Bruce spent six years with no one to talk to, no one who penetrated beyond the façade he projected: dangerous, criminal, gaijin loner. Be honest, it's been longer even than that, maybe more like twenty years, he thinks. Ducard's interest in him is focused and challenging. Stern, like the archetypal father.
Every day Bruce rises with the dawn to the sound of feet sliding and blows landing in the training room above. Sometimes he hears a shout of pain or surprise, but these are quickly quelled.
"We value the strength of the karate kiai, but here we have progressed beyond it," Ducard told Bruce when a slight grunt of effort escaped him during one of their sparring sessions. It was still early enough in the training that Bruce opened his mouth to protest, but Ducard held up his hand for silence. "Keep the focus, lose the noise." Bruce set his face in a hard expression, but Ducard must have sensed some rebellion still, and redoubled his force.
Every night Bruce eats in silence with the others—acolytes? soldiers? He does not know what any of them are. Or what he is. The food varies little: rice, some stringy meat that is probably yak and tough greens boiled until they have lost what little flavor they once possessed. It is no worse than that of past prisons. He drinks copious amounts of tea with yak butter stirred into it. The flavor is harsh and smoky, but the warmth is precious.
In the early days of his training, Bruce saw Ducard perhaps once a week. Those early days were spent training with the other acolytes, learning to beat them, one on one, two on one, three on one. They seem little more than animated punching bags, their faces always hidden. Bruce's face is hidden, too, and he wonders sometimes if he is the same to them. In the sensory deprivation of this mountain fortress, his mind plays tricks on him, and aside from the Asiatic cast to the eyes above the masks, he wonders if he fights multiple copies of himself, or of Ra's Al Ghul. There is little else to think of.
He longs for the sessions with Ducard. Ducard speaks to him, even if he does not allow Bruce many words. Ducard looks into Bruce, stripping away his layers of defenses. That kind of focused regard, after years of loneliness, is intoxicating.
The man is coiled strength. Bruce could see him at home in his family's boardrooms, commanding the attention of an entire room merely by walking across the floor. He is mystery—why did he choose this life of brutal austerity when he could be leading nations? Bruce searches Ducard's eyes when they spar, looking for answers.
Sometimes it seems that Ducard can read his thoughts. Bruce fights within that hyper focused state when blocking and parrying blows seemed as natural as breathing. In the silence of the salle when the only sounds are flesh striking well-insulated flesh and hard breathing, Ducard says in his bright conversational tone: "Have you ever heard that when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you?"
The absurdly light tone of Ducard's voice takes Bruce out of his reverie and allows Durcard to land a ringing blow on the side of his head. Bruce shakes himself slightly to dispel the stars speckling his vision. "Then are you the abyss or am I?" Bruce asks. Ducard only smiles, closed-mouthed and mirthless.
"Most military training is designed to break down the neophyte to his essentials and then rebuild him in the image of his new master," Ducard says one day as they spar with wooden batons. "That's not what I'm doing here."
"No?" asks Bruce. He has learned that Ducard respects him more the less he speaks. "We teach silence, here," Ducard said another time. "Silence is a weapon. Fear grows best in silence punctuated by confusion." That could well describe Bruce's time here at the roof of the world.
"No. Here, you have already been broken. You are already a nearly blank page, awaiting instruction." Now Bruce knows that Ducard is lying to him. He is not blank, but a wadded, crumpled, discarded piece of paper, written on heavily, like a palimpsest. Bruce smiles and goes in for a killing stroke.
"I said nearly blank," says Ducard, and Bruce falters, tripped up again by how easily Ducard can read him. "All you are is your parents' death. There is nothing more to you, and there never has been." Grief and anger propel Bruce's next attack, but it is chaotic and unfocused, and Ducard easily foot sweeps him. Bruce lands on his back with loud thud and finds Ducard's baton at his neck. Ducard presses a moment so Bruce can feel the pressure against his larynx and then lets up. He bends down and helps Bruce to his feet, something he has never done before.
Bruce does not sleep well here in the cold mountain fastness, and this night he does not sleep at all. Ducard helped him up? Why? Does he think Bruce weak and needing aid? He frowns into the dark, an unadulterated darkness never seen in Gotham or even in any of the Eastern cities that have sheltered him these past six years. He thinks I'm weak, or he's trying to keep me off balance, Bruce decides.
Ducard attacks him more harshly than ever the next day, laying bare his weaknesses, taking advantage of every one of Bruce's missteps. He scarcely speaks to Bruce at all. His face is set hard and Bruce can see him straining with effort when they are done for the day.
It was not my weakness that caused him to help me, Bruce realized, it was his. Should this make him happy? Bruce wonders. He feels a moment of fierce and exultant happiness the next day, when they fight out on the mountainside, and he forces Ducard into a retreat. He focuses on Ducard's feet, maneuvering him onto the slick ice patches, dancing in the sunlight.
"Good," says Ducard with a smile, this one broad enough to crinkle up the skin around his eyes. "There is nothing wrong with taking joy in the fight. You are progressing." Bruce allows himself a tiny grin of his own. Joy, yes, for a moment he has found it here. They spend the night outside for the first time, sitting quietly around the fire, then sleeping wrapped up in their cloaks. Overhead the stars are sharp little pin-pricks of light, and Bruce sleeps without dreams.