Author's Note: First of all, I have to take a moment to thank you guys for your awesome comments. You all are amazing in every sense of the word! Here we are with the next part - for which, I have to say that I mentioned quite a few places I have never been to. So, if anyone has a higher understanding and wishes to correct my cultural errors, feel free to PM me. :)
And now, on to the fic . . .
II. a blade to bare
And Talia drifted.
She came to find that the world was bigger than she had ever imagined. It seemed to never end at times – the cold desert stretched on and on, its horizons constantly spanning further and further in the distance, but once its edges were crossed, the cities she found beyond were huge, bustling things. The great crossing points of the world put the villages and hamlets she had traveled through - places she had first thought to be massive and filled to the brim - to shame. They were nothing more than small stops on an endless map; footsteps in a sea of sand.
As much as she could, she kept to the more ancient parts of the world. She stuck to the gutters and the shadowed places, still shaving her head and binding her figure – for a poor boy scrapping by was easier to see past and overlook over than a girl without a name or protector in an old and tired land. She picked pockets and stole food and gained coin through helping the haggle of riff raft that existed no matter what country or providence she passed through. She endured. She survived.
And, slowly but surely, she started to rise.
While traveling, she found that she loved architecture, but hated sleeping indoors. She disliked having a roof over her head, closing her in. If she had to learn how to sleep without a strong arm protecting her, then she refused to do so without the stars above. And so, whenever she could, she tucked herself into small corners of the world at night, letting the shadows protect her where Bane could not.
She found that mountains fascinated her. Valleys and hills drew her eyes and quickened her heartbeat. She could not understand the emptiness of the sea, the vastness of it, all a wet and moving echo of the sky above, and so she stood on the shore for hours and drank in the ever constant retreat and charge of the tide as it was pushed and pulled by the moon above.
Over time, the names of the cities that sheltered her and put sand in her boots started to blur and run. She, who had once known only the solitary walls of her prison home, could now roll dozens upon dozens of syllables upon her tongue and know the shapes of the places they heralded - Marrakesh, Gibraltar, Damascus, Kabul, Yerevan, Calcuta, Yangon, Beijing - these and more. She kept to the center band of the world, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and wandered, letting the wind show her what it wished for her to find.
In Delhi she stood on the banks of the sacred river and wondered how so many people could fit into one place at one time. The spices she discovered there amazed her, budding on her tongue and ripping in her throat the first time she experienced them. There were people everyone, packed one over the other like the men had in the Pit, scurrying for the best scraps of food as they rained down from above. She was young, very young, during the years she spent in India, and she learned the art of picking pockets and tailing marks from the orphan kids of the city. She learned the idea of holiness from an old monk who gave her bread every day, his orange robes bright against the pale stones of the temple behind him. He had called her boy, as unknowing as anyone else, and Talia had nodded her head and had not tried to correct him as she nibbled on the bread he gave before giving a shallow bow at the waist and scurrying away.
In Bagan, she admired the architecture of the religious buildings who reigned over the jungles there. She found the scents of incense intoxicating, billowing on the air like moisture before a storm. The smoke and the chanting of the priests was enough to keep her attention for hours, and while she did not believe in the god they prayed to, she admired the beauty of their devotion. She understood the shape of their praise - she, who had watched the sky for so long and known hope, knew a holiness stronger than a prayer to any faceless deity. She worked in a guesthouse there, serving tea to the pilgrims who came and went, and her feet stayed put for a time out of the urge to understand why the masses passing through where so devout. She wished to understand the meaning of their worship.
In Oman and the sweeping lands of Saudi Arabia, she learned the art of reading the desert and its ways. The sands moved with her, she already one of their own, and the empty sky and the empty dunes spook to her like those rainy nights in the Pit had long ago as she covered her face and smiled to the wastes. She was about fifteen, still keeping to the guise of a boy, when she spent a whole summer there learning the art of horsemanship with a breeder of the Bedouin, and the peace and serenity of the work and the land was something she never completely forgot. She flew falcons and listened as the family who took her in spoke about honor and the bonds of kinship. She even saw as a man was made to prove his innocence in a trail by fire - a Bisha'a, where he proved his accusers wrong by eating fire in his forefather's ways. Talia watched and pondered, the desert sky heavy on her shoulders as she felt her own sense of morals and justice bend and warp with each new experience she faced.
In Bangladesh, she was able to get by on her grasping understanding of Urdu - one of the languages Bane had taught to her in the Pit, and she paid her way by working in the paddy fields. She lingered there and developed a fondness for mangos and kathal, and an affinity with the earthy, hardworking people who lived there. Even more than that, she was amazed by how the earth constantly flooded, water the strongest thing in that region. She waded through the pregnant river, fascinated by the fact that the muddy water was up near her thighs where the day prior it was nothing more than swampy ground under her feet. Eventually, she moved on from Dhaka, following the Ganges to the mountains she could see rising in the distance, calling to her.
In the end, she had dozens upon dozens of things she wished to show her friend, to share with him, but that was only if she could find her way back to him through all of the new steps her feet had taken. And to that end, she sought out her father, going on the tales that Melisande had told of her great love. She used her mother's stories, and the even more recent tales that the newer inmates of the Pit had told of the demon known as Ra's al-Ghul. Both were facets of the same man, and Talia used every possible detail she had available to her when she made her hunt.
But the god of shadows was illusive at best, and not one easily pinned down. The men who followed the League were fanatical to the point of death, and the few times that Talia had tried to get her information by force had proved fruitless past giving her a reference point for what the human body – the human mind, could take and endure. As time went by, she felt little guilt for any of the necessary evils she committed while on her path. She was unable to feel much for the world that had shunned her so, and to that end she fancied herself like the sky over a faceless mass - pitiless and cruel, but essential for life.
It suited her well, she told herself, the cold flame she had burning inside of her. It had let her rise once. Now, she just waited for it to do so again.
In the end, where she could not find her father, she gave him a legend to follow – the legend of a child, born in hell, birthed of a great love, who escaped that prison due to the blood which had begotten it. She called herself the child of Ra's al-Guhl, speaking the name she had never breathed aloud, but had heard all too often on her mother's tongue, during those hazy, pre-dawn years in the Pit.
It took time, but Talia knew how the shadows worked. And so, slowly but surely, she let them carry her to him.
.
.
It took three years, nearly four, before her search bore any fruit.
Her journey had come to a pause in a small town in the Kashmir vale, tucked into the low part of the Himalayas, drawn as she was by the indomitable rise of the mountains and the curiosity she held for snow. She liked this area of the world, calm and callused as it was, and even though the air was frigid and unwelcoming, she learned how to be warm on buttered tea and yak meat. She learned how to breathe in air that held little oxygen. Her body became loose, rested in the shadow of the mountains - their massive stone fingers rising from the earth in a futile effort to touch the sky. Talia understood their rise and their insatiable reaching. She had grown as they had grown, and she fancied herself kindred to them as she carved out a place for herself at their base.
It was there that she finally decided to let her hair grow out. After a few months without taking a blade to her scalp, the tresses had already came down to cover her neck, nearly reaching her shoulders. They were dark, thick and soft as she remembered her mother's being. More and more so, when Talia looked into the mirror, she found her memory of her mother being refreshed. She bore Melisande's face perfectly, and the sight was both bruise and balm to her when she beheld it. All was the same, all but for the color of her eyes. Their shape and full stare was Melisande's; their color, cold and blue, belonged to that of a stranger, a stranger who Talia hoped to someday meet. She no longer bound her figure, at first keeping to the sanctuary of thick winter gear to hide her frame, and she was surprised when she had to adjust her clothes to fit. Her body had curved and bloomed over the years, nearly the form of a young woman rather than that of a gangly child. A few years of eating well and regularly and the exhilaration of her travels had made her body lean and strong, hardened and fit through years of running and searching and crafting herself into a blade in order to survive.
While her body had grown, her purpose in the world had grown as well, ever carrying out justice in her own form of the word. She stole when she was hungry. She killed and hurt when it was needed. But finding odd jobs in the criminal underworld had led her to the head of the rings time and time again, ever showing her where to cut and place pressure to do the most damage. Prisons were laughable to her – for what walls could hold her now? Such things were just a training field – practice, as she struck and bit out at that which laid within. Each death, each cut at the roots of the criminal world was all a ploy, a plea – find me, she said to the shadows, and it wasn't until she was doing time in a Chinese prison in Sikkim (for spoiling a local arms dealer's fun with a girl who wanted no part with him) in the foothills of the mountains that she met Ra's' emissary – a tall and imposing man named Henri Ducard.
"It is quite a name you have developed for yourself," he started out by saying, his voice coming from the shadows, so entwined was he with them that Talia actually had to look twice to find him amongst the darkness.
She was still kneeling on the ground from where she had been shoved back into her cell, spitting out blood from where the guard had backhanded her for a smartly spoken word. But that same cold flame was burning inside of her, and she felt no pain, only curiosity as she ran her tongue over the back of her front teeth in order to make sure they were all still intact.
They were all there, for the time being, at any rate. She made a sucking noise, clearing the blood from her lips with her tongue before wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She stood when she was assured that nothing was too seriously damaged, and she wiped the ice and mud off of her clothes before answering, "It was the one given to me," in a tone that did not care, that did not matter as she looked at him carefully from the corner of his eyes. Ducard was a tall man, not as tall as she remembered Bane to be – but she already knew where to hit to topple him. Where to poke and scratch and place pressure. But there was an odd sort of warning in the back of her mind that advised words rather than blows. The man looked as if he had once been a part of the mountains - as if his stony body and rugged features had been clipped from the snow and cliffs rather than born from anything soft and mortal. His eyes were clear and hawk-like, watching her with the sharp regard of a hunting creature as she took him in and made her impression. Her fists clenched. She felt adrenaline spike, even though he was giving her no fight to wage.
You will not win, the cold flame at the core of her whispered its warning, not as you are now.
And so Talia listened. It was a sixth sense that had kept her alive for that long, and she was not stupid enough to discard its warnings now.
Ducard said nothing to her for a minute's time, instead choosing to stare at her. His stare searched, travelling over the shape of her face, mapping out the sharp cast of her jaw and the round curve of her cheeks. She had a full mouth, turned down more often than not, and while her eyes were large in her face, they gave nothing away.
His did neither, but he apparently reached a decision when he said, "And yet, the name is nothing if the one bearing it does not measure up to the weight of it. You don the mantle of a legend, but you are just one woman, clawing and scratching even though there are no bars left to hold you."
She squared her jaw, but did not rise to the taunt. He paused, as if waiting, and finally she said, lowly, "There are no bars that can hold me," in a voice that promised. "Not even the ones around me right now."
"I believe that to be true," Ducard said, and Talia looked up, weighing his words for a slight before finding none. She turned away from him, keeping her eyes on the floor of the cell rather than on the ceiling. "And yet, here you are, serving out a sentence for petty heroics in a town that no one knows the name of. The girl you saved, for example -"
" - her name was Choden. Ask her if she thinks my deeds to be empty." Talia interrupted, her tone level, the edges curved to bite.
"Yes, you saved the girl, but you left the man free to do as he may to any other," Ducard pointed out. "Your blows lack direction, they lack purpose."
"What do you want, Mr. Ducard?" Talia finally asked outright. "I came to this place to rest, not to have my actions mocked and scorned. If you have nothing to say, I ask you to take your leave and let me be."
A heartbeat. Something about Ducard's face said he wished to smile, but he did not. "I represent a man, a powerful man, whose hatred of injustice in all of its forms just may match your own. With the guidance of Ra's al-Ghul - with the League of Shadows, it is possible for us to train you. To hone your abilities until you are a tool, poised to strike against the core of injustice, rather than just the shadows of it."
Talia snorted. "Fanatics," she breathed, even as she felt a spike in her chest. After years of searching, this was what she had waited for. This was what she had wanted. "Terrorists who use the shield of their cause to sleep better at night."
Ducard inclined his head. "Many have said that of us through the years. But those who say as much are simply those who are not strong enough to do what must be done. Now, I ask you – are you strong enough? Do you have what it takes to step forth where others have fallen through."
"You tell me, Mr. Ducard," she said, tipping her face up so that her eyes caught the light, a reflex as old as time to her. "Something tells me that you would not be here otherwise."
Ducard snorted. "Men ten times more than you have tried and been found wanting. In the end, it matters not what I think."
But it did. It so very did. Talia thought of the sea of bodies in the Pit and her friend being swallowed, and knew that it meant everything. Her hands fisted. She forced her heart to still.
And Ducard watched her as if he knew every one of her struggles. Every one of her hopes and fears.
"If you have tired of sparring with the petty mire on the bottom of humanity, I wish to offer an invitation to you. Tomorrow, you will be released. If you wish to find what you are looking for, head for the monastery at the top of the mountain. There is a rare blue flower that grows on the slopes there, pick it, and bring it with you."
Talia waited a moment, a heartbeat, before answering. She turned his words over, one then the other, in her mind. "And what will I find there?"
He paused. Ducard's eyes were sad, and for a moment she was reminded of Bane and the way he would look when she was confused by the idea of the world beyond the Pit. "When that time comes . . . that will be for you to decide."
.
.
And so, once again, Talia climbed.
Her fingers bled from where they scraped against the rock and the cold. Her lungs ached, made dry and stretched thin on the bitterly cold air she breathed. Her body protested, each muscle and limb screaming as she once again asked it to do the impossible. But, even so, it responded. Once again, her weary limbs did what was said could not be done - taking the impossible and turning it mute under the weight of her determination and her conviction. When she felt herself start to falter, she would simply glare at the mountains and bite her tongue, letting the warm flare of blood in her mouth ground her. The mountains were just too large things who could not reach the sky, and Talia had long since been used to dealing with them and their kind.
The air was thin here, and growing even thinner the higher she ascended, but she was used to harsh climates. She breathed in deep and slow, and climbed at an even, steady pace, feeling the burn in her muscles and the tightening in her chest that came with great heights and that fine line between rising and falling.
When she found the bloom, she was surprised to see that it was a small thing, tiny in her hands. Harder than the climb itself was being careful not to crush the bright blue flower's petals as she ascended up the face of the mountain. Her own face she would press against the rockmass when the path became thin, the next step nearly non-existent, but the pack on her back she carefully kept away from the stone, not wishing to see her prize bruised.
The higher she went, the more she decided that the view from the peaks was unparalleled by any other she had seen during her travels to date. A part of her – the part that still belonged to her protector - carefully put the details in her mind away, so that one day, she could tell them to him. He used to spin such stories to her, and now, it was she who could offer hope in the sky. It was she who could speak of life beyond the Pit and seek wonder in return. When the mountain seemed insurmountable before her, she remembered the tales he would tell to her on the days when she fell, when she could not scale the wall and her fingers and knees would scrape and bruise. She remembered his hand on her shoulder as he infused her tired little body with new life with his words alone.
She remembered, and the memories infused her with a new determination, a new energy as she climbed. This time she breathed in the mountain air, and she felt cleansed, as if something black was being purged through her veins with the pain, with the impossibility of her feat. And so, when she scaled that last heighth, and saw the elegant slope of Ra's al-Ghul's monastery, she felt triumphant, more awake and aware at the top of the mountain than she was when she had first embarked upon her journey. Her eyes were bright when she reached the large double doors of the temple, fevered even, and though her cheeks were bitten by the wind and her body screamed its fatigue, she stood up straight. When she smiled, it was more of a grimace, baring her teeth, showing them sharp and clean and ready to tear.
She was admitted by men clad in shadow black, with steps that sounded like whispers even though the wind from beyond struck against the monastery and made its old wooden beams creak. Talia's boots were covered in ice and mud, and she sounded like a wounded beast stumbling through the underbrush in contrast to the silent men who led her.
When she was admitted to Ra's' chamber, the men who had escorted her faded into the dark parts of the room as silently as they had appeared, not a word spoken the whole of their journey. Talia watched them leave for a heartbeat before turning to see the familiar form of Ducard, whose hawk shaped eyes were on the blue blossom that she had in her hands.
"Your flower," she announced, throwing the small bloom onto the wood floor that stretched between Ducard and her. Ducard, her, and an Asian man with wise looking eyes and robes stained a dark and deep red; a smear of blood against the shadows around them, just barely kept at bay by the lazy torches on the walls. He watched her over the brim of a steaming cup of tea, sipping daintily as if to taunt and teased. Talia eyed the steam, but asked for naught, used was she to watching while other people were full.
The man - Ra's, Talia presumed by the way the shadowed men who hid in the corners of the room bowed in difference – inclined his head when Ducard retrieved the flower and presented it to him, waving a hand to the bloom in dismissal. Talia, who had bled and froze in order to retrieve the flower, watched it go with ownership in her gaze. Her jaw tightened. She made fists of her hands, keeping them still at her side.
Ra's was watching her every move carefully, Ducard even more so. They said something in a language different than what Duccard had used when he had happened upon her in the prison at the base of the mountains. She caught a word or two, and then her mind caught on as it once again shifted to match the syllables as they were spoken – Urdu, the language a mixture of the one used at the base of the mountain, and a more ancient form of a tongue from further east. It was an earthy dialect, used for temples and the study of the most holy. She paused, and caught how the syllables spoke of her accomplishment of scaling the mountain. They mentioned her bloody fingers, peaking through where she had cut holes in the tips of her gloves in order to better feel the stone under her hands. They mentioned her eyes, their shape and their color. They mentioned how they matched her mother's gaze. They wondered then, how eyes straight from Melisande's face could stare with such a hardness, such a hate.
And Talia stiffened, a part of her protecting a still wounded spot as an animal would cover its den, and said in their tongue, "You did not know Melisande in her final days then, if you think she could not know hate." Her voice chipped coldly at those she addressed, the same as the ice had against her skin while on the mountain beyond.
There was silence in the room then, even the shadows hushing and turning to listen as the Demonhead his right hand stood still and watched her with eyes that weighed.
"No, we did not know her then," Ducard said in a voice that rang hollow. It was a ghost born thing to her ears, apparition shaped and wanting. "Not as we knew her before."
Talia watched him closely, her eyes narrowed. She watched the way Ra's inclined his head and the way Ducard swallowed. Finally, Ra's bowed his head to her, and a part of Talia went to bow in return, but something stopped her. His eyes . . . they were all wrong, a part of her protested. For Melisande had spoken of a man with eyes like the glaciers in the north of the world; cold eyes and a strong face, with a harsh mouth that knew how to smile when pressed, who knew how to make her laugh even in the most hopeless of situations. . . This man in holy robes, seated on high with soft lines to his face and a dark cast to his eyes . . .
"You are not Ra's al-Ghul," she announced to the room, her words battle-bold and marching. "You cannot be."
The silence that followed was louder than the chatter from the Pit ever could have been. The men of the League said nothing. They did not whisper. She could hardly hear them breathe. And still she looked around, looking for what she could not see. She only caught a flicker there. A movement there. Her eyes searched and came to fall on Ducard. They lingered.
When she fisted her hands, they trembled. The words she wished to speak were a weakness to her, feeling made crippling as an unnamed emotion came and rose high in her throat. "But it is an honor to meet you . . . father."
The man who was not Ra's clapped, slowly and elegantly, while his thin mouth gave way to a laugh. Another set of words were passed between them, this time in a tongue that Talia could not understand, and then the man - whom later she would know as Ubu, her father's most trusted servant - stood with a low bow to them both. Ducard – Ra's– did not watch him leave, instead opting to stare at her with a glow to his eyes that Talia remembered in Bane's when she had tricked from some larger man his food or water.
And so she stood, weary but bright eyed, and waited.
And barely, just barely, Ra's al-Ghul smiled at his daughter. "Welcome to the League of Shadows."
.
.
She was given a room of her own.
Instinctively, her mind thought cell looking at the little chamber, even as she brushed the thought away. The quarters given to Ra's al-Ghul's men were sparse, a lesson in spartan living - but she was fortunate to have a room to her own, where most of the new recruits were kept to barracks until they had proven that they could stay alive through the rigorous training that came with being initiated by the shadows. There was a narrow bed on the far wall, low and close to the floor, and the only other pieces of furniture were a small desk and a trunk for anything she may have had to store. Talia let her pack, everything she had in the world, fall to the floor with a dull thud. The battered canvas was a match for the lacquered floor - who had seen more visitors than her pass through over the centuries. Slowly, the snow on the canvas melted, puddling on the wood in a shallow pool.
The only decorative touch in the room was a shallow basin with sticks of incense on the desk, no doubt meant for meditation and the clearing the mind. Though she had no intention to lose herself in a trance just yet, she lit them, one at a time. The scents grounded her, the different smells still new and intoxicating to her even after four years of freedom.
There was a small window on the longest wall of her room, looking out on the mountains beyond. The sun was just finishing its descent, loosing its high place in the sky as it gave in to the fall of the night. Talia watched the sun die, and undid the braid in her hair, kicking off her boots and finding where the small trunk at the foot of her bed had been stocked with simple clothing - sturdy leggings and coarse woolen tunics. There were warm things for training in the mountain snows, and light but insulated clothes for the cold mountain nights. She stripped out of her wet clothes, and dressed for the night, turning to feed the small stove in the corner of the room for warmth. When exhaustion finally insisted that she close her eyes, she ignored the bed, instead taking the folded blanket from the mattress and spreading it out on the ground. She still chose to sleep on the floor over a bed, preferring the hardwood (like stone) against her back. It was familiar. It was comfortable. Furthering the sense of familiarity at night, she slept with a dagger held between her fingers, even deep as she was in the heart of the Demonhead's temple. Over the years, she had become used to sleeping alone, but still she found that she needed to settle her mind before sleep would claim her. She had to concentrate, focusing and relaxing her taut muscles one at a time while imagining strong arms enveloping her whole. It was a long process, but she was used to it.
Finally she slept, and she slept without dreams.
.
.
The days passed, and Talia found herself initiated in the way of shadows.
If she was looking for a father, she found none, but in the deep parts of her mind, she knew that the role of protector and comforter were already taken. She needed them not. Instead she found a mentor, a cold and chiseled presence who talked about balance and fear and the triumphing over ones fears. Ra's called the cold flame in the core of her anger, where Talia would have called it hate. Hate, he said, would destroy her from the inside out, rotting her bones until they could not stand under the weight of her feeling so. Anger, though. Anger could be harnessed. It could be honed. Anger could become indignation – righteous and just. Anger could become the fuel to take a stand against those who stood unjustly over all. For Talia, who had grown in a world without right and wrong, the idea of his teachings struck a chord, and she listened while she honed her body and developed her skills. The crude knife that Bane had forged in the Pit was becoming a weapon in the hands of Ra's al-Ghul, a wicked blade ready to cut with the slightest of pressures.
And then, during the rare moments that it was just the quiet and the flickering light of candles in the evenings – the moments where Talia could pretend that Ra's was as much a father as she was a daughter - Ra's asked about his wife and her fate, voicing the question that had loitered in his eyes since he had first found her at the base of the mountains.
Dutifully, Talia told him what she could remember of Melisande – which was not much, the memory growing hazier and more distant with every passing day. She told him little things, the things she held dear. She told him of the woman who would claw out a man's eyes when crossed, the fierce thing who held her daughter close and did what she could in the time she had left to her before the inevitable. Talia told him of Melisande's stories; of her love. And she spoke of her death with the numbness of one who had faced the same fate day in and day out. She spoke as one who had risen above it. She spoke with a numb voice and clenched fists as Ra's had looked on with a cold flame in his eyes that Talia fancied was just like the one at the core of her. He did not speak when Talia was done, and she did not press to know his thoughts, to understand his mind. She understood his anger, and that was enough.
And yet, more than the ghost of her mother, she spoke of her protector in those twilight hours. She spoke of her Baldassare, the man who had been her hope in place of the sky above when everything around them had been dark and shaded grey.
Without him, I would not be alive, she said simply, as if that should have explained everything – as if that should have meant everything. She had stood on the shoulders of a giant, and she had soared while he remained on the broken ground.
And now . . .
Someday . . . someday soon . . . I will return for him.
Her voice was a promise, even as Ra's inclined his head indulgently, allowing her her thoughts without disagreeing outright. But Talia was long used to looking for a battle in one's eyes, even as shadowed a gaze as his.
And so, she set her jaw and bid him to do his worse.
.
.
Of course, the fight did not even there.
It continued, carried on in its many forms - everything from whispered pleas in dim corridors, to logical insistence over shared meals and outright demands on the dojo's floor. She drew the line at stamping her foot like a petulant child in front of Ra's' men, but if it would have meant his agreement – his acceptance and aid, she would have stooped to that indignity and even lower still.
Ra's al-Ghul was stubborn, but Talia was patient. For years she had trained to rise from the Pit. For years she had schooled and dedicated herself to finding her father. She had waited, just as long, to rescue her friend, which was a slower moving blade, ever present in her side. It stuck. She could feel it between her ribs, pushing aside flesh to find bone. It was a sharp pain, as much of an impetus as the cold flame in the core of her.
When her annoyance and rage had her pouring through the men her father let her fight (not due to strength of her own – not yet; but she was not about to lessen her blows on men who would not fight the Demonhead's daughter to the fullest extent of their abilities), Ra's took to teaching her himself. Those lessons were a new lesson in humility, she coming away the lesser in their spars time and time again. But the losses did not force her down. Each fall had its own lesson to teach, and she would have been lying if she said that every time she climbed the wall under Bane's watchful gaze she had made it without falling, without scraping her fingers and skinning her knees. Instead of buckling under the pressure, she proved how she could pick herself up to stand, again and again and again until it was near impossible to keep her down. Ra's watched her progression, and even though he said nothing, she knew he was proud. That pride was a faint thing, hidden in the farthest parts of his eyes, but she was long used to reading subtle nuances of emotion in gazes. His was no different.
"Please," she tried once more - the latest of many attempts, and when she spoke the simple word was honest on her tongue. The syllables of the entreaty pooled, bitter and fierce, hanging heavily in the air between them.
"You do not even know if the man is alive," Ra's finally snapped, the most logical of blows in return. "You said yourself that the mob consumed him as you left – what makes you think that they would have let him live?"
"But you do not know. It is impossible to be certain - one way or the other," Talia countered, her voice fervent, her eyes alight as she climbed to her feet again. "He is strong. Stronger than any man I have ever known. If anyone could have lived, it would be him."
"No man is infallible," Ra's retorted, the edges of his mouth curving, not quite making a sneer. "And I will not risk my men on a fool's mission for the sake of sentiment."
He circled her, waiting, and Talia fell loosely back into a defensive position in reply. She held her hands up, and watched him warily, her eyes holding the stillness of a viper as she watched the way he moved. Carefully, she paid attention to the way his weight shifted, to the way his limbs flexed. He leaned right, but charged left. Talia spun, and deflected his first swing.
"And what makes you think he will even want to see you?" Ra's continued next, his words fighting for the right to steal her air more so than any of his actual blows. "You, the child who left and abandoned him to die in hell? What makes you think that your devotion to him is as strong as his to you? What makes you think that he will continue to cherish the thing that would have destroyed him?"
A rush. She moved too quickly, and paid for it with a kick to the stomach. She ducked right, recovering from the blow and fixing her course as she came back around, but not soon enough. In return, Ra's' fists were almost teasing as he pointed out her mistakes. But she was fast. She ducked again and sprang up behind him, all a child stealing bread from much larger men all over again.
"He lifted me up," she scathed when she had the breath to do so. Her voice was sharp, more emotion than she would have liked to show her father leaking into the syllables. "I would not have had risen without him . . . and I cannot believe that he would have held that against me."
And still her throat was tight. The soft parts she still carried – the parts of her she held behind her heart and lungs – ached with the thought of what if I have become nothing but a blight to his memories? A nuisance? A bane?
She missed a step, and in return Ra's next blow was punishing on her shoulder in order to point out her weakness, her flaws. She scowled at her own feeling. Emotion – fear – it had no place in a fight. In any fight, from a simple spar to the ultimate battle which they all waged in union with the League. Fear made one weak. It made one expendable. To some extent, Talia agreed with him and his teachings on that prospective – but it had been her fear, her anger, her hope, that had helped her escape the Pit all of those years ago, and it was that which kept her going now. Someday, he said, that emotion would cripple her. It would destroy her.
But, for now, Talia let it burn bright. Ra's turned, looking to build upon where she had faltered, and she stood up straight and tall under his scrutiny. When she spoke, her voice burned. "How could my friend now hate me? Do you think that Melisande hated you in those final days? Do you think that she could bring herself to know hate during those years she was able to keep herself – to keep me, alive?"
A stronger blow, aimed for her midsection. She sidestepped, her heart quick in her chest. That one would have done some damage. "Do you think she could have began to curse your name?" Talia continued. "She, who loved so fiercely that she would condemn herself to such a place to begin with?"
Another blow, quick. Another and another. Talia danced. She waited.
"You speak of things you do not – you can not understand," Ra's countered. His voice was calm when he spoke, his eyes like a frozen lake, still and carefully serene. But there was a faint furrow between his brows. He struck to punish now.
And Talia ducked and spun and turned, and finally landed a hit of her own, low on his back. He brushed the blow off, almost catching her fist as she completed the jab, and Talia danced backwards again. "How can love for a child be any less for that of a mate? They are different kinds of love, one can argue, but all are love– one and the same," Talia said, her voice near mocking. And yet, the air around her stilled. It turn cold. Immediately, she knew where she had miscalculated.
Ra's' eyes hardened, and such a look was hidden behind them that she felt something inside of her sicken – and it was that same something that kept to them the roles of mentor and student. It was this that kept him from the role of father as much as it kept her from the role of daughter. She had wondered . . . she had wondered if Ra's had wished that it was his wife whom had been saved rather than his daughter. But it had only been a question before, half distant and unanswered. Now . . .
Talia let the cold flame in the core of her flare. The burn of it hardened her. She did not care about Ra's' regard for her. She did not. She simply needed him now – needed the lessons he could provide her, needed the resources he could offer her. It would not always be so.
"You overestimate the strength of some bonds," Ra's said, his voice carefully devoid of feeling. "It was once, but will it always be so?"
"Always," she insisted without thought, moving and ducking and striking. For that was the one truth in her that she held most dear – it was stronger than her hate, more real than her hope. It was tangible, and she nearly held it in her hands again. If only she could make the man before her bend.
Ra's struck, pushing on where Talia felt her muscles burn. He did not fall, he did not falter. He was like the walls of the Pit, pitiless and unmovable, and Talia bared her teeth in defiance and vowed you will not break me as she had then. And he continued, "You were nothing more than an oddity to him. You were something to pass the time with, a last shred of humanity in a place where men had none. I doubt he even remembers you, if they left him alive by some miracle."
And his last words were a real fear in her mind. It sickened in her as she remembered Bane's eyes watching her as the sea of angry men with clawing hands and evil fingers drew him under, like the tide pulling at the waves who desperately reached for the shore . . .
And so she hit and pummeled and struck as her heart thumped out a sick tempo in her chest. But her feeling had made her blind, and all Ra's had to do was wait for an opening before landing a powerful blow on her side, sweeping at her feet at the same time in order to take her balance. She faltered, trying to stay upright, but it was useless. Her arms windmilled for a moment, not accepting her fall before she gave into gravity, hitting the floor of the dojo hard enough so that the wind was taken from her.
Ra's flew down after her, his hand held to her neck in order to finish the bout. But Talia narrowed her eyes, and from the sleeve of her tunic she loosed a blade that should have been forbidden in the sparring circles. She thrust up as he came down, moving so that the flat of the blade ran against Ra's side just as he pressed down on her throat – a warning.
Ra's shook his head, but there was pride in his eyes as he lifted his hand from her throat, yielding. It was close, but if the fight was true, Talia was not sure which of them would have landed their wound first.
He rose, and for a moment she stayed flat on her back, staring up defiantly. "I was more than a novelty to him," she said when she had finally caught her breath, addressing his last words to her.
"Oh?" Ra's snorted, even as he offered a hand to help her up. "And what was that?"
She held his stare (and she did not think about Bane's eyes, not on the sky, but on her. She did not think about his wide mouth and the curve of his smile. She did not think of the weight of his hand on his shoulder - love brighter than the sun in a place that had none but the false light to look to from above), and got to her feet without his aid. Her side still ached from where Ra's had not pulled his strength, and her breath hurt in her lungs, but still she said, "I was hope," in a voice that struck. That was the single thought at the core of her – the ignition point of the flame that kept her going, and she refused to dishonor that - even with her words.
She sheathed her dagger in her sleeve again – his dagger, still carried from all of those years ago, and its weight was a balm against her skin. She turned, and walked away without looking back, leaving Ra's to watch her go with a look in his eyes she could not discern.
.
.
She climbed to the roof that night when the walls and ceiling of her room became too much for her to take.
The air was frigid outside, the temperature falling until it was dangerously cold, but she couldn't feel the mountain's bite. Her skin was hidden under layers of thermal wear, the heavy wool and fur lining her hood and sleeves keeping her body's head close. Her still growing hair tickled her neck from where it was tucked under the layers she wore. The tresses were longer now, past her shoulders and just starting to curl at the ends. A few strands had escaped her braid in order to dance in her face, playing a strange waltz with the unwelcoming wind around her. The breeze was stiff - as if the mountain was trying to howl and sing to the sky above, but no snow fell. Instead, the night sky was perfectly clear, and the view of the stars was breathtaking from their high place in the peaks.
Talia tilted her head back, and looked up, naming the ones she could and imagining names for the countless others.
In the Pit, they hadn't been able to see many stars, but Bane had arranged pebbles on the ground, and had told to her the names of as many as he could remember. He told her of their dance across the cosmos, the way gravity and the song of time carried planets in their thrall. He told her of the way the moon controlled the oceans, the tides – and she, who could not comprehend the idea of the sea could not understand the concept of such an immense space beyond their world. Not then. But now . . . carefully, she picked out the Hunter, the three stars of his belt painfully bright to behold in the clear night sky. While so many cultures thought the stars of Orion to be a warring figure, Bane had given her a small smile and instead told her of the Rigveda, how the rishi who wrote those hymns called that constellation Mriga- the Deer, that which was hunted, not that which hunted. There were always many views to a whole, he had told her, and he had bid her to remember that.
Above her, the stars danced, and she followed them with her eyes. She read their story as they told their tale to any who would listen below.
And a voice in her mind whispered, the stars to planets, and the moon to tides . . .
Her breath hurt in her lungs, it was heavy from more than the thin night air.
The next morning, she left, alone and determined, convinced that the shadows would follow her.
.
.
Of course, Ra's al-Ghul caught up with her right outside of Kathmandu. There were no words of anger in his mouth, just a sharp look of disapproval in his eyes. He brought only a dozen men, but a dozen men of the League were equal to many a small army, and Talia nodded her gratitude rather than speaking it aloud.
Her father did not try to drag her back to their temple in the mountains. Instead, he set his maps on the table between them, and showed to her a better course than the one she had been traveling. He paused for a heartbeat, the shadows from the lamps throwing his shadow in dancing patterns against the walls, and finally he asked about the Pit in detail. He asked about its shape, its schematics, the numbers of the prisoners, the guards - the secret places in the back tunnels, the high parts and those low. And, together, they planned their attack. Tactics were a new thrill to Talia, who had been studying the subject in theory, but had never practiced in actuality, and the ease of command and strategy was one she would later take out and better examine when she had time and quiet enough for thought.
For now, though, they were close enough to the Pit so that she could recognize the change in the air around them. Old senses, long dormant, opened back up, reminding her of half forgotten tastes and scents and sounds. She inhaled, and the dry scent of the desert bit through her nose. The sand that flew with the breeze cut against her skin like the rendering of tiny claws, making her skin itch. The weight of the sun as it shone against this cursed part of the word and the open wound of the sky above . . . both were truths that she knew better than the shape of her own face.
"Are you ready for what you will find?" Ra's finally asked as the morning sun dawned above them, and Talia lifted her eyes in order to catch the light.
She rolled Bane's dagger between her fingers, the blade slipping with the ease of familiarity against her skin. "It matters not," she said as the light chased the shadows across the sand. "He has been ready for too long, and that is all I care for."
Ra's nodded slowly at her answer, and turned from her.
She inhaled, the breath full in her lungs. It was time, then.
.
.
The ruins of the warlord's city were smaller than Talia remembered them. Before, when she was just a child looking upon the world for the first, the crumbling edifice had dwarfed her, even more impressive than the city that had sprawled, new and fertile, beyond it. Now, years later, the remnants of the great city no longer seemed as menacing as they had when she was a child. The ground was not an evil thing spreading out underneath her feet. The horizon was no longer unending, keeping even the earth from reaching up to touch the sky above. Instead, the great stones of the land were just lost travelers in the desert, wandering without reason or aim. They remembered, and held ghosts and empty things rather than flesh and blood and soul.
And while Ra's traced the shape of the ruins with his eyes, no doubt seeing the ghost of his wife in every twist and turn of the stone and mortar, Talia looked down and down and down, and prayed to whatever deity would listen that she too would not gaze on the ruins and find her loved one a memory.
"I had vowed never to return here," Ra's said softly, speaking more to the wind - to a ghost whom Talia could not see or feel - than to his daughter. His face was tight, closed off, but his whispered words held the closest thing to real emotion that he would ever show. His voice echoed, being caught by the breeze and tossed back to his mouth, as if the ghost he addressed had heard and mourned as deeply as he.
A heartbeat passed. The wind threw loose strands from her braid the same as it cradled her fathers words. She looked over at Ra's, and let herself share a corner of his pain - the mourning lasting only until one of the men in black lifted his hand and announced that the cables were secure. She slipped into her harness then, memories of Melisande fading from her as her heart hammered, rising up into her chest as if trying to escape through her mouth. Her blood thundered in anticipation, her veins slipping with feeling and adrenaline and the fear that every creature had of falling . . .
She closed her eyes as she stood on the lip of the Pit, and remembered being a child all of those years ago – she remembered jumping and grasping for freedom with too tiny hands. She remembered soaring.
And again she jumped, and let the air of the Pit reclaim her.
She fell, down and down and down, and around her there was a whistling sound as her harness caught, as the ropes of the men around her slipped through the air like a dozen serpents uncoiling. There was a louder sound then, a gross parody of hail in a storm as bullets rained, and then there was nothing but screaming as her father's men fired into the mass of inmates like maggots reclaiming a festering wound, taking the dead flesh and consuming it.
The sound of screaming rose, drifting up to the heavens – the screams of the fighting, the hurting, the dying, and yet Talia could not see the mouths that screamed. She could only look down.
In the end, her friend was easy to find amongst the masses where she had feared that he would not be. He was a calm spot, a still thing in the storm. Bane was motionless, the only one of the Pit's denizens not shouting at the sky, the only one not falling to the whistling of bullets in the air. Instead, he was calmly sitting out in the open space of the pit's floor, right by the stairs that climbed up as far as they could. And he stared, his eyes unblinking upon the sky above.
He was just so still, Talia thought, feeling her throat turn tight on her as she undid the buckles to her harness with fingers that shook. Her movements were clumsy and slow, and her father, not crippled by feeling as she, made it to her friend first - following her eyes and knowing the man she sought instantly. Moving slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal, Ra's knelt down in the sand, bringing himself eye to eye with the the creature who did not start at the sound of guns, who did not move to defend himself from the vengeful angels who seemingly flew down from on high. At first, Talia could not understand why he was so still, why he was so listless, and then Ra's held out a hand to the rags that covered his face, and even the gentlest of pressures had them soaking with blood. Ra's' eyes were calm at the development, even as hers flashed like a hunting creature's, seeing only that her friend was in pain, that he was not whole from where she had left him all of those years ago.
Talia fell to her knees at her father's side, and instantly her hands were on Bane, her fingers hungry things as she felt over his arms and the slope of his shoulders. I remember, I remember, her body swore - her body swore and her skin ached and her fingers rejoiced. But the eyes before her were hazy and unaware as they opened. They were clouded. They gazed past her, to the sky beyond.
There was a sob in her throat when she saw the blood that was dripping from the cloth that covered his face, and barely, just barely, she felt Ra's' hand on her shoulder. "He is drugged, Talia. I doubt he can see you, let alone discern who you are."
She shook her head, unable to answer, and determinedly she shook away the haze that had settled there. She breathed, and felt the crippling fear and the weakness that feeling so brought. She shook her feeling away and called on the cold flame at the core of her. Balance, she whispered fiercely to herself. Balance she needed, and then and only then would she be of use to her friend.
This time, when she moved to secure the harness around Bane, her hands did not shake. They were cold, methodical, as she then did the straps to wrap around her body as well, shooing away her father's attempts to help her. She had once ascended from this hell under the strength of her own fingers, and now, when he was finally to rise after her, she wanted it again to be of her own strength, just as she had once drawn on the strength of him.
His breath was deep in his chest when she moved him, even as she tried as hard as she could to be gentle. His breath wheezed, as if bearing through a great pain. His eyes rolled back in his head and closed, useless to the world around him, and at the boneless feel of him – he who was always stone and mountain and sky to her, Talia bit her own tongue to keep the feeling in her from rising and suffocating her. Desperately, Talia yanked on her rope, and thought up, up, up. She had to get him away. She had to get him out. They had to stop the bleeding, and he needed to open his eyes again.
They started to rise, and Talia held him close as they made their ascent. Her arms were strong around him where he could not be, and she needed to breathe around the lump in her throat or else she would be useful to no one, and -
He opened his eyes. She had forgotten how grey they were as the haze clouding them cleared, just barely, swallowing the sky above where all around was dust and stone and blood . . . Her name was a gurgled sound in his throat. He could not get it out. She remembered the blood, soaking through his scarf, and she tried to force a smile onto her face, for him, always for him . . .
"Just like Icarus, my friend," she whispered as the sky fell in upon them.
"But you kept your wings." His lips stretched to make the words. He tried to smile - she could tell from the way the blood coated the clothe that covered his face with a new vengeance, soaking it through as he forced the sound from his mouth. She could feel his heart hammering, and fought the urge to close her eyes against the agony she could feel in the loose cast of him.
"I had one last flight to make with them," she said, her words like a vow fulfilled as they approached the lip of the Pit.
He was unconscious by the time they made it to the top, though his eyes stayed open as long as they could, drinking in the sky as it came closer and closer and closer, and finally, Talia was slapping the hands of her father's men away in order to pull him onto the sand herself. Her heart was hammering, fit to consume, and her eyes were like those of an animal as she bared her teeth and saw to him herself. "He is mine," she said fiercely, like some hunting cat protecting her prey, scrambling to kneel on the sand so that she could cradle his head in her lap.
Her hands trembled as she pulled down the cloth that covered the lower half of his face. It stuck, pulling sickly with a trail of blood and saliva and some sort of poultice that the doctor had been treating him with, and -
"Oh gods," she breathed, though she believed in none, and in that moment she wished she had one name to address as her stomach turned and she prayed.
"His face," one of her father's silent men – normally shadows, flickering and emotionless – breathed, matching her prayer. A murmur went up, one that was silenced as Ra's glared, waving his hand as he cut the words away as one would slice through flesh to find bone.
His face . . .
His mouth was nothing more than shredded flesh, fresh blood seeping out lazily from where the skin had long since scarred over. The scars webbed and traced and cut into each other, consuming his mouth from the curve of his chin up to the bottom of his nose. She looked, and saw where that too had been broken, where his jaw had been shattered, where teeth had been lost . . . There was scarring everywhere, it never ended, even on the scarce amount of skin she could see . . .
For me, for me, for me, a voice in her head mourned. He would not suffer so if it had not been for me.
Talia closed her eyes and remembered his smile, the way it hooked and rose on his face as she made her ascent, and then the men around him had swallowed him like a wave, and -
"Home," she said without realizing she spoke. "We have to get him home. The healers, they can fix him, they can fix this."
Ra's put a hand on her shoulder, and she started at the contact, looking up. "Talia," he said gently. "There are some things that can't be fixed."
"Nothing would need to be fixed had it not been for me," Talia whispered the words. "I cannot . . ."
The cold flame in her was rising. It was blazing - a white heat that built behind her bones, in her very soul. "The doctor," she finally said in a voice that slithered and wound like ivy. "The scars . . . they were inflicted by the men, but the nerve damage, the infection . . . It is his fault. My friend would not suffer so if not for him."
The cold heat consumed her, and she let it rise in her throat until she held it in her mouth. It was hate, not anger as Ra's would define it. It was hate, hot and feral and burning in her bones, as fierce as it was the day her mother had been taken from her. It clawed and ate at her and rather than draw her lips back and scream as she wished to do, she ordered coldly, "Take all from him as he has taken from my friend. An eye for an eye," in a voice that seethed.
Ra's was watching her with a look she could not name. "It is balance," she explained in a low tone, just smothering the edges in her voice so that it came out cool, all the desert at sundown while inside she ached like the barren ground covered over by the noon sun. "It is justice."
"In a way," Ra's said carefully, but even so, he waved a hand, and his men jumped to do as she bid. "But not only for this." And his next words were cold - cold as her words were cold, and she knew it was not only for Bane that the doctor would suffer. It was for Melisande. It was for the child she had left behind. It was catharsis for the guilt that no likely ate at Ra's' soul the same way the cold flame ate at hers.
In the end, she did not care for the hows and the whys of her wishes being carried out. The doctor screamed from the Pit below, and the prisoners left alive howled their rage to the skies while those still dying moaned and cried their pain in a sacrifice of lips to the heavens above. And Talia held Bane close like a vengeful god, cradling his head to her chest, feeling the blood from his mouth soak her tunic even as she felt his breath, dim and soft and hardly there, but still alive. Alive, he was alive.
And so Talia held on to him, and felt the flame inside of her cool, but just barely.
.
.
The healers in the mountains had seen many things pass their way from the Demonhead's ranks throughout the years, but never had they treated a man who had no face left to him.
After a whole day of treating and prodding and incense and chanting, the head monk came and whispered of the damage. There were ribs that had not healed properly, a bone in his arm that had to be rebroken in order to set properly. His body was covered in scars – up and down his spine where a blade had been dug in deep and then dragged, again and again over every limb. There were so many scars and scrapes - over and over again over every inch of flesh, the largest scars minus the ones on his back and face were on his chest where a lung had been punctured and badly healed. And then his face . . . it looked as if someone had tried to dig his mouth out with a rusty blade, and between the infections that still raged and the nerve damage that had not been properly treated . . . The scars still bled sluggishly. They were inflamed. And that infection had spread . . . The infection they could fight. They could even win over time. The nerve damage . . . he was in constant agony, and only a steady supply of opiates had been the thing to help him cope in the Pit. Talia had closed her eyes upon hearing so, and cursed the Doctor once again, wishing that they had taken more than just his eyes from him.
When the healer left, all he could do done for the night, she sat by Bane's side. With one hand she held his own from where they had been crossed over his chest. With her other she just barely traced the bandages that covered his face, now clean, mapping out the shape she remembered from before, the shape that would never be again. She didn't dare place any pressure down, instead her touch ghosted. It claimed and remembered and mourned as Talia rediscovered what had been lost to her for years.
Some of the scars she knew the stories to – some she had witnessed, had helped him treat with the tender sort of knowledge that they had been born and suffered in her name, for her sake. Some scars were new – from scuffles and scrapes and the day to day life of the Pit. But most of them . . . most of them she could date to the day she left, the men of the Pit having taken their pleasure in blood where they had been denied in flesh, and he had suffered greatly so that she would be spared the fate of her mother . . .
"He suffers greatly," Ra's said then, his voice an echo of her mind, interrupting her thoughts like an arrow through water. His voice was quiet as he watched her, his eyes distant. "It would be for the best to end his suffering."
She felt her breath catch sharply in her lungs. Like a knife.
"No," she said with her exhale, the one word nearly savage on her tongue with the low insistence it held. His life was hers. It had been since the day he had sworn it without words, sparing her, sheltering her . . . Their's was a symbiont circle, and she could not – she would not let him go until his last breath left his body of its own volition.
"Daughter," Ra's shook his head, his voice almost gentle around the appellation, and she closed her eyes upon hearing it for the first. A low pain in her gut rathered that he would not swear to it when he did not feel it to be so, that he did not use it but to gain a stride in an argument. "It would be mercy. I urge you to put aside your own feelings . . . and let him go. It would be a kindness to him."
The words struck. She squared her mouth against them.
"You place him in more pain this way," Ra's said next, the disapproval thick in his voice. "You prolong his suffering – he may not make it through this night, or he may take months to heal. Months, months of pain and agony to add to the years he has lived with this blight."
"The pain has made him strong," Talia said, her voice finally calm, her voice finally level. She did not cry. No more. "He will continue on as he has, and be the better for it." Suffering builds character, Ra's had said the first time he had faced her in the practice ring - when Talia had bruised and bled like a child who had went against a wolf. She had agreed with his words then, and she still did - she knew the truth of them better than most.
Ra's shook his head at her refusal to comply. When his jaw set stubbornly, the shape it made was the same as hers. "No man can take so much without leaving what they were behind for what the pain creates. Humanity survives, but it morphs, it adapts, and you may not like what surviving and suffering will turn him into."
Like the pain had to her, she thought, though she did not say. Her pain and suffering and adaptation had thrown her as a cold and shadowed reflection of the wife Ra's had once known. To some extent, Ra's' words were true of himself even, and at the thought, Talia looked down at the hand she had placed over Bane's, and wondered if Melisande would have even recognized her husband had it been she who had survived the Pit in place of her daughter. Would Melisande have known the little bit of Henri Ducard that was lost behind Ra's fierce devotion? Behind Ra's conviction? Behind his hate? It was a question Talia knew not the answer to. She doubted it was a question Ra's himself would have known how to answer without facing truths that he would rather not.
"I will take whatever comes from his survival," she whispered her answer, swearing it even still. "In any form, in any way . . . Father, you must understand that." It was the first time she had addressed him as such since the first, and finally, the calmness and clarity in her voice was a strength. She closed her weakness away, and looked on Bane with dry eyes. He would live, she had decided. Anything else was unacceptable. Not after all they had gone through . . . "Would you have smothered any little bit of Melisande had she survived what they did to her? Would you not have taken her less than whole and refused to let go until you had no other choice left to you?"
Ra's waited a moment. A heartbeat. His eyes narrowed, thin, icy slivers in a chiseled face. Talia narrowed her own eyes in return. In that moment, she was a reflection.
"Then let him live," Talia said simply where her father could not answer. Her voice was a stone in her mouth. She ached and mourned and suffered each painful breath her friend breathed at her own, and yet she could not . . . she could not yet let that pain go. "Let him rise."
Ra's said nothing, just looked between the broken man and his daughter for a long, long time. He stayed until, beyond them, the sun disappeared fully behind the mountains. Without a word still, he stood and took his leave, and Talia listened to his footsteps until she could hear them no more.
.
.
In the end, she thought it fitting that the first time she slept in a real bed, he did as well.
The healers had made their last round for the night - all they could do to make Bane comfortable done, and yet Talia had found herself reluctant to leave his side when the time came. She was as she was as a child once more, and she did not want to know the space away from his shadow. She thought of her little room, of the hard floor and the incense she still burned for comfort. She hooked her jaw, her decision easily made as she kicked off her boots, and shedded the thick wool tunic she wore in favor of the simple cotton tank-top she had underneath. The bed he was on was narrow, as all were in the healer's wing, but she was used to threadbare cots and the stone floors, and the softness of the mattress and the thick blankets was a luxury unused to for her – for him, even more so, being further placed from such things than even she.
He did not stir as she carefully folded her much smaller frame in against his. She tucked her face into his chest and reached over to drape one of his arms around her, careful not to disturb the tubes the kept him sedated, that fed him where his mouth could not.
Her breath was shaky, but his was deep and rumbling and constant against her cheek. It anchored her. It calmed her, even as her eyes grew damp and her throat ached around the stone that had gathered there. She had one hand over his heartbeat, as if assuring herself that if he was there, then all would be well. Her other hand she rested on his side in a sort of half embrace, sharing his heat as much as she gave of her own. She imagined that his breath came that much easier when she was near, but that much was sentiment, even she could admit. It made the stone in her throat burn. It made her lungs ache.
Her dagger was forgotten, resting where she had tossed it into one of her discarded boots. Even without its comfort, she still felt safe, utterly content for the moment, even though exhaustion and concern and regret still swirled in her veins. They were kept at bay for the moment - for the night. She closed her eyes, lulled by the rise and fall of his chest, and that was the first true night of sleep Talia had had since escaping the Pit all of those years ago.
When she slept she dreamed of flying with wax and feather wings over the desert far below. But there was a shadow joining hers over the ground as she stayed carefully away from the sun. She flew that night, and finally, she was not alone.
.
.
In the small hours of the morning, she stirred briefly, feeling one of his arms tighten about her, his body reaching out to hold her instinctively, even in his sleep.
She woke to find one of his hands in her hair, and she felt half a smile when she realized that he had never seen her as such before. But sleep was heavy, and she was reclaimed by it once again until the morning broke.
.
.
Nearly a month passed before the healer devised a way for Bane to walk amongst the living once again. His plan was an idea at first – a faint sketch of a mask, complete with tubes and conductors that would keep him permanently at rest, that would keep his damaged nerves perfectly numb. It was a tricky balance, keeping one forever drugged and drunk, and that alone could kill him more slowly than any wound they could try to treat – the side effects could be even more than that, for it was not a normal blend of drugs that would keep to Bane his sanity. The healer simply called it venom – pressed and developed from their years of studying the fauna of the world, the poisons and illusive things that belonged to the floor of the earth.
He would be strong, the healer warned. If he rose above the haze and sharpened his mind, the strength he could bear would be unparalleled by mortal men. Even aging would be doubtful, the healer theorized, and Ra's, who had lived with immortality in its many forms, turned to his daughter and asked her to consider that fate more than anything else.
Then again, the device could possibly not work at all, and the venom that would save him could also destroy him. That too was a sobering point, a point that made her clasp her hands together and will her blood to be still. Yet, in the end, there was not any choice in her mind. She would see Bane whole again, in any form. The means meant nothing to the ends.
He will know no pain? was all that she asked when the healer finished speaking. It was all she needed to know. He will know peace?
He will not know pain, the healer answered carefully, and she nodded her understanding.
He would no longer ache on her account, she decided. He would no longer bleed, at least, not from wounds of old.
When the healer finally presented his finished design, she held the mask, eying its bulk and size. It would completely cover the ruin of his face, leaving one to guess whether or not his skin was whole underneath. The straps were thick and black, and the tubes around the mouth carefully covered a grate that would let him breathe, breathe in air that would always taste of metal and medicine, and at the thought she ached. His voice too would be stolen from him, and as she held the mask up to her own face curiously, she wondered what her friend would sound like when he was returned to her.
It was a cage as much as he had ever suffered, a part of her mourned. But it would heal him. It would allow him to walk and live once again, and that was all that she could think of in the end. It was all that she could let influence her decision.
By the time the doctor was ready to mount the mask for the first time, Bane had been weaned off enough of his sedatives so that his eyes were half open and hazy, dulled by pain as he looked at the world around him as one who had only known one place, one time, for much too long.
And so, she stood by his side, and ran the pad of her thumb over the ruin of his face, one last time. "It will all be over soon, my friend," she said, her voice calm, her words level as she gave her vow to him. "I promise."
His smile was bloodied and weak, and his eyes rolled with such a pain as he gazed at her. But still he tried. For her, always for her, he tried. She could feel the shape of his mouth underneath her fingertips. She tried to memorize it, to hold it with her for the time to come.
For it was to be the last time she would see his face for a long, long time.