Howdy, folks.
I hope you all are healthy, happy, and doing generally well! It's odd for me to think about the fact that we're closer to the end of the story than we are to the beginning. I sincerely appreciate all of you who have been along for the ride, as well as those of you joining for (what is rapidly becoming) the tail end. Your reads, reviews, and kudos always warm my heart.
Clarification about last chapter: short answers are, yes, it was the same blue flower smoke that Crane weaponized in Batman Begins; yes, the weird part was mostly a hallucination; yes, Mel did have a kind of catharsis while wicked high. Without giving too much away, the substance of her realization was to do with that feeling of a hole in her guts; sometimes that thing inside you that feels like a lack of something is, in fact, something powerful waiting to be invoked. This was 100% true for Mel, as we shall see.
You're beautiful people!
P.S.
I'm including a question with some spoiler-ish tendencies in the footnote. Read at your own risk! :3
She breathed in slowly. The feeling of her ribcage expanding, of her lungs swelling with the steady flow of air, felt good. It was cleansing, somehow, to pull in the weight of the filtered, 68 degree oxygen into her body. Without that weight she felt insubstantial, twitchy, restless. Mel held her breath and trailed her fingertips over the keyboard, feeling the spark of square corners and smooth plastic along her nerves. She exhaled equally as slow, her thoughts speeding forward.
Order: Nymphaeales
Families: Hydatellaceae, Cabombaceae, or Nymphaeaceae
She paused and her breathing hitched, then continued when she made a selection.
Nymphaeaceae.
Ok.
Genuses: nymphaea, nuphar, euryale, victoria.
Mel traced the structures in her head, once just words, now trailing, connected, interwoven shapes like branches. A giant lilypad floated calmly over the ripples of thought, waving her away. Nymphaeaceae was another dead end. She opened her eyes and stared at her laptop while her brain thrummed with irritation. Dully she cast her gaze at the vials sitting abandoned on her table, at the scattered notes that hadn't been touched in days. Her eyes closed once more, palms sliding to rest against the cold workbench.
Ok.
Ok.
She tried again.
Order: Amaryllidaceae
Families: Agapanthoideae, Allioideae, Amaryllidoideae...
There were perhaps fifteen more families to list but she knew already that the direction wouldn't yield the answer. That something. Pressure built behind her eyes; frustrated, she began to grasp aimlessly, becoming more and more distraught with each hasty, useless attempt.
Rosales.
No.
Fabaceae?
No.
Thymelaeaceae-
NO.
She was so close. So painfully close to that something that lingered in the shadows. She could taste it, could nearly reach out into the darkness and brush it with the tips of her fingers, the notion that was bursting to come through her brain and exist.
Something. Something. Something.
Her hands clenched against the metal, knuckles white and forearms tense.
Something. But fucking what?
The door opened behind her and the something, whatever it was, shifted further away. She despaired. The hiss of his mask whispered through the silence, easing her palms to melt flat against the workbench. It had been two days since she'd last inhaled the smoke that had set her mind on fire. She felt dull now, uninspired; unable to pin down precisely what it was that had been so clear in those moments. Now and again that something would crackle across her synapses, a flash of an idea, an image, a sound, a memory. Her fingers, cold and flat on the workbench, remembered curling in glorious warmth. She shifted on her stool.
Mel knew the heat had been him. Two mornings ago- after her smoke-addled catharsis in the delousing shower -she'd awoken in a ray of pale morning sunlight, nestled alone beneath the elaborate quilt in the Lucinda Kane City Archive. The air in the empty room had been heavy, almost watchful, as she'd shakily found her feet. The inside of her elbow had been bruised and she could make out several injection marks. Mel rubbed at the spot now. Some kind of neutralizer, maybe? That would track if the smoke was a hallucinogenic, possibly a poison. She should be terrified, maybe she was, but she didn't feel terrified. She felt different, new. In those dark green moments she had both seen the bottom of the abyss and pulled herself back again; she had risen, had clawed and dragged herself back to earth. Fear was nothing compared to the sensation of being burrowed against the massive warmth of him, shielded from everything and left to sleep, to grow. It was nothing compared to feeling her mind exploding with that something she now sought to remember.
Mel looked over her shoulder. Bane sat heavily with his elbows leaning upon his knees. He watched her calmly and she stared back but, wrapped in memory, she did not quite see him. Her eyes trailed along the wiring that hid his face, the tubes that administered the gas. Twisting and clinging. She frowned as that something pushed even harder at her skull. A tickle was beginning, like blades of grass brushing against her bare skin. She closed her eyes once more.
Ok.
Asparagales.
No.
Caryophyllales...
Bane's breathing was quiet and mechanical. She could hear the soft hiss of the gas as it traveled through the tubes, as it began the inelegant process of absorption through his lungs before slamming to a halt at the blood/brain barrier. Her eyes flew open. That something jolted in her veins and it was suddenly as though Mel was finally seeing him. She slid off of her stool, landing absently on her feet as she stared at Bane. He watched her approach him like a stone. Only when he blinked was there any sign of the man hidden beneath the apparatus, the mask that dispersed the aerosol that blanketed his pain but could not truly reach it. Mel stopped two feet away. From here she could plainly see the place where she knew the canisters connected.
Aerosols.
Porcupine quills and squid ink.
Her fingers reached towards the mask. Before she could touch it his hand shot up and closed around her wrist, so casually and tight that she was sure he could shatter the bones inside without effort. A small gasp of pain whispered passed her lips but pain, like fear, was temporary. Although she offered no real threat his eyes challenged mildly. The playing field nearly wavered but she knew that she owed him no explanation. She was smart as hell and owed nothing to anyone. Mel leaned her face closer and took in the connection point between canister and tubing while his fingers remained around her wrist like a vice. A strand of hair slipped across her shoulder and brushed against his knuckles. It had not been intentional but she found his gaze again and watched with a clinical curiosity.
Nepenthes gracilis.
The shift was small, like a ripple, like she'd felt from him before but somehow still much deeper. The pressure of Bane's thumb increased into her pulse. His eyes slid slowly to the strand of her hair and then to find Mel's. Their color was truly somewhere adjacent to green: bright and sandy like someplace arid, someplace where deep roots were required. Her mind whirred along persistently.
Nepenthes pervillei, nepenthes stenophylla-
Stop.
Wait.
Something, something was there. Mel blinked in surprise, her breath catching for a beat. Bane reacted abruptly, sitting back on the stool. His hand around her wrist held ever fast, but dropped to rest on his thigh; the huge boots scuffed the tile as he widened his stance and formed an open space. Instinctually Mel stepped forward to fill it, trembling at the remembered heat that she could feel in her bones. Still he said nothing, his breathing calm as it warbled through the mesh and his chest brushing her arm as it rose and fell, rose and fell. Raising and falling; cyclical, but not a system. Not self sufficient. She closed her eyes and the sound filled her ears.
Her brain flowed backwards slowly, deliberately, through the classifications that coursed freely through her mind.
Species: nepenthes stenophylla, nepenthes pervillei, nepenthes gracilis…
Stop.
Genus: nepenthes?
What else?
Genuses: Nepenthes, Sarracenia, Darlingtonia.
And, suddenly, she knew. She could do better.
"Heliamphora."
Her pulse beat hard, pressing to meet Bane's thumb. She opened her eyes and he was waiting.
"Sun pitchers. It's sun pitchers, but-"
Everything was crashing through her at once, thought and revelation and sensation and words, and all of it tangled in her throat and choked her. Sun pitchers, a small genus of carnivorous South American marsh plants, were the solution, that something that she sought. Somehow. She stretched the fingers wide in his hand, reaching, yearning, grasping.
"But...I can't see..."
He stood in that silent, graceful way that shouldn't be allowed of giants. As the hand holding her wrist rose it slowly pulled Mel towards him until there was only an inch of charged air between them. Experimentally, she leaned into her heels and knew a wicked thrill when she felt the slight engagement of his bicep and forearm needed to hold her in place. Bane's desert green eyes flashed with a bright, lethal triumph; they burned into her and Mel bathed in their pressure and heat. The voice from the mask was low.
"Then let us unshackle you."
A loyal employee, perhaps, had found a moment to padlock the doors of the Wayne Botanical Gardens. It was a noble thing to do; as the lock was smashed and wrenched away, Mel felt fleetingly grateful for the small act of protection. But when she stepped inside into the months of unbothered photosynthesis and growth all thoughts of gratefulness, all thoughts from all moments before this, melted away. She gasped as the warm heady air hit her like a train, as tears nearly welled in her eyes before she bit them back violently. Huge fronds had begun to grow across the neat pathways, sprouts and tendrils twisted from between planters, over signs and beneath benches. Mist hung in the air beading on leaves and in her hair.
It was flourishing, it was so fucking unruly, and it was perfect and beautiful.
A breathless laugh whispered past her lips and she moved forward, letting her coat drop forgotten to the floor as she moved through the dappled green light. Heat and sweat prickled on her skin. A giant taro, alocasia macrorrhizos, brushed against her and she took a moment to press her nose to its massive leaves. She greeted them all like this- canistropsis billbergioides, aphandra natalia, monstera dubia -stroking with fingers and nuzzling against her cheeks; condensation rolled along her chin to collect in her collarbones and breasts.
Bane followed at a distance, the hiss of his mask a soft and unhurried reminder of his presence. Mel turned and watched him stand like stone and solid and man, looking like the very antithesis of this place; not like her who breathed this hot air into her lungs and the chlorophyll into her veins. He regarded her with eyes that blazed and cut but he was wise and stayed back. She grinned and twisted her damp hair away from her face. Outside he was the conquering tyrant of Gotham, the behemoth, the steel and strength of unquestioned power. In here, though, he followed her guidance. She tingled; she fluttered. She turned away and continued.
When she returned back to City Hall, Mel striped the sweaty clothes from her skin. They felt too confining, like remnants of a different age. She slid the green nightgown over her head and shivered at the sensation of the soft silk and cool air brushing against her. She was new, now. She had her something.
Deep in the rainforest room, beside her bench and the pond of the victoria amazonica, had sat a clump of sun pitcher plants as she knew there would be. The little heliamphora had been there all along: waiting as she had sat and thought, typed on her expensive tablet, as she worried and fretted and tweaked and hypothesized. Today she had knelt beside them in the damp air and stroked the little tubes, murmuring to them and listening to see if they would murmur back their secrets. When she'd walked back to the truck some time later, she'd cradled them in her arms.
Mel buried her face against them and inhaled the smell of the damp, sandy soil. They touched her eyelids gently and waited for her to discover their purpose. Goosebumps rose on her arms and she looked up into the darkness of the corner office. The windowless room was dim and cold; an empty dish from dinner on the desk, a mess of worn clothes in a heap on the lumpy couch. Mel frowned and pulled the heliamphora and Julius into her arms then stepped barefoot into the empty hallway. The third floor hallways hugged the perimeter of the building with a wide opening from which one could look down to the lower lobby or up to a windowed roof. She placed the plants on the railing and stared up through the domed glass ceiling into the night sky. Moonlight shone down onto their pots; it was silvery and cool and not the sun, but it seemed something better than nothing. Her shoulders raised and lowered with a quiet sigh and Mel turned to look back at the office, catching her reflection faintly in the acrylic plaque on the door. She blinked and stared. She stepped closer.
Her eyes, like Bane's, were adjacent to green. But if his were the bright golden green of a desert stone, hers were very much the opposite. Dark rings the color of loam with flecks of true, deep green swirling towards the edges; the twist of an understory vine creeping its tendrils up a tall tree. They were sharper than she remembered, greener even, as she stood in the icy air in a forest-colored nightgown. Her hair was wild, curling from the earlier moisture, blooming over her shoulders. She gazed at herself for a moment longer, at the face that had always been hers and was also new, then drew the plants into her arms once more and padded down the hall. Someone weaker would've stayed to wither in the dark and the cold, would've perished on the floor on that first day, might've choked to death on their own vomit in the basement.
As she opened the door to the Lucinda Kane City Archive she heard the roar of the fire before the light began to dance across her skin. Bane sat before it: a pillar in his dark fatigues and bare, impossibly muscled arms. His gaze followed her as she crossed the room towards the tallest window, placing the plants in a slice of starlight that would become south-facing sun in a matter of hours. She brushed her fingertips over their leaves, their soil; the heat wafting from the fire warmed her arms and she smiled. They were ready. She could rest.
The hardwood was smooth against the soles of her feet as she walked back towards the bed. As she nestled beneath the elaborate quilt, curling into the spot that her body immediately remembered, she thought of the huge trees felled a hundred years before, chopped, split, sanded and laid to become the floor in this monument of marble and stone. The thought made her uneasy as she settled into a light sleep, dreaming of forests calling out for their long stolen companions. Some time later she awoke as the mattress sank beneath his weight and heat filled the bed almost at once. One massive hand settled against her ribs; heavy, but not pressing. An invocation. Sleepily, Mel turned and burrowed into the curve of powerful torso and the warmth of him. She drifted away once more into dreamless sleep while she waited for the sun to rise; over her head, the mask hissed in the silence.
xo, trppnwtz
Spoiler-y question:
This story is intended as both a fleshed out origin story AND a previously untold origin story in the Nolanverse. I've been trying to toe around giving too much away as we built towards this point, but I'm curious if anyone has guess?