Chapter Four: Off the Record

The moon rose high and shined brightly in the night sky, observing all of the city's sleeping citizens and criminals.

The Joker and Bane both spent the night chemically and physically restrained while Maureen passed out on her sofa with a bellyful of booze and fast-food fries dunked in ketchup.

The consulting cardiologist who was called to Arkham in the dead of night to evaluate Bane, left some written orders and directed an extended stay in one of the hospital rooms.

The following morning rolled around for everyone, from Gotham City's street sweepers to every inhabitant of Arkham Asylum.

Maureen brought the classic muscle car, that chugged gas with just a press of the accelerator to a grinding halt into her assigned parking spot at the rear of the sprawling facility. Three chain-link and barbed wire topped fences kept the employee's vehicles safe.

Maureen hooked a right upon entering Arkham, nodding to Carl as her heels clicked with each step towards the hospital wing. She checked in with the overnight nurse who was finishing her notes before clocking out.

"Good morning Cassie, how's Bellinger?"

Cassie Freestone rolled her eyes. "He's asleep, I had to increase his morphine drip," she whispered.

Jimmy G. Bellinger was a recent transfer, but was in actuality, a lizard clothed in Arkham's hospital gown.

A cannibalistic, necrophile with a penchant for boys under ten.

Maureen nodded, "and the new one? Bane is the name I was provided by the hospital, no last name. How's his cardiac output been?"

Cassie flipped through Bane's chart and traced the most recent EKG that she had personally performed a few hours earlier.

"He's been stable. Pressure has stayed within normal limits. Dr. Fausto from General checked him out and changed his medications. I already faxed the orders to the pharmacy."

"Great," Maureen said with a close to genuine smile as she added. "How's Featherstone?"

Sebastian Featherstone was a long-term patient at Arkham Asylum. He'd had the same view from a rectangular window after being remanded there after experiencing a psychotic break and killing his bride and half her family with the sterling-silver knife he was supposed to use to pierce the bottom layer of the three-tiered Tahitian vanilla bean sponge cake.

Featherstone had carved his eyes out with the biodegradable cornstarch spork on Arkham's plastic lunch trays, crying how everywhere he looked was a replaying of his wedding day on a loop. The guards had reported that they heard Featherstone screaming apologies and was found on his knees, his bloody hands, clasped in front of his thin chest.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, let me retry, I love you, I do," Featherstone continued to mumble even in the IV opiate's unbreakable stranglehold, his face swathed in white gauze, his empty eye sockets filled with folded absorbent sponges.

Maureen and Cassie chatted a few more minutes before parting ways. Maureen just starting her day as she walked towards Bane's curtained off section of the room and Cassie to the timecard to clock out and eventually home.

"Good morning, are you awake?" Maureen called as she gripped the mauve and grey curtain that was pulled closed in front of Bane's bed, his limbs secured to the bed railing.

Bane had heard the approach of Maureen's heels as they clicked towards the curtain, pausing.

He grunted a sound that was similar to a greeting and listened as Maureen pulled the curtain open, the cloth parted the air with a gentle woosh as she pulled at it.

Maureen didn't realize she was twisting her wedding ring around her finger as she pulled the curtain closed behind her and pulled a squeaky, rolling stool closer to the side of his bed but still further away than he could hope to reach if he decided to make any sudden moves.

Maureen's eyes danced over his face, his closed eyes, unable to avoid seeing the tension etched in his features. She looked over the various blinking monitors that measured every aspect of his living state of being.

"Your prognosis is positive," Maureen said as she settled on the padded stool.

Bane cracked open his eyes. The overhead light was blinding as he caught her crossing her long legs, noticing the barest peek of her burgundy polished toenails before he let his eyes fall shut, the light overwhelming and fatigue too strong.

"How are you feeling?" Maureen asked as she pulled a lined notepad from her oversized bag.

"I am improved from yesterday," Bane muttered in a hoarse voice, his throat painfully dry.

Maureen nodded and made a pleased noise as she took note of his current set of vitals.

As she was jotting down his blood pressure and oxygen saturation percentage, Bane cracked open his eyes again, despite the penetrating light that raped his corneas.

"How long will I be here?"

Maureen paused, looking towards him to find his eyes partially open, squinting against the harsh, overhead fluorescent lighting.

"In this room? I'm not sure, I'd imagine several days at least. Are you anxious to return to your room?"

Bane managed a grunt that might've passed for a laugh if he didn't feel like his body's nervous system was being pulled through his skin, one ropy, spaghetti-like strand of nerves at a time.

In Bane's continued silence, Maureen dated the top, right corner of her notepad as she spoke. "Do you feel strong enough to talk about what brought you here?"

"Is it my decision?"

"Of course it is," Maureen quickly said. "It helps neither of us if you're not in a cognitive state to speak. The analysis would be plagued with too many variables from the start."

Bane forced himself to open his eyes wider, meeting Maureen's eyes as his pupils shrank to a pencil point.

"What happened to those that stood with me?"

Maureen set down her pencil. "I would've guessed you would've heard that by now or at least glimpsed a tv with your duration in the hospital."

Bane shook his head, "I heard whispers and caught glances but never from a source that wouldn't have need to pervert the truth of the events."

Maureen pursed her lips as she considered how to summarize all that had transpired while he was in and out of surgery, awaking from or falling into heavily anesthetized clouds.

"Many of those that were rounded up after the Batman detonated the bomb over the water were quickly moved through the court, found guilty and given death sentences via the electric chair."

"What happened to Talia al Ghul?" Bane forced himself to ask, speaking each syllable slowly, deliberately. He struggled to keep even a hint of emotion from his tone.

"Who's that?" Maureen asked.

Bane held her eyes, unblinking. "You know who that is."

Maureen didn't pause to take a breath. "I know what I've read and seen on the news. I want to know who she is to you."

"Who do you think she is?"

"I don't know, that's why I asked the question," Maureen answered in an easy tone.

Bane held her eyes for a handful of heartbeats before letting his tired lids fall closed and turned his face up towards the ceiling and water-stained panels.

Maureen stood when it became clear that Bane was through speaking.

She paused and glanced over her shoulder when he called to her from the bed, heavily restrained with locked cuffs and IV opiates.

"Will this conversation be a part of your court recommendation doctor?"

Maureen found his eyes open just enough to vaguely make out her silhouette.

"No," she finally said. "This conversation is too nuanced, it'd be easy for either side of counsel to distort it to fit their narrative," Maureen added gently and left Bane to his thoughts.

Across the facility in one of the level four supermax wings, the Joker was cackling and pissing himself, his arms wrapped up in a canvas straitjacket. He squeezed his eyes shut and strained his bowels to produce a soft shit that filled his adult diaper.

"Mommy," the Joker shouted in a high-pitched voice. "Mommy, I need you to change my dipey-wipey. Mommy I need a rim job," he howled and began rocking back and forth, causing the soft mass in his diaper to spread and coat his pale butt cheeks but kept the mess contained within the sturdy, elastic of the diaper.

As seasoned techs dealt with the Joker, on the other side of the vast asylum, Maureen stepped off the elevator and nodded at Ferguson who was posted in the hall, playing some chirping, chiming game on his phone.

Ferguson returned Maureen's nonverbal greeting with his own nod and went back to destroying a kingdom while looking for his gnome queen. Maureen pressed the start button on her coffee maker and powered up her laptop. While her coffee percolated, she scrolled through some of the public record footage of Bane outside Black Gate Prison. After she dumped some vanilla flavored creamer into her coffee, she settled at her desk and pressed the play button.

The footage was initially shaky as Bane rose to his full height outside the prison and held open his muscular arms wide. Maureen began to make notes as he addressed the angry, frothing masses.

"Behind you stands the symbol of oppression. Black Gate Prison, where a thousand men have languished….," Bane thundered through the small speakers of her laptop.

Maureen pressed pause and made a column of words to incorporate for when she next revisited word association with him.

Maureen spent hours in her office watching footage of Bane around the city, the destruction in his powerful wake and felt a cold trickle of original fear blow against the back of her neck as she watched him break the neck of Doctor Leonid Pavel on the football field.

As Maureen continued watching videos, back in the hospital wing, Bane stared up at the ceiling, a tech passing through had dimmed the lights when she noticed him squinting.
Doctor Maureen Hightower's words kept peppering him. "I want to know who she is to you."
Bane closed his eyes as he thought of watching Talia depart, feeling hot tears sting the back of his eyes, willing her to turn around one more time and look at him in his memory.
Talia al Ghul was his mother, his father, sister, and lover, despite them never exchanging even a fleeting touch of their lips.

Bane blinked hard and began to rapidly ask and answer questions to the water-stained ceiling tiles.

"Who is she?" Bane asked in the voice of a baby born with a wounded heart.

"Who is she?" Bane asked, his voice strained as he knew from enough whispers that Talia was dead and wouldn't rise again. A phoenix whose fire had been stomped away.

"Who is she?" Bane asked aloud, his words shaky, his voice forced in the pitch of a child with a damaged soul.

"Who is she?" he whispered hoarsely, sounding like a burgeoning adolescent shedding their childhood and crawling into a body with a stained and fractured aura.

Bane was almost thankful for the cramp that tore through his side and caused his cardiac monitors to blare loudly, alerting the staff.

The cramp was later found to be from dehydration and not long after the initial pain, Bane found himself with a fresh IV flushing his body, causing his tissues to expand as they soaked up the pushed fluids.

Maureen ended her day after a belly, eye, and earful of Bane's attempt to destroy Gotham City.

Ferguson was still playing his game and gave Maureen a limp wave as she boarded the elevator bound for the first floor and eventually to the employee parking lot.

The large V8 engine took its time turning over and Maureen made another mental note to take it in for an oil check as she headed to a big box retailer that had a grocery section with a limited selection of dairy, produce and a mostly decent deli.

Maureen grabbed a cart and took extra time going up and down nearly every aisle, grabbing items at random. She paused in the long aisle of wine and spirits. Maureen practically licked her lips and her eyes nearly crossed as she lasered in on the label of a top-shelf Irish whiskey.

She pressed her lips together, hearing Josef's judgement the times she drank a wee bit too much.

Maureen closed her hand around the glass bottle and bit her lower lip, finally settling the bottle in the cart, nestled between a six-pack of coffee-flavored protein shakes and a box of cereal of colorful, puffed rice cereal.

As soon as she got home, she twisted off the whiskey's cap and drank a few harsh swallows before pre-heating the oven for her packaged lasagna dinner that would be ready an hour after the oven hit 425 degrees.

The next day dawned with a surprisingly quiet night at Arkham with low incidents even at the peak of the Witching Hour.

Maureen drove her alternative, also gas-guzzling SUV to Arkham and after parking in her assigned spot, deposited her purse and jacket in her office before heading to the hospital wing.

She found the curtain separating Bane from the other patients was open and he was sitting up with a pillow behind his head.

The muscular technician Boris was close by, watching Bane like he was carrion on the side of the road.

Bane had one hand free in order to eat his bland breakfast of overcooked and under-seasoned hashbrowns, bright yellow scrambled eggs, and a few slices of honeydew melon that had a peculiar grey cast to it.

"Good morning, you look like you're feeling better," Maureen greeted Bane as she walked into the partitioned section of the room.

Bane nodded. "Much improved."

Boris walked over to Bane and reapplied his stainless-steel cuff to the bedside railing before nodding to Maureen and leaving with the half-empty breakfast tray.

"You never told me Talia's fate doctor," Bane said suddenly, his voice stronger as the new cardiac medication had relieved the chronic discomfort he'd been navigating daily.

"And you never told me who she was to you," Maureen countered as she sank onto the padded stool and crossed her legs, smoothing her skirt down.

Bane's eyes moved to where she began twisting her wedding ring around her finger several times before she continued. "Would you like to talk about the charges that the state has levied against you?"

"What's there to talk about?"

"Do you feel the charges are valid?"

"War calls for extreme actions, it has a different set of rules."

"This wasn't a war."

"Of course it was."

"How would you characterize your role in the charges being brought against you?" Maureen pivoted.

Bane let their eyes meet. "Doctor, how did Talia die?"

Maureen took a deep breath and narrowed her eyes. "Blunt force trauma when the vehicle crumbled, I don't have specifics."

Bane closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillow. He knew Talia was dead but hearing it from someone without an agenda and undiluted made his heart want to just stop beating.

"She was a soldier, a brother on the battlefield," Bane said tiredly, keeping his eyes closed.

Maureen nodded, waiting for Bane to add more.

"I kept her safe, watched over her," he added after a few minutes of complete silence.

"Do you long to hold that kind of role again?" Maureen asked.

Her question made Bane open his eyes, his gaze first landed on her still hands holding the notebook before rising to find her eyes.

"The time for that has passed, hasn't it doctor?"

Maureen frowned. "I can't speak for a judge," she started before Bane interrupted her.

"Your words will be of no consequence. The justice system is being forced to allow this evaluation because of so many eyes watching. I will be transferred from the courthouse directly to the gallows."

Maureen pressed her lips together. She knew somewhere that he was completely accurate but would never reinforce such a statement.

Bane spoke again before Maureen could pull a sentence together.

"It's not a reflection on you, this will cement Gordon's political future and be payment for the Batman's death."

"Oh, he's back," Maureen interjected, causing Bane's words to evaporate as Maureen continued. "Gordon had this telethon and trotted all these orphans with cancer across the stage. The Batman came down from the sky like Jesus tap dancing Christ in latex and gave Gordon a fat sack of cash. Our hero," Maureen mocked and rolled her eyes.

"Tell me about your interactions with the Batman," Maureen added as she dated her notepad.

Bane nodded thoughtfully. "He was admirable when we met," he vaguely murmured.

Maureen nodded and made a few notes about his caginess.

"Part of the charges being brought against you involve first-degree murder of billionaire John Daggett."

Bane chuckled dryly, his shackled palms tingled as they remembered wringing Daggett's skinny neck, how easily the vertebrate snapped.

"How about the Cat?" Maureen murmured as she made a few more notes before looking up and watching Bane's pulsating orbs fill with a dark storm, his pupils practically flashed, and his chest gave an ache as it remembered the impact from the Bat Pod's canon fire.

"I'm sure the state has assembled quite a revolving doors of witnesses to my crimes," Bane stated, ignoring the larger part of the question.

Maureen nodded, "they've built quite a complex case against you," she admitted.

"I understand you'll be transferred back to your room tomorrow," Maureen added when Bane fell back into silence.

"Apparently earlier than anticipated," Bane remarked.

"Yes, you responded well to the medication change."

Bane nodded, not voicing his relief to hearing he'd be moved, the other patients in the wing howled throughout the night and spoke in the language of the soulless and depraved.

Maureen noticed his suppressed reaction but couldn't discern what it meant. She made a note in the margin about the flicker in his expression before glancing up at his medical monitors and jotting down his current vitals.

"Excuse me Dr. Hightower?"

Maureen pulled open the pastel curtain to Cassie Freestone's face. "I've got a Dr. Carlton on the phone, she said it's urgent."

"Thank you Cassie. Excuse me," Maureen said to Bane as she stood and smoothed her skirt down.

Bane watched her go and shut down his other senses and applied all that energy to listening to her side of the phone call.

"Dr. Carlton," Maureen said as she picked up the phone at the nurse's station.

"Dr. Hightower, I just received the results of the Joker's toxicology panel, he's gotten his hands on methamphetamine."

"What?" Maureen said. "How detectable was his level?"

"I honestly don't know how he's alive, he's more meth than man."

Maureen pinched the bridge of her nose and nodded as Sara described the chemical process they'd employ to detox the Joker as well as pass on the information up the ladder in order to find his drug source.

From behind the curtain, Bane heard Maureen end the call and the sound of her clicking heels that heralded her return.

Bane watched her settle back on the squeaky stool, noticing a small u-shaped scar over her delicate ankle bone.

"Apologies for the interruption, there's always a fire burning somewhere around here," Maureen said as she smoothed her hand down the notepad and tapped her pencil on the next blank line. "I'd like to talk about your last day in Gotham, when you believed the city was to be leveled by the neutron bomb."

Maureen continued when Bane remained silent, staring at her ankle, the raised scar was disfigured by her sand-colored nylons.

"You were prepared to die?"

Bane raised his eyes to hers before he spoke. "I was a warrior; I was always ready to die on the battlefield."

"You considered Gotham City a battlefield? The people here didn't ask for a war."

"This city was on the brink of implosion long before I set foot here. My arrival was inevitable."

Maureen made a few notes without looking away from him, not feeling insecure that she blinked first. "Was this your war or did you take orders and act accordingly to their will?"

Bane paused, his ego would never allow himself to sound like he'd let anyone put a ring in his nose and lead him, but he did follow Talia and was sustained by her very exhale.

His hackles rose in defense as anger was heavily infused into his spoken words. "Do you want to hear that I was brainwashed by Talia, that I have feelings of unrequited love for her? That I acted blindly?" Bane practically spit.

"Did you?" Maureen quickly pounced on, making Bane feel like prey in the claws of a tigress as it teased him with puncture wounds before ripping out his throat and consuming him.

Bane clenched his teeth until his jaw popped as Maureen returned his gaze, her expression completely neutral and not a flicker of readable thoughts in her unblinking eyes.

"I serve and reign in a world you wouldn't understand doctor."

Maureen nodded, "well, I'm evaluating based on laws in this world. The legal system will not consider the veracity of alternate defenses to the charge of war crimes, additionally, the militia and doctrine you profess to are not going to be acknowledged by the judge, he ruled them inadmissible."

"Why did you choose this profession, this place?" Bane abruptly asked, making a sharp, sudden U-turn on the Autobahn.

Maureen tilted her chin. "I've seen the legal system here be swayed by money, political influence and discrimination, I've seen people unjustly executed or given life sentences when there are healthier more salient options."

"Life within these walls is healthier?" Bane asked, accompanied by a dry chuckle.

A small smile flitted over Maureen's lips, quickly passing as she spoke, ignoring his question. "On the day that you anticipated Gotham City being leveled, what were you feeling? Did you ever feel like putting a stop to everything?"

Bane frowned, "I wouldn't have been able to stop what was put into motion, even if it was my desire."

"Did you long for death? Welcome it?"

"I would not have died in the manner in which you're familiar doctor."

Maureen cleared her throat, "what manner of death do you believe I'm unfamiliar with?"

"A soldier does not die in the same way as others, I was part of an intricate puzzle."

"Tell me about the puzzle," Maureen said, the point of her pencil poised over the page.

"You would get lost in its constructed mazes doctor."

Maureen cocked an eyebrow and fought an unprofessional bout of sarcasm to accompany her smirk. She directed her attention to the pad of paper and made a few notes.

"Would death by the electric chair still qualify as a soldier's death?" she asked, looking up to find Bane's gaze back on her ankle, squinting as he tried to make out the scar and its possible cause.

"I stepped on a piece of glass when I was five," Maureen said answering his unasked question before repeating herself. "How would you qualify death at the hands of the state?"

Bane raised his eyes. "They are not in a position to judge the veracity of my strength and honor."

"They are though, you will be tried by the state. They want to find you guilty, and they want to take your life."

Bane nodded, considering her words, "why this theatricality then?"

Maureen's tone turned solemn. "They have to, everything needs to be unimpeachable about your trial. They want everything wrapped up efficiently, I don't want to squander your time here."

Bane gestured around the room as much as the restraints allowed. "The way the time is spent has no effect on the overall deception."

"It could and it has in the past," Maureen stated, her tone steeped in seriousness. "Myself and my predecessor have had some success in lobbying support when the psychological proclivities support medical over legal intervention."

"Is that your opinion doctor?"

"I don't know yet," Maureen answered truthfully before adding. "That's why I don't want to minimize our sessions by grand-standing, displays of ego or forgetting the finality of a guilty verdict."