Batman- NIghtmares

I drag my feet across the floor making my way to the large bed that greets me in its comforts. Alfred has pulled the sheets back for me. Good man. There's a hot water bottle under them too. It was a long night, as per usual. I never give up early on the nights. That's not part of the promise I made myself all those years ago. I can't, if I just gave up on random nights, what idea what that give all the criminals? No, I have to keep at it. Everyday and every night.

I've crawled into bed but...it's not as comforting and inviting as it deceived me into believing. It's warm sheets and fluffed pillows are only a disguise, a front to beckon me forth. Underneath the sheets, underneath the warmth and comfort are the nightmares, the nightmares that are my downfall.

They greet me as my eyes close; their images a distortion of faces whom I once loved. Whom I still love. My mother comes first, her large eyes so filled with life and laughter and love...then it changes, the life has been drained from her eyes, as if they were taken out and wrung like towels and then put back into place. Their no longer round and full but wrinkled and too small for the sockets. Then comes my father. His once strong angular face that is a mirror image of my own, sinks into the bones, revealing the structure beneath. The skin droops and laps over itself, melting like the wax of a candle. Then his eyes too start to melt, their whites dripping over the skin and into the crevices of the bones. Next comes my adopted son Dick. He stands next to the distorting images of my dead parents and laughs. He laughs so loud and so hard, like he never has before...he grabs at the bottom of his eye sockets and he pulls. He digs his fingers in and pulls as the dark crimson liquid of blood drips from his eyes. At first it isn't that much but then more and more starts to drip as he pulls hard enough that the skin peels away from his face revealing nothing but the white bones beneath.

These are the things that greet me in the comfort of my own bed. These are the things that I fear the most. Not the criminals in the street, not the Joker whose laughs haunt the halls of my home... but the changing memory of my own parents, the changing of the one person who I care about most in the world.