Static Frame

“Begotten always longs for its begetter and loves it; especially is this so when begetter and begotten are solitaries.”

***

Her old clothes are gone. She hunts for them high and low before realizing in fear that they may have burned them. For fear of plague – they must hate her clothes, rags that they are, layer on layer. She hadn’t gotten rid of the uniform of the Pit over the course of her travels, only added more and more on top of it – warmer against the night, though no less ragged. A leather coat, gloves, wraps for her legs, all carefully collected for their utility and at no small cost, paid for in time and skill and the shouts and clubbing blows of men when her feet weren’t swift enough or her hands deft enough. Without them she feels not naked but angry at the theft. Her father’s men should have known better than to rob her while she slept.

Her father wears clothes of a different style now, another dark sleek uniform. Talia sits squinting at him in the clear thin light, watching him drink tea, and lets the words run out of her. She tells him about the doctor, about the guards such that they were, dead or indistinguishable from the men they were supposed to keep in line. She tells him how her mother, his wife, died. She tells him how his daughter survived in the dark.

She speaks of her protector, only reluctantly between spates of ragged crying that she doesn’t understand and that leave her traitorously without breath. Her father doesn’t know what to do with her when she cries, but he never leaves her, even when she shrinks from him – not from the memory of the other prisoners, those in the Pit who could do no better than to destroy and devour, but from the unfamiliarity of this new comfort. He was too thin, and smelled wrong, and didn’t know how to hold her.

Her father fails to understand.

“This man you speak of. Did he hurt you?”

His voice is gentle, but his face is grave and its lines are hard. His hands are on her hands.

Talia pulls away and raises her arms a little indignantly to endorse her own health. Her shins and palms and feet are still raw from the climb, so long afterward, but she is intact: two hands, two feet, teeth, eyes, and all.

(How frightened she had been when her teeth had begun to fall out; she’d seen Bane knock a few loose from a man’s jaw once, a man who had tried to coax her away from him in the line for bread, but she never knew they could come loose on their own, or that they’d grow back again, if not like hair, only once. Bane’s teeth didn’t show much, but they were long and strong, and bit well.)

The surge of energy that had given her the strength to leap in the first place, that lingered long enough to get her ragged body here by some half-remembered set of directions, has ebbed away entirely and left only her empty body behind. The man never asked to climb with her, to accompany her out into the day; he never asked her for, for a scrap of her food. He never asked her for anything, only gave, and she left him there.

“He protected me,” she says, staring into her lap, “he gave me food. He used to carry me. I slept in his cell.”

Her father touches her hair very lightly. It’s growing out in irregular wisps.

“You are safe here. You no longer need him to defend you, you owe him nothing. Talia, did he hurt you?”

There’s a strange pressing in his voice, an urgency, that she is strongly wary of. It might be an insult, or another question she’s meant to guess the correct answer to. When she does understand his meaning, heavy as lead, something inside of her withers all at once.

“You mean, did he rape me.”

He inclines his head cautiously, mouth a grim slash. What could Ducard know about that? The way men devoured women, ripped them apart? What men did to women, what men did to each other. Bane knew it too well and hid her from it, covered her eyes and her ears. And himself? He would have died first. If that was what men did, Bane was hardly a man, not to her.

Talia spits out, “Never,” with a abruptness that startles even her, hands curling into fists against the flat of her legs. The intensity of her reply makes another crease appear in her father’s forehead, but he believes her.

---

The knife-blade scrapes along her scalp, close enough to cause a little pain with each scrape but not to cut; the stubble of her hair falls away, dusting her neck and forehead, and itching terribly. Her protector has one leg on either side of her, which he used to do to steady her when she found the procedure a frightening indignity; now she grips him for comfort, companionably. He has strong legs, and so does she, but she’s small enough to fold up in his shadow.

“Talia,” he says, not any of the other things he calls her that are all about being a small thing or an animal (a bear cub, a bird, or a rabbit), “you haven’t bled yet, have you?”

She doesn’t quite grasp his meaning, and it seems to be a strain against the bounds of language for him when he explains, something a dozen languages and all the wisdom that trickled into the Pit from above won’t let him say. He confesses that he doesn’t know how old she is in the first place, for all his wisdom, and neither does she. And, he says, it might not even happen at any rate, she might never round out and bud down in the Pit, even with him feeding her enough to keep her eyes bright and her body and soul together. Better not to become a woman here. Better to remain the child. In every language except their own private one, she is not only a child but a boy. Better that.

“It’s time for you to leave this place,” he says thoughtfully, resting his chin on the top of her head.

“Before my father comes for me?” It sounds distant anyway, even as a hope, that this stranger who is her father (and what is that to her?) will climb down surefooted as a spider and take her away from here. It was only a saying in their shared vocabulary, mother and child and stranger, meaningless.

“That day may never come, that we both know. Your mother waited for it, and found no help from him.” His mouth twists a little. “Practice climbing.”

---

And what was a father going to be to her? Not the man who had saved her a place at his bench, who taught her geometry, who had cut her hair for her and dressed her and carried her on his back, not the man who fought like a dog to win both of them a place in front of the fire. Who saved up splintered scraps of wood to keep a fire for her now and then, on the darkest nights. Who taught Talia to keep count of the seasons by the length of the days and by scant few stars, taught her their alien names. Taught her how to put the best of her weight behind the knife, showed her where to put it. Not the man who had taken her lost teeth and buried them in between the stones in the walls.

“The strain of travel may be too much for him. If you love your friend, let him stay. Let him continue to be treated here; he will be provided for. Let him know some small peace.”

Ducard’s voice is kind, but she scarcely hears a word he says. Her unease is rising, choking her. Very small peace indeed.

Even in the Pit, she never woke before he did, never pried his arms off and wriggled away unless it was to shake him awake in the case of some urgent matter, a riot too near where they slept or a visit from the guards. He never left their sleeping spot without telling her where he’d be, if it was someplace they could not go together. He would never leave her side, and in turn she would never venture out of his sight, anywhere he couldn’t account for her.

“I do love my friend. And I know what he would want.” Talia is cold, and imperious as a queen. She fears more rationally than most that if she leaves him again, he will die. He may yet die if he accompanies them to the next safehouse, where resources are few, but they’ve gotten by on little before.

Ducard – Ra’s al-Ghul, he is no more the man Henri Ducard than she was the carefully sexless child of the Pit, this is who he has become – takes her to her protector’s side in the middle of the day. When Bane’s condition is stable, for whatever that means. Perhaps he means to teach her a lesson.

The sprawl of machines is incongruous against hard wood and lacquer, and the man among them is drastically misplaced, the pale high-altitude sunlight painting a stripe across him where he lies. He looks horribly thin, still broad but sunken in, and his body lies slack, like his mind might not be in command of it. Even when Ra’s al-Ghul announces himself and bids her approach, and his eyes open, his limbs don’t stir. Men with broken backs often can’t. His face is not so ruined, under the net of tubes and wires; she had expected one great wound. And true, his nose is mashed like a boxer’s and it has a tube running up it, his mouth is one great sore, his jaw has been set wrong for too long now, but there are still some teeth in his jaws. His eyebrow is split. The numerous wounds on his scalp, healing to pinkish seams on his shorn head – oh, she had been so frightened, so frightened at the thought of the brilliant man she’d known being reduced to a stranger, something only alive, not really living. But the Pit hadn’t destroyed his brain, only his body, and that could be fixed.

A flicker of recognition arrives in his eyes. (They, at least, are still the same.) His mouth opens a little, slack and red, and he breathes something like the syllables of her name, and a sleepy hello. (“Goodbye.” Hello.) Talia falls to her knees and embraces the frame of the makeshift hospital bed in lieu of the man lying in it. She does not shake nor weep. Her body is electrified with perfect joy.

She hears the smallest of choked sounds and it takes a moment to register that it came from neither her own lips nor her friend’s. When she turns her head, Ra’s al-Ghul is looking away.

Ra’s al-Ghul treats her protector with uncommon dignity, but never yet trust. It takes her years to know that the look on his face when he saw them reunited was not stifled resentment as she imagined it, but sorrow.

 

Both of them at first are spared the full brunt of the League’s training on account of their infirmity – Talia’s only wound is what bitter acolytes suspect to be her main advantage, her father’s favor. This allows at least for the two of them to martial their forces over the same span of time and to grow strong again. They spar together once the League’s physicians have declared him fit for it, no less rigorously than any other pair of partners but with a lighter touch and more grace. He lets her throw him, graceless enough on her part without him hitting the ground so well and getting up so quickly despite his size. He straightens up, squares his bulk and carefully checks his brace and his mask, then they spar again, and she throws him once more. It’s never as easy as the first time, where he jumped as much as he fell, but he knows how much challenge she’s needing better than she does. Members of the League closer to her own size are not so understanding and give no such quarter, but Bane is three times her size, and still towers over her even as she grows inches, seemingly overnight. Against all odds, Talia grows by leaps and bounds; against all odds, Bane heals.

---

Bane heals; Talia grows.

Bane is the strongest man in the League by far, impressive enough to look at, but much more so for those who had seen him too weak to stand, little more than a pile of bloody scraps. He absorbs the ideology of the League of Shadows quite well, but never quite adopts the graciousness of their brutality. There’s always something thuggish there at odds with his fine form; when Ra’s al-Ghul is angry with him he calls him a mad dog in private, but there’s nothing wild or unrestrained to be found in him. He is restraint. He is built out of personal control, a man carved out of the stone of the Pit, and the drugs that flood his system would stagger a lesser man, leave him incoherent. He is constance, he is strength, but the imprint of the brother Talia knew will never quite leave him. Something in him simply hardens.

Talia is not the strongest woman in the League of Shadows, nor the most beautiful, at least by her own reckoning. Her finest features – her lovely eyes, her graceful step, her soft voice – are all stolen, something the real Talia puts on and takes off when her work is done. There is nothing shameful in deception, and the men she kills are just as dead for meeting their end at such lovely hands. Her hair grows out to long soft curls, she learns about poisons and knives and about wine glasses and invitations. Pliancy, knowing when to yield, knowing when to cry. It becomes critical to know things that Bane can never teach her, when he has never had a reason to be good at tact or evasive social niceties even as a method of twisting the knife, and she must become her own woman or die, not to remain a thin shadow of a stronger man.

When Bane is exiled, Talia can’t follow without sacrificing everything they’ve worked for, and with it the last chance that he might one day be reinducted to his proper rank. And when Ra’s al-Ghul dies the one small benefit in that loss is that once again Bane is permitted to rise and take his place at her side. They will never be without each other, even ten thousand miles apart.