agates-link asked: I just spent the last 3 hours powering through all the NDND good end fics and sobbing big fat tears of FEELS SO GOOD. Your attention to detail throughtout your timeline is just BEAUTIFUL and needs some serious appreciating.<3 you mentioned that Damian officially recognized Gideon as a brother and a Wayne, how did the public take to it? For that matter, I don't remember if canon mentioned how the public took to DAMIAN suddenly showing up as Bruce's biological son. I would love to hear your ideas!
I’m a detail-oriented lady, and as you can see from my asks, I’m continually building my silly little AUs. That’s one of the main reasons why I put together my timeline post—-I wanted to make it easier for people to read my sprawling mess without wondering what the hell is going on. I don’t write the drabbles chronologically, but I try to make it so that readers won’t be spoiled for later drabbles when they’re reading the earlier ones. I do wonder sometimes how the drabbles transition!
I don’t remember off the top of my head if/how Damian’s public appearance was handled, but I imagine that Bruce’s false eccentricity went a long ways to padding the acceptance of his sons. I mean, look at him from an outside perspective—-he created this persona of a fairly dull, boisterous, playboy with a probable drinking problem. He’s always globetrotting with a model on his arm, showing up for most of the charity events he sets up—-but leaving early, for a whole list of lame excuses. He’s a vision of the excess of old money, so his choices are viewed with the same kind of “he’s a little nutty and disconnected from the rest of the world—-you know how celebrities are” we afford our media superstars.
Rich people don’t have to act like normal people, and Bruce has had a habit of adopting every black haired and blue eyed boy with a tragic past that he has come across. Some eccentric billionaires collect Wedgewood. Bruce Wayne collects sad little boys. I’m sure that there are armchair psychologists who watch him and theorize that this is how he deals with his own tragic family, so on and so forth. When Damian appears, he’s marketed as the youthful indiscretion of a rich boy sowing his wild oats—-a baby that his unnamed mother kept quiet until she wanted a paycheck.
Gideon was treated in a similar way, but Damian was careful about how he introduced him. He wasn’t treated like an accident, because Bruce’s philanthropy was what was lauded after his death, not his playboy promiscuity. By that point, Damian was thirty years old, a father of three, and launching Wayne Enterprises in crazy new directions with Tim and Dick’s help. He painted Gideon as a brother he thought he’d lost, the last part of the legacy Bruce Wayne had left the world.
And Dick just listened to his speech and was like oh god my Little D has grown up and is a big man who shares his feels and I am so proud a bloo bloo bloo.
