Legend of the Batman

THY DESTINY SCREECHES

Crisp bronze autumn leaves fall before me like snow in the winter. There were people around me, nothing but faceless husks, hollow as a dead tree, to me at least. The only people now that mattered were Alfred and maybe Rachel and her family, standing opposite us.

My eyes were blurred, flooded by salty tears. But they weren't tears of sadness. I thought they were, a weakening of my soul, but there was something else hidden behind it all. Commissioner Loeb had called it fear, said it was alright to be afraid. But he was wrong. This was not fear. This was rage.

When the priest had finished his speech, he had asked me up to give my eulogy.

I stood before dark silhouettes in the morning breeze, hoping that it would just blow them all away. I wanted to speak my mind, it had been etching away at my walls of self-control, yet when I was there I was speechless. I look down at their shared gravestone. THOMAS WAYNE and MARTHA WAYNE lay grimly etched on the grey stone, the power couple of Gotham City. Thomas who was a world renowned surgeon had opened high quality yet affordable medical clinics all over Gotham, Metropolis, New York and Central City. While Martha Wayne, high-rising socialite, leading pharmaceutical researcher and philanthropist.

Each one had spearheaded charity campaigns all over the world. They were very important people, and a multibillion dollar company to their name, they were influential. But to me…they were simply mom and dad.

It took me a while but I finally noticed that I had remained motionless for a few minutes, people looked at me expectantly for words I could not find. It was then that I had realised the tears start to trickle down my cheeks. I look to Alfred and he offers me a kind and understanding smile, bobbing his head for me to be strong or to decide for myself.

I then turn to the rest of my audience, and just like that, without an ounce of thought, I ran…

…

I woke up to a damp and desolate room, a dark and stony prison with bars keeping us from escape at one end. I shake myself away from the memories, ever haunting my sleep. As if I were not having troubled sleep as it is.

Soon one of the guards opens the doors and another battalion escort me and the other inmates into the open space, a courtyard of sorts if it could even be called one.

It was cold, freezing up here in the mountains of Nepal…at least I think I'm in Nepal. After my dealings with various Triads and gangsters, I have completely lost my bearings as I pass nearer to the Himalayan Mountains.

Why I was now imprisoned I could not tell anymore. I had travelled with a group of well-meaning individuals, activists standing up to a corrupt government. Or perhaps it was the serial murderer I had tracked down in Tibet—tracked down and killed myself.

Regardless, I had travelled across the continent, looking for meaning, for mentors that could enrich my tired mind with purpose. A distraction perhaps, or at least it's what seven years of therapy had shown me. In the end I had found many teachers, I learnt many techniques in unarmed combat, my name even allowed me some military training in Russia. I think that was where I had lost that name completely. My name was Bruce Wayne, all that I ever really needed was to drop my last name, grow a beard and become radio silent for a year and here I am…forgotten...

Even to myself.

Then on that day while breakfast I had unwittingly picked a fight with a couple of thugs I had known from before, wanted for rather grotesque crimes, some even rather silly. I had found myself in far greater odds than six men on one, but in that environment, I didn't survive past knocking out five of them. Maybe I broke the last guy's arm I think, before the guards took me.

Yet it was here when they sent me to solitary confinement that I came face to face with a large figure hiding in the shadows, two guards dead at his feet. They came out of the dark but it wasn't a man in front of me, it was a woman. A beautiful woman of light olive skin tone, black eyes and dark brown hair tied up. I asked her what she wanted, how she got in here and who exactly she was.

The woman smiled and answered only two of my questions. 'I've seen your face in the magazines before, Mr Wayne, though I must admit you don't look as charming or well-groomed as you did five years ago.'

I was taken by surprise and my survival instincts kicked in as I readied myself for a fight. My mind started analysing her various possible moves— Difficult without first observing her movement but not impossible. 'How do you know who I am?'

'Well the world is much too small for someone like Bruce Wayne to just vanish, no matter how hard you try, all it takes is the right person and the right motivations to find you.' She then approached me casually steady. 'As for who I am, just know that I speak on behalf of a man greatly feared in the criminal underworld. In my language he is called Ra's al-Ghul, and he can offer you a path.'

'Demon's Head,' I translated roughly. 'I've heard of you. You're vigilantes, mercenaries.' I crouch down next to a tap and begin to wash up a bit—my face was covered in blood and muck.

'No, no, Mr Wayne, a vigilante is but a man scrambling for his own gratification,' she now stood over me. 'He can be ignored, he can be forgotten, or destroyed or even locked up.'

Clear and cool water splashes upon my face and I look at her as I awaited her answer.

'But if you become more than just a man,' she says, kneeling down to meet me, I guess on equal level and I finally found myself staring into her mesmerising eyes. 'If you dedicate yourself into an idea, then you become something else entirely.'

'And what's that?'

The woman smiles at me as if it was something shared between just us, like I knew the answer already. 'Legend, Mr Wayne. A being that takes on life beyond the physical, and if they can't kill you, then they will fear you for eternity.'

…

I wake up in a cosy room lit with candles, a comfortable enough bed and a blanket to cover me from the cold. Yet my night was far from comforting. My dreams were riddled with nothing but a veil of darkness, as thick as fog, and then a flash of lightning before my eyes. I see the light reflected upon her eyes, my mother's eyes. I stand helpless again.

My chest is beating like a train, even as I sit up and let the sweat fall off of me, I still feel the dread of immediate danger, yet, I knew otherwise, that I was safe here. It was like that gunman was in the room with me, hiding in the shadows just tormenting me with his very existence.

I lay myself back and try to sleep again. I know it would be useless so I just lay awake as I always did outside, surrounded by the screams—my own as well as that of my mother's.

…

'Do you still feel responsible for you parent's deaths?' I regarded that question for a while, letting it linger far longer than I should have. My mentor, seated in front of me had already sensed my answer, perhaps long before he'd asked.

We were in a cave of ice and snow, isolated from the outside world. It was quiet, silent that I could hear my own blood coursing through my veins. I should be cold right now, should be shivering in the winter. I feel indifferent, nothing. 'My anger outweighs my guilt.'

My teacher smiles and rises off the smooth stone base. 'I will teach you not to run away from your fears and your pain but to confront them. You will learn not to ignore your anger, but to channel it into a force of immeasurable strength and endurance. So I ask you, are you ready?'

I rise up to join him and he begins to direct me to the mouth of the cave.

When we got outside—a forest of white snow covered mountains as far as the eye could see. I was at the top of the world with the gods' chilling kiss upon my skin. Welcome to Nanda Parbat.

…

Ra's al-Ghul was the name I had heard throughout my journey into the grimy criminal underworld across the globe. Ra's al-Ghul—in Arabic it means The Demon's Head, in every other language, he is more than that, he is the nightmarish creature that invades the dreams of every criminal unfortunate enough to grab his attention. That's what I hear, that is, everywhere I went, but always in half whispers, as if he were some ancient deity, or curse.

But now, I come to ask him for guidance, to train me. Here in Nanda Parbat, a mountain region in the Himalayas just east of Pakistan, is a grand temple dedicated to this art. They call themselves the League of Shadows, but we all know them as ninjas, as assassins.

We stand the both of us, on the surface of a frozen lake in the mountains. Both of us dressed grey Shinobi shozoku robes and black metallic gauntlets with three spikes sticking out of the forearms. We were armed with a ninjato and without even stating, or waiting for me to find my footing on the slippery ice, he attacked. I was able to block his first few attacks but managed to get cut when he lunged at me to complete a consecutive fifth form strike.

'You know how to fight, but you don't see the connection between the fight and the battle as a whole.' He was a rather effective teacher; patient but firm and his training—rigorous. Within the few days I'd been up here, I've been trained in many forms of martial arts, many disciplines by many masters but with Ra's', there was something behind his teachings. 'Fear can cloud one's judgment. It is a natural instinct that activates to ensure direct survival, perceived survival. But with the right instruction, your fear can be channelled into a lasting weapon. So tell me, what do you fear, Mr Wayne?'

I sighed—that feeling of anguish and absolute loss of direction crashing over me like a truck. 'I fear many things…'

However, to whatever it was I had said, the enigmatic master shook his head and raced up towards me, his blade on his left coming in to lunge at me. I match his attack with my own defence and the steel of our swords ring. 'The physical symptoms of fear may take many forms,' he says, his grip and stance does not weaken. 'Will you let that form define you?'

For the next fifteen minutes was spent with me in defence, staving off his concentrated and lethally precise strikes. To what end eluded me.

'You blame yourself for your parent's death,' Ra's stated, an obvious fact.

I shook my head. 'My anger outweighs my guilt,' I reply and lash at him from the left.

'That will not be necessary,' he then says, a grin appearing which made me feel quite uneasy. 'Your parent's death was not your fault,' I felt it. It may have been nothing but the all so slight pang in my heart…a rising anger. I felt where my footing slipped and lunged at him in the wrong position and my ninjato was caught between the blades on his left forearm. 'It was your father's.'

Ra's shoved me off. I lost my footing and landed on my back, sliding across the lake and my sword now out of my hands. He slides over to my side and prepares an overarm strike at me. I catch the blade in my own gantlets.

'Death does not excuse the fact that your father failed to act when it was necessary.'

I kick the older man off of me and went for my sword a few metres to the side. 'The man had a gun,' I said in my father's defence as I get up onto my feet.

'Would that fact have stopped you, Mr Wayne?'

'I've had training.'

It was at this point that Ra's had begun to explode into a flurry of unpredictable yet highly choreographed attacks and I was just quick enough to dodge. With each strike he punctuated something that really got to me. 'Your training…is…nothing. Will…is…everything!' Somehow, Ra's had managed to unbalance me yet again but this time I felt the ice below me begin to crack. He stood above me, looking down at my defeat. 'The Will to act is what defines a man. Your fear has taken the form of rage and anger, and your Will to act is drowning in it.' I suddenly came to the realisation that my heart rate was erratic. I was far beyond rage and anger. My mentor then kneeled down to help me up. 'You are afraid—but not of me, not of your past and certainly not of death. So tell me Mr Wayne...what are you afraid of?'

I fell silent for a little while, words being held in my head in a jumbled mess of thoughts and feelings. I didn't know what to say.

'Your rage can make you stronger, Bruce but if you let it, leave it to fester within your soul, it will destroy you and leave you as nothing but an empty shell ready to be filled with the corruptions of this world.'

I nodded, showing an understanding. 'I came to you, sensei, to ask you to teach me how to use my anger to my advantage, to use fear as a weapon for justice.'

'Then I need you to confront your fear and tame it,' and with that, Ras hands me a steaming pot. He instructs me to breathe…and I do. I breathe in the fumes and feel the effects almost instantly. Then I hear a scream, my mother's screams? No…No, it's a screech, a slight screech that slowly grows, and grows, and grows until my lungs are enveloped within them…

…

Into the forest I raced, trying to out run the shadows that chased me, screeching my name—the rage, the pain. Unrefined, I stumbled through the oak pillars and slipped over foliage. I had no destination in mind. I just had to get away. I just had to run.

Then, a calling of faith, or the clumsiness of an angry child, I fell. I fell…I fell forever, into a dark crevice in the ground. The Good Mother had swallowed me whole and returned me into darkness.

The cave was monstrous. It must have been there for centuries. There, deep in the shadows, I saw red and glowing eyes pierce my very soul. The sudden sound of squeaking voices, a figure in the dark was my destiny, their screeches were my calling. In a violent BANG! I found myself surrounded, engulfed by the winged terrors that haunted my dreams. But at last, I felt my pain forgotten, my anger expelled, and my fears had taken the form of bats.

At first I was frozen in fright, shaken to the core as they fluttered at me. I rolled myself into a ball on the rocky ground, drumming my head of the terrors.

Then, I decided, to open my eyes—a decision that would change my life forever. There was no turning back.

I suddenly saw that night once again. My dad, as he takes the bullet, trying to protect us. My mother, her pleads go unheard, as the man rips her jewellery off of her neck and shoots. I hear my own screams.

I stand in the company of the bat— my brethren. I would use their image to strike fear in those who prey on the fearful. I am vengeance…