He hadn’t slept much, not since he’d been taken and set down in a world that he wanted nothing to do with. It was hard to rest there, bordering on impossible, and if by some miracle he did close his eyes, something triggered him into opening them right back up again. It was Alfred staring at him from the doorway or the sound of gunshots that weren’t there. It was the image of a woman cowering before him, sinking against a wall, weeping, begging when she didn’t need to.
It hadn’t been his Gotham and Bruce had hated every second spent there, trapped and unable to claw his way out. The city was cracked down the middle and he’d done everything he could to fix it, knowing that nothing he did would help. Nothing he did would mend what was broken. People there were terrified of the Batman. They didn’t want him. He haunted them day and night and he had no mercy, no mercy and no compassion for anything or anybody. They hated Batman and they were wary of Bruce Wayne. He walked into a room and the room fell silent, deathly still as soon as he appeared.
Bruce had cleaned out his wounds that morning, had washed away the blood and the grime and the sweat. One of the manor’s employees, a middle aged woman who had fled the residence soon after Bruce wasn’t himself anymore, had come to him with clothes and words of concern that he replied to as best as he could. She was the one who told him that his other half had the manor, had his cars and his weapons and everything else that belonged to him, and to Terry.
The Batman who had a rightful place here would get his possessions back, and he would take them back as forcefully as he could, because when it came down to it, the man with his face did not deserve empathy or pity or tolerance.
Halfway through the door where Terry told Bruce to meet him, and somebody collided with him, the second person he’d gotten a good look at since earlier today. The first thing he did was reach out to him, put his hands on his shoulders to keep him steady, to make sure that he was real. Bruce did not clamp down on him, did not crush the way the other one had done in the Cave. He was tentative, unsure.