My name is Mengde, and I love Batman. I've loved all the Nolan movies, the latest one perhaps most of all, and after seeing Rises for the third time I was inspired to write this piece about Bane.
Obviously don't read it if you haven't seen the movie yet. Also I don't own these characters, whatever. You know the drill. Enjoy.
The Fire Rises
In every person's life, there is a moment, through imparted wisdom or self-actualization, when an essential verity becomes clear.
They have no point.
They realize that they have come to this place at this time, instead of all the other places and times to which their choices might have brought them, and it means nothing.
The reactions vary. Some reject the essential truth of the universe, instead latching onto religion or blind, ignorant denial to see them through this moment of existential crisis. Some embrace this idea and go on to live their meaningless lives in true form, wasting away in pointless minutiae to pass the time until their end finds them.
A few – a very few – devote themselves to an ideal. A symbol. Whether as mundane as art or as poignant as true justice, here lies the path of the fanatic.
But every once in a great while, there is a person who becomes something more. They are not simply a follower of an ideal; they become its avatar. These are the most dangerous of mankind, the most singular in their drive – the most meaningful human beings of all. I know because I am one of them, and the man I will tell you about is another.
Here, then, is how an ordinary man became the truest, and most perfect, avatar of Love.
It matters very little who he was. What name he was given by his mother, where in the world it was that she first held him. Pointless. So is the crime he committed which led to his being thrown into the Pit. He might have murdered a man, or stolen a piece of fruit to ward off starvation. It is not relevant because who he was before his moment of revelation has no bearing on who he became.
So, there is a man in the worst Hell in Earth, justly or no. Every day he looks up at the sun, dreaming of climbing out of the prison and escaping. He is poisoned by his hope, twisted by it. Perhaps he attempts the climb; perhaps not.
And it is here that the moment takes him, wrapping him in its ideological coils and making him realize: there is no point to his existence. He will die down here, alone, and nobody will care. Nobody will remember him.
But before he can choose a path to take out of the darkness, away from the disgusting banality of his existence, one is presented to him, laid out at his feet.
He sees the other prisoners piling into the unlocked cell where the woman lives with her child.
He is too far away to do anything for the woman, and there are too many prisoners mobbing her in any event. But he sees them ignoring the child, even as she moves to stab one of them, and he knows it is within his power to save her.
Who he was ceases to matter as he moves in. Who he was is now gone as he drives off the angry prisoners and gathers the child up in his arms.
"I will keep you safe," he tells her. "I promise."
The first step is a small thing.
The child grows. The other prisoners, fearful as they are of her protector, eye her sidelong and wait. They know they need only be patient.
The plague comes. So does the child's first blood. She is a woman now, and those prisoners who – for whatever reason of moral compunction or simple practicality – were waiting for this event notice. They notice everything.
Her protector has killed a score of them, over the years, but they know this marks the end of whatever détente they wordlessly maintained with the other inmates of this hell.
They sit in the cell together, after dark, in front of a small fire.
"Tomorrow I will try the climb," she says, warming her hands before the flames.
He looks at her with hollow eyes.
"They won't let you," he says. "They'll know you'll escape or die, and they would not want either."
She absorbs that for a while.
"Those sound like the only options I can entertain," she finally says.
And he knows she is right. If she stays, the other prisoners will do to her what they did to her mother, and the plague besides…
So he does the only thing he can do. He wraps her in his arms – still an easy task all these years later, he must think, she's so thin – and says, "I will keep you safe. I promise."
It is the only thing he can give her, this promise; the scraps of food he passes to her instead of eating at mealtime were never truly his to begin with, and the door he closes each night does not lock by any design of his.
"I know," she says, the fire sputtering. "You always have."
They sit by the fire, warding off the cold of the night, and he does not tell her what he must be thinking. He is not a selfless man. He is protecting her because it is his purpose, because without her he means nothing.
But at the same time, he is a selfless man. Because he knows that when she leaves, he will stay, and it will be the end of his life.
They wait just long enough for the sun to peer over the lip of the prison. She will need light to climb by.
"Go," he says to her. "And do not look back."
He can see her opening her mouth to speak, to thank him or tell him something before the end, but he knows that if she does his resolve will waver. He will find some reason for them to wait another day, and another, and each day they wait, it will become that much harder for him to let her go.
So he throws open the door, pushes her out onto the catwalk. "GO!" he says to her. "NOW!"
The other prisoners realize what is happening. They swarm after her, trying to mob her, trying to keep her from the climb, but he throws himself in front of them. He is big, and brutal, and single-minded in his purpose. He holds the stairs, breaking one man's nose, headbutting another hard enough to make him fall unconscious.
But there are dozens of them, and only one of him. He looks up as their hands clutch at the cloth covering his nose and mouth, and in that moment he sees her make the leap, the impossible leap, the leap which has defied every man to try it.
He sees her grasp the ledge at the end of the leap, begin to pull herself up. The climb is elementary from there. Every prisoner knows it. Every prisoner knows the leap is the key, the leap is the true obstacle between themselves and freedom.
So he says, "Goodbye," knowing she cannot hear him, and he lets the other prisoners pull him down.
The other prisoners are unhappy with him.
They register their discontent with blows. Blows to his stomach, his ribs, his arms, his legs. His face.
After a while, the blows stop hurting. It is because he is unconscious.
The doctor sees the damage and does his best to repair it. His best, unfortunately, is lacking in comparison to the efforts of more talented men, more dedicated men. Men whose lives have purpose.
The doctor's life has no purpose. He long ago accepted that fact, seeing a kind of beauty in the simple acknowledgment of the pointlessness of his existence. He watches the sun pass overhead each day, not even considering the climb any longer. He is an old man; he could not make the leap.
He has no purpose, and no aspirations, and consequently his efforts suffer.
So does his patient.
The days are nothing but a haze. The unremitting agony, crippling though it may be, is a small thing next to the simple, overriding pointlessness of his existence.
His purpose in life is discharged. There is no longer a reason for him to live. He only persists.
If there is a reason he does not end it, it is this: when the agony casts a fog over his mind and the stark harshness of his surroundings slips away into delirium, he can clearly remember her smile.
It was an expression reserved solely for him; he knew how her smile would infuriate the other prisoners. Innocence and happiness are poison here, both for their bearer and for those exposed to it.
He remembers the only time she made the mistake of smiling in front of another prisoner. The prisoner tried to stab her in the back with a jagged piece of rock. He managed to score her, leave a mark that would scar but do little else.
He died quickly after that.
The man remembers the nights he shared with the child in front of the fires he would make for her to ward off the chill. Fire provided an illumination of a different nature than the sun. The sun was harsh, taunting, superior, constant. Fire was friendly, personal, quick to bite but mindful of its limited existence and consequently without judgment.
In his mind, the child looks up at him and smiles at something he has said. He would smile at the memory himself, but even trying now causes him too much pain.
The men who come rappelling down from above are looking for him. He discerns, through the haze of his pain, the piercing blue eyes of one of them as he examines him. There is something familiar about this man – his features, the shape of his face – but he is too tired, too far gone to be able to concentrate on why someone he has never met before could seem familiar to him.
They take him from the Pit, hauling his body up with rope. They put him on a bed, and put the bed in a plane. He feels the plane take off.
He stares at the ceiling, not thinking about why these men have come for him, or how he has finally escaped the Pit, even if it was not under his own power. He had a purpose, and it is gone. Wherever these men are taking him, whatever they want from him, does not matter. He does not matter.
The plane lands. They take his bed and put him in a white room, plug him into IV drips and put electrodes on his chest. They look at his face, discuss 'options.'
He does not listen.
He barely registers it when the familiar man from before, the man with the piercing blue eyes, comes into the room and sits down next to his bed.
Then, for the first time in a long time, he truly hears something:
"My daughter is alive because of you."
He turns his head to look at this man.
"The League of Shadows owes you a debt," the blue-eyed man says. "One which we would see discharged justly. Name me what you desire and it will be yours."
And he speaks for the first time since he said 'goodbye':
"Let me protect her again."
The blue-eyed man considers this.
"If you are to remain with us, you must leave everything behind. You must become more than you were – greater and more terrible. We will build you into more than a man; we will make you a force of justice."
"Whatever it takes," he says, and he smiles despite the pain. He already knows he does not care about this man's League, or his justice, but he will use them if he must.
"Then your initiation begins now," the blue-eyed man says. The doctors come back in, carrying something. A mask.
"This is your new face," he says. "It will hold the pain at bay… for the rest of your life."
He knows what the blue-eyed man is saying. He knows what he will be agreeing to by putting on that mask.
But as he slips it over his head, feeling the straps tighten against his skull, he feels no regret, only satisfaction. As long as she smiles, that is all he needs.
He has never needed to smile back.
You know the rest of this story – how Ra's al Ghul eventually excommunicated the masked man from the League of Shadows, unable to bear the sight of him because of the memories he stirred. You should also know that the only reason Ra's al Ghul and the League lived, that day, was because he knew killing all of them would upset the child.
That was what she always was to him, of course. Even when they met again and he saw how she had grown, she would always be the small girl in his arms, huddled against him in front of the fire.
You know how he went out into the world, doing mercenary work to pass the time and build his resources until the child needed him again. You also know how when she finally did call on him, he brought the corrupt city of Gotham to its knees, broke the Batman, and poisoned the minds of the people with hope.
None of it was ever for himself. He cared nothing for revolution, or the League of Shadows and their justice. He merely played the part she needed of him, because he loved her.
What you do not know is that I named him.
He was the one that kept the other prisoners at bay. He was the one who banished the darkness and the cold with fire. He was the only person who did not abandon me, because he loved me.
For all that ever threatened me, he was my Bane.
And how often I wish my purpose could be as benevolent as his.