A/N: My first Batman story, so please be cautious of anything...misplaced, I suppose? This can be read as a romance (that's how I wrote it, at least) but you can read it as a friendship as well :) Please review-I don't care if it's a "good job" or a "dgsaeawt." Okay, well, the latter is a bit uncalled for, but you hear my point.
Villains are like people-they scream just as loud, they agonize as a human would. The difference is, no one hears them.
She is a child turned soldier, and yet she is still like a precious thing he is never allowed to touch.
He knows her from the moment she comes into the deepest depth of hell-he knows the screams, at least, as they echo through the prison like a foreign battle cry. Several heads perk sporadically, as if the secret had slipped all their minds for a moment, before their attention retreats back to their meaningless activities. It's Bane's head that stays up-he looks into the bars of the prison cell, looking for something to see, though the shadows encompass the scene.
He hears her name through a chain of whispers, and still he cannot believe that her existence is thorough.
She grows among men, though she does not have the face of one. Her hair is sheered and her clothes are dirty, and she certainly lost any table manners she may've inherited from her mother, but her face is that of perfection-her eyes look into you, and her milky white skin looks porcelain beneath the rags. She looks misplaced, unprotected. She looks into the eyes of the prisoner's grey, unforgiving stares, and it feels unnatural, to have a balance between clean and filth.
He never speaks to her, and it wasn't as if he wished to.
He is a savage, he is a scoundrel, he is the pit of society, of human nature, and he certainly doesn't want to spend his time getting to know a child. It's not as if a minor change in the prison monarchy is going to make every single one of them "change their ways." The fights still break out amongst them, never diminishing in her presence. People are killed, though those are mostly at night, when only the reflection of the knives can be seen and she is sleeping somewhat safely next to her mother.
But she is still among people like him-savages, scoundrels, pits of society-and she shouldn't be here. If things had gone in another life, she would be in a palace, Bane concludes. Somewhere among servants and silk, and she wouldn't have to wallow in stones and storm.
He doesn't let her affect him, and yet in the pit of his stomach she's the only thing he's ever thought about for this long.
She grows, and things go for the worst.
After years of mild rest-of continuously failed escape routes, and prison food and fighting and killing and sometimes just plain boredom-a spark arises. Amongst the men, unrest begins to flutter. Bane pays little attention to it at first, but as it grows and strengthens, he comes to realize that things are but a ticking clock in the prison. Fighting and blood are becoming punishment to themselves, and it is no longer enough.
He doesn't worry, because he can take care of himself.
(but she can't, he hears in the back of his mind, but he's never listened to that voice anyway.)
He doesn't care for her, he tells himself. He isn't waiting for her to grow, he didn't calm her cries when she was an infant, he didn't sustain her boredom as a child, and he certainly didn't shield her from the cruelty of the world. He doesn't want to kiss her, or hold her, or be her guardian angel, because that's all too good and human for someone like him.
And yet, as the screams echo in the prison and the blood is poured and things begin to slowly break, he only hopes that she grows to not be like the rest of them. That she'll defy them, that she'll defy her past, herself, even.
But he doesn't want to call it hope, until he accidentally does.
It erupts like a cork in a bottle.
He's not sure when it starts, or when it will ever be destined to end, but the moment a clawing hand collides with his shoulder he wonders vaguely where she is. He hopes blindly that she's in her cell, watching this, frightened but safe, but he sees her like a white spark amongst darkness. She travels down the stairs, looking at the only world she knew with wide eyes, and he notices blood on her collar.
It's somewhere in between the first step and the last that he suddenly feels her in his arms, and his mind goes temporarily blank as he runs through the fear, the chaos, the pain. He holds onto her as he looks up into the tower, to the rocks and the circular sky. The rope is long forgotten, perhaps even demolished, and good sense is gone as well as he pulls himself towards the lowest rock, not feeling the gripping, tight hands until she climbs from his arms.
She looks back once. He should have a million things to say to her, something like a hero, like a soldier.
He almost forgot he never was one.
"Goodbye," he says.
He learns pain like he's never felt it before.
He sees her in another life, though she is no longer a child any longer, and doesn't need protecting.
But he will still try.
Because he still thinks that beneath a beautiful woman who learned the quickest way to kill and the slowest way to agonize at age five, that underneath the child with beautiful eyes and a prison for a childhood playground, that there is a blind hope.
If he ever wanted to kiss her or hold her, it is much too late, now.
But she caresses his cheek, and there is only one thing that Bane can do, behind all the pain and the danger and the evil and the terrible, terrible man that he knows that he is.
"His only crime was that he loved me."
The words cut like a slow, slow knife.
They taught her well.