For: Hurlstien
By: ShadedRogue
Fandom: Batman
Kingdom Come
He was a child who had been born of Hell; a son of the dark and terrible places that men had only dreamt up in stories and children could never imagine even in their worst nightmares. His mother, he had been told, had died in childbirth – although he had heard the whispers that she had suffered a much darker fate at the hands of the other inmates – and his father was a man he had known only through whispers and rumours and through the whippings that had stripped the skin from his back. His father was the reason he had been born to suffer this fate – gaining life imprisonment but, like a coward, dying before he had the chance to carry out the sentence.
He was intimate with pain and suffering, a companion of the shadows and far too used to tight spaces. Several decades of his life had passed before he had ever felt the warmth of the sun, before he had even seen the world in vibrant colour instead of muted greys. This place was where they threw the most hardened and dangerous criminals, or their children, down to rot for the rest of their lives –and often, those children became the most hardened and dangerous of them all. This place was Hell on Earth, but he had fought and clawed his way to the top, he had killed and nearly been killed, and he had become their king.
He may have had a name once, when his mother's heart had still been beating, but she had died a long time ago and no one else had cared to remember it – but it didn't matter. Whoever he had been, the name that he had never had, had been a small, weak boy who had hidden behind the shadows of others – some unfortunate child that he had cast aside as he took his mantle as the king among the damned.
Now he is somebody strong and dangerous, ruthless. He is Bane, now, and he had risen up from the dark fires to become the king of Hell – and now, as he stands there watching Gotham burn around him, he sets his sights on a different kingdom.