“A seed can not flower under ground, it has to be stamped out.”
Pure. –Vulnerable. In the pit, the belly of agony that lie those afflicted, cursed to their slow suffering, too bore innocence. Grief, and torment lined the cold stone underground of death and bone. To each cast unto their own plague, unique hues of misery and disease infected psyches. What was once human , now only existed wraiths smothering in their own deteriorating rotting souls.
Like a slow drip. Burning, cutting through flesh, underneath the bone, and dissolving what was left of any life it once held.
A harmony of persecution and only darkness, that unadulterated light could not exist.
Should not exist. –He knew.
As a boy, the symphonies of suffering was all his young psyche knew. Light, hope, companionship, compassion, and love was of folklore… visually, mentally, it was a world he would never know or understand, and a world that could not exist for him.
Until her.–The child of L i g h t.
As a boy in the shadows, he had seen many things. Observing destitute’s routine, and it’s victims. But, nearly a man… there was something else. Something very new. Something fresh and free of any parasitic particle of decay, that his world had touched before. Plucked from the outside like a ripe fruit. Lowered into the depth of despair for it’s taking–
a woman. Blossoming with Life.
He had never seen a woman before. Nor could his eyes understand the concept of what true “beauty” or life was until it was there surrounded by decomposition, iron, and lust in front of him. Against the rotting contrast. The positive of true life against it’s negative. Not even the blind amongst them could miss. All that were condemned to damnation, would submit to it’s pestilence. But not her.
That anomaly in the pit of death and darkness was sacred.
For a boy who had been shaped by despair, tragedy, of affliction and tribulation, that light was his own. The paradoxical suffering that was Bane’s existence, birthed – his purpose.
Love. The way her eyes met the infants…. the affectionate stroke over her head. The vision unlike any other he’d witnessed, born into this hell, was that of a longing. He’d watched it daily from a distance–warmth ; Everything and anything unlike he’d known himself. As a teenager it had been retribution; and as she grew, redemption unto his own lost soul of humanity destined in solitude. She, in all her innocence, contradicted and defied everything surrounding them; And as she grew, so did the ambition to ensure that that abnormality be protected and lifted from the f e a r, isolation and despair, in all it’s cancerous desperation where it reached in all directions to silence and contaminate her purity. The same that had bound and broke the pulse to any man or child it touched, before her. He would not allow the same fate to consume true innocence. Like a diamond in tar. A rose buried far too deep below ground. She was vulnerable… exposed to the suffocation. She could not know the dangers of the world that she was born into. The same suffering he had endured. The air he breathed was different now. Gratifying, alive, and vibrant around her.
Such a delicacy in a world it was not meant to be in, or could survive, would need strength in it’s vulnerabilities to it. It’s innocence. Before the colour of her world was lost and the darkness had begun to reach for her. Before it’s infection and mutilation closed in.
It would meet the older product of it’s persecution…the calloused mass it bore and forged in it’s crucifixion. Her protector.
Perhaps it was the kindness in her eyes… when they connected to him without fear. The twinkle of wonder beneath the child’s lashes amongst the shadows. The unfeigned luminosity in the depth of warmth he’d never felt before. A growing new hope.
As an infant, a toddler, and a young girl; She’d taught him what it meant to truly live as a human being with compassion, joy, humility, and love by her mother, into his twenties. Maybe it was something he’d craved all along. Delicate. She was precious and very special to him and he was her “Habibi” – her friend.
Blue-green watch shifted beneath veiled focus slowly between the doctor and her mother’s face. He could feel the girl’s hues find his, searching for the answer in his expression to what he could not say. His vision seeped in one blink over to meet her eyes resting upon the bars framing her seraph face. Even in the darkest depth of the earth, plague and contagion could find them. His eyes moved from hers to the sun carved over her head in the iron cage she shared with her mother. If she were in fact sick, the pain that he had kept her from, would certainly find her soon. That was something he could not shield her from; But, it would give her the strength and endurance she would need to r i s e when that day came.
His bound lips beneath the indigo sari masking his own lingering youth, parted. His reflection of the destination place he knew she would find staring back at him over her head. Wincing, the heart of his attention moved back to it’s motivation. Sapphire innocence still searching him for an answer.
“Tabib is there to make certain her eyes do not share the same colours as the men here… on this side.”