He thought about Talia, then. It was interesting that he used a proclamation of loyalty to say he wasn't going to sell out his comrades, rather than quid pro quo or even a fanatical declaration of righteousness.
If Batman were to assume that the boy was speaking off the cuff, not deliberately trying to obfuscate his true motives, then... loyalty. Loyalty. No matter how righteous your war, eventually, it's the one in the foxhole next to you you're fighting for. This in spite of him easily being young enough to lend himself well to fanaticism, especially as the victim of violent crime himself, and--
Well.
The victim of violent crime, robbed of his family, bets on personal loyalty being the best way to convince the Batman that he won't cooperate... he wasn't so different from Dick at all, was he? Bruce Wayne, deep inside the Batman's stony countenance, felt a hotly irrational surge of hatred for Shuichi Takatori.
If the boy was just brainwashed into believing this was his only option in life, that would be reprehensible, but to take a child's need for a stable environment and tie the two together, and he was-- well, for the sake of his own soul, it was a good thing the Takatoris were mostly extinct by this point.
"A difficult position," he repeated, trying to get his thoughts under control. And re-kidnapping him to keep wasn't going to solve the problem. It was just going to make him cling harder to what he had. The only way to get Omi out was to let him walk out on his own.
He turned, nonchalantly, to pace, to break eye contact, to let Omi not feel like he was being stared at.
"Suicide is usually at the very bottom of someone's bag of tricks," he said, "meaning you'd already eliminated the option of killing us instead. That either shows good assessment skills or a value for innocent life despite ideological differences. And I don't think you've put that option back on the table, so I have to wonder what it is you want to happen next."
no subject
If Batman were to assume that the boy was speaking off the cuff, not deliberately trying to obfuscate his true motives, then... loyalty. Loyalty. No matter how righteous your war, eventually, it's the one in the foxhole next to you you're fighting for. This in spite of him easily being young enough to lend himself well to fanaticism, especially as the victim of violent crime himself, and--
Well.
The victim of violent crime, robbed of his family, bets on personal loyalty being the best way to convince the Batman that he won't cooperate... he wasn't so different from Dick at all, was he? Bruce Wayne, deep inside the Batman's stony countenance, felt a hotly irrational surge of hatred for Shuichi Takatori.
If the boy was just brainwashed into believing this was his only option in life, that would be reprehensible, but to take a child's need for a stable environment and tie the two together, and he was-- well, for the sake of his own soul, it was a good thing the Takatoris were mostly extinct by this point.
"A difficult position," he repeated, trying to get his thoughts under control. And re-kidnapping him to keep wasn't going to solve the problem. It was just going to make him cling harder to what he had. The only way to get Omi out was to let him walk out on his own.
He turned, nonchalantly, to pace, to break eye contact, to let Omi not feel like he was being stared at.
"Suicide is usually at the very bottom of someone's bag of tricks," he said, "meaning you'd already eliminated the option of killing us instead. That either shows good assessment skills or a value for innocent life despite ideological differences. And I don't think you've put that option back on the table, so I have to wonder what it is you want to happen next."