Batman Begins/Dark Knight Decrescendo

She awakens to pain. Throbbing pain. Her chest burns and wheezes, wrists strapped to a bed, an IV shoved in her arm and they are standing around her; the men that used to trust her. The police.

It is hazy but she hears one say, "She's too dangerous to be kept alive."

"We need her to find him."

"Bane's dead. He left enough blood at the scene."

"But did you find a body?"

The second man is quiet. Her monitor beeps and the smell of fresh plastic tubing suddenly chokes her. Talia tries to retch but finds herself suffocating. Not even able to control the liquid that flows inside her.

The monitor shrieks and she descends back into darkness.

* * *

The nurse that tends to her has a low voice and smooth hands. He whispers her the dates as they pass—one week first, then two. He reads her the paper and she is too tired to tell him to stop, that she doesn't want to hear about Gotham, that she only wants to know what's happened to him, where he is and if he's okay.

Did you find a body?

They didn't and she knows there's still a chance.

* * *

By the third week she is fully conscious and could read the papers herself if she wanted. But instead she focuses on finding all of her muscles again. Squeezing, then releasing. She reawakens them all one by one. She sends fire into her veins, vengeance burning up her skin as the days continue to pass.

One day the nurse helps her to walk. His hands are reassuring on her hips, guiding her forward and there is something so terribly personal and weak about the whole thing that she collapses after a few steps, feigning fatigue.

The nurse leaves. Alone, she dissolves into tears.

A few days later the police move her to a cell where she sleeps on a blanket on the floor. The sounds of small bugs scratching at her cell walls remind her of the pit, but there is no one to keep her company this time. The prison guards and detectives are brutal and frequent. They come two and three at a time. They handcuff her to a metal chair dragged in on its back legs. They slap her, beat her, humiliate her.

One of them, a new officer with fresh stubble on his cherubic face, slips a hand between her legs when the others have left. He tells her, "We don't really need to find him, you see? He's dead. This is all just for show…"

She is still too weak to fight, and instead finds herself focusing on his face.

* * *

The day she is able to do ten pushups is also the day that he comes for her.

The old prison rattles with dust when he arrives. Gunpowder, explosives burn in the air. The chains on the doors rattle. The bricks shift. She feels the vibrations of a very large man shaking the floor, closer and closer until she can smell antiseptic. Painkillers. She smells his mask, closes her eyes.

His footsteps fall in front of her and rattle the gate.

He stops, unsure. Then moves forward.

"Tali…"

"I knew you were alive."

He breathes and it echoes through the mask. It is so awful the way he is looking at her—in pity, in sympathy. His irises trace over the black eye and bruises, the cuts on her cheeks and lips. Talia feels a shiver trickling down her spine.

"Bane—"

"They beat you."

"Not now."

"No one touches you, Tali. No one but me."

They stare at each other like that and the silence billows out between them. Stiff, unmoving. She can smell the air around him, the smell of him, of his weapon and mask.

He hands her a set of knives and a gun. Then she is pulled forward by his proffered hand.

* * *

In her dreams she is 25 again. She is slimmer, faster. Her eyes are open wide, staring into the sunlight as she rests on a rock along a large creek. Bane is as she remembers him as a child. The skin on his face is smooth and unmarred. Thick lips, wet, curving into a smile as he pushes her hair out of her face.

She frowns. He is less intimidating somehow.

"You'd rather me disfigured?"

He speaks and it is his voice, not the mask. Talia tilts her head. "I have tried hard not to remember."

"But you can't forget. Your memories make you stronger."

"I am already strong."

Bane laughs and his hand slips between her knees. They tickle the flesh at the top of her thigh, curling along the edge of her underwear before plunging inside. She gasps, feels pain. There is a revolver sitting behind the rock where she rests, and she lifts it daintily as his fingers spread.

"I escaped the Pit," she says. "I was the strong one. Not you."

She puts a bullet between his legs and watches the blood spill out across his pants.

* * *

Sunlight.

His weathered fingertips brush across her hairline. She is lying on a couch in a white tiled room. White walls rise around her, broken by large panels of glass that expose their surroundings. Sand. She can smell is before she can see it. Groggily, she sits up out of Bane's lap and rests against the back of the couch.

"How did you know I would come back?" he rasps. His fingertips play with her neck, gently massaging and she tilts her head back in response.

"I came back for _you_, did I not?"

"I was dead."

She laughs but the sound gets caught in her throat. She was dead, too, for a while in there.

Finally she turns to face him, touches the mask.

"I knew because I could hear you breathing," she whispers. "At night. When it was quiet. It was almost like you were breathing inside of me."

* * *

They sit for a while, but Bane is constantly moving. His limbs are jerky, muscles twitching. His eyes narrow into the hallway.

The knives she clutches close to her chest. She slept with them on the plane ride out here and now she sweats against them. The air stirs. Sand thrashes against the glass doors and she feels her own muscles tensing.

Bane chuckles. "Is there no one to trust anymore?"

A sudden flash of movement to their right. Flickering. Her unused muscles stretch and flex.

The man has a knife in his throat before she even knows she's thrown it. A black suit hides the gurgling blood. Feds. How did they make it out here undetected? With their pale skin and smooth fingers, black suits against the grainy finite pieces of sand. She can smell the man's cologne and it reminds her of the young officer in the cell. The one whose face she can't forget.

Bane pulls her away. His hand crushes hers as he breathes, gasps through the mask, barking orders but there is no one to take them because it was an inside job.

He realizes it a moment after she does.

"The back," he grumbles.

Giant hands grip the automatic machine gun and wrench it up to his side, blasting a hole through a wall to their left. Sand whips up in the wind. Talia grabs a machine gun from a dead man and wraps it around her body, still painfully slower than she'd like.

They shuffle through the kitchen and footsteps rattle the tiles behind them.

There is a sleek black helicopter towards the back of the house. Two armed men stand in front of it. Bane takes one down with a smattering of three shots and Talia hits the other in the eye with a small switchblade.

Old muscles twitch and fester, remembering who they are.

"You pilot," Bane wheezes.

But to where?

There is no where they can go that the rest of the world won't find them.

* * *

They fly almost a full tank, 700 miles, before having to stop to refuel. The sand turns to rock, grainy beige to a withered green and almost constant grey. Weeds climb up around boulders and suffocate. She knows this place.

"Russia."

Bane nods as she settles the craft a few miles outside a small city. "We head east. Mongolia."

"You planned?"

"As far as placing a truck just outside this city," his eyes flicker. "But not much further."

They walk, quickened by fear, across the boulders and jagged rocks and escarpments until they reach the city. Bane has close to five thousand dollars in cash. He wraps his face in a black cloth while Talia buys food and supplies in the city center.

Here the risk of exposure is low—the people have battered skin, weathered faces partially hidden in cloth from the wind, their eyes mistrustful but not conspiratorial. There are no televisions. It is almost on the opposite side of the world from Gotham.

But not far enough.

As she stores the supplies in the back of the large jeep Bane bought earlier, she can't help but think of the prison back in Gotham. It irks her. It springs goosebumps from her skin. Why think of that place? Why not somewhere else? The Pit was much worse, surely. Death was a constant threat.

Deep down, though, she knows the difference.

The difference was the hand that slipped between her legs. The difference was the nurse that held her so tenderly and the tubes that tied her down to help her breathe. It was the loss of power; the loss of herself.

Bane throttles the engine, sending the car roaring to life. His hands clench the steering wheel. She doesn't know when he last slept or for how long. Black bags hang under the eyes that she treasures so much and it hits her then how long it's been since they last touched.

Her hand slips across the top of his shaved head, feeling the smooth skin beneath her fingertips. Bane's breathing speeds up. He glances over to her, then back to the road. "You've grown soft," he says. "I've never seen you like this."

"Soft how?"

He shifts. "Your eyes. It is… What did they do—"

"Perhaps I am fatigued, Bane. Perhaps it is because I no longer need to be so impenetrable."

She can almost hear his tortured lips puckering. "No. It's much more than that, isn't it?"

* * *

They hit snow and ice just as the sun is rising on the horizon. Talia clenches the door, memories of the prison fading in and out as orange sunrise flashes across the barren landscape. She closes her eyes and smells cologne, feels starched cotton, a hand with a ring. She hears a zipper being lowered and her eyes pop open again, blinded by the sun's rays.

Her breath expels a fine grey mist now. It is much colder here, different from any place they've known before.

They roll over huge piles of snow, tires crunching, before finding an outcropping of rock that has an entrance. Hidden on the side of a small mountain, the front two boulders part slightly in front of them. Talia ventures in alone, scanning the surrounding walls, the cavernous ceilings. Here the wind is cut off. She can hear it howling outside but she can't feel it on her skin.

For the first time in a long time, a smile flickers across her face.

* * *

Hours later they are lying on a thick cot made of straw, covered in thermal blankets. A fire flickers between the stones as Bane's hand roams over her body. He reaches her thighs and she stiffens. She swallows. Her throat is raw as she expels the sharp air.

Bane says, "I hope I killed him."

"Who?" she asks.

"The man that hurt you."

Talia tilts her head. She is weak now, in a way that deeply embarrasses her, and her eyes flicker to the ceiling. She forces the muscles in her legs to relax. "I could have killed him myself."

"You were still recovering."

"I should have killed him."

"Things change."

He says it so oddly. Like he is reading the last line on the last page of a long book. Her hips twist, open for him, but her mind refuses to quiet itself. What now, she wants to say. Is this it? Her steady decrescendo? Will she spend the rest of her life trying to forget, hunting food, and keeping house?

Bane's hand disappears beneath the silk fabric of her underwear.

Deep down she knows it isn't enough.


End file.
