Disclaimer: For the legal bit, kindly get thee to chapter 1
Note: For a story that started off in wet dreams, we've strayed from the path. But bear with me sailors, sexytimes ahead.
Chapter 4: With a head like a wrecking ball, truth
In that tunnel he loses time to the sound of steel bars sliding shut, to the way his reality buckles into a solid, sinister shape. It never occurred to him that she might have been telling the truth all along; that she was no better than she pretended to be. His destiny and doom were his own. He wore a mask, He worked alone. But for a short span of time she had been his partner in the dark.
There's power in the way Bane calls his name, calls him back to be a man, aging, alone. It's an old magic, naming a thing, telling it the shape it must take, forsaking all others. Now, in front of a madman and an army of thugs Bruce is stripped even of anonymity, of the secret that he'd only managed to keep from the woman at his back. There it stands between them, broken and heavy as steel bars, his name, the secret he never meant to live long enough to tell.
In the moment before he lunges for Bane, he can see her shadow where it falls before him on the floor like despair, twisting through his, taking on the shape of his sins.
(-)
When it happens it's riveting, like the crack of bone, like the tearing of flesh. Like bright light that gets in your eyes at midnight. She blinks eyes that won't ever adjust to this, paces like she might walk it off, reminds herself she was always going to turn on both of them anyway.
Just not at the same time.
The very worst thing might be that she was just beginning to find a new shape inside her skin, a tiny room, the merest hint that some day, instead of a living like a parachute, she might become a safe place to land. But then his name fell from Bane's lips, a sonorous click, and she became so much hostile territory. Like he'd buried himself, landmine, in the pit of her stomach just in case she tried to walk away, grinning, with her life and a string of pearls.
Bruce Wayne. His back shatters like a bomb going off, reverberates inside the uncrackable walls of her ribs. Bruce Wayne, a bright light in her eyes, the click of a mine, the despair of very nearly getting away unscathed.
(-)
Bruce doesn't think about vengeance in the pit, not sadness or beauty or regret or love or sex or shame; he thinks about pain. It stitches every second together until the ragged edges of days and nights flow like a seamless shroud. It is more constant than the anger or the fear. It is the seed that bears his every thought and act, the very setting of the story of his life. And like a setting it sinks into every sight, every word, finally fading to foundation until the prison is just a prop, his healing a mere plotline.
There's food, plain and colorless, but good enough. Dull, boiled grain, beans, scraps of meat. There's water, tepid, rationed, but clean too; he keeps it down. In his years abroad he'd run through the full gamut of food borne illness, the viciousness of a parched throat opening to Montezuma's Revenge down to the inevitable, endless flux of Bangkok Belly.
There's all the sleep he can want—if he can take it standing, rope around his back in the devil's own traction. There's a roof over his head—too much roof—and no weather to speak of except for the occasional howling sandstorm, passing with the wrath of a distant god. In some ways he's safer than he's ever been, here where Bane's declared his death at another's hands a capitol offense.
The men around him are gaunt souls stretched out over interminable sentences, with spectral voices wrung out from chanting. Were they there by choice, the pit might be a monastery, a Buddhist temple, a solemn, sanctified retreat. A place carved from the earth in honor of a harsh, kind diety. Nothing to need, nowhere to go, everything to want.
Instead it is exile.
He thought he'd known exile, eight years abroad, eight in self-imposed confinement. Eight years learning the tricks to fight his way out of the worst of places, eight years watching most broken of places right itself when he stepped out of the way. He'd turned himself into terror to save his city and then frightened his city out of its need for him. He thought he'd understood then. He was wrong.
The first thing he learns in the pit is there is no such thing as self-imposed exile. To separate oneself from the turn of the world, to live as far on the fringes of humanity as is possible is isolation. But exile is something else altogether. Isolation is about protecting yourself from yourself. Or rather, protecting all the shiny, bright bits of your life—your Rachels and Alfreds and Mirandas, your mother's memory, your father's name—from the taint that fills the ridges in your fingerprints like identity gone wrong, from the shadow on your soul. Isolation is a stunted tree stretching toward moonlight, trying to grow into the most hostile of spaces so it won't block out the sun.
Exile is uprooting, casting out, making helpless. It's life under a foreign sun while your native soil is swept away in the flood.
He learns it as he counts days, feeling the sun blister skin that falls outside the shadows. He thinks of Gotham and air growing crisp, leaves turning toward fall. Flowers on graves, flowers in glass gardens. Children holding hands against the dark. He thinks of frost-slick asphalt under the tires of tanks his money built and his secrets kept safe until Bane revealed he had no secrets at all.
He watches through snowy reception as Gotham's defenses drop through waiting sinkholes; stadiums, banks, Harvey fucking Dent. Coverage is chaotic, dizzy handheld shots of kangaroo courts, a camera panning desolate streets from the sides of a patrolling tumbler, dust rising from collapsed sewers that hold a thousand cloistered cops who whisper revenge like prayer, counting bullets like rosary beads. There were less panoramic displays too, close ups of women and children staring down the barrels of guns, surrounded by leering men, begging for the Batman and mercy and their mothers.
The smallest of mercies is not lost on him. There is no word of John Blake, the boy who hadn't yet managed to die a hero. There's no word on Lucius, on Gordon, on Miranda Tate. They would be there in the thick of it, fighting like fallout shelters, in all the ways he never learned, welcoming the world in, holding it safe until the end.
He didn't see Selina Kyle either on the newsreel, not as victim or torturer, not numbered among the dead. She'd be clear of the city by now or keeping her head down or thrusting it out to bloody the nearest hand before fading away. Like him she is a junkyard dog, beaten down but with her back still pointing toward home. It had stung when her teeth sunk in, when he learned the way she said home would never mean Gotham, had never meant him.
It didn't matter. Her ferocity had a different focus, her loyalty a different name. But she too had been beaten by the hand that fed her, was trapped in Gotham's untender mercy. There were debts on the path to her freedom, guilt, vengeance, love. She was angry at everything, maybe him most of all. He could work with it. It was enough. He knew the chorus her demons sang by heart, the screams of a city that rose even above the pain.
He could hear them screaming in his bones, in his knitting flesh, in the strength returning to his limbs. He chewed them like food, listened to them like lullabies before sleep, dreamed them like every promise he'd ever made. Their pain was his pain. Pain wasn't the eye of the storm, it was the levy that never broke.