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Bruce and Clark lived during Roman times, Clark as scribe and Bruce as the emperor, and they secretly developed a relationship. When Bruce announced plans to make Clark a consul, the senate started plotting. When Bruce was at Clark’s house, men stormed in and slit Clark’s throat in front of him. Then, they kidnapped Bruce and brought him to the Senate. Only a third were there, the third that plotted against him. They mocked him, belittled him, and then stabbed him. Then, they threw him into the river and announced to Rome that Bruce had betrayed his country, and established a new emperor.
Ra’s Al Ghul found him floating in the river, and experiments on his unconscious body. Bruce couldn’t go back because there was a new emperor, and he issued a kill on sight warning for Bruce. Eventually, Bruce’s training was done, and he thought barely any time has passed because he looks the same. However, as he leaves, he realizes it’s been 30 years, and due to an experiment of Ra’s, he’s effectively immortal.
Bruce assassinates the senators that killed Clark and overthrew him, dressed in a dark cloak. He’s caught after he kills the last one, however, and is held in the deepest cell in the empire for decades. There are legends about him, myths preposterous or dangerously close to the truth. Eventually, he escapes.
Bruce witnesses the fall of the Roman Empire. He can’t kill himself, he’s tried. So he travels. However, every five years, he always returns to that little hill in Rome where they buried his beloved Clark. He builds a mansion there. He lives in Italy and meets Marco Polo, his father, and his uncle. Together, the four of them travel to Asia.
He’s interested when the printing press is invented in 1440 and buys a bookshop in Italy, along with several ships because he’s interested in reinventing himself as a merchant. He becomes friends with an eccentric man named Leonardo, and he’s the first person to know Bruce’s secret since Marco. He’s still living in Italy when he hears that a man named Christopher Columbus is traveling to India. He’s the owner of a rather large trading company by the time Columbus returns with the discovery of a new continent.
Bruce decides to go in the year 1720. Before he leaves, he hires a servant to watch after Clark’s tomb and gives him the mansion. Bruce tells him that he’s instructed the bank to send money every month for him to care for the tomb and that he would come back eventually.
He travels around a bit but settles in the small but growing town of Gotham. There, he builds a mansion about a half-hour’s ride from the town. His trade is flourishing, especially now that there’s a new continent. On the anniversary year of Clark’s death, he realizes that he won’t be able to visit his tomb. So he goes out into town and gets wildly drunk. He wakes up in the morning next to a woman. He’s terrified and remorseful about what he did and feels as if he has betrayed Clark.
A year later, the woman shows up at his doorstep and shoves two children in his arms. She tells him that she named them Anthony and Darius. He raises the two, but he hires help by the name of Thaddeus Pennyworth.
When Anthony and Darius turn 25, the American revolution begins. Darius joins the war, but Anthony stays behind to become a doctor and to care for his 3-year-old son, Charles. Then the war is over, as quickly as it began. Bruce receives a letter of condolence from the first president, and it tells him that Darius was a hero. Bruce is heartbroken, and Anthony descends into madness, killing a man. Bruce watches the hangman’s noose loop around his only son’s neck and sees it pull taunt. Bruce lost both sons that year.
He waits until Charles grows up and hands him the reigns for the Wayne business. Charles buys property cheap and holds onto it as Gotham grows. Bruce waits until Charles has sons, Solomon and Joshua, before leaving Gotham and starting life anew in another city. Charles dies at 52, leaving a considerable-sized fortune in the form of real-estate to his sons, Bruce’s great-grandchildren.
Solomon becomes a judge, and Joshua becomes a businessman. Bruce watches them combine a dozen businesses that they had started and create Wayne Enterprises, and as Solomon builds Gotham into a flourishing city. He stays in America until both get married, and Solomon names his son Alan.
He leaves America around 1850 and returns to Italy for a year, wandering the streets of Rome, and remembering his life, a millennium and a half ago. He returns to where his beloved was buried and sees that a small town has sprung up near it. The mansion belongs to the slave’s great-great-great-grandson now, who’s a wealthy man. The grave is as pristine as ever, and he mourns the life he could’ve had with Clark.
Bruce joins the British navy, works his way up to Commander. Then, the mess that’s the Great War hits the world. Then, everything’s all fine and dandy, and it’s an age of prosperity for everyone.
The Great Depression strikes America the hardest, and as America all but shuts down, the whole world is affected. Then the Third Reich happens, and Bruce absolutely hates those who think themselves better for no particular reason.
It’s in the decade after WWII that it first happens. Bruce double-takes so hard he almost got whiplash, because that is clearly the face of one of the senators in the plot to overthrow him and kill Clark. He tracks down Ra’s al Ghul, the old bastard, and asks him if reincarnation is possible. Ra’s tells him yes, and that some of them keep their memories, but some don’t. And then idk Bruce kills those dudes with memories again and eventually finds Clark and they live happily ever after or something.