Chapter One: Whispers from the Mouth of the Dead
Talia is dead.
Batman is presumed dead.
Alfred continued to manage Bruce's estate, splitting fiduciary responsibility with Fox.
Gotham would take a long time to heal from the trauma.
Gordon and Blake continued to be rattled about Miranda Tate's true identity and motivations.
Selina ended up leaving the city.
After shooting Bane and seeing the bomb detonate over the water, she'd hopped back on the Bat Pod and hightailed it out of the city, initially with no destination. She just wanted to find somewhere to lick her wounds and mourn Bruce.
The paramedics didn't try very hard to check if Bane was still breathing or attempt much resuscitation effort, if any. Bane was toe-tagged, body-bagged and transported to the Gotham City Morgue.
Bane was not dead; his pulse was very faint. The dismissive paramedic hadn't even hooked him up to a cardiac monitor and only brushed his fingertips against the carotid pulse in Bane's vascularly striated neck.
The morgue was full of bodies from the chaos in the city, Bane was left on a stainless-steel table instead of in the refrigerated drawer.
Even if the morgue had been at maximum occupancy, Bane wouldn't have fit into the cold storage, his shoulders were too broad to slide inside the cold chamber.
Bane remained as still as a lifeless corpse on the table in exam room seventeen on the next to the lowest level of the morgue.
The table with drains along all sides was cold and hard under his broad, damaged body.
The small room with the tiled floor was reserved for autopsies on high-profile corpses, access was severely limited.
As Bane laid under a grey sheet that had originally been a crisp shade of white, a flicker of life remained deep inside his body, a single ember inside the center of his still heart, heavy and limp inside its opaque pericardial sac.
A single flame burned inside him, standing up against hurricane-force winds in the center of his brain, flickers of electricity grew stronger, lightning in a bottle.
As Bane rose through the layers of numbness affecting his central nervous system, outside the morgue, junior pathologist Jane Bell attached her laminated badge to the rounded neck of her hunter green surgical scrubs.
Jane made a beeline for the employee lounge and poured the dregs from the coffee carafe into a squat paper cup, making a face as she drank the caffeinated elixir in three bitter swallows.
Jane had a bounce in her step as she stepped onto the elevator, wrapping her long, thick braid into a low bun at the base of her neck, securing it with a sturdy plastic claw clip.
She smeared a vanilla-caramel balm across her full lips as the elevator descended to the second to the lowest floor, emerging onto the tiled hallway that led to the room where Bane was laying under the sheet stamped GCM.
Jane typed her personal code into the keypad, the lock snapping open with a satisfying slick. She pulled open the heavy door, her eyes immediately going to Bane's broad form, a mountain draped in the county issued sheet.
She practically skipped to the portable speaker as she plugged in her phone and tapped on a classical playlist, all powerful songs, crashing crescendos and violin solos that could make one's heart stop beating.
She washed her hands before opening Bane's medical chart.
Today was the first day that Jane was going to be able to be lead on an autopsy, have an assistant instead of the other way around.
Her mother Arlene Bell was the lead medical examiner for Gotham City and would be serving as her daughter's autopsy assistant that day.
Looking back, Arlene would always regret hitting the snooze alarm a handful of times. If she'd gotten her fat ass out of bed, she would've been in the morgue at the start of Jane's autopsy preparations.
The ideal maximum number of autopsies recommended for a medical examiner annually was 250.
Bane would be lucky number 251.
Arlene had become pregnant before she was done with her ivy-wrapped medical school.
The father had left town and never looked back.
Arlene had worked hard, head down, raised her daughter and had a stellar career.
That morning, early retirement was around the corner, tickets already booked for Machu Pichu, pleased to pass the torch to her daughter.
As Arlene dallied around the house, making an extra cup of coffee, and completing the crossword puzzle, across the city in the morgue's lower-level examination room, Jane adjusted the volume of the seasons of which there were four until the sound filled the cold air.
As Jane milled about the chilly, heavily air-conditioned room, Bane began to rise further to consciousness, his frontal lobe cloudy from the trauma, taking time to remember the events that led to him being declared dead and zipped up in a leak-proof bag.
Bane didn't have enough blood flow to even twitch when Jane's small, gloved hands began touching him, slowly removing his remaining clothes as she murmured to herself.
The thick, dark-green gloves were rated safe for chemotherapy exposure as she cut through the heavy laces of Bane's boots, pulling each off and bagging them separately, using a black marker to note the date and time of collection.
He couldn't move as Jane's hands efficiently over his body, cutting through the fabric of his pants before moving her attention to the charred Kevlar flak jacket over his broad chest.
Bane couldn't see Jane from behind his closed eyelids.
He couldn't taste her exhale in the air from the gun powder burns on his lips.
Bane couldn't smell her through his singed nasal cavities.
Bane began to rise to further consciousness, his curiosity bringing him closer to the surface, sending him up quickly. If he'd been a deep-sea diver ascending at the same rate of speed, nitrogen bubbles would've filled his body, threatening to end his life.
Jane palpated Bane's broad chest, trying to ascertain the structural damage through his bruised, muscular body before she mentally drew an incision line for her thoraco-abdominal incision, imagining slicing through the layers of his muscular tissue with her PM60 bulldog scalpel blades, attached to a custom-made ergonomic handle her mother had bought her for graduating.
Behind his presumed dead eyelids, Bane's brain began to whir with energy, atoms splitting inside a nuclear reactor as he assessed the damage to his body and his capacity for movement.
Jane had no idea what was happening inside Bane as the next song up was one of her favorite symphonies. The music told the story of a dark evening on a broad, bald mountain.
She was transfixed and lost in her pathology prep as Bane the mountain she was preparing to carve into, hollow out, split his skull, and weigh his brain continued to become more aware.
Jane's deft fingertips pressed into a particular spot directly over his sternum, the area purple from deep bruising where his ribs met.
The smallest sound escaped from between Bane's lips, a tiny vulnerable whisper composed of true nightmarish pain.
Jane's hands paused their examination as she leaned closer to Bane's slack-featured face. Frowning at his scarred sharp features that were visible around the busted titanium mask.
Bane felt his fingertips tingle as Jane's hands manipulated the damaged straps and hinges of his mask, pulling it free until she could bring her face even closer to his, straining her ears.
He could feel her warm exhale on the skin of his exposed nose, smell the cinnamon latte she'd had on the way in, the rich coconut milk had spread warmth throughout her chest and belly, the weather outside bone cold.
Jane was overwhelmed with the scientific anomaly actively occurring when Bane's eyelids snapped open, his caramel orbs flecked with energetic flecks the rich color of basaltite.
Her mouth fell open in shock and awe as Bane closed a large hand around one of her wrists, the tiny bones threatening to be ground into dust, his grip impossibly strong even in his diminished state.
Jane reacted to the sharp and sudden pain of his unbreakable hold around her narrow wrist, her free hand scrabbling on a metal, towel-lined tray, closing around a stainless-steel kidney basin, gripping it tight before swinging it in a wild haymaker, a medical pantomime of a drunk fuck at the bar picking a fight.
Bane sat up ramrod straight, imitating a mummy being awoken in its tomb by marauders and intrusive archeologists looking to make money from poaching the dead.
She managed a shrill sound as he shot out his other hand and caught her wrist before the basin could make contact with the side of his head.
If Jane had made contact, the metal edge of the basin would have slammed into Bane's temporal artery, causing him to rapidly lose unconsciousness before his life ended, actual finality, this time from total exsanguination.
Any further sound Jane attempted was stopped as Bane abruptly released her wrists, pushing her backwards and away from him, causing her to fall to the hard, unforgiving tiled floor.
She gasped as she tried to catch her breath, cradling her right wrist to her chest as the impact strained and stretched the ligaments.
Jane's wrist pulsed in time with her heart as Bane swung his legs to the side before slipping off the table, landing heavily on his ankles.
A jolt of pain shot up his legs and he couldn't stop his sharp, scarred features from contorting in pain.
Bane moved his head side to side, his spinal vertebrate popping and cracking before he dropped his gaze to where Jane remained on the floor, a broken bird fallen from the nest.
His voice when he spoke was unrefined, each syllable was filtered through gravel.
"Do you have a remedy for pain?"
Jane blinked rapidly, speaking as she gave the slightest shaking of her head. "We're not really setup to care for the living," she managed, her mind whirring before she quickly added. "I have some epi-pens in the first aid kit," she said as she nodded towards a set of grey aluminum cabinets.
"That will suffice, procure them," Bane rasped.
Jane's forehead pulled into a frown as she stared up at him, trying not to look at his exposed skin. She'd cut all but a pair of royal blue boxer briefs from his broad, muscular body.
She struggled to her feet, telling herself that cooperation would save her life.
Jane wasn't entirely right or wrong.
Bane watched as Jane moved laterally towards the cabinets, never taking her eyes off of him.
She fumbled with the numerical combination on the cabinet with the first-aid kit.
Jane nearly dropped the plastic first-aid kit, struggling to open it while keeping her damaged wrist pressed to the center of her chest.
She pushed the plastic case back onto the cabinet's shelf before squatting and rolling the pen towards him. The pen with the bright yellow and red printing came to a stop at the tip of his big toe, the nail bed pale from mineral deficiencies.
Bane gave the pen a kick, sending it rolling back in her direction, never dropping his eyes from hers as he spoke, his voice hoarse. "Administer it."
"It's easy, I'll walk you through it," Jane quickly rebutted, drawing her foot back to kick the pen back towards him.
"You will administer it, now," Bane commanded, drawing himself to his full height, keeping the pain off his face, his damaged body protesting the tension he put on his frame to frighten and intimidate her.
Jane pressed her lips together as she considered her options, focusing on slow, even breaths as her wrist throbbed with an increasing and steady ache.
Bane struggled to keep his composure. "Administer it," he repeated, his words strained as beads of sweat sprouted on his forehead.
Jane cleared her throat, her fingers tingling as her wrist continued to swell, the skin stretching taut under the inflammation at the site of injury. "Sit down," she finally said as she pointed to a swiveling office chair tucked under a particle board desk.
Bane kept her in sight as he crossed the room, pulled the chair from under the desk and sat down heavily.
"This is the morgue," Bane stated as Jane remained rooted in place by the metal cabinets.
She nodded.
"How long have I been here?"
"A few days," Jane murmured.
"Who has access to this room?" he asked, earlier noting the keypad on the reinforced door.
Jane listed off the small handful of people allowed in the room.
"How many people know I am here?"
Jane shrugged, "I don't know."
"Disable the lock," Bane stated as he rose from the chair, not wanting to be interrupted by the short list of people who could enter the room without much notice.
