Chapter Sixteen: Simultaneous Internal and External Combustion
As Bane's lips remained pressed to Thera's, his hands moving urgently along her body, seeking solace and comfort, closer than before, Talia and Laz al Ghul exited the bustling train station and made their way to the gas guzzling utilitarian vehicle parked at the rear of the sprawling lot.
Laz al Ghul was tall. His lean muscle tissue gave him the look of Da Vinci's David and the magnificent vascular striations and visible tensile strength.
He stared at the flocks of travelers and commuters as they milled about the station and parking lot. Laz's upper lip twitched in disgust as he ran his sharp blue eyes over the unwashed masses, those that were lesser than him.
He narrowed his gaze as the aroma of the bustling crowd reached his nose. Laz was far from the eastern slope of the Himalayas, where the air was pristine. He was accustomed to seeing the vast majesty of Everest upon rising each morning. Beginning and ending each day in proximity to a towering mountain of earth and ice that had its own weather system.
Laz closed his eyes as Talia unlocked the vehicle and held the door open for her uncle, her eyes downcast in deference and fealty.
Before he slid onto the ripped and tattered seat, he took a deep inhale of the stagnant air, filled with the collective exhales of pigs wallowing in necrotic human shit, happily basking within bodies that were ill taken care of, pitiful excuses for humans in comparison to a man who had scaled to the highest point of the world with an open mind and lungful of the hallucinogenic properties of the Bhutan blue flowers.
Laz al Ghul let his eyes track a morbidly obese couple with their round children packing into an economically priced minivan. He could see through their pathetic facades that almost passed as viable life forms. Their brains were congealed with ignorance, their blood moved through veins with deliberate laziness, saddled in debt.
As Talia navigated the beastly vehicle from the parking lot, he cast one final glance at the useless bags of fluids and filth, pissing detritus and destroying the world with their perceived notions of privilege.
As Talia drove towards the coordinates of Mt. Clover and the ranch house, back in Gotham City, Bruce Wayne stood next to Lucius Fox and scrutinized the residue of the phosphorus grenades that had instantly vanquished the lives of so many at the police station in fiery, flesh-melting engulfment.
Bruce and Fox rolled through hours of surveillance camera footage from outside the station in an effort to find and identify the escaping culprits. The security footage from inside the station had been melted to nothing salvageable under the chemical weapon attack.
Fox could practically read Bruce's thoughts as he sharply turned towards him. "I was saving it for a rainy day, but I've outfitted the Tumbler with a new 5.7-liter GM engine."
Bruce stared at the screen as he clicked on drone images that had captured the carnage at the Gotham City police station. There was no need for body bags, there were not enough parts left to even dissect in an anatomy class. The county coroner was reduced to essentially using a medical company's version of a broom and dustpan. The entirety of the police station fatalities were scooped into lidded specimen cups prefilled with a formaldehyde preservative solution.
As the victims of the white phosphorus grenades, from the same supplier of the chemical weapon usage in Raqqa and Iraq were scraped off the scorched floor of the station, back in the Mt. Clover ranch house, Bane lifted his lips from Thera's and stared down at her. His gaze was full of needs he was unable to verbalize, his very exhales, tortured with questions he was unable to ask.
He nearly growled with frustration, knowing that they needed to expediate their departure from the mountain that would continue to mourn well after all known life had ceased to exist. Bane parted his scarred lips to speak and no words emerged, he knew he didn't have the time to luxuriate and drown himself in her body. Only being to express his deepest and unspoken wants with the touch of his hands and the plunging and filling of her with his painfully hard cock.
He exhaled raggedly when Thera lifted her bejeweled left hand and pressed a couple of her fingertips against his lips. He dropped his head to the curve of her neck and inhaled deeply before untangling himself from her warm, naked flesh with enormous reluctance.
Bane stood up and pulled her to her feet with him. "We need to leave this place," he stated in a tone heavy with regret.
Thera nodded as she reached for her discarded sweater and started to slip her arms into it. Bane steeled his resolve and tore the fabric from her hands and yanked her back into his arms. He engulfed her with his embrace, practically lifting her off her feet. He held her with such fervor, her breath was forced from her lungs and she was left gasping as he pressed his lips against first her forehead before lingering on her lips.
Before he released her, he whispered raggedly, each word accompanied by a hot exhale against the curved cartilage of her ear.
"I love you," Bane rasped and let her feet come in full contact with the hardwood floor.
As Thera's brain receptors reacted to his words, lighting up her corpus callosum like the starry night sky and emotional fireworks flew between her brain's hemispheres, in the monstrous vehicle that was steadily approaching Mt. Clover, Talia squeezed her hands tight around the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white.
She had spent much of the driving time filling her uncle in on all the details he had not been aware of with Bane crossing her and turning his back on the League of Shadows, forgoing his oath.
Laz remained largely silent as Talia continued with Bane's betrayal with the knowledge of him having possession of the microchip with information that every corrupt governmental agency would love to have in their hot, little hands.
Talia's eyes practically spit fire as she shared Bane's immediate infatuation with his pet doctor who played with the dead for a living. Talia detailed Dr. Thera Phillips resume and painted her as a soulless ghoul with a loose cunt.
Laz looked out the window at the passing trees as the large vehicle flew over the uneven pavement.
"Where is the apostate and his whore?"
Talia pressed the accelerator further to the floor and made Rudolf Diesel proud of his invention from beyond the grave as the air was compressed and the introduced fuel combusted as it was dispersed unevenly, urging the powerful four-stroke engine to devour the asphalt. Talia had visions of baptizing the already grieving mountain with more blood, pain, and suffering.
The rapidly increasing temperature of the highest internal or external combustion crafted engine was a beautifully nonlethal juxtaposition to the fiery, sweltering deaths of the inhabitants of the Gotham City police department.
As Talia continued to catch Laz up on Bane's dissention, back in Mt. Clover, Bane raised his hands to cup Thera's face. Her skin was soft and supple and in diametric opposition to the rough texture of his golden skin.
Thera took a small breath to speak, unsure of what words would be spilling from her mouth. Bane shifted his thumbs to press gently against her lips, seeing the confusion in her wide, unblinking eyes.
"There's no rush for you to give me your heart," he murmured and let his fingertips slide away from her lips and trace gently down her neck, across the valleys of her prominent collarbones and down the length of her arms to grasp her hands. Bane lifted her left hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against the stunning ring.
Thera watched him retrieve the sweater he had ripped from her hands and passed it back to her. She continued to watch him wordlessly affix his mask back into place before she parroted his motions as he dressed.
He set a few of the zippered duffle bags on the unmade bed before finding her eyes.
"I'm going to straighten up the barn, we'll need to leave soon."
Thera nodded, "will we ever be able to stop running?"
Bane nodded, "we're going home."
Thera could only blink her eyes at his words before he departed to the barn to clean up the steel drums of liquid death. Meanwhile, in the swiftly moving, emission belching vehicle that Talia was driving, continued to consume miles faster than a rapidly beating heart. Laz continued to stare at the landscape out his passenger side window.
He held nothing but disdain for the bottom feeders that only consumed and contributed nothing, Laz wished he could raze the planet of useless eaters.
Laz turned towards his niece and assessed her profile before speaking.
"And what of the fool who cloaks himself inside the skin of a flying rodent?"
Talia was quiet for a beat, a silence that Laz noted to himself.
"Bruce is manageable," she finally said, feeling a rush of wetness to her cunt at the thought of being drilled by the billionaire's thick cock.
As Talia turned her attention to the GPS monitor and merged onto a different highway, back in Gotham City, Bruce and Fox went over the Tumbler's inventory and deadly modifications.
Bruce felt a swell of false confidence as he loaded exploding tip missiles into the Tumbler's upgraded weaponry hull. As he continued securing more tactile items inside the Tumbler, in the Mt. Clover ranch house, Thera finished hastily packing up all the clothes and toiletries before zipping the bags closed.
Bane was already in the barn and Thera had not witnessed him walking softly first to the kitchen cabinet that held the in-demand microchip and slipping it inside his cargo pants pocket. Thera cautiously made her way to the open barn doors and watched from the shadowy entrance as Bane rolled the heavy steel drums until they were in a tight cluster and began to obscure them from view with hay bale after hay bale.
Thera watched in fascination as Bane's muscles rippled beneath the surface of his warm skin, exerting a brute display of strength as he hefted each bale to further hide the drums of death from view. Thera felt a tingling sensation from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes and found herself near salivating as she watched his bare upper body begin to glisten with sweat.
Her eyes zeroed in on a bloated bead of sweat that slowly slid down the massive lateralus muscles of his back and stained the waistband of his dark pants darker. Thera felt her chest tighten and her breath slow as his triceps flexed upon lifting and manipulating the golden tightly baled rectangles of dry hay.
Bane felt the weight of her eyes and turned towards her and caught her voyeuristic gaze from her vantage point in the doorway.
Looking back, Bane wouldn't have been able to explain his next actions. He had always been resolute and steadfast in his convictions. He would never have imagined that he would break the pledge of fealty he had made towards service to Talia and The League of Shadows. Bane would've never believed that his true birth and thriving in the darkness and training on the eastern slope of the Himalayas would've made the present moment a reality.
Thera gave an audible and excitable gasp as he dropped the bale he had been holding to land heavily on the ground and stalked towards her with the determination of a lion upon the vast fields of the Serengeti.
Thera gave a sound between a whispering purr and carnal moan when Bane swept her up in his formidable embrace and aggressively pulled her off her feet and half-carried her to the discarded hay bale. He was already tearing at her clothes as he deposited her on the tightly shaped hay.
Bane was frantic for her bare skin and hot wet center. He was practically breathless in his urgent need to free his rapidly hardening cock and possess her body.
Thera's chest heaved as he urged her thighs further apart and positioned himself closer to her intimacy, she looked down with pupils' dark with wet desire as he pressed his hard rigidity against her tight opening. "Tell me you want me," he growled and teased the head of his cock over her sensitive clit and wet feminine folds.
"I want you," she gasped as he sank himself inside her without much grace, completely filling her, their intimate flesh wetly kissed in union.
"You're completely mine," he grunted as he increased his rhythm, growing erratic as he became overwhelmed by the smell of her warm skin and intimate center squeezing around his cock.
Thera could only gasp breathlessly in agreement and dropped her arms to his waist, gripping his taut, firm flesh tightly, her fingertips individual points of pressure on his bare skin. His uneven thrusting made the tip of his cock brush against the internal pleasure spot deep inside her and coaxed her intimacy to flood with wetness until she felt a hot coil under his penetrating touch that blossomed with a spine-bowing crescendo.
"Yours, I'm yours," she cried out as her orgasm washed over her with a deeply satisfying wave. Thera's feminine center squeezed his cock until he tumbled after her into the vast depths of orgasmic bliss and pulled her flush against his body as he spilled himself deep inside her. Bane dropped his face to the curve of her neck, the cool titanium of his mask pressed against the warm flesh over her rapidly pounding carotid pulse.
They each gave a contented sigh when she lifted her lips at the same time his cock slipped out of her intimate opening and she felt a rush of wetness follow at the apex of her thighs.
As the sweat cooled on their nearly naked bodies, Talia urged the large engine to propel them closer to Mt. Clover.
Talia glanced down at the GPS directions that popped up on the screen, notifying her of an upcoming exit west.
She glanced over at her uncle whose eyes were open and staring out the windshield and then flicked her eyes up to the rearview mirror where the flaccid bow from the brightly wrapped gift bobbed as the vehicle's thick tires went over uneven patches in the road.
As Talia and Laz continued to drive in a charged silence, back in Gotham City, the well-paid Samantha slipped into a tailored three-piece business suit. The creamy tan fabric clung to her lithe figure. She twisted her hair into a bun and let a few tendrils deliberately escape to tease her temples.
She assessed her reflection and dotted a few dabs of French parfum to her wrists and behind her ears.
Talia had left Samantha an envelope with cash and keys to Miranda Tate's spacious penthouse suite that followed an in-person conversation about paying Mr. Bruce Wayne a visit under the guise of needing the billionaire's philanthropic advice.
Talia knew that Bruce's ego would inflate until he could barely fit behind his desk when the young, sharp Samantha strolled into his office in three-thousand-dollar Louboutin's.
Samantha met Kirov in front of the sprawling high-rise that Talia perched on top of in the cultured skin suit known as Miranda Tate.
Talia had provided Samantha with Bruce's direct phone number and even in the midst of cramming a veritable one-man arsenal into the Tumbler, he immediately put thoughts of going to war on hold when Samantha's sultry voice greeted him on the other end of the call.
Bruce was immediately hooked when Samantha introduced herself as an awfully close acquaintance of Ms. Miranda Tate. He hadn't showered yet and still smelled Miranda's benevolent pussy on his fingers.
Bruce knew that he should postpone a meeting with the death toll only certain to rise but couldn't imagine disappointing Miranda in the slightest.
Bruce and Samantha set a meeting time on the 37th floor of Wayne Enterprises. Samantha pressured Bruce into a same-day meeting, claiming she was dealing with the possible loss of EPA protections that would directly impact Gotham City and the citizens that were so goddammed precious to Bruce.
In his haste to feed his ego and super-ego, Bruce made a simple mistake that would end up costing him his life.
Bruce didn't tell Fox where he was going, he didn't tell anyone.
From one moment to the next, Bruce Wayne was in the building.
Then he wasn't.
As Bruce took the stairs two at a time to the 37th floor and cleaned up in the private bathroom attached to his office, Kirov drove Samantha towards Wayne Enterprises. She loaded tranquilizer cartridges similar to the ones Bane had used earlier on the trio of the dangerous men into a matte black gun. Unbeknownst to her and Talia, those men were now actively liquefying in their steel drum crypts.
As Bruce brushed his billionaire teeth and slipped into an expensive pressed suit and crisp white shirt, Bane rose from the hale bay and held out his hand towards Thera.
Thera reached for his hand and let him pull her to her feet, his skin hot where their flesh kissed.
They adjusted their clothes before he gave one last look around the barn and reclaimed her hand. Bane's expression was neutral, but inside his skull, his thoughts were frenzied.
As Bane and Thera returned to the ranch house and gathered up the duffle bags, his mind volleyed scenario after bloody scenario throughout his frontal lobe.
He knew that with Talia and an active League of Shadows, that he would never be able to settle anywhere for long with Thera. Bane knew that the existence of Talia's life anywhere on the planet would mean he would always be hunted, and Thera wouldn't be safe, even at his side.