8.
Prue screamed.
It was a primal sort of scream, where you're not aware how desperate you sound. The rush of water blanketed her voice, but it still carried through.
"Don't! Bane, don't!" she urged him.
She wanted him to stop. She didn't want to see him kill the Batman with his bare hands. But he was not listening. Though he had seen her and acknowledged her presence, it appeared he was fine with her watching his gruesome deeds unfold. In fact, that might've been his purpose for bringing her here. He planted another fist in his opponent's jaw.
It was Barsad who dragged her away from the railing and put a hand over her mouth to silence her.
"Enough with the histrionics, darling," he spoke in her ear. "Nothing you'll say will change the Bat's fate."
Prue wrestled against his hold, but the henchman wouldn't release her. He let her keep watching, though.
She could see that Bruce Wayne had managed to wrangle out of his captor's hold and was trying to get up and put up a fight. He was considerably weakened. Bane pushed him down a short flight of stairs. The Batman fell, but he pulled something from his armor and threw it at the wall. It was a loud device, like small fireworks detonating. It was meant to distract the muzzled beast in front of him.
"Theatricality and deception," Bane drawled with an amused whirr. "Powerful agents to the uninitiated. But we are initiated, aren't we, Bruce? Members of the League of Shadows."
The League of…The League of what? She'd never heard of such an organization, but then again, why would she? It sounded like a cooked up name in a James Bond movie. And now she was hearing that both Bane and the Batman had been a part of it.
The villain and the hero, members of the same "league". It must've been a joke, but no one was laughing.
"And you betrayed us…" Bane hissed, seizing the Bat by the throat and lifting him up until his feet barely grazed the ground. He delivered several punches to his gut and launched him across the bridge.
Prue couldn't make him out anymore with the water coming down so rapidly, but she could've sworn that Bane had said that he was the League of Shadows now. Was he the sole leader then? And were his men also a part of it? Was Barsad a member? She somehow couldn't picture that.
Bane called out a foreign name that she didn't catch. Whoever that man had been, Bane claimed he was…fulfilling his destiny.
Prue shuddered. She had wanted to believe that he and his crew were part of a small terrorist cell with limited interests, not…not founders of some grand conspiracy. She felt like she was part of a complicated hoax that operated on mirrors and illusions. None of this seemed real.
The Batman made one last attempt to evade the monster. He activated a device on his belt and suddenly, the feeble lights around them were snuffed out and they were engulfed in darkness. Prue couldn't see what was happening anymore, though she distinguished movement and shadows.
She pulled at Barsad's sleeve. "You have to go down there." To stop him, to end the fight, she hoped. But Barsad didn't move.
And then, she heard Bane's voice again.
"Ooh, you think darkness is your ally?" His voice had a husky, almost satisfied purr to it. "You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it. Molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man. By then, it was nothing to me but blinding!"
Prue heard the sharp intake of blows. Bane had seized his target once more, even in the dark.
I was born in it…I didn't see the light until I was already a man.
She went over the words in her head with a feverish need to understand. He was speaking metaphorically, wasn't he? He must have been. No one lives in literal dark for that long.
"The shadows betray you," Bane's voice boomed from below. "Because they belong to me."
Prue heard a sickly crack, as if a mask had been broken. This time she didn't scream. But she had to bite down on her tongue to stop the bile from rising in her throat. This kind of violence was unbearable. You only read about it in books or saw it in movies. You hoped you never had to witness it.
"I will show you were I have made my home while preparing to bring justice," Bane continued, his boots treading loudly on the metal bridge. "Then… I will break you."
At this juncture in his speech, Barsad pulled her back against the wall abruptly.
Prue couldn't see what was happening, but there was a sudden, deafening noise. A loud crash erupted above her and large chunks of the ceiling started falling down in a heap of rubble. With it, came the bright glare of lights from above.
"Your precious Armory!" Bane cried out triumphantly. "Gratefully accepted. We will need it."
Prue stared up, her jaw slack in wonder. The hole in the ceiling revealed what looked like the basement of an office building. They were…this was…
Adrenaline made her fast on her feet. She connected the dots in a matter of seconds.
If he was Bruce Wayne and this was his "armory", they were under Wayne Towers.
Prue suddenly recalled that first assignment. She'd had to drop a briefcase inside a manhole, in the vicinity of Wayne Towers.
Oh God. She clutched at her stomach weakly. Had her own actions indirectly led to this? Had that briefcase paved the way to infiltration? Had she helped them raise a coup against the Batman?
She saw the Bat raise himself one last time, though he was barely standing.
"Ah, yes," Bane drawled with glee. "I was wondering what would break first." The Batman ran at him and hit him with unrestrained anger, but Bane was in control now. He was ruthless and emotionless and clear-headed, and he put his adversary down with swift blows.
"Your spirit or your body," Bane finished, heaving the Bat up in the air, as if he weighed little more than a child. The sinews in his arms bulked with the effort. He dropped him with a victorious thud. She heard a spine crack.
Then he bent down and pulled off the bat mask from Bruce Wayne's face. It came off so easily. There was only half of it left. It was broken.
Bane dropped it almost absently into the sewer below. The water swallowed it with a fury.
Prue gazed after it, transfixed.
Already, some of his men were hauling the Batman's body into the shadows. The shadows that belonged to him.
"Come along, sweets," Barsad whispered low. "Show's over."
The show may have been over, but she was still replaying moments from it in her head. Some scenes were so vivid that she had to blink and ground herself in the present.
The present was this strange room. Pipelines crisscrossed the ceiling. The skeletal walls were made of bricks which had come loose and water was trickling in between. She was in a different part of the sewer, but the air was still fetid and the place still looked uninhabitable.
Yet, this was supposed to be an office, or some kind of private study. There was a desk in front of her and a tall chair behind it. There was a lamp on the desk too, the cheap kind you could buy in any major store. To her right, there was a metal bookcase, with leather-bound volumes and ledgers on each shelf.
She surveyed the contents with interest. She didn't feel guilty. Barsad had left her here alone. If she wasn't meant to snoop, he should've done a better job. But there wasn't much to snoop, sadly. Most of the titles on display were in…Arabic or Persian, if she had to guess. It was gibberish to her. There were also notebooks filled with numbers and figures and all sorts of things she'd never understand.
But stashed between these volumes were two books she recognized, two books she understood.
A biography of Hannibal of Carthage, the famous General, and… the second one...
Prue frowned. This didn't make sense. She flipped through the book in wonder and she noticed a few key passages had been underlined.
Wait…does this mean…
The door behind her was pushed open. She stashed the books back quickly.
Bane entered the room with heavy steps. There were droplets of water running off his bare arms and shaved head. He looked distracted, as if he hadn't noticed her presence yet.
Prue steered her gaze away from him. She contemplated the floor in silence. Despite what she had seen tonight, she felt he wouldn't bring her here just to kill her. He seemed to like spectacle and punishment. He wouldn't just kill her; he'd give her a lesson. And he'd have a speech ready, no doubt.
"Barsad tells me you did not care for my methods of discipline," his voice drawled mechanically as he sat down at his desk.
Prue blinked. "Was I supposed to like them?"
His eyes glimmered. "No. But you will see in time that I did the Batman more good than harm."
She frowned. "Where have you taken him?"
"Some place where he will learn. It will make him stronger…or it will kill him. But it will make him a man."
"Wasn't he already made a man by - by your league?" she asked.
"Ah, you paid attention to that," he remarked with a rueful glint.
"The League of Shadows," she repeated. "It's hard to forget a name like that."
"And yet, so many have," he replied with a hint of derision in his voice. She didn't know if he was only humoring her. Like a hunter toying with its prey.
Prue pulled on her coat tighter. "You said he betrayed you. Why are you then interested in his fate?"
Bane stared at her for a moment. "Why are you? You screamed for me to stop. You called my name, just as you did that day at the Stock Exchange."
Prue shook her head. "Anyone else would've done the same in my place."
"Not anyone."
She shrugged. "Bruce Wayne is still a human being."
"Yet you don't give your sympathies to every suffering creature around you," he countered with an arched brow. "You didn't care about all the hostages that day."
"No…because it'd be too much. I'm just one person," she mumbled, feeling suddenly as if she was the one put on the stand.
"So. Some people are more deserving of humanity than others."
"No. You're twisting my words."
"Am I?"
"You didn't answer my question. Why do you care about his fate?"
He chuckled darkly. "I care about the fate of all citizens of Gotham."
Prue gritted her teeth. She could see she was getting nowhere with this particular line of questioning.
She stared at his ordered shelves and swallowed the knot in her throat.
"Did you mean that thing you said, about not seeing the light until you were a man?"
Bane lowered his eyes and gazed at his hands, the coarse hands which had undone a man tonight. He brushed a thumb over one torn knuckle. The blood had dried on it.
"Were you kept a prisoner?" Prue asked again.
But the beast remained quiet, observing his own hands.
"Did someone hurt you? Is this vengeance?" she pressed on, despite his stubborn silence.
Bane opened a right-hand drawer by his side and retrieved a file from within.
"I have something for you here –" he started.
But Prue brushed him off, before she lost her courage. "No. Answer me. If it's not vengeance, is it self-destruction? Do you mean to kill yourself?"
This certainly caught his attention. His hand stilled on the open file. He looked up at her with the same unvarnished surprise he had betrayed when they had talked about Miranda Tate.
"What?"
Prue walked to his bookcase and pulled out the book which had puzzled her so deeply.
"When I saw the book on Hannibal of Carthage, it made sense, of course. A great general with superhuman ambitions and a painful vendetta against a system which had wronged him? I understood how he could be a model for you. But this other one, it didn't make sense to me."
And she showed him the battered copy of the biography of Gaius Petronius Arbiter.
"I mean, they're practically opposites. Petronius was everything Hannibal would've hated; a Roman courtier with a passion for easy living. Hannibal wanted to destroy Rome. Petronius cherished it. Hannibal lived life on the hard edge of battle. Petronius lived life for pleasure and beauty. Why would you put them together? But then I remembered, they both died by suicide."
Bane watched her with rapt attention. His eyes were dark with a flood of emotions that she could hardly make out. Like the waves of the ocean, swallowing each other up.
But she pressed on, feeling she was in her element. This was a history lesson.
"Hannibal tried to destroy Rome, failed and then fled. But wherever he went, he conspired against the Republic. When the Romans finally caught him, he chose poison rather than submission. And Petronius ...He wanted to die on his own terms. He had always offended the Empire and Nero with his personal freedom. He cut his veins in the presence of his friends and spoke the truth one last time about the men in power. In that way, both deaths are a statement. A statement against the status quo."
Prue felt feverish with excitement. She imagined briefly that Professor Attwood would be proud of her.
"I saw the passages you underlined...You want to destroy your own Rome, but you don't want to survive the destruction, do you? Maybe I'm wrong, but whatever you mean to do to this city, or to the Batman, you're going to do it to yourself too."
She stopped for breath, exhaling loudly. She felt as if she'd run a hundred miles. But it felt good somehow.
Bane rose from his chair abruptly, knocking the desk in his wake.
Prue stepped back in alarm. Had she struck a chord? Had she got it right?
He walked towards her with measured steps, his posture poised to strike. Her spine collided with the shelves behind her. Yet it didn't feel like he was cornering her.
She looked up at him with fear and expectation. He was going to tell her the truth. She was going to read it in his eyes.
He stopped when he was a hair's breadth away from her. The mask's perfunctory hiss echoed straight into her belly. They stared at each other, two parallel bodies that had nothing in common, that did not even breathe the same air.
"Tell me…" she trailed off, her throat dry. Tell me if I'm right about you.
He raised his arm, the knuckles still stained with blood. He gently pried the book on Petronius from her fingers and set it on a shelf above her head, all the while keeping his eyes on her.
Prue didn't want to touch him, but she wondered what would happen if she reached out and brushed her fingers against his arm. He was inured to violence, but would a different sort of contact startle him?
"I take it you saw the news about Richard Blevin," he murmured, pulling her abruptly away from her thoughts.
She had to pause. She'd almost forgotten the night at the Gala and anything that came before it. She was so clearly wrapped up in the moment.
"Yes, I did. …Thank you."
The familiar words of gratitude never seemed to grow old between them.
"Hmm."
He stepped away then and she felt like a string which had been released. Her shoulders sagged in relief….and disappointment. He hadn't revealed himself to her.
"That file," he said, pointing a finger to his desk. "Contains some information I need delivered to Miranda Tate. The language is coded, so do not bother trying to understand."
Prue blinked. "You…want me to make another delivery."
His eyes crinkled. "Did you think you were free?"
"I – I thought after everything…after tonight..."
"That you'd be done? No, no, my dear. This is only the beginning. If anything, your little speech has strengthened my resolve."
"Your resolve?"
"You will never be done. You profess to know so much about me, let me grant you your wish. If I ever felt inclined to let you go, I take it back now. You are mine to command. You belong to me. Until the very end."
The temperature in the room suddenly turned frigid. She felt cold frissons all over her body, as if she had fallen in sewer water. This was not how it was supposed to go.
"Until – until the end?"
"Your end or mine," he replied gruffly and tossed the file in her direction. "Barsad will come fetch you."
Before she had any notion of protesting, he had marched out of the room, slamming the door in his wake.
A/N: hello again, long time no see! this chapter continues the canonical scene between the Batman and Bane, with lines taken directly from the script. the rest, of course, belongs to me, to take a page from Bane's book. I hope you enjoyed this chapter and thank you so much for all your reviews, I'm so glad new readers are discovering this story. There are a lot of anonymous readers I have to thank too, you're all wonderful. Let me know what you think about this chapter!