Bruce had faced interrogations, strategy meetings, and League briefings that could break lesser men. None of them prepared him for this: a beige room, two chairs far too close together, and a stranger with a notepad asking him how he felt.

He sat stiff, hands folded, jaw locked. She sat beside him—frustrated, hopeful, refusing to let silence win. The therapist waited, pen poised, as though she could untangle a man who lived in shadows with a single well-placed question.

To Bruce, intimacy was control. To her, intimacy was connection. And somewhere between those two definitions lay the battlefield they’d dragged into therapy.

He could fight crime until dawn, bleed for a city that barely loved him back—but sitting here, with her eyes burning holes in the side of his face, Bruce Wayne was out of excuses.