Chapter 1204 Lamb's Cry (Twenty-five) (Patreon)

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As the night rain fell again over Gotham, Bruce, who had been circling the city, returned to Wayne Manor. His hair was damp and stuck to his temples, and his complexion looked a bit pale.

When Alfred came up to hand him a towel, he asked cautiously, "Master, are you alright?"

Alfred didn't often take the initiative to express concern for Bruce, preferring to act instead. But now, Bruce's condition looked truly terrible.

He had let himself get drenched in the rain, soaking his hair and clothes, and his gaze seemed unfocused, like a street addict high on drugs.

Hearing Alfred's question, Bruce suddenly grasped at it like a lifeline. His gaze focused on Alfred's face, and he asked seriously, "Alfred, is there really such a thing as ghosts in this world?"

Alfred draped the towel over Bruce's head, led him to the sofa, and began drying his hair, saying as he did so, "That depends on how you define ghosts."

"I've always believed that death is not the end for humans. As long as a person lives on in the memories of their loved ones, they are not truly gone. In the eyes of their closest ones, though they have departed, their presence lingers everywhere, like a lingering spirit in the room."

Bruce leaned back on the sofa, muttering, "No, I'm not talking about that kind of philosophical explanation. I... never mind, Alfred, could you please bring me a thermometer? I might have a fever."

Alfred touched Bruce's forehead with his fingertips and shook his head, saying, "No, Master, you don't have a fever. Your temperature is normal. If you're feeling unwell, I can get you a hot glass of milk."

To Alfred's surprise, Bruce didn't refuse, just nodding and saying, "I feel a bit cold. Could you make the milk extra hot?"

Soon, Alfred returned with a steaming glass of milk. Bruce leaned forward eagerly, reaching out with slightly trembling fingers to take the cup.

The next moment, he flinched from the heat and nearly spilled the milk. Alfred stood by his side, saying patiently, "Master, I know you and Dick haven't been getting along well lately, and you may be feeling angry, but Dick is still a child..."

"No, it has nothing to do with Dick." Bruce held the scalding hot milk cup in his palms, lips pursed as he said, "You may think I'm talking nonsense, but when I went out just now, I ran into someone who... looked like Thomas."

Alfred's eyes widened. As he folded the towel, he walked towards the phone, saying, "Master, I'm afraid I'll have to call a psychiatrist for you. Hallucinations are a very bad sign."

"I'm also not sure if it was a hallucination, but..." Bruce took a sip of the milk, then fell into deep thought, mentally replaying every detail of his encounter with the man who resembled Thomas. He couldn't find any flaws in his observations.

His superior intelligence, calmness, and rationality, as well as his focus on factual evidence and psychological profiling, all told him that the person had a high probability of being Thomas Wayne.

But the problem was that these same qualities were also telling him that Thomas was long dead, and he had witnessed the burial of the body with his own eyes.

The pallor of Bruce's face came from his poor mental state, but it wasn't because he was shocked to see Thomas - it was because he was starting to doubt whether his own memories were correct.

Unrecognized mental disorders often have a telltale sign before the onset: the patient begins to doubt their own memories, with inexplicable fragments inserted into their brain, making it difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Bruce clearly remembered every detail of Thomas and Martha's fall, as well as the expressions of every guest at the funeral. As a young Bruce, he had seared that day's events deep into his own mind, and it had haunted him as a nightmare for over a decade.

But now, the scene that had appeared in his dreams countless times was being overturned. His deductive abilities told him that the man he saw tonight was indeed Thomas Wayne.

This could not be achieved through simple cosmetic surgery. A good detective like Bruce doesn't just look at a person's face when determining their identity.

He remembered Thomas' every logical action, and the Batman who appeared today perfectly matched that logic.

Alfred's eyes shifted slightly, and then he sat down across from Bruce, taking his hand and saying, "Master, calm down. When something in reality contradicts your memories, it doesn't necessarily mean reality or your memory is wrong. There may be some hidden circumstances we don't know about."

"If you judge him to be Thomas, then he may indeed be. The fact that you remember him being dead before doesn't mean he couldn't have faked his death or resurrected later. That's not impossible, is it?"

Bruce looked up at him, the eye contact still seemed a bit dazed, but in an instant, a violent radiance burst out from his pupils, and he said excitedly as he stood up: "Correct, what you said is right! Thomas and Martha might have faked their deaths, they might not have died at all, they might have gone into hiding, and now they're back!"

"No, I have to go find him now, I need to find out what's going on." Bruce was about to leave, but at this moment, a noisy commotion suddenly erupted upstairs.

Bruce just raised his head and saw Tim leaning over the railing of the atrium, looking down at him and shouting, "Hey, Bruce, you'd better come up and take a look, Dick seems to be having a nightmare."

Bruce took a deep breath, trying to cool down the boiling blood in his body. He took several steps at a time and rushed into Dick's room. The tear marks on Dick's face had not yet disappeared, and he was leaning against the pillow with a dazed look. Jason was sitting next to him.

Bruce walked over and gently embraced Dick, using his fingers to wipe away the tears on his face. Dick seemed to have collapsed, he grabbed Bruce and said in a tearful voice, "My ears hurt a little..."

Dick's tears kept falling, he was even trembling with fear, and he kept trying to push Bruce away with his arms.

Bruce hesitated for a moment, not knowing whether to continue to hold him or to let go. Jason gave Tim a look, and Tim walked over and grabbed Dick's hand. Jason pulled Bruce out of the room.

"He's very scared," Jason said to Bruce. "This is a very obvious post-traumatic stress reaction. What happened between you two?"

"I..." Bruce thought back to the daytime events and sighed, "I don't know why Dick doesn't want to do his homework, even if I stay with him, he just keeps procrastinating."

"He doesn't have good study habits, and I got anxious for him, so I scolded him a bit, and then he just ran out."

Jason scratched his head, but Bruce squatted down and looked into Jason's eyes, saying, "Your empathy is so strong that you can even tell what I'm thinking. Do you know what Dick is thinking?"

"Have you read any books on adolescent rebellion?" Jason asked.

Before Bruce could answer, Jason touched his chin and said, "Previously, when I was reading those psychology textbooks, I occasionally came across some books on adolescence and rebellion."

"There's a theory that's quite interesting, which is that rebellious behavior is actually very normal, it's a necessary stage of personality growth."

Jason's tone became a little more calm, obviously reciting the content from the books.

"Before the rebellious period, children's understanding of the world and their own behavioral standards come from the authority established by their parents. Parents tell children what things are like, what they can and cannot do, and children accept this information without reservation."

"But after reaching a certain age, children begin to establish self-awareness. They start to think, who am I? What should this world really be like? And what kind of person do I want to become?"

"These questions cannot be answered by parents. Parents can only say, you are a child, and tell them what they think the world is like."

"So children begin to explore, no longer accepting the information that parents have instilled in them without reservation. They start trying to use their own perspective to judge things and understand the world."

"But to do this, they must first break free from the judgment of their parents. The authority of parents has occupied the space for their personality growth. In establishing self-awareness, they must delete some of the concepts that their parents have instilled in them, in order to have space to place their own concepts."

"But to break through the concepts of their parents, they must first rebel against authority. So children begin to try, using repeated rebellious behavior against their parents, to attempt to break through the shackles of others' thinking and establish their own personality."

"This is why children in the rebellious period often seem so fickle, extremely irritable, and inexplicably like to go against their parents."

"In their subconscious, they are eager to prove that they are an independent person, not just an appendage of their parents. They want to prove that they have a unique perspective on everything, to prove that their personality is complete and independent."

"But at this age, the majority of children cannot survive without their parents, and parents also do not believe that they are independent. So this leads to very sharp family conflicts."

"Children feel that their parents are oppressing them, not wanting them to have a complete personality, and think that their parents' views are outdated and want to brainwash them."

"Parents feel that children are unreasonable, ungrateful, and are a heartless and ungrateful white-eyed wolf."

Bruce listened to Jason's analysis a bit dazedly. He seemed to have heard this set of analyses from someone, and in the pauses between the lines, he was very familiar with them.

So Bruce forgot that the one in front of him was Jason, his child, and not a teacher, and instinctively asked, "How do you deal with it?"

[Read at www.patreon.com/shanefreak, and thanks for the invaluable support!]

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