He stood helplessly again in a dim, narrow alleyway as his parents were gunned down and their valuables forcibly taken. As a dark crimson substance, almost black in the darkness of the night, edged from his parents' broken figures towards his shoes. As Joe Chill hastily fled the scene of his crime. Again. But this time there was a voice urging him to pursue the bastard…even if it cost him everything.
And so he did.
His pulse pounded in his ears, a two-tone rhythm that seemed to beat out the words, "Stop. Him. Stop. Him." Yes, he would stop him.
Something suddenly took ahold of him, weighing down his legs and arms, making it difficult to run as fast as he would have liked. He looked down and realized he was attired in his vigilante regalia, and elation at this discovery gave him new wings.
This time, he wasn't just Bruce Wayne, a small vulnerable child watching from the sidelines. This time, he was Batman.
He urged his legs faster.
Chill leered over his shoulder and pressed onwards.
A sudden desire to tear the smile off of Chill's face gripped him and he tried sprinting faster. But it was strange. Oh, so strange. Try as he might, he couldn't overtake Chill's long strides. In fact, he found himself falling farther and farther behind, the distance between them more than he could possibly cover.
No, this was impossible.
He couldn't think, and in quick desperation, he hurled a few Batarangs at the retreating figure but they swirled back towards him and glanced off of his armor, falling to the ground. Mocking him.
He came to a halt and watched Chill disappear into the darkness of the city.
The beginnings of fury, sorrow, and something like fear rushed through his veins. Did it come down to this? Maybe it turned out that Batman was nothing more than a Halloween figure, a symbol for a lost man who had forgotten how to grow up. A damn farce of what he should have been. If, as Batman, he couldn't even do this…if he couldn't even avenge his parents…then what was the point of it all?
His eyes swam with unshed tears.
"Bruce…" A voice called him back.
He blinked several times in quick succession and realized that he had never, in fact, left the alleyway. He was young Bruce again. A small vulnerable child watching from the sidelines.
"Bruce, come here."
He obliged his father and knelt beside him. His thoughts jumbled together violently, and when he finally opened his mouth to speak, his words came out as a sob. "I failed, Dad. I failed you and Mom and—and Rachel. I can't do this—I can't—"
"Bruce…don't be afraid…" And Thomas Wayne fixed his unswerving gaze on his son, his eyes glistening with the lights of a city that he would never see again.
Bruce awoke with a start.
Another nightmare.
With a sigh, he stared up at the ceiling, willing himself to remain awake—at least until the image of his father, bloody and broken on the ground, had faded altogether from his mind. But it wouldn't. Like a broken record, it kept playing over and over until he swore it had branded itself on the very stitches of his soul.
They were coming undone. The question was, when would he break completely?
After a while, it was all Bruce could do to restrain himself from sobbing into his pillow with self-pity. With self-loathing. But in the end, exhaustion outweighed the desire to remain conscious, to stay away from a realm in which his past was his present and there was no foreseeable future. His conviction dissolved with the threads of sleep that gently shut his world-weary eyes, swimming with unshed tears.
And he lost himself again in dark slumber, forever drifting towards the embrace of the monsters in his mind. The monsters he found in himself.