Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Right, Robin headcount!” Bruce calls out as he gets ready to go on patrol.

“Chum?”

“Here!” Dick grins and waves from where he was doing a handstand.

“Jaybird?”

“Present!” Jason doesn’t even look up from the book that he’s reading for English class.

“Sweetheart?”

“B-A-T-G-I-R-L, not R-O-B-I-N,” Cassandra signed in return, smiling.

“Duckie?”

“Not a duck!” Tim protests from his perch at the Batcomputer.

“Missy?”

“Yep!” Steph was practically draped over Tim, watching him type.

“Little Bat?”

“Tt,” Damian glared at him for the nickname.

“Alright, into the Batmobile, all of you. Time for patrol.” He commanded, slipping into the front seat himself.

Five Robins, one Batgirl, and one Oracle are an unwieldy crowd for one Batman to manage, but through some miracle, he can corral his children into not setting Gotham on fire nor getting themselves killed every night.

… Most nights.

It’s not like Bruce set out to be a single dad to five and three-quarters children (Steph insisted she can be counted as half at most, and Barbara refused to be counted at all so he sneakily added a quarter in there). Honest.

Dick fell into his life at eight years old and angry, and now at fifteen, he’s doing cheerful somersaults into Bruce’s heart and arms. 

Jason hit him in the gut with a crowbar at ten years old, and three years later he’s more focused on quoting poetry that makes him melt and gush about how smart his boy is.

Cass ran straight into him and held on at eleven years old, and even now that she’s thirteen, she still has the tendency to randomly attach herself to him like a silent shadow.

Tim decided that just appearing in the cave and declaring that he knew Bruce’s secret identity was the best course of action when he was nine, and he still decides to do light B&E into Bruce’s heart whenever he sees him nearly two years later.

Steph threw a brick at him (and ended up hitting Tim instead) and told him she was going to annoy him until he arrests her dad last year, and last month annoyed him into planning her twelve birthday party and buying her a new motorcycle (Bruce couldn’t be annoyed with her, never). 

Damian, so small at eight years old, was handed over to him by Talia not even a year ago, and Bruce has promised to never let the boy go.

Barbara was still insisting that she wasn’t his child, and she threatened to emancipate herself at sixteen years old just so he couldn’t adopt her. Jim was not pleased with Bruce when he heard that threat.

And Batman most definitely did not set out to have five Robins, a Batgirl, and an Oracle.

He hadn’t seen any other way to help Dick heal, except by letting him be Robin. Barbara was just more stubborn than him, and he knew he would never win that fight.

Then Dick, after a short period of jealousy and dislike towards Jason, had found out that Jason was adopted because he lost his parents and didn’t want his father’s last name, and so insisted that Jason can share his mother’s name; being Robin.

Cass showed up, and Barbara took her under her wing, handing down the mantle of Batgirl to her new little sister. 

Tim showed up, and Dick and Jason made the executive decision to make him a Robin just because he gave Batman a heart attack, plus the fact that Tim’s parents were out of the country and couldn’t stop them.

Tim proceeded to drag home purple-clad Spoiler-Stephanie and ask Dick if they can adopt her as a Robin too, with stars in his eyes even as Batman protested in the background.

The second Damian had appeared on the front step, Dick had picked him up and spun him around, proclaiming “Free new Robin! Hell yeah!” even while Damian attempted to stab him. (Damian had succeeded in stabbing Tim, and Steph agreed with Jason that’s just how new Robins should introduce themselves now; attacking Tim.)

And now Bruce has too many children. Now Batman is followed by a mob of children everywhere.

Now Bruce ‘Batman’ Wayne has seven reasons to wake up each morning, to go through the day, to fight through the night.

Now he has seven children burrowed deep into his heart and he never wants to let them go.

He loves them so much he–

“Dad! Tell the demon brat he can’t steal my cape!” Jason whined.

“Father! Tell Todd that I need to keep them warm, and my cape is keeping me warm!” Damian shot back.

“Boys, names on patrol!” He replied reflexively. 

Wait… ‘them’?

Batman whirled on his children, where Damian had one arm curled around two soaking wet kittens and one hand reaching out to grab Jason’s yellow cape.

Damn it, he only looked away for five seconds, where did he even find them?

“Little Bat, no. You know Jaybird likes his cape. Have you asked R-1 for his?” Batman gently reprimanded, watching as Jason further pulled his cape around himself like a comfort blanket. Jason was the one who liked the cape most of all, and Batman remembered fondly the time that Catwoman described his second eldest son as ‘Five percent boy, five percent nerd, and ninety percent cape.’ A direct contrast to Dick, who, despite designing the Robin costume, hated his cape because it impaired his acrobatics.

“Heck yeah, you can have my cape, Baby Bat!” Dick flung his cape to Damian, who took it grumpily.

Steph laughed from where she and Cass were doing handstands. 

Tim looked up from his binoculars, the only one actually staking out the gangsters across the street. “Y’know you can’t keep them, right?”

Damian snarled, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you already have five pets! The rest of us share one!” Tim complained, “B, tell him!”

“Duckie, go back to monitoring.” He gave Tim a look, and the boy returned to his task.

“Little Bat, we can swing by a shelter once we’re done here, but I don’t think bringing two newborn kittens to our home where we have an adult cat and two dogs is a good stress-free environment for them.” 

Tim gave a little smirk, but thankfully Damian didn’t see it.

“Can we give them to your thieving paramour? That harlot at least knows how to take care of cats.”

“OI!” Was yelled at by several kids, all coming to the defense of Selina.

“R-5, do not insult Catwoman.” Batman said sternly, exasperated by Damian’s dislike of his girlfriend. Unlike the rest of the kids who are already jokingly calling Selina their step-mom, Damian still wishes that Bruce would get back together with Talia. Selina would make a comment about children of divorced parents, but Bruce just wants his children to get along with his partners.

“Uh, B?” Steph spoke up.

“Yes, Missy?”

“Aren’t we supposed to be going after them?”

“Wha-? Damn it! Chum, Oracle, Jaybird, go left! Duckie, Missy, Batgirl, go right! Little Bat, with me, we’re dropping in from above.” He rattles off orders as soon as he realizes that the gangsters had spotted them and were running away.

Yeah, Batman can totally manage seven children.

Chapter Text

The League was captured.

The Justice League was captured. They had all responded to Superman’s call for help about Lex Luthor funding some mystery laboratory that had Kryptonite, and got blindsided by the massive amount of fighters, Kryptonite, lead, and other weapons directly made for taking down the JLA. 

And Lex Luthor just would not stop monologuing .

Bruce was just silently attempting to break out of his restraints, much like Oliver, who kept making eye-contact with him and exaggeratingly rolling his eyes at Luthor. It was giving him deja-vu back when they were all teenagers at boarding school together and Ollie mocked Lex throughout their entire Social Studies presentation about American Capitalism Pros vs Cons. That particular group-project had landed all three of them in detention for several weeks, a short two-day suspension, two black eyes, and a split lip.  

The meta part of the League was still trying to break out using brute force and enabling Luthor’s dramatic ways. Clark dramatically yelled something back at Luthor about hope, kindness and betrayal, as if Lex didn’t once put a dead bat in Bruce and Oliver’s dorm room to try and cure him of his fear of bats; man’s worse than some of Batman’s rogues. 

That made Bruce make eye-contact with Oliver and roll his eyes, which promptly made Oliver choke and wheeze, because Bruce was still just Batman to him, he hasn’t outed his secret-identity as the man’s childhood friend yet, oh shit abort abort-

Luthor suddenly shrieked and dropped to the ground, unconscious.

“What the hell?” Oliver was the first to say anything, staring at the brightly colored child. He looked like he was seriously wondering if he was hallucinating. “Everyone else can see the toddler in a cape too, right?”

“Dad!” Jason beamed and ran towards Bruce, bright yellow cape streaming behind him. 

“Jaybird, what are you doing here?” Bruce was only mildly confused; his children were tenacious, it’s a miracle that they haven’t tried to follow him on a League mission before, but Jason was normally his most well-behaved child (after Cass).

“I’m here to rescue you!” He declared happily, with the exact same tone he had when he declared that being Robin gives him magic, before putting on a mock-serious look on his face. “You were late to pick us up from school, and we know that it wasn’t Mama’s turn to pick us up from school, and then Grandpa said you got a League mission but you missed check-in, so we knew something was wrong.”

The restraints hissed and released them all simultaneously.

Tim appeared from behind a computer, still small enough that he was kneeling on the desk chair to hack in. “Yeah, so Oracle and I hacked in and saw Luthor being a bigger drama queen than Robin 1 and 2 combined, so we all came.”

Bruce just gave a disapproving look and grunted. He knew that if he tried to discipline them right now, they would forget by the time they got home or get distracted by something or other. 

“Wait, Spooky has kids?” Hal said, sticking his hand up in the air like Cass tended to do when asking a question. “Who would procreate with you? Like, they have a mo- Oof!”

Damian stood silently glaring down at Hal’s fallen form, “Do not insult my father like that, you honorless highlighter!”

Dick laughed creepily as he dropped down from the vents, “Nice one, Baby Bat!”

He then looked up and gasped dramatically, “Oh my god, Superman! Hi! I’m B’s eldest, Robin!”

“Chum, focus.” Bruce grabbed his ADHD son’s attention, “Exit route?”

“The girls are on that. Duckie, is it clear yet?”

“Partially,” Tim piped up as he hopped off his computer and joined the main group. “Robin just sent the signal that we should make a run for it now, before reinforcements come.”

“Aren’t you Robin?” Barry asked, looking at Dick.

“We’re all Robin,” Jason replied with a ‘duh’ tone that all teenagers perfect. “He means Missy.”

“Batman-” Diana started, looking concerned.

“Not now, Princess.” He shot her down, “Escape first.”

“Robin.” He turned to his sons and grabbed their attention, opening the cape just slightly so, “Bird cage.”

They all rushed at him and ducked under the cape, disappearing into the safety of the kevlar blanket as if they were never there.

J’onn tilted his head and made a soft comment about this peculiar behavior of human young that nobody but Clark heard.

Batman began running out, not even inconvenienced by the boys clinging to him as they followed from under the cape, and the League was forced to go after him to not be left behind.

Luckily, there was only one group of guards in their way, and half of them went down when Bruce threw Dick at them, the young boy doing a triple somersault before kicking two guards in the head and hitting another in the head with a wing-ding. Oliver, Bruce and Barry took out the other four not a second later.

“Holy Hippos, Batman! Didja see that?” Dick bounced excitedly as he started cartwheeling down the hallway.

Bruce merely gave an agreeing grunt, before indicating to the boy that he should return to the safe space of the cape.

“Did you seriously throw a child at the bad guys?” Hal questioned.

Bruce glared back at him, a very clear ‘it worked and it made him happy’ message in his eyes.

“Nevermind,” Hal looked away and muttered.

Dick disappeared underneath his cape and they continued on their way back to the roof, where Batgirl dropped down onto Bruce’s shoulder in welcome.

Barry shrieked in surprise, and even Clark stared at her in confusion as to where she came from.

“Dad. Safe. Go?”

“Good job sweetheart,” He replied. 

“Hey B!” Steph hollered from where she was smashing a chair over a scientist’s head. “Do we get ice-cream and waffles for dessert tonight? We did a successful jailbreak all by ourselves!”

He hummed to say ‘sure,’ and turned to Barbara was pulling away from hacking the facility from her laptop, seated casually on the wall while Steph and Cass did all the fighting. “Oracle.”

“Batman.” She rolled her eyes in classic teenage apathy, “I was babysitting with Robin, but then they got anxious so we’re now babysitting on the field.”

He grunted, well aware that the kids were actually being as safe as they possibly could, but he still worried.

“This is so surreal,” Barry whispered too loudly to Hal.

Oliver looked mildly amused, “They look like my nieces and nephews. God knows they can run circles around their dad.”

“And you,” Dinah added, also staring at the kids. “They’re why he had a green beard last month, the little one thought he was mocking the eldest for his crush and decided to defend his brother’s honor with hair dye and scissors.”

“Babe,” Oliver whined, embarrassed.

“Batplane is coming, ETA one minute.” Oracle snapped, and grabbed Dick from inside the cape, dragging her boyfriend out so they can cuddle in the chilly night. “I better not miss the newest episode of Antiques Roadshow because of this.”

Jason and Damian left the cape, apparently tired of hiding away inside, and playing a game of tag. Or maybe it was just Damian trying to kill Jason for messing with his hair. Bruce didn’t want to know.

He waited a beat, then his heart dropped right out of his chest. 

“Where is Duckie?” He growled, realising that he was missing a kid. “Jaybird, Chum, where did your brother go?”

“Right here!” Tim popped up holding the hand of a young boy in white with a house of El symbol and… a baby in his arms?

Diana quickly grabbed the poor baby that was not being held properly, shushing it as it mewled its displeasure.

“I found a friend, can we keep him?” He grinned toothily, holding up the hand connected to the poor boy that looked confused about Tim’s… everything. “Oh, and the baby too.”

He grunted in confused, tilting his head to make Tim go on.

“I saw that they were making clones in the basement, so I went to check if any of them are friendly, but only these two were here. They’re clones of you and Superman, so I guess we have to keep the baby, but can we keep Kon-El too? He’s nice.”

Superman was gaping at Kon-El, who just waved.

Bruce sighed, “Only if Superman doesn’t claim custody. Kon, are you cold? Do you need a blanket?”

“I need a Robin,” Kon replied, deciding that he wanted to keep Tim too.

“Sure,” Bruce decided to give in. “Superman, I suppose we’ll be arranging play-dates often.”

Superman just made a low whine of confusion.