Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It took a lot for everyone to be in the same space at the same time. Between Jason’s problems with Bruce, Damian and Tim’s problems with each other, and Dick’s obligations in Bludhaven, to have everyone in the same city required an event like a mass Arkham breakout or an alien invasion (Clark being the exception). To have the whole family in the same room and behaving only happened under a greater threat.

Alfred’s disappointed eyebrow.

The butler had gotten everyone present through various means. Some were simply informed of the situation (Bruce and Damian), some were told to make the necessary plans (Dick), and some were amenable after some reasonable concessions were made (Cass, which brought Stephanie and Barbara). Some had to be persuaded (Jason called it emotional blackmail, Tim called it a threat to his livelihood (by which he meant coffee)). But what Alfred wants, Alfred can usually get, and now everyone was waiting in the parlor for Sunday dinner to begin.

The air was tense, as it often was with this mix of people, but not as tense as it could have been. Dick was catching up with Damian, asking about school and how his friends were doing. Barbara sat in a corner with Jason, bickering about how she wanted a closer look at the specs of his helmet. It was a long-standing argument, since Jason had been brought back into the fold, but mostly meaningless. They both knew that if she actually needed the information, nothing could really stop Oracle from finding it. She just wanted Jason to show some trust and he wanted to hold on to what little autonomy he had. Bruce sat nearby listening to the argument but pretending he was reading the Gotham Gazette.

It was the cluster of teens on the couch that were the most relaxed. Steph sat in the middle with Tim on her left and Cass on her right, scrolling through Twitter. She was just about to give up and switch to Instagram when a post caught her eye. Clicking on the link, she snorted when she saw the collection of images that had caused the scandalous headline. “Hey, Dick!”

“Yeah?” he asked, turning from Damian.

“When were you going to tell me we’re dating?”

Dick rolled his eyes, knowing exactly where she was going with this, but that didn’t stop Damian’s outraged “WHAT?!” or Bruce’s concerned one.

“Oh yeah,” she said, enjoying the moment. “‘The Wayne Heir and the Au Pair: A Forbidden Love?’ Gotta say, I love the Lifetime movie title. Plus, it’s been a while since the tabloids got me, so I guess I was due.”

“Why on earth do they think you’re the au pair?” Bruce asked.

Scrolling to the relevant pictures, Stephanie passed the phone to Tim, who passed it to Barbara, who passed it to Bruce. While the man looked at them, she explained, “They got a few shots of me waiting outside Dami’s school.” Dick tensed, but she was quick to reassure. “Nothing of Dami, but it might be worth sending out a press reminder that you don’t appreciate people taking unsanctioned photos of your underage kid.” Steph had been Wayne-adjacent long enough to know how things worked. “Those combined with the shots from when Dick surprised me with coffee last Monday before he went back to Blud have the potential for a great story.”

Bruce passed the phone back around and Jason snorted when he caught a glimpse her enthusiastic response to surprise coffee. “Why’d you have to kiss him on the mouth?” he asked.

Phone back in hand, Steph answered primly. “Because Ivy had raised hell the night before and I had two midterms to get through that day. I would have kissed Riddler if he’d brought me my favorite coffee in the largest available size.”

Tim and Cass shuddered, and Jason opened his mouth to retort, but Dick cut him off with, “Jay, I’ve seen you kiss Roy with more passion after a really good explosion.” Jason closed his mouth.

“But why do they think you are an au pair?” Damian interrupted. “You meet with me after school twice a week to spar, not to care for me like an infant.”

“They probably picked au pair for the rhyme, Little D,” Dick said. “They probably just think she’s a babysitter because like it or not, most normal kids your age need after-school care, and a college student the family knows is a good choice. It’s actually a good cover.”

Damian sat back sulking. “I suppose. But what will you do to disabuse the public of the ridiculous notion that you and Grayson are involved?”

“Way ahead of you,” Steph responded, phone still out and camera open. She reached for Tim’s head and leaned it onto her shoulder, feeling Cass do the same on her other side. She snapped a few pictures of the three of them grinning cheesily at the camera and then opened the photo editor. A quick filter and it was off to Twitter, where she spoke aloud as she typed her captions. “Great… day… with… bae.”

“Stephanie…” Bruce growled from across the room.

She pushed the button. “Too late!” she chirped. “Now we just need Tim and Cass to retweet it and no one will be talking about mine and Dick’s forbidden love affair.”

Tim snorted, but pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Steph, we’re trying to shut down a rumor, not feed the shippers.”

“The shippers will shut down the rumor for us,” she said, leaning her head on Cass’s shoulder to watch her retweet. The string of hearts and smilies was a nice touch. “Enough people arguing about which one of you two I’m actually with and Dick will be kicked out of the running.”

Most of the family was smiling indulgently at her ingenuity, though Bruce was rubbing his temples like he had a headache. He did that a lot around her. She thought the matter settled when Damian spoke up. “What is a shipper?”

Steph elbowed the resident fanboy, Tim, so he could explain, which he did after an eye roll. “It’s a term for people who want certain people to be in a relationship. In this case, we’re talking about the people who think that Steph should be dating either Cass or I.”

“I see,” Damian said. “So when Father tells Pennyworth how he believes Grayson and Gordon should get over themselves and start dating again, he is being a shipper?”

Dick and Barbara both turned a quick glare on Bruce, who was unfazed. Had he been anyone other than the stoic, emotionless Batman, Steph thought he might have shrugged. “No,” Dick said, “When Bruce does it, he’s being a nosy busybody.”

“Shipping is usually the term for when the people who have feelings about the relationship don’t actually know the people at hand,” Barbara explained. “So, like when the average person gets invested in celebrity relationships. More often, it’s for fans of something fictional, like a TV show or book series, getting involved in who they want to end up together.”

“But why should they care?” Damian asked. “It’s not like they have any say in the matter. All they can do is enjoy the story.”

“Because the author is dead, bat brat,” Jason interrupted from his corner.

Damian tilted his head at that, considering. “Yes, in the case of many novels, the author is deceased. What does that have to do with anything?”

“No, it’s like,” Jason paused. “It’s a concept. Barthes. All postmodern and sh- stuff. Basically, the author is just the person that writes down words, but all the ideas come from society, and society’s rules and concepts dictate what exactly the author can say and how they can say it. Therefore, the author is useless to discovering whatever ‘hidden meaning’ there is to a story and is functionally dead.”¹

“What does that have to do with the reader deciding what the story is?”

“Well if the author is dead and there’s no hidden meaning, then who gets to decide what the story means?” Jason asked.

The room was quiet for a moment, then, “The true locus of writing is reading,”² Barbara interjected. When everyone turned to look at her, she rolled her eyes. “I have a degree in library science and an eidetic memory. I’ve read and remembered my share of literary criticism over the years.”

“Yeah, it’s the reader,” Jason said. “It’s actually a lot like this theory called reader response criticism. That’s the idea of analyzing reader’s responses to a piece of literature and finding meaning there.”³

“How do you know how to analyze the responses?” Tim asked. Steph looked at him askance, as he’d never been one to care about literature over the sciences. “What, I’m curious,” he muttered.

“There’s different ways. Some people focus on how the text affects the reader, some focus on the exchange between the text and the reader, some focus on the text as an individual reader understands it. There’s also theories about how what impacts the reader impacts how the reader reads a text, either their psychology or their socialization.”⁴ Surprisingly to some of the younger members of the family, Jason was more engaged in this description than they’d seen him about anything else, aside from killing the Joker. “There are even some concepts about how you can look at a variety of reader responses and come up with the average interpretation for a work, kind of a master interpretation. Of course, that negates the whole idea of individual readers having different responses, so I don’t know why anyone would do that.”

“Where did you learn all this, Little Wing?” Dick asked.

Jason blushed slightly, a rare occurrence. “I may have borrowed some of Babs’s lit crit books back in the day when she was tutoring me to get caught up in school. Some of it was over my head, but some of it was interesting.”

Barbara snorted. “If by borrowed, you mean stole and then sneakily put back when I mentioned they were missing, sure, you borrowed them.”

He ignored the dig and continued. “The problem is that even though we say that everyone is entitled to their own interpretation, no one actually believes it. Everyone’s going to fight for their idea of what the ‘right’ interpretation of something is and refuse to acknowledge others.”

“And those who have power actually get a say in the matter,” Jason said.

“How do you mean?” Damian asked.

Dick spoke up. “Think about it this way. When you were growing up in the League, did you every question anything Ra’s said? Any of his decisions or philosophies?”

“Of course not,” Damian said, “I was raised to believe Grandfather was always right. It was not until I came here to learn under Father that I began to see the errors in my raising.”

“Exactly, Little D. When you were with the League, Ra’s had the power, so he decided what the truth was. When you left that, he had less power over you, which meant he didn’t have as much power over your truth. Whoever has the power determines the truth in a given situation.”⁵

Damian seemed to be thinking it over. “So when I become Batman, I will decide the truth.”

Steph, Jason, and Tim all made various noises of amusement while Dick cringed. “Not really…”

“But you said whoever has the power decides the truth!” Damian protested. “When I take Father’s place, I will have the power, so what I say will be the truth for the family.”

“Kid,” Jason interrupted, “first of all, we all know that Cass is going to be Batman before you are.” Steph saw Cass grin sunnily out of the corner of her eye while Damian’s brow dropped into a frown. “Second, do you think what you could ever have enough power over me to tell me what the truth is?”

“Well,” Damian began, clearly on uneven footing.

Jason continued. “Do you think even Bruce has enough power to tell me what the truth is?”

And Damian had played audience to enough arguments in the cave to know the answer to that one. “No.”

“That’s because as you get older, you determine who or what has power over you. When you’re a kid, it’s pretty obvious. Parents, teachers, that kind of thing. When you’re an adult, you take all those influences you’ve had and decide how much of each one to listen to. But generally, for most people, the big official voices are the ones that get heard.”

“Like when the police put out the notice that someone has broken out of Arkham,” Barbara said. “The people of Gotham take that statement to be true, so they take precautions to avoid whoever it might be.”

Damian paused, clearly processing the thought, before he shook his head. “What does any of this have to do with media interpretation?”

“Well, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?” Steph said. “If I want to have an opinion on a book and want to tell the largest audience I can, I can say it all I want, but I’m still just some girl rambling about it on Twitter. But if some professor with a fancy PhD writes that same opinion in a fancy article with a million citations that I didn’t use because Twitter has a character limit, they get published in a journal and a bunch of other people who have PhDs in their field take it seriously. The difference is that they are being heard from a place of power and I’m not.”

“You even see it within media. Screenwriters write test scripts all the time for TV shows they want to write for and movies that are being planned. They are fighting for the opportunity to be the truth that the general public will see, no matter what the general public actually wants.”

Bruce cut in to Dick’s example, saying, “Remind me to show you the truly terrible script for the movie they wanted to make about Diana.”⁶

Barbara smiled wickedly and leaned forward in her chair. “How sexist was it?”

“The only reason that man still has limbs is because Barry convinced her to turn it into a drinking game instead.”

Steph couldn’t decide if she wanted to read it or not. Maybe a hate read when she was done with the semester. Another elbow into Tim’s side, and he pulled out his phone to start picking through Bruce’s various files trying to find the script. Dick, in the meantime, had picked up the train of thought again. “You also see it with comic books. We’ve been reading about the same superheroes for decades, but the guys who first wrote them aren’t writing them anymore. Instead, you get the current writers for the company all pitching their ideas hoping that their interpretation will be the new truth for the character. Like that one guy, the one who brought back Bucky Barnes.”

“Brubaker,” Tim said, still scrolling.

Dick pointed at him in acknowledgment. “Brubaker. When he was a kid, he thought it was dumb that the audience never really found out what happened to one of his favorite characters, so when he grew up and became a comic book writer, he put his idea into writing.⁷ It was the same idea he’d had since he was a kid, but now he was in a position of power, so it was able to become truth.”

“So why do those who do not have power not seek it out?” Damian questioned. “If all you need to do is communicate using the accepted means of power in order to have your interpretation heard, why do these people not do that? Then they can have control over what the truth is. It seems idiotic to not try.”

“It’s not so simple, Dami.”

“But why not?”

“Lyotard!” Steph broke in, only to have the whole family’s eyes on her.

“…Is the thing Dickiebird used as the first Robin suit,” Jason said. “What’s your point?”

“No, the French philosopher. L-Y-o-t-a-r-d. He had this whole thing about differend.”

“Différend,” Bruce cut in, properly accented. His eyes hadn’t left his newspaper.

Slightly flushed, Steph snapped out, “Would you like to explain it?”

“No.”

Rolling her shoulders, Stephanie locked eyes with Damian. “Différend is this whole other postmodern philosophy, like death of the author is but on a completely different topic. Lyotard was a political philosopher, and he wrote a lot about injustice, especially things like the Holocaust. One of his concepts that he came up with is différend, which is the idea that there are things that need to be said, but there aren’t words for it.”⁸

“Like the horrors of the Holocaust,” Tim said.

“Or the kind of stuff we see on the streets,” Dick followed.

“Yeah, like that. So the point of différend is that we need to come up with the words for the thing that needs to be said as soon as possible, otherwise the people in power will silence the injustices that need to be spoken about before the words to describe them can be created.⁹ Basically, if you are a person without power who doesn’t have the words to describe the problems you have, make up your own language.”

“When the hell did you learn French political philosophy?” Jason interrupted.

Steph blushed slightly and began examining her cuticles to avoid making eye contact. “Gotham U requires a social science course to graduate, so my advisor convinced me to take intro to poli sci. I sucked at it, so I ended up asking about extra credit and my professor was a huge Lyotard fan, so… yeah.”

Still confused, Damian brought the topic of discussion back to the matter at hand. “What is the point of this prattle, Brown?”

“Right, well, if the people don’t have power, they don’t have access to the kinds of writing and media that will give them power,” Steph explained. “Anyone can write a script or a comic book, but unless you have the connections to get that into the hands of publishers and producers, you don’t have power. So instead of trying to control the genres of power that are used to create truth in the media, people without power created their own genres so they can still speak their truths without having to rely on the power structures imposed by those useless rich white men.” Bruce cleared his throat, possibly offended. “Of which Bruce is clearly one.”

“Exactly!” Tim said, heading off any possible arguments between the two. “You have all kinds of people who see these ideas and representations floating around in common media, but they don’t see themselves because media is created by and for the people in power. So, in order to create their own representation while taking ownership of the stories they love, they created fanfic.”

At that, Jason snorted. “Seriously, Timmers, fanfic? What a nerd.”

“I’m the nerd?” Tim bristled. “You’re the one that pulled Barthes into this in the first place!”

“It’s not like the idea of fanfic is new,” Steph interrupted. “It’s just the term. People have been writing their own forms of popular literature for centuries, but that was before copyright gave the author sole ownership over their writing. Back then, it was considered fair game to tell your version of the same story.”

Damian’s soft, “But I thought the author was dead?” was hidden by Bruce’s, “Stephanie’s right.”

She froze. Most of the room did, in fact. “I’m sorry, Bruce, could you repeat that?” she asked. “I think I just hallucinated that you said I’m right.”

Bruce rolled his eyes, a default action where Steph was concerned. “I did say you’re right.” Steph preened internally under the rare admission, but she wasn’t about to show it. Cass, however, seemed to know and squeezed her elbow. “About the history of transformative literature in western media. People have spent a long time writing and rewriting the same stories.”

“Like Paradise Lost,” Dick said. “It’s just a retelling of the Book of Genesis with the devil actually being less of a jerk.” He paused, thinking. “Huh. By that measure, I guess the Renaissance was just Bible fanart.”

“It was,” Tim and Barbara chimed in separately.

“There were actually some problems before copyright came into play,” Bruce said. “When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, he had only written part one before it was published. Then Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda wrote his own sequel which became moderately successful, so when Cervantes eventually wrote the second part, he felt the need to address this unofficial sequel which did not align with his thoughts on the story.”

“And how often did you read Don Quixote when you were dreaming up the Bat, old man?” Jason needled. Rather than answer, Bruce returned his attention to his newspaper. Returning to the topic at hand, Jason continued, “Even now you get modern versions of classic stories, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”

“Isn’t that just you hanging out and reading Austen in the manor library?” Dick chirped from across the room. Jason lazily flipped a middle finger at him.

“The point,” Tim interrupted before they got further off track, “is that the public will generally accept reinterpretations if they come from places of power, like a bestselling novel or a blockbuster movie, because as much as people like to believe they are individuals, they spend a lot of time accepting the culture being fed to them.”

“But what is fanfic?” Damian asked. “And what purpose does it serve?”

“Fanfic is like those transformative works, but it doesn’t come from a position of power,” Tim said. “It’s written by the fans who have no say about anything and can’t make a change to actual media, so they write their own stories and publish them online.”

“It’s definitely it’s own genre at this point,” Barbara said. “There’s a language and culture surrounding fandom as a whole and even different fandoms separately that is unique from other kinds of media.”

“And it’s not just the fact that fans can’t write directly for the TV show or whatever that means they don’t have power,” Steph explained. “The people who create fanfic and fanart and vids and headcanons and all that usually belong to marginalized groups. Non-male, non-white, queer, disabled, young.¹⁰ They’re not the kind of people who get heard or see accurate representation of themselves in media, so they take their favorite characters and play with them so they can see their own point of view reflected in their faves.”

“Even then, most fans don’t try to claim any kind of ownership over their interpretation,” Tim said. “At least, not in the traditional way. People get mad when someone reposts their work word-for-word on a different website without credit, but if someone wants to reinterpret their interpretation? That’s actually a big deal. If someone makes art for or creates fanfic of a fanfic, it’s generally considered an honor.”

“One of the major websites even has an ‘inspired by’ function so you can link back to the fanfic that inspired you,” Steph said.

Jason grinned. “And how are you familiar with this function, Brown?”

Steph tossed her ponytail over her shoulder, refusing to be ashamed. “I dabble. You should see what kind of stuff gets posted under the Red Hood tag in the vigilante RPF fandom.”

If Jason had been drinking, Steph is sure he would have done a spit take. As it was, his eyes had bugged out a little and it looked like he might have been silenced for the time being. “The thing about fanfic,” she continued, “is that it’s not about getting that recognition. It’s not like a movie or a novel where if you don’t make a certain amount of money, you’re a flop. Yeah, people like to hear that their work was enjoyed by someone else, but unless you’re a big name fan, you can’t guarantee that anyone will actually read what you’ve written.”

“It’s not about being heard, it’s about speaking.”

Wow, Cass may not say much, but when she does, she really hits the nail on the head. The room sat quiet for a moment before Damian decided that he still had questions. “If such a practice is so common, how have I not heard of it before?”

“It hasn’t always been popular,” Barbara started. “Like Steph said, a lot of fanfic writers are young, which means they aren’t very practiced writers. When fanfic started gaining attention, people saw the bad writing and decided fanfic was dumb and something to be made fun of. The thing is, fandom is a community, and everyone wants their writing to be better, so they ask their fandom friends to read over their stuff and help make it better.”

“It’s called beta reading,”¹¹ Tim said. “Like beta testing for computer programs. A second look. It’s the same thing as editors for professional novels or peer reviewers for academic papers. A lot of people use betas, to the point that some writers who don’t may put a tag on their work that tells people they didn’t. Of course, fans are dramatic, so a lot of times it’s something like, ‘no beta, we die like men.’”

“Or to really prove a point,” Steph added, “‘no beta, we die like mne.’”

Across the room, Jason muttered, “No beta, we die like Robins,” which was quickly followed by a sharp “Oof!” When Steph looked, he was leaning over slightly with his hand on his ribs and Barbara was settling her elbow back on the arm of her wheelchair.

“Beyond that,” Dick said, “fanfic often knocked down by those in power because they think fanfic is taking power away from them. We mentioned copyright earlier, and that’s part of it, but copyright is basically the protection for what the media authors really worry about.”

“Which is?”

“Money,” Jason said bluntly. “Authors like to sue for copyright infringement because they think that if a fan is out there reading fanfic, they’re not reading the original book or watching the original TV show or movie. Which is complete bullsh-” Jason paused, knowing that while Alfred had been busy putting the finishing touches on dinner, he had a sixth sense for when one of the family was using especially foul language. “Garbage. It’s garbage. If someone is reading or writing fanfic, it means they’ve read the book, probably multiple times. They’ve watched the show or movie over and over. They have consumed the media and paid their money to the author. Fanfic doesn’t take away any power from mainstream media.”

“Now who knows things about fanfic?” Steph teased.

Jason rolled his eyes, but plowed on. “It’s about seeing this genre created by marginalized people, people who don’t have a voice or representation or anything in modern mainstream media, and trying to squash them because they might hypothetically pose a threat to those in power who are desperate to hold onto that power for as long as possible.”

“The public even gets annoyed when people who start out with fanfic try to turn it into mainstream media,” Dick said. “You’ve heard of Fifty Shades of Grey, yeah?”

“I have heard Brown and Gordon giggling about it over the comms, yes.”

Bruce’s eyes darted up, glaring at both girls. Steph looked down, a little ashamed at being ratted out for gossiping about a romance novel on the comms, but Barbara was not so fazed. “He’s twelve years old, Bruce. With everything we see on the streets and the magazines I’m sure one of his friends has snuck into school at this point, I haven’t said anything over comms that he wasn’t aware existed.”

“Comms are for patrol use.”

“And the private line I encrypted is for my use however I see fit,” Barbara fired back. “It’s not my fault he stumbled into our book club discussion.”

There was a tense standoff as the two glared at each other before Dick broke the silence. “Anyway, the book series was actually a fanfic once upon a time, until the author pulled the story offline so she could swap the names out and publish it. And even though it was based on someone else’s work, she had changed enough of that world to pass it off as an original work when she replaced the character names. The thing is, people found out about it being fanfic and started making fun of her for it. By that point though, she was worth who knows how many millions of dollars, so I doubt she cared as much.”

“150 million,” Bruce said.¹²

Jason turned to him. “How do you know these things off the top of your head? Seriously, how?”

“Because I’m Batman.”

“Because the Gotham Gazette picked up an article from the AP for today’s paper and he’s probably already passed that page,” Tim countered, flashing his phone at the group.

“There were actually a lot of fanfic authors around that time in the same fandom who did something similar,”¹³ Barbara said. “It caused some issues because the whole deal with fanfic is that the fans don’t profit, but here was a large group of people specifically trying to do that. It made the publishers with power nervous because these writers were setting up their own publishing shop to make money without interference from the big names.”

“Meanwhile, Steph said, “one of my favorite fanfic authors has taken one of my favorite fanfics and rewritten it heavily so she can publish it independently through online retailers. She still left the actual fanfic up for fans to enjoy because she actually put effort into making sure her original story was original, but because she isn’t going the traditional media route, she’s not getting attention and no one is seeing her awesome and original werewolf concept.”

“Send me a link,” Jason asked, and Steph threw him a thumbs up.

“And like we said before, if someone is just ranting about an idea on Twitter or some other social media, no one is going to take it seriously,” Tim said. “Even if they provide sources to back up their interpretation, they’re not considered valid because if you had a valid interpretation of a work, you’d be putting it in a journal, not a Tweet.”

“Which is ridiculous because I have awesome ideas about books and television, thank you very much,” Steph sniffed.

“So,” Damian said slowly, “even though people like to believe that they are challenging authority and interpretations by creating a new genre and writing outside the norm, these challenges are only accepted if they come from the already accepted genres and forms of discussion?”

Jason clapped his hands slowly with a sarcastic smirk on his face. “Welcome to the postmodern, kid. For your next lesson, a three page essay on Star Trek’s ‘Darmok’ and how you don’t need to understand language to communicate.”

Tim snorted, and Steph was about to tell Jason to stop being such nerd when Alfred appeared in the doorway to the parlor. “If you are all settled in your discussion, dinner is served.”

They began filing out of the room, one by one towards the delicious smells of the dining room when Steph heard from behind her, “Wait, Brown, did you say that people write stories about us?”

She had to hold back a laugh as she called over her shoulder, “Dami, believe me when I say you are not ready for that. Besides, it’s different. We’re people, not characters.”