Born to Thomas and Martha Wayne, the affluent couple that Gotham City considered to be its first family, Bruce Wayne spent his first few years of life as a sheltered prince within the grounds of the lavish Wayne Manor. His friends were few and far between, often the sons and daughters of the city's other dynasties, but the lone exception was a boy named Harvey Dent. Harvey, the son of the Wayne family chauffeur, had a rebellious nature that often brought adventure to Bruce's otherwise dull but happy childhood. The two were thick as thieves, despite often getting into trouble for venturing into the woods surrounding the massive estate to play pretend. It was during one of these games, where Bruce was pretending to be a gallant knight tasked with capturing Harvey's rogue that had made off with the King's jewels, that he experienced his first trauma: accidentally falling into an abandoned mine shaft and spooking a massive colony of bats.

The experience changed Bruce's personality. Refusing to leave his bed for days, suffering from nightmares about the winged animals, he quickly grew to be withdrawn, easily frightened and suffering from mood swings. And as Thomas was often on call as a surgeon at Arkham Hospital while Martha was busy with her work as a city councilwoman, his parents were regrettably unable to attend to him in the weeks following the incident. This was where the family's aide, Alfred Pennyworth, stepped in and took matters into his own hands, hiring renowned psychologist Leslie Thompkins to try to treat Bruce before the fear worsened. While it took a few months of sessions, Bruce learned to compartmentalize, accepting that there were things he could not change.

That same year, his life would be forever altered. In addition to seeing far less of Harvey, whose father had been fired after evidence of physical abuse had come to light, Bruce learned the real reason that Thomas and Martha had kept him at the Manor for all those years: Gotham City was overrun with rampant crime. After falling prey to the mafia in the thirties before mellowing out in the sixties, the gangster Carmine "The Roman" Falcone had been making a play for control of the streets. The Mayor, District Attorney, and Police Department were all helpless as rival factions began to challenge Falcone for territory, leading to a gang war that saw the rate of fatalities rise by the day. Thomas himself operated on hundreds of innocents caught in the crossfire, while Martha had been leading inquiries into corruption. When Bruce pressed them for why Gotham had become like this, Thomas decided to be honest. "Because there's something wrong with this city."

Following that, Bruce exhibited renewed signs of withdrawal. A decision was made to try and prevent a backslide: drawing on a fascination with early period films that Thomas has manifested through screenings of classics like The Mark Of Zorro, The Maltese Falcon, and The Hound Of The Baskervilles, the family of three attended a showing of The Grey Ghost Strikes!, a modern send-up of an adventure character adapted from the pulps. As Bruce watched each scene play out infront of him, his eyes widened with glee, and he began to re-enact the thrilling action. Thomas and Martha realized that the spark that had been missing was re-ignited, and the three shared a quiet moment of relief in the auditorium. As fate would have it, it would be their last.

By the time Alfred reached the scene of the Monarch Theater a few hours later, Thomas and Martha's bodies were being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Bruce was being attended to by a uniformed officer named Gordon, shell-shocked. The attending officers relayed the grim events, as told by the ticket counter attendee: the three were heading out of the theater in the rain, trying to unlock their car, only to be approached by a desperate gunman. He had demanded their valuables and a struggle ensued, with the gun going off by accident. Whenever Thomas slumped over, Martha screamed, leading to her prompt murder. The gunman then fled, leaving their orphaned son to kneel before them - as if at an altar that the relentless rain rendered a baptism.

It didn't take long for Bruce's melancholy to return. But unlike before, it was being tempered by a righteous fury. Somewhere inside Bruce's heart, an all-consuming need to prevent his pain from happening to anyone else had manifested. And so the boy made a silent vow: the devotion of the rest of his life to avenging his parents' deaths, reversing Gotham City's decline, and acquiring the talents nessescary to carry out this mission. Choosing Alfred as his first mentor, the boy began to learn a variety of specialized skills. How to read lips, how to pick a lock, and the proper methods of fencing and archery. The tenets of stage acting, the practice of speed reading. Even a few self-defense methods learned from Pennyworth's time in the UKSF.

But his journey was only beginning. From New York to New Jersey, Chicago, and Alaska, Bruce's teenage years were a blur of traditional education and some form of unorthodox trauma therapy. Deciding to enroll at Princeton University under the guise of joining Harvey as a law student, Bruce took every minute between psychology and philosophy classes to bone up on cultural studies, foreign languages, and nightly boxing courses. It was clear he would travel, and the reason was simple: his insights into the American justice system were unsatisfactory. To carry out his vision for righting systemic wrongs in a city like Gotham, he knew that he would need to operate outside the law.

So whenever he turned nineteen, Bruce vanished. From South America to the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Africa, India, Asia, and Russia, Wayne sought the world's greatest masters whenever it came to criminology, martial arts, espionage, and engineering, among other skills that he found nessescary. By the time he was twenty-three, he had learned how to scale walls with the ease of a cat burglar, and by twenty-five, he was being given a crash course in tracking in desert terrain. It didn't matter what it was; all that Bruce knew was that he wanted to be the best at it. To prepare for the unexpected at every point, engaging in a proper war against the criminal element. Only when he realized that he was holding onto a particular fear did Bruce choose to face it head-on, undertaking a spiritual journey through the caverns of Nanda Parbat. It required thirty days of isolation, where one's soul was said to be torn apart and rebuilt.

And by the time Bruce emerged from the caves, he was reborn, ready to return to the city that birthed him. At twenty-nine years old, a decade after he had left America, Bruce's plane touched down at Gotham International to an awaiting press gathering. Whisked away by the loyal Alfred, Bruce's plan of action began to take shape. But before he could begin in earnest, there was one more leg of his training that had to be completed: learning the ins and outs of Gotham's criminal underworld directly. Crafting a criminal alias, Bruce first took to the streets not as a vigilante, but as an observer - "Matches" Malone.

Following a year spent as the enemy, testing Bruce's sense of right and wrong, he finally assembled a small arsenal of non-lethal weapons and gadgets. Putting on a mask and taking on Gotham's criminals directly, his first campaign against the mob lasted only a couple of months, with enough injuries and close calls to force Bruce to reconsider whether he was on the right path. There was a missing element, an unspoken lack of something that gnawed at him. He had the skills and the willpower to put them to use, but he was missing a method.

Visiting his family's mausoleum to pay respects, now sitting on the grounds of an abandoned Wayne Manor following his purchase of a penthouse tower within Gotham, the spiritually lost Bruce opened the crypt's doors in the dead of night - and was greeted by another waiting nest of bats. But rather than revert to his childhood fear, Bruce stood among them, his determination renewed as he realized that their image held the key to his success. To elicit fear from his enemies, Bruce would have to become more than a man. He would have to transform himself into a creature of the night, a perceived entity of fear that rendered the whole of criminality into a superstitious, cowardly lot.

A month later, Sergeant James Gordon would find a local street gang strapped to the side of a building: each member hung upside down and terrified out of their minds. High-ranking members of Falcone's organization would be found hours later, suffering from contusions and fractured limbs. Carmine himself would be discovered hogtied in the bedroom of his estate, promised by a shadowy figure that this was only the beginning. By the time the sun would rise on that first night, thirty-nine criminals in Gotham would either be in custody or in the infirmary. All with the same story, each with a similar tinge of horror in their voices. The press and the underworld alike would christen this avenger of evil with a name befitting his image: The Batman.