A Detailed Timeline of Events

February 19, 1975: Bruce Wayne born
- He turns 30 in Batman Begins, which came out in 2005 and takes place in a presumably contemporary setting.
- There are conflicting reports about the exact date of his birthday, but February 19 came up more than once, and it happens to be my mom's birthday, so obviously we have a winner.

December 1983: Thomas and Martha Wayne murdered
- Though his age is never said in the beginning of Batman Begins, according to the comics/just about anything else you can find about Bruce Wayne's childhood, he was eight years old when his parents were killed.
- In the movie, it's clearly winter when the murder takes place. Bruce and his family are wearing coats, and I believe there's even a little swirl of snow in the alley when they leave the theater.
- I would bet that it was around holiday time when Bruce and his family decided to take their ill-fated trip into Gotham City. Bruce's father shows him the pearls he's going to give Mrs. Wayne as a present, probably for Christmas. Though a night at the opera might be a normal outing if you're a Wayne, they decide to take the train, which Bruce is obviously unfamiliar with, so maybe this is another holiday perk. Alfred doesn't drive them and he doesn't show up at the police station afterward, so maybe he was away visiting family for the holidays.

January 30, 1984: Valencia Carter born
- She had to be born after Bruce's parents were killed so that he would have no memory of her living in Wayne Manor. The precocious Bruce we see playing with Rachel around the grounds would surely have noticed and taken interest in a new baby in the house.

1984-1994: Bruce attends boarding school
- I went out on a bit of a limb and guessed that Bruce had a boarding school education. In the U.S., boarding schools are largely concentrated in the East Coast region. As Gotham City is traditionally located somewhere between New York City and Atlantic City, I don't think it would be too much of a stretch that he would be sent away at a relatively young age for schooling. The majority of boarding schools are for grades 9-12 or high school age, but there are a good number that take children as young as kindergarten age. Bruce would have been around grade 3 or 4.
- Of course there's Alfred to consider, and though I don't think Alfred would have wanted to send a young Bruce away, he might have made the decision to do so based on how difficult Bruce was finding it to move on, especially while living in Wayne Manor. As we see in Batman Begins, this still troubles Bruce well into young adulthood.
- Lastly and most importantly, it served the purpose of my story to have Bruce pretty much absent from Wayne Manor as Valencia was growing up, since they had never met before.

1994-1997: Bruce attends college
- This is purely guesswork, but I figured Bruce was probably a junior (third year) in college when he was expelled from Princeton. If he had been on track, he should have been graduating college by 1997. I'm going with the theory that Princeton was not the first Ivy League school he was kicked out of, and expulsion does tend to mess up one's credits, so he was probably a year or at least a semester behind.
- This also would explain why Rachel is presumably out of college and already working at a law firm when he returns, assuming they are the same age.

1994-1997: Valencia attends Brentwood Academy
- This is the elite private school Valencia's mother gets her into when she's 10 years old. In the comics, it's a high school, but I turned it into a junior high.

1997: Joe Chill's trial, Bruce disappears
- This year I figured out retroactively. The end of Batman Begins is 2005, the year of Bruce's 30th birthday. That takes place a few months after his return to Gotham, meaning he came back from the dead in 2004. He was missing for seven years, which means he ran away from Gotham in 1997.

1997-2004: Bruce roams the world
- Basically seven years of what Bruce tells Ra's Al Ghul: he was pretty much a vagabond, stole for food, got involved in international smuggling, and ended up in a Chinese prison. Somehow, somewhere he learned how to fight seven men at once.

1997-2000: Valencia attends Gotham Prep
-Gotham Prep, my creation entirely, is an elite, private, college preparatory school located in the Palisades. Though Bruce did not go here, it is where most of Gotham's wealthy send their kids to be educated. I guess it could be a boarding school that accepts day students as well.

Fall 2004: Bruce trains with the League of Shadows, returns to Gotham
- This comprises a relatively short part of Batman Begins, but I imagine that Bruce was there for several weeks, if not months, mastering their techniques and earning the trust of Ra's Al Ghul.
- When he returns, Bruce lays low for a couple weeks, then shows up at the Wayne Enterprises board meeting as Bruce Wayne, the billionaire playboy.
- Again, this is very fast in the movie, but it probably took a few months for him to set up his operation as Batman, so that would take care of the rest of fall 2004 and bring him to his birthday in February 2005.

February 19, 2005: Bruce defeats the League of Shadows (end of Batman Begins), Wayne Manor burns down
- Bruce's 30th birthday. He saves Rachel from Scarecrow, insults everyone at his birthday party, burns the Manor down, and keeps the League of Shadows from destroying Gotham via a very fancy form of biological warfare.

August 2005: The Dark Knight, Rachel Dawes dies
- The Dark Knight is set six months after Batman Begins. Though so much happens in that film, all the events happen right after one another. Not a lot of time passes, and my guess puts it at a month at most.

January 30, 2006: Valencia turns 22

February 19, 2006: Bruce turns 31

April 2006: Valencia returns to Gotham (GC Ch. 1-3)
- The Return: Bruce comes back from a business trip to London and fires his secretary, Wayne Manor is finished
- The Interview: Interviews are held for the position of Bruce's secretary, Bruce interviews Valencia
- The Disappointment: That night, Alfred tells Bruce all about Valencia

Valencia's Original History

This is what Alfred's monologue about Valencia's past looked like before I decided to add in Bruce. Aside from the little tweaks to transform this into a dialogue, there are a couple other things I would change: Talia Carter was 19 when she had Valencia, her name probably isn't Talia because of the similarity with an upcoming character's name, and I wouldn't have kept that part about Valencia's becoming depressed whenever they were apart. That's just not Valencia, though I think my point was to show the extent of her feelings for her boyfriend.

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“Miss Valencia’s mother was sixteen years old when she arrived in Gotham. Her parents were upstanding, British citizens who kicked their daughter out of the house when they found out she was pregnant. Their housekeeper, a cousin of mine, sent Talia Carter to stay here at Wayne Manor until her parents relented. They never did.

“It was about a year after your parents’ death. Miss Talia knew nothing about housekeeping, but the staff soon fell in love with her. She was such a young, thoughtless yet kind-hearted thing, and we all thought Miss Valencia was the most beautiful baby ever born… saving yourself, of course.

“It was obvious from a very young age that Miss Valencia was quite intelligent. They tested her repeatedly in the schools, called her a genius and allowed her to skip a couple years. By the time she was ten, she was at Brentwood Academy.”

“The elite school here in the Palisades? Only the richest in Gotham can get their kids in, which is why my father didn’t want me to go there.”

“You never met Talia Carter. She got her daughter everything she possibly could, and then some. But as much as she loved her daughter and wanted the absolute best for her for her own sake, I believe part of it was fueled by revenge. She wanted to turn Miss Valencia into a wonder, a prodigy, and make her own parents sorry for abandoning her and missing out on helping raise their grandchild. So Miss Valencia had all the lessons, played all the sports, attended all the parties her mother thought necessary for her upbringing.

“Yet in many ways, Miss Valencia was the more adult of the pair of them, the more responsible one who got their bills paid on time and made sure the necessities came before everything else. I don’t think she ever cared much for playing the piano, swimming competitively or riding horses, but she seemed to bear her mother’s enthusiasm for all those things with a sort of…”

“Condescension?” The memory of his brief meeting with her surfaces in Bruce’s mind, the politely tolerant but loftily self-assured way she had addressed him.

The older man looks at him sharply. “I suppose you could call it that,” he says slowly, “an affectionately tempered sort of condescension. Her mother wanted her to be a prodigy, so she played the part as she did everything else—wonderfully. And it worked… for a while.

“Miss Valencia was able to get into Gotham Preparatory Academy on the Wayne Scholarship, which was started by your parents and funds the education of one outstanding student at Gotham Prep for four years,” he elaborates, seeing the blank look on Bruce’s face. “I tried to talk Miss Talia out of it. She was much too young, only 13, and she didn’t have the advantages of her classmates, but it was too good a chance to pass up, so she went, and that’s where it all started.

“He was a Wayne Scholar as well, but a couple of years ahead of her. The more she saw of him, the less we saw of her, and it frightened her mother. Miss Talia even began to talk of withdrawing her from the school if she persisted in seeing him, but for the first time in her life Miss Valencia absolutely refused to do as her mother wished. So Miss Valencia stayed at Gotham Prep, and they became inseparable.

“They thought the world of each other, and everyone could see it wouldn’t—couldn’t—end well. They were too young, too... in love, if that’s possible. When they were together, everyone else didn’t matter anymore, and the bouts of depression and despair that Miss Valencia suffered when they were apart for any amount of time or during one of their few fights was almost painful to witness.

“When he graduated, Miss Talia thought that would be the end of it, but he gave up a scholarship to MIT, opting instead to study at Gotham University in order to stay close to her. Miss Valencia began to talk about going to Gotham University once she graduated, and this was the final straw for her mother. Miss Talia began to make plans to move back to London upon Miss Valencia’s graduation, but then something happened that changed everything.

“You see, he wasn’t bad person—he seemed to care a great deal for Miss Valencia—but he’d grown up with the wrong sort of people, starting with his father. They lived in the Narrows and one day, when Miss Valencia was visiting him, she walked in on a fight between father and son. He ended up pulling a knife on his father and wounding him severely.

“There was a trial, and it caught the entire city’s attention. With the suspect and the main witness both Wayne Scholars, the company’s lawyers got involved, since it would be bad for business if he were convicted. Needless to say, he was cleared of all charges on the basis of self-defense, but they didn’t stop there. They unearthed evidence against his father, his ties to drug rings and the black market, thousands of dollars of gambling debts. They were even able to implicate some of the other criminals and locked them all up. They fed the media a trumped up version of his life as a disadvantaged youth struggling to break free of the world of crime he had grown up in, and they absolutely loved it.

“Miss Valencia got her share of the media attention as well. She was the faithful girlfriend who never left his side during the entire trial, a maid’s daughter who was on the verge of becoming the youngest graduate at Gotham Prep and valedictorian too. The company was determined that they would live out a fairytale. Their happiness would show that Wayne Enterprises’ philanthropic spirit hadn’t died with Thomas Wayne.

“They talked about running away from it all, the pressure and scrutiny, the high expectations placed on them. Sometimes I wonder if things would have ended better if I hadn’t interfered, but I did. Her mother locked her in a room the night they planned to leave. Miss Valencia made herself sick crying and yelling, and we were forced to sedate her. He didn’t show up the next day, or the next. Her mother was convinced he had run away without her, and as the days passed, Miss Valencia seemed to start thinking the same thing… until his body washed up on the riverbank.

“Miss Valencia was supposed to have met him on a bridge that night, and while he waited for her, his father’s associates, the ones that had been scapegoated by the lawyers, attacked him. To distance themselves and the company, the lawyers let leak a story that he had been addicted to drugs, that the attack was a result of a drug deal gone wrong. They were poised to continue exploiting Valencia, setting her up as the innocent victim in all of this, but they never had the chance.

“She’d somehow gotten her hands on the sleeping pills we’d given her, and she took the whole bottle. We barely got her to the hospital in time. She very nearly died. Her heart stopped for a few minutes. But by some miracle, she survived, and before she was up and about, her mother had her on a plane to London. I later heard from my cousin that Miss Talia made amends with her parents, who helped take care of Miss Valencia.