#geo force

A small drawing in the same "Tara lives and Brion takes care of her AU" °°

I think I need a name for it.

Hey there, thanks for the ask! ❤️ Unfortunately, I can't give you a complete answer. Not a REALLY complete one, at least. Because what we know for sure is this: Batman knew Tara worked for Slade and had betrayed the Titans.

How do we know that? Brion. It all comes back to Geo-Force. Like gravity. Heh. See what I did there? 😎

Because what Brion knows, he learned from Batman. So we can indirectly reconstruct at least part of their off-panel conversation. In Tales of the Teen Titans Annual #3 (April 1984), Brion is given the sanitized version of the story: Tara was a hero, and she died fighting Deathstroke. Then, in Batman and the Outsiders Annual #1 (September 1984), he already knows the truth—or at least part of it. And we get this heartbreaking moment from our favourite secondborn royal redhead:

So Batman told him something. At the very least, he told him that Tara had betrayed the Titans. Which means Batman himself had to know that much.

How did Batman find that out? I think the answer is pretty obvious. Dick. It's never shown on panel (or at least not that I remember, so please correct me if I'm wrong), but who else would have gone to Bruce and told him?

Especially since the Titans seem to force themselves into a kind of self-imposed silence after Tara's death. They even avoid Gar because they don't want to talk about what happened. Hell, even Wally has to learn about Tara's death from the newspaper—or, more accurately, from the sanitized public version the Titans gave the press.

But from that point onward, Tara's betrayal is treated as basically the worst-kept secret in the superhero community. The JLA seems to know about it in the Terra miniseries from 2008, and it's apparently known in the 2009–2010 Power Girl run as well, not to mention the clear and unmistakable way Tatsu explains it in The Other History of the DC Universe #3:

Thank you, John Ridley. THANK YOU.

But if we're talking about the fact that Slade raped Tara, that's a completely different question.

Because Gar surely thinks—or at least suspects or fears—that Tara and Slade were sexually involved. But he's never shown openly discussing that with the team, and even Dick might not know for certain. And even if he did… would he tell Batman? Like, let's imagine the conversation: "Hey, Bruce. Yeah, it's been rough since Tara's death. I still can't believe she was a mole for Deathstroke. Can you believe the two were screwing!?" I don't know. I just… don't see that happening 😭

My personal theory is that Dick suspected something, given Tara's words in her final pages, and might have voiced those concerns to Bruce.

But then we have Last Will and Testament, where Brion seems to know about the sexual aspect of what happened to Tara—or at least the overall framing of the issue strongly implies that he does.

He never explicitly says, "Slade raped Tara," but he does say:

"What he did to my sister…"

So, at some point, Brion learned. Was Batman the one who told him? Personally, I don't think so. It would be unnecessary and, frankly, cruel. Why would Bruce tell Brion that his sister had been sexually exploited by the same man who ultimately caused her death? What purpose would that serve?

So how did Brion find out? We don't know. Infuriatingly, we'll probably never know. Maybe he went through some classified files. (He does mention a file about Slade, written by Nightwing, in Last Will and Testament, and this is also the version I go with in my fics) Maybe he overheard a conversation. Maybe he found an old report. Maybe Slade sent him a text saying "Hey, your sister had a birthmark on her butt." We. Don't. Know.

So, to sum up: - Bruce definitely knew that Tara had betrayed the Titans and worked with Slade. - Bruce may have suspected that there was something sexual and abusive going on between them. - Whether Bruce actually knew the full extent of what Slade had done to Tara—including the rape, the coercive control and the maybe-drugging—is unknown.