Moonshadows (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moonshadows) wrote2016-12-27 11:08 pm
moonshadows) wrote2016-12-27 11:08 pm
Table of Contents for Batman Beyond
I accidentally an AU. Explaining how, exactly, the AU works requires some knowledge of events from TAS and JL/JLU because there are differences that rippled down the timeline. The TL;DR is that Waller didn't scrap the Beyond Project, and she didn't stop with Warren and Mary McGinnis. Max is also a Wayne cuckoo laid in another man's nest. Terry finds out about his biological father and has an identity crisis so severe that it sends him to the hospital, which is where he is when Max realizes he's her half-brother. A more detailed explanation is below the links. Entries are, as usual, in chronological order.
Max finds her old man
Settling in
Dana gets dumped
Max and the Minotaur
First day back/on the job
Words with Gordon
Max calls Dick
More Words with Gordon
Static
The VR ROOM
Getting Payback
Contacting Waller
Future's so bright, I gotta wear shades
Max's Granny Goodness
Diana returns
The AU Explanation
First, unlike my other timeline, Selina did not have the freedom of running around as Catwoman and Batman wasn't quite so worried about her mental health. He gave in to the "I am the night, I know better" arrogance and decided that what was really best for Selina was to go straight, not grasping that she had emotional scars and exposed nerves that he was treading on by gently trying to force her into the mold of what he thought she should be. During the events of Catwalk, that came to a head and she snapped, lashing out against the subtle attempts to control her. After that, however, she realized that she'd crossed a very dangerous man and if she wanted to live to regret it, she'd have to act fast. She took Isis and went to Metropolis, where she sat on a rooftop and did her best to flag down Superman. She explained the situation, the five years of probation, the emotional damage it was causing her to not be Catwoman, and the "choice" Scarface gave her when he strong-armed her into his plan. She explained how as much as she cared for Batman and liked Bruce Wayne as a friend, neither of them were willing to try to understand her and all she wanted was a place where she could live in peace and neither of them could touch her. Being Catwoman wasn't about crime; it had never been about crime, it had always been freedom and yes, she'd stolen to benefit animals, but she'd never do that again if she could just have that freedom back.
Superman doesn't deal well with damsels in distress, and he knows that Batman WILL find her - and maybe he's a little disgusted that Bruce would unmask her and turn her in, and then court her as Bruce and fight alongside her as Batman and not have the courtesy of telling her who he is. And maybe the Justice League events have already started, and he knows Diana has feelings for Batman, but has he been giving her the cold shoulder because he's Batman and he has no time for romance, or because his heart belongs to Selina and he hasn't been honest with anyone about it? So he calls in Wonder Woman, because when a woman is crying about a man she usually wants to talk to another woman, and Diana has a right to know this anyway, and when everything is said and done, Diana takes Selina and Isis to Themiscera where the Catwoman can live in peace outside the reach of Batman or Bruce Wayne, and heal.
Diana and Clark Kent visit Dick Grayson secretly, since he's also been chafing under Batman's control and they're worried about him having a breakdown, too. The three of them agree to not tell anyone where Selina is and the other two fly off, but Dick has a confrontation with Bruce about being controlling and respect and Bruce not being the expert on who or what anyone should be. In the end, Dick leaves and becomes Nightwing and cuts nearly all contact with Bruce. Diana's also chilly towards him, and this extra source of frustration leads him to figure out what Lex Luthor is planning before he can remotely take over the Watchtower. He never has that confrontation with Waller in the Cadmus war room; she never shifts her position on working for the government or how she feels about Batman, or the wisdom of cloning Justice League members. And, because I seriously can't see how she could have figured it out, she doesn't know he's Bruce Wayne.
Fast-forward thirty years to the inception of the Batman Beyond Project. Why put all your eggs in one basket? Some two dozen couples scattered across the country are chosen, not because of their psych profiles matching Tomas and Martha's (how would she even know that?), but because the female's DNA closely matches Batman's X chromosome. The men are "inoculated", and Wayne babies start being born. Unlike the canon timeline, they're not left alone aside from an attempted orphaning at the age of eight; for one, Waller doesn't know that that's what spurred Batman's birth. Instead, children with promising psych profiles are guided, shaped into what she knows of Batman's personality. It wasn't a coincidence that Terry was in a gang; he needed to learn how to fight and fight dirty, so pressures were added to his life to push him in that direction. Everything about Terry McGinnis was dictated from the outside, like The Truman Show.
Meanwhile, in the Gibson household, Mrs. Gibson gives birth to a half-white baby that's clearly not the child of her black husband. He demands a paternity test, and when it proves that he's not the father, the yelling and divorce proceedings start. Their other daughter, ten at Max's birth, is fully old enough to understand that her little sister is to blame when their family is shattered. Max is neglected horribly, given the barest care needed to keep her from being a source of unwanted official attention. Not that they cared about her, but if she died or got taken away, her sister would be taken away, too. When the sister turned eighteen, their mother hung herself. Things got worse for Max, and schools and libraries became a refuge. They moved into a tiny, dirty apartment in the slums, barely one bedroom that her sister claimed. Even when she got married and moved out, Max wasn't allowed to go in because when social workers came to inspect, her sister would show up and pretend that she was still living there. Max got a stipend, barely enough for food. She learned to be a hacker and set about finding her real father.
The trail started at the fake flu shot, and from there she clawed her way into the Beyond Project's records. She realized that she wasn't the only one, but the identities of the other families weren't in that database. So she wrote a search algorithm to crawl through public records looking for a pattern like hers: divorce, and a child who didn't match his or her parents in looks but had chromosomes close to the one she didn't share with her sister. The only other Batbaby in Gotham had a much bigger file than hers: reams of information on training and conditioning to shape him into the next Batman. That helped her find a match; unfortunately, the match was in the hospital with severe psychological damage. So she went to his teachers and, helpful straight-A student that she was, offered to bring his homework and maybe tutor him. It wasn't hard to match his activities to Batman's once she knew to look.
She told him that she knew his secret, that they were half-siblings, and he lashed out at her because everything that made him special, everything that made him worthwhile, was a lie. A story written by someone else; his only worth was as Batman, there was no "Terry" beneath the scripting. Max countered that everything she was had marked her as "unacceptable" and shattered her family, and she was going to stick with him because he was the only family she had. She realized that by only scripting Batman and not the secret identity, they'd left Terry a huge opening in which to build an identity and break out of the mold they had planned for him. She vowed to hunt down the ones in charge, and their father, and take revenge for both of them and all their unidentified half-siblings. He told her their father was Bruce Wayne.
Rewind twenty years to Bruce Wayne's heart attack. In a very adult temper-tantrum, he not only shut down the Batcave, but he did his best to burn all the bridges leading to Batman. Naturally, the old friends he still had were worried about him and tried to help; he wasn't having any of it. If he couldn't be Batman, then he was worthless and he wasn't going to accept their pity or their empty promises that he could still help fight crime via computer and being the brains. He stopped answering the phone, deleted emails, even refused to answer the door. One by one they gave up and left him to be miserable, waiting for him to signal that he was ready to talk again. Superman sent Bruce Wayne cards every Christmas; Bruce Wayne burned them. After a few years, Diana (who had been prodding him obliquely over the "shape you into what I think you should be" thing every so often to see if he'd realized it was wrong and that he'd driven Selina and Dick away doing it) caught him outside and informed him that Selina Kyle, who had been living happily and peacefully on Themiscera all this time, had reached the end of her mortal lifespan and died and that no, the last name on her lips was Isis's, not his, because he'd hurt her and driven her away. She told him point-blank that Selina hadn't wanted to even hear about him until he'd expressed regret over how he treated her, and that she'd kept Selina's fate a secret because he'd never shown that regret.
Several years after that, when it really sank in that no one was going to try to talk him out of his pit of depression, he finally realized that if he wanted anyone to come to his funeral, he was going to have to do the reaching out. Initial attempts were little more than angry assertions that he'd been right and they should agree, and being soundly rebuffed put him off of the attempt for another few years. Then Terry wandered into his life, and he set about trying to shape the boy into Batman. He was a dick about it. Maybe Terry saw a photo of a younger Bruce and realized that he looked more like the old man than he did like Mr. or Mrs. McGinnis. Maybe Bruce figured it out first and went digging and let something slip about the Beyond Project. However it happened, Terry realized his entire life and identity was a lie and fell into a near-comatose depressive apathy.
The arrival of Max into both of their lives was a tangible relief. She could, would, and did yell at Bruce for pushing Terry too hard or for trying to shape her into something. She craved the kind of pressure to exceed and expectations of perfection that had damaged other young people Bruce had been a mentor for, acting as a target for the impulses Bruce knew were harmful but didn't know how to break. Max made good on her promise to stick with Terry, not only standing up for him but helping him discover who he was when he wasn't being Batman. In addition to that, she started picking up the babysitting and household chores he didn't have time to do when he was on duty, experiencing something like a healthy family environment for the first time in her life. With the pressure off of him, Terry could come to terms with the fact that he actually wanted to be Batman without feeling like he had no choice in the matter. Bruce learned through trial and being yelled at how not to be a controlling douche, and attempts at rebuilding went better with a fierce, independent, and stable Max there to demonstrate that the coal mine was still safe.
By the time Max and Terry approached graduation and their respective 18th birthdays, things were looking pretty good. No one person could do everything Batman had done in his prime and still be emotionally healthy, Bruce Wayne included, but by splitting the expectations the two of them managed pretty well. When Superman started feeling Terry out on the subject of joining the Justice League (no mind-control starfish here, thank you), he got violently turned down. Gotham was Batman's responsibility, not the world. When Max went 'hmmmm' at the idea of joining in his stead, Terry enthusiastically backed the idea - in no small part because it would keep them off of his case. With the results of genetic compatibility coming back - they teamed up to get their old man a new heart for their birthdays - the three of them quietly and gently broke the news to Mrs. McGinnis. A horrible lab mix-up, the doctors said, a blood sample being mistaken for something else, lots of technical terms, but the end result was that her late ex-husband had fathered Bruce Wayne's children - and they weren't the only ones. The record was quietly fixed to show that Max was Bruce's daughter, and suddenly Matt realized he could grow up to be CEO of Wayne Industries. They also revealed who Batman was and had been, and Mary and Matt probably moved into Wayne Manor as Max was moving to the Justice League's headquarters.
I think that ought to cover everything...
Max finds her old man
Settling in
Dana gets dumped
Max and the Minotaur
First day back/on the job
Words with Gordon
Max calls Dick
More Words with Gordon
Static
The VR ROOM
Getting Payback
Contacting Waller
Future's so bright, I gotta wear shades
Max's Granny Goodness
Diana returns
The AU Explanation
First, unlike my other timeline, Selina did not have the freedom of running around as Catwoman and Batman wasn't quite so worried about her mental health. He gave in to the "I am the night, I know better" arrogance and decided that what was really best for Selina was to go straight, not grasping that she had emotional scars and exposed nerves that he was treading on by gently trying to force her into the mold of what he thought she should be. During the events of Catwalk, that came to a head and she snapped, lashing out against the subtle attempts to control her. After that, however, she realized that she'd crossed a very dangerous man and if she wanted to live to regret it, she'd have to act fast. She took Isis and went to Metropolis, where she sat on a rooftop and did her best to flag down Superman. She explained the situation, the five years of probation, the emotional damage it was causing her to not be Catwoman, and the "choice" Scarface gave her when he strong-armed her into his plan. She explained how as much as she cared for Batman and liked Bruce Wayne as a friend, neither of them were willing to try to understand her and all she wanted was a place where she could live in peace and neither of them could touch her. Being Catwoman wasn't about crime; it had never been about crime, it had always been freedom and yes, she'd stolen to benefit animals, but she'd never do that again if she could just have that freedom back.
Superman doesn't deal well with damsels in distress, and he knows that Batman WILL find her - and maybe he's a little disgusted that Bruce would unmask her and turn her in, and then court her as Bruce and fight alongside her as Batman and not have the courtesy of telling her who he is. And maybe the Justice League events have already started, and he knows Diana has feelings for Batman, but has he been giving her the cold shoulder because he's Batman and he has no time for romance, or because his heart belongs to Selina and he hasn't been honest with anyone about it? So he calls in Wonder Woman, because when a woman is crying about a man she usually wants to talk to another woman, and Diana has a right to know this anyway, and when everything is said and done, Diana takes Selina and Isis to Themiscera where the Catwoman can live in peace outside the reach of Batman or Bruce Wayne, and heal.
Diana and Clark Kent visit Dick Grayson secretly, since he's also been chafing under Batman's control and they're worried about him having a breakdown, too. The three of them agree to not tell anyone where Selina is and the other two fly off, but Dick has a confrontation with Bruce about being controlling and respect and Bruce not being the expert on who or what anyone should be. In the end, Dick leaves and becomes Nightwing and cuts nearly all contact with Bruce. Diana's also chilly towards him, and this extra source of frustration leads him to figure out what Lex Luthor is planning before he can remotely take over the Watchtower. He never has that confrontation with Waller in the Cadmus war room; she never shifts her position on working for the government or how she feels about Batman, or the wisdom of cloning Justice League members. And, because I seriously can't see how she could have figured it out, she doesn't know he's Bruce Wayne.
Fast-forward thirty years to the inception of the Batman Beyond Project. Why put all your eggs in one basket? Some two dozen couples scattered across the country are chosen, not because of their psych profiles matching Tomas and Martha's (how would she even know that?), but because the female's DNA closely matches Batman's X chromosome. The men are "inoculated", and Wayne babies start being born. Unlike the canon timeline, they're not left alone aside from an attempted orphaning at the age of eight; for one, Waller doesn't know that that's what spurred Batman's birth. Instead, children with promising psych profiles are guided, shaped into what she knows of Batman's personality. It wasn't a coincidence that Terry was in a gang; he needed to learn how to fight and fight dirty, so pressures were added to his life to push him in that direction. Everything about Terry McGinnis was dictated from the outside, like The Truman Show.
Meanwhile, in the Gibson household, Mrs. Gibson gives birth to a half-white baby that's clearly not the child of her black husband. He demands a paternity test, and when it proves that he's not the father, the yelling and divorce proceedings start. Their other daughter, ten at Max's birth, is fully old enough to understand that her little sister is to blame when their family is shattered. Max is neglected horribly, given the barest care needed to keep her from being a source of unwanted official attention. Not that they cared about her, but if she died or got taken away, her sister would be taken away, too. When the sister turned eighteen, their mother hung herself. Things got worse for Max, and schools and libraries became a refuge. They moved into a tiny, dirty apartment in the slums, barely one bedroom that her sister claimed. Even when she got married and moved out, Max wasn't allowed to go in because when social workers came to inspect, her sister would show up and pretend that she was still living there. Max got a stipend, barely enough for food. She learned to be a hacker and set about finding her real father.
The trail started at the fake flu shot, and from there she clawed her way into the Beyond Project's records. She realized that she wasn't the only one, but the identities of the other families weren't in that database. So she wrote a search algorithm to crawl through public records looking for a pattern like hers: divorce, and a child who didn't match his or her parents in looks but had chromosomes close to the one she didn't share with her sister. The only other Batbaby in Gotham had a much bigger file than hers: reams of information on training and conditioning to shape him into the next Batman. That helped her find a match; unfortunately, the match was in the hospital with severe psychological damage. So she went to his teachers and, helpful straight-A student that she was, offered to bring his homework and maybe tutor him. It wasn't hard to match his activities to Batman's once she knew to look.
She told him that she knew his secret, that they were half-siblings, and he lashed out at her because everything that made him special, everything that made him worthwhile, was a lie. A story written by someone else; his only worth was as Batman, there was no "Terry" beneath the scripting. Max countered that everything she was had marked her as "unacceptable" and shattered her family, and she was going to stick with him because he was the only family she had. She realized that by only scripting Batman and not the secret identity, they'd left Terry a huge opening in which to build an identity and break out of the mold they had planned for him. She vowed to hunt down the ones in charge, and their father, and take revenge for both of them and all their unidentified half-siblings. He told her their father was Bruce Wayne.
Rewind twenty years to Bruce Wayne's heart attack. In a very adult temper-tantrum, he not only shut down the Batcave, but he did his best to burn all the bridges leading to Batman. Naturally, the old friends he still had were worried about him and tried to help; he wasn't having any of it. If he couldn't be Batman, then he was worthless and he wasn't going to accept their pity or their empty promises that he could still help fight crime via computer and being the brains. He stopped answering the phone, deleted emails, even refused to answer the door. One by one they gave up and left him to be miserable, waiting for him to signal that he was ready to talk again. Superman sent Bruce Wayne cards every Christmas; Bruce Wayne burned them. After a few years, Diana (who had been prodding him obliquely over the "shape you into what I think you should be" thing every so often to see if he'd realized it was wrong and that he'd driven Selina and Dick away doing it) caught him outside and informed him that Selina Kyle, who had been living happily and peacefully on Themiscera all this time, had reached the end of her mortal lifespan and died and that no, the last name on her lips was Isis's, not his, because he'd hurt her and driven her away. She told him point-blank that Selina hadn't wanted to even hear about him until he'd expressed regret over how he treated her, and that she'd kept Selina's fate a secret because he'd never shown that regret.
Several years after that, when it really sank in that no one was going to try to talk him out of his pit of depression, he finally realized that if he wanted anyone to come to his funeral, he was going to have to do the reaching out. Initial attempts were little more than angry assertions that he'd been right and they should agree, and being soundly rebuffed put him off of the attempt for another few years. Then Terry wandered into his life, and he set about trying to shape the boy into Batman. He was a dick about it. Maybe Terry saw a photo of a younger Bruce and realized that he looked more like the old man than he did like Mr. or Mrs. McGinnis. Maybe Bruce figured it out first and went digging and let something slip about the Beyond Project. However it happened, Terry realized his entire life and identity was a lie and fell into a near-comatose depressive apathy.
The arrival of Max into both of their lives was a tangible relief. She could, would, and did yell at Bruce for pushing Terry too hard or for trying to shape her into something. She craved the kind of pressure to exceed and expectations of perfection that had damaged other young people Bruce had been a mentor for, acting as a target for the impulses Bruce knew were harmful but didn't know how to break. Max made good on her promise to stick with Terry, not only standing up for him but helping him discover who he was when he wasn't being Batman. In addition to that, she started picking up the babysitting and household chores he didn't have time to do when he was on duty, experiencing something like a healthy family environment for the first time in her life. With the pressure off of him, Terry could come to terms with the fact that he actually wanted to be Batman without feeling like he had no choice in the matter. Bruce learned through trial and being yelled at how not to be a controlling douche, and attempts at rebuilding went better with a fierce, independent, and stable Max there to demonstrate that the coal mine was still safe.
By the time Max and Terry approached graduation and their respective 18th birthdays, things were looking pretty good. No one person could do everything Batman had done in his prime and still be emotionally healthy, Bruce Wayne included, but by splitting the expectations the two of them managed pretty well. When Superman started feeling Terry out on the subject of joining the Justice League (no mind-control starfish here, thank you), he got violently turned down. Gotham was Batman's responsibility, not the world. When Max went 'hmmmm' at the idea of joining in his stead, Terry enthusiastically backed the idea - in no small part because it would keep them off of his case. With the results of genetic compatibility coming back - they teamed up to get their old man a new heart for their birthdays - the three of them quietly and gently broke the news to Mrs. McGinnis. A horrible lab mix-up, the doctors said, a blood sample being mistaken for something else, lots of technical terms, but the end result was that her late ex-husband had fathered Bruce Wayne's children - and they weren't the only ones. The record was quietly fixed to show that Max was Bruce's daughter, and suddenly Matt realized he could grow up to be CEO of Wayne Industries. They also revealed who Batman was and had been, and Mary and Matt probably moved into Wayne Manor as Max was moving to the Justice League's headquarters.
I think that ought to cover everything...
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-09-08 07:04 am (UTC)(link)I am impressed you managed to post in 2016 and yet I am reading the posts today!
I would love to see what happened to Waller, and how Max's life in the League went if you should ever feel inspired.
no subject
I'm using my time-travel powers for good! Seriously though, "date out of order" is a glorious thing. I like having one entry a day, and I like having all my TOC in one place where they won't get lost in the sea of ficlets.
*checks list, digs through folder* ...I do have two more pieces written. I'll try to get them up this week. Sheesh, I need to make a list.