The Batman Who Laughs was suppressing himself.
In the three seconds after Nightwing Dick Grayson had come over to support him, his eyes had darted toward the other man's neck at least five or six times.
He still had a pair of scissors tucked into his palm, but since he had yet to swing them, Third Generation Robin Tim had quickly noticed and taken them away.
Tim Drake was still the most observant among all the Bat brats. The Batman Who Laughs suddenly realized something. In the previous dream, although the entire Bat Family he had seen had worried looks on their faces, they had generally been rather wooden and stiff, like a group of puppets acting out the things the Bat Family had once done to him.
But at the time, The Batman Who Laughs had been immersed in slaughter, in the exhilaration of killing his Bat Family all over again. The immense pleasure of killing his former self once more had filled his thoughts, causing him to overlook the inadequacies in the reactions of the Bat Family before him.
For example, he had pulled out a table knife and charged at one of his Bat Family members, yet his Jason Todd had not immediately drawn his gun and shot Batman. It was such a rare, perfectly legitimate opportunity to shoot Batman, but his Jason had failed to seize it at once.
For another example, when those members of the Bat Family were being slaughtered by the power of Mandrakk, not one of the Bat brats he had raised had pulled out a contingency plan to restrain his rampaging self.
Oh, he had been worried about that. Back then, he had killed those Bat brats in advance precisely to prevent the people who knew him best from becoming obstacles.