#Fun Fact: Tim gave me the most trouble. THAT BOY HAD SO MANY OUTFITS and all are relatively?? similar and often depicted? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bigskydreaming · 4 years

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The multiverse trip trope, with the canon Batfam ending up in a No Capes AU, where their counterparts, being equally hyper-competent but having no secret identities to hide or vigilantism as the primary focus for channeling their energies into....are equally ridiculous to all vigilante versions of the Batfam, but in vastly different ways.

With no need to hide his athletic abilities or to try and distance himself from immediate association with his past acrobatics, Dick focuses his time and efforts on gymnastics after Bruce takes him in. He’s an Olympic gold medalist before he’s twenty, hailed for practically reinventing the nature of high-bar routines thanks to his innovative ways of melding elements of his former acrobatics with his gymnastics regimens.

Because of his many medals and natural charisma, he’s also a highly sought after brand face, asked to endorse or act as a spokesmodel for all kinds of things. He takes a particular savage joy in having his revenge on society as a whole, for the grief they gave him growing up, between the jokes about his circus background and ‘garish’ ensembles he patterns after his old costumes. Each year, he himself quietly seeks out talented designers who because of their backgrounds and the elitism of the high fashion world, are only able to advance so far in that industry.

Acting as a silent investor for them with the funds from his endorsement deals, he charms his way through backroom deals and opens the necessary doors to get his designers into the high profile fashion shows that can make designers’ careers, allowing them the much needed opportunities to showcase their designs and get them out into the world and in front of potential buyers.

But in addition to their own designs, Dick then commissions the designers he patrons, to design for him the most absurd things they can come up with. The kind of high fashion wtf’s that Ugly Betty’s wardrobe department could only dream of making, and then making into a punchline. Design for me an outfit you wouldn’t even inflict on your most hated enemy, Dick says to them.

And each year they do, and Dick models those looks personally. Then he sits back with his siblings and cackles with malevolent glee as the snobby ‘it crowds’ of his generation later turn out in droves to purchase his ‘signature looks.’ Strutting around town in imitation of the poise and charisma he pulls off effortlessly - but those, no amount of money can buy, and given they’re the only reason Dick Grayson alone can get away with wearing this stuff and still look as good as he does when doing so - well, the socialite circles inevitably end up looking utterly ridiculous. The harder they try and sell it with artificial confidence that Page Six and talk show hosts see right through, the more they get shredded to pieces with scathing jokes and headlines that put anything they ever managed to come up with to shame.

Meanwhile, the revenue from their frenzied purchases of these ‘must-have’ looks of the season? More than enough to launch the careers of Dick’s designers, right up to the A-List, where Dick leaves them to do what they want and make the most of it, with his eternal gratitude for humoring him and his rich kid eccentricities. (Not that his designers haven’t all since long figured out the joke and gotten vindication of their own out of it, as the designers and buyers who tried previously to shut them out because of their humble backgrounds, now all rush to try and rip off their more out there and high profile ‘Dick Grayson Looks’ with their own versions, over-saturating that particular market demographic just as people start catching on that these designs were always doomed to fizzle without Dick wearing them himself......leaving Dick’s designers with an open, uncluttered path right to the demographics they actually want to sell to, with the designs nobody’s attempted to imitate yet because they were too busy keeping eyes glued to Dick’s peacock ensembles).

Bruce has long since given up expecting he’ll ever understand his various children without them making an effort to translate first.....so the first time he walks in on Dick, Jason and Duke watching E! with a focus they’ve never displayed for sports, and with the coffee table covered in so many papers and flow charts and graphs, the den looks more like a War Room rather than just three of his boys watching Entertainment Tonight with frightening intensity.

Bruce just waits in the doorway for them to notice him and arches one eyebrow when they do. Oh, there’s a point to all of this, he’s sure. But damned if he can figure out on his own just what the hell it might be.

His eldest just beams at him with his thousand watt smile.

“Love me or hate me, they all want to be me,” Dick sing-songs. Then he shrugs innocently, as though that explains it all.

It doesn’t, Bruce is fairly certain.

“Why?” He asks somewhat plaintively, after his struggle to select one of the many, many questions buzzing in his head glitches on that one syllable and refuses to budge until he at least voices that much.

“We’ve been over this, B. Its part of our Twenty Seven Step Plan to Destroy the Upper Class,” Jason says impatiently, still jotting notes in pen on one of the graphs, eyes still locked on the TV. “God, its like you never listen, I fucking swear.”

“That running joke you two had when you were in high school?” Bruce asks blankly, focusing on his two eldest. Duke is paying absolutely no attention to him any way, leaning over to cross something out on the same graph Jason’s working on, scrawling some kind of correction while Jason nods like that makes total sense in whatever bizarre arithmetic they’re all working off of.

Dick sighs in the fond manner of a parent whose child has just done something particularly endearing. “You gotta admit, its kinda cute he still thinks we’re joking when we talk about class warfare.”

“Eh,” Jason grunts noncommittally. “Benjamin Button he is not.”

“If you boys don’t mind, could you do me a favor and make sure to clarify when you’re making fun of me? I have trouble spotting the insults otherwise,” Bruce says dryly.

“But that’s what makes it fun!” Duke says, beaming with his own version of Dick’s thousand watt grin. Equal in intensity, but where Dick’s tends to burst into being all at once like a supernova, Duke’s tends to sneak up on you, slowly increasing the illumination until you realize you’re blinking spots out of your vision and it hits you that you haven’t been able to see anything but blinding luminescence for awhile now, and you don’t even know for sure how long.

“Well how about just this once, you boys take pity on me and cut your old man a break,” Bruce says, still in tones as parched as Saharan dunes. “Explain what I’m looking at here as though I’m five.”

“Christ, B, you’re not freaking geriatric,” Jason mutters. “You’re only in your forties, its way too soon for you to try and milk the senility angle.”

“We’re documenting record of public reactions to the latest fashion crimes of Gotham’s A-List,” Dick cuts off Jason, taking the aforementioned pity on his father as he provides an explanation that is in no way helpful.

Bruce squints at the screen. “But aren’t those the same outfits you wore during your Fashion Week thing last month?”

“Well yeah, but on me they look good,” Dick shrugs.

“Don’t gloat,” Jason says to his brother. “It’s tacky.”

“Facts are facts,” Dick says without a hint of apology. “Lying in the name of false modesty would be the true dishonesty.”

“Incredible. You even manage to put a pious-sounding spin on being an egotistical shit,” Jason marvels. “How do you do that?”

Dick shrugs again. “It’s a gift.”

Bruce clears his throat. “And what’s all this documentation for, anyway?”

“Dick’s book,” Duke says matter of factly. Bruce would be flattered by his children’s apparent belief he can intuitively leap from one esoteric comment straight to an epiphany like some kind of goddamn gazelle - if he weren’t still so lost.

“Dick has a book? Since when? I thought Jason was the writer in this family,” Bruce frowns. “And I’m quite certain there was a big to-do made when you were all much younger, where it was decided that each of you would focus yourself on distinct pursuits not overlapping with any other siblings’, so as not to kill each other in your inevitable quest to be number one.”

“Well first off, Dad, if you couldn’t handle a little competition between your children, you shouldn’t have adopted competitive children,” Dick lectures absently, still scribbling away at those damn pages.

“Its not like you all came labeled with future character traits,” Bruce says crankily. They ignore him.

“And secondly, upon discovering that the agreement we all signed was the end product of carefully dropped hints aimed at making us believe we all came to the table of our own volition, when in fact, they were merely the machinations of the mastermind known as our meddling father,” Jason intoned, finally looking up at Bruce to raise one eyebrow at him significantly, “the Treaty of Wayne Manor’s South Family Room circa 2012, was thus deemed by all signatories to be fruit of the poisonous tree, and subsequently rendered null and void.”

Bruce’s frown deepens. “How did you figure that out? And why are you suddenly talking like a Bond villain?”

“Well it was mostly more of a theory until just now,” Dick beams at him. Dammit. You’d think he’d know better than to walk right into things like that by now. “But Tim had a hunch pretty much from the start, except then we all ended up branching out towards different interests anyway so it didn’t seem to matter that much, and we figured why not let you keep thinking you got a win there, you know?”

“I have the most thoughtful children.”

“We do try,” Jason hums.

“We try,” Duke snorts. “You add snarky commentary.”

“That was implied.”

Duke rolls his eyes and rolls right past that. “And Jason’s talking like that because he’s got that book tour coming up in a couple weeks, and he’s test driving new Eccentric Author Aesthetics.”

“Gotta give the people what they want,” Jason shrugs. “My fanbase expects the precociously grumpy darling of the New York literary circuit to be baffling and unpredictable, I give them baffling and unpredictable.”

“And here I thought you’d said you hated your fanbase. And rather then giving them anything, last I heard you were claiming to be withholding your sophomore manuscript just to spite them,” Bruce says. His voice is still lost and wandering in the desert, not a hint of precipitation to be found. “In fact, I distinctly recall wanting to take you out to celebrate the rave reviews of your debut novel, the week of its release. Only you were busy having a diatribe about how ridiculous the reviews were and how nobody had any business calling the barely coherent linguistic finger paintings of an emotionally stunted twenty-one year old the ‘next great American novel’ and it called the entire slate of reviews’ credibility into question as any brains capable of producing thoughts that erroneous should be required to display a count of their individual brain cells before anyone even considers viewing any thought produced by them as potentially being credible.”

“And you thought he never listens,” Duke snickers at his older brother. “Sounds like a direct quote to me.”

Jason just shrugs again, not remotely moved. “Yeah but I hate everything, so its not like that really means anything. Also, I’m full of shit. I thought everyone knew that.”

“He’s not subtle,” Dick informs Bruce.

“Subtlety’s for losers,” Jason defends himself. “Like tact.”

Bruce clears his throat again. “Back to the matter of Dick’s book?”

“Oh, right!” Dick chirps. “I have a book. Well, will have. This is research for it.”

“So you are taking up writing after all?”

“Hah!” Jason barks out loudly. “Dick can’t write for shit. He can’t even write a thank you card, forget about a whole fucking novel.”

“Umm, I can write, I merely choose not to,” Dick sniffs pointedly. Then he rolls his eyes in disgust. “And Jesus Christ, chill, Prince Passive Aggressive. I can’t believe you’re still making such a big deal about that. Let it go already.”

He and Jason both shoot quick looks over at Duke about two seconds after Dick’s last sentence. Duke looks up just in time to catch their glances darting away again.

“Hang on, why did you both look at me, like you thought I was about to start singing that stupid song from Frozen?” Duke frowns at them suspiciously. “You guys do know that I’m not Stephanie, right?”

“Yeah but you have been hanging around her an awful lot lately, and she’s contagious,” Jason points out. Duke’s frown deepens for a moment, but then it wings out of sight and he shrugs, perfectly at ease again.

“Yeah, that’s fair.”

“Anyway, its Dick’s tell-all book on Gotham high society,” Jason continues on. “I’ll be the one actually writing it of course. He’s just the pretty face getting slapped on the cover, but I mean, that’s the only reason people are gonna wanna buy it, so I’ll probably just phone it in anyway.”

Bruce focuses on the only part of that reveal he can handle at the moment. “Jay, you’re not remotely capable of ever phoning something in.”

“How dare you accuse me of having a work ethic. Rude and disrespectful. My reputation isn’t built to withstand that kind of slander.”

“And feel free to mock all you want, but my pretty face on that cover is what’s going to earn me my first SCPF,” Dick announces loftily.

Duke looks up. Opens his mouth. Shakes his head. Closes it. Looks back down. Sighs. Looks back up again.

“Not that I don’t know better than to ask, but what the hell is an SCPF?”

“My version of an EGOT that I just made up while Jay was being offended by a compliment to his work ethic. Spokesmodel, cover model, print model, fashion model. The four cornerstones of the modeling world, which I will then have conquered, leaving me free to move on to other endeavors.”

Jason studies his older brother gravely. Then he shakes his head.

“Even as a complete and utter joke, that combination of words disgusts me. You make me physically nauseous sometimes, you know.”

“Another gift of mine, I suppose. I have so many,” Dick muses, leaning back and examining something on the chart he was scribbling on, as if trying to take in another angle for some no doubt ridiculous reason. Why were his children like this.

“Before this migraine finishes settling in and pitches its tent for the night, anyone care to tell me just what exactly this tell-all will be telling?” Bruce sighs. It was never too early to start damage control when this particular combination of his kids were conspiring together.

“Oh, everything,” Dick says breezily. “Who had affairs, who embezzled from their companies, who bribed or blackmailed or bought off this or that. All kinds of juicy sordid stuff, real page turner stuff, you know? You’d think important people would do a better job of keeping high stake secrets all hush hush instead of dropping them all willy nilly at various galas over the years, but c’est la vie.”

“Its almost like there are potential hazards to condescendingly assuming the uneducated circus brat someone adopted as an obvious PR stunt, like, just can’t understand a lick of what people say around him, what with his thick foreign accent obviously conveying he just don’t know English words so good nope, nope, nopers,” Dick concludes merrily, a familiar sparkle in his eye. One that usually heralded social cataclysms to come.

“And so you’ve taken it upon yourself to warn the public of those potential hazards. Good for you, son,” Bruce says sardonically. Despite his best efforts, the corners of his lips keep tugging stubbornly upwards.

“Just trying my best to give back to the community that’s given me so much,” Dick shrugs in the closest approximation to an ‘aw shucks’ vibe that Bruce has ever seen his son manage in as long as he’s known him. Jason reaches over and smacks the back of Dick’s head.

“Hey!” The elder brother snaps back, rubbing the back of his head with wounded dignity. He glares at his smirking brother.

“My bad. I thought you were against false modesty. Just trying to help keep you honest, bro.”

Dick narrows his eyes at him. “Touche,” is all he says.

“Last question before I give up and admit defeat,” Bruce interjects before that escalates. As tends to happen in moments like the previous. With no limit to how long or how far that escalation might last. By his count, his two eldest boys were somehow still engaged in four entirely different extended, longterm feuds they seemed somehow able to treat as separate and distinct from each other, with one of those stretching all the way back a good ten years, and still no end in sight as far as anyone knew.

How did they determine what fights would end in minutes and which warranted stretching out over a course of years? Bruce really couldn’t say. How did they manage to stop and start the same argument off and on for all that time, without letting the last-addressed state of the argument affect how they interacted when their fight was back on ‘pause’? No idea. How did they seem able to treat each different matter they fought about as its own distinct entity that had no bearing on anything outside that particular argument, with no overlap or cross-pollination as far as anyone else had ever been witness to, and why did they even bother doing so in the first place? God, Bruce dearly wishes he knew.

Unfortunately, for all that his entire horde of children often at times seem to exist on a wholly separate and private plane unreachable by the rest of humanity, Bruce’s first two children to fill the halls of Wayne Manor with laughs, screeches and occasional declarations of war and an intent to maim, dismember and murder -

Well. They at times seemed to possess a language and extra senses unique just to them, and baffling to the entire rest of the world and their own siblings as well.

Oh well. At least Bruce could take some small comfort in Duke’s occasional glance of wary confusion, thrown towards one or both of his brothers when they weren’t looking.

“Yo, this is Planet Earth, hailing one eternally out of touch bachelor billionaire way up in the atmosphere,” Jason sharply cuts into Bruce’s distraction with a snap of his fingers. “Are you trying to milk the senility thing again? We’ve been over this. You need at least another decade of mileage before we’ll validate your senior citizen card.”

“Right.” Bruce rolls his eyes at his son, but shakes his head to clear it nevertheless. Ah, yes. “Yes. Indulge me, please. What exactly does what you’re watching have to do with Dick’s....tell-all, and how does whatever all of this is count as research?”

“Oh, we’re just keeping record of public shaming of every snobby rich jackass to buy one of the fashion monstrosities Dick wears at Fashion Week, only to then look utterly ridiculous and absurd when they try and wear it in public and everyone points and laughs,” Duke chimes in.

“I see,” Bruce says, his lips twitching again. “And this of course all ties back into class warfare and...what was it again...oh yes, the Twenty Seven Step Plan To Destroy The Upper Class?”

“That’s right,” Duke nods.

“I even know what the title is going to be already,” Dick smiles with bared teeth. “I’m going with: ‘Weapons of Choice.’“

“Of course, as I keep explaining to him, nobody gets final say on the title of their book, and there’s every chance the publisher will end up changing the title to something they pick,” Jason says with a pointed look at his brother.

Dick’s willful obliviousness visibly deflects Jay’s arched gaze long before any point can hit and make an impact. “And as I keep explaining to him, if they try and change the title, I will simply explain to them that they are incorrect and it already has the perfect title and one can not improve upon perfection.”

Jason strangles a gutteral, incoherent growl before it can fully escape from his throat. “I want to throttle you.”

“I know,” Dick says sunnily.

“Well, as long as you’ve thought this through, which you clearly have, I have no doubt you’ll get the results you’re after,” Bruce says. Doubtfully. Though of what, he’s not entirely sure. His sanity, thinking that yes, half a dozen precocious, willful and utterly incomprehensible children, that’s the ticket, exactly what my life needs. Yes, that was probably the matter actually in doubt.

“Ugh, B, you’re not getting it,” Dick complains. He exchanges frustrated glances with his brothers. “He’s not getting it.”

“It’s not rocket science,” Jason says patiently. “Basic rule of street fighting....the most effective takedowns come from aiming at someone’s weakest point. Whenever possible, go for the throat. What’s the equivalent of the throat as far as Gotham’s upper class is considered? Public image.”

“Destroy their public image, destroy them,” Dick finishes cheerfully. “They crack, get egg on their face like the nursery rhyme says, and bam, Humpty Dumpty has a great fall and all the queen’s knights working as a team still can’t put them together again and while they’re distracted the pawns can slip past them and become queens!”

Jason stares at him. “I know what you’re doing and its not going to work.”

“What am I doing?”

“Deliberately mangling the fuck out of a bunch of different well known sayings that you know perfectly well how they really go, while doing that thing where you act like you’re the most airheaded ditz to ever live and have a brain that runs off of helium instead of oxygen like the rest of us. Because you know damn well how obnoxious that is to anyone who knows exactly how intelligent you really are and that you actually have a mind like a steel trap that remembers fucking everything, no matter how inane, which is fucking rude, because that’s wasted on you and also, stop it. I told you. Its not going to work.”

“Oh Jay.” Dick tilts his head to the side and grins wider. “That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Uh huh,” Jason says, unconvinced. “Then what, pray tell, are you doing?”

“That thing where I trick you into believing I’m doing the more obvious seeming thing and then annoy you with my fake airhead routine until you end up flattering me and paying me compliments when pointing out why my airhead routine could never work on you and is thus just annoying,” Dick says brightly.

Jason’s eyebrows inch incrementally together with the slow, ominous scrape of stone grinding across stone. Dick is entirely undeterred, and simply shrugs again with a painfully fake display of innocence.

“Its dinner time and my ego needed feeding. Thanks for that bee tee dubs, it was getting hungry. Nom nom.”

“Yeah,” Jason says casually, after a good ten second pause. He nods decisively. “Okay, I’m going to murder you now.”

He lunges for his brother, but Dick’s resting pose is the equivalent of anyone else impatiently waiting at the starting block of a race. He’s up and on his feet, gracefully dancing out of range of his younger but bigger brother’s wider reach, and has darted halfway towards the other exit to the room by the time Jason finishes scrambling to his feet. Not that any of that delays the younger man from taking off in a dead sprint in pursuit of his laughing sprite of a brother the second he does.

Bruce stares after them for a moment and then shifts his gaze down to Duke, who’s still seated contentedly on the floor, blithely unaffected by Dick and Jason’s mad dash out the room as he continues scribbling down notes.

“I will pay you all the money I have, not to grow up to be like them,” Bruce says in the gravest possible tone he can manage. “You don’t even have to wait til I’m dead.”

Duke sighs and shakes his head. “B, c’mon, man. I’m clearly on Team Class Warfare. I’m insulted you think I can be bought.”

Bruce frowns. “You all are way, way too fond of this trolling thing you do.”

“Mmm. Agree to disagree.”

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