But a man
"you should settle down you know"
It comes out rattled, unbidden ... rusty and cranky like those crushed cannisters young boys back in his native alley ways used to kick around and play with ... A poor imitation of football, each striving, hoping to make it out of the destitute wretched town ...
Oh,he remembers .. Amidst the plexed pain , the anchored agony and the gusts of floating anaesthetic gas.
And it surprises him still, those rare moments when the delicate curtains, those well constructed masks of indifference and pretence fall taking along everything, all those words , said and unsaid with them , to place
"Hmm"
"Abandon this plan .. All of it to me .. This Wayne .. Bruce Wayne .. You should marry him, take yourself and take him out of this forsaken city and just leave, Talia"
Her eyes, they move a single fraction, an almost invisible turn towards him, and he doesn't know if it is annoyment or nonchalance that her leaden eyes cast upon him.
And then she smiles
"And why my friend shall I concede to your suggestion?"
She fully turns towards him now, facing him, matching him eye to eye, his anomalous blue versus hers.
"It isnot like I practically enjoy being around him, not in every aspect at least"
He knows what she means ... He knows she is taunting him the way his mind already does, conjuring every image of their encounters, all the things men do with beautiful women, and it provides no relief. Bile, bitter and boiling rises up his throat.
He doesn't wish to acknowledge that it tortures him, like rubbing salt into his eyes or taking off his mask and that yes, he is jealous and possessive and frustrated and yes beneath all those scars he is a man .. A man not a beast with impulses and wants and needs right at the tips of his reddened calloused fingers.
It is a silent rage that raptors through him ...an unquenchable ire .. But he wouldn't give her that leverage , the leverage of acknowledging his hurt, letting it drown him, weight him down and drag him in front of her, kneeling down at her feet and giving her that conduit so she could go on about 'mending him' and 'giving him whatever he desires' ... at her own expense.
He is beyond repair.
"You deserve better than this"
'All those years ago, I didn't save you for this' he wants to say, but it doesnot part his lips .. 'I wanted you to have a life, to hope .. To fix all that has been broken .. I wanted you to be happy.. I wanted you to escape the pit, to escape me'
She might have left the pit , but the pit didn't leave her , it carved itself into her soul.
And it didn't help to have him as 'a constant reminder' like Ras al ghoul put it years ago.
He might have had a point.
"Even your father knew that" he added
She chuckled.
Her hands, soft, tender and small, everything but an assassin's hands reach towards his face, fingers brushing lightly against it before spreading across cheeks, cupping them in an all too gentle manner that makes him against every speck of better judgement leans to her touch
"It is none of your concern my friend" it comes out cold and acerbic "However, if you wish to leave .. That is an entirely different matter"
"You enjoy tormenting me, don't you?"
Had his face been intact and uncovered, he would have smiled wistfully. She tried to picture ... Imagine what he would look like yet the shadow evades her and the image comes out hazy and oscillating almost like a pipe dream.
She knew fully well that he can't part from her .. Not whilst alive at least.
It didn't work well the previous two times.
"It makes two of us .. My protector"
She throws the title to his mutilated face and he doesn't know if she meant the torment or the parting.
She doesn't know how to love.
That they both know well.
It is a sick thing she does to Bane, pushing him to these limits but it is beyond relief knowing she held this unwavering power over him, such unbreakable spell ...
A sad twisted way of showing love to somebody beyond a person's reach .. Every inch away from their stratosphere .. Universes apart .. Thrown together in the pit through a whirlwind of fate.
Only meant to exist in the shadows.
Sometimes, only sometimes out of sheer curiosity he is tempted to take off the mask lest he could remember what he used to look like, what Mevlut ,the young man at the age of fifteen used to look like , with such sharp eyes and angled features similar to the desert eagles , the brightest son of the village's preacherman ,such respectable kind man of faith, murdered by a tyrant, a warlord who spread out war and famine and ungodly horror along with his mercenaries wherever he put.
He is met however with a very different face, chapped and rigged, retaining none of the previous streaks of handsomeness or brightness, it is a mass of disordered contracted scars, an unsightly mess ...
The face of a monster, not a man.
"Let me see your face" Sixteen year old Talia commands him, now at thirty, one day, years after being rescued out of the pit, years after being fitted with the mask of anguish.
"No"
"Is it the pain?"
"Mostly"
It isnot only the pain .. It is a fear knitting at the depth of his gut .. Fear of her reaction, of her rejection ., of her feeling guilty, feeling responsible for whatever carnage committed , written on his face.
"But I want to see you"
It is one of those rare times she reverts to being a child, pleading and pouting and had it been an any other thing, he would have complied without a second thought.
He looks at her, longly, wondering when had she changed that much, gone was the chubbiness, the roundness of her face, her features were more mature now, she is even taller ... Feminine even.
She didn't waste the opportunity while he was absorbed as it was. She stealthly managed to pry her way around him, yanking the straps and pulling the mask away from his jaws ..
And he falls.
He falls into a perpetual abyss of pain.
"What have you done?" he rasps
She stood there, hand clutching her mouth , frozen with a mixture of horror and shock itched upon her face.
He is shattered apart.
He wakes up in a ward, bleak and off white
"I am sorry, I am so sorry"
She is perched on a chair near the undersized bed ... Now leaning across, holding onto his hand.
This mask, the one he is nuzzled by this time is way too pliable and transparent, way too ordinary and clinical .. A simple breathing mask hooked to anaesthia that he takes off quite easily
"I didn't want to taint your memory of me .. I didn't want you to see what they had done to me"
"It is all .."
"Don't.." he says between laboured breaths "don't say it, don't even think about it"
He fits the mask back as his eyes becomes groggy, bleary with each passing second .. And he doesn't know if it is the pain stinging his eyes or simply a mirror to her own ones.
And then she leans across, hovering a dangerous distance from before taking off the mask and kissing him where his torn lips should be.
He was petrified .. He doesnot recover nor does he register himself responding to her unexpected advance.
He doesnot know why he cries that hard, why she is crying so hard as well ..
"It is going to be alright, I promise" she whispers between his lips "Everything is going to be alright"
It is hours later, after she had left that the gravity of the weight of what occurred between them sinks inside of him.
Everything has changed.
It isnot long after he arrives that he learns of the 'New prisoner' from the leering inmates ... Locked in a special cell .. well surveyed .. The daughter of the faithless man, responsible for so much misery, many an inattonable crime ...
He takes his time , monitors and plans well until he snatches the keys from the wretched doctor and heads towards the cell with every intention of making her pay for her father's crimes, her crimes ... Her revelling and ravishing all those years in their own toil .. all their possessions and wealth her father destroyed, stole along with their lives.
When he enters the cell, in the middle of the dark night, a tugged braided rope in hand, he doesnot reckon on finding a broken woman, hair shorn off, emaciated at best instead of the fine 'princess' the village would telltales about.
Yet, what sends chills down his spine, shudders after shudders is the bundled up baby lying in the corner of the bed.
he stood still, contemplating his options, what he should do whilst she cast him with a resigned look, and when his menacing eyes shift towards the baby, not older than a year by any means, she springs to her full height, her eyes pleading with him ' me but not the child'
The devil inside him, the monster in the making roars 'both'
If not for the voice of his father, always firm but kind rationing with him "by what crime shall you condemn the poor child?"
"And what crime did I committe?" the monster growls ... The man laments
The balance remains swinging neither tipping to a side ...
The woman seems to figure out what was going on
"He must have gravely offended you"
He fixes her with the most desdainful look he had ever mustered
"You can't have been here for a long time" She resumes
"and why did you assume that?"
"You haven't decayed yet"
The baby starts to wail, its wails unlike other children's, are muffled, cautious as if it understands what is going on, the precarious place they have been thrown into.
She walks towards the baby, taking it into her arms, nursing and attending to it and for a while it is the saddest image one could come across
'What kind of monster would condemn a baby to a place like that? Who would leave a baby in this place? this is worse than death' he thinks
"Hush, little Talia"
And as if the world is mocking him further, the baby turned out to be a girl nonetheless ..
Ras al Ghoul has managed to secure a new mask for him after the incidence, a clad metallic mask, dura steel, like the jaws of demonic hell hounds.
"I think you should leave"
He says in a solid voice, an icy condemning voice
There was no lost love between the two men ... That everybody knew, if it wasn't for Talia ..
'He must have been watching' it clicks
Ras al ghoul looks him pointedly in the eyes, conveying to him everything he wanted to say, in turn he reciprocated his gaze with such intensity
And for thd first time they are completely open and honest with each other, reaching an all new level of understanding with each other
'You are a monster'
'No less than you. You, on the other hand, are a coward, a hypocrite at best'
'She is a young blossom, so young and beautiful, I can't let her waste her life, her affections on you ... Such a cripple .. I will kill you before you even think about using her'
'like you used her mother' he wants to taunt ... The flare in the other man's eyes, the sheer lividness is enough to indicate that he knows what is going through his mind.
Instead, Bane breaks his gaze, swishing his head to the opposite side
The man is a fool, he concluded ... A fool with a valid point.
Talia and him is some sort of doomsday fantasy .. A fantasy he doesnot dare thinking about. He loves Talia .. He has always loved her, her love shifting and morphing ... From that of a daughter, a sibling and companion .. To that of a friend's and an idol ... A symbol of innocence and hope ... And now ... To that of a woman, Never waning nor failing to root itself in his heart...
Yet ... As much as he wouldn't ever think about hurting her, tarnishing her with the taint of his ugliness from the inside out .. It is for the best he leaves, less the monster takes reign over the man and he submits to his heart.
It is safer and even better for her.
"I shall leave in the morning"
He doesn't wait for the sun to rise.
He is roaming the shadowy hallways, seeking to find his exit when he realises she is tailing him ...
"Go to bed, Talia"
"he didn't ask you to leave, did he? "
Her voice is laced with an anger like no other
He doesnot respond
"Then, I am coming with you"
"No, you are not"
"you promised you will protect me, you promised you will stay"
"And so I shall protect you, even from yourself"
She knew precisely what he meant, the thinly veiled rejection of whatever affections she was harbouring towards the giant man.
"I need you to stay" She repeats
He doesnot halt nor does he spare her a backward glance
"Fine" she drily returns "Run away, like the wounded animal you are. However, for that I shall never forgive you , nor him for what matters"
It would be the last he would hear from her in a while.
She has distanced herself from the league as far as he heard and for that he feels absolved, so absolved and happy for he had always imagined her seeking the sun and striving out of the pit .. Away from the sand, she was smart, she had it in her to soar and acheive and conquer .. To build, the way his father, now long gone and buried beneath, had taught him.
He can't lift up and build anymore, he can't carry stone over stone to, he was too angry at the world, too worn out ... His aim was to destroy, like he mastered in the league, the seed planted in his mind during his stay in the pit, was nurtured there. Now, was the time to reap.
Those societies, those communities that left people his likings and Talia to die, to face the bottommost hell, were rotten, they have fallen far into decandence that they can no longer function, theyabsorb and consume at his likenings own expense, much like parasites. They need to be destroyed .. Built anew from the base up ...
That was his job now, to destroy .. In hopes, someone, maybe someone like her, can build them up
The death of Ras al ghoul at the hand of a rogue disciple shakes the entire underworld ...
There is a fear the centuries old league would be decimated ...
That is when she finds him again
"Hello, old friend"
He marvels at her, how she had come to resemble a Queen, in all her glory and grace and sophistication , the intricacy of her plans, the pedantics and details, surprise him, making him wonder if she truly ever deserted the league ...
"You shall rally them in your name ... You shall gather and hold them, prevent them from straying away from the league's designated path, you shall drive them to the edge of despondency and insanity until the wretched city is destroyed "
"The Rogue Bat, what do you want to do with him?"
"he is mine to play"
"What if I refuse? What if I want you to quit this plan, stay away from these desolate paths of destruction?"
"Then I shall proceed alone" her answer is sharp .. Determined and undeterred.
"What is your motive, Talia? Why are you doing this? It isnot like there is much affection between you and the league .. It isnot like you owe this anyone "
"Perhaps, but it is the only legacy I have ever owned .. The only way I feel like being out of the pit by destroying another one much like you always do"
It is at this moment when he realises that they haven't truly left the pit
"Talia.."
"Talia is no more, Bane. It is Miranda .. Miranda Tate"
The alias rings so foreign in his ear.
The day after his proclamation, she starts making habit out of coming to his place, with the Bat's smell all over her, small bruises across her arms, just to rile him.
Those days, during the darkest nights, She would come and make her way towards his dingy bed, latch onto his back and inhale, just like she used to at the pit
'Retribution' he thinks
Indeed, that masochistic part of her had flourished .. She was becoming a monster, such a beautiful monster and he was but a mere man, battered and bruised and tormented.
"Sometimes I feel, we weren't meant to leave this pit" one time she spoke, breaking the silence of the night
"Perhaps, I wasn't meant to, but you ... You were never meant to be out there in the first place" he tries to whisper, however it comes out more like a drawl ...due to the mask.
"I ... He makes me wish I was her, sometimes. He makes me wish I was capable of hoping, of being optimistic ..."
He snaps out of bed, those words have done him the most grievous of injuries so far and she didn't even intend it, for he has spent his everthing trying to evoke all those feelings in her, trying to inspire her only to have this spiteful bat do it in his stead.
He will enjoy breaking him beyond repair.
He knows he wouldn't make it out alive, he just knows ... And so he fights like he truly is .. A man with nothing to lose until the bat gets an upper hand
"His only crime was that he loved me"
It is but a stray tear that escapes the corner of his eye as the bat watches in bewilderment the surreal scene unfolding before him ...
"Goodbye, my friend"
She fixes his mask, a parting gesture to the selfless man she had known and possibly loved beneath the monsterous mask and its layers
The slowest knife, he thinks .. The bluntest is what hurts the most...
He gathers the remanants of himself as she leaves, sending a one ultimate prayer, perhaps the last he would ever do in his life
'Stay alive'
Then, he hears a sound in the distance.
The mask is no more