Chapter Twelve: She Remains
Bane's words were steeped in regret at some points, his mechanical tone heavy, other moments, his pitch grew high, his chest puffing with pride as he looked forward to flexing his strength.
Sofia cast frequent glances over at him as he detailed Doctor Crane's Kangaroo Court, his opinion of the Straw Man was barely concealed in his mechanical grunts.
Bane looked over his shoulder and at the small backseat of the compact car as he told her Talia's plans of having Gordon and his accomplices exiled to the ice.
"What's in the bag?" he asked, referring to the burlap-colored designer bag. The store's couture vessel was sturdy, thick-handled, seaworthy.
"That?" Sofia asked, "that's for you, but that comes later," she murmured, trailing off as traffic came to a slow crawl because of a four-car pileup, needing to focus on the road.
Bane knew the store from the broken windows on Main Street but couldn't imagine what it could contain for him.
As he tore his eyes from the bag in the backseat and over the hood at the snarled traffic, downtown in that same store, a mannequin stood decapitated after its head had been knocked off during the looting.
Close to naked, its arms ripped off, the lacy slip had slipped to settle around her narrow, plastic waist, revealing perky, plastic tits, becoming a Goddess, a veritable Winged Victory still standing amongst the carnage.
Sofia found she didn't need to prompt Bane to continue speaking or prod him for details as he continued outlining all that Talia al Ghul had planned for eviscerating Gotham City, for turning the skies red from nuclear fusion and poisoning the earth with radioactive isotope fallout, for desecrating the soil for thousands of years.
After Sofia navigated the car past the congestion, she continued at a quick clip towards the outskirts of the city and the insulated hangar where her plane was being housed.
Bane picked up her travel mug from the console and unscrewed the metal cap. He sniffed the empty thermos; the faint remnants of a sweet aroma slipped through the front of his mask and teased his surgically repaired nostrils.
"Have you ever questioned Talia?" Sofia asked, signaling to pass a slow-moving truck.
Behind his mask, Bane's lips settled into a grim line. "Questioned?"
"Sure," Sofia replied without delay, "do you follow her without question?"
Bane didn't address her words entirely as he replied, his tone measured, controlled. "Talia rose from a place men have not, reached places others have not."
Sofia scoffed.
Bane's nostrils flared as he whipped his head towards her. "You do not know Talia al Ghul."
Sofia shrugged, "I know what I've seen, and I'll gladly fly her up higher than any height she's reached and see if she can fucking fly."
"What have you seen?" Bane asked, knowing Sofia had seen Talia in situations he could not be, due to the attention and distraction he invited.
"Do you really need me to tell you what I've seen?," Sofia asked, continuing when Bane remained mute. "The Talia now is certainly not who you risked your life for," she stated.
Bane didn't agree out loud, he knew Talia peddled her body and soul in order to carry out her plan of vengeance.
He'd heard whispers of Talia's actions in her pursuit of avenging Ras al Ghul.
The Talia who gave him directives was not the Talia who rose from The Pit.
Bane lapsed into silence the rest of the way towards the hangar that was surrounded by a vast field dotted with wildflowers and weeds masquerading as flowers.
His mind swirled with everything he'd suppressed in regard to Talia, he was confronted with everything he'd been seeing for years at once, his temporal arteries pulsed, the pressure in his skull turned enormous, his cranial seams under pressure, threatening to split as though he was sinking to the bottom of the ocean and threatened by forces exponentially stronger than himself.
Sofia let him marinade in silence in the passenger seat as she fiddled with the satellite radio, settling on a Breaking News episode of Lemon's Drops.
Since the explosion at the football stadium, Dawn Lemon was on the air without a break, except to powder her nose.
Dawn's journalism was beginning to sound like she was shouting from a balcony in Eastern Europe about a unified Reich.
Sofia listened for a few minutes before chucking as she switched to a station playing a countdown of the best songs from film soundtracks.
The remainder of the drive was without traffic or any other incidents.
Bane was broken from his forced death march down memory lane when Sofia yanked up on the emergency brake handle and cut the engine.
They walked close to side-by-side to the locked doors.
Bane watched impassively as Sofia punched in a numeric code on the keypad, the high pitch beeps the only sounds behind those naturally occurring as life happened.
Once inside the vast hangar, Bane stood a sentry until Sofia gestured to several places he could sit as she rinsed out and refilled the electric tea kettle.
His attention was split between watching her and looking at the large shopping bag she'd set on the worktable, he couldn't help but notice she handled the bag with care.
"Where did you go?" Bane asked, speaking to Sofia's back.
She waited to answer until she'd prepared two cups of tea.
Sofia settled across from him, settling his mug of tea on the table in between them.
Bane grew still when Sofia named a place in North Africa.
A location that had vanquished and destroyed countless lives.
Darkness.
Home.
"I paid a lot of money for a tour without headphones," Sofia murmured as she sipped her tea, pinching an orange petal from her tongue as she told Bane of hiring a dozen hard men to guide her to The Pit.
She'd flown a smaller, sleeker plane, didn't file a flight plan and stayed low enough to avoid radar.
Sofia had been Jesus fucking Christ in the desert with her twelve apostles, each armed to the teeth with fire power and serrated blades.
Death by exsanguination the only absolution they offered.
Bane remained rooted to the uncomfortable, creaky chair as Sofia rose, continuing to speak as she retrieved the couture shopping bag.
"You thought your mother had been struck from existence because of what she was charged with, false accusations of harm against the monarchy, erased because they needed someone to blame for the young boy's death," she said as she returned to the table.
Bane's breath hitched out of sync with his automated aerosolized respiration as Sofia reached into the bag and withdrew a dull bronze urn, the size of a half-gallon milk carton.
"You thought all trace of her was gone but I brought her back to you, she is still matter, even without a corporeal body," Sofia whispered as she pushed the urn across the table.
Bane barely heard Sofia explain that the doctor in The Pit that had mostly put his broken body together had kept his mother's body when she died shortly after childbirth.
The doctor hadn't wanted her body desecrated by the mongrels that roamed around in the darkness.
He didn't want her corpse violated by the once bipeds who now slithered around on their soft bellies.
The doctor didn't wanted the diseased cocks of the criminals to rape her eternal stillness.
He'd carefully cleaned her corpse and wrapped her in multiple layers of perfumed muslin before lividity set in and stained the back of her body a deep purple.
"You risked much Sofia," Bane was finally able to say, his body paralyzed, unable to move.
She smiled, "you need to know she isn't truly gone," Sofia whispered as she pushed the urn containing the ashes of his mother further towards him.
Bane's arms were leaden as he reached out for the urn, cool under his fingertips as he pulled it closer, there hadn't been much to cremate, the bronze urn contained far less ashes than a freshly dead corpse.
"Tell me how you found her," he rasped as he stared at the urn, turning it slowly in his large hands.
Sofia had pieced together The Pit's location from hearing Talia tell her stories of escape so often, the stories of her rising from The Pit grew louder and more boisterous as she drank pricey sparkling wine, the bubbles teasing their way down her throat.
Sofia found it a struggle to not roll her eyes or pantomime jerking off a random dick at Talia's boasts and shameless brags.
The dozen battle-forged men that Sofia flew to another continent didn't ask questions when the fiery pilot produced banded stacks of cash and a directive to keep her physically safe.
As Sofia skimmed over the flight and detailed driving to The Pit, Bane never asked any questions, his gaze softened as he stared at the urn containing the remains of his mother.
Sofia told him of the unyielding men that protected her the entire way, rigid warriors that were anxious to spill blood and take lives in the vein of a tourist collecting souvenir shot glasses and refrigerator magnets.
The doctor that had attempted to save the life of Bane's mother and later, successfully, saving Bane's life had long been torn asunder, his limbs scattered about like William Fucking Wallace's.
Bane admired the urn, rubbing the scarred pads of his fingertips on the brushed bronze surface.
The dull, smooth surface reflected his face, distorted.
Bane could see Sofia reflected as well, her lips moving as his genetic sequencing remembered his mother, each rung of his double helix fell apart, the ladder collapsing as Sofia described dressing in heavy layers due to the hot, desert air, continuing to smoke her clove cigarettes down to the filter despite her perpetually parched throat.
Only one foolish attempt was made to touch her by a man in filthy shrouds, one of her twelve who was more familiar with pain and suffering than mother's milk, whipped a wickedly curved blade through the air. His wrist flicked as he effortlessly opened up several arterial intersections of the would-be attacker with his partially covered face.
The man bled out in under fifteen seconds from severed, bilateral, carotid, radial and femoral arteries.
No one else attempted to touch Sofia Bishop.
The men had broken off into quadrants, several accompanying her into the heart of The Pit, finding where the doctor had practiced his medicine for decades. Sofia had purchased intel amidst the region in advance, had made a lot of friends with her vital talent of harnessing the skies over the years.
She followed a set of notes she'd jotted on the inside of a pack of matches from The Copper Skillet. The sloppy characters led her to a rock wall that looked natural to the untrained eye, but she was told there was something behind it, she was told not to expect a cache of casks.
A pair of the mercenaries used short pickaxes to open up the carefully compiled rocks, tearing down the wall to reveal the meticulously wrapped remains of Bane's mother.
The muslin was stained a sickly yellow after the time that had passed, under the wrappings, his mother was fragile, her skin stretched taut, paper thin.
A handful of the fighters bowed their head in respect as Sofia gathered up Bane's mother in her arms.
Sofia whispered to the wrapped frailty that she was returning her to her son as the mercenaries escorted her safely back to the plane.
"Why did you do this?" Bane finally asked.
It was Sofia's turn to simmer in silence, "because part of you has remained behind in The Pit," she said as she reached out and settled her hands over his as she added. "I want to raise you towards the light, you can some shed the darkness."
Bane thought of his mother's words written to him in those final hemorrhagic moments.
"We will soar to great heights together?" Bane asked.
Sofia smiled, "as long as we both have life, we will chase the horizon."