Chapter Eight: Day Four at Sea: Physical, Spiritual and Cardiac Expectations

The passage of time had blurred for Lena after Bane had spoken to her, eventually covering her with the deluxe linen. He had finished speaking, given her something to relieve the pain and let her slip into sleep. Lena's dreams were composed of reliving her last conscious moments, Bane's body, his cock wetly filling her.

In one such dream world reenactment of his touch, Lena's hand traveled down to cup her intimacy, applying the gentlest of pressure, her folds still slick under her palm.

As Lena slept, continually dreaming of him answering her, in the adjoining container, Bane sank heavily into the upholstered, high-backed chair, his thoughts mirrored her dream.

"What kind of life can I expect with you?" Lena had asked.

Her words reverberated in his frontal lobe as he lip-synched the words to his fresh memory.

For a moment, Bane had been unable to form an answer. What could a predator offer? How could he sustain life when his arterial intersections were filled with darkness.

"I can give you anything in this world, I will pave every one of your steps with gold."

"What do you want from me?" Lena had asked shakily.

A fleeting sadness shimmered to the surface of Bane's eyes before he blinked it away. "I can't force you to truly fulfill my demands," he admitted.

"What is it you want?" Lena asked, a wariness staining her syllables.

Bane had reached out and pressed his palm over her heart, splaying his fingers to cover most of her left breast before he answered.

"I want your heart, your love," he murmured, the words feeling foreign in his mouth. A warrior never spoke of their basal needs, he was disavowing all that it meant to be an apex predator.

"Oh, well, that's a lot," Lena managed, her nipple stiffening under his palm. "I don't really know what to say," she clumsily stumbled over.

Bane teased his fingertip around her hard nipple, his blunt cut nail making her shiver as it circled the sensitive skin. He lifted his eyes to find her eyes reddened and fatigue pulling at her beautiful features with the landlocked, category five tsunami he had caused within her body, life and very existence. He lifted his hand to rest his fingertips under her chin and lift her face further to meet his.

"Consider what that would feel like, we still have nearly a week on the water," Bane had murmured, his words a warm, melodic balm over her sore body and aching wet center.

Lena had nodded and gladly took the pills with the promise of sleep and temporary pain relief.

Those opiates kept Lena suspended in the repetitive dream as Bane occupied himself with map-reading, continued firearm inventory and cleaning and a short nap before the desire to have his hands on Lena pulled him from the antique chair and back to the adjoining cargo container where she snored deeply under the plush linen.

Bane flexed his fingers as he slipped under the silken sheets, molding himself behind Lena's sleeping nudity.

She stirred and mumbled as he smoothed his top hand to rest on the soft skin of her belly, moving lower to rest over her bare intimacy. Lena began to moan and rise to consciousness, shaking free of the opiate's hypnotic hold as Bane began to move his palm in slow circles over her naked femininity, her wet folds crushed under his touch.

Bane concentrated his circles until he had his clit dancing under his fingertips as Lena opened her eyes on a gasp that caused a heated coil to twist tighter in her belly.

Lena began to mumble sounds of protest as Bane tried to slide his finger inside her. She shook her head, her tight center ached, and she couldn't imagine him filling her again so soon.

Bane's faint shred of patience broke as he pulled her onto her back and moved faster than she could process. Lena couldn't articulate the word stop before Bane was on top of her, pulling her thighs around his hips, his hardening cock pushing against her, anxious to be inside of her.

"I won't be denied," Bane rasped in a tone void of life and reached a hand down to draw his painfully hardening cock along her pink folds, seeking her wet center. He didn't give her a chance for a rebuttal before he buried himself inside her with a rough plunge, making her voice distort to sheer incoherency.

Lena looked past the curve of his shoulder as he thrust with frenzy, making her cry out at the end of each stab.

"Look at me," Bane demanded on a pant, his inhalant having a hard time keeping up with his surge of adrenaline. Lena squeezed her eyes shut as Bane never slowed his rhythm but shifted enough so he could lift her chin. "Open your eyes and look at me officer Fischer."

Lena opened her eyes, the meeting of their energy filled irises was enough to push Bane into a quick orgasmic sinkhole. He kept her locked in his gaze as he emptied his cock into her wet center, a spasm rippling its way from the base of his skull to the arches of his feet.

Bane's lungs fluttered, pulling his narcotic touched aerosol deep to fill his alveoli sacs as he felt his cock soften and shifted most of his weight off her.

Lena took a deep breath, thankful for the pressure off her chest as she cleared her throat, not sure how strong her voice would be. "Can I please go clean up?"

Bane rolled to his side until he could lay alongside her, their naked skin pressing together hotly, damp with a light sheen of sweat. "You shouldn't get that bandage wet," he murmured.

"I could fill the sink and at least wash my face," Lena countered and blew out a breath of relief when Bane allowed her to sit up.

Lena surprised him when she cranked back her arm and slapped him squarely across his masked face.

"You could've at least asked before you just fucked me," she hissed, holding back tears of fear and anger all fused together in a residual chemical shroud as she yanked the sheet to cover her naked, aching center.

Bane slipped from between the silken linen with fluid grace and stalked around the bed, an agile predator whose knees popped in protest as he squatted down in front of her.

Lena crossed her arms as Bane didn't speak or blink as he held eye contact. She kept her expression neutral even as her pulse reacted as though she had grabbed a live power line with both hands as Bane remained squatted and raised a hand to settle the rough pads of his fingertips on the top of her bare foot.

Lena pressed her lips together as he smoothed his hand up the back of her calf, squeezing lightly when he cradled his palm on the roundest part of her warm flesh.

"I'm sorry," Bane groaned as he looked up at her.

"Thank you," Lena finally said on a hard sniff and nearly stumbled as she gathered a sheet around her body and stepped around him, leaving him kneeling as she walked towards the adjoining container where there was as luxurious a bathroom as there could be between continents in international water.

"Would you have said yes if I had?" Bane asked as she retreated.

Lena paused, not looking back, both of them knowing the answer to her question as Bane stayed silent in its wake. "Would it have mattered?"

Bane watched her disappear from sight through the rounded, attached doorway, not waiting for his own obvious answer as every nucleus of every cell he possessed, screamed at him in a primal language to pull her back to the surface of the bed, to caress, fuck and memorize every part of her body.

As Lena closed herself behind the flimsy partition, up on the bridge, captain Aleksander Dymtrus threw the satellite phone towards the blinking and beeping navigation panel as his call to Miranda Tate once again reached an out-of-service recording. He swore loudly and retrieved the phone, relieved the expensive device hadn't broken.

As Aleksander drank deeply from a custom flask engraved with his family's coat-of-arms, down in the attached cargo containers, Bane rose to his feet and plucked one of the luxurious sheets from the bed and wrapped it around his nudity.

Bane walked softly, his footfalls making no sound until he came to a stop outside the decorative panel that served as a bathroom door.

Behind the thin wood, painted in a muted golden hue, Lena clutched onto the sink for dear life, shaky and weak from the anxiety, trauma, and dehydration.

She covered her mouth and muffled most of her startled cry as she collapsed to the hard floor, the thin carpet not offering any cushion for her already pain-riddled body.

Bane practically punched through the thin wood that separated them and found her on the floor, her shoulders shaking from the adrenaline dump that doused her nervous system in napalm.

Lena tugged the sheet tighter around her chest as Bane lowered himself to the floor and let his large hand come to rest on the back of her neck, slowing kneading his fingertips into the bunched, tense flesh.

"May I help you clean up?" Bane asked on a rasp, not accustomed to asking permission for much.

He held his breath until Lena nodded, he would've missed the slightest dip of her chin if he hadn't had all of his attention on her.

Lena let him lift her from the floor, clutching the sheet to keep her nakedness covered as he settled her on the edge of the tiny combination tub and shower.

They remained in collective silence as Bane filled the tub with hot water and added imported French bath salts until the air was fragrant with lavender and vanilla fields.

Lena let Bane tug the silken sheet free and methodically scrub and dry her skin as he reveled in every second of their time in the cramped bathroom. If asked, he would've done just about anything to prolong their closeness longer.

Her stomach chose to growl and gurgle loudly at that moment and Lena couldn't help but laugh, trying to recall the last actual food she'd eaten.

Bane basked in the warmth of her skin as she flushed in embarrassment as he let his eyes linger on her naked skin before pulling the sheet to reluctantly cover her.

"Can you walk?"

Lena refused to admit she couldn't and would've fallen back to the floor if Bane hadn't caught her and swept her up in his arms. Lena didn't have the residual strength to argue or fight as Bane carried her bridal-style to the adjoining container and settled her in one of the chairs at an oblong, mosaic-tiled table.

Bane rummaged through the stocked food provisions and procured her several pieces of fresh fruit and a sliced loaf of rustic bread that was beginning to grow stale around the edges.

Lena hadn't realized how hungry she was until she felt a pronounced cramp in her gut.

Bane left her to feast as he took on the uncharacteristic domestic task of making the bed and arranging the pillows along the headboard.

Lena pushed away her plate and apple core when Bane settled across from her. She cleared her throat as she wiped her sticky fingers on the decadent linen when he remained wordless, staring at her impassively.

"What?" she finally asked, wishing he would focus his attention elsewhere.

Bane blinked hard and shook his head, not capable of telling her the needs and wants he kept to himself.

Lena smoothed her hair off her forehead and nervously tucked an errant lock of tangled strands behind her ear as Bane's silence grew deafening, his unspoken words suffocating her and driving the oxygen from the attached containers.

"Why are you staring?" she finally asked, crossing her arms, and sitting as upright as her physical discomfort allowed in the rigid-backed chair.

Bane felt the weight of a spotlight and a thousand pairs of eyes as he was a stage actor who forgot his lines. His tongue was paralyzed, not familiar with the vulnerable cloak that fell around his broad shoulders. There was no predator of his embodiment on the fossil record, not even before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction from 66 million years ago.

The man whose shadow could only be challenged by a supernova, forgot how to speak as Lena sat up straighter, wincing as she would be hard pressed to name a part of her body not affected by a deep, dull ache.

Bane shook himself out of his distracted fugue, his mind only focused on when he'd be able to run the rough pads of his fingertips over her smooth, supple skin. Both hemispheres of his brain raged with the singular thought of the silken strands of her hair getting snagged on his ragged cuticles as he yanked her head back until her neck was stretch taut.

Bane blinked hard and pushed aside the remembrance of plunging into her body, forcing Lena to gasp as he abruptly filled her wet center.

"I was giving thought to tending to your wound," Bane finally delivered on a lazy melody.

"You just did though," Lena murmured, a frown creasing her forehead as he rose to his full height, eclipsing her with his pulsing capacity to easily end lives, destroy kings, and topple empires.

Bane's strategic mind whirred, unable to give voice to his concern.

"We're a long way from land and proper medical care should you develop an infection and need more than the infirmary can offer," Bane finally stated, his words a poor, nearly transparent façade that didn't conceal his raw unease that Lena could become truly ill.

Bane walked around the table and extended his hand towards her.

Lena stared at his outstretched hand, the scars across his knuckles and the calcium ridges in his fingernails.

Lena moved her eyes up the length of his vascularly striated forearm and prominent peaks and valleys of his tricep muscles to meet his unblinking gaze. Bane's swirling orbs simmered, ready to boil over with spectacular dilation if she hinted at refusing, he didn't need to remind her of the comforting perception of her choice.

Bane kept his gratitude to himself when Lena reached out and let him grasp her smaller hand in his. He felt her momentarily stiffen as he tugged her towards the remade bed, the covers pulled back on what was becoming her side of the opulent mattress.

Bane gave her barely enough space to settle on the smooth top sheet. It was Lena's turn to not voice her gratitude as he let her simply shift the decadent linen away from her thigh while keeping the rest of the sheet wrapped tightly around her nudity.

Lena winced and bit her lower lip as Bane used a cotton swab to clean up some of the paper tape's grey, sticky residue it left in its wake.

Bane saw the large muscle of her thigh twitch as the end of the cotton swab moved too close to the seared edge of her burn, the metal had cauterized her flesh as the coils permanently marked her. Lena's suppressed hiss of pain sucker-punched his brain's memory center, bringing forth the memory of crawling like a reptile, his belly scraping against the earth as he moved his broken body through The Pit.

Bane probed the flesh around her burn, remembering the touch of the surgeon who had been thrown in the pit for perceived crimes against a king. Bane dabbed a fresh layer of ointment over the burn, recalling the touch of the man who specialized in pediatrics. The man who put Bane's broken body back together in the darkness with crude tools and remedies had made a living replacing the heart valves of newborns.

Now his surgical light was fire carried in a horn.

"Are you in more pain than you can tolerate?" Bane asked on soft murmur as he secured a fresh bandage and slid one of the round decorative bed pillows behind her thigh, elevating her affected skin.

Lena nodded, "it's getting there," she admitted.

Bane dropped his eyes back to her bandaged thigh, tracing his fingers around the taped edges, before dancing a path up the faint blue of her femoral artery.

Lena dropped a hand and closed her fingers around his wrist as he tugged at the linen covering the femininity at the apex of her thighs.

She squeezed his wrist as she narrowed her eyes at his bruised knuckles, the flesh torn open from fighting the grown, man-child billionaire who dressed up like a rodent in his latex costume, operating high-tech devices.

"What about your pain?" Lena asked on a shaky exhale, her eyes moving to the various bruises in a myriad of colors across his heavily muscled body.

Bane chuckled as he easily shook her hand away as though she was a single grain of salt escaped from the shaker. "You don't need to pay that any mind," he murmured. "How many men have you let touch you?" Bane asked, amusement draining from his tone as he resumed tugging at the luxurious sheet.

Lena didn't have much of a way of creating extra breathing space as she shook her head. "It doesn't matter, Gotham and everyone there is gone now," she answered vaguely.

"It matters to me," Bane grumbled. "How many?" he pressed.

Lena pressed her lips together as back in Gotham City, the oil refinery burned furiously, discarded globs of bubblegum spit on the streets had been incinerated and GPD office Lena August Fischer would be tallied amongst the dead.

Only the gamma rays and neutrons knew that she was still alive, moving at twenty knots across the Atlantic Ocean.