Chapter Thirteen: Day Nine at Sea: The Drift of the Continents
Lena stared down at Bane's face pressed against the top of her thighs, feeling the hard edges of his mask dig into her supple flesh.
As she settled her hands on his shoulders and smoothed her palms down the vascular striation of his muscular neck and massaged the base of his skull, up on the cargo ship's bridge, several of the liberated men broke into the vodka stash of the recently deceased Captain Aleksander Dymtrus.
The new army under Bane milled in every part of the cargo ship, moving them closer to Ukraine.
As the nautical miles were swallowed up by the large ship, down in the adjoining cargo containers, Lena dug her fingers into the bundles of tense musculature of Bane's upper back and shoulders.
"Why did you trust me with my service firearm?" Lena asked lowly as she moved her palms in circles on the backs of his broad shoulders.
"You took an oath," Bane murmured musically as he lifted his head and slipped his arms to encircle her hips and tug her closer, making the robe shift and expose more of her naked skin.
"I took an oath to Gotham as well," Lena breathed as Bane continued to pull her closer towards him, making her begin to part her thighs to allow him closer.
"They are now gone, and your new vow is to me," Bane growled as he began to slide his blood-stained hand up the inside of her thigh.
Lena tensed and pushed at his moving hand with its gore-encrusted fingernails.
Bane quickly retraced a path up the inside of her other thigh with the hand that wasn't responsible for recent murder.
"Your words are now only for me, you may plot revenge in the part of yourself that you hide from me, I will take that as it comes," Bane groaned as he pushed his index finger through the intimate folds of her pussy and teased past the shell-pink lips to plunge his thick, scarred digit inside her.
"I don't want revenge," Lena managed as Bane shifted his hand so he could simultaneously rub this thumb in uneven circles over her clit which grew rapidly to peak sensitivity.
"What do you want?" Bane growled as he slid his finger from her clutching wet center, earning a disappointed gasp from her as he tore her robe and thin gown free as he shoved her roughly back to the surface of the bed.
Lena's voice was stolen as he abruptly lifted her until he could angle his pelvis and thrust his painfully hard cock into her tight center, stretching her around his rigidity as his cock was a mercilessly piston fucking her wetness.
"What do you want?" Bane managed on a strangled melodical moan as he filled Lena until he was stopped by their intimate flesh kissing, growling in guttural frustration as he wanted to fill her further. Bane watched Lena's beautiful features contort in pain as he roughly filled her, feeling a modicum of regret but knowing he could never really change who he was, the cataclysmic division between nature versus nurture.
Bane would never be anything less than an apex predator. D.H. Lawrence looked on from beyond the corporeal world as he watched the hemispheres of Bane's brain shift in the vein of the very drift of the continents as they moved with the ebb and flow of the Atlantic tides.
"I don't want to be afraid of dying in the fire of the next city you destroy," Lena managed on a staccato pant as Bane plunged into her, the thickness of his cock stealing every other one of her breaths.
Bane slowed his rhythmic pace and slid a hand to cradle the back of Lena's skull, sliding his fingers through her thick hair, the strands snagging on his ragged cuticles.
"You can abandon everything you fear, I will keep you safe even in your dreams," Bane soothed on a primal whisper as he sank his hardness as deep as he could in her wet center, teetering on the precipice of orgasmic imminence.
Lena felt a ripple effect from between her thighs as his cock seated itself in the mass of the spongy, oversensitive nerve cluster deep within her. Bane let himself fall forward into unbridled ecstasy as his cock sputtered and quaked inside her tight, pink center as it spurted his hot, sticky seed to wetly coat her innermost intimacy.
He dropped his head to the curve of her neck, loose strands of her hair tickling the curved cartilage of his ear.
Bane stole Lena's ability to recover her breathing as he kept himself firmly seated in her tight center as he smoothed one hand up to cradle the back of her skull, tightening his fingers in the silken fall of her hair. The movement made her arch her back and stretch her neck taut.
Bane's eyes searched hers frantically as he spoke lowly, his tone a strangled melody as it spilled through the mesh front of his mask.
"Have you truly given yourself over to me?" he asked as a shudder wracked his every muscle fiber as his tension reached a fever pitch in needing to hear that she had completely abandoned herself to him. That he had every ounce of her trust that he'd catch her if she fell.
"Have you?" Bane rasped as he thrust his cock with as much strength he could as it began to soften and threaten to slip out of her.
Lena reached up and pressed a few of her fingers against the front of his titanium mask. "Yes," she breathed.
As Bane blinked rapidly, processing Lena's single syllable, throughout the massive cargo ship The Maybutnye, Bane's newly liberated men swarmed like bees. They were a day away from docking in the Ukraine, the men had never felt more alive at that moment by knowing they would be stepping onto solid ground as free men, released from any kind of servitude.
As broken minds began to heal with hopeful thoughts, wishes and dreams unfilled, back in the smoldering remains of what was once the thriving Gotham City, government anti-terrorist divisions sifted through the ashes and organic detritus of the neutron blast.
Name upon name was listed as deceased, friends, family, even the high-schooler Lena knew who worked at nights at a nearby gas station was cataloged amongst the millions of lives snuffed out with the rapidly indiscriminating nuclear fission and gamma rays.
Across the ocean from the smoldering rubble of Gotham City on the cargo ship nearing closer to the Ukraine, a handful of the newly liberated men of Bane's army splintered off and decided that they wanted more than just freedom. These hard men were battle-scarred, had survived being thrust into foreign lands from well-paid governmental agencies to trap, truss and poach.
The small faction of men began to move throughout the rows of container ships, busting them open and exploring the contents, each rectangular cargo container was a steel oyster and they salivated for the pearls inside, whether it be in the form of drugs, money, or firearms.
In the adjoining cargo containers, behind his mask, Bane pressed his scarred lips together, struggling at last to find his words. "Tomorrow we will step onto the shore and begin our life together," he breathed on an urgent mechanical whisper as he rhythmically squeezed Lena's hands.
The leader of the small group of men shouted to his instant brotherhood in broken Romanian as they bashed the locks off the cargo container and rummaged through the contents.
The abrupt victorious syllables carried across the row of still locked containers, including the one holding Lena and Bane.
Bane's hackles rose as he sensed the encroachment and was on his feet and slipping into his clothes as he moved with dangerous fluidity and feral grace to open two steel cases that contained Soviet era automatic firearms and knockoffs manufactured in Bosnia.
"Get dressed and retrieve your firearm officer Fischer," Bane murmured as he returned to her side. "You will stay here, no one will be able to breech but I need you to be prepared for anything."
Lena nodded slowly, her mind swirling with the instant rise of danger and flood of new emotions. Bane left her side again briefly to check the progress of the splintered group of men. These men were proceeding without a plan, they didn't know who was being transported in the cargo containers, they only knew that cash was king.
"I will return shortly," Bane promised and slipped from their set of oblong containers to the one nearby that held the war criminal that had escaped world-famous trials and escaping extradition. The ancient man was dangerous but trapped within a broken, aged body.
Bane had looked at the manifest that captain Aleksander had in his inner pocket before he took a swan dive from the ship. Aleksander had the only written record of who exactly was being transported overseas.
Bane moved to the rectangular container with the dented door and scuffed sides and picked the large padlock, letting himself in, speaking in the war criminal's language of the Fatherland. His bold and assertive syllables danced in the air in front of him as he walked into the container.
"I mean you no harm," Bane stated to the dim container, he obscured a wickedly sharp blade in his large palm in case the war criminal who assisted in the veritable architecture of genocide was waiting to strike.
The silence after Bane spoke was broken first by a different kind of mechanical wheezing as the former commandant of a death camp inhaled deeply through his oxygen tubing, filling his dying lungs, and imbuing him with the strength to form coherent words. The weak voice that emerged from the thin lips, through recessed gums belonged to a man who had personally stomped out thousands of lives under his very polished boot heel.
"What do you want?"
"I need the mementos you have kept from your time serving in another man's war," Bane stated, his tone conveying urgency while also not inviting a shred of denial.
The voice that was once powerful enough to make men piss their pants and grovel at his feet was now garbled and broken as he spoke after another lengthy pause.
"You may have them all but one," the former conductor of death murmured on a rattle.
Bane and the hunted war criminal never saw each other clearly in the dark but their base natures spoke to each other, their DNA strands recognized each other's primordial roots.
The former soldier who was now hunted for following the orders of another man and his vision of world domination directed Bane to where the cannisters of Cyclone D were concealed at the rear of the container.
The two men never exchanged another word.
Bane knew from the recently deceased manifest in captain Aleksander Dymtrus's pocket that several of the containers towards the end of the cargo ship were empty.
Bane moved with ferocious speed and efficiency as he divided the cannisters between the empty containers and wired them to timers he had managed to put together after poaching stolen auto parts and pieces from an adjacent container.
He was careful to not trip the timers and start the release of the deadly gas housed in the metal containers. The efficacy of the gas had dimmed somewhat over the years since they were actively used but Bane knew enough of them together would create enough noxious fumes to stay contained and kill all traces of life in the steel rectangles.
As Bane navigated his way back to the adjoining containers that Miss Miranda Tate had reserved for anonymous travel, the splintered group of men newly minted with freedom continued searching for cash, drugs, or anything of value, nearing closer to where Bane was assembling the trustworthy British sniper rifle he'd had at his side for decades.
Bane smiled as he was touched with the nostalgic memory of winning the Arctic Warfare Magnum in a game of Mahjong with a notorious cheat while making his way through China as he chambered the .338 ammunition. Bane practically salivated as he anticipated leveling the 26-inch barrel and ending whatever life tried to rise up against him.
"It won't be much longer," Bane murmured as his thoughts moved from causing death by loss of limb, bowel evisceration and total exsanguination to Lena's beautiful face.
"We're almost home," Bane rasped melodically as he hoped the lives he was about to take were finally enough for the Ferryman in order to secure the rest of their passage.