The city is too quiet from this high up.

In the penthouse, the glass walls hold back the skyline like a museum exhibit—Gotham framed, distant, obedient. Inside, Bruce is not.

He hasn’t stopped moving since you walked in. He paces from the windows to the kitchen island and back again, as if the rhythm alone might rewind the night. His breath won’t settle. It catches halfway down, splinters, refuses to fill his lungs. His hands tremble—not violently, but enough. Enough that he fists them, then releases, then fists them again. His pulse is a hammer against his ribs, too fast, too loud. He’s cataloging it clinically even now. Elevated heart rate. Shallow respiration. Adrenaline spike. A panic attack is quickly occurring.

He doesn’t stop moving.

The memory loops with merciless clarity. The angle of the alley. The second it took him to choose left instead of right. The sound—yours. The exact distance between you when danger closed in. He runs the numbers again. He always runs the numbers again.

He was late.

Not by much. But by enough.

Fear is there, yes—but it’s layered under something sharper. Guilt, precise and cold. Bruce Wayne built his life on the premise that chaos could be out-thought, out-trained, out-planned. If he prepared enough, calculated enough, sacrificed enough, no one else would have to.

Tonight shattered that equation.

The realization isn’t loud. It’s worse than that. It’s quiet and undeniable: there is no formula that guarantees survival. No strategy that seals every exit. He can predict patterns, anticipate moves, break bones and systems alike—but he cannot command the universe.

He cannot control everything.

And if he can’t—then one day, someone he loves will pay for that.

“I calculated wrong.”

It comes out flat. Not angry. Not even emotional. Just a statement of fact, like reading a line from a ledger.

You’ve been watching him from where you’re leaned against the counter, arms wrapped around yourself—not from fear now, but from the way he’s unraveling in front of you. You call out with a soft voice.

“Bruce.”

He doesn’t look at you. His jaw tightens; his breath shortens. The air seems too thin for him, like the room has shrunk a few inches without warning.

“I was off by thirty-seven seconds.”

Thirty-seven seconds. He says it the way other people say forever.

Underneath the analysis, something far more vulnerable is breaking open. He isn’t just afraid of losing you. He’s confronting the unbearable truth that he cannot be omnipotent—that all his training, all his armor, all his contingency plans cannot promise permanence. For a man who turned grief into a mission, that is a fissure straight through the foundation.

His vision edges slightly, not darkness—just narrowing. Tunnel focus. His body is primed for a fight that already ended.

The illusion of his unbeatable symbol—carefully constructed, reinforced over years of victories—has split down the center in his eyes. He can’t control everything. He can’t calculate every variable. He can’t guarantee safety no matter how disciplined, how relentless, how prepared he is.

And if that’s true—

Then what is he standing on?

He stops pacing only because his lungs force him to. He braces his hands against the back of a chair, head bowed, breath unsteady, trying to drag air into a chest that feels locked from the inside.