title: bleed my aching heart
summary: The promise Bane makes to his young friend will carry him through years in hell.
notes: I have honestly no idea where this came from, given that Bane/Talia didn't much interest me in the movie...but on thinking over it the relationship appears to be much more interesting than on first glance! New fandom, new pairing and new style, so please be gentle!
-o-
I will cry for you
I will cry for you
I will wash away your pain with all my tears
And drown your fear
I will burn for you
Feel pain for you
I will twist the knife and bleed my aching heart
And tear it apart
#1 crush - Garbage
-o-
She should have been a summer-sweet child, with the wind in her hair and the light of a rising sun in her eyes each morning.
Instead she is all dust and death, and broken edges of stone. A child's face is shrunken with hunger and haggard; her small limbs are wasted for want of life. Her eyes are shrunken, starved for light. Her hair, which should be long and dark and perfume-soft as her mother's, is hacked off with a blunted pair of shears when she is little more than a toddling baby to guard from lice, leaving nothing but stubble and weeping red sores. Her doll is little more than a rag knotted at the end, her pillow is a stone and her playground the decaying confines of a cell. By the time her mother dies, the innocence is already worn from her face.
Every time he looks on her, this child shaped in the gaping maw of hell, he hates the man without a face all the more.
-o-
In the cloying shadows of her cell, the dying woman talks.
Not to her fellow prisoners; not even to the doctor who treats her. Alliances in this hungry pit rise and crumble like stone empires, as fallible as man himself, but all men starve for company, sooner or later. They trade stories like men in another world might trade valuable gems, whispering them into the palms of their hands. Talk is all they are left with, now. But not her. She hides her face behind a veil and crouches in the corner of her cell like some frightened animal; the prison doctor is under strict instructions to lock the door at all times. It only makes them crave for a woman's touch all the more; the prisoners see a delicious prize hoarded jealously out of reach. They drool without shame as they pass her cell, all slavering lips and hungry eyes, and some try to reach out and grab for her with fumbling, greying hands through the bars. On more than one occasion she seizes a rusting iron bar and beats back their hands, no fool she.
But in the distant stretches of the night, he hears her speaking to her daughter.
"Mamá, is there something beyond this place?"
Her voice is as high and fleeting as the calls of the birds that sometimes land on the edge of this pit.
"Hush, little one. Rest your eyes. Yes, there is, a whole other place, an entire world, up above. You shall see it, maybe, some day."
"Another world, mama?"
"Yes, sweetling, yes. With space for you to run and dance, where the sky seems close enough to touch, and cities – whole cities – of people. A whole other world."
He remembers so little of his own mother that sometimes he cannot help but believe that she was little more than creation, a flimsy fantasy of his own invention shaped and moulded in the confines of his own mind, but no further. Sometimes he cannot help but imagine that he was formed down here in the bowels of the earth, borne not of joined flesh and desire but of stone and blood and despair. He cannot remember a time when he cried out and was heard, cannot remember a time when his arms reached out in pain and were met with anything more than emptiness.
His cell meets theirs. Through the bars, he sees the child curl into a cocoon of her mother's arms.
"Mamá." The voice is little more than a whisper in the dark, still, he strains his ears to hear. "Why are we here, and not out there?"
There is a pause, a pause that holds the bitterness of long years and betrayed hopes, and a broken heart. "Because of your grandfather, little one. Your grandfather banished us here."
He cannot picture the man's face, nor his shape or mannerisms. All he can see is a hand, twisted by age, perhaps resting on some polished cane of jade or onyx or some other precious stone, as he banishes his daughter and her suckling babe to a pit deeper than hell.
-o-
He has never craved men's company the way others do; he feels no ache for friendship and talk. Sometimes he watches the prisoners – small, shrunken, stooped creatures all of them, he towers above them with the form of a mountain – create loose friendships with the offer of a piece of bread, or the trade of a few kind words, and feels something hollow and empty within. But for the most part he stands in the shadows and touches only stone; these, the things that have given him life. He has been born from dark, and the heavy cold earth of the Pit. He makes these his friends, his companions, his mother's milk and father's guiding hand.
The other men shrink from him when he passes. They are creatures of light and air and the world up above, while he has been crafted by nothing but hell, and they fear to meet his eyes and see that darkness within them.
But the child – the child becomes his to protect. Her small hand fits perfectly into his own; when they sleep side by side her body nestles against his like a second skin, and no more easily severable. His shadow envelops hers when they walk. Whatever crumbling resemblance to innocence has hardened and broken from her, she has forgotten what it means to be a child. But there is something different about her. She clings, greedy, to life while all others merely tolerate it, and in the darkest, most aching depths of the night when all around is quiet as death, it is her life that restores something inside of him that he didn't know was lost. And her eyes…they are unremarkable, the colour barely visible down here in the Pit, but they look at him without fear.
She offers him this most precious gift without guile or artifice, and in return, he gives her his protection, his strength. Men who once shied away from him now do the same for her. Always, he walks behind her, his broad hands spanning her angular shoulders, so that his frame may shield her from this broken world. She becomes his soul, flitting like a scrap of cloth outside his body.
My friend, he calls her, and the words taste wholesome and sweet on his tongue.
-o-
His eyelids ease open one morning to the sight of the child, barefoot, filthy, watching him through the bars with eyes as old as the ages. Years without the sun have stunted her, have wasted her skin and drank the youth from her limbs. Her little lips are bitten bloody. But the fingers that curl around the bars are small, and tender.
They watch each other, not a word between them, their bodies still as stone. Then, without explanation or excuse, she reaches out one arm and stretches out her hand to him.
He reaches back. Their fingertips touch, barely.
His muscles are rocks, and as unforgiving as steel or flint; he has used his hands to crush the life from men or batter them into the earth until their forms are battered and broken. He is not cruel, he is not vicious. He does not crave the sight or taste of blood, or glory in the delight of the weak ruined before him. But he has been bred to become a creature of the Pit, hard and strong and brutal. He does not think on violence; he only knows that he is the violence, the will to survive.
This is the first time he has reached out to another and touched only warmth.
-o-
The day her mother dies she doesn't cry. No tears leak from her eyes. When he lifts her up, away from the animal savagery beneath them, her arms wrap unquestioningly around his neck, but she doesn't cry. She never cries. Only soft, whimpering moans, the kind expelled by an animal in pain. Her will is broken.
He has never been taught kindness, never been told how to care for another. Somehow with the child it comes as naturally as breathing. He does not tell her that she will be alright, or that life will eventually get better; she does not deserve such lies. He does not sing or tell stories or try to make her laugh; such artifices are beyond him. All he does is hold the child's trembling form as she whimpers, cradling her as he imagines her mother must have done. Her skin is hot with fever, her cheeks are hollow – so he pours muddy water over her lips and tears their daily rations into tiny pieces so that her swollen gums might be soothed.
Day by day her health is restored. She sleeps at his side, walks at his side. He watches her, avidly, intently, every time she eats a little more or smiles at some small comment, her triumphs are his.
When she lays her head down to rest, he lies by her side until she sleeps. They will talk, in gentle tones, this unlikely pair, the mountain and this tiny little pebble. And when her eyelids – delicate as butterfly wings, he believes – begin to droop, he speaks her lullaby. No fancified, elaborate string of words and melody this. No mother has ever sung a lullaby so sincere as this, but he whispers as tenderly as any mother whispered to her babe.
'Rest easy, little one. Fear no nightly noises. I will never let you feel this pain again.'
-o-
The man slices at her with a knife as long as his hands are wide, babbling all the while, gibbering like an animal. His gums are rotting, his skin sags from his bones. His beard hangs from his jaw and his neck in great heavy clumps. When the child turns, spinning away, the cold flint leaves a ragged line of red streaking down the length of her arm, beads of purest ruby spattering her clothes. She was holding a piece of bread, and the man was hungry.
It doesn't matter. He hurt her.
His hand folds against the man's neck with the same ease as he might cradle a doll. The flesh is hot to the touch. When it is done, and the limp form is lifeless in the dust, he reaches down and with that same hand envelops her own.
-o-
Once as a youth – still towering over these wretched specimens of humanity, even from his earliest age – he was advised by an ancient prisoner on how best to keep himself to himself. His white beard was crawling with plump black lice and his clothes were soiled with refuse; the other men avoided him, but he claimed he liked it better that way. He guarded his own heart like the most precious of treasures, and when some of the younger men stooped to show him kindness he spat on them and drove them off. 'Harden your heart, young one,' the creature warned him, crushing fleas with the flat edge of his thumb. One cracked fingernail pointed to the body of a man, throttled in his sleep, garrotted by the very sworn brother he'd spent five years sleeping alongside. 'They'll all get you, in the end. You're a smart lad, you, keep yourself as your own and make no man your brother, and you'll survive.'
He'd scoffed. The old man was telling him what he'd known since the first day he'd opened his eyes in this abyss.
But the child is no man, and no brother. He cannot turn his heart against her, anymore than he can be compelled not to breathe. He cannot harden his heart; the child is his heart.
In legends – the oldest of the old, still whispered in the deep crevasses of the earth, the tales whispered by those who will remember her dark eyes, the hardened beauty of the child – it will be told in mocking whispers that their friendship was a carnal one, that he protected her young body only to claim his own sordid desires. It is never like that. She is no bedmate to him, no more than she is his daughter. No more than she is his student, or he her bodyguard. Mere society, with its futile attempts to order man onto a ladder in this world to control and define him, does not have a word for what they mean to each other. She is simply his soul, the only thing that is truly his.
-o-
He does not ache for vengeance or justice; he does not pray to a nameless god for deliverance. He does not waste a thought on who cast him down in the shadows, to suffer for another's punishment, and if there is a god he cannot hear his prayers down here. He is here: let that be an end. He does not feel the same thirst for revenge as other men.
For her, however…the hunger becomes so strong that it gnaws deep within his chest, ravenous, unsatisfied. He hoards it like a miser until it becomes a part of his being. He will avenge this child, this little being, this part of him, if it takes everything he has.
-o-
Sometimes he lets her sit against the great pillars of his legs and stare up into the gaping circle of blue high above them. He's seen other men do the same – sky-mad, the older prisoners call it, lying on their backs in the dust and the filth and the decay, their coarse hands stretching up as if to touch the clouds, as if to draw the sky down to them. These will be the ones who coil ropes around their bodies and make the climb. Once he saw a young man's feet stumble from beneath him as he tried to make the leap, and the knotted rope somehow ended up twisted around his neck. His cheeks were black when they found him down, and the marks in his throat were gouged deep, but the look of bliss on his face was almost obscene.
She sits there, for hours at a time. Just watching.
Do not torture yourself, little one. he wants to tell her. My friend, do not do this to yourself. Hope will drive you mad, you will end up weeping in the dirt because you believed in hope.
But he doesn't. The look on her face is purest rapture, and he cannot bring himself to take that from her. Hope is the very thing that has been foreign to him since birth, but he will protect her, even if that is from the very lack of faith that infects his own soul.
'Some of the prisoners were talking to me yesterday,' she tells him one day. Always she refers to the other men as 'prisoners', but not him; he is her rock, her mountain, her friend. 'They said my father was down here once.'
He has heard the stories; all tales reach his ears eventually. 'A long time ago, little one. He's most likely dead by now.'
Her little body shifts as she peers closer up into the sky. 'They say my father was freed, but my grandfather cast down my mother and me to serve his sentence. That my grandfather was a very rich and powerful man.'
A hand, clawed and cruel, that has never had to scrape in the dust for food or break another human body just to survive; it gives no tremor or twitch of shame as the faceless voice gives its order.
'If we ever escape from this place,' he lowers his head – it is surprising, even now, how easily the word 'we' comes to him, but the thought of them being apart is as impossible as the sun rising in the west – to whisper against her shorn head, 'little one, if we ever get out, I will kill him. I promise you this, I will kill him. For you, child.'
-o-
She no longer cries out for her mother in the deep recesses of the night, when the moon is thin and wasted and all around is a silent grave. He is all that is left to her.
He has always been a survivor, moulding the dark and the blood and the screams around himself until he is invincible - and he is no braggart, does not crown himself in the false glory of fools, but down here, amongst the dregs of the earth, who is there to stand against him? He has always known, somehow, that he will survive. But now he knows another truth; he must keep himself alive, strong and thriving and present, for this child.
-o-
He cannot tear his eyes away even as they fall upon him, like ravening animals on a piece of meat; he cannot tear his eyes away even to meet his attackers head on, to remind them of why they once feared him, to remind them that he is a child of the Pit, born and formed in hell. He cannot break his concentration. All he can do is watch her ascend the wall – no training, no finesse, desperation is her master now and fear draws the whip that drives her – little by little, one foot in front of the next. Clinging to the rock for the heartbeat of a second she pauses, already so very far away, and looks back. He knows she is looking for him. Do not stop for me, little one. Do not wait. Get away from this place. He can wait while she ascends the heavens, forever if he needs to. It doesn't matter. But he will not let her die here. If you fall, I will catch you, he thinks, even as his arms are wrenches from behind him, I will not abandon you until you are free. He watches, even as they beat him without mercy.
Whatever else, they cannot take this from him.
He barely feels the pain, the weight that drags him down; he is numb, and caked in dust and stone. From a great roaring distance, it seems, he feels the grating crack as his knee is broken from under him, but it means nothing. Nothing is important, nothing, save for that great far off circle of blue, and the tiny figure on the walls. His eyes never leave her, searching, hungry. He wills her on, his heart aches in his chest for pounding. When she stumbles it is his body that flinches, every hurt and fear is his own, as it has always been. Every time she makes a leap it is his heart that soars; his joy and hers are one. And when she finally reaches the surface he shouts for her, so exultant and so loud that the sound seems to come from the very bowels of mountains and the depths of thunder. Surely she will hear him, from so high.
Run, little one. Run fast, run far.
He is shouting for her even when they bring him down.
-o-
Pain fills his body, reaches down with scraping claws to tear inside him, raking into the very heart of him. Unbearable heat and bitter cold plague him in equal measure. Every movement is an agony, every breath a chore. The marrow of his bones is fire, boiling lead, dragging him down into the dirt in which he was born. Beneath his skin he imagines worms burrowing, their teeth gnawing at his flesh. The morphine that the doctor regularly feeds him billows through his form like cool smoke, easing and stroking deeper and deeper, but it's never quite enough. His pain is constant, faithful, his relentless companion. But it is nothing compared to what he feels upon looking down, or turning over in the night, and finding himself alone.
He finds himself searching the shadows for her, for his little one, imagining her footsteps on the baked clay just out of reach. He aches to hear that little laugh, feel that warm presence nestled at his side. Every night he thanks whatever god above resides in that open space high above that she is out, but every day it kills him all the more to wake and remember that she is gone.
She was his soul. How can he survive without his soul?
When the worms – always under his skin, delving, wriggling, eating, the doctor speaks of fever and addiction too strong to break, but all he thinks of is chains of cool cool smoke coiling through him, setting him free – grow too strong and leave him slumped against stone, barely able to move, he contents himself with thinking of his vengeance. He spins fantasies like the lightest silk. One day, he tells himself, he will find himself out of this hell, he will set off through the land with nothing above him but the great wide nothing, he will find the man he has hated all these years. In his mind he paints the monster's face: heavy-browed, pale-eyed, cruel-mouthed. He will take this monster by the throat and beat the life from him, breath by breath and drop by drop until his life's blood stains everything he held dear, and his little one is finally avenged. The thought eases his pain in a way that not even the morphine can.
The pain only grows. He sees the world through a vision of sweat and fog, and finds he has not even the strength to raise his head.
Once, just once, he sees her. Not as she was, his little fighter, but tall and strong, with her poor shorn head crowned all in bronze and honey. She is flanked on all sides by figures robed and masked, guarding her on all sides as he once did. Her hand reaches down to his.
'Little one,' he whispers through parched lips and a tongue that feels too raw and engorged for his own mouth. This must be a vision, a fever-dream, he has had them before, for how can she be back here in hell once more? 'Little one, even if this is a dream, stay. Even if this is a dream, I cannot bear for you to leave again.'
-o-
They loop ropes around his broken body like chains and drag him from the pit, it passes in a haze of sweat and pain. The cold air of the open sky strikes him like an iron hammer, driving him to his knees. He is heaped with blankets and taken high, high, high, until he who was born into the very depths of the earth cries out like a small child, afraid that one false step and he will fall. A soft hand strokes against his brow. Always his little fighter is kneeling at his side, spooning liquid through his torn lips, whispering to him of this man, of her father, who will save them both.
'He is a strong man, my friend. A very strong man. He will look after us both.'
He does not have the heart to tell her that this tall strong man looks on him with something stronger than fear and deeper than hatred – and that is revulsion, raw and bitter. Her father sees not a man, but the Pit, the knives and the maggots, the unbearable darkness and sweltering heat, the disease and the despair and the fear, everything that his woman and his child were abandoned to all those years ago. He cannot bring himself to care. All he knows is that his friend is here, and she looks on him with love.
He comes to realise that she is beautiful, in perfumed robes; her mouth is shapely and her eyes as dark and piercing as the night they were both born into. Her head is unbowed, her body held with a new strength – good food and clear air has renewed her. In a way it seems almost not to matter. He has loved her since she was a child, when her skin was pallid and her body wretched. Her beauty is not important. All that is important is her.
Day by day he feels strength flow back into his very bones, heavy and rich and almost meaty. Their bodyguards – or else their wardens – marvel at his animal force. When they fasten the mask to his head and once more blessed gas coils through his lungs, he smiles – though no man alive will ever see it now. It is a cruel thing, hooked and jagged and formed with the appearance of a cage for some deviant beast; he doesn't doubt this is how they see him. Men, even the men of this shadowed band of brothers, shy away from his deformed iron mouth, his unnatural voice. Only she willingly meets his eyes.
It is no surprise when he is cast out; in fact it is something of a relief. He doesn't belong here; he is a monster, an outcast, an abomination that reminds them all too much of a hell far below. His little warrior shouts defiance, but he is silent. When he leaves, she runs after him.
'I'll come with you.'
Without thinking he cups her cheek in his hand. It's warm to the touch. 'No, little one, you must remain. For a month, or maybe two, not long. When it is safe for you to follow, I will send word.'
Her eyes are wet; but her father has long since trained the humanity from her. Something not even the Pit could take from her has now been withered and killed with the stern governance of the League of Shadows. He mourns that. 'Where will you go?'
For the longest time, he doesn't speak.
'A long time ago, little one, I made you a promise.'
-o-
The miles are long, and innumerable. It's a winding road he travels, treacherous and seemingly without end, but he endures it with all the patience of a pilgrim; endures his blistered feet and the biting winds. Every journey must eventually reach its destination. His own journey is lonely. Men flinch from his giant's form, his ruinous mouth, but his questions are answered hastily. Their words are the only thing that guides him to what he seeks.
He walks through richly carpeted halls and up marble stairs, past ornate bird cages and slender vases formed of the thinnest china imaginable and heavy perfumed tapestries shot through with threads of real silver and gold, marvelling at everything he sees. Hating it. His very presence pollutes this house, and he is glad of it. This power, these riches – never was anything more undeserved. He will smash every last precious object with his hands until not a single piece remains intact. The place should rather have been filled with the perfume of a young woman, and the laughing, running footsteps of a grandchild.
The man himself is not the monster of his dreams: a balding, stuttering, middle-aged buffoon with a little pot belly straining at the front of his crisp linen robes. He gives a squeak when he sees the face of his reckoning, and nearly soils himself. He is no monster. He is weak. He is a fool.
His hands nonetheless fold slowly around this fool's sagging throat, tightening inch by dying inch. His fingers crush down on cartilage and muscle that writhes beneath his weight. No kind, quick, merciful death for this fool, no. His friend's mother had no such mercy. Neither would she have done, were it not for him.
The old man's dying breath rattles in the night. 'Please…please, I must know…I have many enemies…which one of them sent you? Why are you here? Who sent you?'
He stares down at him. He has been waiting for this moment for many long years.
'I come on behalf of one whom you should have protected.' He pauses, listening as the life's breath is slowly crushed from his body. 'And one whom I love.'
-o-
much cookies and appreciation for anyone who managed to wade through that rather sorry mess...