Chapter Eleven: Deceptive Fatality
As soon as Tom Sky was well out of earshot, leaving Bane and Jane alone, only the cicadas witnessed Jane's words, she whipped her face towards him.
"You have an amazingly distorted view of how this world works," she spit, chuckling to herself.
Her laughter was reserved only for her and a recent memory. Jane shook her head, her amusement continuous.
Bane's forehead furrowed in genuine confusion made his forehead furrow as Jane slipped deeper into her memories.
She didn't really hear him until he repeated himself. Jane was thinking about the recent body of a well-built, corn-fed young gentleman. The dead teen had a strong body, but no real knowledge of how to fight when he bumped into the biggest guy at the pool table at a dive bar while on spring break with six of his lacrosse buddies.
Jane blinked her eyes rapidly as she finally heard Bane's voice.
"What are you speaking to directly Jane?"
"What were you discussing with that Sky Guy?" Jane asked, adding on a hot seethe, "are you thinking you can sell me for some kind of knowledge?"
Bane spoke without thinking, reflexive, immediately possessive. "No, I meant when I said that you belong to me. He's merely going to funnel all of his words on a whisper into my ear," Bane growled as he raised a hand and pointed a scarred fingertip with blunt cut nails to his right ear.
"Belong?" Jane lamely echoed.
"Yes for as long as you are in this world with me, you will play the part of being my partner in public."
"Play," she flatly stated.
"I'm sure you will be able to manage when we are in mixed company, your safety will be ensured even while I remain in this state," Bane added.
His diminished capacity did not dim the danger that poured from him in electrical waves.
The sharp response Jane was about to spit was pillow smothered before she could speak when Deborah Flowers voice sounded, growing louder as she approached.
"Jane?"
Bane watched as Jane's face was completely transformed as she affixed a smile on her full lips before she turned towards Deborah who was holding a plastic bag, the faded logo was from a popular grocery store.
"I wanted to give you this and also extend an invitation to dinner," Deborah started, pausing as she flicked her eyes over to Bane's broad form, nervously continuing. "A small group of us have dinner and build a big campfire, Tom sources food, I don't know how he does it," she added as she chuckled.
"We'd love to," Jane said and mostly meant it, she was deeply hungry, and Deborah seemed kind.
Deborah's face softened with a smile. "Come on back in a few hours, I'll save you two spots."
Jane watched Deborah walk away before she turned back towards Bane.
He watched, mesmerized at how rapidly the warm smile she'd given Deborah dissipated as they locked eyes, her features were drained to a lovely sharpness.
Jane narrowed her eyes as she took in a deep breath, her nostrils flaring before she finally shook her head and stalked past him and back to the van, her new home sweet fucking home.
Bane followed Jane, both of them remaining in silence.
Bane watched Jane yank open the rear doors of the van, holding out his hand when she placed a foot on the corrugated metal step.
"I don't need your help," she spit.
"I'm aware Jane, but I need yours," he murmured on a vulnerable rasp, surprising himself the most that he would make such an admission.
Jane could only blink at Bane's confession, wordlessly holding out her hand to help him step into the back of the van.
As they settled in the back of the van, the gurneys on each side resembled the bedrooms in 1950's sitcoms with separate beds and spontaneous offspring.
As Bane settled on the gurney that had become his side of the van, his movements were careful, he'd been too vicarious in projecting an everything is just fine façade, and his body was paying dearly for it.
Jane was acutely aware of Bane's discomfort, unable to keep an eye off of him in case he needed whatever kind of rudimentary medical intervention she could perform within the confines of the van.
She occupied her hands and the bulk of her attention on digging into the plastic bag that Deborah had pushed into her hands.
Jane's hand closed around a small packet of two-ply tissue; the plastic emblazoned with bright holiday ornaments.
She felt tears sting the corners of her eyes as she thought about how rapidly her holiday season had been eviscerated, turned inside fleshy fucking out.
She blinked fast, ordering the tears to keep from rolling down her face as she thought of the holiday stockings her and her mom opened on Christmas morning after a breakfast fit for a lumberjack who'd never met a carbohydrate they didn't like, all slogged down with a pitcher of mimosas.
Jane's Christmas season had shifted dramatically from chestnuts roasting on an open fire to the fear of being sodomized in her sleep by Jack fucking Frost.
She concentrated on reading and re-reading the label of an off brand of tampons before turning her hand into the arcade claw game and pulling out a candy bar with almonds.
Jane pressed her lips together as she thought of the chocolate orange delicacy her mom always shoved into the toe of her knitted stocking.
Jane and Arlene Bell had been hanging the same stockings, with care, since Jane's first Christmas.
Arlene had just given birth and was preparing to spend the first Christmas with her new baby Jane, and realized she'd somehow forgotten to purchase baby's first stocking.
Arlene had waited until Jane was napping before she ransacked her closet and eventually found a sweater from her great-grandmother in her hope chest that she turned into stockings with her excellent stitching skills.
She'd meant somewhere to buy proper stockings but never did and the mismatched toile modified sweater sleeves hung in the same place every year since, each flanking the wide fireplace.
Arlene would leave the stockings up until she died, always holding out hope that Jane would someday return.
When Arlene's house was eventually cleaned up and sold after her death, one of the people cleaning up the house would toss both stockings. Jane's still held a set of bath salts that had long lost their lavender aroma.
The sugar had crystallized in the orange chocolate rind and the lip gloss had dried out until only glitter remained stuck to the spongy wand and the once crisp one-hundred-dollar bill in the card with a plump kitten had long been taken out of circulation.
Bane noticed Jane's quiet sadness despite his shroud of discomfort that was only growing heavier with each of his labored breaths.
Jane felt Bane's eyes moving over her, heard his unasked questions.
As she buried herself in further exploration of the plastic grocery store bag with items carefully wrapped in scraps of holiday paper, back in the heart of Gotham City, a rendition of silver bells was playing in the conference room of the Gotham City Police Department.
Detective Blake filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee as he glared across the room at the pair of D.C. federal agents, he'd rather contend with rabid reindeer threatening to gnaw off his nose than spend another second with the two agents who made his ego deflate into a flaccid tube sock and crawl back up inside his body.
Gordon didn't mind the Federal agents hanging around their watering hole, he was a much better politician than Blake could ever hope to be.
Gordon walked the two agents through their discovery of Talia's motivations now that the hollowness of her Miranda Tate personality was being excavated, autopsied, and examined.
As Gordon and the two agents dove into the sturdy data boxes full of collated files, faxed pages, and photocopies of Talia al Ghul's attempt to decimate the city, back in the encampment, in the modified coroner's van, Jane's eyes were drawn from the half-full bottle of a vanilla-bergamot scented shampoo and conditioner in one when Bane jammed an epi-pen into the dense meat of his thigh.
She watched Bane's pain wash away, leaving his pupils bright, energetic pools of light.
As Jane continued to root around the plastic bag, back at the Gotham City Morgue, Barsad's body was removed from the stainless-steel drawer and transferred to the crematorium, destined for any free spot in Potter's Field.
The tech barely glanced at Barsad's file before initialing the body for release.
The coroner had determined that Barsad's injuries were consistent with the projectile's radial acceleration as it disrupted his tissue. He had hemorrhaged as his body cavities were filled with three of the heavy metals present in the earth's roiling core, also consistent with gun powder residue.
Antimony trisulfide.
Lead azide.
Barium nitrate.
As Barsad took his last ride in a vehicle on his way to becoming a sack of ashes, Jane reached the bottom of the bag, her fingertips brushing against a bubblegum scented lip balm, the colorful label peeling.
She shifted uncomfortably, her lower back and belly aching.
Bane noticed her silent discomfort, before he could speak, Jane's eyes rose to find his as she abruptly pushed the bag aside.
"I'm going to lay down for a while," she stated.
Bane couldn't help but smile as Jane wasn't asking and didn't wait for a modicum of his acknowledgement before she was pulling his thick, lush coat around her form and turning on her side away from him.
In the few hours before Bane and Jane's dinner party invitation, neither of them slept.
Jane kept her eyes gently closed, letting her thoughts run amok to the cataclysmic upheaval of her life, reality, and new existence.
In the firestorm of electric neural activity, she couldn't help but let her thoughts linger on her advent calendar and not being able to open any more of the numbered doors for the waxy piece of chocolate. She wondered what shape the shitty tasting piece of chocolate would be in if she'd been in the bowels of the morgue opening the little paper door.
The advent calendar was eventually tossed by the nightly cleaning crew, months into the following year, the last of the doors would never be opened. If Jane had been there to open the rest of the year, she would've been in for highly preserved treats in the shapes of reindeer, snowflakes, and a chubby Santa Claus to top off the night before Christmas.
Bane's thoughts on the other side of the van never drifted to the culinary, whether it be a delicacy or dried, salted strips of meat.
He hadn't imagined a future past the fiery end of Gotham City.
His future was going to be burning to death in servitude to his goddess.
He was ready to be incinerated into more than five pounds of ashes as Talia had been reduced to in the close to five-thousand-degree veritable inferno.
Bane had been fully prepared and willing to let Dante strike the match that would end his life.
He had been ready to welcome his pores to dilate from the heat.
His follicles to be singed to nothingness amongst the fallout.
He had been prepared to drop to his knees, tear open his shirt and let the radioactive isotopes engulf him, lick through his epidermis, dermis, all the way down to the subcutaneous layer.
A deep frown appeared between Bane's closed eyes as he thought back to staring at the Batman, unable to find pain-relief through his broken mask after he'd been knocked to the ground by the flying fucking rodent.
"I broke you," Bane whispered aloud, squeezing his eyes tighter shut as he replayed the unplanned ending and fruition of Talia al Ghul's master plan.
"How have you come back?" Bane replayed hearing himself ask.
"You thought you were the only one who could learn the strength to escape?" the Batman had asked, his voice gravelly, grating.
Bane focused on Batman's masked face through the pain. "I never escaped."
He had been in too much agony to relish in the masked billionaire's confusion, couldn't bask in the betrayal as Talia had sunk her knife into Bruce's side, finding a space to slice the blade through his taut muscular flesh, violate his internal organs, poke his liver, and assault his gallbladder.
"He is not the child of Ras al Ghul, I am," Talia had added after she couldn't plunge the blade further, couldn't thrust the steel any deeper into his body.
In the back of the commandeered Gotham City Morgue van, Bane felt his eyes burn in the same manner as when he'd shed a single tear when Talia had reached out and touched his mask.
He'd heard only her words over the thundering pain that pounded his central nervous system into submission.
Talia had expressed regrets, remorse, and the inability to forgive her father until Bruce had assassinated him.
Everything had collapsed after that, a star falling in on itself, rapidly turning supernova and fizzling out to become stardust.
Bane saw and felt what should've been imminent death from the Bat Pod's blast to the center of his massive body.
From the same morgue that Bane had forced his liberation and that of Talia's dead body, Bruce Wayne's blood cells cried out from where they were smeared on a glass slide. His mucus membrane swabs were busy being analyzed under a standard toxicology screen but remembered Talia just as she told him he would.
If the broken and deflated red blood cells could talk and had their own sentient memory, they would forever relive his boyish tendencies around Miranda. Each chain amino acid recalled how he'd handed over the keys to the nuclear kingdom to Miranda Tate.
"I won't forget about you," Bruce had murmured.
"I know," Miranda had purred right back, her dulcet tones disarming, her thighs warm when the power went out, her heart had been a Venus fly trap and he'd crawled in on his belly, salivating as he sought her nectar, not knowing from the first glance, touch, and kiss, that it would all eventually prove fatal.