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The whole world changed and no one seems to notice but me.
A young woman with a blonde ponytail sits on edge of a building, purple sneakers kicking the brick as her legs dangle over the side. There is a backpack beside her, a bit of slick black material with a splash of purple peaking out. Her gaze drifts from a handful of stars to a bright beacon in the sky: the bat signal.
No one.
Behind her on the roof there is the outline of a large blue box.
***
24 hours earlier
What the hell?
Batgirl opens her eyes. She is flat on her back on the street, her blonde hair twisted in the asphalt and her purple cape the only barrier she has between herself and the hard ground. The first thing she sees is the night sky of Gotham City. Around her, the tall, gritty buildings are lit by street lamps.
She sits up, pulling herself to her feet with a wince. The last thing she remembers… she was on the subway. Definitely not here.
She touches behind her ear and speaks. “Proxy? You there?”
Silence.
“Oracle? Anybody? You’ve got a very confused Batgirl here. Seriously guys, is this thing on?”
More silence.
She looks around, getting her bearings. Her gaze drifts up to a solitary form against the backdrop of the building beside her. A figure jumping onto the rooftop. No cape. A familiar silhouette.
She immediately takes off after it. She leaps, catching the fire escape halfway up, and climbs with some serious skill, sprinting once she gets to the top of the building so that she can make a running jump, her cape fluttering behind her.
The figure she was following freezes once she lands on the same rooftop, just beside the wall of the outcropping that holds the door to stairs down to the building. He turns. It’s Nightwing, his face expressionless under the mask. A suit that isn’t exactly like she remembers, but she recognizes Dick Grayson all the same. Nightwing again, not Batman.
“Who the hell are you?”
Batgirl’s expression is just as blank, too surprised to even register that.
“Um. Hi. I’m Batgirl.” She waves at him. “Did someone knock you on the head or something?”
“You are not Batgirl.” Nightwing advances on her, looking her up and down, taking in every detail. “Are you some kid playing dress-up? Where did you get the suit?”
“Oh, very funny.” Her hands go to her hips. “What is this, prank Stephanie day? Do you really think I need more hazing after all this time? I just woke up on the street when the last thing I remember is being across town. Some answers would be nice here, Dick.”
She doesn’t know whether to be pissed off or freaked out.
Suddenly, Nightwing grabs her and pushes her against the wall. “What did you call me? And who the hell is Stephanie?”
Okay, going with freaked out.
Holding her against the wall with one forearm, Nightwing doesn’t wait for her to respond, and instead raises his other wrist to his mouth and says, “Batgirl? Where are you? I’ve come across something really weird here…” Wait, who the hell is he talking to?
“Dick, let me go!” She struggles, though it’s half-hearted as she has no intention of hurting him. “It’s me, Stephanie, Stephanie Brown. Batgirl? Former Robin?” She grits her teeth. “Former girlfriend of Tim Drake?”
He looks genuinely surprised, and loosens his grip a little. “You’re delusional.”
No, she’s pretty sure that he’s the one who’s delusional. And she’s really sorry to have to do this…
She kicks him, hard, and it’s enough to catch him off guard. She twists and ducks underneath him, and takes off running. He runs after her, but it’s no use.
The other Robins had always been better at a lot of things, but she can still run the fastest.
***
Oops.
She can see Batman’s eyes, cold and unfeeling through his mask. “Tell me how you got in here.”
He has his hand at her throat and is holding her approximately a foot off the ground. He’s already ripped her mask off, but betrays not even a glimmer of recognition. Around them, the batcave is all stark gray stone and steel. Familiar and yet not.
She really, really should have tried harder to find Barbara first. But when that proved difficult, coming to the batcave had seemed like such a good idea…
“I know the way. Please, hear me out… Bruce. Please.” Her voice is a slight croak.
Those cold eyes widen just barely enough to register surprise. And his hand loosens enough that she can breathe properly, at least.
“It’s me, Stephanie… I don’t know why no one recognizes me. But I’m Stephanie, I really am, Batgirl and everything. I’ve got the suit in my bag.”
“Sit.” Batman’s command is cold, terse, and he pushes her down into a chair. A few minutes later he’s gotten fingerprints and DNA and his fingers are flying over his computer.
“You don’t exist.” This is how he eventually acknowledges her when he looks back.
She shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Your fingerprints, your DNA, your identity – they aren’t in any database I can access. You don’t exist.” He stands up and walks over to her again. “You say you are Batgirl. Tell me your story.”
A little shaky, Stephanie tells him. She starts, almost reluctantly, with being Spoiler, moving onto her relationship with Tim, her time as Robin, her faked death, her return, her change of mantle. He barely has any reaction throughout, except for the part where she tells him how he’d thought her dead, and the flicker of emotion in his eyes is only a flash and then it’s gone.
And when she is done, the first thing he says is, “If you were actually Robin you’d have been memorialized. You would have a costume here under glass. You don’t exist, Stephanie. So either this is a very elaborate ruse, perhaps including a delusion of which you have convinced yourself…”
Stephanie begins to protest, but he is already crossing the room. “There is a possible alternate explanation, which seems not implausible only because of the timing. Earlier today an acquaintance brought me this.” He returns with a piece of paper, and she sees upon closer inspection that it is a letter.
“This is a letter from my father,” he continues.* “From an another version of my father, still alive. In an alternate Gotham, a parallel universe that was wrong and then was corrected.”
Stephanie blinks, confused. “An alternate universe? What does that even mean?”
“It means that very recently the world changed. That something transpired to shift the universe into a new form with a different history. A different course of events. And I have no idea how it might have happened, but if everything you say is true, then perhaps you are a remnant of that universe. Because it isn’t that we don’t remember you. It’s that you don’t exist here.”
“I exist!” Stephanie jumps to her feet, bellowing at him. “I am a person, and I was a Robin, a real Robin, I don’t care what anyone says. And I’m Batgirl now and I won’t let you or the freaking universe take that away from me.”
He could have stopped her if he wants to, but he clearly doesn’t. Because when Stephanie runs, she finds no resistance, and she is out of the batcave and on a long, deserted road before she breaks down and cries.
* See Flashpoint Vol 2 #5
***
The next day, Stephanie confirms what Batman told her. It is like a montage of her life colliding with this universe’s wrongness.
She finds her mother’s house with an unfamiliar family living in it. At the public library she searches directories until she finds her mother instead – in another city, childless. She uses the same directory to find another address, this time in Gotham City.
She doesn’t dare put on the Batgirl suit, but she takes her backpack and waits outside Barbara Gordon’s apartment. She follows her, quickly and silently, until she eventually sees Batgirl emerge like a phoenix from the ashes. Barbara, young and whole, swinging towards a rooftop. Patrolling, just as Stephanie once had. There is no Oracle in this world. No Proxy. But Barbara has her legs, and how can Stephanie think that a wrong thing?
She thinks of tracking down Tim, but no. No, not yet. The lack of recognition from Batman and Nightwing is one thing, but she isn’t made of stone.
She goes to one of her favorite rooftops, instead. She needs to see all of Gotham. The city that doesn’t know her.
***
Now.
When Stephanie sees the bat signal in the night sky, she considers for a moment going to it. What does she do now, after all? Stephanie Brown might not exist, but she’s still here and she can’t help that. Should she talk to Bruce again? Introduce herself to Barbara? Try to make a new life even if it just seems like an imperfect copy of the old one?
The footsteps behind her are light enough that she doesn’t hear him approach until he speaks.
“Stephanie Brown,” he says, and somehow makes he name sound like a compliment. A commendation of the highest order.
She hops up from the ledge and turns towards him, reaching instinctively for her backpack. The young man in the brown suit and the red bow tie is completely unfamiliar. He also seems just as at ease on the roof as she does.
“Excuse me?” Does he know her? Because no one knows her, apparently.
“You’re Stephanie Brown,” he says, sliding his hands into his pockets and rocking slightly on his feet. “You don’t know me but I know you. Which must be quite a relief considering what you’ve probably figured out in the past, oh - ” He looks at his wrist, but there’s no watch there. “Day or so, or was it a universe ago? Hard to keep track. Hullo, I’m the Doctor.”
“The Doctor,” she repeats, skeptical. Had that blue box been there when she’d sat down?
“Yes, the Doctor. I’m sort of an expert in this whole wibbly wobbly alternate reality thing. And you, Stephanie, well you are a remarkable thing, yes you are, and it has nothing to do with masks and capes. You’re a fixed point.”
“A fixed point in what?”
“In the universe,” says the Doctor, with a note of cheerfulness that she expects to find grating but somehow finds comforting instead. “Do you remember that crack in the wall in your bedroom when you were a little girl?”
This conversation just keeps getting weirder and weirder. “The crack in my wall. Yes, I remember. It stayed even after my mom tried to fix it. I was scared of the thing, convinced I heard voices sometimes.”
“Oh, I’d like to know what you heard. But that’s okay, not worth finding out, really. Thing is, you spent a long time exposed to a field of time energy. Made your brain all - ” He wiggles his fingers by his temples. “Special. I have a friend with the same thing. I mean, had a friend, well…”
He runs his fingers through his hair, and she thinks for a moment that there are a hundred different emotions on his young face all at once, but then they’re all gone. “Depends on what year it is. Anyway, thing is, whatever happened to the world – and it’s still a little unclear even to me, which is barmy, let me tell you – whatever happened, you were immune to it. And when I came to investigate, the TARDIS brought me right to you.”
There are a whole lot of questions that Stephanie could ask following that bit of rambling (including, what’s a TARDIS?), but what she says is, “Tell me how to fix it.”
The Doctor arches a brow, looking perhaps as if he is impressed by that answer. “Well…” He sounds for all the world like he’s about to give her an answer in turn to that, but instead he says shortly, “You can’t. Sorry. Universe is this now. And since you still have a foot in the old one, with your memories… you weren’t written into this one.”
Stephanie’s body language deflates a little.
“Hey now.” He takes a step forward and puts a hand on her shoulder. “You not existing is a major screw-up on the part of the universe, Stephanie Brown,” the Doctor says. “But even the universe can’t stop your presence here now. So welcome to a brand new world. I know it’s hard to think about, but what do you want to do with your life?”
Stephanie looks at him for a moment, and considers telling him that she’ll go to Disney World, but instead picks something a little more broad but just as cliché, her voice dry. “Maybe I’ll travel.”
The Doctor tilts his head a little. “Really?”
“Uh…” It had been a flippant answer – it’s not as if she’s had any time to process any of this at all. But seeing those faces of blank recognition, seeing another Batgirl swinging through the night sky… she wants to get out of Gotham. “Sure.”
“In that case…” He takes a step backwards, gesturing towards the blue box that, seriously, was not on the roof earlier. “Care to go for a spin?”
She has no idea what he’s talking about, but before she can ask, he grins and adds, “You can bring the suit. You’ll be the only Batgirl where we’re going. Hey, you know, you’ll be really handy to have around, I think. You wouldn’t believe how much time I spend running from things.”
He snaps his fingers and the door opens.
Stephanie looks over his shoulder, barely long enough to get a glimpse inside before the words form on her lips: “Let’s go.”
The bat signal flickers and dies in the sky just as the TARDIS doors close behind them.