List of things I own: Plot, the stupid stuff I made up in my screwed-up imagination
List of things I don't own: Characters involved and anything else copyrighted to and/or owned by DC Comics
Rating: T for my standard stuff
When Bruce was young, he learned the meaning of tragedy.
The grimy alleyway mixed inky black shadow and dirt with crimson blood so well that one would almost think they were meant to mingle. Something crunched underneath his feet as he stumbled forward toward his parents, and it might've been his mother's pearls, forgotten in the frenzy of screams and violence and fear. He slipped on something—maybe water, maybe blood—and crawled over to Mommy, who was sprawled out like a dead bird, to Daddy, whose white dress shirt was soaked in the warm, red stickiness of his own life. Bruce's pants were saturated with it, and his tears dripped down into it. Where were the police? Where were the paramedics? Surely somebody had heard it, had called for help.
Another twenty minutes of kneeling next to his parents' lifeless bodies convinced him otherwise.
In the days that followed, he met a lot of adults that apparently had something to do with his parents. It seemed like the whole city knew Thomas and Martha Wayne. But when they wanted to shake his hand, he just stared at theirs. When they wanted to ask him questions, he remained silent. And they all reacted the same way, too. They would all look at him with these sad smiles and faintly watery eyes, shaking their heads. They would all say to one another, behind his back, "Poor little Bruce. It's hardened his heart already."
They had no idea how right they were.
Time went on. He grew older, he grew colder, and everything around him changed before he realized it. The manor had become peaceful, and somewhere along the line he became its only occupant, about the same time that another tombstone was added to the family plot out back. The painful clamor in his mind and heart had quieted. But Gotham City, and the world itself, only proceeded to gradually get worse until, at last, Bruce took notice. And something…else within him was awakened, something much more cunning and sinister.
That something was the first of his demons.
It drove him across the globe, searching for God only knew what. Perhaps he wanted inner peace; perhaps he only wanted to perpetuate a war he could not win. And everywhere he went, every would-be mentor he sought out, always carried the same attitude toward this phantom feeling. It was all really very tragic, how often he was told he was pursuing an insane goal. Nobody seemed to understand him. Nobody seemed to care.
Then, chance—or maybe it was fate—took him to an old master of a near-forgotten martial art in Taiwan who spoke to him of a certain Ra's al Ghul.
And Bruce realized that he was looking for purpose, purpose that Ra's could give to him.
Perhaps the world wasn't as hopeless as he'd thought.