Batman Begins/Dark Knight 1. Chapter 1

WHERE YOU GO

**Chapter 1**

_"I can be just as harsh and evil as the world,_  
_But sometimes, I would rather like to be kind…"_

* * *

She had awoken in the night and her mother had not been there, and she had cried for her, the silent weeping that she had been doing since before she could remember, the kind of crying that attracted no unwanted attention. Her mother had appeared out of the darkness like a spirit, had held her close and kissed her and told her that she had only gone to the other side of the cell and there was no need to cry. Talia had burrowed her cheek into her mother's clothes and wrapped her mother's soft waves of hair around her fingers, and afterwards she remembered to look for her mother in the darkness before weeping. It was not hard. Her mother always stood in the same spot, near the cell door, gazing out expectantly at the walls of the pit.

Talia was never been allowed outside, not even when she was older. She could sit in the cell or nuzzle her face against the bars, but when she saw her mother finish braiding her hair and veiling her head, she knew she would be left alone for a time. Inevitably, she would tug her mother's dress and whisper,

"Can I come too?"

And her mother would always answer, softly but firmly,

"No, Talia." A gentle touch of her cheek. "Stay here. Wait for me."

So Talia would sit on the bed, on the blanket that was the only possession her mother had brought down with her from Outside, and watch her mother flit through the prison, feeling a squirming envy. Her mother did not know of the restlessness that overtook her daughter, how she wished terribly to be able to dash up the steps and all around the levels of the prison, to go all the way to the center, the bottom of the pit, and look up into the opening. She had memorized each way her mother took – out the cell, down a level of stairs and then to the right. She would go lower if she wanted to empty out their waste (they didn't use the communal toilet of the prison, but shared a chamber pot, the contents of which her mother threw out every day), to the left if she wanted to reach the place where food was lowered, and out of sight for… Talia didn't know. But she could find the path there too, she was sure of it.

Her mother always went when the other prisoners were in their cells, hiding her face and crouching low to the ground. Talia understood that it was dangerous to go out – how many times had a man passed by and hissed at them, or stuck a skinny arm into their cell and tried to grab them? But Talia thought there were good men in the prison too. She had seen a few. The doctor, he had always cared for her. There were others who passed by and looked at her, sometimes even talked to her. Her mother always told her not to answer, so she didn't, but she liked them. There was Limping Man, who smiled when he walked by her cell, and Crisscross Man, because he liked to tie his robe over his chest in the shape of an X. He would nod at her when she caught his eye. Tattoo Man had stopped once and shown her the inked in drawings that covered his skin, and her mother had used them to teach her colors. On his back was the color of plants in spring; over his arm, the colors of honey and butter; over his face, the color of the sky, of water. It had taken a long time for her mother to teach her that color. The only color her mother did not need to teach her was the color of blood. Talia had seen that plenty of times.

She had a ball to roll around. It wasn't really a ball, more a piece of cloth wadded up, but if her mother tied it just so, it became a bit more rounded and she could play with it in her cell while she waited. She had tried to tie it herself many times before, but the knots were too hard and her fingers too small and clumsy, and eventually she had thrown the string into a corner of the cell and cried furiously to herself. Then her mother would come, stroke her arm, and show her, again, how it was to be done, but Talia could never learn it right, do it as perfectly as her mother could.

So she rolled the ball, back and forth. She also had a pile of rocks to play with, pretty ones her mother had found for her. One of them had a white streak right down the middle; another shone when she held it at the right angle (her mother called it "crystal"), another was black, smooth and round, and yet another had small blue flecks over the surface. She liked to form piles with them, arranging them based on size or shape or color and then choosing her favorite out of them. Other times, she tried to build them up as high as she could before it toppled over.

Yesterday, her mother had shown her how to form a pyramid, layering four of the stones at the bottom and stacking the rest so that they formed a little pyramid. Talia tried this now, placing the four flattest ones on the ground in a square shape, then three on top, fitting them into the grooves of the bottom stones, then two on top of them. But her favorite part was when she would pick a rock at random and tug it free, watching the whole pile topple all over the floor. She hoped her mother could find another stone for her, so she could make a perfect pyramid.

Her pile built up as high it could go, Talia stood up and ran to retrieve her ball sitting a few feet from her. It got caught on everything – a bit of jutting stone, the sand on the floor, the rough metal of the bars catching on the cloth – and she had to get up and toddle over to pick it up. She would also toss it, watching in glee as it went to the ceiling, so high up above her. When she was small, she would jump up and down on the cot and try and reach it, but then one day she had torn the bed and her mother had been mad at her. The doctor had to come over and repair it. But there was a shelf of ledge hanging out over their cell that was even higher than their ceiling, and she wondered if she could hit it too…

She threw the ball up, and it sailed between the bars.

Talia froze. It was _outside_.

She crept over to the bars. There were men about, trailing up and down the levels of the prison, but they were always there; she noticed them no more than she did the dust in the air or the indirect sunlight that crept along their walls. They passed by, most doing no more than sending her a shifty glance, while she stared at her ball sitting outside.

She could not go out. Her mother had told her never to leave, in that stern, quiet voice that meant she was deadly serious. But it was her ball out there. What if the men took it? She knew there were kind men, but none of them had ever had a ball, or at least she hadn't seen them with it, and she couldn't fathom one of them not wanting it and stealing it when she could.

So she would not ask, or send pleading looks for help to them. She would get it back herself. Creeping over to the door, she slid her arm out between the bars, carefully, cautiously, drawing back quickly when a man passed by. When he was far away, she drew near once more, squeezing her small body up against the bars. They pressed painfully against her shoulder as she tried to reach for the ball. It did not look so far, but she needed just a bit more length. She glared at the ball, memorizing its spot, then turned her head so that it wasn't in the way and reached out as far as she could, squeezing out her shoulder and part of her body until the bar was jabbing into her back.

And suddenly she felt cloth against her fingers. A triumphant smile spread itself over her face. She grasped her ball and pulled her arm back, turning her head back around so she could see outside.

She jerked back.

There was a man kneeling there, his hand outstretched towards her and fingers cupped slightly, as if he might grab something that had rolled out the cell – or had just released something back to her.

Talia held the ball against her chest and stared. His face was covered – Covered Man, she named him. She rolled the ball over and over in her hands. The string that held it came untied from her nervous worrying, the cloth tumbling loose into her hands. She stared at it and felt a hard pain in her throat. Now her ball was gone, and just when she had it back. Her mother would remake it for her, but it always took so very long for her to return…

She folded the cloth in her small hands, wishing she could make it into a perfect triangle like her mother could. Hers had wrinkles and folds in it. She looked up at the man again, who was standing now. His head almost reached the ledge above, she realized with awe. Not even her mother was so tall. She hugged the folded cloth to herself again, then pressed it over her head like her mother would. Her mother always looked so pretty that way. She swayed back and forth like that for a few moments, feeling rather pretty herself, and thought she saw Covered Man's eyes widen slightly. He drew nearer. She hopped a few inches closer as well.

A figure appeared from behind him and moved. There was a thud, and suddenly the man had fallen to his knees. Talia backed away, pushing the cloth from her head.

From out of the shadows of the prison came her mother, her mother who had slammed her fists into the man's head, who was now rushing into the cell quicker than Talia had ever seen her. She tore the cloth from Talia's grasp, crushed it in her hands and threw it against the wall, then sank into a corner, grabbing Talia and squashing her against her chest. Her hands pinched the scant flesh on Talia's arms and she could hear her wild heartbeat in her ear, and suddenly Talia knew that her mother was scared. She began to cry, for it was a very bad thing if her mother was scared and could not protect her. By the time her mother got around to comforting her, and when Talia could finally lift her eyes to the cell door, Covered Man was gone.

Later, her mother had pulled her into her lap and hissed that she was not to cover her head or take off her pants or cry or do anything to reveal that she was a girl, and sounded so angry and scared that Talia was on the verge of tears again, even as the unfamiliar word – girl – resounded in her head.

"What's a girl?" she had whimpered.

"We are girls," her mother had said. Talia wiped at her eyes, feeling them sting as a loose thread got under her eyelid. She supposed that her mother was a girl – she certainly looked different enough from the others in the only home she knew – but Talia felt more like one of the men (that was what her mother called them) herself, with her short hair and prison clothing.

"It is dangerous to be a girl here," her mother murmured. "We are different. They will hurt you for this."

Talia had known they were different, but never had she connected the hooting men, their leering smiles and grasping hands, to this difference. She had even seen her mother attacked, her arm or dress clutched in a prisoner's hand. Her mother always managed to spring free, but Talia had seen the men hit each other as well and bleed that red color. Sometimes, she even saw her mother with that color, running down an arm or her skirt. She had hated the men, then, had wished that her mother might fight back and hurt them. But she knew it would not happen. Her mother was too good and kind to attack others. But when Talia was older, she would be big and strong and she would make sure they never hurt her mother again.

"Promise me, Talia. Tell nobody." Her mother had said it with that dark, serious look in her eyes.

"I will."

"You _won't_."

"I won't, I promise." She squeezed herself close to her.

Her mother sighed, wiping at her daughter's tear-soaked cheeks. "Shhh…. no need to cry. Let me tell you a story."

* * *

Her mother's stories were what Talia loved the most. Often, her mother would go out, and when she returned it would be with some gift for her daughter. Once, she came back with a piece of cloth that she had folded over and sewn and wrapped over Talia's body, replacing an older, worn out shirt. The pieces were always too baggy, too large for Talia, and it made her skin prickle from sweat and the roughness of the fabric. She wanted to dress like her mother, who was so beautiful in her dresses and veils.

"This is an old dress," her mother would say, and point out the stains along the sides, the fraying of the edges.

"But it's pretty," Talia insisted, feeling small and ugly in her dust-brown tunic and floppy shoes. Nobody had anything like her mother's dresses, even if it was dirty and stained.

"I knew women who had more beautiful dresses by far," her mother said. Talia curled up beside her. Whenever her mother had that tone of voice, she knew she was about to tell a story, a story about Outside. Talia had never been Outside, but she dreamed of it – a big, wide open place, full of plants (they were green blobs, for she could not imagine the soaring trees and multitude of flowers and shrubs and grasses her mother described), of water (a fuzzy blue expanse – water was a rare and precious thing in the prison), mountains in the distance (Talia could not imagine anything higher than the ledge, the prison walls), homes and buildings and all the lovely things her mother told her about.

"There was a woman, once," her mother said, "not beautiful – or most said she wasn't – but she had a dress that flowed like the wind. It was such thin fabric, thinner than this cloth," and she touched the most worn out edge of her dress, which to Talia felt it might tear if she so much as pulled on it, "and smooth. You could run your fingers over it and not get your skin caught on even a thread."

Talia examined her own hands, which were roughened from playing on the ground or grasping the bars of the prison, the nails short and uneven and which got caught on everything.

"And the colors – it was yellow at the top, but so light yellow you thought it was white, cream-white-" Talia didn't know what cream was, but she wouldn't interrupt when her mother was in this mood, "- but when it reached your chest, it had turned to gold, like the sun when it has just started to set. And it was orange too – the color of the sky when the sun has disappeared, and then pink, and red, and purple at the bottom…"

"What else?"

"The end of it was over her left shoulder; it flowed all the way to the ground, and the colors were the same as her dress, but when she walked, she never stepped on it. It would cling to her body and flow over her feet."

"And she had long hair?"

"Yes, down to her waist."

It was an incredible length; even her mother's hair only fell halfway down her back. Talia loved her mother's hair. Her mother often kept it in a braid, but Talia's favorite moments were when she took it down and let Talia run her hands through it. Sometimes, she would talk about how women washed it with liquids that made it bubble (Talia did not know what a bubble was), and perfume it, and comb it out so that they might tie it up into far more elaborate designs than her mother's simple braid. Talia didn't understand all of it, but she did know what combing was. Her mother often let her do it, using her fingers to tug out knots. Sometimes Talia would find a little white thing crawling around in it. She thought it fascinating and would let it run over her finger, but her mother always crushed them, a look of disgust on her face.

Most other times though, it was food her mother brought back, a small piece of bread they would share, a skin of water, or rarely, a piece of preserved meat.

"Which piece do you want?" her mother would ask her. She had ripped the bread in half, into two irregularly shaped and sized pieces.

Talia would point to one, and her mother would give it to her. Sometimes Talia picked the larger piece, and sometimes the smaller. Her mother said this was the best way to be fair – one would split the bread, the other would take whatever piece they wanted first. Talia didn't think so, though – after all, if she was the one who chose (her mother always insisted she did), then she was always the one who could make the other person have a smaller piece. It wasn't fair, and she thought sometimes that she ought to split the bread and let her mother choose.

But when they started eating was the best time. "What is this?" she would always ask her mother. And her mother would say it was bread, and Talia would ask, "Was there anything else?" referring to the boxes of food that was dropped down for the prisoners.

"No," her mother said, and always, "but there is more food Outside." Talia would ask her what, and as she filled her stomach, she would also fill her mind with her mother's descriptions.

"Fruits," her mother might say. Fruits? "Sweet, round things – sweet is the taste, you feel it here-" she might point to the tip of her tongue – "and it is… soft, and disappears so quickly, but it's the taste that always lasted the longest." Talia would try in vain to imagine it. On the rarest of occasions, there might be some fresh fruits or vegetables sent down, but the men always managed to grab it before her mother could. Talia had never tasted sweetness.

She didn't mind, though. It was better when her mother described them. "What kinds of fruits?" Talia would ask.

"Round ones," her mother would make a shape with her hand, "pink and red," indicating her dress, her veil for the color, "but lighter. It was mostly pink, or white, but there was red here or there." A sudden flash of inspiration. "Like your face." She indicated her cheeks. "And when you bit into them, they were soft, they melted on your tongue and the juice would squeeze out of the flesh and drip onto your skin."

Or, "Yellow, long, and smooth like the skin here." And she rubbed the underside of her wrist. "Peel the skin off and eat the inside, and it would feel… soft, but like there was a bit of sand inside." Talia made a face. She had sand in her food before, and it was awful, but her mother said it was soft sand. Or maybe, "A ball with a tip at the end, light green, and you bite it and it is like your bread, dry, and like chewing dust, but just a bit sweet."

"Do they have bread, too?"

"Yes, but the inside is white, and soft." Their bread was gritty with sand, crumbling and dark. "And you could spread things over it to make it taste better – butter that melted in the mouth and honey that would slide, slow and sticky, off the crust of the bread, and which made it salty or sweet." Talia thought she might prefer the sweet.

"What else?" she asked her mother.

"Meat, from a-" and she would give a word Talia didn't know, but she would say it was a creature with a mall body and arms that spread out and helped them to fly, soar through the air, unbelievable as it was to Talia. "The legs and wings would have honey dripping from them, sticky and sweet – it would get on your fingers and you would feel the stickiness for hours afterwards. And the meat came right off the bones and tasted… salty, but the honey made it not so much…"

Her mother had once brought her a piece of meat. It had been so hard and tough that she had spent hours chewing it, her jaws aching, before finally spitting it out when her mother wasn't looking. The taste had made her tongue feel dry and dusty.

"…and they would decorate it, with fruits and flowers."

"Flowers?"

"Yes…" And her mother fell silent for a few moments. "They are… beautiful things…" She made shapes with her hands, a center and parts flowing out of them, like wings. "All colors, but mostly red, yellow, orange, purple – and all shapes too-" And she would cup her hands and describe how one had its wings folded within itself over and over again, or another made a round shape with its petals and a yellow center. "And when you ate, there would be others playing music and singing."

Of all the things her mother had told her, it was music she could not describe, though she said it was similar to singing. At night, they would share the bed, and her mother would tell her about singing, and teach her a few songs. Talia would roll the melodies in her mind and the words in her mouth long after her mother had fallen asleep, repeating them, memorizing them, always knowing there were more and that all these things were Outside and they might see them one day.

And occasionally, her mother would tell her about her father, a brave and wise and handsome warrior who loved them both very much and was coming to rescue them. Talia loved those stories the best – not for her father, who she did not know, but for her mother, who looked so much happier when telling them. Her eyes would grow wider, her gaze far away, and her hands would move with more energy as she described how her father had fought off twenty men and been made leader of an army.

But the story always ended sadly. It always ended with the warrior gone and her mother in the prison, and when Talia asked if there was any more, her mother said there was none. And it was the first story Talia knew, and so she would always be surprised when later stories had happier, satisfying endings.

Yet she was always afraid when she asked for stories, because always her mother would sigh and say, "That's enough stories," and leave Talia alone on the bed to take her place at the cell bars, looking up at the walls of the prison. Other times, she would simply stop and be sad and still. Talia hated those moments, when the silence descended on them so that the very air seemed heavier, suffocating. She could never be sure what caused those moods – sometimes too much time spent looking out the cell door, sometimes when Talia asked too many questions, sometimes when the men were loud and raucous. They spat through the bars or urinated on the floor, calling to them or cursing them. Her mother would only turn her head away, while Talia watched them, a hot angry pit in her stomach, wishing they might hurt for their actions. Her mother could not do that – she was too kind and gentle – so Talia imagined instead that she hurt them herself. She would watch them and try and memorize their faces and, occasionally, feel a tiny, stinging satisfaction if she saw them hurt or die.

And then there were some days, the worst days, when there no stories. Those days, her mother would lie on the bed and not move, not speak. Talia would tug on her dress and whisper, "Mother, mother…"

And when she still did not get up, Talia would sit there, rolling her ball slowly around the cell and waiting. Sometimes, Talia would see her mother cry, and then Talia would curl against her mother's back and twist her dress in her fingers. Those were the worst times, Talia hiding her face and trying not to cry because her mother was crying and it scared her so terribly.

When the crying was over, Talia crawled close to her mother. "Will my father come?" she asked, for sometimes when she asked of her father, she would make her mother smile. She wanted only to see her mother happy, to watch her eyes sparkle, but it seemed less and less often that her mother was ever happy.

Drying her eyes, her mother only said, "Perhaps."

Talia swallowed. "Why hasn't he come before? Mother?"

Her mother turned her head away. "He was exiled... he wouldn't know..." She let the sentence trail away.

Talia squeezed up closer to her. "Know what?"

Her mother shook her head. "It doesn't matter."

And Talia was left to ponder this man who her mother said was a great, strong warrior who loved them both, but who hadn't fought her grandfather, who hadn't come searching for her and her mother. Was he frightened? Was he not as strong as her mother said? Was he cruel and bad just like her warlord grandfather and cared nothing for Talia or her mother?

"He is your father," her mother would say whenever Talia voiced her tiny, tiny doubts. "He loves us both very much."

But he was a man, and the only men Talia knew of were the inmates sharing their prison. Some were kind, most indifferent, and a few cruel, and she when she saw them draw near her cell, she would shy back, fighting a mix of curiosity and fear.

"He is not like them," her mother would say when Talia spoke of that. "Fathers love their children."

But the only fathers Talia knew were her mother's father, who had sent his daughter to the prison, and this own mysterious father of her own who did not come and who made her mother cry when she spoke of him, her mother who did not cry even when talking about the cruelty of her own warlord father.

When Talia cried, her mother would stroke her head and comfort her and soothe her into sleep. But Talia could not cry now. Her mother was sad, and Talia had to be the happy one now.

"Mother," she whispered, "my father will come. He can take us Outside, and…" She would not admit that the big, wide open Outside made her stomach clench - how could there be a world bigger than that of the cell and the pit? She pushed the fear aside and thought instead of how they wouldn't have to worry about the bad men. Talia could go out of her cell when she wanted to (her mother had to explain often that people did not have cells Outside). She could eat all the things her mother told her about, and smell flowers, and her mother could hear music and singing again and wear dresses and put her hair up.

"He'll come," Talia said again. She lay down, imagining her father descending towards them. "He's looking for us, Mother, and then he'll climb down and get us."

Her mother's voice was a thin thread of sound in the cell. "Yes, Talia. He will come." And then she grabbed her daughter and clutched her tight, tighter than she ever had. Something deep inside Talia knew to stay still, to not wriggle about as she did when her mother held her a little too tight. She lay there and let her mother rock her back and forth and wrapped her arms around her neck. Sometimes, she thought, even the ones who were meant to protect her needed protection too.

But most of all, Talia thought, her father would come down, and she cast aside her trembling doubts and nightmares of a man throwing her down to the prison and taking away her mother, and thought only of happy dreams of her father, who would make her mother smile, truly smile, and make sure she would never cry again.

* * *

**A/N:** So, if you've reached here, then I take it you got past my soppy summary and the rather lengthy chapter above. Congratulations! (That probably sounded patronizing, but it wasn't meant to be.) This is my first story in some months and second Bane/Talia fic, so hopefully I'm not too rusty.

I'm in the habit of posting notes at the end of each chapter, but I really don't have much to say here, except I apologize for any historical or cultural inaccuracies, as I did little to no research at all for the story, unless you count diving into your own childhood memories as research. The location of the prison and ethnicity of Talia's mother were kept pretty vague (I have this image of the filmmakers waving their hands around and saying, "Oh, you know, that desert-y area around middle-eastern-southern Asia"), so I'll just use that as an excuse. Nothing else to say, except that the next chapter will be up in a few days and will be more exciting than this. (I'm not exactly harboring any illusions about what character readers want to see most.) Read and (hopefully) review!


	2. Chapter 2

WHERE YOU GO

**Chapter 2**

* * *

Outside, Talia knew, was where the food came from. Her mother told her there were men above who gathered bread into boxes and dropped them into the pit. It was a twice-, sometimes thrice-daily occurrence for Talia: a rustling in the air, a gathering of men around the levels near the center, an expectancy in the air. Sooner or later, she would hear a crash as the box fell to the ground, its contents spilling out from the broken wooden slats.

Her mother was cautious. She did not go when the box first came down; to do so would be too dangerous. She went when the men had taken almost everything, then went scavenging, finding pieces, crumbs, they had left behind.

But once in a while, something changed. Once in a while, the boxes stopped coming down.

She knew something had changed when the box only came down once in a day. The men by then were ravenous; for the first time she heard screaming as they scrambled through the food. When her mother returned that night, she had less food than usual. Still, she gave Talia three quarters of the bread, and shook her head when Talia asked if she wanted some more.

Daily, the food grew less. Talia did not know this, did not see the box where it dropped, but her mother brought back less and less - half the portion they had before, a quarter of it, and one afternoon, only crumbs, which she placed carefully into Talia's palm and watched as she licked them off, one by one. That night, Talia's stomach was wracked with pain, so that she had to curl up before she could sleep. Her mother later held her in her lap and rubbed her abdomen, humming one of her songs. Another night, they were awoken by men raiding the doctor's supplies. She had heard snarls of conversation, demands for food the doctor could not give, spat out in a grating, growling voice.

A crash and a cry of pain sent Talia burying her head in her mother's arms. Her mother soothed her and rocked her back to sleep, but every time some fight occurred, Talia would always try and peer up and memorize that man's face – a bad man, not one of the good men who sometimes helped them.

Soon after, her mother acquired a knife. Talia did not know how she got it, but somehow she managed to bring that blade, little more than a glass fragment, and show it to Talia. She dug out a loose stone and hid it there, and Talia spent the next day watching the men who were also lucky enough to have knives, trying to see how they stabbed, how they slashed, how they struck. She watched them bleed, watched them fall, and saw how sometimes they got up again, moving more slowly, and sometimes stayed in the same spot. But her mother didn't like her watching, and whenever she caught her pressing her face to the bars, she would scoop Talia up and bury her head in the blanket. So only when her mother was gone did Talia practice the same jabbing motions with her own arms, holding her imaginary blade and dreaming of striking the men who hurt them.

The days dragged on. Sometimes there was more food, sometimes less, but what was changing the most was something Talia could not put into words. It was in the murmurings of the men, their movements, hunched down and eyes slitted, the way they cast furtive looks at their cell.

Rumors were spreading like the illnesses that occasionally swept over the prison. The men whispered of arguments, fighting above. Occasionally a new man was dropped down into the pit, men who spoke of mercenaries and warriors ravaging the city nearby. Once, they whispered of a warlord and rebellion among his men, casting odd looks that made Talia's mother stiffen and turn away.

It felt like suffocation, this change; a tenseness that made Talia draw herself up until her muscles hurt. And it was tiring. Talia dragged herself around the cell, feeling tired and listless, and finally her mother called the doctor over to check on her. He limped over from the adjoining cell, looking tired and worn, put his hand to Talia's forehead, checked her tongue and under her arms, squeezed the small bit of flesh on her wrist, and said she was fine and that everything would pass, in time. He patted her face, his callused palm rough against Talia's cheek and dragged himself back to his own cell.

He had forgotten to lock their cell door.

It was Talia who first noticed it, the way the door bounced slightly instead of closing. It was she who saw the cluster of men passing through adjacent cells, but she watched uncomprehendingly, expecting them to be stopped by the door. Her mother, following Talia's gaze, turned around to look as well.

It seemed that, one moment, her mother was sitting there and everything was as it should be. The next moment, the cell door was slammed open, men were pouring in, faster than Talia thought they could through such a small opening, and then her mother was torn from her. She had not even been able to catch one last glimpse of her face.

She chased after them, beating them. They would not hurt her mother, they would not, they _could_ not, even as a thought pressed into her forehead that they were, they were. The knife was in her hands, she didn't know how, didn't remember retrieving it, or following the men, merely that she had switched from hitting ineffectually to stabbing. She saw a flash of her mother's skirt and heard a keening wail rising up. That was her mother, but it could not be her mother, her mother never screamed like that. One man, stumbling backwards, fell against her. The movement jolted her, and she buried the knife in, surprised at the softness of cloth and flesh, of the sudden difficulty in pulling back out. The man jerked, his back arching in pain, but it was not enough, her mother's screaming _wasn't stopping_ –

And then she was scooped up and carried far, far away. She heard a thin shrieking from far away, felt her throat tearing and her fists aching. It was a moment before she realized she was the one making noise, a piercing wailing that did not seem to be coming from her mouth, that she was the one fighting vainly. Then there was a pressure against her back and she had her head shoved down, and she was watching feet and floor flash by, rocking against a hard body, being carried. It was not at all the way her mother carried her, her mother who was gentle and would run a hand over her head to comfort her. This was jolting and terrifying and painful as she crashed against the hard body, but all her struggling did was increase the pressure on her back. When she tried to put her head up, something smacked her back down so that she was staring down brown robes and watching legs that were not her own running over the ground.

And then it stopped, the jolting eased. The legs and the floor seemed to come up to her as the man sat down. She squirmed harder, her arms trapped between her body and his; her knife was gone. She wanted to go back to her mother, whose followed her no matter how hard she pressed her face against the rock-hard body clasping onto her. But it was worse, far worse when they abruptly stopped.

"No…" she gasped, pushing helplessly at the force holding her. "No, no, _no_…"

And then she heard a voice from somewhere above her head. "Shh…" And a hand pressed into her back.

It sank in then – her mother was gone. The pain, the sudden, terrible uncertainty of her life, that there was nobody to protect her and that even those who do were not immortal, that they could be hurt and disappear and die, was so overwhelming that it felt like her body might break from it, and she balled herself into the man's body in a hard little knot. She wept, long and choking and unrelenting, soaking his clothing. Only something on the ragged edge of her mind registered how he held her, rocking her briefly, and tried to soothe her with words that felt like a low rumble in his chest which she remained curled against.

* * *

She awoke in a cell, and though it was not much different from the one she shared with her mother, it was disorienting and unfamiliar. There were no cells next to theirs, no long row of bars and rooms to look at. There were only filthy stone walls, the only bars being in the front. The bed she lay on was on another side of the cell, the blanket was more ragged, the entire cell more cluttered with objects she could not identify in the gloom. The shape and structure of the walls was more worn, more used. Even the smell seemed different.

Terror filled her. Always her mother had pulled her away from men, and she had often seen their hungry eyes, dodged their grasping hands. There were good men, but where had they been when her mother was taken from her? None of them had helped; none of them had saved her mother, and now, she was in the cell of one of them.

She dashed off the bed and to the door, scrambling for the lock, an opening, _some_ way to escape. There was no coherent thought in her head, only a paralyzing fright that removed any sort of logical thought. Somehow, she had to get out. If she got out, she could run back to her mother's cell, and everything would be all right then. It was a bad dream, and her mother was waiting, alive and safe, for her to return.

She did not hear him approach. All she knew was that she was tearing at the lock, then suddenly she looked up and the man was standing in front of the cell, staring down at her.

Panic exploded in her mind, and she almost tripped trying to run back. Any memories of the man saving her, of the wordless comfort he had provided and that she had desperately needed, fled her mind. As he opened the door, she dashed back to the bed and threw herself under it, shrinking into the darkest corner of the cell.

From where Talia sat, all she could see was the man's feet. Terror threatened to suffocate her when she saw the door open and the man enter the cell, stop, then turn and approach the bed. She squeezed herself back further, further, wanting to become invisible, to become part of the stone walls...

He ducked his head under the bed. Talia sprang back, smacking her shoulder blades against the wall; with both hands she grabbed at the bars of the bedstead just as his hand whipped out and got hold of her arm. A brief struggle ensued; he pulled her out from under the bed even as she twisted frantically in his hands, wordlessly, pounding her fists against his body and, when he pushed her away from him, clawing at the wrappings on his arms.

He held onto her just long enough for her to tire, to see him standing like a statue and simply _watching_ her, then shoved her back on to the bed.

She rolled on the leather bedspread and scrambled up, and for one moment her puzzled glance met his expressionless, slightly narrowed eyes, the only part of his face not swathed by cloth.

Then she dived under the covers, balling herself under them.

For several more moments, there was not a sound, other than the usual noise of the prison. She stayed where she was, a creeping sensation crawling up her arms, and finally dared to lift up the cover an inch.

A glimpse of brown robes was all she needed to see. With a muffled gasp, she jerked the blanket back down, then tilted her face up against the cloth. It was thin enough in certain places that she could see his silhouette, now and then. But even that was too much. She did not dare to look at him even through that for fear of attracting his attention. Already she could imagine him, so gigantic and frightening that she didn't think she could see his face.

Finally, miraculously, he seemed to lose interest, for she saw the shadow of his body pass and heard his footsteps recede. For long moments she huddled there. Fear and anger clung to her, the latter more so as the cell remained quiet. The men had taken her mother, had hurt her, and she wanted to hurt them back. But even as she thought that, the fear returned. She was alone, without even her little blade. Nor could she forget how ineffectual that weapon had been, how the men had ignored her stabs… She could not even recall the faces of the men who had taken her mother.

Silence fell over the cell, save for the usual mutterings of the other prisoners echoing off the walls, the clanging as the doors opened and closed. It was the normal, soothing sounds she was used to, and as nothing happened, she felt more secure under the blanket. She closed her eyes and slept.

* * *

There was bread. Bread, held in his hand, ripped in half and offered to her.

She was startled, because that was what her mother used to do; yet it was also unfamiliar, for her mother had let her choose her piece, yet here she could see that he had his own piece, held in his other hand, and that it was smaller than hers. It is extraordinarily odd, too, for her to see the bread in such a large hand. She started to reach for it, then stopped. This piece of bread was more, far more, than she was used to; even before the boxes had stopped coming down, she had never had this much. She pulled back her hand, hiding it under the blanket she had somehow managed to wriggle her head out of. To have so much was a rare thing, too rare without there being a trap. She scooted back into her safe corner of the bed and stayed there, bunching the blanket around her like some sort of barrier. Then, she lifted her eyes just slightly to look at the man.

He was dressed just like the other men, she noted with a twist in her stomach. All the men who scared her, who had dragged away her mother – he was like them. All she could see of his face were his eyes, the rest being covered, and even they scared her. They were flat, like there was nothing behind them, yet they bored straight through her.

But then he glanced down and placed the bread on the pillow and sat down against the wall on the opposite side of the cell. He did not face her, but Talia had the feeling that he was watching her anyway. She scrunched herself behind the blankets and waited.

But she was hungry, her starved stomach demanding food, food that was sitting a mere foot away from her. She bit her lip and squeezed herself even tighter, pressing her hand into her stomach as her mother had. But it did not soothe the pain.

The man's head was turned away, but still she felt an odd buzzing, a tenseness that drew her body up. She pulled herself over the blanket carefully, hoping he would not catch slower movements. Cautiously, she reached for and took the bread, feeling its crumbling texture in her hand.

Her stomach chose that moment to growl, loudly, complaining of its emptiness. His head snapped around at the noise and she froze, eyes fixed on him for signs of danger. But nothing happened, save for his eyes narrowing slightly – but not in anger, she thought.

She flung herself behind the safety of the blanket. She did not like it. She liked it better when his attention was not on her. She wanted to be invisible.

Talia ate the entire piece, but it was not the same. Her mother wasn't there, to gather up the crumbs in her hand and give them to her, to tell her stories. So when Talia hid under the covers once more, her stomach still seemed somehow empty.

Her bladder, however, was full, quite full. She had not noticed it during the night, but now she did, the tight pressing against her bottom, and there was no chamber pot to use. They always had one in the cell, and her mother had used it as well, and Talia knew it was because there was something different about how they urinated, something to do with being a girl. She curled on the bed, the blanket pulled over her head, her hand squeezing between her legs as if to try and hold in her urine, but she had to do it more and more as time passed. What if she wet the bed? Once she had, and her mother had been angry and forced her to wash out the stain. This was not their bed though – but the thought of the man being angry left her petrified. She squeezed her legs together even tighter.

The man left his cell several more times, and one of those times she dared to pull the blanket off her head and look. And there it was, her salvation – the pot had magically made its way into the cell.

Talia started to get up, then saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She flung the covers back over her head as the man re-entered the cell, though the pressure on her tummy was almost unbearable. He had to go, she thought to himself. Please go. She could not reveal herself as a girl to him, or else he would do terrible things to her, bad things like what they had done to her mother – and it seemed she could hear her mother screaming in her ears once more. Her bladder was completely full, and she thought if he did not leave, she might wet herself all over her pants and his bed…

It seemed like hours before he finally did go. As soon as his footsteps had melted into the clangs and shouts that made up the prison sounds, she tore off the covers and ran to the chamber pot, shoving it into a corner. Quickly she urinated, her back to the bars as her mother had shown her. Sheer nervousness kept her dry for several seconds. It was frightening without her mother, who had always stood over her, blocking her from being viewed by the others. She pressed herself into the wall and dropped her pants only a few inches, and hurried to pull them back up when she was through, though it meant wetting herself slightly on the front. She pushed the pot further away so the smell wouldn't reach her, then ran back to the comfort of the bed.

Night fell. The man returned to his spot against the wall, and when a long time passed and he didn't move, Talia knew that he meant to stay there. Fear made her bladder shrink, and again she felt an urgent need to use the pot. But he remained on the floor the rest of the night, and Talia did not dare to use it while he was there, so she squeezed her legs together and tried to ignore the cramping in her abdomen.

For endless hours, she feared he might get up and lie in the bed next to her. A mindless fear threatened to overcome her when she thought of him so close to her, but an equally paralyzing distress would start in her mind when she thought of the emptiness of the bed, of not having someone to sleep next to. She had never gone a night without her mother lying beside her, enveloping her in her clothes and her smell and her sweet songs. The bed she lay on felt too big, too cold. The unbearable loneliness and the tight tension of fear in her body made her draw up into a fetal position and twist the blanket around her, unable to sleep. She kept thinking that maybe, if she wished hard enough, if she could just squeeze her eyes shut and want her mother back, want her just the right amount, she would come, and so she pulled herself tight with yearning and need and waited.

That was how it went, the first night without her mother.

* * *

Talia dreamed.

She dreamed that she was outside the cell, and even though she had never been allowed out, she was not afraid. She moved along the levels with confidence, because there was a place she needed to go to. She knew where it was, though, and all she had to do was traverse the stairs up.

She opened the cell door in her dream and stopped. There was her mother, smiling at her. She was sewing something but put it aside and reached for Talia. She went to her, suddenly a lot smaller than before, and climbed into her lap, resting her head against her. She smelled sweet and clean, as she always had, and as she lay there her mother told her stories. The words were indistinguishable, but her tone was familiar, soothing…

A bang, and Talia sat up, the dream disappearing as quickly as it had come. The Pit lit by the pre-dawn blueness of the sky, the blanket was wrapped around her and another piece of bread sat by her pillow, and Talia was utterly alone.

She squeezed into herself, but did not cry. She had dreamed her mother was there, so close and real that she had to be alive. Talia was sure of it. If she could just return back to their old cell, her mother would be there, smiling just like in the dream, and everything would be the same again. She clung to that dream, that hope. She just had to go back. Her mother was waiting for her, probably worried because she wasn't there with her, but she couldn't leave the cell because it was dangerous, which was why she wasn't searching for her. And she probably didn't know where she was anyway. Talia had to be the one to go back to her.

But first, she had to leave the cell.

She sat up, afraid to leave the bed yet wanting to look around her. Every movement was a terror to her, a fear that she might draw the attention of the other prisoners upon her. She kept the blanket around her all the way, ducking her head underneath it when someone turned towards her, but still she inched closer and closer to the edge of the cot.

The most terrifying part, though, was climbing down. Then she had to abandon the protective blanket, to slowly draw out her leg until her foot touched the floor. When it did, she held her breath without thinking, almost expecting some kind of explosion, the banging open of the door and the yelling of the prisoners.

There was nothing. Talia let out her breath, then let herself drop off the bed. Only then did she suddenly notice her need to urinate again. She ran to the chamber pot and relieved herself (noticing that it was empty). Finished, she scrambled quickly to the bars, hiding in the corner where it met the wall. From here she could look out into the prison.

It disoriented her. The levels were unfamiliar, the walls higher, the shadows darker. She squeezed her head into the bars, searching about. Slowly, old landmarks popped out at her – the lowest levels, where waste and bodies were thrown; the rope and ledge, at a new angle and so high up compared to the cell that she almost couldn't see it; the stairs to the highest levels –

She clutched the bars when she saw the doctor's cell. She had lived in the cell right next to it, and so had her mother, if only she could reach it. For many moments, she did not dare to tear her eyes from it, and when she did, she glanced back up constantly, as if the cell might move if she weren't looking.

She pulled herself to the door and ran a finger down the lock. It was the doctor who had always locked the cell, but she had never watched him. She could not recall if he had a key or a bar or anything else about how he opened and closed the door. She pushed at it; it didn't give. She bit her lip, wanting to cry – how could she have dared so much and failed now – and reached over to make another try, but then saw a hulking figure moving out of the shadows.

Fear of another kind pushed her into action. She scurried back into the bed, tugging the sheet over her – but in the midst of her panic, something else inside her was thinking, planning. He would have to get in, and to get in, he would have to open the door. She turned around quickly under the blanket, curling her legs up against her body and sliding as close as she could to the edge of the bed. As she heard him draw nearer, she pulled up a corner of the sheet to watch, waiting.

The door opened, and Talia started as she heard the scraping of the bars against the ground. Her leg twitched, but she held back the instinct to run. The man was too close to the door and blocking the way outside. She waited, hearing her small breaths against the blanket. Her heartbeat was thudding in her ear, and she didn't dare to take her focus off the door or even blink, afraid she might miss the opportunity.

The man paused at the doorway, glancing in her direction. He stepped inside his cell and turned around to close the door.

Talia tumbled out of bed, but it was clumsily done. The blankets tangled in her legs and she crashed to the ground, kicking them away, but she dared not tear her gaze from the door, at the opening to outside. The sound from her fall had sent the man spinning around to look at her, and in his distraction, he had forgotten to close the door –

Talia pulled herself free of the blankets and scrambled to her feet, her right shoulder aching. Without looking, without thinking, she pushed past the man's leg and burst out the cell.

* * *

**A/N:** Getting a bit more exciting, I hope. You have to feel for Bane here. I suppose in my story, he's been watching Talia for some time, you know, attracted by the novelty and her innocence and so on and so forth, but now he has to take care of her (the horror), so he's basically learning that children can be scared and strange little things too. And that they need to eat. And sleep. And pee. And have jabby little bones that hurt when they smack you. So fun times for the both of them!


	3. Chapter 3

Three chapters in and I only now remember to say... Disclaimer! Batman does not belong to me, but to DC Comics; _The Dark Knight Saga_ is similarly not mine, just a fun little sandbox for me to wallow around in. The films belong to Christopher Nolan and the rest of the crew and cast, who all did their jobs and performed their characters marvelously, especially the guy who played John Daggett, who looked like he was having way too much fun hamming it up, probably because he knew he was due to die halfway through the film.

And with that out of the way, the next chapter!

WHERE YOU GO

**Chapter 3**

* * *

Confusion and terror washed over Talia as soon as she was out of the cell, making her stumble. She grabbed onto the railing and pushed herself forward, not daring to look back. Men were stumbling up and down the levels, huge, looming, dangerous, and she shrank against the wall as they drew near her. Most had their faces covered, so that when she stopped, she could not even tell if they were looking at her or not, and their shambling walk made them seem like monsters from half-formed nightmares.

A shout echoed around the walls, and Talia jumped and started running once more. She had never gone outside, almost never run about, and already her small legs ached, her breath rasping in her throat. And she was lost, terribly lost – she looked for the landmarks but her run about the circular prison had disoriented her –

A hand grabbed at her arm. She gasped and jerked out of the grip, feeling cloth tear. Without looking, she ran again, adrenaline adding an extra burst of energy. She was going about in circles, passing stairs that seemed the same as ones as she had just run by. Panic was rising in her chest. She tried to think but her mind was a jumble. She had been lower down, could remember the pit walls soaring higher above her, so her mother's cell had been up, on a higher level – the stairs! Before she could hesitate, she ran for the nearest steps and hurtled up the steep stairs on hands and feet, her calves burning as she forced herself up and over each one –

She grabbed at the railing and pulled herself onto the floor, clutching a stitch in her side. Her chest ached and she could barely see from the sand that had swept into her eyes, but she forgot it all when she realized that she recognized where she was. She was just a few yards from her old cell.

She shoved past another prisoner and clung to the bars of the cell that was three down from the old one – then two down– one –

She almost jumped for the door, her weight pushing it open, and even as a thought prickled her mind (_unlocked, the door was never unlocked, it was _wrong) she threw herself inside, opening her mouth to cry out for her mother.

The cell was empty.

For a moment she thought she was in the wrong one. Her mind clung to that explanation – but the bed was in the same place. The frame had the same grooves in it. She ran a finger down one, but this time their familiarity did not reassure her. It was the same stains on the sheet spread over the bed, the same holes and notches in the wall… and her mother was not there.

Her mother was gone. Talia collapsed on the bed, gripping the metal frame and squeezing until it felt her fingers might break. Her mother was gone, her mother was not coming back, and it seemed that a terrifying void opened up in her mind. She was alone, with nobody to look after her, to take care of her, and all she had left was a horrifying uncertainty.

She sobbed, so hard her body shook the bed, gasped and cried again and again as the pain grew in her chest and would not leave, twisted her insides and blocked her throat. She buried her head in the cot and stayed there, crying until the grief and the sadness dulled and she was tired, so tired. Dimly, she thought that if she stayed there, her mother might come back, just like before. She didn't believe it, but she was weary and lost and helpless, so she curled on the bed and closed her eyes. As she did, her fingers caught on something soft and familiar. She drew it nearer instinctively, but it was only when she opened her eyes did she see it was her mother's decorated blanket, the one she had brought from Outside. It had been squashed up between the bed and the wall, unnoticed. She hugged it close, burying her nose in it and taking comfort in the faint, residual scent of her mother. It did not take long for her to fall into an exhausted sleep.

* * *

She dreamed again. She heard the door open in her dream and smiled when she saw her mother enter. She had been right after all. Her mother was merely out, maybe searching for her, and in her dream she sat up and lifted her arms, waiting to be gathered up and held close, where nothing could harm them –

A hard shake made her spring up, still clutching the blanket to her chest. The dream had been so real that for a moment she was confused, but then joy soared through her heart. She turned around and cried out, "Mother-!"

Then a hand that was definitely _not_ her mother's grabbed her and dragged her off the bed. She tripped and smacked her foot against the floor, the sudden pain making her cry out and almost lose hold of the blanket, and the room whirled as she was spun around.

She entered a world of chaos. There were men, men everywhere, their faces covered and their dirty hands snatching at her. They flooded through the unlocked door and surrounded her. She shrieked, thrashing wildly at the one hand that was holding her in place. Fingernails scratched her bare arm and she screamed again as they jammed into the cell, their bodies squashing her and hands raining blows on her limbs and almost tearing her mother's blanket from her hands –

She heard a wet smack, then a heavy thud, and suddenly the men parted, and she was being swept up and away and held against a hard body. The world dipped sickeningly and she yelped as another punch landed on her back, but then she felt a heavy weight pressed against her body and the back of her head. Before she could register more than the swirl of multiple men around her and the wildly careening room, and then a crash.

She saw the cell door swing open and slam into the bars; the man holding her had clearly run into it, the force of his body pushing it open. His momentum sent them out farther than he intended, the both of them banging into the railing. He staggered, and the world dipped; Talia felt her stomach drop as she seemed to plunge out over the pit. Pain was spiking up her legs from the metal bars that her smacked into her thighs. She slipped from his grip and she cried out, grabbing wildly – but then he scooped her back safe into his grip at the same time that he was scrambling up. She clung to him instinctively, feeling his heartbeat thudding rapidly under her own body. Men followed them, their shouts filling the air, but before they could crush them, she saw a fist whip out and send two back. They fell back against several others, who fell back against more, and in that break the man carrying her regained his balance and ran, his body jolting up and down against Talia's, his breathing fast and loud and hot in her ear –

They were at the cell when the others caught up. Talia, facing the back while the other fumbled at the door, screamed for the third time as one snatched at her face. The man carrying her jerked forward just in time, the other prisoner grabbing empty air. The world spun again – Talia felt hands at her shirt but only for a second before she was pulled free – and again they whirled, so that all she saw was a flurry of shadows and walls and robes –

The sound of the door opening and smashing into the wall resounded sharply in her ears, but never had something so painful give her so much relief. They tilted again as the man stumbled in, then she was dropped onto the floor. It was quite a distance down, and the shock of the fall send pain shooting up her wrists and ankles.

Before she could even get up though, Talia felt herself being jerked around by the back of her shirt. She had no time to struggle, heard only a bang and saw the bed smacking into the corner farthest from the door – and then she was sent flying onto the cot. She flung herself about to see the man shoving the door closed against the mass of prisoners pushing back – and when another prisoner tried to snake his hand in, she saw the man grab his wrist and twist it all the way around. As the other howled in pain, the man grabbed him by the neck and smashed his head onto the bars before shoving him back into the crowd. As he tried to close the door, the crowd surged forward; he slammed his fist into one's throat and snapped another's prying fingers, flinging the man howling back at the mob. The temporary reprieve as the men were pushed back was enough for him to slam the door shut and jerk down the lock.

Talia crawled to the end of the bed, her mother's blanket rolled up in her arms, and her savior shot her a glance. She started. She recognized the eyes. It was the same man who had rescued her when they attacked her mother, the man she had just escaped from... the man who was protecting her.

He turned to the crowd, shoving her back towards the corner without looking at her, crouching in front of her. The other prisoners seemed only to get more enraged – Talia could hear their shrieks grating in her skull. A glob of spit shot between the bars, landing on the floor, and she saw her protector twitch, his hands balling into fists.

Her protector pushed Talia back even further, dragging down the cloth covering his face. There was a feral look to his face, his teeth bared at the prisoners, his body restless and pacing, and when one prisoner tried to jam his finger into the lock, he rushed forward and crushed the bones in his hand before hurrying back to Talia, sitting until she was blocked entirely from their view.

She curled in her corner, shaking. Her arms stung from the scratches she had received, her legs were throbbing, and leaning against the wall only made the bruises on her back hurt more, but she was still frightened, still terrified of this man who could hurt the others so easily.

But he was familiar, she thought, at least more so than any other place, than any other man. Her mother was gone now, and she recognized nobody else in the prison save for the doctor and the few others who had passed by her cell and been kind to her. But where had they been when her mother was attacked?

She touched his robe. He jerked around as abruptly and fiercely as if she had been one of the inmates, and shoved her back to her corner, and for long moments she huddled there, not daring to move again. But as her fear lessened, and as the shouting of the mob outside lessened, she gathered up the scant courage remaining in her and drew closer to him. She settled herself close to his back and drew in a quivering breath as she touched his robe again. This time, he did not react; perhaps he did not notice. She let out her breath, steadier now, and felt safer; the queasy uncertainty in her stomach was dissipating. With her mother's blanket held against her body and a corner of the man's robe in her hand, she closed her eyes and slept.

* * *

The rest of the day and the days after were full of firsts. The first time she looked him full in the face, though still all she saw was his eyes, the blankness in there that scared her more than the ferocity she had seen while he fought the other men. The first time she took bread from his hands, followed by the first time he gave her a sip of precious water from a crude bowl, flicking a dead fly out of it and holding it for her because her hands were too small for the heavy ceramic. That was also the first time he reached for her and she did not flinch back, and the first time he touched her, wrapping his hands over hers to help her hold the bowl. And that was the first time she really saw his face, when the crowd was finally gone and he had turned to look at her. She was surprised then, so surprised that she stared pointedly at him, forgetting her mother's admonishments to never look at people. She had expected to see an old face like the doctor's, or a ravaged, scarred one like that of the other prisoners. Instead, he was whole, and young. She stared for a very long time, so much that he noticed her looking and hurried out of the cell.

There was the first time she examined the cell thoroughly. It was much the same as the one she shared with her mother, yet different. The bed was on another side of the room, and looked more worn, more stained. She rubbed a finger on them, but they did not come off. The leather had more ties knotting it to the frame, more holes in the edges. But there was also an extra blanket padding it, and a softer pillow. The alcove contained more bowls than her mother's had. Even the rocks seemed smoother, and several were loose. Talia wriggled at them but did not try to peer inside, not sure if the man would want her to. She did, however, explore his entire cell while he sat in his old place in the corner, watching her. She watched back, counted how many times he would leave the cell (which was more times than she had fingers and toes), and how he would pace fiercely around the cell or the perimeter of the prison with odd irritability, the restlessness of his movements making her feel twitchy as well.

And then there was the first night, the first time, that she shoved down her fear and sadness and anger, that she grabbed his blanket off the bed and walked over and sat down by the man's side. He looked down at her, perhaps surprised, but then wrapped his blanket around her small form and called her "little one". Before she fell asleep, she felt him tuck her mother's blanket around her from where it was slipping out of her arms.

That night was also the first time she had a nightmare, a dream of a mass of men grabbing at her, her mother's dying screams echoing in her ears when she awoke and found herself being held by a person who was _not_ her mother. Immediately she jerked back, forcing back a scream, and then she struggled, smacking her fists against the mysterious person. The man, forced awake firstly by the jerk of her body when her mind fled the dream, then by the fact that she was kicking him in the stomach, fought back, grabbing her arms and pinning her hands and legs until she collapsed against him in exhaustion.

Only then did he speak, soothing away the bad memories as she entwined her fingers in his clothing, whispering of safety and comfort and the hard satisfaction she would feel when he would get rid of those men for her. His touches and his words were clumsy, not at all like the caresses and sweet songs her mother used when Talia awoke in the night, but they reassured her enough that she might sleep again. She buried her head into a soft spot under his arm and fell asleep to his voice. There would be other nights, other dreams, some that even he could not stroke away, but this time at least, there were no more.

And the last of those firsts – the first time he slept next to her on the bed. She had lain there as the sunlight left the prison, his blanket tucked around her side and her mother's bundled and gripped close to her chest and face, and watched as the man locked the door, arranged the bowls, and pulled off his outer robe – slowly, it seemed. Delaying, she thought, her stomach twisting slightly.

All of a sudden, he turned around and strode towards the bed. He tossed the robe over her, the quick movement making her start. She scooted over as he sat down heavily beside her, the bed jolting under his weight. For a few seconds he remained there, and Talia wondered if he was planning to sleep sitting up, but then he crawled stiffly into the bed and lay down at the very edge of the bed, pushing at the blanket, bunched over her stomach, to move her over further. When he felt she was far enough, he rolled over to the middle of the bed and promptly squashed her into the wall.

He shifted aside, perhaps feeling her bones jabbing into him, or maybe hearing her muffled squeak as her breath was squeezed out of her lungs, and said, "Do you have enough room?"

Talia started, her elbow smacking the wall behind her. A hot tingling ran down her fingers and up her shoulder. She nodded and buried her head in her mother's blanket.

He jabbed at her with a finger. It hurt, and she flinched back. He must have noticed that too, for when he touched her next, it was the lightest of taps on her forehead.

"I know you can speak, child," he said. "Do you have enough room?"

She thought of remaining silent, of continuing to mime her communication, but then she thought of how he had treated the other prisoners and how angry he could be, and she changed her mind. She said, "Yes."

The word rolled clumsily off her unused tongue. Her own voice sounded foreign to her ears, as harsh and painful as those of the other prisoners.

In the darkness, she saw him nod. He didn't speak again, but rolled onto his back, placing his arms behind his head. This gave her just a bit more space, even if it meant having to draw nearer to his side. Then she tried to sleep, lying beside him and feeling that tightness come over her limbs, uncertain whether she should lean away from him and lie against the wall, which made her back hurt, or move closer to him. She sucked in her breath and inched just a tiny bit nearer, and when he didn't push her away, or really even respond, she moved another inch, until she was lightly touching his body.

He was different from her mother – large where her mother was small, heavy where she was light, hard where she was soft. But his warmth – that was familiar. The blanket that he had folded and tucked only around her because it was too small for them both – that too was like her mother, wrapping her in a hug, so that even if there were no songs and she had a little less room and felt a little bit hotter than usual, it was better than having an empty, cold space beside herself. So she rested her head against him, and he accepted this, and as she fell asleep, she thought that it was not really so different from before.

But the third thing, that was what she remembered most.

* * *

**A/N:** A couple of people told me that they really liked how silent Bane and Talia were, which was highly amusing to me as the actual reason they didn't speak was because I couldn't get their character voices and dialogue right, particularly Bane's. So I copped out, hence the silences. Writing, yeah! Though it's fine by me if you all continue to think of me as an actually talented writer who planned all this out for symbolic purposes and what-not.

More seriously, it's a bit hard to envision Bane's dialogue pre-TDKR. I though his, erm, very florid way of speaking was due to the learning he did after leaving the pit, plus the mask, the accent, and the fact that in most of TDKR he's "play-acting", i.e. not talking the way he "naturally" would. It's more that he's projecting an image of himself as leader, terrorist, whatever, to various people, so how he speaks to them would obviously be different from when he was younger and with Talia. It also doesn't help that the only word we ever hear him say to Talia is, "Goodbye". Not a whole lot I can extrapolate from that. (Seriously, Nolan, you couldn't give me more than that? But it was probably intentional, you know, mystery and ambiguity and leaving it to the viewer's interpretation kind of thing. Not like what I'm doing, which is more like, "Oh crap, every piece of Bane's dialogue that I write sounds stupid, well I guess he just won't be much a talker, ha ha ha, nobody will notice!")


	4. Chapter 4

Sorry for the longer waits between chapters. Dead week and finals week have been upon me. Which doesn't mean that it took me longer to write stuff - all of this has already been written - it just means that I...forgot. Hm, that sounds worse, actually.

Right, fourth chapter!

* * *

WHERE YOU GO

**Chapter 4**

* * *

When she was small, when her only entertainment through the endless days was watching the play of shadows and light moving along the sides of the Pit, she had asked her mother what had created them. Her mother had told her about a great ball of fire that moved across the sky. Talia had only gone out once, and then she was in too much of a panic to examine the sky. She had never looked beyond the walls of the Pit, never been able to angle her body or face through the bars so as to be able to see the end of the pit, and could barely comprehend the idea of a sun. She had imagined an orange circle scooting over the prison.

Her new protector had more things to do around the prison than her mother had, and often he was gone. The first time he had left was in the early morning. She felt the bed shift as his weight left it, and had awoken immediately, scampering after him, in such a panic that she had forgotten to put her shoes on. He had turned around and pushed her back, so hard she fell and landed on her rear.

He moved towards her, holding his hands out apologetically, picked her up, and brushed the sand off her clothing, though it felt more like he was smacking her body. Then he turned around and tried to leave again.

She followed, scampering out in front of him, and managed to get to the cell door before he saw her, grabbed her, and scooped her up around the waist and put her on the bed.

"_Stay_," he said sternly, pushing at her chest. He seemed to be trying to be gentler, but still his shove made her ribs ache, and she rubbed at them as she watched him disappear around the other end of the prison. Sighing, Talia lay on the bed, and played around with the covers until she heard his now-familiar footsteps approaching.

He returned with a short length of blue cloth in his hands, which he wrapped around her neck and showed her how to tie over her face. She smiled when she managed to tuck in the end so that it did not fall apart, feeling just like him.

That was how the next day went, and the next, and many more afterwards. Generally he would get up earlier than she, only shaking her awake later, offering some piece of bread or other food in his hand. Many times, he would watch her eat, sometimes nodding approvingly before going outside once more. Then she would play alone, tracing the stones, tossing her blanket about, crawling under the bed, or climbing up to the alcove where he kept his bowls. Sometimes she slept, the heat of the desert helping her in this regard. Occasionally, she liked to tidy up the cell as she had seen her mother do, sweeping the ever present sand off the shelves of rock and from the floor, dusting the bowls, and neatening the blankets. Sometimes she even spread out her mother's blanket among his, smoothing out the dark red fabric with its familiar embroidered designs. And a few times, she tried to follow the man again, but always he pushed her back into the cell. She wasn't sure herself why she kept trying, except that whenever he left, she always had a tight, queasy feeling in her stomach until he returned.

They did not speak much, so that sometimes days might go by with only a few words exchanged between them. But he watched her, so when she licked her lips because the skin was peeling from dryness, he moistened her lips with a wet cloth. When she itched, he wiped at her face, scrubbing roughly at her cheeks or neck or behind her ears. She often went to sleep still scratching at those spots, only now it was because they felt too raw and exposed there. He tried to be gentler to her whenever he saw that, and she sensed that and did not protest if he grabbed her a bit too hard or when a push almost made her fall over.

At night, they crawled into bed together. He indulged her and let her curl up with her mother's blanket instead of using it to cover herself. He also let her have his own blanket, covering himself with his outer robe and usually sharing that with her too. She wasn't sure if he fell asleep after she did. Certainly when she had to go to the bathroom at night, he would roll over to watch her in the darkness, then lift her back into the bed when she was finished. On the occasions she couldn't sleep at all, or when she had bad dreams, he remained awake with her. As the nights passed, she dared to move closer to him, inch by inch, until one morning she awoke with her face in his shirt, his scent of sweat and dust in her nose and his arm draped heavily over her shoulders.

And one day, when she followed him after as he went outside, expecting to be plopped back into the cell as usual, he turned around and opened the door wider. It was so surprising, so unexpected, that she stopped dead in her tracks.

"Haven't you been wanting to go out?" he said, his voice making her jump. He had pulled down the cloth wrappings around his mouth and was regarding her expressionlessly.

She bit her lip and nodded.

He made an impatient motion. "Well?"

Talia looked up at him questioningly, then took a hesitant step forward. Slowly, she edged to the door, until a sudden fear struck her – what if he was trying to be rid of her? The thought made her grab onto the bars of the cell.

He reached down and gave her a shove. "Go _on_, then." And she was pushed unwillingly outside.

She whirled around as the door banged shut, but her protector had joined her outside and was only locking their cell. He stood against the railing, looking down over the prison, and presently Talia joined him, sticking her head between the horizontal bars. It was the hottest part of the day, and most of the men were in their cells or lolling along the sides of the prison. The center, in particular, was quite empty; it was directly under the light with no cover for shade, the light reflecting off the stone and concrete blinding them.

"Have you ever seen the sun, little one?" Talia's protector asked suddenly, standing over her.

She shook her head.

"Then come." He gave her another gentle push on her back, and led her to the stairs. There were men drifting nearby, lying against the walls, and more than a few of them looked up as they came out, their eyes watching Talia hungrily. But though she waited for hands to grasp at her, for clawed fingers and sharp nails to scrape at her flesh, none dared to approach, likely remembering their experience of a few days ago. Still, she kept close to her protector, and he to her, moving quickly to the steps. It was noticeably hotter there, being exposed to the sunlight, but empty of men, Talia noted with relief.

Her protector went down the steps, then looked up at her, waiting. She edged near them more cautiously. They looked much steeper going down than going up, but she nudged a toe over and let her foot fall on the lower step, then followed with her other foot. Only when both feet were safely on the same level did she take another and another, one hand grabbing onto the railing for support. It was all still new to her, so that even once down on level ground, she toddled over and grabbed onto the nearest thing for help, which was her protector's hand. She squeezed his much larger fingers in her palm and began her way down the next flight of steps, pausing when she noticed he wasn't moving. She glanced back at him, saw he was looking at her hand in his, and gave him a tug, somewhat uncertain of his reaction. He jerked his head about as if shooing off a fly, then went down, dragging her along.

After two more flights of stairs, Talia's legs were aching; she had tripped once already on her too-big shoes and would have gone tumbling all the way down the steep steps and likely to the bottom of the prison if her protector not grabbed her. She couldn't quite contain a complaining moan when she saw yet another level down.

"Tired?" asked a voice that sounded very far above her.

Talia looked up at the man and shook her head, then made her way determinedly to the stairs. She had just started down them when her feet were scooped out from under her and she was lifted into her protector's arms.

She hesitated, but it was not unlike her mother, even if he was bigger and harder, so she wrapped her little arms around his neck as he settled her body against his and started going down the steps, Talia bumping uncomfortably against his body. He must not have liked it either, for several times he stopped and shifted her around, trying to settle her rear against his arm.

They reached the very bottom with no incident, a bright, open area that made Talia feel very exposed. There were stairs all around them, good places for men to surround them as they had her mother in their cell. She glanced about uneasily, clutching the man's scarf. The man paid no attention, but instead pointed up.

"There, child," he said. He pulled up his scarf, hooding his face, but Talia had no such protection from this new source of heat. He pointed again. "The sun."

She craned her neck up and saw the opening of the prison and, in the center, an explosion of brightness. She thought she knew warmth, but being directly under the sun – that was something of a whole new kind. In the cell, heat was slow, heavy, listless; here, it was scorching her skin, an active thing that prickled the skin. She saw the sky – an intense cerulean that made the blue of their shawl look washed out – the clouds – pale white wisps she can barely see because of – and a spiking, constantly changing something, like nothing her mother had ever described to her. She had to duck her head down when her eyes began to sting, as if the thing's rays had shot out and pierced her eyes.

"The sun looks like that?" she whispered, rubbing her eyes. Little white spots were still flashing in her vision.

"What did you think it looked like?"

"My mother-" She paused, twisting her fingers in his shawl; the thought of her mother still brought her pain. "My mother said it was a ball of fire, and it moved all over the sky." She felt a small sense of confusion as the picture in her imagination clashed briefly with the real thing. She had never seen fire, except as an orange glow in the far off cells of the other men, too distant for her to really make out. She had thought, then, of a great golden ball of the same color, scooting over the prison.

He was watching her closely, not answering for a moment. "Your mother was right," he said at last. The pain in her eyes had left, and she peered up at the sun again. "Don't look at it," he warned her. "You will burn your eyes." But he did not stop her as she tried, again and again, to examine this new phenomenon in the sky.

When looking at the sun yielded no new answers, she reached up for it, trying to shield her eyes at the same time. It was so blindingly bright but utterly fascinating. She shifted her rear, which was seated on the man's arm, clambered on his shoulders for height, and reached up. It looked so close that she thought she might grab it, if she stretched just a bit further. She tilted over so much she finally slipped off the man's arm. In her panic, she grabbed the nearest thing for support, which unfortunately happened to be the man's face.

After extricating her hands from his nose and mouth, the man carried her back to their cell, Talia still glancing back for one last glimpse of the sun. "Can I see it again?" she asked. She wiped her hands neatly on his robe.

He glanced down at what she was doing, eyebrows raised, but did not stop her. He said, "Later, little one."

"When is later?" she dared to ask.

"Later is later."

"Is later soon?"

"I suppose."

"How soon?"

"Child…" he sighed, in the same tone of voice her mother had used when Talia talked too much and her chatter had begun filling the cell. Talia quieted and rested her head on his shoulder, rubbing her cheek against the rough fabric of his clothing. Very soon he sighed again and rubbed her head. It felt rather like he was trying to take her scalp off, but she liked it. It meant she could spring up again and ask him questions, and she had one burning in the front of her mind.

"Can you pick that up?" She pointed to something she had seen over his shoulder.

"What?" He spun around, a little too quickly, and for a moment it seemed the cells and walls had melded into an indistinguishable blur. He grasped the back of her head. "What is it?"

She shook her head, then spotted it again. "That. That rock." She pulled her arm free from where it was trapped between her body and his chest, and gestured to the side.

"This?" He held the rock in his hand. She grasped it eagerly. Her old collection was lost, but she could start a new one. She held it out to him, the rock taking up her palm, admiring the smoothness of the stone, the perfect swirls of gray and black over its surface. "It's pretty, isn't it?"

Her protector looked at it briefly. "I suppose." He hoisted her into a more comfortable position, then wrapped his arm around her so that his robe covered her. "Be quiet now. We're going back."

She did as she was told, playing with the rock in her fingers as they made their way to the cell. In some ways he was not like her mother, who had marveled over her collection just as much as Talia. She held onto that assumption for as long as it took him to start coming back to her with gifts hidden in his pockets – bright crystals and rusted coins and, once, a polished gem that she always placed at the center of her, a place of honor among the rougher, unpolished rocks of her collection. On the hottest days, he would sit against the wall, legs sprawled out and Talia between them, watching her play. As she divided up her collection, she would hear other inmates approaching and see him tense, then draw up his leg if anyone came too near, his robe falling over his knee so that she was blocked from view. Only when the intruder left would he relax, body loosening.

And sometimes, as he watched her play, he would say something.

"Tell me," he said, with a touch of caution, "what other stories did you hear from your mother?"

She looked up from her rocks, thinking. "Flowers," she answered, remembering.

He leaned forward. "And what are flowers?"

"They are like… birds." And she scooted nearer to him. "Like this." And she made the motion her mother had shown her, her palms held close to one another and her fingers splaying out. "Or this." Another shape.

"Mmm… there are others, too." He took hold of her fingers gently, folding them slightly inward. "Like that." And then he cupped her hands. "Or that."

"You've seen them?" she asked eagerly.

He released her hands, examining her face for a long moment. "No," he said finally, "I have not." And she knew by the tone of his voice to drop the subject.

But he had many stories, and knew many things, and Talia accepted this happily, passing the interminably long days listening to him, playing near him, around him, with him; she dragged herself up and down his legs or his arm or his body when he sat, while he watched with bemused interest.

He was her friend, her protector, and he always knew what to do. The starvation period was passing, more food was being dropped down to them, but there were still time when they did not have enough to eat, when he came back not only with food but also with blood on his clothing and spent nights wrapping cloth around his cuts, so he showed her his secret stashes of bread, hidden in holes around the cell. Sometimes he gave her a few pieces, picking off the spotted, fuzzy bits, while telling her of worse times, times when there was so little food that the men grew mad with hunger, became wild beasts, and attacked one another in their rage and insanity – to steal each other's bread, Talia assumed. When she said this chirpily, he gazed down at her with the same bemused expression he seemed to like using around her, and agreed. He knew where there were plants struggling to grow in the cracks of the prison walls which he would tear out and give to her. She ate them, even though their leaves tasted strange and their roots were tough and often had long hairs she would have to pull out from between her teeth. While she gnawed at them, he told her where to find them, how to recognize them, how to gather them, how to pay attention to when she ate them and how a tingling or burning feeling in her mouth meant she should spit them out.

Other times, he would frighten her with scary tales, for some reason often coinciding with the times when Talia did something strange or wrong. After showing her the sun, he had allowed her to venture out occasionally from the cell to play in the sun, always when he was near enough that he could see her. There were many times when he spotted some danger she was unaware of and would suddenly appear at her side, scooping her up and back into the cell without a word. More often than not, it was a man who had come too close.

Other times, though, it was something else. Once, it was because she had followed an odd, scuttling creature she had seen crawling on the ground. Her protector seemed to have mixed feelings towards the moving things that were not men. The mottled, scaly things that could crawl up walls, with their lashing tails and bugged out eyes, he would tolerate, but he killed the furry animals because he said they stole bread, and had to drag her away once from the strange, legless creature that slid along the floor on its belly.

However, the many-legged thing she had seen was nothing like any of them, and Talia had followed it in fascination, drawn by its shiny black skin, the two claws it clicked threateningly at her, and the thin tail it held aloft over its body. She had just been reaching out to touch it, to see if it's black covering was as smooth and hard as it looked, when her friend had found her and scooped her away, knocking the creature with a stick into another cell. She had heard a surprised shout from the occupant of the cell before her protector rushed her back. Later, she had listened as he told her a frightening tale of a man who was killed by just such creature, its sting making his foot swell and blacken and rot. Afterwards, Talia avoided such animals when she saw them, except to try and knock them into any nearby cells, just as he had.

Some nights, he would take her outside and show her the silvery orb in the sky that he said was the moon, and tell her the story of why it was always a different shape when she saw it. Once, when the moon was completely gone, he showed her the speckling lights that filled the sky in the moon's absence, tracing outlines and reciting tales about each one. Even though Talia could never see the shapes he described, she enjoyed listening to his voice, her head pillowed against his shoulder as he talked.

And the remaining nights, they would swap stories of Outside, Talia struggling to tell all her mother had described, then listening with rapt attention as her protector told his. And if sometimes she forgot to tell him one, or if both could not remember who owed one a story, he would shrug and relate one of his own anyway, for he had dozens and dozens of them, and if he repeated one:

"You already told me that one." She pouted at him; she had reached the point where she could tease and poke at him without too much fear.

And he would tilt his head and smile a bit and say, "So I have." And then he would tell another, always one she had never heard before. He never complained if she forgot herself and told him the same story, but listened just as attentively. Night always ended with his stories, lulling Talia to sleep, where she fell into dreams of the pit, of the Outside world, of her mother, of him.

* * *

**A/N: **I don't ever plan on writing this from Bane's POV, but if I did, it might go something like this:

_"Occasionally, he had heard the other men speak, not just of life outside the pit, but of the people. More often than not, they spoke of their families: parents, wives, children. Bane had never held much interest in any of that, but he had absorbed the knowledge nevertheless - a lucky thing, considering his circumstances now. The men spoke of many things - their children's faces, their schooling, what they ate and wore and played with - but Bane could not remember them speaking of the one, strongest feeling that had possessed him since the child came into his care: sheer paranoia._

_The child got into _everything_; there seemed to be nothing and nowhere safe for it. Suddenly, it seemed like Bane was spending all his time running after a child half his size (closer to a quarter, he thought). He was catching it when it tripped over its own feet (which was surprisingly often, considering that the floors of the prison were generally smooth and level), leaping after it when it threatened to plunge headfirst over the railing and down to the bottom of the prison, dragging it away from the scorpion it had insisted on following. He could not take his eyes off the child, because every time he did the child seemed to teleport itself to the opposite side of the prison (somehow in spite of the fact that it kept tripping over itself). It was _exhausting_, and he soon began dumping the child back in his own cell, but _then_ he would come back and find it traversing the walls or tipping the bed over onto itself or attempting to eat a moldy piece of bread, until finally he wanted to_ _grab the child and shake it in the hopes that some common sense might penetrate its fuzzy-headed skull. That inclination lasted as long as it took for him to enter the cell and for the child to see him, to leap off the bed and cling onto his pants leg and chirp happily about how today it had seen this and played with that and here was everything it had done all day, and what had _he_ done while outside the cell? _

_Those inclinations always died a quick death."_

Oh Bane. He cares; he's just hiding it behind a grouchy, un-talkative facade. Oh, and occasional unintentional roughness. (It's okay. He's just not used to being around anybody he can't beat the living crap out of. Or around someone who is probably a quarter his size. He'll get better.)


	5. Chapter 5

I am so late to this, but seriously: what is this new typeface? And this formatting? Nooo. I don't like change!

Anyway, last chapter!

* * *

WHERE YOU GO

**Chapter 5**

* * *

He brought the sun to her on the first cloudy day that she could remember, just a day or two after he had brought her outside. That morning, she awoke thinking it still night, but her friend was up and watching the cells around them. The other inmates were milling around, their restlessness stirring the air. But there was something else – a smell that stung the nose with its freshness.

She crawled to the front of the bed, nearest where her protector stood at the door. He had not pulled up his scarf to cover his face, which was unusual. "It's so dark," she said.

He turned around and lifted her into his arms. "That's because it is going to rain."

"Rain?"

He explained about clouds – the white wisps she had seen in the sky – and how, when they grew big and dark and covered the sky as they did now, they would bring water. She scowled– great gray masses moving across the sky and blocking the ever-constant sun? And bringing water, the most valued substance in the prison, to them?

"You're teasing me," she said grumpily.

There was wry amusement in his eyes. "Come out with me and see."

And he carried her out and showed her the sky, tracing the fast moving clouds for her, and held her when she clambered herself up his shoulders and tried to grab them, for they looked so close, much closer than the pale bits of cloud she had seen the other day.

And the most puzzling thing: "Where is the sun?"

"Shhh…"

He pointed to the clouds. Together, they found a spot close to their cell but away from the overhanging ledges that blocked their view of the sky. The other men, for once, ignored them, gathering on the steps near the center. Talia had never seen them that way, expectant, not fighting – or at least, as she watched one shove another to the ground, not fighting as much.

A rumble shook the sky and seemed to echo down the pit and vibrate along the walls and floor. Talia gripped onto her protector's shoulders as the shudder trembled up his body and into hers, throbbing within her chest.

"What-"

"Shh…" He pointed up, lifting her onto his shoulders. With the others gathered in the center below, she was now the highest person in the prison.

A tiny fleck of wetness hit her cheek. She swiped at it, staring at her hand. Dryness and heat was all she was accustomed to; this coolness against her cheek… she rubbed her fingers, letting it spread. She wondered if maybe it was a tear, though she was not crying – and then she felt another on the tip of her nose, then her eyelids and speckling against her lashes.

"It's water," she whispered excitedly. She saw drops hitting his face. She wiped her hand against him, staring at the water in wonder.

And then it began to fall, harder, pattering against the ground above and below them, and as it grew stronger the drops smacking the floor echoed off the walls, melding with the new drops until the entire pit was a chorus of the pit pat sound, rising up over them and drowning out the sound of even the men, screaming below.

"What is it?" she cried over the pattering of the water as it fell upon them, soaking into his robes, her tunic, and infiltrating her body with its odd coolness.

"Rain."

Then she was scampering along his body, trying to grab as the drops became a physical thing, streaks of light, as they dotted the ground and turned the light gray of the floor into dark, as it fell harder and harder and became a sheet, a blanket of water that pelted her skin and dripped over her arms and face –

And for the first time since her mother died, she laughed, but the rain only fell harder, drowning her out. She tilted her head up opened her mouth and let the water – fresh, cool, delicious, and so different from the stale bowls she had drunk from before – flow down her throat or – when she made herself stop breathing – overflow her mouth.

"Put me down!" she exclaimed over the rain, and when he did, she ran to the railing and climbed up it, gripped its metal coldness, so wet her hands slipped on it and she almost went plunging to the bottom of her prison, except that her protector wrapped an arm around her waist and deposited her on the ground. The rain fell on her, droplets streaming from her short hair and clothing. Seeing that, she lifted up her arms and saw the rain falling, irregular drip drip dripping, then spun about and smiled again as the water twirled from her clothing.

When she was done, when she had run back to her friend, he scooped her up and she rested her sodden, oddly heavy body against him, and giggled again as she squeezed his shawl between her fingers, for it made the water it had soaked in squelch out between her fingers. She looked at her protector then. He was watching her with the oddest expression on his face. She wasn't quite sure what it was, but the closest thing she could think of was her mother after her sickness and when she had hugged Talia. He looked at her that way now, and touched her cheek.

"Where did the sun go?" she asked him as he lowered his hand. "Will it come back?"

There was a smile then, not in the mouth, but in his eyes. He lowered the now-damp wrappings from his face. "I have captured it, just for you, little one. It is waiting. I will show it to you later."

She did not question him. He had made the sky go gray and brought water to her. She did not doubt that he could bring down the sun to her as well.

She looked all over their cell when they returned, in every corner, under the bed, under the sheets and pillows, but could not find the sun. He watched in some amusement as she ducked around their cell before returning outside. He was collecting water, using every bottle, bowl, and water skin they had, forming a veritable collection of containers which he stacked on the little alcove in their cell. He left the door open for her, watching as she slipped on her shoes and skidded in and out of the cell, crashing to a stop at the railing. The dirt and grime was washing off her body, forming brown rivulets of water that streamed down the levels of the prison. When he saw that, he took a spare piece of cloth and rubbed it all over her body as she stood in the rain – down her arms, up her legs, and lifting her shirt so he could reach her stomach, back, and chest. But when he neared that area, the place where her urine came from, she dodged out of his grip. He didn't seem to think it odd, but she felt an odd twisty feeling in her stomach. She had lived with him for a long time, or so it seemed to her. Surely she might tell him her secret? Thinking of doing so made the queasiness in her tummy increase – but so did the thought of not telling him.

Rain was splashing into their cell, forming a little border of wet and dry concrete; it was dripping down the walls of the pit and soaking the very air. By the time night fell, the other men had ceased their wild howling, the release of their pent-up emotions, and returned to their cells. It would continue for several more days, all the water pooling in the center of the pit, the place where he had taken her to catch her first glimpse of the sun, and was to remain there for weeks afterward, a place to wash, to bathe, to drink from. Soon, they would be cold and wet and missing the sun, but for now, it was a celebration for all, even Talia, who found that water made her clothing weigh down on her and itch at her skin. This was not new to her – her first memories were of heat and sweat and the stickiness and scratching that accompanied it – but she did not remember this completely new feeling, the little tremors along her body that her friend said was called shivering.

"It means you are cold," he said. "Raise your arms."

She did. "Why am I cold?" she asked him as he squeezed the water out of her left sleeve. He had been wearing his outer robe, which had soaked up most of the water, leaving his inner clothing only somewhat damp, but Talia had no robe, and the water had sneaked beneath her collar and along her back, trailing chills down her spine.

"Because you are wet," he answered patiently. "Water makes you cold."

She watched as he twisted the cloth of her sleeve once more, getting out as much water as he could. Other times, he might have used a bowl to collect the precious drops, but today there was so much he could not have possibly saved it all, and so he let the water drip onto the floor.

"Where did the rain come from?" she asked as he worked.

"From the clouds." He released her sleeve. "Leg."

She lifted her right leg obediently. "Where do the clouds come from?"

"From farther away. The wind blows them over here."

"Why do they come from far away? Why don't I see them here?"

"It's too hot here for them to be made."

She mulled that over for a bit. It made sense. Water came from clouds, and water was cold, so clouds had to be cold too, and they probably wouldn't like the heat here. "But w_hy_ are they made?" she asked.

He gave her an exasperated look. "Child, do you _ever_ run out of questions?" Before she could answer, he grabbed a cloth and started scrubbing at her head and face.

"Mmf," she said, voice muffled by the cloth.

"I cannot hear you, little one."

She smacked at his hands indignantly until he pulled the cloth from her face. "You're doing that on purpose!" she accused him.

"Doing what?" And he started wiping at her face again. She yelped and struggled and fell over, then ducked his hand and rolled off the bed onto the puddle-soaked floor.

"Little one," said her protector wearily, "you are getting water all over the cell."

She narrowed her eyes at him, then kicked the puddle, hard, splashing the man.

He stared at her a moment, then picked up a bowl and walked outside.

Panic rooted her to the floor. Was that bad? Had she angered him by disobeying? But they had been having fun, weren't they, and he had seemed... she didn't know how to describe it, but he had been tired without actually _being_ tired, like he was teasing her, which he sometimes did. Had she made him leave? The last thought caused her to spring into movement; she ran after him to where he was standing just outside the cell, opening her mouth to call for him –

He turned around and promptly dumped the bowl of water all over her head.

Afterwards, when he had managed to stop her from smacking her little fists against his leg in a fury, when he had re-wrung out all her clothing and she was as dry as she could possibly be (but still grumpy, she thought huffily to herself, she was _never_ going to let him forget _that_), he wrapped his blanket around her shivering form, lifted her back onto the bed, and whispered into her ear: "Let me show you the sun."

He cleared a spot on the dirt (to place the sun, she thought), moved away what few possessions they had (because the sun would be hot, of course), and formed a pile of precious wood (that puzzled her), little more than stray sticks that fell into their pit and the roots and stems of persistent plants that tried to break through the stone walls, that he had kept in a dry corner of their cell. He smacked two rocks against one another, sending a stream of sparks over the wood.

"The sun," he explained to her delighted face.

She leaned forward to watch, her fingers curling the corner of her mother's blanket as she tried to suppress the temptation to try and catch one of the fleeting specks of light. After a few more tries, one of the sparks leaped onto the wood and ignited the tinder. Quickly he dropped the stones and blew on it until it caught the kindling, consumed it, and spread to the sticks, growing into a great orange flame, rising and falling, flickering and fading. The heat it exuded felt like a physical thing, soaking her from head to foot and down to her bones.

"This is the sun?" she asked in wonder, both drawn to and frightened of this new thing.

"It's… part of the sun," he said.

She nodded wisely. "A ball of fire."

"Yes." He tilted his head down towards hers. "This is fire." He raised his arms and held his open palm towards it. "Hold your hands out," he said. "Feel the heat."

She put her palms up, imitating him. She basked in the warmth, so different from the dry, stark heat of the desert. She was neither cold nor wet anymore, and she shed the blanket. The fire was enough, and so comfortable she was brave enough to lean against her protector's body and not think of anything, other than the fire, and the slow melting feeling of it, and how different it felt from the sun. The sun felt… sharper, she thought. Faster. She had grown hot quickly under it when he had taken her outside.

He reached over and dragged her over that she was sitting between him and the fire. They watched the flames in silence. His hand lay over her crossed legs, and she traced her finger up and down the flesh of his palm, across the calluses, playing with his fingers, rubbing her fingers over his roughened nails, following the lines. Finally she laid her hand in his, her fingers and palm dwarfed by his.

He asked suddenly, "Do you have a name, little one?"

Talia jerked her hand back. _Never tell them your name,_ her mother had said once, very long ago. She wavered indecisively and tried to buy some time. "Do you?" she asked him.

A pause from him. She glanced up and saw him frowning to himself, as if the question had never occurred to him. "I have no name." He leaned forward and threw a stick into the fire. "But they call me something, the men."

"What?"

"Bane." He looked down at her as if expecting a reaction. The word meant nothing to her. "You can call me that too, if you wish," he said when she only blinked curiously at him.

She whispered the name to herself. "Bane."

Bane sat back against the wall, looking at her. "Now, what is your name, little one?"

She moved away from him slightly, squeezing her still-damp shirt between her fingers. He had told her his name…

She said, "Talia." She glanced up at him warily.

He nodded. "Talia," he repeated, and though it was different from how her mother said it, with her lilts and the way her name seemed to float on her tongue, she liked it anyway.

"Bane," she said back to him, and smiled to herself. She still did not know what it meant, but she did know that now she had something to call her friend, her protector. And though her mother had never expounded on what things might happen if Talia should reveal her name, Talia had known that it would be bad – but Bane had not done anything to her. "Bane," she said again, and he dragged her back and onto his lap, tugging the blanket tighter around her.

For hours she watched the fire with fascination. Its shape like that of the sun, an almost indiscernible ball with streams of flame flowing out from its core; its restless, energetic movement; its warmth that seemed to magically absorb the water from her hair and clothing. She watched as it ate up each stick, creeping along it with slow hesitancy, as if it truly did not wish to burn it black and consume it, but then eating it up quicker and quicker, like a starved man at a feast. Their pile of wood was small, though, and soon the fire began to shrink. She saw how it weakened, sputtered whenever small raindrops splashed nearby, trying valiantly to regain its former size but unable to find any more wood, and it saddened her.

"It's dying," she said mournfully, tugging on Bane's sleeve.

He had been sleeping, but he awoke at her words. "The sun doesn't die, little one," he murmured, "not for a long time."

"It goes away…" she said hesitantly.

"But it always returns." He handed her the last few pieces of wood and let her feed them to the fire. "You see? If it has just the smallest thing to eat, it will live." He pulled her arm free from the confines of the blanket and stretched it towards the fire. "Feel it. Stronger already." He put a careful hand on her head.

"Will it hurt me?" she asked, flicking her finger around a tendril of flame.

His gaze lingered over her face. "Not you," he reassured her. "Not you."

Talia looked up at him, picking at a stray thread from his tunic around her fingers. Her heart seemed to be beating in her throat. "Bane?"

He had closed his eyes. "Mmm?"

She twisted the string tight across her fingers. "I'm a girl."

Without opening his eyes, he drew her in closer to his body. "I know." He held her fingers and untangled them from the cord.

Relief and joy flooded her mind. He knew. He knew and he had not done anything; he had not hurt her or told anybody else. She sank gratefully into the cushion of his body, curling herself into his. For the first time, she felt truly comfortable, truly safe. Together, they watched the fire eat the wood and rise, throwing their shadows across the walls.

* * *

It's over! It's over! I shouldn't have started posting this right when finals week when started, because I basically forgot about it and rushed through some of my editing, but yes, it is finished! (And so are my finals, incidentally.)

Final notes: I liked ending the chapter on rain and fire - brings to mind a certain scene from TDKR. It also explains why the heck there's a giant lake of water at the bottom of the pit. (When I finally got the movie, and could watch it and pause it and pick up details in glorious 1080p, I saw it and just thought, "Oh God, there's a lake down there and I just spent my entire story talking about how dry and thirsty everyone is, what the heck do I do - RAIN!") The title came from a line from the musical _Les_ Miserables,specifically a line said by Valjean to little Cosette that went, "Where I go, you will be." Changing it to "Where You Go" for my fanfic title is to avoid plagiarism issues, and definitely not because I misremembered it. (Incidentally, the title I had for this originally was "I Will Be", but that sounded way too much like an old Avril Lavigne song, which was not a connection I wanted.) The lines at the beginning of Chapter 1 are a translation of lyrics from the German musical _Elisabeth_ that I thought fit kind of well here.

Yep. So, if you care to, comment, review,what have you. I have another Bane and Talia story, but I don't know if I'll post it (mostly because I hate it now and think it's awful). Eh, I might. Look for it in a bit. And thanks for reading!


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