Batman Begins Today

“I’m not going to kill you,” the Batman said. “You’re going to tell them. Every criminal in Gotham. The shadows used to belong to you. Now they belong to me .”

But on the night of his final trial—a village cowering before a false king, a cart of opium to be burned—Bruce hesitated. The king was a man. The village held children. And the League’s answer was always ash. Batman Begins

Bruce followed him into the mountains. The League of Shadows’ temple breathed ice. Here, a boy who had once fallen down a well learned to fall on purpose: from cliffs, from burning ropes, from the pedestal of certainty. Ra’s al Ghul, whose voice was the rustle of old parchment and older bones, taught him that justice was a scalpel, not a shield. “To fight injustice,” the ancient man whispered, “you must become something terrible .” “I’m not going to kill you,” the Batman said

“Then by all means, exsanguinate on the Ottoman.” Alfred’s hands were gentle, but his voice carried the weight of thirty years of watching boys become ghosts. “The detective from Internal Affairs called. A Sergeant Gordon. He wanted to thank you for the location on the drug shipment.” The shadows used to belong to you

Bruce stared at the cowl on its stand. The ears were crooked. He’d fix that tomorrow. “Did he ask for a name?”

For the first time in years, Bruce almost smiled. The rain kept falling over Gotham. Somewhere, a child was watching her parents die in an alley. Somewhere, a man in greasepaint was licking his lips. And somewhere, in the flooded subbasement of a Narrows tenement, a doctor named Jonathan Crane was injecting his own neck with a serum that smelled of almonds and screaming.