Chapter Text
The library in Wayne Manor was decidedly intimidating; it had been built in the early 1700s as a parlor room with rows of inset shelving to store curios and decorations.
The first Governor Wayne of the Colony of New Jersey had then stored his most fanciful copy of the Bible and a few odds and ends- primarily tax law information which couldn't be stored in his study.
His eldest had a fondness of collecting maps, and so a collection of atlas' from around the known globe took place of pride next to old laws. The library was quite nearly burned down when British soldiers found evidence Governor Wayne was a traitor and assisting the American Revolution.
Both his sons, the eldest at 17 and the youngest at 3, however, were killed.
He had, then, a selection of daughters before finally, in 1760, having another son. This particular Wayne had a passingly odd interest in machinery and mining.
It was Rutherford Thomas Wayne who founded The Wayne Company, which would be renamed into Wayne Industries long after his death. It was Rutherford Wayne who turned the curio-filled parlor into a proper, burgeoning library, with books and scientific papers from all over the world about mining, and geology, and the sciences of metallurgy.
Rutherford had several children; Elias, who would return the Wayne name back to the political sphere by becoming first a county, then a state, and finally a federal judge. Edith, who would become an ardent abolitionist and, in fact, cause several Wayne properties to become parts of the Underground Railroad. Johnathan, who would add manufacturing to their family's mining and refining business. And Gabriel, who would find himself interested in maps and worked to expand the railroad system of the US.
Elias added his own selection of law-books, while Edith was fond of poetry. Jonathan would add information on ships and early aeroplane designs. Gabriel would add a whole new set of maps, along with books of sketches done by settlers on the long trails across mountains and valleys alike.
Despite Jonathan having several sons of his own, he would later hand the company over to Edith's husband, who had political dealings all across Europe, China, and India, and would make Wayne a globally-known name.
Edith's eldest took over the business and added histories of wars. He would later die alongside his father in the Great War, leaving no children, and causing his only brother to inherit the company at the age of three.
This put Edith in a rare position for ladies in her day and age of power; as a widow, she was able to act so long as she couched it as in the best interests of her son. Edith took them from manufacturing sheets of metal and chain link to making something else.
Guns. Bombs. Anything else her ladies group, a secret society known only as the Court of Owls, wanted.
Edith, the publicly lauded charitable woman and ardent abolitionist, would die in her sleep at the ripe age of 93. Her grandson, Michael, would take over, and take her minor real estate investments and turn them into massive money-making opportunities. He'd fill the library with very little; he was always out making a deal or ten.
Jonathan the second would fill the library with mysteries, in particular murder mysteries. He was a prolific writer under a pseudonym of said mysteries, and also collected to works of his wife, a naturalist with an odd fascination with nocturnal animals. She even had him expand the cellar into the cave systems below Gotham because of- not in spite of- those awful bats.
And so it continued, until Michael Wayne purchased a ridiculous number of very pretty books and equally pretty shelves because having libraries was all the rage in his social circle.
Thomas Wayne, his son, would add a multitude of medical textbooks, removing several that were blank and instead giving them to his wife as journals. Martha Wayne, his wife, would fill them with photo albums.
Martha had pictures and news articles of the Wayne family going back for generations, as well as her own. She had pictures of Alfred tending the garden, dirt streaks on a much younger face. She had pictures of herself holding little Bruce in her hospital bed, just a few hours old. Pictures of important events and small ones, of her and Thomas greeting Princess Diana and Prince Charles as guests at their wedding. She had pictures of her son with blue icing smeared all over his face from his first birthday, all mixed together.
Between pictures were invitations, pressed carefully behind the thin, clear plastic to weddings, parties, funerals. The minutiae of daily life, preserved until the paper and plastic rotted.
The tradition had a sudden, painful end, with the last picture, showing Bruce and Thomas in the foyer, labeled on the back of it "two handsome boys on the way to the theater," right next to an invitation that had been hand-delivered the month prior to the opening of the Monarch Theater in Gotham.
The pictures resumed some years later, though not in any of Martha Wayne's albums. Pictures of Dick through school and sports ended up on the refrigerator or the mantels above the fireplaces.
Pictures of Jason growing up did the same, and a few well-loved books ended up in the library when the boy was done with them.
Usually, they'd be returned to the library at school when he was finished. There were a few copies now that, while they still bore signage indicating Gotham Academy Library or Gotham Public Library, had been purchased by Bruce.
Tim didn't add anything - at least, not at first. His pages of albums and shoeboxes of loose photographs were hidden away, safe from his parents, from Bruce's grief, from Damian, and from the risk of being unappreciated by those in the pictures.
Over time, and with effort, not to mention quite a bit of telepath-assisted therapy, other binders started to show up in the library. Photos carefully dated on the back to ISO time standards were placed not haphazardly like Martha's, covered in decorations from her scrapbooking, but placed meticulously as if on an invisible grid.
Despite this, the pictures were excellent and taken with great care. And while Martha's albums were seldom touched for fear of messing up a memory, Tim's were backed up usually a dozen times or more, and were touched with impunity.
Sometimes (frequently), family members would compete to find who appeared in pictures the most, their least favorite siblings' ugliest picture, and as time went on, reminisce. There were similar binders in the Batcave- copies of all upstairs as well as pictures in vigilante disguises.
Bruce ran knobbly, wrinkled fingers, still strong despite their age, over the spines. The collection had increased over the years, and broadened as glowing green albums found their places alongside them.
A rattling cough pulled his attention back to the task at hand. "What book did you want me to read, Terry?"
The six year old rubbed his snotty face into the rough material of Bruce's pants, then frowned as the jeans scratched his sensitive nose. "That one," the boy said.
"This is one of your uncle's photo albums, sport, it doesn't have any words," he explained. "Are you sure you don't want Dr. Seuss?"
Terry's face scrunched up, whether in preparation for more miserable tears (Bruce could only sympathize- he'd have to have Danny have words with whatever being allowed a child to get sick with chicken pox and strep throat at the same time) or another productive sneeze, Bruce wasn't sure.
He pulled the photo album out anyway and reached across for a well-loved copy of Dr. Seuss Stories- a custom thing ordered years ago, from when Bruce becoming a grandfather was more of a warning from the PTA moms regarding his eldest than truth. It was Terry's favorite, and a good fallback.
He settled Terry down after a few moments and sat his supplies (hydrocortisone cream the market could only dream of courtesy of the lab in the Batcave, tissues with lotion, bottled drinks, and Terry's cough syrup) onto one of the loveseats, Terry on his lap and already half asleep.
"What's it?" Terry muttered, pointing at the first picture.
"This? This is from when your cousin Martha was born," Bruce explained, stroking the picture of a cloning pod with an indistinguishable shape in the middle fondly. "Your uncles Tim and Connor couldn't have kids, so they made their own. It's why they call your cousin Martha a Christmas baby, even though she was born in September."
--------NaNaNaNaNaNaFLASHBACK-----------
"Babe, do you think they'd look better with your nose or mine?" Tim asked from his position near the cloning pods, which had been removed from their hiding place.
"Depends on if they're a boy or a girl," Kon joked- joked, because this child would be a combination of both of their DNA. And as both had an XY chromosome, there wasn't really any other way their son would come out.
Tim had grumbled, mostly good natured, and put something into the computer.
That was in the early days, when they had decided on Johnathan, to honor John Kent. Then, his name had proceeded to Johny, then John. Eventually, he had become it, it had become 'the project', and the project just had numbered iterations.
That had lasted until Christmas that same year, when Danny had dragged in a slime-coated billionaire and forced him to recreate cloning machinery from memory as payment for violating 'Christmas Truce'.
Danny's younger sister- and technically clone- was proof it was possible. Vlad, eager to get into a decontamination shower, made it happen.
Bruce had always thought it nice the first grandchild born into his family was named Martha. (After Kent or Wayne was anyone's guess.)