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redrobin-detective · 1 year

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The Drake Legacy

Janet Drake was born with everything a little girl could ask for.

She was from a high class, reputable family, not famous as the Waynes or Elliots but that was okay. They preferred it that way, they got the money and status without the high expectations. She wasn’t a beauty but she had a sweet face, pouty lips and with the right clothes and styling, could be pretty enough. She had an older brother whom all the expectations and business matters were piled onto leaving Janet free to be a pretty, thoughtless thing before marrying well and living her days in endless luxury. She soon learned to hate the loose but ever present noose around her neck.

Jack Marvin was born not quite with nothing but not much above it.

Jack’s family lived in an eternal battle to stay out of poverty. His parents both worked two jobs to make ends meet and Jack was put to work as soon as he was old enough. Jack wasn’t a particularly good at any of the jobs he took; he felt cheated working so hard for the money just to be handed over to his parents. He wasn’t particularly handsome or smart or strong. The only things Jack really had going for him was that he was clever and could be very charming when he desired. He used these traits to skate from job to job, skimming a bit off the top of his earnings to keep for himself. Jack went to bed every night cursing his lot in life and telling himself it wouldn’t always be this way.

Janet was dressed in the finest clothing, went to the best possible schools and associated with only the wealthiest Gotham citizens. She hated every minute of it. She felt like a porcelain doll, her parents’ pretty possession for other people to ogle at. Her dainty, pure white tea gloves felt constricting, her high heels too tight and the pearls around her neck like a vice. Like any child lashing out, she found pleasure in the opposite of her upbringing. She took any opportunity to be reckless and dirty, made an elaborate garden just to bury her silken hands in the dirt. Janet thought about sports but she’d never been much of team player, preferring solitude. She instead took up gardening, hiking, anything that got her outside of the polished marble of the Drake estate and into nature.

She hadn’t given much thought to college, it wasn’t like she needed a job after all but it was better than staying home waiting for her mother to make her a match. She looked up jobs that put her in the dirt and signed up Gotham University’s archeology program. Even if she got bored, it could be fun for a bit.

Jack wasn’t stupid but school just wasn’t his thing. Authority figures telling him what to do just pulled at his nerves. It felt like the whole world was against him, looking down on him. He walked around with this constantly simmering rage and indignation under his skin. Jack would show them who the loser was. The various odd jobs he’d worked his life gave him some interesting experiences, made for good stories at parties. And Jack Drake was always welcome at parties. He had an easy, affable manner about him so he made friends quickly but they often didn’t stay long. But not before Jack had gotten food, money and shelter out of them. He was a nice guy but you had to look out for number one after all.

High school came and went and it was time for the next step. Jack knew if he didn’t go to school, get some sort of degree, he’d end up with a dead end, miserable job like his folks. He gathered what money he’d saved, borrowed or stolen and headed to Gotham University.

Janet met Jack in their shared Introduction to Psychology class. It was hard not to notice him. He almost always came in late, since he commuted from across the city she later learned. Jack also had a habit of challenging the teacher, asking sarcastic questions and making passive aggressive arguments. It made him unpopular with the students trying to learn but Janet was fascinated. The messy hair, the roguish smile, he was no Brad Pitt but he had a nice face and more importantly he was so different from the stuffy, upper crust boys she dated. She asked him on a study date which turned into a real date. He was passionate and fierce, he had real ideas that weren’t determined by popular opinion. Their fights were as heated as their make-ups but she kept getting drawn back into his orbit after every spat by his doe eyes and crooked smirk.

It was supposed to be a fling but Jack really seemed to get her. They spent hours railing against the injustices of their parents upon, about the stupid expectations of academia. She convinced him to switch his major to archeology and the two of them flourished. When his money for school ran low, she thought nothing of dipping into trust to fund his classes, food and other expenses. For the first time in her life, Janet felt seen not as a Drake but as herself. So when two years later, Jack got on his knee with a ring, she said yes.

Jack didn’t like college any better than high school but he kept the reins on his temper because he knew this was his only way out of poverty. His classes were stupid and he had to miss out on parties to work part time jobs to pay for tuition. Until the girl with the designer sweater and smarmy smile asked him to study together. One date led to another and another. At first he stuck to Janet because she was an endless money pocket, who pulled out her gold credit card without second thought. He’d wine and dine her as long as possible to keep the free food and expenses flowing. And then the unbelievable happened, he actually started to like her. She was obviously a trust fund baby, a know it all used to getting her own way. But she stuck up for herself, even when she was wrong and bulldozed over anyone who stood in her way. She screamed just as loud as he did during arguments and listened to his rants with an understanding nod. Soon, she stopped just being a wallet and became something more.

She made him switch to archeology and he did, one because she was mostly paying for his degree at this point and two because he wasn’t focused on anything else. He found he liked it to his surprise. Jack would stay up late talking about different cultures and their unique lifestyles, a world neither of them knew and wanted a piece of. Janet was all about the process, the digging and the satisfaction of finding what she was looking for. Jack was interested in the money that could be found with artifacts. One day, he looked up a realized he loved Janet Drake against all the odds and took the plunge. He bought the best ring he could afford and got on his knee and was shocked when she jumped into his arms and said yes.

Janet wore a white pantsuit to her wedding, one last middle finger to her mother who was already beside herself that he daughter was marrying outside their social circle. Just before Janet walked down the aisle, her mother hissed at her that she’d regret this one, two, ten years down the road. Everything she loved about Jack now would turn into disgust and she’d be running home soon enough. She nuzzled Jack’s shoulder during their first dance and positively preened when he agreed to take her last name. From now on, Janet and Jack were a team in everything. They finished their degrees and hopped right into the field. With Janet’s money and connections, they had their choice of sites to chose from. They worked hard at their profession but they lost far more money than they made, not that it mattered.

They played hard too, dining in the finest restaurants, visiting the most beautiful locations, attending the most exclusive events. They spent more time abroad than they did in Gotham, only returning for the big events. She was given access to the Drake money but her parents weren’t really speaking to her anymore which was fine by her. One morning, a few years into their marriage. Janet woke up terribly sick. The sickness progressed until finally she was forced to admit that she was pregnant.

Jack took to wealth like a duck to water. He looked good in tailored suits and became quite the connoisseur of wines (as well as other high quality spirits). He loved to travel, to get out of the smoggy, hell hole that was Gotham and indulged in rich luxuries like golf. It didn’t matter that he was becoming one of the out of touch, arrogant elites he’d once hated, all that mattered was that he was better than those who’d looked down on him. Things with Janet were good, so good during those first few years. They still fought hard but they loved just as hard. They had their shared interest in archeology but had their own separate tastes that often had them apart for weeks as a time. He was happiest abroad with her at his side, buying and doing whatever he liked. The worst were the times they had to return to Gotham, attend to those stupid black tie events. It was the time he felt most like a kid who grew up on food stamps, his wife blending in perfectly with the blue blood crowd while Jack felt like a heaving fish out of water. He kept pushing to extend their travels.

He wasn’t too concerned when Janet started getting sick. They were on the other end of the world and they’d both had their share of travel sickness and food poisoning. But it kept going on until finally Janet was presenting him with a positive pregnancy test. This had not what they planned for.

They’d agreed, fairly early on in their relationship that children were not for them. They were too independent, too busy, too modern to be tied down by a child. Janet would be happy to travel the world with Jack until she was old and gray but now there was a wrench in the equation. Jack had told her to abort and move on but Janet found herself hesitating. She longed for freedom but oh wouldn’t it be nice to have a little one running after them? Her mother cursed her to be unhappy but Janet was determined to prove her wrong. The more Janet thought about it, the more she realized she could have both. She could be a famous archeologist and a perfect loving mother. She convinced Jack and endured 9 miserable months, working right up until she went into preterm labor and delivered a son. She was exhausted and angry at how long the whole ordeal took. Janet held her son for the first time and felt a kind of weary fondness. Her Timothy wasn’t exactly cute and he screamed like a banshee but he was hers and they were both going to have to get used to it.

Jack had not been too crazy about the idea of keeping the baby. He’d disliked children even when he had been one. Even though they had exorbitant amounts of wealth, kids were still money suckers and he wasn’t looking forward to paying for toys and diapers. Plus they’d need to settle down back in Gotham, back where Jack really didn’t want to be and watch as his kid grew up to be another lazy, rich brat. Janet talked him around eventually, selling him on the idea that they’d do it better. That they could still have their travels while also raising a normal kid. He suffered right alongside Janet through her pregnancy and was almost relieved when her water broke while they were hunched over some broken bits of poverty. Jack smoked a whole pack of cigarettes and had two beers before he was allowed back to see his wife and new kid. It was a boy, Tim was small and red and screamed and squirmed like crazy. His first thought was that adoption was still an option. But Janet seemed determined to see this through so he buckled in and told himself that different wasn’t bad.

They mostly stayed in Gotham the first few years of Timothy’s life. Janet really tried to combine the best of both worlds her son came from. They took him to the opera and little art theater, to galas and the circus though the less said about that mess, the better. She didn’t know what was normal for kids but Tim never seemed to stop screaming or sleep. That boy wailed at the top of his lung at all hours of the night, tuckering out only as the sun rose before starting up again a short while later. No one could blame her for hiring nanny after nanny to care for him just to escape the noise. She felt a bit guilty but sometimes, late at night listening to her son yell down the hall, she wondered if Jack was right and they should have aborted. Speaking of Jack, the tension from Tim and being in Gotham put the first real cracks in their relationship. When it wasn’t all fun, Jack became surly, sarcastic and it wasn’t as cute as it had been in college. He didn’t want to help with Tim, just hired more caretakers and spent more time away from the house doing god knows what. Her mother’s warning at her wedding came back to her and Janet swore that No, she would win at marriage and motherhood and prove her mother wrong.

Jack really wasn’t built for fatherhood. By god, did that kid ever shut up? What was the baby even screaming about anyway? It’s not like he ever went hungry or didn’t have enough toys like Jack remembered growing up. There was a sense of pride in being able to provide for his son but it was steadily worn down by the day to day challenges of sharing a house with a fussy baby. He and Janet fought more, their screams right in time with Tim’s like they were the Von Trapp family singers. He didn’t get why Janet was so mad for him not helping more with the kid, it’s not like he knew what to do to get Tim to settle down. Like, he loved his kid. Jack tossed him around and helped him toddle around but when you had money why did he have to do everything? Why not hire people to do that for them while he and Janet did their own thing? She started frowning at him more than she smiled and he was reminded for all that she was a rebel, she was also a princess. Her presence became more irritating.

Once Tim was old enough that it wouldn’t appear negligent to leave him, they started taking trips again. At first just for a few days but then they became a week, then two then more. Tim was always left in the best possible hands, highly recommended nannies, expensive day cares and later posh boarding schools. Janet felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, then would feel guilty and call to check on Timmy. Whenever they spoke, he seemed ecstatic to hear from her, excitement she wouldn’t get if she saw him every day. He babbled about his hobbies, his friends and she would secretly relax. Because she was doing it right, she’d been brought up under suffocating circumstances. Timothy had all the wealth but none of it’s trappings. He didn’t need to dress up and be paraded around, he could eat pizza and wear sweatpants and be a little weirdo. She bragged to her friends about her son’s grades, about his independence but she really didn’t care what others had to say about her boy. As long as he was safe and happy, then Janet would be too. If only her marriage to Jack would improve as well.

When Tim was 11 or so, another curve ball hit them. Her brother died of a sudden stroke, stress related the doctors said. He’d been the CEO and majority shareholder of Drake Industries, the company that gave them their wealth. Suddenly, there was a void where a Drake was needed. Janet had always enjoyed taking from DI but now she had to give back to it. She began taking time off from travels to settle the company which only put her further at odds with her husband. He was an incompetent businessman and to save the company, she cut him out of the decision making. Jack became a nightmare, being unsupportive and aggressive, trying to muscle his way back into the proceedings but she held her ground. The more time passed, the more Janet had to realize her mother was right. She was approaching middle age with a precocious son, a failing company and a husband she was learning to hate.

Jack had been counting the days until they could, legally and socially, leave Tim with an appropriate caretaker and get out of Gotham. He’d be there for Tim when he was older, more interesting. When they could talk about girls and cars and sports. Until then, Jack had no interest in stick figure drawings and smudgy fingerprints. So they traveled again and it was good again for a while. He found he couldn’t lose himself to the thrill quite so much, he wasn’t a young man anymore. At various moments, he’d wonder how little Timmy was faring at home, had made his fair share of panicked calls to the nanny just to make sure Tim was okay and hear his voice. He loved Janet, well mostly but there was special kind of parental love he felt for his son and sometimes it aggravated him. Tim didn’t turn out quite how Jack expected, he wasn’t some asshole rich boy like he’d feared. He was small, squirrely, had the strangest hobbies and was, frankly, a really weird kid. But Jack loved him dammit, weirdness and all. He’d teach the kid how to play football or something normal during their next break home.

But then Janet’s brother died and dumped the company straight into their laps. Now Jack would forever be grateful to DI for funding their lifestyle but actually managing it was a pain in the ass. At first, he and Janet were gonna do it as a team like always but she quickly butted him out. She brushed off his ideas, made decisions on her own and soon was doing everything. It burned at him, to be dismissed. Once more, he felt like the poor boy outsider, that he couldn’t possibly run a big company like Drake Industries. It had been happening for a while now but Jack was rapidly falling out of love with his wife.

While Jack and Janet were busy running DI, finding new ways to hate each other and squeezing in the occasional archeological trip, Tim Drake was coming into his own without them. He knew his parents loved him, they just had other things to do and so did he. Tim wasn’t worried about their trip to Haiti, they’d been on a million trips and he was busy learning to be Robin anyway. His mother’s death and father’s injury gutted him. He cried and wailed like he’d been told he did a lot as a baby but he knew he was grieving not his parents as they were but the potential family they could have been. It took Tim a long time to realize that his parents did love him but they weren’t perfect. They prioritized themselves over him, were distant and bland and made no real attempts to get to know him. He thinks to himself its maybe why he was so drawn to the Bats, it was the closest thing to a normal family he saw on a daily basis.

Tim Drake is a sum of many parts. His parents may be gone now but their traits live on in him. He is his father’s black hair and widows peak, his mother’s sharp nose and crooked ears. His eyes a blend of mom’s flinty grey and dad’s ashy blue. He has his mother’s Jewish faith and his father’s walnut allergy. His stubbornness and bossiness came from watching Janet and his practiced charm and manipulation straight from Jack. From both of them he learned how to be alone, how to get things done and how to put his vast amounts of free time to use. What he didn’t learn from them was how to be a family but that was okay, he had other teachers for that.

#this is 10% fic 90% meta #jack drake #janet drake #I have such strong feelings on the drakes and why they're Like That #to explain why Tim is Like That #I'll scream forver that Janet was the Drake the wealthy one #I don't care for Intense Girl Boss Janet #I think she was selfish person who did a lot of things out of spite #She's not given a lot of space in the comics I think she loved Tim but obviously prioritized her interests over all else #Jack just *feels* like a guy who grew up poor adapted to rich life then was mad he wasn't rich when he drove the company into the ground #he can be nice charming but theres this underlying anger and righteousness I feel in the comics #Jack is a man who Expects certain things earned or not #and that caused a lot of problems when he woke up from his coma and his perky 12 year old was an indepedent secretive 15 year old #idk this got sooooo long im so sorry

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