Bruce was past twelve so I was about ten. I had not finished Dr. Arkham's PhD thesis so I declined the theater offer. I remember it was about dementia, something along the lines of my brother's sickness. I shared a late dinner with Alfred, since I wanted to finish my reading before. And as we were clearing the table, I had a sudden chest pain. I really think my heart missed a beat. And all my muscles contracted. I think I heard a wolf's howl but that's probably the shock getting to my head. Feeling their death was weird enough. Don't know why my psyche needs to add the howling shit. Anyway, I looked at Alfred and said something like 'Something terrible just happened.' and he believed me. I told him to take the car and drive downtown to where they had been. Which he did, leaving me alone at the manor. I started hearing voices and seeing shapes in the house. My brain was in total apprehension. I knew it happened but I had no tangible facts to hold onto and my very clever brain, that asshole, was losing grip of reality. The loneliness added to that and I decided it'd be better to step outside. So I waited, sit on the staircase, my brothers wolves meeting me there to spend the night in their furs. The connection was not lost, after all. So when Alfred and Bruce came back home, the sun was slowly rising. Alfred got all fussy about me sleeping in the cold but I was really not listening to him then. I could only feel Bruce's pain and that's all that mattered. Understand, I had lost my parents too and I was heartbroken. But I had gone through that and worst. When your parents die, in the natural case of events, you're left with your siblings. The relation you have with them tend to last longer and grow stronger. So I was only worried about Bruce. I told Alfred we would go rest and asked him to have a scolding hot bath and warm food ready for later in the day, when Bruce would wake up. I seemed to know what I was talking about so he did as I bid. We curled under the cover, as we used to, but I hugged him. I hugged him so tight, I wonder how I didn't suffocate him. And I tried to take his nightmares away. I don't know. I was keeping my eyes closed but refrained from sleeping and I was thinking 'Give me your nightmares, give me your nightmares' until I would really see nightmarish things in my head. I don't know if I actually took them from him but he woke up ten hours later, almost refreshed while I felt washed and had to linger in bed for six more hours.
The following days were nothing but heavy. Alfred and I handled as much as we could. Alfred for the adult stuff and me for taking care of Bruce. It makes me shudder. What a horrible thing had happened to us. And already I could feel Bruce's rage growing. I attempted addressing it, reducing it, talking him through it. But it was such an unfair horror. At the funerals, he ran away. I ran after him. And we fell. In one of our secret spot. And he cried. Like a baby. An orphan baby. He cried the tears I had never let out. But I joined that day. That one day, I let him see me cry. I thought I was being mature, keeping things inside. And it's not like I was struggling. I had always kept things inside. Nobody ever showed me how to express feelings. I had built that idea myself that showing happiness brings you good but showing sadness, weakness only brings you bad. Over the following weeks, I became oblivious to how this trait of mine was affecting Bruce. I understand now though. It made him feel weak. I was younger than him. I was a girl. Bruce's not exactly the sexist kind but, well, it was twenty five years ago. I could hold myself together while he only felt devastation and despair. Slowly, he grew detached. Not from me. But from everything else. The six next years, we grew closer and closer. He wanted to study. Study hard. We travelled to Harvard, Cambridge, the best universities. We past our diplomas together. For me, it was easy, without undermining anything or anyone. So I helped him through it. We were kind of closing ourselves in a bubble. All along, I thought I was carrying out our parents' will: growing us up into Wayne Enterprises' future. You know, we needed to pick up their fight for Gotham and make it the beautiful city they were trying to build. In my head, it was limpid: together, the two of us, against all the criminality, the poverty. But Bruce had other plans.
On his eighteenth birthday, we threw a massive party. We were Waynes after all. There are no private celebration in this world. I hate that. As much as Bruce did. Or does, I don't know. It all went very well. People would joke about we should get married and all sorts of crap. I mean. It's not like I never thought about it. He was eighteen, I was sixteen, he had grown into a quite handsome man, it must be noted. But while I would have welcomed the idea I think, he had disengaged from it quite clearly. Fair enough. Not like I cared. We drunk that night. Too much I guess. When the last guests would not leave, we ran off. In our secret spot. And… Not that it's any of your business. But he finally mentioned to me this inferiority he felt towards me. That he was weaker than me. Well, that he felt weaker than me. I still don't think he was but one's weakness must only be assessed by oneself. So I've come to learn. But then he served me some kind of bullshit based on 'I don't have what it takes to make you happy' blah blah, it outraged me. I got notably pissed off. I hate this manly talk about how they should make women happy. We can make ourselves happy, you know! I don't need anyone to give me what I need. I can get it myself! That he felt frailer than me is one thing. One thing I accept. But that you should reject me because you think you're not good enough for me. It's plain stupid. Like, stupider. I told him it was my business to chose who's good enough for me, certainly not his and I walked home. He snuggled to me later in the night and in the morning, he was gone. With my massive hangover, it's not like I had a chance to hear him pack his stuff and step out. So I woke up to find Alfred regretfully telling me 'Master Bruce has left the premises' and at first I thought 'Good' because better have him off finding his strength than brooding over here. But that was the first two months.
So… Seven years later. Yeah, you heard it right. Seven. Fucking. Long. Lonely. Years. But what have I done during these seven years right? Well I kept on educating myself. I took care of Wayne Enterprises, in the name of my lost brother, declared dead too soon. Generally, I followed my Mom's steps. She wanted to build schools, help the homeless. I took all Bruce's clothes and went in the streets myself to chat with the poor people of Gotham, hand them the outfits Bruce would never wear again. Oh I knew he was not dead. But I also knew that he would come back… bigger than his eighteen years old self. So anyway, these trousers and shirts were obsolete. I created as many job positions as I could to help people get off the streets. Built reinsertion complexes, education centers, took part into every urban project that would end up on my desk. I think I made my parents proud. Worked hard for that. On a personal level, well, I was not really giving any importance to that level to be fair. Between sixteen and twenty-three are the years you start going out with friends, flirting around with boys, or girls. Finding yourself. I was highly advanced obviously. Too mature for these games. I knew who I was, I knew what I had to do and I knew what I was waiting for. Who I was waiting for. So I politely declined the first hundred invitations to go out and 'have fun'. Less politely the next hundreds ones. And kept my head full of work. I was successful enough the first years. But it was nagging at me. And I wanted it off. I wanted to be far as well actually. Not going after Bruce. But I was missing some pieces there and I'm sure you can't even figure out which.
So, just like that, I decided to travel to Ireland. And here you get it. I trekked through the Lost Valley to find the stone house I had caught a glimpse of as I ran away. Oh I found it alright. In a pile of pebbles and apparent signs of fire. No one in sight, dead or alive. All traces had been wiped out, either by him or by other adventurers like me. Nothing to relate to. But I'm so clever you know. I spent some months on it, analyzing the paper from my Mom's diary, the ink, the writing, the dates, cross-checking the events, clever clever clever. Got myself a name, which I don't like. Wayne's far better. But most importantly, found my sister. You know, the one that ran away. She told me later she could see the disaster coming but no-one would listen to her. She was only six after all. She left and my parents did nothing to find her because, she had gone back to the society you see, she was non existant to them anymore. Some good parenting there, I tell you. So I traced her down. She was going under the name Lee. Which gives Amy Lee. And yes, I'm talking about that singer. Alfred took me to one of her concerts and I waited for her outside. When our eyes met, it was an evidence. Right away, she knew. We crashed into each others' arms and for fours years, I believed I was whole again. I told her, she told me and soon I filled the void left by Bruce. I was still waiting for him of course. My heart is that big that I could have held them both in there. But though I was never alone because I always had Alfred *winks towards him*, I needed that relation in my life. That one person I can entrust with everything. Bruce had filled that void after the wolves and had set my standards so high. Too high. But Amy, she met them, easy. She was my moon. We shared a fusional sisterhood. But so short. Her beginnings had been close as rough as mine. A six years old in the wild. She had been picked up by some orphanage somewhere, adopted by a sweet family of artists where she found her place, started writing out her dark memories of our brother and the pain he had caused her. She had the sweet voice you all know and she soon rose to fame, moved to US and formed Evanescence, with that guy, Ben. He was a childhood friend and she had loved him for long. But this son of a bitch. He played with her. Gave her affection and then abruptly rejected her. Classic case of bipolarism doubled with assholeness. I tried to be her defense and always offered her a safe place when he would be mean to her. But his intentions being so nasty, he soon found the best way to fuck it all up. He fell in love with me. Or so he told Amy. So she was left between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, I was her salvation. On the other, I was the cause of her pain. She got angry at me. Mad angry. I took it in the face. I had nothing to defend myself from, I hadn't done anything wrong. I left her scream out her filth on me without so much as a flinch. Until she got sick of my face and threw me out. I came back to the mansion, a tiny bit affected but knowing she would see reason soon and come back to the safety of my arms. I waited three days. And grew worried. I told Alfred, poor Alfred, sorry again, I would go back there and might stay with her for some time. I found her dead. She had broken the wall mirror in the bathroom and had cut her wrists with the shards, staring at her blood flow out of her veins in the water of the bath. I swear to God. I swear that if I could have been more broken than then, I might have picked up a shard myself and follow her. I remember crying, without a sound, taking her out of the water and holding her close. And when there was no salty water left in my body, I started rocking her. Apparently I stayed two weeks in the flat. From the proves I gathered, I must have been in an after traumatic distress. I acted as if she was still alive, fooling myself. I would move her corpse, dress her. Even prepare food for both of us. As if. She entered an advanced stage of decay. And one morning, I felt the same sort of sensation as when I saw Mr and Mrs Wayne's murder. We were on the sofa. Well, I was on the sofa, watching TV, and I 'saw' that Bruce was in a plane. Of course, I learnt afterwards he had taken a lot of planes while he was away. But I could clearly understand he was coming back. Far from outbursting my joy, the realization hit me. I turned my head and saw, really saw, the corpse at the other end of the sofa. It's like I had been asleep and I just awoke. And got hit by a truck right then. I put her back in the tub, called the cops and lied I just found her like that. There was no witness, no proof otherwise, no-one to sue so no investigation to be had. I got away with it. But my heart certainly didn't. I shamefully drove back home and crashed in Alfred's arms. Only to tell him Bruce would be back shortly and that I needed to gather myself. And to do it quickly.