He could still hear it echo through the looming bricks and mortar up around him. The shock as the breath left him, the anguish as fear took him. He smelled the smoke and the spattered his face as much as his parents blood.
Thomas Wayne was a tall and great man, fearless to the end. And there he lay, no composure to his empecible posture, a formless pile of blood and an expensive suit covered by it. The body lay on Martha, whose lipstick had been freshly covered by the gargled blood that choked her to death, her grace and ellegance a shadow, faded.
Bruce could still feel it all, the rattling of the pearls when the necklace snapped as the gun wrangled its way around and to her long pale neck, and the fear before that which took him when his father slumped back when the first bullet went through him. The chimes as the empty casings fell seemed to echo most of all.
They rang in his ears even after the sirens should have drowned them. The alley still seemed dark when the police lights should have banished the shadow. Alfred came soon, and though he hugged him he still felt empty and cold.
He vaguely rememered the things that happened after that, days seemed to blend into one another, sometimes he slept, but only after laying awake at the ceiling of the bedroom in his parents house. Sometimes he ate but not more than a few morsels when he woke.
He remembered the funeral. People were there he recognised, he thought a few of them might have been his friends, faces with childhood still painted on them. Some of the older people tried talking to him, in suits finer than his fathers, but they never wore them with as much grace. They looked anxious and hungry, like the man who took them away.
"Don't be afraid." His father had said that when the killer took out his gun. And now Alfred said it. No, not in the same way,
"Don't be afraid to be upset, son." Alfred told him. Bruce never answered him back. As they opened the family crypts in the grounds of Wayne Manor Bruce didn't feel fear. The great stone doors scrapped across as four men opened them.
He felt rage.
They poured out, and it seemed to Bruce they were infinite, like a great rushing fire they could not be halted. Screeching and consuming they engulfed the attendants, drowning out their screams. Alfred put a hand on Bruces shoulder, for comfort Bruce thought.
But Bruce didn't want it. As the Bat came for him he roared right back, louder than all there, fear and rage consuming him.