The Batman: Episode 2

On the 4th of January was when he returned to Gotham City. Fabled city, mostly for it's criminals, but there was a rich history there beneath it's tarnished reputation. There was a charm to the city whose streets were lined with junkies and the homeless, there was something to be fought for. Hanging high above Gotham's skyscrapers and smokestacks was an airline, seated in a coach was Bruce Wayne, his face went unshaven for a long time. Watching the city turn below, the train cars navigate through the cavernous valleys between buildings, the scum and dirt looked like tiny ants from up here. It all had a pattern and he looked down upon Gotham not as if it were his home, but his prize. 

It wasn't where he grew up, it was his kingdom. 

EPISODE 2: The Death of Bruce Wayne
Two years had passed since Korea, from Kirigi he learned ninjutsu. The art of being a ninja, he learned how to be silent and stealthy, how to fight, and much like the teachers before Kirigi, how to kill. After Korea he flew to France, where in Paris he met Ducard, a man that taught him brutality and deception. With Ducard he hunted men, bounties, but their partnership went south after Ducard killed a man. In Egypt he studied medicine, found and lost love. In Tibet, he joined a monastery seeking peace and closure with the deaths of his parents because of the one constant that was apparent in every single one of those places. The constant presence of that one thing since the night of his parent's murder.

An idea.

A mission statement to kill crime. Festering and germinating in the mind of Bruce Wayne was a cancerous idea, much like any idea, one that grows and grows until it's given life or cut off and discarded like a tumor. Bruce endured the natural conditioning of his mind, known in Tibetan Buddhism as Dzogchen, where duality is replaced by nonduality, the unification of all. 

Thogal was a ritual of meditation, sealing Bruce within a cave for seven weeks with nothing but his thoughts. It was one of the most highly dangerous Tibetan Buddhist practices, known to drive some men mad. It was a ritual that allowed Bruce to experience a simulation of death and rebirth, something he was always interested in, something that he believed would rid him of his violent thoughts. 

In the darkness of the cave his thoughts became tangible. The silence was deafening. His heart beat slower. He could hear things that weren't there, he could hear insanity slowly approaching in the depths of his soul. It was coming to claim him and there was nothing he could do. Bruce Wayne was ninteen years old and it was in that instant that he realized that he never grew up, that he never stopped being a child. In the pool of blood below he saw his adolescent face reflected in the murky fluid, a tear fell from his eye and rippled in the puddle below.

The darkness came for him and the first thing he thought about was his parents. The first person he expected to be at his side was his father. Thomas Wayne was a strong father, he believed that the only right way to raise a child was with fear. He never laid a finger on Bruce, he wasn't abusive in that right, but he made sure that he was afraid of him. The yelling alone was enough to bring a young Bruce to tears, just by how his voice echoed off the walls of Wayne Manor when he raised his voice. Thomas wasn't affectionate, but making sure Bruce stayed on the straight and narrow was how he showed his love for the boy. 

Bruce remembered playing with Tommy Elliot in the yard one evening where they found an old watering well on the grounds. Tommy, being the troublemaker of the two, dared Bruce to descend into the well. Vividly, Bruce remembered the sound of the loose brick as it slid against the one it was placed upon, the crumbling and how the wind filled his agape mouth as he tried to scream out while plunging downward. The sound of leathery wings on the air, the piercing screeches growing louder, the way their beady eyes hit the light. 

The way they pummeled him, flying right into his small frame then upward into the late evening sky. Bats. Dozens of them. Thomas, Martha, Alfred and the Elliots hurried out onto the lawn and only minutes later had Bruce out of the well. The way Thomas laid into the boy left the Elliots cross, the way they refused to say anything to Tommy had Thomas equally as cross. 

"You could have been seriously injured, Bruce!" Thomas cried, "Or worse! I tell you to use your head for a reason, boy!"

Using his head was something Bruce was forced to become proficient in since a young age. Thomas prepped the boy for a life of making hard decisions, they'd sit in Thomas's study in his free time and go over medical scenarios. Impossible scenarios where there were no happy endings. They always ended with something being amputated or the patient dying to save another person's life. Bruce hated these scenarios. Bruce, much like any child his age, wanted to save everyone.

"Mommy, was I in Hell?" Bruce asked his mother as she embraced the boy, wrapping a blanket around him, pulling him away from the well he'd fallen down.

"You could have died, Bruce!"

"Enough, Thomas."

"The boy's got to learn!" Thomas exclaimed, "Alfred, fetch the bandages."

"At once, sir." 

Fear and love were one in the same to Thomas. 

The tenth day of Thogal, he remembered the nightmares. The shrill screeching, the leathery wings, wetting the bed every night, the weeping. Thomas introduced Bruce to a psychiatrist, a colleague of his, a man tall man with a goatee who wore teashade glasses that hid his eyes. Dr. Hugo Strange only added more fear to the boy's life, everything about Strange from his posture to the way he spoke spooked the young Bruce. He walked with his chest out, Hugo Strange was nothing less than an alpha male because he refused to be anything less. For months he picked the child's brain about his phobia of bats. 

The shooting of his parents flashed into his mind.

Bats circled above his crown. 

The fifteenth day, his mind stopped generating thoughts manually. Anything that he saw wasn't generated by Bruce consciously. In the pitch black darkness one could see lights, illusions cast by the mind, the Buddhists believed these visions to be significant. His mind was worn, trying to make out the sound, trying to make out the color of what he was staring at.

Then it drew closer, or what closer was if Bruce had any sense of depth in this darkness. It was yellow, a vibrant gold, almost. With his eyes wide, he stared, the formless light expanded, he could hear the leathery wings and the piercing screeches. It took form as a bat, and it was then that Bruce realized this was the shape of fear. The bat was a symbol. 

On the 49th day of Thogal, Bruce Wayne had died within the caverns, consumed by his cancer. The idea he seemed to want to kill, the one he'd grown to fear had taken him over and what emerged from behind the stone that the monks pushed from the mouth of the cave was a man who was without fear. What emerged from the starvation, from the seven-week meditation was a creature not unlike Bruce Wayne, but different. 

"What did you experience during Thogal?" One of the head monks asked over tea, the bearded Bruce looked down at his cup, then up at the monk with lowered eyes.

"War." Said Bruce. He could no longer stay at the temple, even if they allowed him to with the violence that they believed plagued his heart, he had war to declare, and he would go back to the heart of it all to wage it.

Gotham City, January 4th, Bruce Wayne stepped off the plane after being away from the city for almost a decade. In drab rags, the press documented the return of the prodigal son, the wealthiest of the Gotham Elite, coming home to sit upon his throne and what they found was a bearded and weary Bruce, dressed in tattered clothing. 

"Master Bruce." Alfred greeted, flashes bulbs went off around them.

"Alfred."

"You look rather drab, sir. I trusted you would take better care of yourself." Alfred deadpanned, "The car is ready." 

"Good, there's a lot of work to be done." Bruce patted Alfred on the shoulder, allowing the Butler to lead him through the crowd of cameras and microphones that were thrust in his face. Questions flew at him from every direction, asking where he'd been, if he had children incognito, whether he was coming to reclaim Wayne Industries from Lucius Fox. The most disturbing were the questions about whether he fled the country because he ordered a hit on his parents. 

The baseless and wild question that came out of left field wasn't what caught him off guard, it was who asked it. Bruce's eyes were drawn to the direction that the voice came from, in the crowd he recognized a girl from a lifetime ago. A beautiful redhead in the crowd, one of the few reporters who didn't have an outstretched arm, but he could clearly see a recorder in her left hand.

Victoria Vale, a childhood friend, she went and grew up into a model-slash-journalist it looked like. The look in her eye narrated how she felt about Bruce, her disdain the way the twelve year old suddenly got up and left the country without so much as a word. On top of that he didn't call or write, he merely left her, and ever since she hadn't trusted anyone the same again. Bruce Wayne was her first bad experience of many when it came to the opposite sex.

He'd make it up to her, Bruce decided. 

"Where to?" Alfred asked as he stepped into the driver's seat.

"Home, Alfred." Bruce hadn't said the word home in such a long time. Alfred looked at the man sitting in the back seat of the luxury sedan through the rear-view mirror and smiled. It was as if a weight had been lifted from his chest. 


Weeks passed.

This was no city to raise a child in, James thought. He placed down the last of the boxes in the den and flopped down onto the couch next to his wife. A sigh escaped him, his fingers combed through his peppered red hair. Barbara made jokes about how he was only thirty yet had graying hair, blaming it on him working too hard. The jokes were really an outcry that she wanted more time, James was oblivious, though. One of the greatest detectives on the force and he couldn't even pick up the hints his wife was putting down.

"Pop! Pop! Look what I found!" A young boy ran into the living room cradling the limp body of a squirrel. 

"Junior!" James jumped up from his seat, "Throw that out now and wash up! Are you trying to get sick?!" Gordon asked, the excitement left the boy's face. James Gordon Jr. was a little funny, the fact of the matter was that his parents were afraid there was something wrong with him mentally. The twelve year old boy wore black nail polish and lipstick, he listened to music about killing people, and while James was also oblivious that this wasn't all that abnormal for teenagers these days, his obsession with dead animals troubled him. 

"This is no place for us to raise him, Babs." James said, watching his son discarding the bird outside in the trash can out front.

"We'll be fine, Jim." Said Barbara, patting the cushion, trying to coerce her husband away from the window and back to the couch. All James happened to see in their son was the weird, thought that was expected seeing as how he was working most of the time. This city was hell and James knew it, he grew up here, and the first thing he did was leave once he was old enough. Chicago wasn't much better, but it was where he met Barbara, it's where he made his home, but in his fight against corruption he made a lot of enemies.

It got him transferred to Gotham. 

Barbara turned on the television and Gordon sat back down. On the screen was a portly man with a large nose and spectacles. Pinched in his teeth was a cigarette, smoking as he held a conversation with the paparazzi. 


"Have you heard that Bruce Wayne has returned to Gotham, Ozzie?" The paparazzo asked, Oswald Cobblepot looked over, pulling the cigarette from his mouth and blowing a stream of smoke from his lips. They nicknamed him Penguin due to his oblong shape, his beak-like nose and the fact that he waddled when he walked. It wasn't an affectionate nickname that he was fond of, but it's one he'd learned to live with. 

"The last time I saw him he was but a boy, it's good to have him back, I suppose." Penguin responded as he prepared to cross the street to a night club across the street. 

"Do you have anything to say about the allegations that you're involved in human trafficking?"

"No comment." Not amused by the question, Cobblepot scowled at the camera before crossing the street. 

Gotham was an organism, on the other side of town the Red Hood was striking, robbing a bank blind with a number of accomplices. In the District Attorney's office, Harvey Dent smoked a cigar with an old friend by the name of Tony Zucco while watching Penguin on the television. Selina Kyle patted a young girl on the head in an apartment on the East side, then kissed an older woman on the cheek behind the girl before leaving the apartment, she slipped into her car, looking over her shoulder at the catsuit that was laid out in the back seat.

Crime ruled the city.

In street clothing Bruce Wayne walked up the avenue, a leather jacket on his back and leather gloves. A fitted tuque atop his head and a scarf around his neck. His breath was visible on the air, the burning neon of the red light district flashed against his face. In his disguise no one could discern him from anyone else, he was just another person on the street, it allowed him to approach the disgusting pimp that was dressed in a violet suit on the sidewalk. 

This was the enemy camp, the punch he threw that knocked the pimp off of his heels was the an act of war. Teeth clattered across the pavement, hot blood spattered on cold white. 

January 26th was the beginning of the end.