When Bain came back on the third day, he was no longer surprised when he heard Bruce say good morning in that low tone. He just squatted in front of Bruce's cell door and said.
"I don't know if you're pretending to be driven crazy by the torture Amanda inflicted on you. Maybe this is your way of teasing or retaliating against her, but I'm not here to hear that."
"Then what do you want to hear?"
"I just want to know about you, about Batman, about..." Bane's tone gradually deepened, and it took him a long time before he uttered one word: "About Gotham."
"I don't know what exactly you mean."
"A long time ago, I asked a colleague to recommend any good vacation spots. He told me that Gotham would be a good choice. I think this idea is very interesting. Perhaps the best place for us criminals to relax is exactly
A city of sin."
"So about five years ago, I went on an East Coast trip with someone who was a good colleague. The first stop was a bustling metropolis, and then Gotham. It felt pretty good, like I was back home.
"
"What's your home like?"
Bane fell silent again, and after a while, his voice with a deep vibrato came from outside the door: "You are smarter than I thought, Batman."
"Thank you for your praise."
"You have deeper darkness in your heart than me, but you appear to be more straightforward than me, and you use this straightforwardness as a weapon. You have indeed exceeded my assessment of your level, and now I am more interested in you."
"My pleasure."
"So tell me, Batman, what was going on in that city I saw a month ago?"
"I do not understand what you mean."
"I mean, why did the legendary Dark City disappear in just five years, and Gotham not only has sunshine, but also hope?"
Bain knocked on the door with his hand and made a "winter" sound. His tone was full of a slightly morbid curiosity for knowledge.
"Tell me, Batman, what did you do to this city to make it what it is today? Tell me, how did you save Gotham? That's what I wanted to ask you after I followed you here.
question."
"Why do you ask?"
"Because Gotham cannot be saved." There was finally a fluctuation in Bain's tone. His breathing became heavier and his speaking speed became faster: "Because five years ago, I saw the city's
At that time, I judged that even if I replaced you, I would not be able to cure this city, and I believed you could not do it either, so I left."
"That colleague once asked me why I didn't kill you, because when I saw you from a distance, I thought you were too young and immature, and I didn't think you were worthy of being my opponent."
"If I must take your life, it is best to make your despair worthy of this city. Then I call it a miracle, but you are not worthy yet. Then you are still far away."
"Thank you for your praise."
"Batman..." Bane murmured: "A few months ago, I revisited this place out of curiosity - I couldn't believe what I saw. You, a boy indulged in his own childish fantasies and games,
In just a few years, a crack was carved into Gotham's dark barrier that never sees the light of day."
"Now the miracle belongs to you, and I want to know, what is the true face of the miracle?"
"Why do you ask?"
Bane was silent for a moment, shorter than his previous silences, and asked, "Truth for truth, right?"
"What's your home like?"
"A prison, it sounds ridiculous, but my mother was captured during the war, and the people who captured my mother decided that if there was a boy in her belly, he would pay for his father's crimes, and then I was born
."
"Sounds bad."
"Yes, but what's worse is that I was born and raised in prison. There is no healthy growth. My body is far inferior to those of the new strong prisoners who were imprisoned. I was constantly beaten and abused.
grow up."
"And one day, a prisoner wanted to use me to escape from prison, so he pushed me down the tunnel and made me comatose. Maybe the blow to the brain changed my mind. I couldn't bear it anymore, so I killed him."
"I don't know what exactly you mean."
"In a very cruel way, I removed his mandible, injected rat bait into his stomach, and then stuffed a bunch of hungry live rats into his esophagus and let him go from the inside out.
Got chewed up."
"The warden thought I was very cruel, so he threw me to the bottom of the cell, a dark and narrow place where the tide could rise at any time. I made a living by eating rats."
"But this strengthened my will and body. When I really grew up, I seized the authority of the prison and ran rampant here. They took a fancy to my strong willpower and chose me to be a part of the biochemical experiment.
member."
"The experience in the laboratory was very boring. As you said, the experimental projects were not taken seriously and the doctors were not professional enough. They injected me with a toxin to make me stronger, so I killed them, and everyone was released from prison.
He escaped and became a free mercenary from then on."
Bane's tone became deeper and deeper, and after a while of silence, he finally asked: "In exchange, aren't you going to reveal some truth about Gotham?"
"I don't know what exactly you mean."
"What do you think Gotham is?"
"Gotham is a city located on the east coast of the United States. It is close to the Atlantic Ocean and has a temperate continental humid climate. It has four districts under its jurisdiction and a total population of nearly 10 million people..."
"It seems that I won't be able to get an answer today." Bain stood up, put one hand on the door and said: "I took Amanda's order and lured you here, not just to complete it.
The mission is also to create a secret enough communication channel for us."
"This method is not honorable, so I owe you, but I have to figure this out. You will always answer me, goodbye, Batman."
"Goodbye, Bane."
An hour later, Bruce woke up again. He blinked in confusion, trying hard to dispel the hallucinations in front of his eyes. Feeling the silence in his ears, he said to himself: "...He's gone? The automatic reply shouldn't be there."
What's the problem?"
Soon, he became quiet again, apparently diving headfirst into the shit mountain code, like every Gothamite ever did, repeatedly trying to find gold in shit with great perseverance.
On the second, third, and fourth days, Bane would appear outside Bruce's cell door every day, talking to him about many things, but rarely receiving a response.
Of course, Bain noticed something was wrong with Bruce's short and repetitive answer, but he thought that if he helped Amanda trick Bruce here, Bruce would think that he and Amanda were in the same group, so performing in front of him was driven crazy by sensory deprivation.
The drama is also normal.
Bain knew that he had to break through this layer of defense before he could get the real answer.
But what first surprised him, then shocked him, and finally made him helpless and speechless was that for a whole week, this Batman did not say a word to the only person he could communicate with during the harsh sensory deprivation punishment.
Bain almost felt admiration.
As we all know, the most severe thing about sensory deprivation is that in a completely dark space, people cannot feel the flow of time. This state of complete loneliness seems to last until they die. This is a very deep feeling.
Despair, almost no one can resist.
In most cases, sensory deprivation cannot be very strict, but when Amanda builds this prison, she will naturally put a lot of thought into the final punishment. The cells used for this kind of punishment are surrounded by layers of maze-like soundproofing devices and are tightly blocked from light.
, even the ventilation devices are absolutely silent.
The criminals will be very strictly restrained in the chair, with no room for movement except to meet their personal needs from time to time. If it were not for the fact that long-term immobility may cause physical diseases, Amanda even considered direct intubation to solve the problem of eating and excretion.
question.
This is simply the perfect environment to cultivate the Stockholm plot, and Bain naturally knows this.
In this case, with someone to communicate with and a way to experience the passage of time, the imprisoned subject will definitely go crazy looking for a sense of security to alleviate the terrible loneliness and despair.
The destruction of the will.
Bane originally wanted to kill Batman, but after he saw the situation in Gotham again, he thought Batman was a miracle, so like all the villains in Gotham, he didn't want to destroy Batman's body, but
Want to completely destroy his spirit, or even better, manipulate his spirit.
What Bane has for Batman saving Gotham is not admiration, but a morbid curiosity. This is malice without reason. Bane does not need any reason to cross the moral bottom line. His birth and
Growth itself is twisted, and morbidity is the norm for him.
But now, he really has admiration for Batman. Batman has almost completely surpassed the limits of the human spirit. Adding up to two weeks and fourteen days of sensory deprivation, in terms of thinking and feeling, it may be more than a few times.
The even longer and painful torture of ten years in prison failed to make this tough guy say a single word.
It is precisely because Bain spent his childhood and adolescence in a completely enclosed small space that he can understand how this kind of pain can distort the human spirit and drive people crazy.
He also knew better that if he had a partner at that time who didn't have to do anything else but just come and say a word to him every day, he would definitely be grateful and would do it no matter what the other party asked him to do.
Loneliness is the greatest enemy of mankind, and human beings in loneliness are the greatest enemy of order.
But for so many days, Bain got nothing but a few repeated answers - he was convinced.
Finally, Bain stood in the dark corridor, feeling the boundless silence that he had been extremely afraid of and the loneliness that still surged into his heart after recalling the past for many years, and said to Bruce.
"I once thought about breaking your spine and watching you lying helplessly on the ground, unable to do anything, being abandoned in the rainy night, because this way you can feel the pain I have suffered, not physically.
Pain, but the loneliness and despair brought about by powerlessness.”
"No matter how you look at it, I have to defend myself. I don't like dynamic bloodshed and conflict."
"I prefer to deprive people of their power, watch them die in silence, and let them understand that in the last moment of their lives, what they fear most is not death, but the loneliness of being abandoned."
"From the moment I was born, I was abandoned by this world."
"But this is not a kind of revenge. I failed to defeat loneliness in loneliness. I chose to escape from loneliness, return to the crowd, and resist with violence. This proves that I lost to it."
"I searched the world and killed countless people in this way, just to prove that I was right - no one can defeat loneliness itself in loneliness."
"Until I met you, Batman."
Bain raised his hand on the door, retracted his arm and hung it by his side. His posture was solemn, as if he was saluting something, and when he spoke, he seemed to be sighing softly.
"You defeated loneliness, and you also defeated me."
Then he put his hands on the door again, gritted his teeth and said, "And I just want to know what supported you to defeat it. You have to tell me, Batman...answer me!"
He was answered only by deeper silence.
At the same time, Bruce’s inner world echoed with his angry and doubtful voice——
