Once, Bane had known such agony that he was stripped of his humanity. Once he had lain helpless in a dry corner of the Pit, raving and snapping like a dog at his fellow prisoners, living on the scraps and slop brought him by the foul-smelling sawbones who had sewn up his back, let alone by the sole merit of superstition but subject to curses and speculation about which demon had possessed him.
He had not cared. He had been lost in a wilderness of torment; every movement was a battle, and every shift in temperature pierced his limbs and his spine and his face with a thousand lances. In his memories, he made it different; it soothed him, to pretend that he had clung to the thought of Talia's wide eyes seeing the sky for the first time. In reality, he had nearly forgotten she existed, until he saw her thin face over him again, until the abyss of pain closed into solid ground— a soft bed— beneath him and he met his new master for the first time.
The mask had closed over his face like the lid of a sarcophagus, the numbing tingle of sorcery wrapping around his wrong-healed vertebrae and spreading throughout his body like a flood of oily water. In time, even he had forgotten his old face, gladly trading his humanity for the surcease of pain; all that mattered was Talia, beautiful and fierce, free of the fatalism and anguish and knowledge of pain that had bound some part of Bane's soul forever in that prison. If there was pain, there was pain of the spirit, the pain of longing and hope that no sorcery could dull, and Bane had embraced it.
Only now that bittersweet pain had become a blade in his chest, a torment too great to embrace; his mind could not wrap itself around it. How had he been so blind, to imagine that even the beloved daughter of a sorcerer could escape the moral degradations of the Pit? His burden was pain to be endured, the knowledge of someday-death at his master's bidding or at Talia's, the isolation and emptiness of a scarred body and a war-honed mind. Hers, it seemed, was something darker and more insidious: had she been stripped of her taste for truth by all those years of lying and hiding? Was she so devoid of feeling that she felt no twinge of conscience when she lied to him, her most loyal creature? Had she perceived his longing for her, and seen it as the handle by which one holds a tool?
He trained in the arms-yard, and his squires wisely made themselves absent; he tore apart a training dummy with a mace, and switched to the staff until he broke two of them, and then he took up one of the leather-wrapped logs used by the axemen and pummeled it with his bare fists until even his horn-callused knuckles began to bleed.
There was no pain in his flesh; physical pain was no longer his to suffer. Only a bone-deep ache in his hands whispered of his body's few remaining limitations. He felt his chest heaving, and the tendons of his arms beginning to tighten after their work, and it was only now that he began to reckon the other pain that he suffered— the greater pain, which pervaded him utterly, which dwarfed the hot shame and rejection of Talia's deceit as a mountain is dwarfed by the sky.
He knew that John loved him. He knew this in his bones, in his drug-numbed tongue, in the battle-ache of his loins. I know what it is, John had said, to love, and be unloved, and what Bane had seen in his eyes—
And yet if he had learned any lesson from this… this madness with Talia, he had learned that love is not enough on its own to heal the scarred spirit, and how even the strongest love may be twisted by guilt and ambition. He recalled the long years he had spent, wrestling within his spirit as he reconciled with his scars and with his favors sold for bread, and for a moment he saw John as John must have seen himself: stripped of his hard-won status, bound to a man he saw as a merciless killer— a man the size of a draft horse, a man who could (and did) break his enemies across his knee like dried kindling— and driven, reduced, by his own passions to something lower than a whore: something that let itself be touched and invaded for no payment beyond the fleeting pleasure of the flesh, against honor and loyalty.
As if John's pleasure were not wealth beyond every coin in the kingdom; as if he had not, with a quarter-hour's use of mouth and hands, brought his greatest enemy low and held him helpless in his own grasp. Surely John understood this, thought Bane, and the clarity of thought retreated into a confused whirl of emotion and frustration.
Then there was a moment of ringing silence, like the hollow of sound when a bell is muffled, and Bane felt the summons like the shifting of the earth beneath him. He knew this feeling; he knew that he was only caught up in it because he was, to some degree, magically entangled with al-Ghul. He knew that his master would arrive soon, and that until al-Ghul's arrival Talia would be in danger, and despite the confusion within him, Bane ran for his mistress's side.