#to be fair most people would assume that batkids are biologically bruce's because of the hair and eye colour they all share

[undertheredhood]

bruce after bringing home a kid who is eerily similar to him: alfred, what are you doing?

alfred hiding the dna test behind his back: nothing?

[teentitanimals]

AU Where All the Batkids are in School but are Still Superheroes

I see a lot of No Powers Highschool AUs out there, but superheroing is half the fun to me. And yeah, technically, I’m pretty sure most of the Batfam have been to school, but I mean, at the same time? You’d have to squish their ages down, but I think it’d be wild! And also, it’s all the Batkids (and some Superkids because why not, they go to the same school in this AU, okay?), including Helena, Terry, Matt, etc. And yes, they all keep their backstories (as in, Terry and Matt are still McGinnis’s too, and all that.) Also, I suck at knowing the education level system and ages, so, just a warning there.

Not in School (duh): Bruce, Alfred, Selina, Jim, Lucius, Clark, Lois, other adults

In (Fourth Year) College: Kate (23-24)

In (Second Year) College: Dick, Barbara (19-20)

In (First Year) College: Tam (18-19)

In Senior Year: Jason, Luke, Kara (17-18)

In Junior Year: Cass, Harper, Terry (16-17)

In Sophomore Year: Tim, Steph, Carrie, Duke, Conner (15-16)

In Freshman Year: Damian, Helena, Colin (14-15)

In 8th Grade: Matt, Jon, Cullen (13-14)

In 4th Grade: Timothy Fox (9-10)

In Kindergarten: Tiffany (5-6)

Who Stays Where?

For reference, I’d say they all go to a school somewhere between Gotham and Metropolis, rather than Gotham Academy or Metropolis High. Let’s call it... Mediocre High. A mediocre school for completely normal, mediocre kids.

Stays in Metropolis w/ Clark and Lois, but are at Wayne Manor 90% of the time anyway: Kara, Conner, Jon

Has their own apartments/safehouses but are at Wayne Manor 90% of the time time anyway: Kate, Dick, Jason, Tim, Steph, Harper

Stays at Wayne Manor: Terry, Cass, Carrie, Duke, Damian, Helena, Colin, Matt, Cullen (unless Cullen stays with his sister... or if any of them run away, because they do that often too)

Stays with their parents, or at their own apartments, and are at Wayne Manor a little less than 90% of the time anyway: Barbara, Tam, Luke, Timothy, Tiffany

What’s the Sitch with Relationships?

Biologically Bruce’s, and known to the public as biologically Bruce’s: Damian, Helena

Biologically Bruce’s, but not known to the public as biologically Bruce’s: Terry, Matt (these two often visit their mother!)

Legally adopted by Bruce: Dick, Jason, Tim, Cass, Duke

Not legally adopted by Bruce but, come on, they’re his kids anyway: Harper, Cullen, Carrie, Colin

Family Friends that are like siblings/cousins (or siblings-in-law ;3): Kara, Conner, Jon, Barbara, Steph, Tam, Luke, Timothy, Tiffany

Wine Aunt/Older Sister: Kate

Shenanigans

It was a hilarious bit started by Steph and encouraged by Dick, Jason, and Carrie that they should all stuff themselves into the smallest limo or helicopter possible and crawl out like clowns. It was funny, to be fair, but the bloodshed spilled because of it banned them from doing it again. The kids got split into two separate cars after that, but eventually went back to one big limo, except for those who’d prefer to keep their sanity and drive there on their own (assuming they have a licence).

This batch of kids, excluding Kara, Conner and Jon, are often referred to as the “Wayne kids”, or the “Gotham kids”. Sometimes Kara, Conner and Jon get called Gotham Kids as well, despite being from Metropolis and proud. They’re vocality from protesting against being called Gotham Kids earned them the nickname “Not-Gotham Kids”.

Damian, Helena, Colin, Matt, Jon and Cullen are one of Those groups. Often together, closely knit, all characters on their own, but together, they lose all braincells. Teachers love all of them individually (with the exception of Damian), but are absolutely terrified of them as a group.

The second group most like that would be the girls- Tam, Kara, Steph, Cass, Harper, Carrie and sometimes Barbara, Kate and Helena. Alone, they’re pretty good kids, but together their chaotic-ness knows no bounds.

Who are we kidding? All of these kids are like that. Put any two together, and you’re either going to see someone get stabbed, a glitter bomb explode, an impromptu dance session, or debate the pronunciation of “bologna” for an hour.

Due to Damian often claiming he’s the rightful heir as the blood son, Helena, Matt and Terry will often pipe up to remind him that he isn’t the only blood son (or daughter, in Helena’s case). This often causes problems, not because Damian attacks them (verbally or physically), but because Terry and Matt aren’t, in the public’s eye, biologically Bruce’s, so the kids often have to scramble to make up some excuse to outsiders, often settling with it being an inside joke.

In this AU, Terry and Matt go by “Futurebat and Futurebird” because Why Not? As for Conner and Jon both being Superboy... how about, we just keep it that way? Because, really, Why Not? The public dubs them both the “Superboys”, and there’s no need to change it for now. Sometimes Conner gets called the Superclone, but mostly they just differentiate by some variation of “Superboy One/Uno and Superboy Two/Dos”. Sometimes “Superteen and SuperPre-Teen” when Jon was a bit younger. Also, think of all the shenanigans that can arise from that. Amazing.

Damian, at first, had as much hate towards Helena (and eventually Terry and Matt when they learned of them as well) as he did towards Tim. But, Helena always found his anger a bit funny (so long as it wasn’t life-threatening, which it often was). She never wanted to “be the heir” to Batman or Catwoman. She just happened to be their kid, and she wanted her own hero persona anyway, aka The Huntress.

To explain the situation with Helena, Terry and Matt, I’d say Helena (who’s a few months younger than Damian) was raised by Bruce and Selina, but the two’s relationship was on-and-off, and there were long periods where Selina would solo-parent Helena and Bruce (or Alfred and/or Dick, really) would solo-parent Helena. Eventually, the two got their shit together and are currently in a loving relationship, but not married yet. Terry and Matt were, of course, kept hidden from Bruce, being raised by Warren and Mary in a loving family. Eventually, after the death of Warren, and Terry trying to strike out as a solo hero, and the discovery that his DNA matched Bruce’s rather than Warren’s, their story was revealed that Terry was planned to be “future Batman” by Amanda Waller (needless to say Damian did Not Like That). Terry confronted Bruce and told him about it, and eventually Matt would learn the truth as well.

The only people Damian actively calls by their first names are Jon, Colin and Helena. Helena is only because Damian didn’t want to admit she was a Wayne at first (even though her legal last name in this AU is Kyle-Wayne).

They have a lot of animals, some are permanent, some come and go, some are just strays they feed, but nothing will compare to the amount of cats they have. The majority are strays that stay outside of the manor, yes, but they have too many. Sometimes they’ll be walking down a street opposite side of Gotham, and see one of their cats. This isn’t even because Selina now lives with them, and she brought her cats with her. No, it’s because Dick, Barbara, Jason and Steph, among others, loved the idea of Catwoman being a crazy cat lady, so they kept getting her more cats, which, in turn, gave everyone a new cat. And Damian was not helping in the least bit. Selina at least tried to stop them from bringing more cats home, but Damian would smuggle them back in anyway. Bruce honestly wishes someone had a cat allergy so they would have an excuse not to have that many cats.

Helena is a dog person. She likes cats, but... Dogs.

The Batkids all fight over the right of getting to babysit Tiffany.

Cass is often called the Good Kid by teachers and staff. That is not true, the true Good Kid is Duke. This is because he’s the only one that can maintain his braincells even in a group... 90% of the time, anyway.

Half of these kids will vanish during school hours to go stop some crime even though Bruce has repeatedly told them not to do that. The other kids who are not superhero vigilantes or manage to respect said rule (which is not often) scramble to make excuses for them. No excuse has ever been something normal, but it works because “When have Wayne kids ever been normal?”

School events like dances and football games are awful. Some of the kids are aware going will be awful, and desperately try to get out of it, but someway, somehow, they always wind up there. It would have been chaotic enough just having the Gotham Kids go, but when they bring their friends too (Teen Titans, Young Justice, Outlaws, whomever), there’s no hope. Their classmates at school both fear and look forward to these events, depending on how they go down. On one hand, it’s the Waynes! You’re basically watching “Keeping up with the Waynes” in real life! On the other hand, oh god, don’t get caught in the crossfire, whatever you do, run for dear life if you must.

Amazingly, Dick is the only one who got permanently banned from these events. And he didn’t even do anything. Well... anything as bad as his siblings, anyway.

They have all gotten suspended at least once, whether they are a Good Kid or not. Jason is actually one of the Good Kids so long as his siblings aren’t around to annoy him, but he got caught with a gun once, and barely escaped getting expelled... well, actually, he didn’t barely escape it, he was a Good Kid after all. But it was still on the table. That was, miraculously, the only time he got suspended.

Damian, surprisingly, does not have the highest suspension rate, but he does have the highest “called into the office” rate. You can guess all the reasons- sneaking pets into school, sneaking wild animals into school, having knifes and/or other weapons on him, belittling other students (he’s not intentionally trying to bully them, but, he can’t help but point out what they’re doing wrong), arguing and insulting teachers, ditching class (for vigilantism of course), etc.

The highest suspension rate goes to Dick, before he went to college. Mostly it was just due to how often he would skip classes and not turn in homework, but occasionally he would get into fights (to defend another kid, usually). The schools hadn’t yet gotten tolerable to the chaos that is the Waynes yet.

I suppose I should list the Good Kids. They are as follows: Cass, Duke, Jason, Luke, Helena, Cullen, Jon and Tiffany (she is Small and Innocent).

The Bad Kids: DAMIAN, Conner, Steph (she likes causing trouble for fun), Carrie (same as Steph, but more class clown-y) and Terry (mostly when he was younger).

The Bad Kids Sometimes: Harper, Timothy Fox, Kara

The Neutral Kids: Tam, Tim (depends on whether he’s crashed from lack of sleep or caffeine overdose), Dick, Matt, Barbara

The “Troubled” Kids (don’t label them that schools, rude): Colin, Cullen too technically but he’s more “Good”, Kate, literally all of them depending on the time of day (or night, specifically)

[bigskydreaming]

You like Riordanverse? Have you ever considered Batkids demigod au? Or just headcanons? Like each of them having one godly parent? I think Athena could probably claim all of them if she wanted to..

Ironically, my fondness for the Riordanverse is precisely why I’ve never been that tempted to write fic for it and likely never will be. Whether with original fic or fanfic, I pretty much just write the things I want to read….but that don’t exist outside me writing them. 

With fanfic, the end result of that is I basically am just inspired to write content where I see like….wasted potential, IMO. Books or comics or shows where there’s enough in the source material to capture my imagination and draw me to particular characters…..but beyond that, the source material is leaving a ton of stuff untouched or making a bunch of narrative choices that I’m just not engaged by.

So the thing about the Riordan books, is I like what’s actually on the page and don’t have any real specific…’gaps’ in the narrative that I feel a need to fill in or change or alter with different takes. They give me what I’m looking for from them so I just enjoy them as a reader rather than being inspired as a content creator.  And similarly, like, if I want to read or follow in my head a story using the Riordanverse or its premise…there’s more books to come in the already existing series, so I just don’t really feel that itch with that particular universe. I love mythology stuff in general, so I’d be more likely to write or imagine a fanfic that comes up with my own spin on mixing mythological elements with the Batfam, that I haven’t seen yet (something I actually did a lot of with Teen Wolf content I wrote)….rather than apply an existing mythological premise like Riordan’s to them.

So I just haven’t put much thought into even headcanons along those lines, and am not super likely to, because one other thing is one of the little angles about the Riordan books that I really really liked, was that like…..Percy isn’t the son of who you’d expect the main character of a series of Greek mythology books to be, y’know? Like, if you had to guess at the start who Percy’s dad would turn out to be, having no clues as to which specific god it might be…..most people would be likely to assume Zeus, or maybe Apollo. Poseidon seems like a fairly random choice….and that’s what made it work so well for me. Because it made Percy feel just that much more like a real character who just happened to be the main character of these books, rather than a character who’d been basically engineered to be the ideal protagonist of these books.

My point there being for me personally, it just wouldn’t work to try and make headcanons about which godly parent matches each Batkid most ideally, based on their divine attributes and the Batkid’s characterization. Its counter-intuitive to one of the things that really sucked me in most……so I could totally headcanon that Dick makes sense as a son of Zeus or Apollo or Helios or Hermes, because of his love of all things flying….but that wouldn’t really feel like a Riordan premise to me, y’know? 

So if I were to do that ever, it would be more likely that I’d just pick totally random gods to be each Batkid’s divine parent, and then from there headcanon how that affects the Batkid in question and how that ends up working into their existing characterization. Make the character and how this affected them grow out of the choice, rather than make the choice grow out of the character and who would be best/most affected by which god.

*Shrugs* But of course, once I do that, I’m kinda likely to just end up growing a whole story anyway, only it wouldn’t be one I’d ever feel a ton of motivation towards because like….its not really a story I NEED to see play out. Even just thinking about it, I end up diverted by stray thoughts like……okay, just as an example, totally spitballing here, but like, I just randomly tried picking a god to be Dick’s divine parent that would be somewhat different and not the most obvious or preferred choice, and thought okay what if Hephaestus were Dick’s biological father. 

Except then my brain does this thing where before I can even START thinking about how that would weave into Dick’s existing characterization or lead to new stories, I’m like okay, but Riordan already did ‘character finds out they’re the son of a god’, what ELSE could I do with a story about Dick and also Hephaestus. 

And then I’m off and running with like, okay, so because the Greek gods exist in the DC universe and the Titans because of Donna have even interacted with them a fair amount, what if Hephaestus is murdered and nobody knows by whom, so the Greek gods call upon Donna to recruit her friend, a detective even they respect, to solve the mystery. And so Dick is brought to Olympus to investigate, but in the process of searching through Hephaestus’ forge for clues, he ends up finding this mysterious trinket he feels drawn to and pockets, and in doing so, ends up with Hephaestus’ like, essence kinda imprinting on him….because the Divine Artificer had been the one to craft weapons that could kill even gods like him, so he of all the gods would most certainly be aware of the fact that there are things that could kill even them….making him the most likely to also craft a solution to even that particular problem, and thus design something that could help him cheat death, even if killed by a god-killing weapon. Hence the seemingly innocuous trinket that actually acted as kinda a godly flash drive to download his divinity and memories and self into a new vessel should his old one end up destroyed.

WHICH THEN, instead of exploring how Dick might be affected by having Hephaestus for a biological father or how having some of his divine attributes might explain certain traits or skills of Dick’s or complement them……which is still a story I’ve seen versions of already with Percy and Jason and the other main characters of the Riordan books….this premise lets me explore what if those divine attributes or whatever are instead kinda imposed upon Dick as he already is? What kind of internal struggle would result from that, given Dick’s fierce independence, and what kind of balance could be struck from Hephaestus’ divine nature as a craftsman and artificer like….possibly finding an outlet through Dick’s natural problem-solving instincts and existing detective/investigative talents….and so rather than ending up changing Dick, Dick’s own nature acts as a kind of filter that changes how Hephaestus’ vast array of attributes are focused, and in what ways.

And then plus you also get to have the whole “Dick drawing upon Hephaestus’ memories to try and solve what’s now weirdly in a way his own murder” thing, and that’s always just fun, y’know? LOL.

But yeah, that’s how my brain works and so even though its not what you were looking for, hopefully it was still of interest to you.

Also, just as a throwaway, another reason I’d probably always have trouble headcanoning any of the Batkids as having a godly parent based just on archetypes, is that like….they kinda already do. LOL. Given that Bruce has at many times over the decades been paralleled with Hades, and occupying the same place in the JLA pantheon as Hades occupies within the Olympian pantheon. Much like Clark is kind of Zeus, king of the heavens, and Arthur of course is Poseidon, and the Flashes have always been modeled after Hermes, and the Green Lanterns are Hephaestus and so on. So my mind kinda already flashes to ‘well, Dick’s dad is already like, the dark, brooding god of the Underworld, Judge of Souls and ultimate arbiter of justice, god of wealth and riches, with a helm that lets him vanish into shadows and pass unseen, and also not as dour as the hype would have you believe because he’s all of those things while also still being the kind of dork who would have a dog named Spot Ace the Bathound.

(The joke there is because Cerberus is just the Latinized form of the Greek word Kerberos, one translation of which is believed to possibly be ‘spotted.’ Aka Hades had a monstrous three-headed dog of legend, that actually the giant dork named Spot. Remind you of anyone?)