't make any sense—that Tim himself is Red Robin and something else is clearly going on. Sawyer backs down, but Tim's ties to everything, previously unconfirmed to the Gotham PD, are documented. Not nearly as securely as Dick, Barbara, and Cassandra's were, mind you. That will come back later.
Eventually, Tim caught up and stopped his phony from robbing him blind, who surrendered to the police for identity theft rather than face him. Tim then goes off to settle things with Hush, beating him to a bloody pulp until he begs for mercy and insists, "It's not what Bruce would have wanted." Tim retorts, "Bruce isn't here anymore," and throws him out a window to his death. Side tangent there- In one of the revised versions of The Road to Nowhere, I would have mentioned Stephanie left in a compromising situation while suffering flashbacks and fighting Black Mask II that would have led to her killing him. I kinda went off on a kick of the sidekicks having one-time, deeply regretted breakings of the one rule for a period of this development.
Anyway, a couple years after that, a crooked cop was going to be looking through some GCPD records and find the information regarding Tim's secret identity. The crooked cop himself lost family members during The Road to Nowhere and still blames Batman and company for it. He goes to Tim and Steph's house, claiming to be there on police business, and then attempts to kill Tim as revenge. Tim and Steph fight him off, but are still horrified by the situation. Tim demands of the others to know what happened, and Dick admits to giving his identity away. Tim remains furious at him, but elects to keep the matter to himself so as not to deeply interfere with their interwoven families. Still, he decides for himself that he's still distrustful of Dick and their friendship is damaged for years as a result.
That's about all the backstory stuff, so now we can finally push on to the modern day. In the earliest version of this story, the villain was an Apokolips-fueled AI that merged with the Batcomputer, thus giving us a wholly mechanical-brained version of Bruce's ideologies. I think that would have been okay, maybe even better nowadays than it was a decade ago, with how AI has become such an intrusive thing in our lives, but I didn't love it enough to stick to it then. I'll keep building out who the actual big bad is as I explain things.
I stopped just shortly before we got to the first meeting between Stephanie and her adopted-away biological daughter Jodie. That first meeting, at least in some form, did get featured in my story, "Cool Aunt." I mention this now because Jodie had a role to play later.
Anyway, at the Easter celebration I mentioned earlier in the story, evil Batman and a gang of his underlings show up and confront the family directly while all their kids are at a church event or something like that. My plan was for there to be evil equivalents of all the Bat-fam members present. A character called "Nighthawk" appeared to be spying on the family in Chapter 12, he was the, "Evil Nightwing" as it were. The young woman with the piercings was Tim's evil Red Robin equivalent, and if you paid attention you may well have put together that she's actually Bluebird, AKA Harper Row from New 52 DC. I feel a little bad for writing her as a villain in hindsight, she was never my favorite character, but I think I had more dislike for her than I could justify years ago. There was also an evil Oracle equivalent who never made it to the page. She had this awesome name I looked up that had to do with an owl's vision (since owls are associated with wisdom) but for the life of me, I'm googling and I just can't find the word. Booo. Cassandra/Angel's Wario version was, for a while, going to have some plant-themed metahuman abilities and operate under the title Pagan, but in hindsight I think it would have been pretty disrespectful to be writing, "Angel, good, Pagan, evil." So probably for the best that never came to fruition. The only core group inversions I never came up with were for Steph's Batgirl and Damian's Robin. And maybe I would have omitted Robin altogether to hint at something else, you may already be on to what…
Anyway, evil-Batman and his cadre, sans evil-Oracle, who would be represented by a drone or something, show up to tell the original Bat family they can join him, or they can stay out of their way, but opposition will not be tolerated. The original fam fights back, but without equipment and years out of practice, they get wailed on pretty badly. Evil-Batman tells them next time it might be their children who suffer before he departs.
The family's left in a panic for who these guys are and what their supposed to do. A lot of the weighed down plot points start bursting here—Tim snaps at Dick yet again, Stephanie demands to know what is wrong between the two, and when she learns the truth she tells Tim he needs to back off, Dick obviously wasn't the one who attacked their family and he's been nothing but good to them. Theories about the evil Batman are proposed, Jason Todd and Damian are quickly at the top of the list of suspects. Damian's still totally off the map, but Barbara manages to hunt down a sign of Jason and dispatches some of the group to investigate him. As it turns out when they track him down, Jason really has gone clean since the events of Angel of the Bat, and is living a happy, well-adjusted life with a wife and children of his own. I don't remember who confronted him in my plans, but Stephanie was probably there so they could bury the hatchet on the fight they had back in Angel of the Bat.
Barbara manages to backtrack internet information on her evil counterpart and sends part of the group to go investigate what appears to be a bunker a few miles outside Metropolis. In the midst of this, Damian actually turns up at Dick and Barbara's door. After an initial scare that he really is the evil Batman there to kill them, he reveals he has only the loosest idea what's going on and is offended that they think this is all his doing. So murderous Batman isn't Jason and it isn't Damian.
Upon breaking into the bunker outside Metropolis, the members of the group doing recon (very possibly Dick and Tim in their first real moments of working together again) come upon a ransacked laboratory. They find scattered files and containment chambers that bear the same names as the members of the villainous Bat family, including one that is still occupied with a woman's body in a vegetative state hooked up to a line of computers, Oracle's counterpart's true form. Then it comes together that their evil counterparts were picked out and molded very intentionally to emulate the same dynamics the original Bat family had, which the behavioral scientists within could, with the right training and equipment, give them something on par with the Justice League readily under their control.
This organization? Project Cadmus. Their endgame? Project Batman Beyond. The murderous Batman? Terrance McGinnis.
Gonna take a second to say it is wiiiiiiiild to finally type that twist out after it's been in my brain so long.
Obviously, that invites some questions. In the earliest drafts (probably when he was a singular villain, before the evil Bat fam came to be), Terry straight up came back in time to do his villainy. Later on I started to dislike the idea of involving time travel, and instead just decided that Cadmus cloned Bruce while Bruce was still actively being Batman. The alternate scenario presented at the end of the animated Justice League series played out: Terry's parents were killed, Cadmus continued to play God with his life and the life of the other Bat family knock offs, and, eventually, brought them all together in this same laboratory to finish out their conditioning. Not entirely sure how Terry got wise to what was going on, digital-brain Oracle equivalent probably had a hand in it, and it broke him to realize his entire life was manipulation. Terry and the other Batman knock offs end up breaking free, slaughtering the Cadmus scientists, and deciding to fulfill their destiny on their own terms—wiping out whatever their warped sense of evil is.
In the midst of the revelations, Comatose Oracle equivalent catches Tim and Dick's break in, takes control of some of the surrounding machinery, and attempts to kill them. They overcome her initial onslaught and, after some struggle, knock her offline, but ultimately refuse to leave for fear they damaged her life support system and meticulously ensure it is still operating. They then escape. Comatose Oracle alerts Terry to this, leaving him utterly enraged and deciding if the old sidekicks will hurt his family, he will return the favor.
Fearful for the kids, Stephanie ends up hiding her children with her father, who assures her he'll keep them safe. We'd have gotten a scene in which his home was attacked and he really did do all he could to be a good grandpa, but he was ultimately beaten and the kids were taken. Same with Sarah and Jodie.
It's at this point I'll make a quick aside to note I had a couple different versions of the late game I toyed around with in my head. In the most basic version, Terry and company kidnapped the kids of the next generation. There was a more elaborate version with some other differences throughout where Terry's end goal was to create some great, power-nullifying forcefield around Gotham, as Cadmus's brainwashing gave him an extreme disdain for metahumans and aliens and the like. And then he kidnapped the kids for good measure, despite Steph's father's attempts to stop him. Either way—rescuing Jodie, Oscar, Sarah, and Robin was essential to the endgame.
Finding her counterpart's hacking skills too powerful to overcome in a short span of time, Barbara reveals she still has one big contribution to the final battle. She reveals a safe box under her and Dick's bed that contains a small needle full of distilled Lazarus Pit chemicals and, with Damian's help, jabs it into her spine. The chemicals are sufficient to return the use of her legs for about twelve hours in addition to granting some lingering super-strength, so Barbara can join the team physically for the final battle.
In the midst of the adults preparing for the final showdown, Sarah tells the rest of the captured scions about their family history, having been aware of the finer details already. Jodie leads a successful charge in breaking them all out of containment, pulling a Die Hard, giving the bad guys their own small dashes of trouble, and solidifying her place as cool big sis/cousin. At some point, she'd have even stolen a few costume pieces, reworked them, and declared herself the new Spoiler (paying off something I hinted at back in Times of Heresy when Steph complained no one ever inherited the Spoiler legacy from her.)
Barbara and Jodie each lead their respective groups into a final battle with Terry and his knockoff Bat family. You can probably guess how things went from there. The final showdown probably would have been a real ballroom blitz—moments of the adults fighting their counterparts (and Barbara mostly fighting Terry—his suit grants physical enhancements, the Lazarus chemicals have her closing the gap, and her counterpart isn't exactly the fighting sort), but trading off with others when necessary. One by one the evil Bat fam would be taken down and get increasingly outnumbered. Terry would be last man standing, of course, and even Jodie/Spoiler probably would have gotten to take a few shots at him. I'm sure if I was actually writing this to the end at this point, I'd try to come up with some more interesting conclusion than, "they punched him until they won." Probably would have done something like a conversation with all of them about how their traumas were exploited in order to make them child soldiers, and how, in spite of what gets leveled against Bruce Wayne, the original Bat family just wasn't that, and that, in spite of everything, they all turned out pretty healthy. Defeating the bad guy by appealing to shared experience and humanity would end up being a major thing when I wrote Times of Heresy a while later, so the thought was at least with me that whole time.
There would have been a final scene of everyone reunited, happy, and Dick and Barbara sharing a dance before the Lazarus chemicals wear off and Barbara loses control of her legs again. Dick catches her and reaffirms his promise to her that he and the rest of the family would always be there to lift her back up.
I don't remember if I had a definitive ending to Cassandra's arc of her favorite priest retiring, or a clear picture on what arcs of their own Damian and Sadie might have gone through. Maybe I had a clear picture once, but one can lose a lot of memories in a decade.
So, there we have it. My unmade, "Ultimate Batman-less Batman story" that never was. Such a great idea that DC shamelessly stole from me twice and named both stories "Gotham Knights."
I kid, obviously. But it certainly was interesting to observe someone at DC did indeed get the idea of following the supporting cast trying to put things back together after Bruce's death. I never played the video game or watched the show, I've heard pretty mixed opinions on both, and neither appears to have established any kind of long-lasting legacy. It is kind of amusing that the video game focused on the cast still being costumed heroes while the show focused on a civilians, even if they shared names and elements with the comic book characters. Also—we got a queer Tim and a queer Steph out of the two versions of the story, yet I feel like DC is determined to never, EVER let queer Cassandra happen. Feels pretty funny if you're me. Actually, I think I did hear that some tie in set in a hypothetical future did confirm a Steph and Cassie relationship happened, but it still sounded mostly offscreen. Gonna have to give that a boo.
As I reflected over in When Does It Get Better, the younger members of the Bat family have basically been stuck as teenagers to young adults for 30 years now. I don't imagine that's ever really going to change, and that's probably one more thing that made me want to tell this story. I'd love to see them all trying to be actual adults and parents, I want adult Steph to finally reunite with her daughter (hence why I still ended up writing Cool Aunt). I still love writing teenager protagonists in my stories and the like, but I've grown up, I've gotten married, I have a little family of my own, and I'd just like to see that happen for some of my beloved fictional characters too.
Cool Aunt and the epilogue of Da Pacem Domine don't feature Terry McGinnis as an evil Batman, a plot to match the old family against a new one, or any of that. But they both do feature these characters I care about later in life, doing well for themselves. Which, eventually, this story would have featured too. As to why this one never came together—I'm not really sure. I don't think I can nail it to just being one thing. Maybe trying to do a big ensemble cast with a sort-of shifting POV just tired me out too much, maybe I struggled with how to keep things engaging in the fight between the old guard and the new blood. Eventually, I just went back and did the Angel of the Bat sequels, which this story isn't compatible with. There were some ambitious ideas here, I feel, but maybe more than I was set to handle.
I've always felt very strongly about endings. I always want the final battle I write to be the best in the story. The final entries in book series tend to be among my favorites. And nothing makes me cry like a well fought, emotionally satisfying climax. Even if there was maybe still room to do more, I wanted this story to read as a possible end to the Batman mythos. The surviving original cast goes up against a new, edgier generation and, ultimately, the idea of a legacy sequel is rejected. Bruce is gone, the old team have their families now, and maybe the world is safe enough when all is said and done. Some of this did still make it into Da Pacem Domine, so it's not like it was all disregarded.
On the topic of endings, I believe this is the very last post-mortem on an unfinished fic I need to do. I've been doing editing and reuploading the Angel of the Bat trilogy to AO3, so I haven't totally retired as I intended, but I'm getting really close to the end now. It was a hell of a ride, these characters have truly meant a lot to me. I intend to keep writing until the day I die, I've had a couple short stories published at this point and, as I've alluded to several times over the years, I have a fantasy universe entirely of my own creation I want to publish someday. Maybe if I am utterly, exceptionally lucky, I can pivot that into writing some stuff for DC someday and actually get to work with these characters again. Again, utterly, exceptionally lucky, but crazier things have happened, I suppose. Dreams and aspirations aside, writing the Bat family has always been a delight, and in spite of the satisfaction I feel toward the ending things came to, retiring from writing them was always going to be bittersweet. It was a great time for me to the very end, and in whatever form you may have encountered my storytelling, I hope it has been for you too.
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Again, if anyone wants to use elements of this to tell your own story, I only ask that you let me know. As I said, I'd love to read what someone else comes up with out of my outlines.