After the whole psychiatrist fiasco, his parents didn't bring up anything related to the topic again (at least not in front of him). Bruce himself wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, even if maybe (very heavy emphasis here) a shrink would actually be useful in this situation. Nah. Bruce could already picture how that meeting would go: "My name is Bruce Wayne, and I'm actually a grown man stuck in a child body. I'm feeling a tad depressed because my dead parents are alive and I'm trying to decide if I was hallucinating or not. Oh, and at night I dress up like a rodent and fight criminals."…Yeah…no. He preferred not to be labeled crazy, thank you very much. Though some of the Justice League members might insist otherwise, he was perfectly sane (somewhere within the vast, vast multiverse, Superman sneezed). He knew it would have made his life easier if he had agreed to be checked out by his father's friend and bluff his way out, if only to convince his parents that he was fine, since he'd have had no problem talking his way around psychiatrists. The damage was already done, however, and now there was no way he could get his parents to believe he was the same little boy they'd known for eight years. But there was no use crying over spilt milk, and even if they somehow bought it, he'd still have problem pretending to be the a kid anyhow. Dick always accused him of never actually growing up; saying that he'd never really left that alley. Maybe his son was right, but if he was, then apparently being mentally stuck at eight years old didn't prove very useful if you were trying to be an actual eight years old. It had little to do with his no longer being a kid since he was eight the first time and more with the fact that he was already grown man. He doubted that it was normal for men his age to remember how to accurately act like a kid anyways.
His parents, perhaps fearing another outburst from him, didn't question him about the mugging anymore and instead tried to pretend that everything was normal. He could tell that this was temporary, though, and his parents just wanted to wait several days for him to have time to settle down before they tried to figure out what happened to their son again. He felt guilty at having worried them so much. He was nevertheless thankful for the break from all the inquiry, though, since he needed the privacy were he to figure out what kind of mess he managed to get himself into this time.
The most likely scenario so far that he could think up was time travel. This reality was too detailed, too concrete, lacking any of the usual instances of uncoordinated flashback to his deepest, darkest, most traumatic memories that he always experienced in the aftermath of a heavy dose of Scarecrow fear gas, nor did it possess the inconsistency that accompanied the world of dream. His age wasn't something fabricated, since he could clearly feel that every muscle on his body truly did belong to an untrained eight years old and not the vigilante who has spent nearly twenty years honing his fighting prowess. Everything here seemed like they stepped right out of his memories: the smell of his mother's perfume, his father's voice, the manor as it was before – bright and cozy. If these things were made up from information taken out of his head, they would not have been as clear. It pained him to acknowledge it, but after so many years, he could no longer recall the little details about his parents. No matter how many hours he spent searching through his own mind, he could not remember his mother's face as she smiled, his father's eyes when he told him how much he loved him... The passage of time had taken them all from him as it flowed, leaving him only his motivation: the gunshot, the sound of his parents' bodies hitting the ground, the blood dripping from his mother's necklace as he held the string in his hand and sat there for hours. It was those that stayed vivid in his mind as well as his nightmare no matter how many years had passed. He felt guilty for forgetting the way his parents lived, for not treasuring them, and it wasn't until he had been flung into whatever-this-place-was that he truly remembered how precious those memories was.
But if this was truly time travel, then what? The first rule of time travel: DON'T MEDDLE WITH ANYTHING written in capital letters and underlined will be found if the League members searched through Justice League guide book. Well, sorry to whoever wrote that rule (oh wait, it was him), that boat had already sailed. His parents sitting downstairs was proof of that. This was what he had wanted all his life, wasn't it? To have his parents back? He should be happy, right? He'd finally gotten his wish, the one that just a few days ago, he thought that he would have given anything for it to be granted. So why was he laying here, feeling a profound sense of loss when he thought of the life he might now never get back?
