bruce wayne

Bruce Wayne is not a sentimental man. He is not, and has never been, a believer.

There's no God that church preaches, he decided that for himself long ago. There are gods, he's seen them firsthand — never a God, omnipotent and merciful. Not when he was a small boy, wailing over two bodies, his small hands clenched so tightly around his mother's pearls, frozen round tears. Not when he held his own son, broken and still in his arms, a soul-shattering silence that was the only answer he’d ever received to a prayer. Prayer was a child’s plea, a desperate scream into a void that never, ever screamed back.

And yet.

He finds himself here again, drawn to this cavernous church like a ghost to its haunt. The air inside is cool and still, thick with the scent of melting wax and frankincense. Motes of dust dance like lost spirits in the kaleidoscopic beams of light spearing through the stained-glass windows, painting the ancient stone floor in fractured hues of sapphire and blood. The sun is rare in Gotham; it feels like a reward for being here. He doesn't come for salvation. He comes for the silence. He comes to sit in the house of God who wasn't ever home. Perhaps, it makes it peaceful.

In the shadows, the saints watched him from their alcoves, their painted eyes holding a weight he could feel on his skin. Their gazes were a familiar pressure, a constant in his life. It was the same scrutiny he endured under the flash of cameras at galas, the same wide, terrified whites of a criminal’s eyes on the streets, the same silent judgment from the portraits of his ancestors lining the manor’s halls. There was no escape, not even in the cavernous silence of Wayne Manor, a mausoleum where every empty room was a monument to a life he might have lived.

Bruce lowered himself onto a bench, the old wood groaning under his weight. His eyes, shadowed and tired, drifted upward, past the flickering constellation of candles, to the crucifix looming over the altar. He watched Bruce, too. The sorrowful Christ, head bowed under a crown of thorns, body a map of a sacrifice Bruce could not comprehend. It was a suffering with a purpose, a pain that promised redemption for a world he loved. His own nightly crusade felt like penance too, but it was not merely Gotham's sins he carried.

He carried his own too, with no absolution waiting at dawn, and in the profound, echoing emptiness of this holy place, surrounded by the symbols of a faith he could never grasp, Bruce felt perfectly and utterly undisturbed. That, perhaps, was the only communion a man like him could ever hope to find.