The man with darkness in his soul will use it to his own.
The boy with wings and broken dreams will fly away from home.
The devil with the angel eyes will die in pain alone.
The laughter ringing through the night will shepherd in the tone.
The world remains as cold and cruel, content in having known.
He read the poem in a book somewhere when he was young, and couldn't stop thinking about it. Writing it down, memorizing it, until years later, when it made sense. When he could no longer remember the name of the author, or the book he found it in, but each word was as clear as the crystalline words in his memory, forged in fire from that poem.
The man with darkness in his soul will use it to his own. Bruce. He had absorbed some of that darkness the night his parents died, and turned it into a weapon.
The boy with wings and broken dreams will fly away from home. That must have been he, himself. He had been running as much as flying, he supposed, with all that had happened to him.
The devil with the angel eyes will die in pain alone. Jason. It still pained him to think about Jason, ever after all the years that had forced themselves between he and his brother.
The laughter ringing through the night will shepherd in the tone. The Joker. He changed with every day, set the tone for everything anyone ever did in that damned city.
The world remains as cold and cruel, content in having known. That one made the most sense out of all of them. Even after everything they had done, after every loss, every win, the universe was indifferent. Nothing was better. The universe didn't care.
All the things he had done, and all the things that never happened, the words written on used napkins and typed on lost Word documents, proved the poem true, every word ringing with the same clarity that he'd known in the never-ending split second between life and death, the one time he actually died.
It was ironic, he thought, to go like this. After everything he had survived, after psychopaths and murderers, after villains and corruption, to be taken by a careless teenage girl on her phone, when he was old and too slow to save himself and his granddaughter.
Ironic, and just a little bit poetic.
And he closed his eyes, and flew one last time, the weight of his discovery sliding off his shoulders like rain in the wind, and his only regret was not being able to tell his family he loved them one more time, because it would be a long time before he was to see them again.
And the world would remain as cold, and cruel, and just a little bit darker now that the spark of good, honest light that was Richard Grayson flickered, as it had done so many times, and finally faded out into the darkness, to join those that he had lost in the poetry of a teenage girl, saved by her grandfather who died in a car accident, and who found a poem in a book by an author, and was perplexed.
C'est la vie, or so they say. That's life, and a poem.
TazzieLuv13- you're absolutely right. Fixed it now, though.