vaness :D

Detective Comics #575 by Mike W. Barr

Bruce is clearly able to treat a severe stab wound on his own. It's actually more of a puncture wound considering the sword went through him.

Here, he's dealt the same blow, but in the next panel we see him lay down and die.

BRUCE WAYNE / BATMAN

they spent their days bowing under the rigid curriculum of their masters, but they'd sneak out at night learning the city and putting their skills to practice. with dilated pupils and racing hearts, they got themselves in every kind of trouble they could imagine, just to test themselves on getting out. under the guise of 'training,' they allowed themselves to follow every impulse with twin grins.

they stowed away on pirate ships to learn maritime warfare (they wanted to walk off the plank at least once). they practiced stealth by looting jewels from British museums and returning them to their home countries (they'd just watched a movie on heists). they competitively started their own cults to master persuasion and manipulation (they liked the drama and theatrics of it). they spent a week learning voice mimicry to control the pitch and range of their own voices to command attention or disperse suspicion (mocking each other was more fun when they could accurately match the other's voice). they learned hypnosis and mentalism to understand the psychology of suggestibility and the human subconscious ('why are you hitting yourself? why are you hitting yourself?')

it's important to me because bruce will never be that person again, will will never again be that impulsive teenage boy unburdened by the weight of a city. he lost himself to grief and paranoia, to control and intention.

He’s been watching the man pretend to be drunk for about half an hour now, making a fool of himself for all the Elite to see. He had two beautiful models on each arm hanging off of him to serve as eye candy—or, as he tried to make it seem, being used to support his unsteady weight.

So far, in the night, Wayne had ingested a couple shrimps, water, five glasses of different juices and not a single drop of alcohol. When the man started to act out, speak sluggishly and lose balance, Clark had become slightly worried that someone had spiked his drink, but there was not a single chemical tang in any of the drinks—alcohol, sedatives, poison or otherwise—that Clark’s nose picked up on.

It was a bit disconcerting, to say the least, to know that the man that just ten minutes ago walked face-first into a (very big and very visible) marble pillar was stone-cold sober.

That alone meant Clark didn’t have such a high opinion of Wayne; this whole charade of his of playing dumb could just be a desperate cry for attention, or a business move to be underestimated by opponents. Whatever. It wasn’t any of Clark’s business what a billionaire playboy with no serious scandals did to have fun.

What really caught his attention, on the other hand, was how calm and controlled the man was even while lying through his teeth. There was no acceleration in heartbeat, no hitch in breath, no spike in cortisol or adrenaline scent, not even the minute fluctuations in temperature humans usually experienced when embarrassed, excited, angry, or put on the spot.

Clark refuses to use his X-ray vision to check if the man’s blood really was flowing to his downtown are as he led the women around him to believe he was as excited as he said.

A woman—not either of the models he was with—touched his chest flirtatiously and Wayne gave her a lazy smile that probably looked devastatingly charming to anyone without microscopic vision. No reaction. One of the few males surrounding Wayne insulted him jokingly to his face. No reaction. Bruce’s son (Clark had no idea which one, and it felt wrong to take on Lois’ advice on referring to Wayne’s many children as numbers) immediately jabbed a finger in the man’s chest to (very aggressively) defend his father’s honor, positively assassinating the good mood in a ten meter ratio as Wayne had to talk his ward into not escalating the situation even more. No. Reaction.

Clark frowned faintly into his champagne flute. It was kind of very creepy how even his heart was steady, Clark had honestly never seen such an unwavering blood flow in a human, not even Lex Luthor could pull off such bullshit without even the slightest change in his body as a giveaway.

Clark looked away after a while, suddenly uncomfortable with how long he’d been observing the man. He could almost hear Batman’s voice in the back of his mind telling him to stop sticking his nose in Gotham’s business. And he would comply to his friend’s wishes.

bored clark pacing in a little tiny superspeed circle…