Chapter Nine: Pre-Game
Bane's eyes widened, barely perceptible unless one was looking closely.
Sofia saw all of him as she lowered herself back down, the soles of her shoes in complete contact with the damp, concrete floor before reaching for one of his hands.
"Let's get out of here," she whispered, despite the solitary confinement of her workspace.
Bane allowed her to tug him by the hand and lead him out of the Gotham City Sewer System to where she had a nondescript car parked. On the outside, the beige hybrid shell concealed a fuel-eating, greenhouse gas producing, ozone destructing combustion engine.
Noxious exhaust belched from the tail pipe as Sofia downshifted, the hybrid façade of the car straining as it attempted to contain the climbing revolutions per minute.
It was quiet inside the car, warm from the heat pouring off the ravenous engine.
Sofia took the scenic route towards the airfield where her C130 was nestled in a reinforced steel hangar, round-the-clock security generously provided by Talia.
She was disappointed she wouldn't be able to take her steel beast into the air, instead planning on taking up a small Cessna.
Her thoughts of what her false flight plan would look like were interrupted as Bane settled his hand over hers, where it rested on the stick shift.
Sofia looked over as Bane gave a firm squeeze, his large palm warm as it engulfed her hand.
"Where are we headed Sofia?" Bane asked as she looked over at him briefly before returning her eyes to the road, the miles disappearing quickly under the fast-moving tires.
"Have you seen Gotham City from the sky at night?" Sofia asked.
"I have not."
"It's beautiful to witness," she murmured as she flicked her eyes to the tachometer as it was climbing close to red lining.
"There's more beauty to witness without my feet leaving the ground," Bane rasped, the words accompanied by a mechanically hissing percussion.
Bane couldn't see the touch of color that filled her cheeks in the car's dim interior at his words.
Sofia merely pushed the engine harder, anxious to be up in the air.
During the time that Bane was not performing Talia's bidding, she was out traipsing through Gotham City, infiltrating Applied Sciences, oozing across the tile floor, leaving a snail trail as she got Lucius Fox to buy her benevolent act, her grace and seductive philanthropy.
While Talia, masquerading as the tasty Miranda Tate, ingratiated herself to Fox, Alfred and Wayne had a spat, a quarrel.
Nasty words were exchanged, harsh truths revealed.
Wayne and Fox discussed the succulent Miranda Tate and everything she had to offer and open besides her sustainably sourced diamond-encrusted wallet.
Miranda could've taken a celebratory lap in her stilettos when Fox finally took her to the reactor.
She had to be careful to conceal the ecstasy that threatened to show on her face, keeping her tone even, taking on the affectation of one who is genuinely demure.
Everyone eagerly lapped up the falsity that Miranda spilled from between her luscious lips.
No one saw the genetically mutated succubus that lurked just beneath Miranda Tate's clear complexion.
Nobody saw the demon behind Miranda's sparkling eyes, her pupils shuddering in anticipation of razing Gotham City to the ground, the radiation contaminating the soil for thousands of years, making it uninhabitable, zero viability for human life.
Wayne grew more and more eager to bury his cock in her duplicitous cunt.
Sofia set a record time for getting to the airfield, Bane kept his hand over hers on the stick shift, wordlessly admiring her profile and the shape of her body he knew was under her baggy coveralls.
The small Cessna was painted a rich blue with bright yellow accents, the tail numbers in the same golden yellow hue.
Bane waited by the tail of the plane while Sofia filed her false flight plan and other data that attributed ownership of the small plane elsewhere.
While Sofia was jotting down the license number of a bogus pilot and other fake credentials, she called Talia on her compact satellite phone.
Talia picked up after the third ring.
Sofia kept the call brief, telling Talia in an uncompromising, succinct manner that she needed a little personal time, not a terribly long time.
Talia was compelled to say yes, hard-pressed to say no to her prized pilot.
She didn't tell Sofia it was actually quite a convenient time for her to flutter off to wherever she needed to be since there was much to prepare in anticipation of the upcoming football game between the Gotham Rogues and the Rapid City Monuments.
Sofia scribbled someone else's name on the flight manifest after she ended the call with Talia.
As she walked back to where Bane was waiting, she felt a slight sting of guilt that she should tell Bane where she was going, what she had planned.
Bane knew by watching Sofia talk from a distance, even absence her words, that the phone call was one of significance.
"Everything is okay?" he asked, his eyes glued to the frown that pulled at Sofia's forehead.
"There's a problem with one of my credit cards," Sofia murmured easily as she walked past Bane and opened the squeaky door on his side of the small aircraft.
Sofia taxied to the runway; bright white lights illuminated the asphalt path. The small plane rose into the air, climbing until Sofia leveled out the aircraft just around 10,000 feet.
Gotham City was a glittering landscape below them, the moonlight illuminated the ocean, cars were moving dots of colors, the bridge and buildings resembled constellations.
"Isn't it lovely?" Sofia asked as she looked out the side window.
"Yes," Bane answered without hesitation, staring at Sofia, not sparing attention for any other view.
He watched her flick a couple toggle switches and adjust a dial before she radioed to the nearest tower her altitude and airspeed.
"Who were you talking to on the phone?" Bane asked after she ended the transmission with the tower.
Sofia glanced over at him, "Talia," she answered as she fished her battered packet of clove cigarettes from one of her coverall pockets.
Bane waited for her to add more, behind his mask, he pressed his lips together in the continued silence.
It was seemingly eons before Sofia volunteered her voice.
"Something came up that I need to tend to."
"You're leaving Gotham City?"
"Just a few days I hope," Sofia said as she looked over at Bane.
"Where are you traveling?"
"Hmmm, I'm still working that out," she lamely managed as she lit the end of her cigarette, taking a deep inhale, filling her lungs with the perfumed smoke.
"You're not going to tell me more," Bane stated, his tone low, mechanically oozing.
"No," Sofia murmured as she flicked ash into the already overflowing ashtray.
"Are you coming back?"
"Yes," she said without a shred of hesitation.
Sofia would return to Gotham City.
She would land a borrowed plane on the runway of the private airstrip the same day that the Rapid City Monuments checked out of the exclusive The Gotham and headed towards the Gotham Rogues stadium for the big game.
While Bane decided to not press Sofia for answers she wasn't going to give and allowed himself to look at the landmarks around Gotham City, making him see what he was going to burn, down in the heart of Gotham City in the board room of Wayne Enterprises, Talia continued to keep all of her balls in the air, irons in the fire and yellow ribbons around every goddamned tree to keep her plan of liberation moving forward.
Talia split her time between being completely herself and wearing the beautiful flesh suit of the refined Miranda Tate.
During the time that Sofia would be away, Miranda would take over the boardroom.Talia would deepen her foothold in the Miranda façade while Sofia was abroad, in an unwelcome space, with no shelter from the sun's heat.
Sofia had brought a handful of Talia's nameless, armed men to accompany her. Hard men with empty eyes who'd pillow-smothered their own fears upon birth.
While Sofia was gone, Bane's thoughts were constantly consumed with her, churning, not knowing what a precarious situation his hothouse flower was in, the unforgiving climate she was treading.
After leisurely circling the city and out over the roiling, angry and alive Atlantic, Sofia returned the plane to the remote airstrip and spacious, reinforced hangar.
She set the plane down without much bounce under the thickly treaded tires.
Bane didn't want her to open his door, hastily pushing it open before she could lay a hand on her own.
They walked towards the hangar, side by side, from afar, they looked casual.
Comfortable next to each other.
Bane and Sofia traded long glances at each other, sneaky, secretive, each looking away when they were caught.
Bane's fingertips tingled to a point just shy of aching, wanting to settle a hand between her shoulder blades, slide his warm palm to rest on the smooth curve of her lower back, his fingertips grazing the curve of her bottom.
They reached the locked double doors before his torment ended about whether or not to touch her.
Sofia punched in a numeric code on the keypad and nodded a greeting to one of the guards on site at all times.
"Sit wherever you'd like," Sofia said after she opened a second set of locking doors, flicking on a set of lights.
Bane looked around the large room within the vast hangar. The ceiling seemed like it ended in the stratosphere, no light reached there, anything could've been hiding in the darkness.
He sat on a sturdy bench, not much furniture was in her temporary living space.
As Sofia bustled around turning on an electric kettle of water for tea, Bane let his eyes dance around the room. Her bed was neatly made, the bed linen was in a soft shade of grey blue, a single pillow at the head of the firm mattress.
There weren't many trinkets or baubles about, no picture frames or anything of a personal touch except an ash tray that was well-used, painted a vibrant bubblegum pink.
As Sofia moved about the small kitchen area, Bane walked over and picked up the bright ash tray.
A picture was embedded in the glass bottom, a picture of Sofia nestled against the side of a much taller man.
Bane squinted at the image of the man, the glass over his face was chipped, multiple cigarettes had been extinguished, creating a murky remnant of the man.
He traced the pad of his thumb over the gouged glass that distorted the male's face, forever etched from existence.
Bane's eyes had more interest for the still frame of Sofia, the picture showed her smiling broadly, her hair long and loose, wearing a tank top that showcased the bare skin at the top of her chest. He narrowed his eyes when he saw there was no blemish on the skin over her breast, no mound of scar tissue.
Sofia's voice behind him broke Bane's concentration.
"Do you ever take that off?"
He turned to see her holding a small tray of wheat crackers with large chunks of sea salt, sliced rounds of salami and a handful of green grapes, their skin taut.
"It would be incredibly painful."
"Do you need to eat?" Sofia asked as she settled on a squat chair across from him, setting the tea and tray down on a small tabletop.
Bane shook his head, returning to the bench as she sandwiched a piece of salami between two crackers.
He did require sustenance, but he performed it in private. In order to obtain the proper nutrition and caloric load his body required, he needed to slip a plastic nasogastric tube through the front of his mask and guide it without sight through a nostril and down to his belly, administering a total nutrition in a liquid form from a bloated IV bag, the solution a creamy beige in color.
"Why hold onto something that you find offensive?" Bane asked as he set the pink ashtray on the table before picking up the tea, lifting it to the front of his mask, inhaling deeply. The scent of orange blossoms filled his lungs.
Sofia smiled sadly as she looked down at the ashtray, "not offensive, it's all I have as a souvenir of a different time, a different life."
Bane touched the scarred tip of his index finger to the smooth skin over her heart in the photo before gesturing towards her across from him, "tell me what happened to bring you here," he said, reaching across the table, pulling sown the zipper to expose her disfigured skin. "Tell me how this happened," he added as he caressed the grotesque skin malformation.
Bane watched in slow-motion as the tip of Sofia's tongue darted out to snag a chunk of sea salt from her lower lip before her smile wilted. "I made the mistake of following my heart," she scoffed, shaking her head as she pulled her zipper closed, strangely not wanting Bane's eyes on her skin.
"I fell in love while in service to another government," she began, naming a country that Bane was familiar with. "I met that One by chance, His vision for the future was everything I'd always thought, He had a small group working with Him, they all flew planes," she muttered as she pulled a few plump grapes from the vine.
Bane listened with rapt attention, barely blinking as she described being perverted through His words and eventually His body. Sofia didn't elaborate on the physical but Bane's mind painted picture after picture of Sofia and this other pilot, this man that had staged a coup and gotten Sofia very involved, caused her to revolt against her own government.
"I killed a lot of people that night," she remarked, not sad or proud, just factual. She'd taken countless lives as they attempted to overthrow the government.
They weren't successful.
"Five of us got to a plane, so many left behind, dead or dying," she said, her expression soft, her thoughts a million miles away as she recounted slipping into the co-pilot seat and helping her lover lift the metal beast into the air, to perceived safety, to a future He had promised her filled with days of fun and fucking, mother's milk.
"I didn't know that He had other plans," she spit, fire and anger returning to her voice and features as she gestured towards the ashtray and his broken image.
"Once we got a safe distance from our failure, He engaged the autopilot and shot our friends, my three friends before He shot me, He attempted to parachute but the chute failed to fully deploy. He got caught up on the plane and was bounced against the fuselage repeatedly until I was able to bring the plane down in friendly territory."
There hadn't been much left of her lover by the time she'd brought the plane down, his flight suit contained his battered and disarticulated body, a skinsuit practically full of jelly from the high-altitude blunt force trauma.
"I didn't know how much money He'd stashed in the plane's hold; I still had a sizeable sum left after paying for absolute discretion, medical care, and a new identity. After I healed, I bought my plane and started over," Sofia said as she bit into a cracker.
"Is that where you're going, back to where you had your old identity?"
"Oh lord no," Sofia said with a chuckle, "somewhere I've never been, a new adventure."
"You're coming back?"
"Yes," Sofia murmured as she reached for her steaming cup of tea.
Bane intercepted and grasped her hand, squeezing as he rose to his feet and yanked her assertively towards him.
"Why won't you tell me where you're going?" Bane asked on a strangled rasp as he delicately closed his fingertips around the silver pull tab of her zipper, the fabric of her coverall parting as he lowered the zipper, restraining his urgency, like trying to hold back the Atlantic tide.
"Because it could be a spectacular failure that I'd like to keep to myself, I hope not though," Sofia whispered as she allowed him to peel away every bit of clothing she was wearing.
Once she was a glorious bare vision, Bane took a small step away from her and began slipping out of his own clothes, acutely aware of the weight of her steady gaze.
Bane reached out and settled his hands on her hips, massaging his fingertips into her supple naked flesh, an appreciative growl ripped through his broad chest at the sight of her bare center.
Behind his mask, Bane licked his lips at the sight of her intimate flesh at the apex of her thighs.
He pulled her towards him, crushing their nakedness together as he continued moving them until he could sit on the edge of her bed, pulling her onto his lap, hissing with a pained pleasure as she shifted until her thighs fell to either side of his hips, her intimate wetness pressed to his hardening cock, the thick length growing further rigid as she rocked her hips forward.
"What will you do upon your return to Gotham City?" Bane asked as he gripped her hips, keeping her hips rocking in a smooth, easy rhythm, the arteries of his thickness pulsated in time with his pounding heartbeat.
"I heard that the football game is not supposed to be missed," Sophia managed on a near-breathless gasp as Bane rubbed his fingertips against her clit, smoothing through her silken folds, teasing them until wetness made his fingers slick.
Their moans were in concert as Bane teased the tip of his thickness just inside her tight opening, swirling the sensitive head of his cock just inside her wetness.
He wanted to ask other questions but could not make himself speak the words.
Bane's tongue was paralyzed, wanting answers while being afraid to ask the question.
Sofia felt the fine shudder that ran through his vast musculature, could hear his blood cells bloat with unrequitedness, his soul speaking his needs.
"Do you want to know if I'm coming back to you?" Sofia whispered as she licked her palm before reaching down and sliding her hand along his throbbing shaft, squeezing, and stroking his thickness as Bane could only nod, a mechanical groan emerging from the front of his mask.
"Yes," she murmured as she pressed her lips to the front of his mask, smelling the medicinal scent of his analgesic exhale.
She smoothed her hands up to rest on the rounded curves of his shoulders as Bane dropped his hand to his cock, echoing her shudder, a pleased growl spilled from between his scarred lips as he began to ease himself inside her, fighting with tremendous effort to not abruptly fill her wet center without any grace.
"This is your last trip without me," Bane growled as he began sliding inside her, filling her in small increments as her flesh was forced to stretch in order to accommodate his rigid length.
Sofia's breath hitched at the end of each of his impossibly deep thrusts as he increased his rhythm, certain she'd split apart as his impossible thickness filled her, stopping only when their intimate flesh kissed.
Bane smoothed his hands up and down her sides, tightening his grip around her narrow waist, keeping her in place as he pistoned himself inside her with a growing urgent rhythm.
Sofia found herself tingling from head to toe, an electric jolt rocked her core every time Bane filled her completely, their flesh wetly kissing as she was lifted with his thrusting. She could feel the veins and arteries on his arms swell with pressure from his pounding heart under the smooth pads of her fingertips as his whole body began to grow tense.
Bane wished the pain of removing his mask was not so physically decimating, he longed to have his lips pressed to hers as he filled her, wanted to share rapid exhalations.
His rhythm grew erratic as he became overwhelmed by the smell of her warm skin and intimate center squeezing around his cock.
Sofia echoed his moans, gripping his taut, muscular flesh tightly, her fingertips individual points of pressure on his bare skin as he felt himself grow close to climaxing, his balls pulling up tight to his body, a coil of pressure in his core.
Sofia's breath hitched as Bane shifted until he could raise a hand and grip her chin, smoothing the rough pad of his thumb across her lower lip. He made her gasp as he slowed his pace, bringing her body closer to the precipice of ecstasy.
"You need to come back to me," Bane demanded on a series of mechanical grunts, his breathing ragged and out of sync with the aerosolized delivery system.
Sofia could barely nod before she sharply rocked her hips, crying out as her orgasm washed over her with a deeply satisfying wave.
Her feminine center squeezed Bane's cock until he tumbled into his own orgasmic bliss and pulled her flush against his body as he spilled himself deep inside her. Bane pressed his masked face into the warm curve of Sofia's neck, longing to press his lips against the warm flesh over her erratically pounding carotid pulse, as his cock continued to pulse from where it remained deep inside her.
They both remained in silence, his rigidity still inside her, softening as they caught their breaths.
Sofia's pulse pounded too loud in her ears for her to hear Bane's admission, spoken on a low, vulnerable whisper.
"You're the one my mother foretold would bring love."