As Blake's body was zipped up in a dark blue cadaver bag and prepared for transport to the Gotham City morgue, back at the sprawling encampment, Jane scrutinized her neat line of stitches before applying the final square bandage, taping it into place.
Bane reached down and captured her closest hand after she taped the last corner of the gauze into place, squeezing her wrist too hard.
Jane winced slightly at the unnecessary pressure as she brought her eyes to his, blinking once as she waited for him to speak.
The removal of the straw which allowed Bane to breathe had hurt considerably when Jane had pulled it from the wet wound, fleshy bits stuck to the end of the biodegradable green straw.
Bane shifted his grip until he could close his hand around hers, weaving their fingers together, he pulsed his grip, rhythmically trying to coax Jane to speak the words he wanted to hear.
"Jane?"
She kept her other hand pressed against his dense flesh, her palm resting on the bare skin of his midsection as he kept the pressure on her hand firm.
"What is it?" she finally asked when Bane drifted back into silence while never taking his roiling chestnut irises off of her.
"Will you give me more?"
"Haven't I made it clear that I'm not trying to go anywhere?" she rebutted.
He knew she'd had numerous opportunities to attempt an escape, she'd win in a sprint with his diminished capacity. He'd never seen her even glance at a clearing.
"What more do you want, tattoo your name on my forehead?" Jane sharply added.
With his grip remaining on her hand, Jane tapped his list and the space for one or maybe two names depending on the size of each letter. "Who goes here?"
As Jane tapped the end of the page, drops of blood and other fluids from the straw removal fell from her fingertip and landed on several of the handwritten names.
The first blush colored drop of blood-tinged saline splashed onto the name of Robert Ales, the CEO of the OWL Newsgroup.
The second drop of fluid soaked into the paper fibers, making the capital 'C' swell in the name of Congressman Brett Cullen.
Before Bane captured her hand mid-tap, the last drop of rust-colored skin prep solution landed wetly in the dead center of the lowercase 'o,' of Lucius Fox.
Bane was conflicted, he'd never questioned his devotion to Talia, his loyalty.
Until his death* and resurrection* as Jane had been standing next to the surgical-steel table much in the same way Mother Mary came to visit her son after the large stone had been rolled away.
As Bane's thought-processing center whirled to construct a coherent answer to Jane's question, hours, and hours away, in Florence, at a café on the banks of the Arno, Bruce Wayne ordered a Fernet-Branca to accompany his watercress and arugula salad.
He didn't look much like the hero of Gotham City, presumed to have sacrificed himself for the people, with his bruised face and swollen knuckles. No one took notice of the well-dressed man in the nice coat sitting by himself.
Later, as the number of assassinations in Gotham City climbed, Bruce would catch wind of it and decide to return, not having a clue as to what waited for him upon his return.
Selena would catch an article about the targeted, somehow connected but not, murders in Gotham City. She found it left behind on a table along with a poor tip, spilled coffee, crumbs aplenty and the newspaper.
She would pull her second-skin bodysuit from the back of her closet and return to Gotham City when the number of murders didn't show any sign of stopping.
In the perceived privacy of the stolen Gotham City Morgue van, Bane found his voice, "I want you to need me as much as I need you," he admitted.
Jane's lips pulled into a sad smile, "are you sure you don't think you need me because you're still healing, what about when you're back to full strength?"
"I'm certain," he rasped.
"How do you need me?" she asked in a strained whisper.
Bane tugged her closer, forcing her to move where his pull dictated.
He released her wrists and shifted his hands in order to pull her closer, a growl of satisfaction rumbled through his broad chest as he wrapped her up in his arms.
"Be careful," Jane cautioned, thinking of the freshly sutured wound.
Her concern for his freshly closed wound made her eyes drop to the square gauze taped to his side.
Bane watched her eyes glaze over as she lazily moved her gaze along the naked skin she could see, her fingertips tingling to trace the scarred topography of his broad body.
Jane flushed as she broke away from staring, bringing her eyes to his face, hearing the unasked question in his frown.
She blushed harder as she chuckled, raiding a hand to hover over his heart. "I was just thinking of how I'd been planning my exam on you before you woke* up."
Bane held her eyes as he shifted around until he could slip out of the rest of his clothes until he was lying naked on the smashed together gurneys.
Jane pressed her lips together, her breath coming faster as Bane captured the wrist of her hovering hand and lowered it until her palm was resting over his flaccid thickness. "Touch me however you want Jane," Bane growled.
A gentle flush remained on Jane's features as the corners of her lips turned up into a small smile as she kept her hand resting over his softened length, tempted to let her hand linger.
"Well, I wouldn't have started here," she said as she looked up and met his unblinking eyes, the irises swirling with varying shades of coffee and chocolate.
Bane relaxed his shoulders back against the makeshift bed and let his arms splay out to the sides, trying to mollify how intimidating he knew he was even at his diminished capacity.
"Show me how are you do your work," he growled, his eyes never leaving Jane's, warmly aware that she hadn't taken her hand away from his cock.
Jane cleared away the wrappers and plastic debris from his wound care while she murmured, "I would carefully inspect your body, search for your cause of death, scrutinize every part of you for evidence," she added as she trailed her fingers down one of his muscular forearms and traced the pads of her fingertips over his nail beds. "I'd scrape under here," she said before dancing her fingers across his broad chest.
"I'd search your clothes as I took them off you, inspecting your skin for scars, tattoos, or evidence of past injury or surgery. Sometimes X-rays can be valuable to reveal any anatomical abnormalities or any kind of internal injury that I can't see with the naked eye," Jane added as she drew her index finger down a thick scar that ran down his side.
Jane couldn't stop a chuckle from slipping between her lips as she swept up a lingering square wrapper for a square gauze bandage.
"What part of the exam were you thinking of Jane?" Bane asked, fishing for something illicit.
Jane let herself laugh, "nothing quite like what you're thinking," she said as she drew a large Y on his muscular chest, each arm of the Y starting at a shoulder joint, meeting in the middle over the xiphoid process of where his ribs met and down in a straight line. "I'd open you up," she said, "use a bone saw to cut through here," Jane added as she paused her touch to look up at him.
Bane lapsed into carefully attentive silence as she described removing his intestines first, cutting attachment tissues, freeing the other organs.
Jane stated how she'd examine each organ before dissecting a piece for further lab testing if relevant. She glossed over describing the process of disarticulating him deeper and further, her words ended up falling into an incoherent mumble as she thought about collecting and testing body fluids from his urine, blood, bile in his gallbladder to the gel from his fiery chestnut eyes.
She mumbled about how'd she'd gather up all the organs after she was done and secure them back inside his abdominal cavity before closing him up. She paused, thinking of a couple of the other medical examiners that took short cuts with their stitches, the people ended up looking like homemade rag dolls.
Jane always took time for a neat incision, even if the body was going directly to the crematorium.
Bane's admission broke into Jane's thought-process, abruptly bringing her back to the present moment.
"I want you to want what I want, need what I need."
Jane slowly dragged her eyes up the front of his naked body, eventually meeting his eyes, glossy as his lust grew. "Tell me what that looks like," she murmured.
As Bane told Jane of the future he imagined, she couldn't help but feel taunted by the blank space at the end of his handwritten list. Jane could see it on her periphery, had to fight not to stare at it.
As Bane described a future past the city he was incrementally bringing to its knees before he severed the carotid and bled Gotham City dry, his disciples continued to methodically carry out his instructions and obey His commandments.
Gotham City would soon be reduced to a pulsing dead star by Bane's followers as the sermon he gave by the warmth of the firelight and shared a feast he'd ordered Tom Sky to procure. His disciples took lives, spilled blood, and brought reckoning as they became his will and word.
Much like the fictional book within the widely published Bible, in the book of Revelation when the first seal was opened, much like the white horse sent out to conquer with a bow and crown, so did his followers.
The balding blonde Halo lit a cigarette and took a deep breath before walking into one of Gotham City's lush parks that had remained relatively unscathed with all of the destruction and firepower.
He put together enough coins to buy a hotdog from a vendor standing under a bright red and yellow umbrella before walking through the park to Gotham City's National Bank, walking inside and making a beeline to the branch manager's office.
Before security could stop Halo, he loaded a smooth-shafted arrow to a bow, the notched end arrow with the razor-sharp tip and bow had been stolen from the back of a sporting goods store as the driver went to double-check the pick-up manifest.
The end of the arrow buried itself at the base of the branch manager Kennedy Daggett's throat, cousin of the recently deceased John Daggett.
Halo was able to light another cigarette, but four of the six fired bullets hit square in the center of his body, poking holes through his lungs before he could pull in and hold a bountiful cloud of nicotine.
Across the city, the second seal opened, instead of an actual red horse and a rider armed with a sword, young Ezekial with his rich mane of inky black hair and equally terrible case of cystic acne, bought a roundtrip ticket and deliberately boarded the wrong Gotham City bus.
He had just a few minutes to plant the pipe bomb and start the timer before security informed him he was on the wrong bus.
Ezekial offered his exaggerated apologies and promptly boarded the correct Gotham City bus just as it was about to depart the city.
He didn't look back but felt the earth jolt beneath the bus when the bomb detonated. That particular bus had been booked for a private event; a packed bus full of actively rehabilitating Blackgate Prison guards were killed in a frightfully short amount of time. The full bus had been destined to a wooded area for a retreat in a therapeutic bid to help their PTSD at the hands of Bane's followers when the city was on the brink of falling.
The opening of the second seal and the red horse of bloodshed ended their lives once and for all at the direction of Bane, his murderous marionette never looked back to see the cloud of smoke, a spontaneous cremation attended by noxious diesel fumes.
The third seal opened up and instead of a black horse emerging and prancing up the steps of The Gotham Exchange, it was six men in custodial coveralls in a shade of oatmeal. They entered the Exchange and dispersed to the janitorial closets, rolling out mop bucks filled with grey, brackish water and pulling out MAC-10's, beginning to fire on fully automatic, the two-stage suppressors made the submachine gun easier to handle and fire with the barest of pauses.
The men fired until their bullets ran dry, each reloading three times, firing a combined total of more than five-hundred .45 bullets. The last sprays of bullets had been unnecessary, most, if not all of the last third of the fired bullets lodged themselves into dead flesh.
Bullets continued to penetrate dead craniums, while nearby, the fourth seal was opened and the pale horse of death that walked into the hospital morgue was of the delicate yet invisible sibling to Troy.
The waif Pimento.
But it was not yet Pimento's time to hoist a scythe in the air, she was merely collecting data, observing and would later report back to Bane when she returned to the encampment and Jane was deeply asleep inside the van.
Pimento would whisper everything she saw as she watched the Gotham City Police Station and where Commissioner Gordon lived, who greeted Gordon at the door when Pimento had followed him home.
Both Pimento and Gordon's time would come later.