She's been alone for a long time.
Miranda smiles, letting her eyes soften just enough, touching her expression with a hint of sympathy, a hint of sorrow. It's a face she's practiced, knowing this day was coming, and now that the day has arrived she feels her muscle memory taking over. Her lips curl up and her brow opens. She wonders if the deception is complete, if her pupils are dilating, if her heart is speeding up; she can't tell.
She remembers feeling something like this, once. She hasn't seen his face for four years (what's left of his face, what's visible around the mask), but there was another broken man once, a man the world feared who wanted nothing but her love. Once, she might have just closed her eyes and imagined, and let her mind's eye rule her body.
She doesn't know, though. This is the first time, the first man in four years, and she has been Miranda Tate for so long that she halfway expected to feel something for this sad-eyed murderer whose hands now clutch at her body. The fact that she feels nothing, not even his fingers tracing at her breast, not even the drip of rain from her hair to her shoulders-
Too long, it's been too long.
He kisses her neck and she moans; he kisses her mouth and she sighs. She feels like a machine. Somewhere in her memory, her immortal father smiles, his eyes kind and regretful.
It isn't until they're on the floor, until his hand slips lower, that she feels something rushing up inside, a drowning woman reaching the surface of some dark underground pool at last. When he opens her, she's already gasping, but not simply from pleasure; somehow she hasn't breathed for four years, and the new air rushing over her tongue is sweet and clear. His left hand is at the nape of her neck, steadying her, and his right hand is circling at the crux of her thighs, and she doesn't even have to close her eyes to feel those fingers stronger and broader and more familiar.
Is this a hallucination, she thinks, or am I having a dissociative episode, and it's the kind of detached thinking she's maintained for four years but it's starting to dissolve around the edges as her body responds to Bruce's gentle heartbroken touch and replaces his ragged breathing with the rasp of a mask, replaces his yearning body with broader shoulders and powerful arms. She realizes, to her horror, that she is crying a little.
Somewhere out there in the dark is Bane, her sweet friend, her beautiful protector; he is sleeping in a sewer, he is as alone as she has been, and he will always be true to her. Even now, while she submits to the desires of the man who slaughtered her father- even for the span of four years, with all the power and privilege of a ruler of men, knowing that if their greatest common enemy laid a hand on her body, she would consent.
It's shockingly, awfully simple after that, so easy to lie back and cry out, so easy to replace his body with Bane's. Perhaps it's not healthy, that she can so easily slip out of this reality and find herself in a hundred other places, where it's him breathing into her hair and him shuddering and collapsing into her. She never claimed to be the sanest person. She is, after all, her father's daughter.
If she's still escaping when it's all over, if she's preoccupied with memories of the pit, if in her mind she's burning a handful of charcoal in a tin can while she rests against her protector's mighty chest- in the end it doesn't matter, because Bruce touches her scar in passing fancy and smiles with real hope in his eyes when she speaks of rising from poverty and starvation to power and wealth.
He doesn't seem to understand that she is speaking of a long, slow death, a fierce woman-child who has dwindled in the space of four years into a corpse. She rose, yes; she rose into the light and she remains in the light, but her heart and her soul are far away, in the darkness and in the sewers and in the Pit.