#wayne foundation

“Happy Holidays, Mr. Drake”

A Tim Drake x Reader Pairing

(CEO Tim fake dating reader)

✨ Return to Story Master List ✨

Chapter One: Before…

Wayne Tower never smells like panic.

That’s the first thing you notice when the elevator opens onto the executive floor—how calm everything is. Polished stone. Filtered light. The quiet of a place designed to keep problems contained before they ever become visible.

The Grand Ballroom of the Gotham Plaza Hotel glitter like a jewel box under the chandeliers, each crystal catching the light and scattering it across the polished marble floor. Black-tie guests swirl in practiced orbits, Gotham’s elite, philanthropists, and socialites who could afford to drop six figures on a single evening for the sake of optics. The Wayne Foundation’s annual Children’s Literacy Gala is the event of the season and Barbara Gordon, dressed in a sleek, midnight-blue sheath gown that shimmer faintly under the lights, feels both perfectly in place and utterly out of her element.

She adjusts the delicate silver cuff on her wrist and scans the room with the same precision she uses on patrol. The gala’s theme is “Words That Change Worlds” and every table centerpiece is a towering stack of rare first-edition children’s books encased in glass. Bruce Wayne, impeccable in a tailored tuxedo, is currently charming a cluster of donors near the string quartet, his smile practiced and effortless. Dick Grayson’s laughing with a group of young heiresses. And Tim Drake hovers near the auction table, pretending to study a signed copy of The Velveteen Rabbit while actually eavesdropping on a conversation about Wayne Enterprises’ latest R&D budget.

Random Gothamite, panting a little as they walk: I’ve got a new drinking game idea. You go on Google maps or send out an unlucky friend to the streets of Gotham and every time you come across a building or something that has a Wayne’s name on it you take a quarter of a shot. Only a quarter because I don’t want to be responsible for murder

RG: I’m the one who volunteered for my friends because I hate the taste of booze and there’s a chance I’ll catch sight of the new daytime vigilante as I walk

RG, whispering: Signal if you see this dm me, I’m a big fan

RH: Anyways, look at that!

*Martha Wayne Retirement Home*

RG, turns a corner: oh another!

*Thomas Wayne Free Clinic*

RG: that was fas-

RG: *almost walks into a sign that says: Jason Todd-Wayne Youth Center*

RG: ….

RG: I’ve been out for three minutes

RG: this is gonna be worse than I expected

*the next day*

They were doomed by the narrative from the very beginning in order to highlight the brokenness of of their city.

Their son was destined to live in their tragedy the rest of his life and maybe he never got over it but he was still able to change, and live, and become what he felt he needed to become.

Thomas and Martha didn’t get that change.

June 1964. A month into Batman's "New Look" period, Alfred the butler is dramatically killed off in DETECTIVE COMICS #328. Writer Bill Finger gives Alfred a suitably heroic demise, sacrificing his life to save Batman and Robin from the Tri-State Gang.

Ouch. This is fairly grisly for Silver Age DC, and, more significantly, obviously intended to be final. (If you're going to seemingly kill off a character with the intent of bringing them back later, "crushed to death by tons of rock right in front of their closest friends" is probably not the way to go.)

Two points of interest here: First, the Alfred Foundation, as will be explained later, is the antecedent of what later became the Wayne Foundation (whose building was redesigned in the early 1970s), which did not yet exist at this point. Second, it's awkwardly obvious here that Alfred had never been given a canonical last name. In one 1945 story, he'd used the name "Alfred Beagle," but that hadn't been mentioned again afterward. The name "Pennyworth" was first used in 1969, five years after this story.

Why did editor Julius Schwartz kill off Alfred, who'd been a staple of the Batman strip since 1943? According to Schwartz, it was to help lay to rest the insinuations that had been floating around for years (especially in the wake of Frederic Wertham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT a decade earlier) that the Wayne household seemed awfully gay. It should be understood that the modern conception of Alfred as a military veteran and one-time badass didn't arise until the 1980s; since his introduction in 1943, Alfred had been primarily a comic relief figure, and generally a bit of a ninny. Schwartz wanted to replace him with a "a sort of chaperoning den mother," which became Dick Grayson's Aunt Harriet, introduced at the end of this story:

Schwartz claimed that he borrowed the name "Aunt Harriet" from the lyrics of the 1929 Hoagy Carmichael standard "Rockin' Chair." Like Alfred, she didn't initially have a last name (the name "Cooper" came from the TV show, and didn't appear in the comics until DETECTIVE COMICS #373). In the comics, she was not as old or quite as matronly as Madge Blake, who played the character on TV; she was perhaps a decade older than Bruce Wayne.

I'm a little skeptical of Schwartz's assertion that his goal in killing off Alfred in favor of Aunt Harriet was to make Bruce and Dick seem less gay. If that was the plan, it wasn't terribly effective: For one, as the TV show demonstrated, her presence in the Wayne household hardly decreased the camp factor, and the principal dynamic of her comics appearances was to have her nosiness constantly threaten to "out" her nephew and his guardian! Moreover, the "New Look" period actually discarded the three recurring female characters who'd previously been positioned as romantic foils (Batwoman/Kathy Kane, Vicki Vale, and Bat-Girl/Betty Kane) — there would be new ones, but they wouldn't appear for a while, nor did Catwoman (who had been absent since 1956 and didn't return to the comics until 1966) — so Schwartz actually cemented Bruce and Dick's "confirmed bachelor" status, at least for a while.