Round Two Prompt Post
Round Two Is Currently Closed To New Prompts
Welcome to 'Round Two' of The Dark Knight Rises Kink Meme.
This round will close when it reaches four thousand comments and after two weeks, another prompt post will open.
( General Policies )
Welcome to 'Round Two' of The Dark Knight Rises Kink Meme.
This round will close when it reaches four thousand comments and after two weeks, another prompt post will open.
( General Policies )
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Barsad takes John up to the roof one morning shortly after John's failed attempt to save the cops.
“Why are we here?” he asks, when he sees that no one else is there. A flutter of anxiety passes through him and almost at once fades. Barsad, laconic and staid, doesn't frighten him half as much as Bane does. In fact, he feels a kind of grudging liking for the man. If he were a cop, John thinks he'd look up to him.
“You are going to learn to fight,” Barsad says.
“Oh.” John pauses. “Does Bane know about this?”
“Bane ordered this. He says you're sulking.” John opens his mouth angrily to refute this, but Barsad is already slinging his ammunition belt to the ground. “Show me what you've learned from your police training.”
John shuts his mouth. Obediently, he goes through the motions with Barsad, grasping the familiarity gratefully. He shows Barsad all the holds and defensive maneuvers the academy taught him, guiding Barsad's hands and moving in slow motion. He's glad for the distraction, truthfully. The death of the cops keeps him up at night. Barsad is silent, his hands quiet where he grips John.
“Real time now,” he says. John squares himself, and Barsad attacks at once. John grabs reactively, moves to throw him. In one lightning-quick twist, Barsad puts him in a joint lock and forces him to his knees. John doesn't even see how he does it.
Barsad helps him up. “I can see what Bane means.”
“Okay,” John says, irritated now, his pride wounded. “So I'm sloppy. Make me better.”
He raises his fists, but Barsad shakes his head impatiently and grabs his arms. He positions John the way he wants him and makes him stand there.
“Find your balance,” he says, circling John. Then he shoves him from behind. John pitches forward. Barsad seems to be tiring of his inept student already. He sighs. “We start with the basics, then.”
Barsad seems to have perfect balance. He goes through a few exercises with John, making sure he holds his limbs exactly so, and shows him how to move. It's not like any exercise warm-up John's ever done. It's slow, it's ... something like t'ai chi, if he had to guess, but it's not like he knows a lot about martial arts except what movies have told him. It would be relaxing, if Barsad wasn't barking at him every few seconds to straighten his spine and breathe from his abdomen. And he feels a little stupid when he has to hold each pose. Barsad makes all of this look natural. He could do this all day, John realizes-maybe this is what he does all day, when he's not busy being second-in-command to a psychotic warlord.
The sun is high in the sky by the time Barsad decides they're done with that and instead starts something he calls tui shou, or “push hands”. He makes John stand an arm's length from him, both their arms raised and in light contact with each other. He moves slowly, pushing at John, forcing him to bend and pivot without moving his feet. Several times John loses his balance again and has to realign his stance. Now he's starting to grow impatient.
“Soft,” Barsad urges every time he lands a slow-motion blow. “Softer. Relax and rotate with the blows. Don't push back.”
“So you're teaching me to take a hit,” John says, annoyed. “Not to throw one.”
“Only when you can take a hit can you redirect one. Hit me, if you're angry.”
John should know better, but he is angry. He feels like Bane and Barsad are mocking him with all this. He flings a rapid punch at Barsad's face. Barsad-perpetually sleepy-eyed, whippet-lean and wiry Barsad-tilts out of the way, strikes John's arm aside and grabs him by the throat with the same hand, sweeping a leg behind his in the same motion. He shoves against John's throat, and John hits the ground with a strangled gasp. It happens in less than a second.
“Stop if you like,” says Barsad, eternally unruffled. “Or you can get up and keep doing exercises, if you'd rather learn how to do that.”
His pride and his rear are stinging considerably, but John lets Barsad pull him to his feet. They keep exercising.
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Blake dwells on his failure to save the police officers for a long time: Bane can sense it weighing on him, even after he orders Barsad to start training John. He hangs the cops' bodies where they can be seen through a window from the living room, to remind him, but it doesn't remind Blake in the way he hopes.
He thinks about it, too, when Blake says, “You could have killed me instead of them.”
Blake is a whelp who naively believes there are no worse fates than death, but Bane can read the conviction in his eyes. He would have offered himself. To what end? Any one of Bane's men would offer their lives in his service, but those policemen were nobody special. Bane would have died to see Talia freed from the pit, fully expected it, even, but that was different, too. Talia's purity made him love her. He would have done, and will do, anything she ever asks of him.
The same sort of purity shines brightly in Blake, and that causes him a confusing tangle of emotion.
Barsad has told him how some of the men look at Blake. Men always want to destroy pure things; it's their nature. He tells Barsad to teach Blake how to fight, serving two purposes. It's a good channel for Blake's incessant restlessness, as well as a preparation should he need to defend himself. Barsad is able to spend at least an hour or so with him on the roof each day. Blake always seems even more sullen than usual when he comes back to the penthouse. If Bane is there he gets to watch Blake curl up petulantly on the couch after a shower, nursing various bruises and moving stiffly.
“Don't push him,” Bane warns Barsad. He delegated this task to Barsad because he knows that Barsad will be more careful than Bane knows how to be. His right hand looks faintly exasperated.
“He's in good shape and he learns quickly. I don't give him any more than he can handle.”
Bane is pleased to hear his captive is learning quickly. He wants to see how high the bird can fly before he inevitably falls.
Any concern for Blake washes away when he sees Talia again. He sheds his vest and belt for her, lies face-down and lets her rub away the ceaseless aches of his body, and is annoyed when the guard outside allows Blake to find them like this.
“Oh,” he says, faltering in the doorway.
He's panting lightly, flushed with a sheen of sweat. He's obviously come from the roof. Usually Bane is elsewhere during the day; Blake seems unsettled to find him here, let alone Talia.
“Come in, John,” Talia invites him. “There's nothing to be afraid of.”
“You look pretty intimate.” Blake speaks to her sharply, his words barbed. Bane tenses under her hands. She rolls the heels of her palms against him soothingly.
“You can join us if you like,” she says sweetly.
“Leave, Blake,” Bane growls.
Blake does, surprisingly. He backs out of the room and leaves with a last curious glance at them.
“How are you enjoying your pet?” Talia asks.
“I'm not,” Bane rumbles. “He is a waste of time, and he speaks his mind far too often.”
“He doesn't see yet,” she reassures him. “He will.”
He doesn't tell her how Blake had got to his knees for Bane. That was a lesson, nothing more.
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When he stands in front of Blake, holding the book out, Blake just stares at him.
“What's that for?” he asks.
Air hisses in and out of the mask before Bane replies, “Reading.”
Blake seems skeptical. Bane has given him books before, of course, but that was before Blake was able to just walk to the bookshelf and pick one. Impatiently, Bane pulls his hand away, taking the book with it, and starts to turn, but Blake's hand shoots out and that's when he does something unprecedented. He touches Bane's wrist brace.
Bane goes still. Blake's gaze travels thoughtfully from the brace to the crude binding on his own wrist, put there again after Barsad aggravated the healing sprain.
“You broke it, didn't you?”
Broke. Shattered. Crushed. Bane should hit him for presuming. For guessing.
“One of my earliest injuries,” he answers, instead.
“The belt, does that help, too?”
Bane withdraws his hand. “It can.”
Blake's eyes are too knowing. “And the mask?”
Bane drops the book in his lap and walks away. “Barsad says when you stop sulking he might feel inclined to take you out again.”
“I'm not sulking!” Blake protests. Bane rounds on him.
“What do you call it?”
“You killed two cops. Am I supposed to be happy?” Blake snaps. “Just because I couldn't even-”
His cheeks flush hotly, and anger prickles at Bane. As though he forced John Blake to make his little proposition and see it through.
“I let one live,” Bane reminds him coldly. “Given your failure, I would call that very generous.”
“Well, I wouldn't.”
Bane is suddenly sick of the sight and sound of him. He turns and slaps the light off as he goes to bed, embracing the darkness, not caring what Blake does.
“I know now,” Blake says, after a minute has ticked past. That sharpness has crept back into his tone. “I couldn't get you off because I wasn't her.”
Bane snarls, an echoing, animal sound that silences Blake immediately. “Speak again and lose your tongue.”
Blake is wisely quiet for the rest of the night.
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That's all for tonight. :)
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Please, please, please continue you precious anon, you *huggles*
Also, your Bane is terrifying, kind, complicated and loveable all at once. I love him!
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