Thanks for all the feedback and love! Okay, so after this, I've got three more chapters in the works. Thanks for taking the ride, folks!

(x)

Bruce and Madeline settled into her office. It didn't take long before she asked him her quintessential therapy question. "How've you been feeling?"

"Calm," he answered. "I haven't been experiencing any elevated emotion."

Or if he had, Madeline couldn't imagine he'd admit it to her - or to himself, not without her backing him into a corner first. She mentally stepped back to take a look at not just that single tile but the whole mosaic that was "the prince of Gotham", Bruce Wayne. Assessing his straight-as-a-rail posture, how he looked her right in the eye but …also pinned her with a 1000 yard stare she mostly only saw in the eyes of war veterans. He appeared relaxed, but it was the most forced relaxation she'd seen manifested in some time. This was a kid who's smoke detector was -always- turned on. And the amygdala burned through a lot more battery life than what was inside a couple double AAs. She added up these observations in a matter of seconds, a halfway decent trick acquired from years of practice.

Then she asked herself the last question on her list: Was he connecting with her or not?

Here she stumbled upon an uncharacteristic hesitation. And then she realized with a modicum of dread.

You'll know by the end of this session.

She decided it was in their best interest to kick things off with a common goal. "What about nightmares? Have you had any this week?"

Bruce answered her question, as if he'd anticipated it well before she asked. "I had one. Last night. This one was … different from the others."

Madeline adjusted her glasses and sat back. "Talk to me about it."

Bruce started off, as had so many others. James Gordon. His mother, Martha. He sunk back into the depths of the nightmare, unaware of the courage he displayed in doing so. "I'm in my bed. I wake up from … another nightmare, one that I can't remember." Doesn't want to remember. "I think I'm awake and the nightmare's over, but really I'm still dreaming." False awakening. They'll hose you every time. "I sit up in bed and look around, and the room looks just like my room. Nothing's out of place, but … I have this feeling, a physical feeling, that something's not right."

She asked him, "Where did you experience that physical feeling?"

He looked down in thought, no doubt doing a mental body scan, trying to remember. He looked up at her. "My stomach and my chest."

That gnawing interior discomfort. … Poor kid. "What happens next?"

"I stand up and I walk out to the french window in my bedroom. I unlatch and throw open the window. This strong, cold breeze hits my face, and I close my eyes." His voice is changing. He's in it now. "Then, I open them and suddenly, I'm staring out at a graveyard. It's the same one where my parents are buried." His eyes held that distant gaze, the same one Gordon had right before...

"Bruce."

The sound of his own name jarred him, like a person who just woke up and isn't sure where he is. Madeline said softly, "I need you to take few deep breaths, okay? I know it's a strange request, but humor me."

Bruce nodded and followed her suggestion. He's nothing if not polite. Martha would be proud. (And so heartbroken.) No, nope. Stay here. You can time travel later. Madeline demonstrated, drawing in a deep breath and releasing it. Inhale, exhale. Repeat. When he looked like he was breathing normally, Madeline said, "Okay. Now you said you were standing there looking out of the window."

Bruce continued. "It's like I float up or fly there somehow. I land right in front of their headstones. I can see the smooth, cold marble with their names… The date of when they died."

That date was etched in stone in more places than just that graveyard. "You're coming up on the anniversary of their deaths, in just a few short weeks."

"Yes," he said. "I try not to think about that … but I think about it anyway."

She shared with him, "Anniversaries are important in this business. If we aren't conscious of them, we can self-destruct without even understanding what the calendar did to us."

Bruce nodded, as though that made logical sense. The kid was only accessing the one-plus-one-equals-two side of his brain. It was the only safe place to go. "I'm there, sitting there for awhile. Then, I look up and I notice a full moon is out. My eyes adjust to the darkness, to where I can see almost as clearly as I do when it's light out." A frighteningly accurate metaphor for his reality. "That's when I see it."

Madeline blinked and sat up. "That's when you see what?"

"A… bird, I think. It's dark and … vague. It doesn't have any features." He blinked several times, frustrated by this facet of the dream. "It's high up the sky, but it starts descending, closer and closer. I keep trying to get a better look at it, but then … the scene ends."

She repeated back. "The scene ends?"

"Yes. Almost like a play," he said. Or like a movie, maybe like the one his parents took him to right before they… "Someone pulls a dark curtain closed and… then it's over. And I wake up. This time for real."

Bruce stared at her openly, as though he'd just read off a grocery list to her instead of described one of the most haunting dreams he'd ever experienced in his short life.

Jesus.

… I should have come back so much sooner.

Madeline kept on point, hid her concern and stayed only curious, so he wouldn't close up like a car window. "It know it was dark and vague, but … What kind of bird do you think it was?"

"I don't know." He said uncertainly, "A blackbird? Maybe."

She took a risk with a little dry humor. "Did it perch on a bust of Pallas just above your chamber door?"

Bruce lent her a smile. It only felt halfway dutiful. "No." He quoted softly, "Tis some visitor. Nothing more."

Madeline watched him. Well, at least she hadn't induced a flashback like with Gordon. "What do you think the dream meant?"

He fell back into silent consideration. "I think it's trying to tell me something."

"Sometimes that's what dreams do," she said. "They say: Look here. This is important."

Bruce put the question back on her. "What do you think it's trying to tell me?"

She breathed out a loud sigh through one corner of her mouth. "Well, we could be psychoanalytical. Talk about the elements of the dream, give them roles, make them actors. Or we could wax philosophical, postulate about what a blackbird represents. But … I don't think there's anything substantial to be found there, in this case. So let me ask you this. When you were in the dream, how did you feel?"

"I started out feeling alone and afraid." Bruce's voice was even, pragmatic. Still didn't have the slightest hint of emotion. She'd need a crowbar and some elbow grease if she ever figured out where he hid that black box. "Then when I saw the bird, I felt …intrigued."

"So the dream ended on a neutral note."

"Yes," he agreed. "I just wanted to know more."

The seconds ticked past, and Madeline made a game time decision. "Are there times in your waking life where you've started out feeling afraid and then that evolved into a feeling of curiosity?"

He nodded another affirmative. "When that happens, I feel... clear." He spoke easily. Too easily. "It's energizing."

Bruce looked like a kid and spoke words like an adult. But he was both and he was neither. Much like he knew simultaneously too much about grief and too little. And he was intellectualizing that grief all over the place, and it needed to stop. "So you might say that your nightmare has left you with an interesting problem to solve."

He blinked. "I suppose it could be looked at that way."

Madeline leaned in and said in a soft but firm voice, "Maybe the more you learn about what things are, the less terrifying they are to you. In fact, maybe if you can just learn to master all your fear, you'll figure it out. You'll fully realize whatever terrible mistake you feel you made in that alley outside the theater. And then you'll never have to feel your heart break like that ever again."

Bruce stared forward silently. She knew he heard the words, but he failed to react to them in any way. Somewhere in some back corner of her mind, she heard Harvey telling her that she had other tools in her toolbox besides her sledgehammer. You might want to root around in there one day, doc, you know, see what else you got.

Get out of my session, Harvey.

And just like that, therapy froze to a standstill.

Shit.

Well, she'd challenged him, and she did so knowing a complete circuit board shut down was possible. Such were the hazards of her brand of therapy. And this kid/adult might not think she could hack a little silent treatment, a little who blinks first. But he had no idea to whom he'd thrown down the gauntlet. She could outlast anything. The wall behind her would say something before she did.

Madeline counted the seconds as they stared at each other. She blinked and shifted in her seat, showing him that she could do that and also not have to say a word.

Bruce finally did speak up, but he did so only to change the subject. "I began reading your book."

So he brings up a topic that, at any other time, that high-on-myself side of me is just dying to talk about. Good lord, he was sharp. Look out girls. Look out world. Bruce Wayne is coming for you. But she wasn't about to let him off the hook that easily. She ignored his statement. "There are other ways to address that fear you feel that are healthy and can move you forward."

He considered this. "What kind of ways?"

Mentally, she breathed a sigh of relief. "We can train ourselves to handle fear well by learning different ways to breathe, to move. I mean, it's really been utilized since time immortal in countries like China, Japan, India…"

He seemed to like something about the suggestion. "How do those tactics control it?"

"Well, it's about purposeful movement and being centered," she said. "Depression's all about the past. Anxiety's all about the future. And we function at our best level when our mind is here in the present."

Another long silence. Well, maybe you should've ended with a open-ended question instead of more intellectualization? Like most therapists? She glanced at the clock. Dammit, only ten more minutes. Whatever. It was her last session of the night. She'd run them over time, if the kid let her.

She brought herself back to her unanswered question from the beginning of the session. Is he connecting with you or not? She decided upon, Not enough that I can be sure he'll come back. So not enough at all.

Then another thought rose into the ether. Maybe Bruce had pointed her down another possible path after all. She asked him. "So, how far are you into the book?"

This question brought Bruce back to life. "I'm nearly finished," he said. "I was wondering… You share case vignettes of real sessions. I know you saw my mother here for several months…"

Madeline nodded, understanding. Then she leaned in, as if sharing a secret. "Keep reading," she said. "You're almost there."

It was a gift that he accepted. It felt so good to give him something, to give Martha's boy...

"You know," Madeline said. "When I first started doing this, way back before the days of the dinosaur…" She joked and Bruce allowed for it. "I was so careful not to bring myself into the session. I didn't want…" Say it. "I didn't want anyone in here to see how fragile I was. How… I could make mistakes, miss things." She shrugged. "But at times, it happens to all of us."

Bruce furrowed his brow. "Do you feel you've said anything wrong to me during our session?"

She almost told him that if he was gonna ask that question then they may as well switch seats. Instead, she said, "When I first met you, I told you that your mother taught me a lot about strength and empathy. I wasn't just saying that." With that, Madeline collected up her poker chips. Maybe if she wanted the kid to connect, she'd have to demonstrate it first. It was time to go all in. "Though your mother didn't know it at the time, I was attending my own therapy to deal with symptoms that were very similar to her own."

Madeline didn't know if Bruce could show true surprise, so even a ghost of it was something. "So psychologists sometimes need therapy, too." He said it as though it was an idea he hadn't happened upon until now.

"Well, I can't sit in a room and hold a therapy session with myself." Then she looked Bruce in the eye and put power behind her words. If he'd already read the book, they wouldn't come as much of a surprise. "Six years ago here in Gotham, a man tried to kill me," she said. "I survived it. Obviously. But afterwards I experienced trauma of my own."

Bruce responded, saying, "In your writing, you said you tried to ignore it."

Actually, I said… "I was trying to 'be strong'. Sometimes that's code for ignoring feelings we don't want to feel." She said, "Hiding our core feelings takes an enormous amount of energy. Despite that, I can't tell you how many times I decided that I was so much better off not feeling anything."

His dark eyes gave away nothing, but to her, it looked like he understood.

Madeline said, "It's a risk, isn't it? Letting ourselves feel when it's so terrifying?"

Bruce only continued to look at her with his striking, intense stare.

"But you've got a coping skill," she said. "You've got your intellect. That'll help you out someday. But you can't hide all your feelings behind it. Any more than I could hide mine behind 'I'm a psychologist so trauma won't affect me.'" They were running low on time. Had to be. "You need to look into your nightmares, not just to learn how to overcome them. But so that when you feel fear or anger or sadness, you can understand that it's a normal human reaction and also that it will not last forever."

He frowned, the face of a man deep in thought. "I think the bird in my nightmare was the reason I looked up from their graves." He looked up at Madeline. "I think it was trying to get my attention."

Another diversion from talking about feeling. But maybe she could use it. Maybe she would be psychoanalytical after all. "The bird is you," she said. "I think what you really want is to understand more about yourself."

He looked at her, still talking about the dream but in a new way. "If I decide I want to do that, I'll have to look at what's behind the curtain."

Oh, God. Would he just. "Well, for what it's worth, everything we're talking about is already here in this room. You brought it with you. We could try to ignore it, but ...I think it's better to know the truth." She shrugged again. "Even if the truth is brutally painful. At least you'll know it for what it is."

Bruce focused in on what Madeline began to believe was his true goal. "Will that make me stronger?"

"Yes," she said. "Not at first. But over time it will."

Bruce sat, staring at her, a barely visible spark of interest in his eye. But she saw it. He watched her quietly, politely, as if he were waiting for her to say…

She pointed up to the clock. "We're a little - well, we're a lot - over time."

Bruce glanced behind his shoulder at the clock, and he stood up from his chair.

Madeline stood up, too. "So what do you think? Think you can stomach another fifty minute hour of this next week?"

Bruce looked at her for a long moment and decided. "I think we can try it."

She'd take it. "Okay. Let's bring you back out to your Mr. Pennyworth. Before he starts to worry that I'm gonna pitch a tent and have you camp out here."

Bruce opened the door for her like a gentleman. Madeline thanked him and walked through.