He didn't think tonight would be the end of it all.
Then again, he never thought any night would be the end. He was too prepared for what he did. Of course, any night could have been the night, he wasn't one of those who see the future. Logically, his time would come. Eventually he would have to come across someone too strong or too fast or too smart or just too laden with cheap super powers.
But when he didn't think about it so logically, the fact remained that he never truly believed that it would end at all.
This night didn't seem so different from other nights. Actually, if he had wanted, he could have recalled a whole handful of nights that had progressed with mundane similarity. Perhaps since none of those nights had been the end, he felt that this one would reach a conventional conclusion. Logical, really.
But he wasn't thinking about those other nights, or about the way he didn't think tonight would be the end of it all. There were too many other things to be thinking about, like making sure his bat-hook found purchase before he swung on it through the Gotham City skyline. Or listening to the staticky voice over the headset telling him where to turn. Or dodging the ever-present beams of ice that exploded towards him once he closed in on his prey.
Mr. Freeze was one of his few adversaries that he very nearly admired. The man was intelligent but not cocky, determined but not insanely so, bold but not over confident. He harbored no crazy dream to take out The Bat, and he rarely involved civilians in his schemes. He was just a man with a past and a goal, and even though he navigated criminal channels, Batman couldn't help but have a grudging respect for him.
After all, what was the Bat if not a man with a past and a goal? He could relate.
The chase had brought the battle to the docks. Always the docks. So many barrels and crates standing idly by, ready to be ignited, to explode. Tonight was really just like any other: black oily smoke billowing into the dark sky, sheets of ice laid down wherever he had just been a half-second before, goons with panicked aim silenced with a single blow each.
As Batman whirled into the air, cape stretching into its ominous silhouette as he locked in on his target, he had no reason to think that this would end any differently than it always did.
Mr. Freeze saw him in his descent, whistling down like a grotesque bird of prey. But he had no time to level his freeze ray on the striking Bat, and the impact sent both of them rolling chaotically across the uneven planks of the waterfront.
Batman freed himself from the roll and leapt away, landing silently to the side as Mr. Freeze tumbled headlong into the large bay door of a smoking warehouse. He lay there, still, helmet cracked, freeze gun sparking in his hand.
Batman took one step towards him, and then a large fireball erupted from his right. Ducking into his cape, he barely managed to protect himself in time. He dodged to the side, whirling into a wary crouch, staring back into the flames to gauge the situation. Any second now, the fire would reach Mr. Freeze, consume him...
But Mr. Freeze was nowhere in sight. He could have been knocked away in the blast - but no, the warehouse door was rolled up a few inches. Maybe enough to crawl inside. But the building was already aflame, glass windows blown out, it couldn't be structurally sound. Not with these barrels exploding with all the regularity and efficiency of a bombing.
Gauntlets grasped the bottom of the door and he was throwing it open with the perfect form of a weightlifter tossing a barbell over his head. Through the smoke and the flames - pieces of the second story catwalk falling, bursting into shrapnel and sparks right in front of him - he detected a large contraption filling most of the room. Heavy tubes and wires snaked from it, all gleaming steel and glass bulbs filled with unidentifiable boiling liquid. He couldn't see it all, parts of it were still covered with burning canvas.
Mr. Freeze kneeled on the platform of a scissor lift, trying to work a electric panel and shoot down flames with his backfiring freeze ray at the same time. Just as Batman saw him, a portion of the catwalk creaked dangerously just over the lift. Mr. Freeze didn't even look up.
Shifting his cape to protect him from the closest flames, Batman jumped forward over the burning wreckage, whipping out a batarang and sending it spinning into the air. There was a sharp metallic clang as it sliced through the weakened railing, severing one side of its dwindling support.
Mr. Freeze did look up at that, seeing the burning structure swing down towards him. But the impact of the batarang had disrupted its balance, and instead of smashing straight down on top of the lift, it arced to one side, flames whooshing three feet away from Mr. Freeze, the torque of the swing ripping it entirely from the ceiling, and it crashed neatly into an enormous glass bulb in the middle of the contraption.
Mr. Freeze howled. "That was the micro-desiccator!" he screamed. "Get out now, Batman, before it's too late!" But he failed to heed his own instructions, abandoning his faulty freeze ray to focus entirely on the panel in front of him.
Batman jogged forward, knocked to one knee as the contraption released a deep, mighty rumble. The walls of the warehouse shook, sending more bits of burning metal sparking to the ground to be devoured by flames.
The scissor lift swayed dangerously, Mr. Freeze lurching back to grip the narrow rail with both hands. Batman lost sight of him momentarily as he raised his cape to shield himself from a barrage of flaming debris from above. Readjusting it so that he could see and run, he darted towards the lift.
The contraption rumbled again, louder, the shock sending Batman to the floor again. He looked up to see ice forming irrationally around the center of the machine, impervious to the heat and the smoke that filled the room. The ice jagged outward as he regained his feet, spears of it snaking out from the shattered glass.
He looked back to the lift in time to see it topple sideways into the flames. His eyes flew back to the contraption, catching sight of the dark form of Mr. Freeze hanging onto the panel with one hand.
"Hold on!" he cried automatically, voice even rougher from the smoke. He aimed his bat-hook at the top of the panel and fired. The place shook right at the moment of impact, his missile ricocheting off the mark and getting uselessly tangled in a mess of girders that had previously collapsed into the heart of the contraption.
He yanked on it to no avail, the line taut and unyielding, but angled too far out of Mr. Freeze's reach. He was trying to scout the floor ahead of him, see if there was any safe path to the place where Mr. Freeze would fall, but a rippling shattering sound brought his attention back to the contraption.
There was now a miniature ice floe forming within the wreckage. The shattering sounded again, and he saw that it was the sound of sheets of ice spontaneously breaking forth, coating whatever it encountered in a shiny crystalline casing. Spears of ice still cracked out, now far enough out to embed themselves into the walls, into the last girders of the roof. And wherever they made contact, new sheets of ice rippled out, covering everything, flames and all.
"Jump," Batman ordered Mr. Freeze, even though he wasn't sure he could make it over there in time. "The ice!"
But as he said it the room rocked from the shockwave of the expanding ice, the devouring edge of it now covering the electrical panel, and Mr. Freeze's hand trapped alongside it.
"I'm sorry, Batman," Mr. Freeze called, sounding utterly sincere. "I didn't realize it would end like this." And then the ice rippled out again, consuming him.
Batman didn't move.
Because for the first time, even after all he'd faced, all his brushes with death at the hands of various psychopaths, he fully understood what "the end" meant. He stared disbelieving as a clear-blue arm of ice shot down to stab the ground right in front of him. And he had only just started to think to run as the shattering sound filled his senses, and then he neither saw nor heard anything more.
He had never thought that tonight would be the end of it all.
He became aware of two things almost simultaneously. First was light and second was cold, although the order might have been reversed. The third thing he noticed was that it hurt, although he couldn't tell which hurt more, the light or the cold.
And that was all there was for quite a while. He thought he could feel his soul shivering.
Eventually it grew dark again, and the cold and the hurt were replaced by a simple nothing.
He opened his eyes. At first all he could see was a cold light, and he wondered if he had opened his eyes at all. But then shadows started to flicker in, and as he watched the shadows became shapes.
"Bruce?" a low voice seeped from a rather large shape. The shadows had not resolved any farther than that.
"Bruce, are you awake? It's me, it's Clark."
At the sound of the second name - neither he felt belonged to him - some of the cold vanished from the light. He tried harder to see, but still he floated in a world of bright and dark patches.
"Don't worry, you'll be fine," the voice said, sounding familiar but somehow different. Who was Clark? "Just rest for now. You're coming out of a long coma, Bruce."
The large shadow slanted to one side, throwing the world as he knew it into a wild spin. He closed his eyes against whirl of light.
Who was Bruce?
The next time he woke up, he remembered. He remembered Mr. Freeze, the crack in his helmet obscuring his face. He remembered the rush of fear he'd felt as the ice shattered up his body. Fear he hadn't felt since...
Well, since a long, long time ago.
He remembered the shadow voice talking to him. Clark? He felt that he remembered who Clark was. Some sort of peppy, annoying streak of red and blue. He shook his head. That couldn't be right.
He opened his eyes, the light subdued, casting the room into real shadows. He saw it for what it was now, a room that was clearly medical in nature, filled with blinking monitors and bleeping screens, making him wonder why he hadn't heard them before.
He noticed he wasn't cold, and he looked down at himself to see he was clad in a skin-tight suit. It reminded him of his Bat costume, but it also felt somehow completely different.
A door quietly swished open at the side, and he turned to see that large shape step into his room. Only now it wasn't a shape, he realized as it came pointedly back, this was Clark.
He frowned. Only it wasn't Clark. This man had his size, his build, his strangely delicate way of walking like he was holding himself back. But receding from his wide brow was a shaggy mane of salt-and-pepper hair, and though he had the same twinkling blue eyes, the boyishness that had always been there was replaced with a certain toughness that didn't seem to suit him.
"How are you feeling?" the man asked in that strange/familiar voice. Seeing him clearly now, Batman realized the unfamiliar sound was the same difference he noticed in the rest of his appearance. Age.
"What happened?" he demanded, his own voice weak and unused, the words coming out a whisper.
Clark, of course, heard him anyway. "You followed Mr. Freeze into a warehouse on the docks, do you remember?" His voice was very gentle, like even the smallest puff of breath would knock Batman through the wall.
Batman nodded. "His machine-" he cleared his throat, "-his machine went haywire. The ice-"
"The ice caught the both of you," Clark cut in, continuing the story past the point where Batman could possibly remember. "I came to help, but it kept growing. I had to take it out to sea so it wouldn't demolish the whole waterfront." He said this apologetically, putting his hand gently on Batman's arm. The touch was warm.
"There was too much wreckage in the ice. I didn't know you were in there," Clark whispered.
Batman looked at his hair, listened to his voice, and refused to understand. "How long did it take you to find me?" his demand another weak rattle of air.
"I brought the ice floe to the Arctic, far enough so that if it kept growing, it wouldn't hurt anybody. I just dropped it in the ocean. And over time, it melted - it was cryogenic ice, weaker than regular ice. And eventually I detected the faintest of heartbeats - yours and Victor Fries'. I cut through the ice and found you both, alive, though barely, and then I brought you here with the hopes I could unthaw you."
At last he recognized the room as belonging to the Fortress of Solitude. He hadn't noticed it before, but this kind of cold light could only be found in one place. He glanced at all the equipment that blipped and told him he was still alive, and wondered if it just looked alien or if...
"How long?"
"Fries came out of it more quickly than you did, his suit that protected him even further from the ice. It only took three months to revive him. Six for you."
"How long, Clark?" he asked again, surprised to hear the slightest of growls coloring his voice. It wasn't much, but it was something.
Clark didn't look at him. "Since you went into the ice," he said carefully, "it has been eighty-seven years, four months, and seventeen days."
Batman didn't breathe, didn't move, didn't think. "What about the hours and minutes?" he finally asked flatly.
"I'm sorry, Bruce," Clark said brokenly, "I am so completely sorry."
There was silence, and Batman drowned in it.
"Take me home, Clark," he whispered.
"I don't think-"
"Take. Me. Home."
He didn't ask why Clark had felt the need to own such a fine aircraft, or why he set it down in the woods just beyond the sea-facing outcropping that held Wayne Manor. He hadn't gotten a look at it from the air.
Tired, feeling weaker and older than he had ever felt in his life, Batman allowed Clark to help him out of the little jet. He took one step without guidance and stumbled. Wordlessly, Clark took his arm and led him towards the house.
"Should be the other way around," Batman muttered, "since you look like my grandfather."
Clark's eyes crinkled, showing off his deep crow's feet, but his smile was strained.
"I called ahead," he said quietly. "We'll have the place to ourselves."
Batman set his shoulders and prepared himself for what Clark had warned him about. They broke through the treeline, but for all his effort the truth still knocked him back like a blow to the chest.
His house, the house of his father, lit up like a museum, a faux-gothic inlay over the front entrance reading "Historic Wayne Manor - Home Of The Bat-Man."
It wasn't just like a museum. It was a museum.
He swooned a little in Clark's grasp.
"Do you want to go inside?" the superman asked.
"No," Bruce whispered, voice gone. "No I can't."
Clark installed him in an apartment he kept in Gotham but never used. He promised to check in on him every day, and when Bruce asked him if he didn't have anything better to do, he didn't answer.
Bruce didn't wonder for long. After figuring out how the TV worked - he felt like somebody's grandpa, staring down all this tech he didn't understand - he flipped channel after channel, absorbing what was happening in the world. It became clear, very quickly, that it hadn't crumbled in his absence.
The Justice League still orbited the planet, saviors on high. But they were called upon unfrequently; evidently they hadn't needed the help of the Batman to clean up the planet. And they were all younger, faster, stronger. There were no faces he recognized, other than Clark's wrinkled one.
He didn't recognize any of the last stalwarts of the super-criminal scene, either.
No Penguin, no Catwoman, no Riddler, no Scarecrow, no Two-Face, no Killer Croc, no Mad Hatter. No Joker.
No Robin, no Nightwing, no Batgirl. No Commissioner Gordon. No Alfred.
From the window of the apartment he looked out at a Gotham City he didn't recognize. It practically shone back at him, all clean streets and sharp, modern angles. It was so bright it almost physically hurt. It looked like Metropolis.
He bet it didn't recognize him, either.
He paced restlessly until clouds rolled in at nightfall. Finally, as his city wound down, going indistinct in darkness, he relaxed. Wayne Manor - the Batcave - wasn't his home. Gotham wasn't even his home. He belonged in the darkness, belonged to it. The night would surely welcome him back.
As he crossed the threshold into the street, the breeze pushed a sparse flurry of snow into his face. He shuddered, almost stepped back inside, but pigheadedness won out, as usual. He stalked through the cold snowy night with shoulders raised, fists deep in his pockets.
No one stopped to gawk at millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, descended from his silver throne to mingle with the commoners. Their grandparents had been born after he'd died, after all.
Bruce hunched deeper into his jacket and turned off the bright main streets, preferring the narrower allies that called to him in a half-forgotten whisper. He noted with some satisfaction that the side streets through which he glided were dirtier, rattier, stenchier - more like Gotham as he had left it.
Without warning, he gathered his bearings and saw that he was at the waterfront. The wind blew stronger here, the snow denser, the cold colder. The pools of light from the streetlamps and warehouses seemed not to extend farther than they needed.
The half moon broke through the shifting cloud cover, a misty Cheshire cat smile leering down at him. He turned to go.
There was a thin, rickety figure making his way towards him down the closest alley. Bruce tensed, fight or flight still his first response. The man was backlit by the far off street, but when he crossed through the meager light shed from a closer lamp, Bruce choked.
The man looked up, instantly wary at the sound. His face was as pale as the snow banks piling up at the warehouse walls, his uncovered head shone in the light. His dark, sunken eyes widened in recognition.
He was the only person who would instantly recognize Bruce Wayne in this day and age. It was only a question of why he looked so young, still in the prime he had reached eighty-seven years ago. Unless, of course, he had been trapped in ice, lost in time for the duration of those years.
But it hadn't been Bruce Wayne he had trapped. Bruce watched him put the pieces together, much more quickly than many of his peers would have done.
Fries stumbled back a step, confused, afraid, as the fractured identity of the man in front of him snapped together once and for all.
Bruce could see clearly that Fries now feared retribution. As Mr. Freeze, he had been the only one to succeed at the one thing he had never really wanted. Ending Batman.
Taking him away almost a hundred years into the future, so that he had missed all his friends grow old and die. His wards, his surrogate family, his sometimes-lovers. Taking him away from everything he had ever cared about and transplanting him into this time and place that wasn't truly his. It would never be his again.
And as he looked, unmasked, into the eyes of Victor Fries, he saw reflected there everything he felt. The shock of displacement, the bitter regret of loss, the dull thump of a sluggish heartbeat trying to find a reason to carry on.
Bruce remembered Nora, how losing her had been the catalyst transforming Victor Fries into the chilling Mr. Freeze. All of his plans that Batman had thwarted, all of them revolved around Fries' one desire to revive her. To have her smile again, say his name, touch his face.
How much would Bruce had given, if only for the remotest of chances to have his parents back again?
Victor Fries and Bruce Wayne, they were too alike. And on top of it now, they were both a step out of time, never to regain what they had lost.
There was no one here who needed Mr. Freeze. No one who needed Batman.
"It was a long time ago," Bruce shook his head. The sound of his own voice surprised him. He walked on, ready to leave it at that.
Fries shrank out of his way but said nothing, the look in his eye broadcasting the fact that he didn't dare believe the Batman was just going to walk away from him.
But Bruce did walk. He walked to the end of the alley and stopped just where it joined the street. One more step and he'd find himself irrevocably swept into the present. Into a Gotham that held no niche for him.
He looked over his shoulder, and then turned all the way back. He could still see Fries, standing at the edge of the dock, wind whipping the jacket that seemed crazy to wear unbuttoned in this weather. A mere shadow against the sea, a token of the past.
For a second longer, he pretended that he was Batman, Gotham's Dark Knight. For a second he could hear the screams of the innocent and the cruel laughter of those that lurked in the midnight shadows. Just one last second in a twilit world that cried out for someone to save it.
And then he stepped backward, into the light of the street, and was gone.