Wow, I can't thank everyone enough for the continued interest in this story. Have a great Sunday everybody.

(x)

Gotham City

5 years ago

"So how was your week?"

"The week was decent… on the whole. But last night, my husband and I had a fight."

The doctor's face took on concern. "From what I understand that's unusual for you two, isn't it?"

"Well, yes. I mean, no. We didn't have a fight, a fight makes it sound …" Martha opted not to finish that thought and said, "We had a disagreement. A disagreement that was a little louder than usual."

Madeline crossed her legs and leaned forward, giving Martha her full attention. "What caused the disagreement?"

"It was about me coming here." She watched the doctor's face carefully. When Madeline didn't say anything, Martha said, "You don't look surprised."

The doctor smiled a little and said, "It seems to take a lot to shock me these days." Martha seemed to be looking for something else from her, so she continued. "Did something bother him about you coming here?"

"No. Well, not exactly that."

Madeline let the silence hang for quite some time. Then she asked, "Maybe he didn't know you were coming?"

Martha squinted her eyes a little before she said, "That's a good guess."

She sighed just slightly before she shared, "It might alarm you just how much of what I do is guessing. I suppose they're educated guesses, but still."

Martha appraised the doctor, sighed a little herself, and then said, "I hadn't been one hundred percent honest with him about what doctor I was going to see or for what purpose. The bills came, and … your billing is discreet. But Thomas is nothing if not intelligent. I have a feeling that he knew for awhile that I was going to therapy, but… he waited until he was certain to say something." She added, "I recognize the irony by the way."

"The irony?" Madeline asked.

"That I want the people of this city to get the best mental health treatment possible … and I hide the fact that I'm getting treatment from my own husband."

She nodded in understanding. "What kept you from telling him?"

Martha thought on that and then said, "It wasn't that he wouldn't understand. But I knew he would worry. I didn't want that for him."

She added, "Also, if he knew just how bad the nightmares were getting, he would have asked you to stop working for Child Protective Services."

She frowned and muttered. "That's the first thing he suggested. He doesn't want to imagine me in those sorts of … situations."

Madeline put it more bluntly. "He doesn't want to see you suffer."

Martha bristled at the observation. She looked to the doctor and said, "Maybe he's not the only one who thinks that's the simplest solution."

She kept the focus on the topic at hand. "How did it end?"

"The disagreement?" Martha sat back, thought, and then answered, "We both had a few choice words with each other. I didn't like the tone he took with me. He didn't like my dishonesty. … But in the end, I apologized for lying to him. He said he was sorry for raising his voice. He was upset and worried for me. I explained that mostly I hadn't wanted him to be disappointed in me."

Madeline pointed out. "You didn't go to bed angry with each other."

"No," Martha said dryly. "We like to stay up and fight."

The doctor laughed a little and said, "I'd say you've got it down pat."

She raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

"The art of the fight," Madeline said. "We see it throughout our lives in all our relationships. Lovers, friendships, even parents and children. You're delighted with each other. Then you do something to upset each other. The two of you resolve the fight … Then you wake up and are delighted with each other again. Delight, rupture, repair, new delight."

Martha made a thoughtful sound and a smile inched onto her face. "So we fight well."

"Are you kidding?" Madeline said. "Your homework for this week is to get into another fight with him. Keep it up, and by the end of the month you'll both be boarding a flight to your second honeymoon."

(x)

Gotham City

Present Day

Dr. Scott smiled at him. Bruce smiled back uneasily. It was impossible to feel comfortable when he was moderately certain that every move was being calculated or evaluated in some way, even by someone claiming harmless intent.

She asked, "Can I get you anything to drink? I've got tea and a couple sodas or water in the back."

He said, "No, thank you. I'm fine."

Madeline said, "You look so much like her."

Her words hit the center of him. He tried not to show that either. "People usually tell me that I look like my father."

"Ah, I never got to meet you dad, so I wouldn't know. You have her eyes though. Martha had very kind eyes."

Bruce quickly changed the subject. "You said that you saw my mother for therapy. For how long?"

"About six months," she said. "Your mother didn't suffer from any chronic mental health symptoms. She came in because she started having nightmares."

Her words awoke something inside of him. The flashes appeared somewhere, not in front of his eyes, but behind them. Pearls dropping. The growling voice of the man holding the gun. Blood streaming down into the cracks of the asphalt in the street. The light fading from his father's eyes. The memories tuned up at times during the day, but at night, that's when they really played their symphony. Bruce asked, "What was she having nightmares about?"

"A number of things," she said. "She felt very deeply for anyone suffering due to the poverty and crime here in Gotham."

Bruce remembered the look his mother would get on her face when she spoke about helping the lost souls in the mental health system. She spoke with passion. Anyone listening could hear the conviction in her voice. Bruce said, "From what I understand, a person can only see violence for so long before they start to absorb it."

"Was there someone who told you that?"

"No," Bruce said. "At least I don't think so."

Madeline asked, "So you've experienced it yourself?"

He began to feel himself being backed into a corner, which was frustrating because it was exactly what he had been concerned would happen if he came to the session. "My parents deaths didn't only affect me. It affects anyone who knew them. I see it happen frequently." In Jim Gordon's promise. In Alfred's every move, look, and spoken and unspoken word.

"You talk about it as if you're responsible for stopping the pain their deaths have caused others."

Another direct hit. It was like a game of battleship, except it was only taking five minutes to send all his ships sinking down into the water. When a game ends that quickly, you begin to wonder if it isn't rigged somehow. He reminded himself that Dr. Scott did treat his mother and no doubt she'd spoken of him. However, he'd also seen just out of the corner of his eye that she arrived at her office by police car. Did she work with the police in some way? If so, what kind of access did she have to files there? He decided to test it out. "Just my being alive and in Gotham causes pain to those closest to me."

Dr. Scott cast him a concerned stare. There didn't seem to be anything disingenuous about it, but Bruce had been wrong about that before. "Because you remind them? Of your parents and what happened?"

She'd stayed on topic. He continued to monitor. "Because they'll protect me at all costs, even if it means giving up their own lives." Something tightened in his chest. He pushed the feeling down, down, down, until it was nearly locked away entirely and made himself say, "Because I'm all that's left of Thomas and Martha Wayne."

The doctor's breathing changed. Her chest rose just a little more quickly than it had minutes ago. Bruce wondered if she knew she had a tell. He wondered if technically she was allowed to even have a tell at all. She spoke softly, "Tell me, Bruce. Is there anything that isn't your absolute and complete responsibility?"

He blinked, but did not answer.

She continued, "Or in your mind is there always something you should have seen, should have known, should have done to stop it?"

"To stop what?" he asked.

"All of it. Any horrible thing that's happened, but especially your parents' deaths."

Now Bruce definitely couldn't decide if she'd read any reports. It was an uncertainty, and those bothered him. Greatly. However, this new sensation stemming up through his body contained hurt and shame and regret. He stopped attending to outside threats and focused all of his energy on overcoming the new threat building inside him.

Madeline said, "Bruce, your mother came to see me because of nightmares, but at the root of it, she believed that she should have done more to save people and end the suffering around her. I diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder."

He needed to buy himself time to sift through the unbearable feelings that threatened to swallow him up whole. So he asked a question that he already knew the answer to, "What's post-traumatic stress disorder?"

"I could pull off my copy of the DSM-V off my bookshelf, but basically PTSD is when a person is suddenly and unexpectedly devastated by an atrocious event and is then never the same. The trauma may be over, but it keeps getting replayed."

"Replayed?"

"Yes. Like a movie, but without the story. It's just…"

Flashes, Bruce thought.

She continued, "It's just fragments and traces of whatever happened."

"Doesn't that happen to anybody who's been through something upsetting?"

Madeline sat back and thought for a moment. "For a long time, that's what we thought. But it turns out some people experience something terrifying and they don't retain any vivid memory of it. So the actual traumatic event has very little to do with who gets PTSD and who doesn't."

Bruce asked, "What does it have to do with?"

"Two things," Madeline said. "When time passes, events can be bleached of their intensity. But with PTSD, the memory is completely intact."

"And the other?"

"Recently, it's been found that when parents are diagnosed with PTSD, their children are about four times more likely to experience the symptoms themselves should something traumatic take place."

Bruce felt himself breathing more quickly. Just like he'd noticed a change in Dr. Scott's breathing pattern, he could only imagine she noticed his.

Madeline said, "When I heard what happened to your parents, I knew that I needed to come back to Gotham. You blame yourself for their deaths, and if someone doesn't stop you, you're going to blame yourself for every bad thing that's ever happened so long as you perceive that if you'd just been smart enough, strong enough, and omniscient enough that you could have stopped it. It happened to your mother, and the same could happen to you. Like I said back at your home, your mother wouldn't want that for you. I promise you, Bruce, she wanted so, so much better than that for you."

Bruce wanted to leave. He wanted to get up, run out to the car to Alfred, drive away, and never ever return to this office again. But Dr. Scott had him now. He couldn't leave, not when his mother, who would never say anything to him ever again, was telling him to stay.

He stopped himself before he said aloud, D4. You sunk my battleship.

Madeline blinked and leaned down. "Bruce? Bruce, are you all right?"

His voice was barely a whisper. "Can you make the nightmares stop?"

"Yes." The doctor cleared her throat, but her voice still shook ever so slightly. It was in that moment that she seemed fully human to him for the first time. "We'll make them go away together."