Promise

The city is forged from steel, carved by industry and covered in the fine powdered dust of construction, yet in the swathed in the moonlight, its beauty glows in the sumptuous marble arches, pale and stark while the sharpened edges of the buildings soften and blend into the darkened sky. Under these facades of metal and glass, concrete and brick, there is a pulse, a living, beating network of veins that lies beneath, beneath the impermeable sidewalk where a thousand steps echo, the tread of citizens long gone, memories of deals gone awry and screams lost to the wind, bodies broken and spirits hardened.

Under the skin of steel flows a river of black fire, roaring an inferno so loud that it can only be heard in silence and flaming so cold that it burns to the touch.

He feeds on that fire, lets it consume him when the time comes to hunt down his prey; he is buoyed on the invisible waves when he glides through the chill air. But what he seeks on this night is the pure silence; the silence that falls when the last head hits the pillow, when the final latch is turned on the door and the streets are abandoned to him and him alone. It is a noiselessness that coalesces like frost, shrouding his form with muffled air, shielding his movements through the unlit streets.

It is the comfort of home.

Bruce Wayne moves with the silence, of the silence. He is the embodiment of a wish that the city cannot yet speak, but in time, he will grant it, even if it must be under the cover of darkness, under the shroud of a promise he made before he knew how to speak.