Chapter Text
This early in the morning, there’s no sentry standing guard for Bane yet.
John pounds up the steps, map clutched tightly in one fist, his mind and body buzzing. He shoves his way into Bane’s quarters, and bites out, “We need to talk.”
Bane is standing at his desk, bent over papers and a map of his own. He slants a sideways glance at John, then straightens. “Very well.”
John closes the distance between them, tilting his chin up, half in challenge. Bane’s eyes are opaque, unreadable; his gaze flicks to the map John holds up, then back to John.
“I want to know what the hell this is,” John says.
If it was Barsad, the question probably would’ve netted him a response like ‘it’s a map—have you never seen one before?’. But because this is Bane, all he gets is a narrow-eyed, calculating (or perhaps calculated) silence.
Bane reaches out and plucks the map from John’s hand, unfolds and refolds it until they’re both looking at the large circle taking up a third of downtown Gotham.
“You’ve been talking to the children.” There’s an inexplicable ring of satisfaction in Bane’s voice. “You asked them where they’ve been delivering their messages.”
John jabs a finger at the map without confirming or denying. “If this is what I think it is—” His mouth thins. “This isn’t a fucking revolution, Bane. This is terrorism.”
Bane’s narrow-eyed look gives way to cool amusement. He turns back to his desk. “What one man calls a terrorist—”
“Another calls a freedom fighter,” John finishes, a furious swoop washing through him because Bane isn’t even trying to deny it. “Cute. Nice soundbite.” He grabs Bane by the arm, fingers digging into hard muscle. “But trapping a city full of people doesn’t fit with any definition of freedom that I know.”
“And how much freedom have you experienced in your life, truly?” Bane pulls out of John’s grip easily, pivots to face him with such speed that John takes an involuntary step back. “Shuttled from family to family, with no say in the matter—”
“What?” John says. “What does that have to do with—”
“—incarcerated before you were even of age,” Bane goes on. “Forced to hide from the authorities when you were merely trying to survive.” His voice is low—pitying, John realises with a sick wrench. “You never had the opportunity to learn anything about freedom—true freedom—let alone what it takes to win it.”
“Fuck you,” John says, but it comes out weak. Wavering, because in the quiet of Bane’s voice he hears an echo of the nurses, the social workers, their hushed sympathy piercing the haze of morphine. “The first chance I had to get free, I took it. I’m not—” He clenches his jaw.
“Not what?” Bane says, eyebrows raised. “Not weak?” He tilts his head, hawk-like. “Not a victim?”
John flinches. “I’m not here for another one of your abstract debates, this is real—”
Bane’s gaze turns flinty.
“It has always been real,” he says. “Every word, every exchange—if you thought any of it was theoretical, then you were deceiving yourself.” John sucks in a breath, but Bane cuts him off. “You wish to know what ‘this’ is?” He holds up John’s map, then sweeps his arm outward, the gesture encompassing the papers on his desk and pinned to the walls. “It has always been in your power to find out.”
“Like hell it has,” John says, even as—damn it all—a worm of doubt wriggles to life. After all, hadn’t plausible deniability been the name of the game, not so long ago?
John glowers for a moment, then shuffles over to Bane’s desk. It quickly becomes apparent that what he’d thought was a map is actually a blueprint depicting a banded spherical device; it looks like a sci-fi movie prop. The blueprint is crowded with labels and arrows and annotations—some printed, some written in what John has come to recognise as Bane’s handwriting.
“I don’t understand any of this,” John says finally, a little flatly.
Bane comes up behind him, touches his fingers to one corner of the blueprint. “This is a fusion reactor prototype,” he says. “Commissioned by Bruce Wayne before his company’s finances began to suffer.” He takes a hissing, contemplative breath. “Tell me, John—do you know what would happen to a reactor such as this if you removed its core?”
John starts.
He doesn’t know, not for sure, but he’s seen… movies. Shitty action blockbusters where the bad guys break into nuclear facilities to—
John shakes his head. It’s—impossible. Ridiculous, too outlandish to be real. But the look in Bane’s eyes is anything but ridiculous—
“Jesus,” John says, backing away. “You’re going to—what, blow up the city?” The instant the words leave his mouth, he’s gripped by an awful, irrational urge to laugh. It claws its way up his throat, robbing him of breath. “Then what’s the point of all that?” He points at the map in Bane’s hand. “Pre-show fireworks? A preview for the main event?”
“A preview, perhaps,” Bane agrees. “Although not in the way you may think.” He moves forward for every step John takes back, inexorable as an iceberg. “It will take time for the people of Gotham to overthrow those in power and institute lasting change. The neutron bomb will act as a deterrent. A warning to those who might otherwise interfere.”
“No,” John says. His limbs feel oddly weak, shivery, like he’s suffering the onset of fever. “No, I know you. Never make a threat unless you’re willing to follow through, right? You’d set that bomb off if they called your bluff, you’d kill us all—”
“It will not come to that,” Bane says, still backing John up. “Because this—” he holds up the map, “—will be more than sufficient proof of our intent. Once we destroy every bridge and tunnel connecting Gotham to the outside world, they will know our threat is not an idle one.”
“Don’t say ‘our’,” John snaps. “I am not a fucking part of this.”
Bane cocks his head, his grey eyes flat as mirrored glass. “Aren’t you?”
John’s back hits the wall.
“Jesus.” He closes his eyes, slides down the wall into a crouch. “Why are you—no one asked you to do this. How the fuck could you think anyone would want this?”
Bane huffs out a laugh. There’s a creak of leather as he crouches down. “You mean to tell me that this city—a city which once hailed a vigilante as its saviour—would not welcome a course of action drastic as this?”
“That was different,” John snaps, jerking his head up to level a glare at Bane. “Everything Batman did was to make Gotham better, to give us hope—”
“And he failed,” Bane snaps back, “because he expended his energies fighting the symptoms of corruption, not the source. Because he refused to trust the people of Gotham with the truth. He and Commissioner Gordon both. But this—” Bane thrusts the map back into John’s hands, folds John’s nerveless fingers around it, then grips John’s chin, tipping his head up. His grey eyes are magnetic, bright with the strength of belief, and John’s breath catches, part of him mesmerised, despite everything. “This will give Gotham a second chance. This will allow the people determine their own destiny, to attain true freedom.”
John twists his hands, the map crumpling between them. It’s—Bane’s doing it again. Making the unreasonable sound reasonable somehow, and the longer John listens, the more likely it is that he’ll end up nodding along, convinced despite himself—
A thing may be true, he remembers Bane saying, and still be twisted.
John jerks his face out Bane’s grip, and crab walks out of range, the concrete catching and snagging at the back of his jacket. Bane says his name—low, somewhere between coaxing and warning—but John pushes himself to his feet. He needs space. Needs to get space between them so he can think because something—isn’t right. Something doesn’t fit.
It’s a tiny firefly of a thought, flitting just beyond John’s conscious understanding, and he gropes after it, half-blind. He looks around Bane’s quarters, then looks beyond the railings, out over the central chamber, the tunnels, the eastern tunnel—
“It’s the kids,” John says, distantly. “They don’t fit.” He looks at Bane, but Bane has finally fallen silent. He rises from his crouch and gazes steadily at John. Waiting. John speaks slowly, testing the weight of each word before laying it down. “If you—as soon as you blow the bridges and tunnels, everything will be out in the open. You won’t need to skulk around, getting the kids to run messages for you. You won’t need—” John’s gut clenches. “We’ll be useless to you.”
“No,” Bane says, and reaches out for John. John pulls back.
“No?” And he does laugh then—an incredulous little bubble of sound that pops almost as soon as it emerges. “Even if everyone in Gotham goes along with this, what good are those kids gonna be to you in a war? Revolution, whatever you want to call it. They’re kids, they can’t fight—”
“But of course they can.”
“—they’re just going to be caught in—” John stops as Bane’s words register. “What?”
Bane looks past John, takes a deep, measured breath. “In theory,” he says, as cautious as John had been earlier, “it takes no particular skill to pick up a gun and pull the trigger. Accuracy is a different matter, but the mere act of firing a gun—” Another measured breath. “Any child could do it. I’d wager at least half those children would learn how, sooner or later, even without the League.”
“In theory,” John echoes blankly, taking Bane in. The way he won’t look at John, the careful way he’s holding himself like he’s ready to block a punch. “In theory, if you got a group of kids young enough, desperate enough—if you could make them grateful, loyal to you, and angry at everyone else—” The tiny firefly of a thought flares into a bright and terrible certainty. “In theory, you could point and they’d shoot. Is that right?” He repeats the question—sharper, louder—until:
“Not me,” Bane says, meeting his eyes finally, grey gaze unflinching. “You.”
“What?” But even as the word leaves his mouth, John comprehends it—Bane’s meaning, his intent—and he rocks back onto his heels like he’s been slapped. “You—” he says, through the sudden constriction in his throat. “You thought I’d go along with that? You think I’d ever allow something like that to happen?”
Bane takes a hissing breath. “It was an error of judgement—”
“You’re damn right it was,” John says, and to his own ears he sounds dazed. His rage—his constant companion since childhood—has deserted him. Even the chill dread in the pit of his stomach is gone, leaving only hollowness in its wake.
Bane lifts a hand—to take John by the shoulder, to placate him, maybe—but John blocks it automatically, bats it away. Bane’s eyes flash. “Listen to me—”
“No,” John says, backing away again, toward the stairs this time. “No, I am done listening to you. I told you—I fucking told you—don’t ever try manipulating me into doing what you want again.” He passes through the doorway, staggers to a halt on the landing.
Bane follows him, stopping just short of the threshold, curling and uncurling his fingers. “You wanted the truth, and I’ve given it to you,” he grates out. “You wanted to know, and now you do.” His fingers clench. “What more do you expect from me?”
John’s eyes feel hot, dry. For a second, his vision blurs, doubles, and he finds himself staring at two Banes, their outlines vague and indistinct. He blinks hard until the two images resolve into one.
“Nothing,” John says, and it’s only now that the burn of anger emerges—too slow to erase the aching rawness in his throat. “I don’t expect a goddamn thing from you anymore.”