I am 100% here for AUs where Tim’s dad forces him to stop being Robin, but “Batman needs a Robin,” so Tim goes to Steph in civvies with his bag full of Robin gear to ask her to take up the mantle.
Mainly, I have the following two moments stuck in my head:
Steph: *answers the door to an exhausted, kinda freaked-out Tim*
Steph: “Wha—”
Tim, slightly frantic: “My dad found out.”
Steph: *grabs Tim by the front of his shirt and drags him inside, slamming the door behind him*
(and)
Steph, staring at the Robin gear: “You can’t be serious.”
Tim: “Please, Steph? You’re the only one I can trust with this.”
.
(Unfortunately, these fics are few & far between, so if anyone has any fic recs…)
Okay, but Jason and Damian have both tried to kill Tim because they both desperately want Tim to be a member of the Dead Robin Club. They just want to have more things in common with their big/little brother. They'd throw him in The Pit right after, but he needs to have the experience so they can bond! They just don't know how to express their feelings.
Bonus:
Steph: *in the background* Should I tell them that there are better ways to bond?
Had the thought “How would the Dynamic Duo of Batman!Dick and Robin!Stephanie have gone?” and immediately started tearing Preboot canon apart and rebuilding it like a LEGO set.
~
Firstly, we gotta make sure Damian isn’t getting sidelined, and for that I propose he and Tim are a team for BruceQuest. Have Damian’s yearning to get to know his dad outweigh his dislike/jealousy/etc of Tim, and highlight Tim’s canonical compassion and forgiving nature.
Either they both make new mantles for this, or they’re both color-coded Robins. Red Robin for Tim, since he’s using Kon’s colors, Green or Blue Robin for Damian (I like Green for he ties to his mom, but him trying to make his own version of the Nightwing suit in some attempt to outrank Tim and everyone calling him Blue Robin would be very funny).
Things start out tense, Damian is only listening to Tim because a) Tim will just have a Titan pick Damian up and drop him back off in Gotham if he’s too much trouble like he was during Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul, and b) Tim is the only person who believes Bruce is alive and is cautiously keeping some of the methodology of proving it to himself at first.
In the original 2009 Red Robin comic, Tim repeatedly got sidetracked with hero work during his quest. Have that keep happening, and actually spend more time in that period than RR did, because it’s part of Damian’s growth. He starts out pissed at the delays and confused by Tim’s insistence on helping strangers. Tim gives some talks about the Bat philosophy and about why he keeps coming back to the hero life despite everything it’s taken from him.
Damian gets thanked by some of the people they rescue, and slowly shifts from pride in his fighting skills to pride in helping people. Eventually starts actively looking for people to help while they’re searching for artifacts. Tim is so flipping proud of him.
Sets us up for some big choices when the League of Assassins finally gets involved.
~
Okay, back to Stephanie, rewinding the comics even further:
1: Don’t kill off Arthur ‘Cluemaster’ Brown, we need him for later.
2: Tim & Steph never date because this is my LEGO set and I want more platonic boy-girl friend pairs in fiction, dang it. Bruce never tells Steph Tim’s identity and Tim is still keeping it secret. Rather than stalking Tim at school and seeing another girl kiss him, Stephanie and Tim are in the middle of an ongoing argument about secret identities when Jack discovers Tim is Robin and makes him step down.
Tim contacts Steph over the phone to let her know why Spoiler won’t be seeing him around, and that’s when she pulls what she did in canon of making her own Robin suit and volunteering with Batman.
Keep most of War Games, but nix the prolonged torture (because fuck that shit) in favor of quickly-gained but extensive injuries (she was tossed off a building? A building fell on her while she was saving someone?) so she really does need a long recovery period, complete with Dr. Thompkins taking her out of the country.
Honestly not sure if they should still fake her death. If yes, I think it should be Bruce’s idea.
This keeps Steph out of the way so we don’t need to rearrange the in-between canon too much, and potentially adds more fuel to the Keeping Secrets vs Not Keeping Secrets arguments.
The start of our big change for Stephanie’s arc is Violent Tendencies. Instead of agreeing to Bruce’s messed up plan, Stephanie is raring to atone for the lives destroyed back in War Games, and what do you know, some motherfucker just started another city wide gang war!
Spoiler works with Robin to stop Ulysses Armstrong. They never worked their shit out before she first left town, so it’s tense, and they fight, but they prioritize stopping the bad guys and bringing what peace is possible in Gotham.
Have repeated moments where Stephanie’s temper and instinct to argue almost messes things up, but she reins herself in to focus on butt-kicking and detective work. Have Tim notice this newer self-control, and have Steph notice changes in Tim, too.
At least one instance, preferably more, of Stephanie meeting someone who was hurt or lost a loved one in War Games, and wrestling with the fresh reminder of her guilt.
If we want to have a two-steps-forward, one-step-back situation, Tim gets caught in the blast of Armstrong’s bomb because after one of their fights, Stephanie stormed off in a temper, leaving Tim to deal with a two-person job on his own.
This sets up Stephanie second-guessing her decision to keep being a hero. If her own temper keeps getting in the way, should she really be doing this?
If we don’t want that, have it be that Tim takes the brunt of the blast because he threw Stephanie to safety or threw himself on top of her. Because that’s the kind of hero Tim is, because at this point in her arc Steph needs reassurance that her friend still cares about her despite her mistakes, and because it’s an example of heroism Stephanie needs to decide if she wants to copy or not.
Stephanie wants to be a hero.
Does she want to be the kind of hero who throws herself between another person and a bomb?
So either scenario, we set up for Stephanie to be doing some introspection when Bruce gets tossed into the timestream.
~
/points at the fried clone-corpse nearly everyone thinks is Bruce/ “Well he ain't gettin’ any deader!”
Tim calls up Cassandra during the whole Battle For The Cowl incident. She needs to wrap up an investigation, but comes back as soon as she can, which is when the dust has settled. Welcome back to Gotham, Batgirl!
(Cass is the Batgirl to both Tim & Steph’s Robin. She gets her own solo book back and has lots of interactions with Babs during this era.)
Not sure whose idea it is for Stephanie to be Robin again; Tim resigning himself to Dick not helping with BruceQuest? Dick acknowledging Batman needs a Robin and seeing Spoiler is struggling? Stephanie herself, volunteering for the second time?
Regardless, very early on, Arthur Brown gets out of jail or comes back to town and is being a Problem. Stephanie’s got a lot of anger, and Dick helps her deal with that. This is both an echo of Stephanie’s introduction, when she tried to kill her dad, and a way of bringing up Dick’s roots as Robin. He wanted to kill Tony Zucco, remember?
One former hot-headed Robin who’s learned how to find balance and prioritize justice over revenge helping the next generation do the same!
Meanwhile, Jason is also around being a Problem, providing straight up antagonism, but also a different opinion on how vigilantism in Gotham should work, so that Stephanie has multiple views to wrestle with.
Stephanie is a middle-class kid from the suburbs, who, as Jason put it to Tim when breaking into Titans Tower, “slept in a real bed”. But she’s also got a (recovering) drug-addict mother and a criminal father, providing points of commonality for Jason to work with. Remember his speech to Mia Dearden during the Green Arrow crossover?
Jason also plays on Stephanie’s guilt, talking about the fallout of the gang war she started, all of the ripple effects that kept going after the initial burst of violence was over. Describes some of his Under the Red Hood crime lord takeover work as “cleaning up your mess.”
Stephanie regrets everything about War Games, Dick is helping her do better going forward, whereas Jason’s argument is that she should have been more decisively violent at the start. It’s hard for all the mafia bosses to fight each other and get the little people caught up in it if the mafia bosses are dead.
During one altercation between Batman & Robin and the Red Hood, Jason punts Black Mask’s head to them and sarcastically says “You’re welcome.”
Arthur’s current criminal enterprise should directly affect Stephanie’s life in some negative way, so that all of this is fresh, not a It’s In The Past situation, and also be endangering civilians’ lives.
This arc has a big climatic scene of Dick being restrained while Jason gives Stephanie the chance to kill her dad.
(We know she’s not gonna, because she’s the Robin in Batman & Robin, but it should be as suspenseful as we can make it.)
~
Meanwhile over in BruceQuest, Tim & Damian are bonding over being raised with high expectations, and confusing relationships with one’s parents. Tim finally allowing himself to think & say negative things about Jack in order to help Damian grapple with his own upbringing? Heck yes.
Damian & Tim & the crushing weight of family legacies & parental expectations!
Tim being allowed by the narrative to be a big brother to Damian like Dick was to Tim!
Damian coming to see Tim as his brother despite his upbringing focusing on blood, and expressing remorse for the introductory murder attempt!
Ra’s trying to pit them against each other and getting his ass kicked!
Tim standing up to Bruce about his toxic habits once they rescue him because Tim refuses to let Damian go through the same crap he did!
~
Since dads are a big thing for both of the above arcs, we could go for three and bring back David Cain for Cass to deal with. Or keep him away, but bring him up in Cass & Steph’s shared scenes. They bonded over having terrible dads in Batgirl 2000, we can have callbacks.
Tim was sending progress reports back to Gotham during BruceQuest (because whether he left on good or bad terms, he wants the Bats to know what’s going on in case something happens to him and the ten year old he’s in charge of needs a rescue).
Once a week Cass makes popcorn and Babs reads the reports aloud. They make bingo cards for What Crazy Shit The Boys Got Up To This Week. When Tim gets home he makes bingo cards about Batgirl & Oracle’s shenanigans (while stealing some of theirs for his scrapbook). Stephanie demands Batman & Robin bingo cards too, and we discover Babs actually made some years ago when Dick was still Robin.
~
There are a lot of different ways who has what mantle could shake out once these arcs are over (in the very short time before the universe reset) but instead of getting into that I’m just going to imagine everyone reunited & hugging.
Not specifically built around that concept, though I fully admit my Reverse!Robins AU is very, very Steph-centric (Red Hood!Steph, my beloved…)
For a full Robin!Steph AU, though, I certainly know what I’d want to see, and that tends to be how most of my AUs begin. Let’s see…
I want Steph to have her own chance to lead the Teen Titans, but I’ve very little idea who I would put on her team.
— My only thought is Argent, because I vaguely remember seeing a page somewhere where Argent was like, “All this hero stuff, I’m just realizing it’s like, real,” and Steph was standing there like, “No shit, Sherlock.”
— Maybe Halo, because I’m reading the original Batman & the Outsiders right now, and Halo’s fun; I think Halo’s flightiness & amnesia-turned-dark-backstory could bounce really well off having Steph for a mentor, since (despite being an agent of chaos,) Steph is actually pretty grounded & realistic in her worldview, and would be a great mentor for the “your past/roots/origin doesn’t have to define you” thing Halo really struggles with. Plus, you could have a running joke of people assuming Halo is the team leader because she’s older & has powers, while Steph is like, “I’M RIGHT! HERE!”
Steph has the right to face off against an evil doppelgänger who isn’t just a shapeshifter mimicking her for a brief time. Clone, alternate self, some sort of VR thing gone wild, I don’t care, I want that “dark reflection” episode, okay?
Steph has the right to foil at least one alien invasion.
Steph has the right to see the ~dark~future~ where she becomes Batman (Steph would make an awesome Batman, in my opinion, but it would require a great tragedy to get her there; she never would if Dick, Tim, Cass, or any of the extended family I don’t know so well were capable of taking up the mantle.) (I believe I have already made my opinions on Batman!Jason & Batman!Damian clear.)
You know that story all the boy Robins get, where they sacrifice themselves for their team, only to actually survive and have everyone reaffirm how loved, valued, & relied upon they are? Yeah, Steph deserves that too.
I think there’s a great running gag in a true Robin!Steph AU where she keeps turning up at Tim’s house to “bail him out,” or ask for advice, and Tim’s dad never realizes Steph is the new Robin, so he’s completely okay with it. He thinks this is Tim having a normal social life.
— I also think there should be an episode where some major event requires all hands on deck while Steph is out with Tim, and Tim has a small crisis over what to do, only for Steph to throw her old Spoiler costume right in his face. “What are you waiting for, dumbass? Suit up!”/“I promised my dad no bat stuff…”/“SPOILER IS NOT A BAT!” Then you get Robin!Steph & Spoiler!Tim fighting back-to-back.
— Could be a great chance for Tim to formally give his blessing for Steph being Robin at the end when she drops him off at home, as he holds out the folded Spoiler suit to return it (“You kicked a lot of ass out there. You know, for an amateur.”) Steph presses it back into his hands with a smile. (“Keep it. In case of emergency, and all that. Can’t have some civilian risking my rep.”)
Y’know what? I want an episode where Nightwing was supposed to babysit Steph & her team, but he gets de-aged back to like 14 during the mission. Steph’s Titans desperately scramble to find a cure and hide this fact from the adults, while Dick & Steph at first clash over their differences as Robin before bonding over being absolute chaos gremlins (much to the horror of everyone around them.)
— Include a running joke once Dick finds out Steph is technically younger than he is, where he keeps stubbornly calling her his little sister no matter how much Steph protests that she is A) currently older than him, & B) not one of Bruce’s kids.
— Once again, this plot should end with Robin!Dick pausing before taking the cure, and telling Steph he doesn’t know how much of this he’s going to remember when he goes back to normal, but he thinks she makes a pretty awesome Robin. (Then he takes the cure, turns back into Nightwing, and immediately hugs Steph hard enough to lift her off her feet, laughing over her protests and saying he’s just showing his appreciation for his little sister. Steph continues to yell about not being Batman’s kid.)
