Chapter Ten: Day Six at Sea: A Scarred God that Walks the Earth

At Lena's whispered words, Bane's heart's electrical functions nearly stopped. In any other human heart that functioned as the rest of the bipedal mortals, the cardiac process would have arrested itself and life would've ended. Bane's mechanically and chemically controlled system kept the potential perfect storm at bay contained within his scarred and battle-worn body.

Lena would never know for sure, but she thought she heard Bane murmur a melodic thank you before a mechanized hiss emitted from the metal tubing surrounding the mesh front of his mask.

"Did you mean the oath you made to me?"

Lena squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her lips into a thin line at his gravelly words. She tried to force her brain into the higher functioning process of creating deception, keeping her tongue from forming and spilling words.

Bane felt the side of her face brush against the warm curve of his neck as she nodded with the barest of movements, a butterfly's wings would've created more friction.

Bane took a deep breath of analgesic-kissed oxygen, emboldened by her admission. He shifted and pushed Lena back until her shoulder blades pressed evenly into the mattress.

"Repeat it to me," he demanded, caught up in the equal parts of perverse shame and exquisite deliciousness at overpowering her. Bane's natural predatory proclivities took over as he squeezed the round cap of her shoulder, all but ensuring oval bruises to begin forming from the pressure and strength of his grip.

Lena blinked up at Bane's masked face. "I don't remember all the words," she admitted.

Bane lessened his hold on the top of her shoulder and traced his fingertips along her prominent collar bone, dipping into the valley of bare skin between her breasts. His voice was strained as he moved the tip of his index finger in small, slow circles around the rigidity of bone and cartilage where her sternum met.

"I vow," he murmured on a rasp and danced his fingers up the front of her throat, feeling her carotid pulse pounding under the delicate skin of her neck.

"I vow," Lena repeated and felt a fine tremor start at the base of her skull and tease itself down to the tips of her middle toes as Bane smoothed his hand up to cup her jaw as he continued speaking, struggling to keep his voice steady.

"To stay next to you, until you die," he murmured in a controlled harmonious tone.

"To stay next to you," Lena began and felt her breath catch as Bane slid his hand to cradle the back of her skull, his fingers smoothing through the silken fall of her hair. "Until you die," she whispered as her strands snagged on his ragged cuticles.

"To share your life," Bane said on a growl, feeling a wave of remembering his primordial roots as he tightened his hand into a fist within the fall of her hair.

"To share your life," Lena gasped as the pressure pulled her head back, causing her neck to stretch taut.

"Bed," Bane practically snarled, his fine control beginning to wane.

Lena gasped and raised the hand that wasn't trapped under his body to settle over his rapidly beating heart. She could feel the strong thudding of his cardiac muscle under the dense flesh of his chest, rhythmically pounding under her palm.

"Let me look at you," she said breathlessly, lifting her hand to reach for his face. Bane's kept her head pulled so far back that she could only see the headboard in the dim cargo container. Lena's fingertips scrabbled at the well-crafted titanium front of his mask as he released his unbreakable hold on her hair to quickly close around her wrist.

Lena shouted out as Bane squeezed her wrist and slammed her hand back to the plush pillows. "My bed," he thundered.

"Your bed," Lena managed as his words crashed over her, reminding her that her choice was paper thin.

"Soul," Bane murmured on a dangerous melody, reinforcing the fact that she could read a newspaper article through the transparency of her ability to make a decision in regard to acceptance.

"Don't," Lena started before the sudden darkness in his eyes nearly kept her from further speaking. "Don't make me live a life in the dark," she managed, her voice threatening to break.

Bane narrowed his eyes down at her, lowering his face until her full lips pressed against the mesh front of his mask. He feasted on her inhale, tinged with metallic nervousness as he shifted just enough to turn back on the small bedside lamp. "My soul," he whispered raggedly when her face was illuminated.

"Your soul," Lena sighed heavily.

"Swear to me you won't make me live a life in the shadows," she added quickly, hating the unabashed begging staining her syllables.

Bane remained silent before releasing her wrist, allowing her to reach back up and trace the metal tubes and wires that formed his mask, breath, and keeper of his life.

"I swear it," he wheezed mechanically.

"Do you ever take this off?" Lena asked as she trailed her touch over the sturdy Kevlar straps that kept the mask pressed firmly against his face.

Bane reclaimed his hold on her wrist, applying a lighter touch as he shook his head. "It's excruciatingly painful to be without it," he admitted, speaking the truth with no need for pharmaceutical prodding.

As Bane made a concerted effort to control his breathing as Lena traced the visible skin of his face, unbeknownst to them both, a few cargo containers to the left of them, a war criminal waited for the voyage to Ukraine to end. The man who was brittle with age was still wanted in connection with crimes against humanity, torture, and enslavement.

This man who had spent his life hiding and running since 1945 was still sought after with lusty fervor, war criminal hunters wanted to steal the air from his emphysema ravaged lungs, squeeze the marrow from his arthritic bones and crush his brain's amygdala like a glossy-eyed insect.

As the man who traveled under the papers of a Ukrainian born citizen Anton Bohdan, appearing to merely be returning home if stopped and asked for his passport had a coughing fit and spit a glob of bloody phlegm into a silk handkerchief, back in the dimly lit cargo container, Bane felt sweat crop up on his forehead as Lena smoothed her thumb along the bony prominence of his eyebrow ridge.

Bane forced a startled gasp from Lena when he closed his hand around her wrist, tightening his fingers as he paused her movements along the sides of his skull.

Bane adjusted his grip on Lena's hand and moved her fingertips along the exposed skin of his face, reddened from the tightness of the Kevlar strap.

Lena held her breath as he trailed the tips of her fingers down the front of his chest, a low growl escaping from between Bane's scarred lips as he settled her palm above his heart, compressing his hand over hers. Lena felt his nipple harden under the smooth skin of her palm, the drumbeat of his heart climbed and thundered under the dense musculature of his broad chest.

Bane cursed melodically incoherent in a dead language as he knew that his cock didn't possess a strong enough blood flow to harden.

Bane tore his eyes away from Lena's searching gaze, the chemical infiltrating her bloodstream had blown her pupils up to full inky black dilation. Lena watched him look anywhere but her and felt him grow still as his eyes landed on an antique iron phonograph from the late 1800's in the corner of the cargo container.

The large egg-shaped Thalamus in Bane's brain was on instant sensory overload and his eyes glazed over as he slipped from the luxurious linen and walked in glorious, scarred nudity towards the musical antique.

"What's wrong?" Lena asked to his broad, bare back. Bane could hear the genuine concern in her voice, the drug still deeply penetrating her.

Lena sat up and pulled the linen over her naked skin as she watched the muscles move fluidly under the naked, marred skin of Bane's formidable frame as he traced his fingertips along the Edison Blue Amberol cylinders.

Lena watched the rich vascular structure of his forearms dance under his naked skin as he plucked one of the four-inch cylinders from a recessed holder.

"Are you okay?" Lena asked again, her eyes drinking in his nudity, his naked skin a topographical map of continental delineations by thick ridges of scarred skin, bustling arterial intersections and muscular curvature.

Bane set the phonograph until the impressive melody of Wagner's powerful Tristan und Isolde began filling every inch of free space in the cargo container.

Bane turned to settle the entire weight of his gaze on Lena as the tenor Ludwig Schnorr von Cardsfeld declared lyrical desires to his soprano Malvina.

Bane walked towards Lena as the married in real-life couple sang to each other in the original recording of the overture from June 10th 1865.

The crescendo built as Bane closed the distance to the plush mattress. His eyes were on Lena but behind his fiery orbs, the cataclysmic swirls of caramel and expresso brown, he was hearing the overture again for the first time.

Bane's gaze grew soft as he saw through Lena, transported back to an early memory of traversing the darkness of The Pit, avoiding certain pockets of darkness that held men who were all animal on the inside, their human shape was all that remained of their humanity.

Bane had been pulled from trying to catch drops of water from deep rock fissures when he heard a strange, whistling melody from afar, the sound bouncing off the dirt before being eaten by the dark.

The young Bane, flesh running red with fresh lacerations, dirt-encrusted abrasions and broken skin had crept around the corner of a jagged rock formation and seen an older man, wrapped in muslin that had turned yellow with age and from absorbing the contents of broken puss pustules. The man's exposed skin and fingers were devastated by leprosy, but he'd still managed to fashion a modified flute from a cleaned up, hollowed out tibia bone.

Bane hadn't blinked as the man launched into a primitive rendition of Wagner's masterpiece. The youthful Bane was captivated by the beauty of the rudimentary melody. Through the tibia bone of a murderer, came the overture's exploration of life and death. The duality between light and dark, boldly, and musically expressed.

As the dying old man let Tristan und Isolde dance around the adolescent Bane, the melody crawled inside his ear and fused with his brain's frontal cortex.

Bane shook himself to the present moment when Lena cleared her throat, "are you okay?" she whispered.

Bane blinked slowly; she couldn't see his almost sad smile behind his mask.

"These were the first sounds I heard that weren't from the dead and dying, the first melody that wasn't stained with fear, drowned in sorrow. It was the first time I heard hope in the darkness and that there was light above me," Bane murmured, his voice thick with need.

Lena shifted back as Bane settled on the edge of the mattress and settled his large hand over her bent knee, his massive palm fell over her warm curved flesh as he continued, his voice growing raspier as he was inundated by the combination of Isolde echoing her own passion as he let his hand slide down the top of her thigh, the tips of his fingertips brushing the cotton gauze.

"I knew I had found light when I first saw you," Bane murmured, his voice on the very edge of a Lupine growl as he continued. "I knew the hope I heard in the darkness was real when I touched you," he added as he smoothed his hand to rest over her bare intimacy, massaging his palm in slow circles over her blush pink folds, teasing closer to her tight wet center.

Bane shifted until he was lying next to Lena, never removing his hand from her wet skin as he teased the tip of his index finger through her petal soft pussy lips. Lena blushed as he nearly stole her breath as he danced the rough pad of his finger in circles around her clit.

"How could you feel something like that?" Lena sputtered, forcing herself to ask him that instead of begging for more of his touch.

Bane buried his masked face in the smooth curve of her neck, Lena's breathing was rapid against his scarred ear as he varied the rhythm of his touch.

Bane ignored her question as he insinuated himself between her thighs. He pulled the deluxe linen from between nothing until no barriers remained.

Lena let her eyes trail down the front of Bane's body, the etchings catching the light and spilling shadows over his curved musculature. Her body couldn't help but delve into the delicious pool of hedonism as her cunt clenched at the sight of his rapidly hardening cock.

Bane gripped his thickening length, hanging heavily between his thighs as he struggled to give an answer to her question.

"I can't tell her that she saved my life," Bane thought and struggled to contain a primal growl as he pulled Lena closer until their intimate flesh nearly kissed. Lena could feel his large hands kneading her hips, she shivered as she felt their life-taking capacity coupled with his fine restraint.

"You blinded me," Bane murmured hoarsely as he drove his hips forward and filled Lena's tight center with harsh abruptness. He stole Lena's breath down to the remaining noxious tidal air at the bottom of her lungs as he satiated his raw lust while stretching her intimacy around his repetitively plunging cock.

Lena panted in time with Bane's rhythmic thrusting and squeezed her eyes shut as his cock brushed deep inside an oversensitive cluster of spongy, sensitive cells, that grew more alive with each intimate touch.

Bane stared down at Lena's beautiful face in the dim light, he shifted without changing the pace of his thrusting rigidity in order to cup her jaw. Lena opened her eyes and met his as he traced the rough pad of his thumb over her lower lip.

Behind his mask, a line of saliva slipped from the corner of his scarred lips as he longed to taste her, press his lips to her body and memorize every bit of her skin.

"Tell me a story," Lena panted, each word ended on a gasp as he shoved himself inside her until he was stopped only by their intimate flesh kissing.

"About?" Bane asked, his tone rough with the need coursing through his body, his senses electric.

"Tell me how you rose up and came to destroy the only place I've called home."