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Stephanie finds herself hesitating, then immediately slaps herself for it. Internally, of course, she's probably on camera right now. Looking like a crazy person would already be too easy, considering she's standing outside the home of the richest family in Gotham uninvited and still hesitating to just ring the goddamn doorbell.
It's probably not an actual doorbell, actually, since she's still outside the elaborate wrought-iron gate, not standing on the front porch. She can't even see the front porch from here. Wayne Manor must sit at the bottom of a hill or something, since the road Steph can see past the gate slopes downward and out of sight after a few hundred feet.
Stalling. That's what Steph’s doing, she's stalling. Goddammit.
Stephanie presses the buzzer.
It's surprisingly anticlimactic. Nothing happens for a few long seconds, and Steph lets out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. Then a screen flickers on next to a keypad on the gate and she has to stifle a yelp.
"Uh, hello?" There's a boy on the screen about her age, looking confused. Steph recognizes Timothy Drake-Wayne from an article she read about his adoption a couple months ago. It's hard not to see the resemblance to her brother, with the piercing blue eyes and black hair combined with a familiar sort of confused defensiveness.
"...Hi." Steph mentally slaps herself again.
Timothy Drake-Wayne's eyebrows furrow together. "...Who are you?"
Steph takes a deep breath in. "My name is Stephanie Brown, but, um... it used to be Todd?" Her voice rises at the end of the sentence, making her sound unsure. She doesn't want to be unsure about this.
On the screen, Timothy Drake-Wayne's overly expressive eyebrows shoot up. "Oh. Oh! Yeah, umm, come in, of course. I'm gonna... I'm gonna go get Bruce." The screen clicks off abruptly, leaving Steph feeling distinctly wrong-footed.
Bruce Wayne. Steph's brother's adoptive father, which makes the man her... step-father? No, definitely not. Whatever.
The scary gate swings slowly inward, and Steph walks through.
It's a long trek all the way to the stupidly ornate front door of Wayne Manor, but it gives her plenty of time to think and overthink and overthink some more. She hasn't seen Jason in roughly... six years? Almost seven, now. Half of her life, spent without her brother.
She'd forgotten what he sounded like, until she found an interview with Jason Todd-Wayne and Dick Grayson on YouTube one restless night. Steph hadn’t forgotten Jason’s face, it was plastered all over the tabloids in the months after Bruce Wayne adopted.
There were about three years between when their mom and when Jason was adopted, right after Steph’s own adoption. Steph had been in the same home that whole time, watching Arthur and Crystal Brown become more and more like Willis and Catherine Todd with every passing day, but she had no idea what happened to Jason. He’d been taken to a group home, and Steph figured he’d stayed in the foster care system after that, since he’d never come to see her. Sure, they’d always heard stories about how Gotham foster care was basically a shortcut to being trafficked, but if Arthur and Crystal didn’t end up being that bad, maybe whoever Jason ended up with was alright too.
The article she read about his adoption said that Jason had been homeless for years before meeting Bruce Wayne, so Steph figured she was the lucky one, not him.
But fate seemed to have flipped the script again, since Jason ended up in a mansion in Bristol and Steph ended up right back where she started, calling 911 over domestic abuse and heroin overdoses.
No sooner has Stephanie pressed the doorbell of Wayne Manor - the actual one this time - than the door has swung open to reveal Bruce Wayne and Timothy Drake-Wayne trying to look like they're not staring at her.
"Umm... hi?" Bruce Wayne looks like he's frozen solid at the sight of her. It's extremely unnerving.
"Oh, um, it's nice to meet you, Miss Brown," Timothy Drake-Wayne blurts, sticking a hand out at her. Steph raises her eyebrows in confusion for a split second before realizing it's for a handshake. Rich people are weird.
"I- it's just Steph. Miss Brown makes me sound old," she chuckles half-heartedly, belatedly realizing that maybe-joke sounds exactly like something her mother would say, which completely defeats the purpose. "You're Timothy, right?"
"Tim, yeah. And this," Tim unsubtly elbows his adoptive father in the ribs, "is Bruce. Obviously."
To Stephanie, Bruce Wayne looks like he’s seven feet tall and built like a wall. Having had two fathers that were seemingly just as big and terrifying to Steph as a child, she immediately feels defensive in his presence. Jason probably felt the same , her mind supplies with no warning, and Stephanie holds back a wince.
However, Bruce Wayne’s appearance is completely at odds with how the man’s expression looks cracked open and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable . Steph forces her eyes away.
“Um- can I get you something to drink?” Tim asks her, like a perfect little gentleman. “It’s Alfred’s day off- that’s our butler -so it’s just me and B today,” he offers as an unnecessary explanation.
“...Sure, I guess?” Steph offers. “Yes, I mean, that would be nice, thank you.”
Tim offers an awkward smile, darting a look at Bruce. “We’ll just go to- to the kitchen then.” Steph nods and follows him through a series of stupidly posh rooms to an oversized kitchen. She doesn’t hear Bruce follow, but a glance over her shoulder tells her that he’s trailing after her and Tim, bringing up the rear in their unconventional little procession.
The three of them sit on barstools at the kitchen island, silently sipping on their drinks. Steph tries to think of something to say, but her brain gets caught on a family portrait she saw in one of the hallways. Bruce and Jason with Dick Grayson, all beaming at the camera and sitting on a couch she saw in a sitting room.
Finally, Tim elbows his father again, which manages to unfreeze him this time. "I- I'm sorry, I'm being incredibly rude, it's just- you look so much like him." Tim winces.
Steph forces something like a smile onto her face. "Yeah, well. Jay used to say I was a clone of him, just with Mom's-" She falters, remembering blue fingertips stretched across the bathroom tile. "Mom's hair."
Bruce's face falls completely flat, and Tim looks a bit taken aback, before turning to look at the man. "B, shouldn't we-"
"Yes, you're right. Stephanie…” The man takes a big, slow inhale. “Catherine Todd wasn't Jason's birth mother."
Um, what? "Huh?"
The obvious reluctance looks strangely out of place on someone as big as Bruce Wayne. "The parents listed on his birth certificate are Willis Todd and Sheila Haywood. Not- not Catherine Todd. We- when we found out, we checked your birth certificate. As far as we know, Catherine was your mother, but not-"
"Not Jason's," Steph finishes for him. "Sure. Who cares, Mom was still the one who raised him. Raised us !" She takes a breath, slumping on her stool. "Who even is this Sheila lady, anyways?"
"She..." Bruce collects himself with a small shudder. "Stephanie, there's some details about- about Jason's death that you should probably know." Steph doesn't miss how Tim shoots Bruce a strange look, something close to apprehension.
It had been hard to pick up a magazine with her brother's smiling face on the cover, faded to black-and-white with bright yellow letters proclaiming "SECOND WAYNE SON DEAD??". Stephanie's sure that listening to the man Jason had considered his father explain it would be much, much harder than reading an impersonal, sensationalized article in a grocery store checkout aisle. "Go ahead," she whispers.
Bruce nods once and dives in. "A week or two before, Jason went back to his old home in Crime Alley. The one he shared with you and your parents. A neighbor gave him a box of some belongings that weren't seized and discarded by the authorities, including the original copy of his birth certificate, which, of course, listed Sheila Haywood as his birth mother. We... we did some research to find her and learned she had been working with a refugee camp in Ethiopia."
Stephanie inhales sharply. The papers had said that was where he died.
"I arranged a Wayne Enterprises outreach mission to there and brought Jason along, as a cover for the press. When we got there... Jason and I were separated and he was kidnapped. We don't know by who or why, we never received any sort of ransom note. And then..." Wayne pauses and shudders deeply, dragging a hand across his face. "There was an explosion a couple of miles out from the camp. They recovered the remains of both Jason and Sheila there, DNA testing confirmed it.”
Stephanie breathes in and out for a few minutes, staring at the kitchen counter.
“Okay,” she whispers. Lifting her head to meet Bruce Wayne’s eyes, she swallows and says, “Thank you for telling me.”
“I don’t- I don’t know if that’s why you came here, but I felt you… deserved to hear it from me. I know it’s several months too late, but… well, as Dick and Alfred and everyone would surely tell you, I’ve been quite selfish in my own grief,” Bruce explains haltingly. Tim shoots him a look of astonishment before quickly covering it up.
Allowing a faint smile onto her lips, Steph says, “Did he ever tell you… sometimes, we would walk down to a little corner store by our apartment and make fun of the people on the magazine covers until the owner kicked us out. Jason thought that the name ‘Dick Grayson’ was just, absolutely hysterical , and I didn’t even get it until a few years later!” Amazingly, Steph actually finds herself laughing about it. Laughing about her dead brother. What a world.
The corner of Bruce’s mouth begins to quirk up. “I believe. There was no shortage of rude names he’d call Dick.”
Steph snorts. “What a little asshole.”
Bruce chuckles , leaving Tim looking totally shell-shocked. Steph kind of wants to take a picture of his face, it’s hilarious.
“One time, Jay snuck into Dick’s room and he-” Bruce actually has to stop talking to breathe between his laughter, and Tim looks between him and Steph in wonder. “He cut a hole in all of his underwear, right where-”
“He didn’t ,” Stephanie gasps.
Bruce nods. “Of course, Dick has his own place in Bludhaven, that’s where most of his clothes are, but still… I thought Alfred was going to ban both of them from the house until they could stop screaming at each other.”
The three of them sit in the kitchen of Wayne Manor for a few hours, until Steph catches a glimpse of the sky darkening outside. Tim doesn’t say much of anything, just listens to Steph and Bruce go back and forth with stories about Jason, happy and sad and everything in between. The poor kid looks kind of lost, but Stephanie figures it must be weird to hear people talk about someone who would have been your family, but they were gone before you even got to meet them. It’s understandable, at least, that Tim stays off to the side of their conversation.
“Okay, I know you have to get home, Stephanie, but one last thing,” Bruce says at last. He waits for Steph to meet his eyes before continuing. “Are you okay? Are you in a safe home, are you happy there?”
Steph plasters on a smile and lies through her teeth. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
She immediately feels guilty for it when Bruce looks relieved. “Good. That’s all he ever wanted for you.”
Finally, Bruce retreats back to do some rich-people stuff upstairs and Tim walks her back to the front door. He still looks a bit out of place, a little too small underneath the high ceilings in the mansion.
“It’s still- I mean, I don’t think I’ve heard Bruce talk about Jason at all until today. It’s still hard for him. And I didn’t know him at all, obviously, but, um, Alfred has plenty of stories, if you’d ever want to come back when it’s not his day off. And Dick, too. He comes in from Bludhaven on the weekends sometimes,” Tim tells her in a rush, like he doesn’t quite know how to say it.
Steph automatically opens her mouth to decline, but… she wouldn’t mind coming back, actually. She’d taken a bus to Bristol today, expecting to give her respects to the Waynes and meet the people Jason spent the last three years of his life with, and then never come back. Almost like the closing chapter of a book. She definitely hadn’t expected to see Bruce Wayne so obviously torn apart by Jason’s death, but still willing to share stories and laugh with her.
Yeah. She wouldn’t mind coming back to Wayne Manor again.
“Sure. I’d like that,” Stephanie tells Timothy Drake-Wayne with a genuine smile.