i love your reverse batgirl au!! do you mind writing more about them?
Okay so after going through the post I realized I wrote it at 2 am, so I'm going to simply rewrite it and then add more if that's okay <3
AU where Bruce adopts Barbara, Steph, Cass and Harper instead of the batboys - Batdaughters: Origins
Would like to start by saying: Damian never exists; Bruce doesn’t sleep with Talia because he's aroace in this universe no I don't make the rules he just is
Barbara Gordon is adopted by Jim Gordon after his brother and his sister in law, Barbara’s parents, die (as per canon.) When she’s six, he's killed by the Joker, who forces Barbara to watch. Bruce is too late to save Gordon and puts the blame for his death on himself, so he tries to atone by giving Barbara a home. Raising a daughter keeps him busy so he doesn’t visit Haley’s circus when it visits Gotham. Dick’s parents fall to the floor, and instead of Bruce, the Court of Owls take him in.
When Babs is 16, Bruce adopts Stephanie Brown. Steph’s father is Cluemaster but he’s put in Arkham early in her childhood. Stephanie’s mother is unable to overcome her addiction to pharmaceuticals (unlike in canon where she does overcome this) and this ends in her death. 11 year old Stephanie runs away from her social worker and ends up finding the batmobile in an alley. She hides under the car and her social worker passes by, but when Batman arrives she jumps out to avoid getting run over. He tries to take her back to foster care but she throws a brick at him and runs. Bruce decides to adopt her once he finds out her father is cluemaster, and when he takes her for waffles she agrees to ‘let him’ adopt her.
Harper Row is taken away from her alcoholic father when she’s 9 and is the only kid to actually end up with Bruce in a normal way. He’s officially a foster parent and she’s placed with him through the system. She tells Bruce that she has a brother, Cullen, who she hasn’t seen since being taken away from her father but Bruce is unable to figure out where he’d gone. Cullen was never registered in the foster care database and none of the workers that picked up Harper recalled there being another child.
When the Justice League encounters Lady Shiva a year later, she fights them and defeats Batman, but the combined forces of Wonder Woman and Superman force her capture and she’s questioned under the lasso. She tells them about her origin and that a man named David Cain had her biological daughter and was training her to be an assassin. Batman realizes that the daughter in question is still only 8, and adds her and David to his search for Cullen. He finds her being trained by David to be a ruthless killer and rescues her. He realizes that she’s mute and deadly and can’t grow up in a regular foster system so he takes her home with him.
Babs becomes Batgirl at 14, but is paralyzed at 17, a year after Steph joins the family. Then she takes the moniker oracle.
When Steph is older she doesn’t feel right taking on the batgirl name, so she becomes Robin. Steph and Bruce have a falling out when Bruce calls her reckless in the field and benches her so she distances herself from him and becomes Spoiler. She meets a kid named Tim in university who was emancipated from his parents when he was 16 and discovers that since he was a kid, he’s tried to follow batman and robin’s footsteps by fighting crime at night in a red domino and black clothes. Steph reveals that she was the Robin that Tim used to watch at night and takes him on as her partner, eventually training him to be a third Robin, one who was never trained by Batman: Red Robin.
At the same time, Harper spends years trying to find her brother, Cullen. She fights crime to find her brother without telling Bruce at first, taking on the codename Bluebird. When he finds out, Bruce takes her on as his partner, not his sidekick, which drives a wedge between her and Steph.
Cass had decided to live a normal life after having the choice taken away from her when she was young, but an attack on her school causes her to fight off a bunch of the rogue gallery to the point of near-death. She holds them off long enough for her school to evacuate and run. After she survives this, Barbara reaches out to her and tells her that if she ever wants it, the mantle of batgirl is there for her. Cass refuses it at first but takes it when she turns 15, deciding to train again, but this time to defend Gotham, and not kill. She becomes batgirl at 16.
Steph and Tim both join young justice and Babs was a part of the Teen Titans before being paralyzed.
When Bruce ‘dies’ for half a year, Cass gives the mantle of Batgirl to Steph and moves to Hong Kong to become Black Bat.
Harper moves in with Steph and befriends Tim, who believes that Bruce is alive. Nobody takes the mantle of Batman after Bruce’s ‘death.’
After he is rescued by Tim and Steph, Bruce returns to Gotham. Cass returns to be Black Bat and Steph goes back to being Spoiler, and Bruce and Steph finally reconcile.
They find out that Cullen was taken by the Court of Owls and turned into a Talon, and when they try to rescue him, they discover that a second Talon had taken a liking to him and was protecting him from the batfamily, seeing them as enemies.
So of course they take both Talons home. Bruce discovers that the second Talon is Dick Grayson and with Martian Manhunter’s help, they help them learn how to be human again.
Dick takes Cullen to live by themselves in a quiet area of Gotham, and Bruce leaves them be, knowing that they deserve to lead normal lives without continuing to be entangled in the batfamily. Only Harper visits.
At the same time, a new crime lord pops up, claiming to go by the red hood. Bruce fears another Joker situation and finds Red Hood to interrogate him and finds out that his name is Jason Todd. Jason, forced to work as a goon for two-face to earn money to support his mother, was a hostage of the Joker and beaten almost to death before Batman saved him, but he was too late to save Jason's mother. (we're ignoring the biological mother plot point here.) He wants to drive Batman to finally break his code and kill so that he’ll kill the Joker. After a fight between them that almost ends in Jason dying, Batman backs off and doesn’t turn him into the police. The Red Hood kills the Joker, but realizes that it didn't change anything. He almost turns the gun on himself but Bruce stops him. Bruce promises to leave him alone, acknowledging that Crime Alley is his territory, as long as he gives them information on a major trafficking ring in Gotham. Jason agrees and together they take the ring down.
After the Red Hood saves Cass from the collapse of a building, he and Cass strike up a tentative friendship. He becomes an anti-hero after sending the criminal underground into a civil war, ensuring the destruction of some of the larger crime families in Gotham. Then he becomes an ally of the batfamily, but still kills.
Duke's story is similar to canon except his parents are cured from the Joker Virus. He still joins the batfamily as the signal, and eventually joins the Outsiders team with Cass.
Send me asks if you want me to go into more detail with a part of this au!
