bruce wayne: the lost years
a vital part of bruce, and something that keeps every good interviewer on their toes for life when dealing with mr wayne, is the 8 years missing between the ages of 21 & 29 when, for all intents and purpose, bruce wayne fell off the face of the earth. this is a man who has spent his entire life in the public eye, only aided by his parents death, and yet for almost a decade he completely disappeared, no trace whatsoever, and even now, years after his heralded return to gotham, that period remains a mystery. bruce wayne does not talk about it, never lets anything slip about it, acts as though those years simply did not occur, and of course speculation runs rife - rumors of kidnapping, tales of being locked in a mental institution, none of them true.
im adding “able to make hurried newspaper mock ups” to the skills on my cv.
at 21 years old, bruce wayne graduates from yale with a first in epe (economy, politics and ethics) and finds himself, at long last, out of the thumb of the wayne enterprises board who have been “guiding” (a polite word for pressganging) him into various schools, colleges and courses, shaping him to become the ceo that they want - a young, easily manipulated man who looks good on the front pages, and will do what they say, no questions asked. bruce is not that man. he has been downplaying his intelligence for years, partly as a way to fit into school, and partly due to his apathy at wanting to excel without his parents there to see. however it has the unexpected side effect of the board completely underestimating him, which later proves to be incredibly useful. when the wayne ent board expect him to step up and become the figurehead/scapegoat for the company, bruce instead, 7 months after graduating, disappears. one of the last times he is seen is at the wayne foundation winter gala, on january the 18th, and then he simply seems to vanish. the initial consensus is that he has overdosed/drunken crashed or injured himself, and that in a few days, the body of the wayne heir will be found and the family tragedy will be complete.
weeks go by and no one finds anything. there is hide nor hair of bruce wayne, despite the thousands of reports that roll in saying he has been seen in everywhere from the versace store on grand avenue to an opium den in marrakesh. during this period, bruce, who is clever and exceedingly wealthy and has been teaching himself to create disguises for the last 8 months, boards a plane to taiwan under the name robert jenkins, with $50 in his pocket and a change of underwear. alfred watches the flight take off, and is the last person to see “bruce wayne” alive for 8 years.
sim, i hear you say, why in christs name would bruce want to do that?
quite simply - he wanted to change the world.
this is a young man who has been sitting on the rage and anger of his parents death for more than a decade, who has seen and continues to see the injustices and corrupt nature of humanity, and he wants to do something about it. anything. he can’t bring himself to sit in a boardroom in an ivory tower when there are people just like his parents dying out there. even if he can save one other life, make sure another child doesnt have to grow up like him, he believes that its worth it. he can’t do that in gotham (yet), as he’s too recognisable, doesn’t have the skills, doesn’t know yet how to go up against the entirety of the board and the breadth of dishonest government officials etc, but what he can do is follow the underhand wayne ent dealings and the leaked technology and try to stop his parents company from being used to subdue and overpower some of the poorest people in the world. to become a faceless hero to people who have never even heard the name “wayne”. bruce boards that plane fully intending to give his life in order to save a few others, and he almost succeeds.
is this a completely foolish endeavour with undertones of white saviour complex? yes. however he goes with good intent, as an idealistic person who truly believes he can make a large scale positive impact, fuelled by his righteous fury. that doesn’t last long. he really has been shielded from many of the horrors of the world, and its not until he actually gets out there and has his eyes opened, that bruce realises the scale of human suffering, and just how stupid it was of him to believe he was going to prevent any new “bruce waynes” from being created, when theyre happening literally every minute. but he can do something, and sets his sights on taking down the triad crime syndicate, because a) somehow theyre involved with siphoning wayne money and warfare tech and therefore bruce feels responsible for those they are hurting and b) he can never do anything by halves. so he starts where the money trail is, stealing to get by, working his way up to infiltrating them, starts to understand exactly what is means to be a criminal, how many of them are just desperate people driven by circumstance, much like how he now is. he makes his way into their ranks, and then, because he’s sloppy and inexperienced, he gets caught out. they realise he’s bruce wayne, the man whose name is on all the shipment boxes, and decide that they can milk a pretty penny out of him from the board execs, but not without roughing him up first and asking him why hes there, what hes doing, who hes working for. the more unsatisfactory answers he gives, the worse the torture gets, and by the time he manages to escape, he really is on death’s door. 8 months after he left america, bruce finds himself dying in the back room of a macau chop shop, infection setting into his wounds, and delirious with fever.
this is when the league find him.
they have been watching the triads, waiting to find a weakness that will allow them to drive the syndicate back and reclaim more turf in east asia, and instead they find a half dead bruce wayne who thought he could take down one of the oldest secret societies & crime syndicates of the world, completely alone. his ambition interests them, and they decide to take him in. they bring him to their nepalese “monastery” and leave him there. if he dies, its no skin off their back, if he lives, they will test him to see if he is trainable. bruce, being a tenacious bastard, doesn’t die despite the league’s idea of medical treatment being “stick him near a fire and wait 2 weeks”, and when he’s healed enough, completes the series of gruelling physical and mental challenges that allow him entry to the league’s most base levels and to begin training. this is when the league begins to manipulate him – they tell bruce they wish to change the world, make it a better place, feed him with the ideals that he wants to hear. they do not tell him how they change the world, the brutal murders that occur, the consistent goal of a global scale purge of those deemed unworthy. and, beyond this, bruce doesn’t want to see. the league are the first people to listen to him, that are willing to show him how to tackle “evil”, able to show him how to curb his anger, and he wilfully ignores some of the ruh roh signs in favour of begging them to train him. he is told half-truths, and, believing these and that the league will give him the skills he has always wanted to be able to fight crime, bruce begins a very different sort of education.
to say that it is ruthless would be a massive understatement.
the league instils over a hundred types of martial arts into the recruits, teaches them the arts of stealth, disguise, marksmanship, subterfuge, swordsmanship, theatricality, escapology, intimidation, ambush, poison and deception. they hone the senses, shape the body into a weapon, they are the shadows, appearing and disappearing at a moments notice, able to use their environment perfectly to aid their fight. they are trained to be predators, to hunt their prey, track them down, and to completely master their emotions, to become dispassionate killers unaffected by their actions. but they are also the “fangs protecting the demon’s head” and therefore moulded into fanatical worshippers of ra’s al ghul.
some of the training is very obviously designed to push the recruits to the limit – they spend days being tortured, water boarded, burned with iron pokers, starved, beaten, whipped. some of it is less obvious, psychological – everyone is stripped of their name and their past. recruits live in silence. they are made to sleep on bare rock and are woken regularly after very little sleep for training. waking up often involves being sluiced with ice cold water, which is also the only water they are allowed to wash themselves with. sometimes they are made to sit in the glacier meltwater until hypothermia sets in, and at other times are left in the furnace rooms until they are hallucinating from dehydration. nudity is often forced, during torture training, during sparring, during the physical assaults on them from the elements. survival training involves being abandoned in the mongolian desert, the himalayan mountains, the vietnamese jungle, the middle of the south china sea on a floating plank of wood, and being told to find their way back to the monastery. many do not make it. many flee and are disposed of. food is incredibly restricted, and they are told to be grateful for what mouldy scraps they do receive. there are days where they are blasted with white noise 24/7 and others where they are made to exist in such perfect silence that it is equally as maddening. time is unknown to them – there are no days or weeks to count, and training often happens in endlessly dark rooms, with no sunlight, no one can say how long they have been there. training occurs until they collapse, gruelling feats of gymnastics and repetitive martial arts sequences and fights with each other where the winner is the last one to yield, regardless of how much blood is drawn or how many bones are broken. no weapon is off limits. giving in, slowing down or showing weakness only means more pain and therefore they are made to fight past the limits of their stamina. drugging occurs both with and without consent, and sometimes they are woken up with the world spinning and tasting colours, made to fight each other while under the effects, whilst sleep deprived, while the world is dark and cold and unforgiving. their senses are often restricted, made to feel their way through the world blind or deaf, made to fight like this. when they show emotion, they are beaten, and when they disobey, they are placed into isolation, with no food or nourishment of any kind beyond the dripping of meltwater down the ice walls of the cramped glacier caves theyre trapped into. bruce watches the people he came in with drop like flies, collapse in the middle of an endless competition, literally almost die from the training. he survives, but will carry the mental scars of this experience for the rest of his life. there is purposeful intent to break the trainees.
of course this is done under the pretence of making them able to withstand life as an assassin, the possibility of capture and torture, the likelihood of ending up in places where comfort is minimal, of keeping them on their toes, sharp and alert, and to an extent this is true. however it is also done with the intention of controlling and reshaping these men and women. the league do not want individuals who can think for themselves, who might rebel, they want perfect soldiers, who will follow orders without question, and sacrifice themselves in a heartbeat for the league. they want only the best of the best, those who can perform incredible feats and push past the seeming restrictions of the human body. this is when bruce begins to stand out. not for his physical prowess, although it isnt unnoteworthy. it’s that nothing they seem to do to him can break him. despite everything they put him through, and him especially due to his defiance, he clings to the one thought driving this, the thought that can not be taken away from him, the thought that keeps him focused and pushing onwards and past what he once thought were the limits of his endurance – his parents. that night in the alleyway. his mother’s blood on his hands. no matter what they do, bruce remains fierce and challenging and refuses to be bent to the league’s will the same as the other trainees.
so they try a different tack with him, and when he “graduates” from recruit to foot soldier, they make him management. this is when bruce meets ra’s for the first time. this is not the first time ra’s has met bruce, however. he has become keenly interested in this talented young man who is ferocious in his training, watching him for a year while bruce is unconscious, drugged or asleep, and has begun to believe that maybe, just maybe, bruce is the worthy successor that ra’s has been looking for, for like … 2 centuries by this point. around this time bruce is both introduced to talia, and legally declared dead in the states. the board have rushed it through, despite the continuing rumours that bruce is alive and lack of evidence, as they want to seize control of his majority share in the company and continue running wayne ent into the ground. bruce takes the role of sensei to the newest recruits and is made to pass the training down on to the next gen, which also shields him from going on “assignment” for the league and seeing exactly what they’re up to when they say they’re making the world a better place. ra’s and bruce become very close, initially in a mentor & student like role, and eventually in more of a father & son dynamic, with ra’s actually calling bruce family and inviting him to live in the al ghul quarters etc. ra’s also takes this opportunity to begin manipulating talia and bruce into a relationship, with the intent of securing his bloodline into his successor. yes that is a fancy way of me saying he wants them to have a baby, combining the wayne and al-ghul genes. for a few years it is actually … i mean i won’t say pleasant because life with the league is never pleasant, but at least peaceful. ra’s literally considers talia and bruce to be married (as apparently only his consent is needed for this to be law) and therefore treats him as a son, as the son he always wanted but never had. bruce teaches recruits and continues training under ra’s himself, he and talia “fall in love” as much as two people who have been brainwashed and manipulated can be, and all’s right with the world.
then ra’s deems bruce ready for ascension, to become the new demon’s head, and everything goes to shit.
because of course, the league aren’t actually sunshine and rainbows, and they kill people and are aiming for mass genocide eventually, and therefore bruce’s final task, to prove he is ready, is to kill. and this man, who for the last 8 years has only survived due to clinging to the memory of his dead parents and the sheer need to do right and change the world, obviously refuses. he has seen criminals and knows that killing them is not going to solve anything, and actually makes you worse than them. he sees now too that the league are not just killing criminals, they are killing anyone they deem necessary to remove in order to angle themselves for a greater position of power – the only reason they were interested in the triads was to take over their position, not to actually aid those who suffer underneath them. and bruce turns around, to the man who has saved him and trained him and treated him like family, and he refuses to kill. the league policy on those assassins who fail or disobey orders, is to kill them in return, which is what ra’s attempts to do. they fight, and bruce badly wounds ra’s, thinking he’s killed him, and flees, believing he’s become just as bad as ra’s and has given in after all, but not without burning down most of the league complex first and leaving them in complete disarray.
of course we know that ra’s climbs into the lazarus pit and builds the league back up, but bruce doesn’t know that. the no-kill rule is now cemented firmly in place. he will not become what ra’s wanted him to be.
there is a month where he wanders aimlessly, tracking down several of the league’s alumni or contractors, such as henri ducard, and begging them to train him, but when it becomes obvious that a) they’re all amoral assholes and b) bruce is desperately looking to fill the weird slightly-more-than-just-a-mentor hole that ra’s has left in him, he gives up and returns to gotham, beginning to plan a way to become that faceless hero that can stem the rising tide of corruption that has been gripping the city ever since his parents passing. 8 year to the day since he abandoned gotham, bruce wayne strolls into the atrium of wayne towers and announces that he’s very much not dead and very much will be taking back control of his parents company. 6 months after that, the bat debuts in the city, delivering carmine falcone and his entire operation to the steps of the gcpd. falcone walks, but the rumor mill has already begun to churn, and already criminals are running scared.
but the bruce wayne that steps off of the plane steps back on to american soil is distinctly not the one who stepped on it. there are physical scars, absolutely, but mainly the changes are mental – there is no rash behaviour, lashing anger, that is all driven away, controlled to the point of it being dangerous. he no longer eats or sleeps properly, is on high alert at all hours. needless to say he may have left the league, but the league did not leave him, and they have fundamentally changed bruce wayne, even if they could not break him and make him into a carbon copy like the rest of the soldiers. this is partly why the brucie wayne persona becomes so important – even to most people it would be obvious that he has undergone severe mental trauma and conditioning, but especially to those who once knew him and were close to him, the change is stark. the only person who knows and he confides in is alfred, and even then, it takes time and comes in pieces, stuttered half conversations about what he went through and how normal it seemed at the time. so the brucie persona is adopted, partly as a way to cover what will become his night job, and throw people off the potential scent that bruce wayne could be batman, but partly as a way to hide just how little of bruce wayne is actually left. the league gave him the abilities to do remarkable things and push his body and mind way beyond that of a normal human, but have only built on the trauma of his parents death and left him feeling broken, unable to think and feel and act as your average playboy ceo, or even just average joe, would without adopting a whole new personality, one that he feels incredibly detached from. and obviously this withdrawn, distrustful man that the league have left behind, is what influences all of his later relationships, with alfred, with his children, with the league and his friends.
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