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Chapter Text

This should’ve been a simple assignment.
Batgirl would accompany Joker to Arkham Asylum. Batman would track down Riddler, shove that candy-cane staff up his anus, and throw him into a nice, cozy cell right beside the clown prince of crime. Both would return to the Batcave, where his trusty butler Alfred, bless his British soul, would be waiting with piping hot tea and homemade biscuits.
Emphasis on should’ve.
Because now, Barbara’s limp legs dragged behind her as she pulled herself over the cracked tiles of the hospital halls by her bruised, scraped elbows, a fresh sheen of cold sweat beading on her forehead, the wet warmth of blood leaking from the exit wound in her lower back, the aforementioned clown prince of crime’s cackles echoing off the corridors that rapidly closed in behind her.
How the hell did she get herself into this hell?

The pointed ears of Batgirl’s cape and cowl whipped in the wind with her rust-red hair as she sped through the soaked streets on her Batcycle, the lifeless stare of the angel that stood by the entrance of the City Hall, the illumination of the dying neon lights like a fading halo around his head, still burnt into space between her shoulder blades. She ran her fingers over each pocket of her utility belt, mentally taking inventory of every tool she had in her arsenal. Batarangs, check. Batclaw and grappling gun, double check. Explosive gel, smoke bombs, adrenaline needle, and gas capsules, check. And a portable water disruptor she hoped to God she wouldn’t need.
The first few drops of a rainstorm that likely wouldn't let up for at least four days straight pattering her cape, the sun a faint, flickering sliver of light in the fog – no, smog of good old, grimy Gotham City.
No wonder her mother, and her namesake, jumped on the first ship out of this place. Not that she didn't have another, much better reason to do so. She had to save her son, James Jr., her baby brother. But leaving Barbara Jr. behind? Not a problem.
If only Batgirl could leave Barbara behind that easily.
The sirens screamed and the curtains of cloud parted, the sliver unveiling into a misty, misshapen smear of a moon with a winged silhouette in the middle.
All units proceed to Gotham City Hall. The Joker has been apprehended. Batman is now en route to Arkham Island.
The Joker has been apprehended.
The Joker has been apprehended.
The Joker has been apprehended.
She stayed at the Batmobile’s side, its headlights blazing, and the brilliant rear lights on the back spilling streaks of red behind its tires. Her knuckles whitened under her gloves as she gripped the handles of her Batcycle, a customized 1967 Yamaha YCS1 Bonanza 180. One of the many perks of working with a billionaire, not including the fact that the work was life-threatening. She strained to keep up with her mentor’s several sharp turns without losing control and hydroplaning into an unsuspecting store window every time he cut another corner.
The dilapidated streetlamps reflected off an emerald sign with a white border that seemed to shine with the fresh sheen of rain on its surface.
[ARKHAM ⬆️]
She glanced at the grimy, orange rectangular slab of plastic below it.
[HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING PATIENTS]
Then, Arkham Asylum approached, its barred gates flanked by another two angels, maybe gargoyles, and framed by gnarled trees, a few half-felled and nicely charred. Courtesy of the lightning that crackled occasionally, but thankfully didn’t strike the huge hunk of metal Batgirl currently straddled.

The bright green lights blinked once. Twice. An alarm buzzed. The interlocked square sections of the lock flipped apart, the gates slid away with a low whir, and then they straightened themselves out with a few clanks.
Batgirl fell in step beside Batman as he hoisted Joker to his feet by the back of his purple pinstripe suit.
The warden waited for them, the Arkham Asylum Intensive Treatment section less than a few feet behind him. The corners of his mouth curled deeply downwards and his brow so furrowed behind his black-rimmed glasses that Batgirl wondered if it stayed that way when he went to sleep. He drummed his fingers against the dome-shaped ruby at the head of his staff, his bulbous, pugnacious visage practically the same shape, his tie and the rose on his lapel a similar shade to Jason’s suit after –
The Joker has been apprehended, she almost screamed at herself.
“Hey Sharpie!” The clown prince of crime sneered, every syllable from his twisted tongue sending a sickening slithering sensation down her spine. “Love what you’ve done with the place!”
“That’s Warden Sharp to you,” the older man answered.
The warden turned to the police officer at his right flank. “Boles!”
“Yo, Frank-ay.” Joker’s garish grin widened when Boles stalked towards him, then he leaned over as far as he could with Batman holding onto his cuffs. “How’s the wife and kids? Ya miss me –”
He gasped when Boles seized him by his tattered collar, his pale, scarred pupil level with the former’s jaundiced sclera.
“Shut it, clown! A lot of people here really want to talk to you.”
That contradiction should’ve been the first clue, but at the time, Barbara was too busy allowing herself a small curl at the corner of her mouth, silently thanking Bole for saying what few had the courage to say to the sick jester themselves. Not that it would deter him from doing so. Actually, it would be as encouraging as a standing ovation to that card-carrier.
Several demented giggles leaked out from between Joker’s scabbed, scarlet-smeared lips as Bole escorted him to a vertical, wheeled four-point medical restraint.
“Really, I don’t mind walking.”
Bole slammed him into the suspended metal board, tightening the leather straps around his wrists and ankles.
“Not so tight boys, you’ll crease the suit!” He burst into another fit of laughter that made Barbara want to hook a batarang into his throat and tear out his vocal cords.
“Get that filthy degenerate out of here.” The warden’s brow had somehow furrowed even more than Batgirl thought possible, but then again, Joker had a talent for irritation.
“Warden, something’s not right,” Batman began. “I’m going with him –”
“I’m going with him,” Batgirl interjected.
Batman’s shoulders stiffened, then he addressed the warden, sighing sharply. “One moment, Sharp.”
“One minute sharp,” the old man answered tersely.
Batman flattened his palm to Barbara’s upper back, pushing her into a secluded corner, where his hand shifted to her elbow, clenching it as tightly as she would cling to the handles of her Batcycle every night after the one in Gotham General Hospital.
“You can’t handle him,” he said softly, sternly.
“Neither can you –” she wrenched her arm away “– and if you thought I couldn’t handle this, why would you let me wear the cowl?”
“You don’t know –”
Now her shoulders stiffened.
“I know what he can do.”
“But you don’t know him,” he said, more sternly than softly.
“And you know Riddler’s running amok out there,” she snapped. “You’re telling me you don’t trust me enough to keep tabs on the clown that you already have in custody?”
“For now,” he corrected.
“You don’t trust me enough to keep tabs on him for now, but you’ll let Jason go after him alone?”
He flinched and the shame hit her like a punch to the solar plexus. Didn’t hurt any less, no matter how many times it happened. But then, like a blurry batsignal when the sun started to rise, it faded in a final flash of lightning.
“You’re not going with him.”
The moment he turned to slip into the shadows once more, she snatched the grappling hook from his utility belt, and lassoed his ankles, and tied the other end to a pillar while he writhed on the floor, trying to wriggle out of them to no avail. For now. He was Batman. He’d find another tool with which to free himself in a few seconds, she was sure of that, but she needed less than a second to sprint over to the elevator.
“I’m sorry, but I am going after him,” she said sharply, “and you’re going after Riddler.”
“Barbara –”
His free hands grazed her heels, but she leaped over him, pushed past the warden, and slipped between the gates a split second before they slammed shut.
“Where’s Batman?” A dark-skinned man with a goatee asked as she sprinted past him.
“He’s going after Riddler,” she shot back, slowing slightly, softening her shoulders, and steadying her tone, so she wouldn’t rouse any more suspicion. “Is Commissioner Gordon here yet?”
“Yes ma’am, he’s, err, waiting for Batman down at Patient Handover. He got here just before you did.”
She swallowed a sigh of relief.

“Sharpie loves his cameras. Hey, Sharpie! You getting my good side? But heck, they’re all good, aren’t they?” Joker jabbed before dissolving into another bout of deranged snickers.
The two pale blue lights on either side of the platform flared, reminding Batgirl of how the computer screen would glare off her father’s glasses whenever he had to file another report.
“I want him securely locked away this time,” the warden said sharply. “Another escape and I will lose support for my mayoral campaign.”
“Don’t worry, warden.” Another guard marched over while the mobile medical restraint rattled to a halt at the end of the dilapidated elevator platform. “I have every available guard stationed here today, sir.”
“I hope it’s enough, Officer North,” the warden hissed at him, “for your sake.”
Batgirl kept a hand on her batarang, taking a spot next to Bole. He nodded to her, but she didn’t miss the slight surprise – surprise, not shock – that glinted in his good eye. That should have been her second clue, which she would’ve picked up on if the damn clown weren’t yapping away.
“Look at all this new security. How’s a guy supposed to break out of here?”
The gears grinded loudly, then thudded against the floor as the platform lowered them to where the elevator waited. Behind and above her, the warden’s words punctuated her ears in snippets.
“...most challenging….curing him…reputation…Dr. Young…patient…”
“New patient in the intensive treatment lobby,” the clear, crisp voice of the robotic announcer declared through the speakers. “All non-essential staff vacate the area.”
“It’s always nice to return to my sweet little ha-ha-hacienda,” Joker chortled as Batgirl and Bole entered a claustrophobic corridor accented with molten orange, and sealed off with a trapezoidal window.
“Tunnel’s full! Start the scan!”
“Scan initializing.”
“Y’know what? I prefer the good ol’ cavity search.” Joker coyly tilted his head at the guards flanking him. “Much more personal.”
“Got a red light! Multiple prohibited items.”
“I want Joker searched again!”
“Errr, it’s not the patient. It’s, errr…”
Bile burned in the back of Batgirl’s throat when the clown’s head whirled in her direction, his smile widening in the same way it did when her father opened the door to find him with his finger on the trigger –
“Whatcha sneak in with you, pup? C’mon. Tell me, tell me! Batarangs? Batclaws? Bat snacks?”
“Scan is green on Joker.”
“Open the gate! Get him out of there!”
“I want weapons on him at all times,” the guard on the left ordered. “Do not let him out of your sight.”
“There’ll be time for you later, Cash,” Joker crooned in mock comfort. “Speaking of time, tick, tock, tick, tock. Is that a crocodile I hear? What’s up, doc? Pencil me in for tomorrow at four. We got a lot of catching up to do…”
They turned right, then into a hallway to the left. A television in the upper left hand corner displaying the Arkham logo switched to another scene.
“Hello, new patient,” the warden said in an uncharacteristically cheerful cadence. “This is Quincy Sharp, warden of Arkham Asylum…”
“Ooh, it’s my favorite show.” Joker lowered his register, speaking as if through thick jowls. “‘I’m Warden Idiot.’ ‘You’ll never escape.’”
“Yeah, it’s Joker!” a prisoner cried from within a row of cells. “Joker, we’ll get you out soon, boss!”
“Shut it and keep moving!” the guard to the right hollered at them. “Joker, I said shut up!”
Again, he may as well have applauded the cold-blooded comedian.
“I’m telling you, the state of the wiring in these federal facilities is shocking,” Joker whined with feigned woe. “My boys over there could’ve been hurt in that unfortunate fire.”
The elevator laid only a few footsteps ahead of them.
“Just got to check your prisoner, Officer Boles,” an orderly spoke up in the same pleasant, placating, and patronizing pitch that he would use for a patient.
“Whatever, just be quick!”
“Only following procedure! Patient seems to be in satisfactory condition.” His pen scribbled rapidly over his clipboard. “Looks like he suffered minor lacerations, probably in the past two hours. There seems to be…”
“Boo!” Joker yelled as he lunged at the poor orderly before throwing his head back in howling laughter, and then suddenly taking on a casual, conversational demeanor laced with the subtlest sniff of lechery. “Want to take my temperature? I’d be happy to drop my pants.”
“He’s all yours,” the orderly grumbled. “Get him out of here!”
“He’s good, get the door open.” The unfazed guard on the left steadily shoved the mobile restraint toward the elevator.
Dun du-dun dun! the intercom sang sweetly.
“Alert in Intensive Treatment,” the speakers interjected. “Category 9 patient in transit. Pacification system active. Shoot to kill permissions granted.”
It was at times like these that Batgirl really resented Batman’s no-guns rule.
“You heard the lady,” the guard on the left cracked to the others. “We got another psycho on the way.”
“Can you smell the excitement in the air?” Joker gushed. “No? Must have been one of the guards, then. Croc old boy, is that you?”
Batgirl shifted into a defensive stance as an elevator that looked more like a cage rose into view, the insides of her veins frostbitten at its contents.
“Keep your weapons trained on it at all times.” The guard on the right, and every guard around him readied their dart guns as the barred doors slid to the side.
Croc ducked, his breathing labored, guttural. He braced a cuffed, misshapen hand on the ceiling as he lumbered out.
“He looks angry!” another guard remarked rather redundantly.
Croc’s shadow spread over them as he stood as straight as he could with his hunched spine, his silhouette eclipsing the lamps, his every stomp sending shudders through the ground, into Batgirl’s soles, and the marrow of her bones.
“That thing looks pissed!” yet another guard remarked very redundantly.
Croc sniffed, the slits in his pupils finning when they fixed on Batgirl. She glowered back at him, remaining tense, but not terrified. Well, not on the outside. Inside, she had to repeat her mentor’s mantra in her head.
I am vengeance. I am the night. I will not fear. I am fear. I am vengeance. I am the night. I will not fear. I am fear –
“I smell the Bat on you,” Croc snarled. “I will hunt him down.”
“Get that animal under control!”
Croc stumbled briefly when electricity rippled across the metal yoke around his sinewy, scaled neck, but he recovered so immediately that he may as well have never been shocked at all.
“A toy collar won’t stop me from killing him, Batgirl. I’ll rip him apart. Eat his bones…” With that, he lumbered off, the ground still shaking with every step.
“That reminds me! I really need to get me some new shoes,” Joker hummed happily, kicking his feet.
“Okay, move up!”
“How come they let Batgirl past security?” a guard muttered under his breath, bumping her shoulder as he entered the elevator. “At least Batman is experienced –”
“I may not be as experienced as him, but I still have enough to wipe the floor with you,” she jumped in. “Asshole says what?”
“What?” he scoffed.
She hooked her ankle onto the guard’s leg, sweeping his boots out from under him, wrestling the gun out of his grip, and pushing the muzzle into his chest. She relished in the reward of his dropped jaw, then tossed him his gun, and leaned against the bars. “Anyone else have any reservations?”
They did not.
They descended into the depths with the clown prince of crime.
“The night is young, pup.” Joker wriggled gleefully in his restraints. “I still have a trick or two up my sleeve. I mean, don’t you think it’s funny how a fire at Blackgate caused hundreds of my crew to be moved here?”
Batgirl’s brow furrowed at that, but she didn’t let it last for long, schooling her expression into the stoic mask that Batman had taught to her by example. She couldn’t let him know what she was thinking. Let him know that she knew what he might be thinking.
Bole jabbed the butt of his gun into Joker’s ribs.
“I thought I told you to stay quiet!”
A lot of people here really want to talk to you, Bole had said earlier, likely referring to said crew. She clocked the surprise in his good eye when she stepped onto the platform, and not Batman. Surprise, not shock. As if it were good news that a less experienced Bat would be with him. Wouldn’t catch onto him.
“Oh Frankie!” Joker gurgled. “You really should learn to keep that fat mouth of yours shut. It’ll get you into trouble!”
“All patients should avoid contact with prisoners from Blackgate Penitentiary,” the warden’s distorted voice began. “Their presence in our institution is–”
The recording cut off when the elevator rattled, throwing Batgirl off her feet, and plunging her surroundings into a suffocating pitch black.
A sickening silence.
Then Joker’s laughter ripped through the stale air.
“What’s he doing?” the younger guard asked shakily.
Batgirl wound the stolen Batclaw around her wrist.
“Stay where you are!” the other shouted at the prisoner as he erupted into an even more piercing fit of guffaws. “Get a flashlight! Get a light on him!”
A fleeting instance of illumination. Joker choked, Batgirl grinding her boot into his chest, the metal cord of the Batclaw digging into his neck as she tightened it. Tightened it even more. Tighter. Tighter.
Static hissed behind her. The warden’s voice warbled again, deeper, distorted.
“...their presence in our institution is temporary. Once again, I emphasize, all Blackgate prisoners should be considered dangerous and must not be approached.”
“What?” Joker rasped out between a strained sound somewhere between a cough and a sneer. “Don’t you trust me?”
Even if she snapped his vertebrae with a swift tug, it wouldn’t be enough. She wished the wire were barbed, like the ones that sick sadist used to ensnare Jason’s wrists above his head, that Joker would beg like that boy did as he and all the other psychos in this god-forsaken asylum bled him, beat him –
Another tremor as the elevator hit the floor.
“Our guest has arrived!” another guard snarked with a cold cheeriness eerily reminiscent of the man – no, the monster they thought they would have in custody.
Batgirl slammed Joker’s head into the metal board behind him. In a minute, she would wish she had snapped that monster’s neck anyway.
Dun du-dun dun!
“Intensive Treatment lower floors are now at level Red Alpha,” the speaker lady kindly informed them.
“So, you’re back,” a guard gritted out. “You killed three of my crew when you busted outta here.”
Batgirl’s stare caught on the two square signs of a gun behind a crossed-through red circle. She quickly squeezed her eyes shut, but not quickly enough. They were already branded on the backs of her lids.
“Only three?” Joker pouted while being wheeled between them. “I’ll be sure to try harder next time.” The wind from the raging fan crept under Batgirl’s cape, the chill stabbing at her skin when he flashed another garish grin at her. “What say we aim for a hundred?”

Commissioner Gordon stood by a desk, sleeves bunched up at his elbows, wearing his favorite worn, brown vest that her mother had bought for him over a button-up shirt, scrawling onto a clipboard, the sheet on it the last leaf among the numerous paper piles stacked at one end of the stained surface.
His cane leaned against a weary wooden post, and he leaned towards his right leg. He could hide it from the others, but he couldn’t hide his limp from her for long, and she didn’t know how much longer she could hide Batgirl from him. Like father, like daughter.
It took all of her training to ask if he were alright, rush over to him, rest her chin on the crook of his shoulder, bury her nose into his neck, and rub his back to remind herself that he was really there. To do what she did for months after her mother left them.
“Long night, Commissioner?” she said dryly. He huffed out a laugh, snatching his cane and hobbling over to her.
“Joker invades City Hall and holds the Mayor hostage, leaving it to me to juggle SWAT teams, the media, and two bats.” He shook her hand firmly, professionally, not paternally. “Yeah, it’s been a helluva night.”
Bruce and her were both bats. At least they weren’t as batty as Joker. Then again, to the media, all three were crazy costumed freaks who came out at night to wreak havoc on the city. Sure, Batman and Batgirl had saved it, but the collateral damage they inflicted in the name of minimizing crime, and the fact that they weren’t part of the service, negated their service.
She fell in step beside him, tracing the edge of her batarang with her fingertips, and watching warily while the guards wheeled Joker away.
“It better be the last one we ever have with him.”
“Hold it there!” a sentry called out. “Sorry, Batgirl. Arkham staff only!”
“I assure you,” her father – the Commissioner started, “if anyone’s qualified –”
She doubted he would be saying that if he could see under her cowl.
“Listen,” the sentry interrupted, “I appreciate the assistance, but she’ll unsettle the more violent inmates.”
“I think he’s talking about you, pup!” Joker chirped at her as the guards corralled him towards the blazing blue lasers that marked the line between the sane and the insane, that like the line itself, could be switched off and on in an instant. Another talent of the clown prince of crime. “Don’t be a stranger. You’re always welcome here.”
Lasers off. Joker walked through.
“Gotta say, it’s good to be back.”
“You okay?” her father – the Commissioner, Barbara, the Commissioner – asked paternally, but still professionally.
“He surrendered almost without a fight.” Her brow furrowed. “You know what that reminds me of?”
“What?”
“When Zeus gave Pandora that box.”
“At least he’s back where he belongs…” The Commissioner – that’s better, Barbara – paused, then added, “with maniacs like Maxie Zeus.”
She would’ve laughed, if laughter didn’t leave a bitter taste now, and if she weren’t laser-focused on Bole taking a huge swig from his flask.
Lasers on. Joker dropped dramatically to one knee. A twist on the wounded gazelle gambit. Rather than pretending to be wounded to draw the predator away from the prey, the predator pretended to be the prey, to draw in his prey.
“Get up! Now!” the sentry from earlier snapped, stooping slightly. Batgirl’s eyes widened and her fingers tightened on the windowsill.
“Officer, don’t –”
Joker headbutted the sentry in the chin.
“Joker’s loose! Alert the warden!” Batgirl bit out, readying her tonfas.
“Hurry!” Joker guffawed, an orderly struggling in vain against him while he strangled the sentry with his cuffs. “We’re losing him, doc!”
She swung her tonfas at the glass, hammering relentlessly with the clubs until her arms burned, but it only cracked, but not before the sentry’s vertebrae did under the chain.
Joker tossed his victim – no, someone’s husband, maybe someone’s father, someone’s friend – aside, kicked the orderly in the stomach, straddled the deceased sentry, leaned over so he was nose-to-nose with the corpse and sneered, “the choke’s on you.” He folded his arm behind his back, bowed, and twirled towards the security camera in the upper right corner of the chamber. “Honey, I’m home!”
Locked. Unlocked. The line between the sane and the insane. Gone.
Batgirl screamed, swung with the last of her strength, and smashed through, shielding her head with her elbows, leaping through the broken glass, and rolling with the impact. When she found her footing, she nearly lost it again when she looked right up at Joker’s silhouette.
“Welcome to the madhouse, Batgirl!” He threw his arms open, puke-colored eyes glinting with glee. “I set a trap, and you and the world’s dumbest detective sprang it gloriously!”
Trap.
Trapped.
Trapped just like. Jason.
Joker bowed again.
Lasers on.
Once they were off, she swore on Jason’s name that she would strangle that fucking clown with his own chain.
“Now let’s get this party started!”
Batgirl braced herself, knuckles whitening on the handles of her tonfa. She clocked the three inmates closing in on her. One at nine, one at ten, and one at three. All male. More muscular, and by extension, all stronger. Not that she hadn’t faced multiple opponents before, but now Batman couldn’t cover her six.
“Ladies and maniacs,” Joker drawled, “I apologize for this interruption to your regular entertainment..”
She scanned her surroundings. The orderly. The sentry. Two more people she could’ve saved if she were only a little stronger. A little faster. Batman would tell her she needed to play this smart and defensive.
But what Batgirl wanted was to let off some damn steam.
With a scream, she struck Nine in the jaw with the edge of her left tonfa, followed it up with another blow from her right, noted Ten’s approach in her periphery, flipped the right so the long end became a guard, and blocked his punch. Nine collapsed as she spun on the ball of her supporting foot, then slammed her heel into Ten’s crotch.
“Up until a few seconds ago, I was going to kill everyone in the room and then watch cartoons, but then…well…you know how I do love a captive audience.”
She backfisted Three, elbowed a recovered Nine, crescent-kicked Nine, then reverse crescent-kicked Three.
“You’re going to have to hit me harder than that!” Three sneered.
“Will do!” Batgirl grabbed him by his ears, rolled backward, and planted her foot on his gut, using his own weight against him to lift him over her, and then slam his head into the ground.
“I’m just warming you up, pup! Fresh from Blackgate Correctional Facility, with a combined sentence of 752 years. Ding, ding, ding ding ding! It’s round 2!”
Four more inmates emerged from five o’clock. One brandished a pair of brass knuckles. Batgirl caught her breath, gritting her teeth at the shocked Commissioner behind the shattered window, then dodged a flurry of punches from the pair.
“Sorry, pup, gotta run. I’ve got places to go, people to slay.”
Five 1 pulled Batgirl to his chest by her hair and locked his arms around her midriff, while Five 2 yanked the tonfas away from her. She socked Five 1 in the nose. Took several stinging hits to the ribs from Five 2’s knuckles, then landed an uppercut on him. She wrenched out of Five 1’s hold and ax-kicked Five 3 before he could get a hit in. Broke his nose bridge with the heel of her palm for good measure. She drove her knuckles into Five 4’s solar plexus, then jumped up, and swept her foot in a semi-circle, nailing him in the temple with the side of her boot.
She flopped to the floor with him, gasping for air, clutching her bruised ribs and draping a forearm over the black eye blooming beneath her cowl. Yes, she hurt all over. Yes, if she had played it smart, her ribs wouldn’t be bruised, or fractured if it weren't for her brass-scraped-and-scratched Kevlar-reinforced, Nomex-interwoven bodysuit with ribbed eggplant siding. Yes, if she had played it defensive, she wouldn’t have a black eye. She had never felt worse in her life, but she had also never felt better.
“The system’s jammed,” someone said through the speakers, snapping her into post-combat clarity. “We’re stuck in here. Joker’s in full control of the security gates.”
“I’ll find a way out,” she croaked, clearing her throat, sitting up slowly with a wince, and nodding to the window. “Gordon, try and contact the warden. Let him know what’s happened.”
Gordon. She had said that name as if it were a stranger’s about a hundred times now. Didn’t feel any less strange.
“I’ll be back,” she affirmed to herself as much as she did to him.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, pup,” Joker sneered from the screen.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she sneered back. “Don’t you have places to go and people to slay?”
For the first time that night, Joker’s smile wavered.
“I’m in control of the Asylum.” He wriggled a finger at her. “You’re not going anywhere I don’t want you to. Understand?”
“Oh, I understand. Doesn’t mean I agree.” The corner of Batgirl’s mouth curled up as she dusted off her cape and retrieved her clubs. She strolled towards the security camera, staring straight into its lens. “Don’t make your crazy cronies any promises you can’t keep.”
Joker’s smile solidified.
“Blah, blah, blah. Always with the hero speak.” His nose scrunched up with more malice than mischief. “I’m getting bored of watching you. Why don’t you just come find me?”
She stayed silent, but that touched a nerve and he knew it. Yet another reminder of how she couldn’t find Jason in time. If he thought that would demoralize her, though, he had achieved the opposite effect. He could bet his balloon-toting ass she’d find him. And when she did, she might break the code just for him.
He switched the lasers off.
“You know it’s a trap,” the Commissioner said in a familiarly stern tone that caused Batgirl’s chest to clench as hard as her teeth.
“Of course it is.”
She walked into it.

Chapter Text

A buzz.
“Barbara,” Bruce began.
Her nose scrunched up at the acrid smoke curling from the rows of circular red lights from where the lasers should have shot out.
“Barbara, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear, what’s up?” She placed one hand on her hip, and pinched her nose bridge with the other, her scalp aching from Five 1 nearly ripping out her follicles. She made a mental note to bundle her hair and tuck it under her cowl for future missions.
“What’s up? You tied me up –”
“You’re Batman,” she said pointedly, “you were probably out of that grappling hook in a minute tops.”
“– and now the Commissioner tells me that Joker’s escaped custody and is running free in Arkham.” Her temples throbbed at her mentor’s tight tone. As if working with her father made him another father to her. Not that she hadn’t given both of them good reason to be cross.
“And Riddler?” Like the morning after that night, her throat tensed from the effort of keeping her tone light. “Is he still, um, running around the city?”
Some static from his end. Shuffling around. “I’m working on it.” Then the same incredulous huff her father sported whenever she got a bad grade in school for the first time, as if he expected her to perform at her best when she overheard him and her mother screaming and sobbing at him the whole night before her exam.
She lifted her hands from her hip and her nose bridge to massage her temples, unable to bear the war on two fronts – Bruce’s lecture pounding into her brain and the stress drilling into the sides of her head for any longer. “Well, I’m working on Joker.”
“Do you need anything?”
The black-and-white portrait of Warden Sharp briefly became Bruce scowling disapprovingly at her from a cluttered desk at the other end of the chamber.
“Is your father still there?” he asked slightly more softly. She blinked. The portrait blurred, then Bruce became the warden.
The memories returned in time with the alarms’ crimson flashes. Her hand gripped her father’s shoulder, pulling him away, but not before the door opened, the bullet flew from the muzzle, and buried itself in his leg.
“Commissioner Gordon is safe,” she insisted. “Joker’s not far ahead. I’ll stay in contact.”
She shut off the earpiece and headed into the right hallway.
“Warning. Security breach in level B8,” the speakers blared. “Warning. Security breach in level B1 –”
The moment the gates to the patient pacification chamber opened, they greeted Batgirl with an orderly pleading with a hopefully-still-imprisoned prisoner.
“Think about what you’re doing, Zsasz!”
She sprinted towards the officer beside the lasers that separated them from the notorious serial killer. The grizzled, gray-haired, dark-skinned man, Zach Franklin (Thanks, eidetic memory) nearly keeled over with relief at her arrival, a fresh sheen of cold sweat on his forehead.
“Thank God! It’s Zsasz. He’s got Mike. He’s strapped in the chair. Zsasz has totally lost it!”
Batgirl would argue that Zsasz already totally lost it the minute he started tallying up his kills on his own skin, but she digressed. She slipped a sunshiney, reassuring smile over her visage as easily as she slid on the cowl every sunset.
“Thank you for your service, sir. I’ll handle it from here –”
“You can’t!” The wrinkles on the poor officer’s face seemed even deeper in the dim lighting. “He’ll kill Mike if he sees anyone trying to get close.” Batgirl wouldn’t be surprised if he were actually younger than he looked. She had seen how stress had aged her father, her mentor, and she felt it eating away at her with every spasms of pain beside her heart. Her smile strained.
“He won’t see me.”
She zeroed in on Zsasz. Almost skeletal in build, definitely not as big and burly as the inmate who bruised her ribs earlier, but sporting a skinny layer of lean muscle and long limbs. Reminiscent of a rabid greyhound, which combined with the telltale too-far-gone gleam in his heavily hooded eyes, told her he would move much faster and much more unpredictably than her previous opponents.
“I see anything that looks even a little like a bat and this guard dies.” He taunted Franklin with the remote, idly fiddling with the on button for the electric chair where he had strapped in a wildly twitching Mike. “Do you hear me?”
He hit the button. Mike convulsed, too shocked to even cry out in agony as molten blue electricity arced around him.
“Zsasz has got my buddy,” another guard entreated from the balcony. “He’s gonna fry him! Do something. Please!”
Batgirl ran up the stairs to his level, lowering her voice.
“I will, but first, I have to get behind him.” She clapped a hand on the guard’s shoulders, trying to physically and psychologically ground him by holding his gaze. “Can you keep him occupied?”
He nodded. Good enough for now. Alright, alright. One step at a time. First, she would have to get physically close enough to Zsasz to strike, but if she did so from the ground, he would see her coming, and she would allow herself to stand idly by while these good, honest men suffered casualty after casualty. She would have to stay up high. Like the gargoyles. If they could support Bruce’s weight, they could surely support hers.
She hooked onto one with her own grappling hook, her heart stopping and dropping into the pit of her abdomen when she nearly tripped and careened over the gargoyle from her toe catching on one of the teeth in its maw. Bruce almost had a lot more practice in this arena than her.
One step at a time, Batgirl. This is about stealth, not speed.
This time, she stuck the landing, careful not to knock over any loose stone pieces that could clatter to the floor and cost the asylum another guard. No, not just a guard. Mike. Someone’s buddy.
She hunkered down, carefully opened her cape, and zeroed in on Zsasz. Looked down. Immediately regretted looking down. Zeroed in on Zsasz and Zsasz only. Her legs coiled like a spring as she prepared to propel herself off the gargoyle in three. Four. Three. Two. One.
The air rushed under her flared cape. Zsasz turned at the billowing of her woven polyester wings, just in time for her to drive all her weight into her heel, and drive her heel into his jaw. A satisfying snap. Zsasz dropped. She tumbled to the floor beside him, her tailbone taking the brunt of the impact. Now, they were both down, but Zsaz wouldn’t be for long, which meant she also couldn’t be for long.
Ow, ow, ow, ow. Batgirl furiously untangled herself from the cape, scrambled for her tonfa, staggered over Zsasz, and smacked him upside the head before he could reach for the remote. Luckily, I’m younger than Bruce, or I’d have to retire.
He had too many tallies to count. Each one a mother, a father, a child, a friend. She found no satisfaction in the fact that he bore hundreds of those scars. They would fade, but the wounds he had left on the countless civilians he had deprived of a loved one would never close. She almost considered hefting him into that electric chair instead, but Franklin and the other officers ran in to apprehend him before she could get her hands on his shock collar.
She whirled around when the grid of screens to her right rippled and flashed to life. Her stomach acid seemed to boil when a bright, bubbly voice blared out over the intercom as the camera spun, then stabilized.
“Can ya hear me? Is this thing on?” Harley Quinn strutted into the middle of the frame, her red fingerless, leather-gloved hand draped lazily over the warden’s staff like she would do to her baseball bat. Batgirl’s gut twisted as she scanned her outfit from head to toe. A nurse’s cap, likely stolen from an orderly. Joker’s right-hand woman sported her trademark pigtails. Red lips, white makeup, and manic, ice blue eyes that she had smeared over with black paint in the shape of her domino mask. A white shirt and skirt caged in a red and purple corset. Her gloves ended above the elbow, purple and red. A black leather belt with a golden square buckle and a matching choker – no, collar. The skirt had specks of blood on it. She wore the name tag of Quincy Sharp. Yet another innocent Batgirl couldn’t save.
Quinn flashed a literal killer smile at the lens. “Oh. Hiya, B-girl! Harley Quinn here.” The older woman placed her hands on her hips and twirled around on her tippy-toes.
Batgirl had half a mind to bludgeon the screen with her clubs, but the other half reluctantly reminded her that the footage could contain important clues.
“How do you like my new uniform? Pretty cute, huh?” she asked casually, conversationally, as if they were two girlfriends on a shopping trip, and she hadn’t forced Batgirl to watch her force herself on the Boy Wonder young enough to be her little brother. “Oh, I got something to show you.” She darted to the left of the frame, then doubled back, holding up a finger. “One second, B-girl!”
Batgirl gritted her teeth, refusing to give her the satisfaction of gasping in horror when Quincy Sharp rolled into frame, tied to his own chair, and muzzled with duct tape.
“Ta-da!” Quinn declared, skipping in, leaning down, and throwing an arm over his shoulders. “I’m now subbing for the old man.” She playfully patted his head, resting her knee on his thigh, just like she did to Jason before she – Batgirl shoved the memory of the reason why she agreed to become Batgirl and swallowed the urge to vomit at the same time. Quinn sauntered in front of the warden. “In case ya ain’t figured it out, today’s the Joker’s big homecoming, and you’re the guest of honor.” She set the staff before her, bending forward, and resting both her wrists on its end.
Batgirl kept her lips sealed shut at first, her hands relaxed at her hips, where she had holstered her tonfas. If only she had Quinn tied to that chair. Whatever pain she had inflicted upon Jason in her final moments, Batgirl would pay her in kind a hundredfold. But then how would she justify it to Bruce? Hey, technically, she didn’t kill Quinn. Just tortured her until she was begging Batgirl to kill her.
“Honored to be here, Harls.” She threw a strained smile at the clown. “Always wanted to have a little girls’ night with you.”
“Tempting, Bats, but no dice.” She spun the staff. “Now the inmates are running the asylum.” She held onto the back of the chair, propped her knee on the warden’s lap again, frowned in theatrical thoughtfulness, and pouted a bit. “Well, technically, they’re Joker’s goons shipped in from Blackgate, but you get the idea.” She grinned, wriggled her fingers in a wave and wound up the staff. “Bye bye for now!” She swung, glass broke, then the video fizzled out.

“Barbara, are you picking this up?”
“I’m here, Bruce,” she said hoarsely, sitting against the wall, knees tucked into her chest, forehead braced against her folded arms.
“Arkham Asylum has vanished off the network.”
“He’s in control of the security system, right?” She scanned her surroundings, ensuring no one was watching before she briefly removed her cowl to wipe off the sticky sweat collecting under it. “He must have isolated it from the grid by re-connecting the system to an uninterruptible power supply with an inverter that includes an automatic transfer switch and a battery.”
“That’s not all he’s done. All police feeds are reporting that he’s placed bombs all over Gotham. Says he’ll detonate them if anyone sets foot on Arkham Island. It’s being suppressed at the moment, but the story will break any time now.”
She didn’t have enough energy to hide the hitch in her breath anymore as she paced around the chamber, glancing at the blackened screens now and then to convince herself that Quinn wasn’t laughing it up at her barely concealed distress from behind the security camera. The clown prince of crime wasn’t just holding the staff here hostage. He had all ten million people in Gotham in his sights. Ten million people that would be safe and sound if Bruce hadn’t held her back from bludgeoning that psychopathic so-called prince to death before they turned him in.
“He’s lying,” her mentor murmured, more to himself than her. “It’s just a diversion to keep people away.”
“You don’t know that,” she seethed.
“I know him.”
I know him, unlike you. And unlike you, I know what I’m doing, and won’t potentially put ten million peoples’ lives on the line because my rage and grief has blinded me to the fact that I’m clearly too inexperienced for this.
“The room’s locked down,” a guard shouted from a distance. “I can’t open the gate. We’re trapped in here!”
“Try the radio,” someone else suggested. “Control should be able to shut down the gate!”
So, Quinn and Batman both thought that Batgirl couldn’t get out of this trap herself. She would show them both that they should’ve known better, seeing as the former used to be a brilliant psychologist, and the other was the world’s greatest detective.

The two guards from earlier peered over Batgirl’s shoulders as she inserted the point of her batarang and slowly, but surely loosened the bolts holding the grate over the vent in place. She nodded her thanks when they very chivalrously lifted the barrier away, tore off a piece of her cape to tie over her mouth and nose, so she wouldn’t choke on any dust, and then immediately slid inside the chute, crawling forward on her elbows.
“Bruce, patch me into the guard radio feed.”
“How –”
“There should be a document with instructions on my computer in a folder labeled, uh, ‘Bat-Business,’” she muttered, begrudgingly revealing that she had intended to hijack the accompaniment of Joker to prison ever since Bruce told her they were close to catching him.
A click of a mouse. Some clacking on a keyboard. Grumbling similar to what her father often indulged in when he tried and failed to project whatever video he had on his phone onto the television. Then, mercifully, audio.
“Steve, more Blackgate prisoners. By the boiler.”
“Who’s that behind them? Oh my God…it’s Joker. He’s free. How did he break out –”
“Feed’s down,” Bruce reported redundantly. Of course the comms were up and down like crazy. If she were Joker, the first step in her plan would be to scramble the signal as well.
“It’s fine.” She reached the exit vent and stuck the batarang into the bolt in the bottom left. This would take a while.

Batgirl leaped into the processing corridor, rounding corners, and racing through the halls until she stumbled across a door splattered with Joker’s beaming mug in lime green paint.
A chill spread down her spine, prickled across her spine, and pierced into her leg muscles, fixing her feet in place when it opened on its own.
“What took you so long?” Joker stood on a safe suspended by a set of chains, impatiently tapping his foot against the corroded metal.
Batgirl’s fingertips grazed her batarang, but then she retracted them. She had cut herself on the throwing blades plenty of times while training with Bruce, but she doubted they could cut through those chains. She would let the clown run his mouth first. Then, while he distracted himself for her, she could wait for an opportunity to send that Batarang flying so it stuck the landing in his Adam’s apple.
Only she would never have that opening, because Joker unlocked the safe, and let Clayface do the talking.
Yeah…she’d definitely have to play defense on this one.
“Ooh, he’s a big one!” Joker jeered.
No shit, you son of a bitch. She took in the crooked, crystalline growths in his spine, deltoids, and trapezius, the horns tearing through the leathery layers in his augmented right arm and left leg. His other two limbs seemed almost shriveled, atrophied in comparison to the massive mutated muscles all over his misshapen, twisted torso.
He nearly took her head off with a fist two times the size of her head. His enormous knuckles grazed her cheekbone, scraping off half her cowl with it. She staggered, then sprang back, stabilizing her stance and whipping out the Batclaw, which she looped. Clayface swung again. This time, she easily dodged and danced away from him. She passed one end through the loop. Another punch. She ducked, then looped the other end and passed the rope through it as well.
As he circled her, she tightened and passed the end through the first loop. He charged at her. She leapt to the side at the last second, so he crashed into the wall behind her. She pulled until the first loop shrunk, then passed the long end through the second loop. Her Batclaw became a lasso. Which would become a noose once she had her target where she wanted him.
When he charged at her again, she threw the loop at his neck, but then the layers of leathery skin shifted over his skeleton, his ribcage closing in on itself, his bones contorting painfully into a much smaller form. He slipped straight through.
Did he…did he just shapeshift?
No, he didn’t just shapeshift. When he stood, his muscles writhing and wriggling over his frame, wrapping in on themselves, his skin darkened into a distinctive purple shade. The growths on his neck fell into shoulder-length copper locks. His leathery skin had transformed into armor with a bat emblazoned over his chest. A cape opened behind him, fluttering in the wind howling through the vents. Batgirl’s throat tightened when she grinned at her.
Clayface’s shin slammed into her stomach, then he picked up the corpse, tossing it at her. The body crunched sickeningly into the wall, only inches from where she scrambled back, coughing gutturally, bracing a hand against her abdomen. She barely blocked his elbow when he threw it at her neck. Narrowly dropped away from the fist hammering down towards her temple. A diagonal kick, diagonal elbow, and overhand punch. In that order. Muay Thai techniques. A martial art that Bruce had trained her in. Whatever she knew, her clone would know. Whatever advantage her smaller size had granted her before, he had adopted. Her only advantage now would be her Batclaw. So, even though every instinct screamed at her to get on her feet, she stayed down for now, feigning desperate gasps for air even though he hadn’t hit her solar plexus.
The second he stepped close enough, she leapt up and lassoed his leg. She almost smiled, but then he jerked his foot back, dragging her to the floor, her cheekbone smacking into the concrete once more.
Clayface’s muscles warped again as he returned to his towering self. She rolled right, then left, her opponent’s massive heels driving into the spots where she sprawled moments ago. She straight-leg slid between his legs, and kept rolling until she came up on her knees behind him, retrieving her Batclaw. But rather than reading her lasso, she tossed it over her shoulder, and prepared her batarangs.
She jumped on him, digging the blades into the leathery folds and anchoring her boots into the crystals lining his back. She secured the lasso around his neck, tightened it, and yanked with all her might, resisting the urge to retch as her intestine tangled from how frantically he shook and spun in an attempt to throw her off. He dropped to the ground, collapsing on top of her, forcing the breath from her lungs. Black dots blurred her blurred vision as she struggled for oxygen, straining to keep strangling him. Her windpipe ached and seared with each stunted swallow of air. The air wouldn’t even enter. Red flared in the corners of her view.
And then Clayface convulsed suddenly, his muscles cramped, a vertebrae snapped inside him, and he flopped to the side, the lime green glow in his gaze fading, and Batgirl weakly clawed her way out from under his weight.
“Well, that was unexpected, wasn’t it?” Joker sighed dramatically and dragged a gloved hand down his face. “Oh well, note to self, need stronger test subjects…” He strutted to the edge of the safe, quickly concealing his disappointment under his typical chirpy tone, pointed shoes clicking against the steel. “Seeing as how I’m feeling generous, I’ll give you this one for free.”
He spread his arms out and leaned back, like a lead actor in the spotlight would pose at curtain call as the audience showered them with cheers, applause and flower petals.
“Knock me off, I dare you!” he sneered. “End this, pull the plug, stop me once and for all.”
Batgirl stumbled to her feet, her battered cheekbone throbbing, retracing the Batclaw, grasping her batarang, rolling her wrists, aiming at his pale throat, and letting it fly. For Jason. For the corpse in the corner. For the first two the clown prince had collected during his escape.
The blade spun straight along its path, its edge pointed at his esophagus.
And she missed.
She missed.
And Joker just laughed at her, his shoulders shaking from the force of it, having to rest his hands on his knees.
“Bats did his best, but you’re still too young for this, pup!” He wiped away a tear. “Well, I’d love to stay and chat, but I have a party to organize. I’ve got guests falling in from all over Arkham.” The chains clanked and the elevator pulled out of her reach into a shadowed hallway illuminated with a hellish red light, his laughter echoing in her ears, ringing with the alarms. “You’ll see.”
Then the doors slammed shut with a resounding thud.
“Ahh, my head,” a guard murmured.
Her one opportunity, gone for good.
“Batgirl. I’m over here!”
With a zap, the electric blue lasers deactivated, allowing Batgirl to step into the compartment, shifting to stand beside the guard, who began to ramble as she nodded along numbly. “They came out of nowhere! I dragged Jerry in here, powered up the gate. Must have passed out –”
“Joker got away through that door.” She gathered the strength to look the guard in the eye. “What’s on the other side?” She couldn’t show weakness. Not now, not ever, not even after she had failed his three colleagues, Jason, and Bruce. And her father. God, she hoped her father was alright.
“We call it Extreme Isolation!” the guard said shakily, dark-circled eyes darting around as if he anticipated that another prisoner would emerge from vents above him at any second.“Only way in is via the transport system –”
“Can you open it?”
“Not a problem. I just need to call another cell.” He marched over to a monitor mounted on the left wall and jabbed at the keyboard. “Okay…something’s wrong here. The main security loop is locked.”
“Here, let me try –” If it weren’t for her training, Batgirl would’ve flinched from the screen when Joker’s face filled it.
“Having a little trouble up there?”
“Joker,” she hissed.
He tilted his head tauntingly. “You were expecting maybe Two-Face?”
“I won’t let you escape again –”
“Silly pup! I don’t want to escape.” He twiddled his fingers. “I’m having way too much fun.” “I even have you here –” he pointed at her, then himself“– to keep a smile on my face.”
“For now.”
“Really?” He cooed at her as if she were an attention-starved toddler poorly recounting some fairy tale her teacher had shared with her at school that day. “We’ll see. Ta ta.” He took a few steps to the left, before his feet froze, and he turned to the camera. “Oh, I forgot to say.”
Then he turned the camera to another monitor. Her father, still trapped in that room with the broken window, his back to the lens. “Just in case you were planning on following me, I’ve arranged a little insurance.”
Her nails pierced her palms when Frank Bole’s club connected with the Commissioner’s skull, the older man’s bad leg buckling, his cane clattering to the floor, just out of reach of where he had collapsed. “Gordon is on his way to Harley as we speak.”
A lot of people here really want to talk to you. Boles, currently drenching his gullet in another swig from his flask, hadn’t meant that as a threat. He meant it in the sense that he would talk to Joker about what the clown prince of crime wanted him to do for him.
“If I see you trying to follow me, he dies,” Joker sniggered. “Harley is looking forward to it.” He leaned up toward the lens, nose-to-nose with Batgirl, manic, emerald eyes gleaming, the screen the only separation between her and his likely foul breath. “Maybe I’ll film it and post it on the Internet.”
As if filming him shooting Jason point blank in the temple weren’t enough.

“The transport system is down,” the guard declared, the clacking of the keyboard like a louder ticking of a clock. “Best I can do is open the door you came in. Sorry.”
“No need to be sorry,” she said softly, biting back the urge to apologize to him for hitting the chains holding up the safe where Joker stood with his arms spread, mere millimeters from his head. She couldn’t waste anymore time wallowing in self-loathing. She had to go to the holding cell. Follow the trail. Help her father – No, the Commissioner, damnit. This was a task for Batgirl, not Barbara. Barbara would become too emotional. Miss important clues. Or just miss.
“Barbara, what’s happening?” Bruce butted in over her earbud.
“Joker’s escaped. He’s sealed himself off. He’s got –” she gulped down the lump in her esophagus “– he’s got my father.”
The shuffling from the other end stopped.
“Jim,” he murmured grimly.
Jim. Jim Gordon. That was her last name, too. Gordon. Gordon. She stumbled halfway through the transfer loop.
The turn of a doorknob. Manic emerald eyes gleaming under the rim of a fedora. The muzzle of a gun turned on her father – the Commissioner – her father writhing on the floor, blood bubbling around the bullet under his knee. Oh god, her father. He had her father.
She sucked in a deep breath that slowly solidified her insides. Placed a hand over her heart, let it pulse through her armor and into her palm, warming her.
“I’m getting him back. Joker can’t – won’t win. Won’t get away. Not again.” The blood flowed through her veins, then burned when her gaze fell on the lime green smiley face on the floor. “I’ll find Bole, and I’ll find him.”

“I bet you’re wondering how I did it!” Joker jeered from a row of three screens up ahead. “Was it a clue the great detective missed?”
She cut around the corner, her shoulders stiffening when another screen cackled over her head as she ducked into another corridor. Cut another corner. Another screen spat down at her.
“Oh, me and Frankie go way back. I got him out of a spot of…bother a few years ago.”
Bile stung the tip of her tongue when she stumbled into another corpse. An orderly with a bucket over his head, the same smiley face painted on it.
“So, when I need security codes or an old man to be clubbed to the ground, I know just the man to ask.”
Not just any old man, clown. The Commissioner. My father. I’ll find Bole, I’ll find him, and when I find you, I’ll put you six feet under the ground.

Batgirl paced around the room, her night vision goggles incorporated into her cowl drowning the area in a light purple hue, indicating that she had activated her evidence scanner. Courtesy of herself. She surveyed her surroundings. The papers from the case file her father had compiled. The desk he had swept them off of during the scuffle.

She locked in on Bole’s flask, laying in a pool of the alcohol he hadn’t even bothered to finish. How very professional of him, and how polite of him to leave her enough evidence to incriminate him if she got out of here. No, when she got out of here. She switched on her forensic scanner.

She could follow the traces in the atmosphere.
This time, she turned on the earbud.
“Bruce, I’ve got a trail to follow. Send me the folder I have on Arkham. I’ll probably have to use it.”
Then she darted after the first wisp she spotted.

“Stupid, unreliable…” a guard grumbled while trying to fix up a power box before resorting to punching it instead. Then he gasped when Batgirl popped up over his shoulder, whirling around and poking at the bat symbol on her chestplate with his forefinger.
“How did Joker get free?”
“Sir, please stay quiet –”
“What’s going on?”
A pair of mismatched shoes hit the platform hanging across from them.
“Uh-uh-uh-uh, B-girl!” Quinn held onto what looked like a rope entangled in gruesome wires. “Mr. J doesn’t want you following us yet!” She pulled out a rusted remote from her pocket, shifting the pad of her thumb onto the button at the top.
The three neon green lights on the bombs in Batgirls’ periphery blinked and beeped one. Two. Three times. Then several cables snapped and the platform shot up the shaft, Quinn laughing wildly at her handiwork.
“Get down!” Batgirl shoved the guard to the side. Then the elevator came crashing down. Batgirl shielded her eyes from the flying sparks with her forearm, the dazed guard hacking from the smoke from a few feet away.
“Oww,” he choked out, “what the hell happened?”
“How did ya like that, B-girl?” Quinn squeaked patronizingly through the speakers. “No way you’re following us now. You’re trapped down here ‘til me and Mr. J are ready for ya! Ha. Ha. Ha.”
Batgirl aimed her Batclaw at a balcony overlooking them, the rope rapidly yanking her onto a higher floor. In fact, she would have to do this floor by floor to reach the surface.
She leapt over a gap, caught onto the grating, shimmied along, then struggled to pull herself up and into the opening of another vent. She dragged herself through, elbow by elbow.
“Hey pup! I know you can hear me.” Joker’s voice echoed through the corridor. “I’ve got a little something for you to listen to.”
She worked the batarang into the bolt, doing her best to block him out, even though the corridor constricted with every word. One turn to the left at a time. Just one turn at a time.
“Harley and Frank are nearly out of the building with the old man. How are they going to get past all those guards? Let’s have a listen, shall we?”
Like Quinn, he said it so casually, so conversationally. As if this were an invitation. At least one could reject an invitation.
She kicked off the grating. Emerged from the vent. Grappled to the next floor. Her shoulders stiffened and her heart dropped into the pit of her stomach as the rope pulled her up. Grappled again. Tried not to throw up when Bole, that corrupt pig, started to shout over the speakers.
“Joker’s got more men on the way. They’re coming around the front of the asylum. Gotta stop them getting in! Quick! Get over there!”
She picked up the pace. Cleared another gap. Climbed another fence.
Hurry, Barbara, hurry!
“How many are there, Boles?” another guard, another father, another friend asked before she swore she could hear his brow furrowing on the other end. “Wait, hang on, how the hell do you know what –”
Static.
“Boles! Frank, what are you doing? No! Put it down!”
More static.
“Frank! What the hell?”
A crackle that reminded her of breaking vertebrae.
“Quinn, it’s clear, get your ass in here!” Bole barked.
“You’re some piece of work, Frankie,” she sighed dreamily. “A girl could fall for someone like you!”
Oh, that was rich, coming from the psychiatrist who fell for the clown prince of crime. Given her occupation, she really should’ve known better.
“Stop flirting with the hired help, Harley,” Joker snapped.
“Don’t worry, sweetie. You know I only have eyes for you.”
Batgirl activated her evidence scanner again. Another wisp of alcohol appeared. She forced herself to ponder if this was how the puppies that her father trained to be police dogs saw the world. A stupid thought, but she would settle for any that would block out Joker’s blabbering.
“Did you hear that, pup? Sounds like Frankie is working out just fine! Another valuable employee for the organization.”
Pup. Like a puppy without a big dog to back up her bark with his bite.
Or a baby bat.
Ha. Ha. Ha. Funny as hell.
She would send him there. And it wouldn’t be a clean kill, like what she could have done with her batarang if she didn’t miss. She would draw it out. Cut off his fingers, his toes, one by one. Tie up Harley and make her watch as she sliced out his tongue, so he couldn’t even plead for clemency, then slit her throat, and then strangle him.
It didn’t register that she had bit through her tongue until she tasted the blood filling the corners of her mouth.
She clambered over another fence. Entered what felt like the hundredth vent that night. God, this would be a long night.

Red bulbs branded the back of her lids with every squeeze of her eyes to shut them. Several shots, each man’s plea for mercy stabbing under her ribs, and piercing into her heart as she struggled to loosen the last bolt.
“Please, I’ve got a kid! You don’t have to –”
If she hadn’t missed, he would’ve come home to that kid.
“You’re right, I don’t have to. I just want to!” Bole chuckled to himself, holstering his gun and kicking the corpse as he stepped over it. “OK, boss says no one gets past. Anything moves, shoot it!”
“You got it!” another cop chirped. “Anyone coming this way is dead!”
Damnit, he had a whole squadron. Just how deep did this go? Batgirl made a mental note to include Bole in her imaginary torture chamber as she carefully removed what she hoped would be the last piece of grating and wriggled out of what she prayed would be the last vent.
“Bruce,” she whispered, “Joker’s men have taken control of the Cell Block Transfer corridor. They have weapons –”
“Calibrate the cowl’s vision mode –”
“I’ll calibrate the cowl’s vision mode to isolate the armed henchmen.” The corner of her mouth curled up. “I’m the one who redesigned it to do that, remember?”
A pause.
“I’d tell you to be smart,” he said tersely, “but it seems you have that covered.”
If she hadn’t just seen Bole shoot some kid’s father, she would have smiled at that. “I had a smart mentor.”
“Your mentor dresses up as a bat to fight crime in his free time.” The Batcomputer whooshed softly as he found and opened what must have been the folder on Arkham. “Give yourself some credit.”
She would have laughed if it weren’t for, well, the whole suck-ass situation into which she had walked herself.
Hey, at least she wasn’t dead, unlike the six people she couldn’t save, including Jason. And, so help her god, her father wouldn’t be included in that count.
She grappled onto a gargoyle, leaping onto a platform, and sprinting towards the next statue, and surveying the other corrupt pigs from above.
“So,” one spoke up, “is the Bat really coming this way?”
There is, just not the one you’re thinking of.
“Who cares?” another sneered. “He sticks his pointy head into the room and we blow it off!”
I’d keep that empty head of yours on a swivel if I were you.
“Yeah,” yet another chimed in, “he’s a dead man walking!”
So close! It’s actually you. Well, if it weren’t for the code.
She dropped down from the gargoyle, shielding herself with the shadows, crouching so her center of gravity remained close to the ground, and carefully rolling her weight from her heels to the balls of her feet with every step.
When Bruce performed his silent takedowns, he had to mold his hand over the target’s mouth and maintain high pressure on their throat at the same time. This was assuming that the target didn’t have a mask on, and it was already a difficult technique to perform on an opponent around one’s size, and these men were, again, twice her size.
So, she unraveled a cloth laced with phosphine from her utility belt, clapped it over the nearest guard’s face, locked her elbow around his neck, and pulled him behind a pipe, gently lowering him to the floor though she wanted nothing more than to let him drop face-first into the concrete.
Yes, phosphine, not chloroform. Chloroform took five minutes to knock someone out, and after what felt like a hundred hours of crawling through vents, she did not have it in her to wrestle with these guys for fifteen minutes.
She dragged the second guard behind the boiler.
Before every mission after Jason’s death, Alfred insisted on checking that the dosage stayed under fifty parts-per-million. She had almost asked him how he knew that phosphine could be immediately dangerous to life when it crossed that threshold, but then she remembered that he used to be an MI6 agent.
She threw the last guard’s arm over her shoulder and dumped him in a pile with the other two.

“No problem, boss. The boys are just finishing off. The Arkham guards never stood a chance,” a deep, gravelly voice reported from the top of the stairs Batgirl currently crept up.
She practically stuffed the phosphine-laced cloth down his esophagus, staggering back with him and struggling to shove him aside as he slumped against her and scratched at her armored forearms.
“Oh, look who it is!” Joker giggled from the three screens spilling their searing light onto her and the wriggling guard. “Are your pointy ears burning?”
The guard grew heavier in her arms. Now that they were alone, she could let him fall to the floor, a sliver of satisfaction shooting through her at the thought of the bruise it would leave on the back of that brute’s big, dumb head.
“I suppose I’d better warn my boys you’re on the way…” Joker made a show of stroking his pointed chin. “Hey, maybe I won’t…It’ll be a nice surprise!”
“Hey, over here!” someone shouted.
She whirled around, knees slightly bent, elbows in, and fists clenched when the reinforced doors to the Utility Corridor unlocked, but then she lowered her arms when she recognized the bald man’s light blue irises, dark goatee, and caterpillar-like brows. Officer North. He had survived. She would thank God, but he didn’t look that thankful himself.

“It was a massacre.” He stared straight through her as he explained the horrific events scratched into the CD of his psyche by the security feed. “Boles came walking in telling everyone to cover the front entrance.” He swallowed hard. “Said something about Joker’s army coming through the main gate.” His Adam’s apple bobbed like a drowning man moments before he lost consciousness. “Two of my guys moved to the exit and Frank shot ‘em dead.” His eyes grew even emptier, except for the shame brimming in his ducts. “They never stood a chance.”
Batgirl pressed her lips tight together as she recalled the conversation that Joker had let her in on while the vents constricted around her.
“And Quinzel?”
“Harley Quinn? She was surrounded by Blackgate prisoners. They were just killing everyone in the room –”
“Everyone except you?” she asked in a tone more accusatory than she had intended. Maybe she did intend it, but not for him.
“I had no choice! I got in here. Locked the door. I, I could see it on the security feed. They had someone with them, it looked like –”
“– the Commissioner,” she concluded with him. She remembered the Joker’s words about not warning his men. His comment about Frank Boles being another valuable member of the organization. Only now did it occur to her that his declaration had been dripping with sarcasm as acidic at the vat that birthed the villain he had become. “Boles is likely dead. They must’ve carried on without him. Outlived his usefulness.”
“Good!” North snarled. “He was scum.”
“I’d say ‘scum’ is an understatement,” she scoffed, and when North’s mustache twitched upwards, despite the whole suck-ass situation, her own smile solidified slightly.

Batgirl emerged from a tunnel system overgrown with puke-and-dung-colored moss, muck, and ferns, stray strands of hair sticking to her to the sweat and soil caked under her cowl. She sensed her perspiration, which had spread over her undershift into two soggy wings around her shoulder blades. She batted the dust off her pauldrons, slowly shutting her eyes while the chilling wind cooled her swollen cheekbone, her spine popping as she could stand straight at long last, having reached the island surface.
She opened her cape and glided towards the asylum mansion’s central clock tower, the moon illuminating the worn windows set in the battered bricks barely holding up the buildings. She could relate.
She nearly crashed into one of the guards posted beside the two dying lamplights framing the entrance when the Joker began another abhorrent routine through the speakers surrounding the compound.
“Hmm,” he hummed. “Harley tells me that the Batgirl’s cycle is still parked outside of the Intensive Treatment building. Now we can’t just have her up and leave us, can we?”
She could picture him posing on a podium, performing disgustingly grand gestures with his hands as he addressed his men in the manner of a certain dictator that her social studies teachers had familiarized her with in grade school. Before her mother left. Before the divorce, designing her own batsuit because she had to bring Jason’s killer to justice. The sight of his suit, soaked in scarlet, seeped into her memory like the sweat slithering into her pores, only unlike her cotton undershirt, no material could wick that memory away.
“Every thug, murderer, and kindergarten teacher that isn’t carrying out party orders should head there now and smash it to pieces,” Joker drawled, drawing her out of the Batcave where Bruce had encased the scarlet suit in glass and to the present. The past the only suffering the clown’s vile voice would spare her from tonight.
“So, the Joker’s free again,” a guard sighed.
“Not for long,” Batgirl said sharply, resisting the urge to let out a weary sigh of her own. She rolled up her sleeve to reveal a remote that would control the Batcycle. Her fingers flew over the buttons, disabling the vehicle’s countermeasures, her gaze fixed on the marble statue of Quincy Sharp in the middle of the courtyard, a stark contrast to how she last saw him. Tied to a chair in his own office, Quinzel’s knee in his lap, his staff in her mismatched hands.
“I saw the alert, what's wrong?” Bruce asked through her earbud, startling her out of her trance. “Where are you?”
“I’m outside the Arkham Mansion.” She tweaked her cowl, which created an itch under her bloodied nostrils. “Quinzel,” she bit out, “probably triggered the alarm. If she’s still got my dad – the Commissioner with her, he could get hurt.”
She parked her Batcycle outside what looked like the Intensive Treatment building in Arkham North on the holographic miniature map displayed by her remote and marked the location. “I need you to send me the schematics for the entire island.”

“The entire island will soon be under my control,” Joker almost sang. “That’s right, boys and girls. Mine. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.” A high-pitched cackle leaked out from his lips. “Just wait till you see my plans for this place. It’s going to be glorious.”
As the first thug to reach the Batcycle approached it, Batgirl intently observed his footwork. His demeanor was sturdy and calculated, but too defensive and structured. She would have to be loose and open to gain an advantage.
When he brought his bat back, her extended leg left the soil first, kicking off and providing momentum. Her body torqued and her heels swung around, nearly carving a swathe through the thug’s chest. He flopped backwards and scurried away.
Once she closed the distance, he propped himself up on his hands and pushed his leg outwards, aiming at her crotch with the edge of his foot. Batgirl grimaced when the moonlight illuminated his dark, rugged visage and the ugly scar stretching vertically over his eye.
Simon Lacroix, also known as Komodo. Of course he couldn’t be a typical thug like before. He had to be a martial arts master who specialized in Capoeira as well. But hey, on the bright side, he wasn’t Shiva. If it were, her suit would be encased in a glass right beside Jason’s.
She dropped beneath his kick and drew the edge of her foot into his instep. Once he stumbled, she fell backwards onto one arm, bending her back, and flipping her hips over her head until she was upright again. She stepped diagonally across from him, simultaneously jumping at him and throwing out a reverse crescent kick.
Komodo slid to the outside of her attack, using one hand to push her forward and sweeping her kicking leg from the inside. She braced her hands against the lawn, smoothly rolling onto her feet. Komodo crouched lower, locking in on her with his forehead and springing forward to headbutt her.
She shifted her weight forward and transitioned into a handstand, following it up with a twirl of her hips and a split. Komodo dodged her leg before she could hit his temple with the lower part of her shin. He lunged at her with what seemed to be a roundhouse kick. She threw her guard up for it, but then he brought his knee and thigh up and across his body, thrusting out in a hooking motion with his heel and hitting her square in the stomach, only inches below her solar plexus.
Batgirl anchored her front foot perpendicular to her back foot, shifting into a low lunge and lifting a hand up to deflect his foot, then she snatched his pant leg and pulled him down with her. She shuffled back a few strides, then she sped towards Komodo with all she had, bending her knees in preparation for the final combination.
She turned her chest towards my back leg and reached my hands through her knees, squatting on the leg closest to Komodo and looking between them to pinpoint his whereabouts. She aimed her hip and heel at his face, straightened out my back leg, put all her weight into it, and spun it so her heel hammered down on his scar.
He collapsed behind her, then she caught her breath, and collected the explosive gel from the compartment below her Batcycle seat. She had the feeling she would need it.
Quinzel had trashed the vehicle. Scratched the sides. Scraped off some paint. Torn up the leather lining the seat. Surefire signs of a scuffle. Batgirl would search the area around the Batcycle for clues as to where she took the Commissioner.
She activated the evidence scanner and paced around the parking lot, a lump welling up in her throat when she spotted a pipe – no, a pipe with his initials – on the tarmac. A Nosewarmer. Supposed to help him with his congestion. Shorter in length. Perfect for carrying in one’s pocket.
I gave him that for his birthday, he wouldn’t just leave it.
Then again, her mother did leave because of him.
She shook her head, struggling to shake off the thought as much as Clayface had struggled with her. The scanner beeped as it picked up the tobacco. Wild Country. His favorite. He had left a trail to follow. Smart. Like father, like daughter.
And alive.
She tugged on the Arkham West security doors. Locked. She would have to find another way around and get back on the trail. Not exactly a silver lining, but a tobacco-tinged one.
The wall ahead seemed weak enough for her Explosive Gel to blow through and open up a new path. She sprayed it on, then ran like hell in the other direction.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Joker chirped through the speakers in the corners of the sewage-dripping, low-hanging ceilings. “I’m getting some troubling reports of a bat infestation in Joker Asylum. Let me remind everyone that it is their civic duty to exterminate this vermin. We can’t have it making its way back to the mainland.”
Batgirl slammed her shoulder into a steel door, pushing with her legs as well as her hands while it screeched loudly on its hinges. The second she stepped out, torrential rain hammered her cape. She sprinted up a staircase. She skidded to a stop at the sight of six guards waiting outside the entrance to the Medical Wing.
“Anyone seen the baby Bat?” the clown prince of crime continued incessantly. “I warn you. She may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. She really is an idiot.” He punctuated that with pealing laughter.
If she were an idiot, she would’ve thrown her batarang at the speaker, but her degree in computer science and, oh yeah, common sense would beg to differ.
Her fingers tightened around a Flash-Bomb. A capsule packed with magnesium and potassium nitrate. Upon impact, it would blind and deafen them for a few seconds. Even if she managed to get into the building in time, they would pursue her. And she definitely wouldn’t have time to find a good hiding place in a place she had never been in before.
Thunder thrummed through the atmosphere, the air crackled, and her skin tingled under the Kevlar, the hairs around the nape of her neck on end. Then it hit her, well, like a lightning strike.
These thugs may have looked like idiots and talked like idiots, but she wouldn’t let that fool her. They were idiots.
If she threw her Flash-Bomb at them and it went off with the lightning, maybe, just maybe, they would believe they were nearly struck by lightning, and she could get into the building while they were celebrating their luck.
A flash. Barbara had counted thirty seconds between the thunder rolling and the lightning dancing through the clouds. She clasped the Flash-Bomb in both hands, and pressed close to the corner, the rough surfaces of the bricks digging into the plates protecting her upper back, the guards just on the other side.
More thunder. She counted down. Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six. Twenty-five. Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two. Twenty-one. Twenty.
She clocked the considerable distance between her and the door. She shifted forward ever-so-slightly. Close enough so she had more of a chance. Far enough so the lamplights wouldn’t catch on her pointed ears, cast her shadow over the guards, and give her away.
Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.
So, this was why Bruce had her do those god-awful shuttle runs. She pulled earmuffs out of her utility pack and adjusted the lens on her goggles, darkening them enough to spare her from the impending eyeball-shriveling shine, but not enough to black out the door.
Three. Two. One.
The Flash-Bomb rolled off her fingers and flew towards the idiots. Lightning shattered the sky. The guards screamed and crashed into each other as the bomb went off with a brilliant burst of light. She held her hands over her ears, then charged at the door with all her might. Her pauldron cracked against the metal, but she slipped through the small crevice she had created.
The door swung shut. Batgirl’s wet boots slid against the tiles. She tripped over them, flailed her arms, and fumbled herself into the floor. It seemed she had also created too much momentum with her mad dash.
She looked right up into a blue laser. The table behind it. The woman humming happily to herself while reclining in the chair. Her legs propped up on said table. Her mismatched boots.
“Hey!” Quinzel pouted as sipped from her cup of coffee. “Scram, B-girl! This is my me-time.”
Batgirl righted herself in an instant.
“Where’s Gordon?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Quinzel played with her pigtails. Batgirl wanted to rip them out of her scalp, braid them into a rope, and strangle her with them.
“I’m over here!” a gruff voice rang out.
And for a millisecond, Batgirl became Barbara. Specifically, six-year-old Barbara. In a backyard. A beach ball between her hands. Her father across from her, waving his arms over his head, her mother smiling at them while she sat on the patio, rubbing her swollen belly.
“Shut up!” Quinzel shouted, smashing through the illusion, then bringing her arm back to chuck the cup of hot coffee at her father.
In one smooth motion, Batgirl shoved six-year-old Barbara – shoved the entire scene into her subconscious, unsheathed her batarang, aimed it at Quinzel’s raised cup, and didn’t miss.
The clown princess cried out and scrambled out of the chair, clutching her hand, the coffee splashed all over her costume, shards of ceramic from the now broken cup embedded in her forearm, blood bubbling from where the batarang had lodged itself in her wrist.
“I wouldn’t pull that out if I were you, doctor,” Batgirl remarked, her silhouette stretching over the room as she marched up to the lasers. “You have a lot of important veins in there, and I wouldn’t want all the life to drain out of you…at least not yet.”
“You, you crazy bitch,” Quinzel gasped out, bumping into the table as she backed away, her free hand pressed over the gash.
Joker’s face flickered onto the screen.
“Harley!” he snapped, though that word didn’t sufficiently capture the sheer scathing, scalding irritation in his tone. “What’s she doing here? It’s too early!”
Batgirl’s brow furrowed, her blood boiling a little less when she took in the damage she had dealt.
Crimson leaked out from under Quinzel’s black glove, her breathing shallow and strained, eyes wide with panic, almost sobbing from shock, her knees on the verge of caving in. Joker’s most faithful follower. Fatally injured if it weren’t for the scraps of mercy Batgirl had thrown under the table. And all the clown prince of crime cared about was his glorious plan for his place.
“I’m, I’m sorry, puddin’,” Quinzel stammered, staggering over to the screen. “Don’t be angry with me!”
“Oh, you little minx.” Joker let out a low laugh, the same laugh that he let out whenever Jason pleaded to be put out of his misery. “I could never stay mad at you.”
The screen blacked out.
“No, no, Puddin’, please –” Quinzel sank to her knees, her quivering lips pressed to the glass, whimpering like a wounded dog “– help me, help…”
A strange sensation cooled the fire flowing through Batgirl’s veins. Somewhere between disgust, sadness, and disgustingly enough, guilt. Then she grit her teeth hard enough to split her molars. What the hell did she have to be guilty for? Quinzel was the one complicit in Jason’s demise. Quinzel was the killer.
But she hadn’t always been a killer, had she? Batgirl had read her file on the Batcomputer. She was a psychiatrist. A phenomenal psychiatrist. Published several studies decrying Arkham Asylum’s inhumane treatment methods. Created hundreds of articles on how cognitive behavioral therapy could be applied to undo the effects of childhood neglect, abuse, and hybristophilia. If only she had followed her own advice before accepting that assignment on Joker.
Could that be why she did what he did to Jason? Some twisted way to reclaim her power after Joker did that to her first?
Quinzel curled up on the floor, clutching her wrist to her chest, her tears streaking through her white makeup, her true face just as ghostly underneath it.
Batgirl’s fingers curled like they were still clutching that batarang, but she walked away. The lasers were blocking her off from the Commissioner. She would have to find another way in.

A biohazard symbol plastered the pale pillar to Batgirl’s left, and to the right of the set of screens. Not a security feed, but what appeared to be several X-rays, the skeletons glowing a sickly greenish-blue against the inky backdrop.
She stopped when muffled words leaked through a decaying wall. Female. Not much older than her. Compliant, trying to remain calm.
“Why are you doing this? I’ve done exactly as you’ve asked.”
More words. Male. Much older. Aggressive. A New York accent that reminded her of another abrasively bright, bubbly voice she may have silenced.
“Look at me! You think I care? Stop your whining and listen good!” The five red hostiles on Batgirl’s scanner aimed their guns at the small, slender figure they had cornered. “If anyone goes near you without Joker’s express permission, then I’ve been ordered to make sure you are taken out ASAP. Looks like you’re our bargaining chip.”
Batgirl turned on her tape recorder and sprayed on the explosive gel in the shape of a bat.
“Gotta tell ya,” the man remarked, “the boss is all over this job. Planned it like a military operation. Friends on the inside and out.”
“I am quite aware that this job, as you call it, requires friends.” The woman’s calm remained, but now it held a hint of cutting, calculating professionalism. “What I want to know is why you chose me.”
Batgirl walked around the area, marking up the next wall with another bat that looked a lot less sad than the previous one.
“Did Joker specify me?” the woman continued. “Why don’t you let me talk to him? I’m sure we can settle this –”
A blast. The walls crumbled, along with the woman’s composure.
“No! Please, no –” she stopped screaming when Batgirl snapped a pocket shut on her utility belt, stepped around the rubble, and sauntered towards her, dusting off the dust collecting on her uniform and collecting herself with terrifying efficiency. “What’s going on? They were talking like they were in control. Is it true that Joker escaped?”
Batgirl glanced at her name tag. Dr. Penelope Young. Smooth, straight ebony hair tied into a bun with short, lopsided bangs. Green eyes, not as neon as the clown prince of crime’s, but still sporting the same glint of malicious intelligence. Expertly playing the part of innocent, as if Batgirl hadn’t overheard and recorded the entire conversation, but she would play along for now.
“Unfortunately, yes. But not for long.”
“I’d been studying Joker’s case for months when he broke out.” Young placed a gloved hand on her hip, performed a surprised raise of her brows. “The Warden was very specific; he wanted Joker cured.”
Batgirl blinked. Penelope’s eyes were icy blue behind her black domino mask. Batgirl blinked again, hard. Penelope Young. Doctor Young, not Quinzel. Batgirl shook her head to clear her vision, then cleared her throat.
“Bad publicity will affect his campaign for Mayor.”
“That’ll be the least of his…” Young’s dark, threaded brows knit together. “God, I almost forgot. They said they were moving through the facility, hunting down the other doctors!”
“Don’t worry, Doctor,” Batgirl said solemnly, the title now leaving a bad taste in her mouth. “I’ll search the other rooms. You wait here, it’s dangerous out there.”

Batgirl followed the trail of tobacco to three encased extractor fans that would’ve been filtering out the thick clouds of toxic lime-green gas that swamped the room below. Her scanner picked up four corpses, but more importantly, one person who had locked themselves in a room, buying themselves some time, but slowly suffocating nonetheless. She had lost one batarang to her temper, now embedded in Quinzel’s forearm. She would have to reserve the rest. Throw them at an angle that would allow them to ricochet.
She tossed one at the power grid behind her. Almost missed. Fans One and Two hummed to life. She caught the batarang and glided to the next fan. Stumbled slightly upon landing, but not as badly as before. Aimed it at the grid ahead of her. Missed. Her temples throbbed. She inhaled deeply through her nose. Exhaled through her mouth. She would beat herself up about that later. For now, she had to focus. She unsheathed another batarang. Aimed it at the grid again. Fan Three started spinning. The air thinned, and the deadly fumes withered away, lost in the hurricane of blades under her.
“Surprise, surprise,” Joker said scornfully, “Batgirl arrives in the nick of time. Next time, Cash, I’ll just shoot you and be done with it.”
She ran past an orderly coughing his lungs out as he leaned against a brick pillar, briefly, and awkwardly patting his shoulder before approaching Cash.
“I don’t know.” He adjusted his prosthetic hand. “We lock him up, he gets out and more people die. If I just had one minute alone with that animal…”
She wished Bruce could hear that. Then again, he’d probably heard it hundreds of times. So, why didn’t he listen?

“Remember, a happy patient is a quiet patient,” an instructional video recited from somewhere over her head. Batgirl, now hightailing it through the medical-equipment-cluttered Upper Corridor, couldn’t be bothered to look, not when Joker began to jeer at her from a screen around the corner.
“I’m not sure I can keep it a secret any longer. Got two old friends coming to the party…”
She stared straight ahead, as if that would block out another orderly’s body curled up under a flickering light, his head tilted nearly ninety-degrees. Rounded a corner. Rounded another corner.
“One of them is just terrified you’ll leave without saying ‘hello.’ The other..” Joker hummed in constructed contemplation from beside a surgery sign beside the small set of stairs she descended. “...well, let’s just say he’s going to be as surprised to see you as you will be to see him!”
She pushed apart the doors to the surgery room, clapping a hand over her mouth to stop herself from gasping in horror.
An older Asian man thrashed against the restraints strapping him to an operating table, his wrists and ankles scabbed and infected because they were tight enough to break his skin, his encaged head jerking wildly from side to side.
“Batman?” he choked out.
“Batgirl, sir.” She forced a smile, clasping his bony hand between hers, squeezing it reassuringly while steadying and softening her tone. “You’re safe now.”
“But…but it’s a trap!”
“I know,” she said more sternly, “just not for me.”
“It’s true!” Joker gasped in delight from the screen looming over them. “You really were trained by the world’s greatest detective. Oh, what the hell, get down there, boys. See if she can detect being punched in the face!”
Six boys, to be specific, blocking every possible exit on the ground. Not to mention, soreness also stabbed at six points on her body: her arms, legs, ribs, back, nose bridge, and cheekbone. She wondered if there was a way for her to grab the orderly – Dr. Adrian Chen, if she remembered correctly – and grapple out, but unfortunately, the ceiling closed off that route.
Despite Bruce’s best attempts to build up her endurance, the human body could only be bruised and battered so much until it didn’t have much left in it, and hers was no exception. She would let them come to her, take full advantage of her gear, and apply the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu techniques Bruce had taught her to the most courageous of her volunteers. The code protected them from death, but it didn’t protect them from permanent disablement.
The thugs barreled forward. She darkened her lenses and dropped a flash bomb into their midst. Her ears rang, muting their distracing shouts and swearing as she sprinted into the blast, the only one not blinded by the brilliance.
She locked her leg out behind the first thug’s knee, using her hip as a fulcrum, twisting it from underneath with her body weight. Then, she shifted her leg up higher on his, gripping his shin, and pulling hard on it, and pushing on the back of his thigh to apply as much pressure as possible. The thug howled when his hip dislocated with a pop. One down, five to go.
She spotted her second opponent in her periphery. Curled into a defensive position, keeping her back to him, and her limbs close to her chest. As soon as he wrapped his arms around her waist, she rolled with him, wedged her foot between his calf and hamstring, seized his foot, and forced his heel to his glute. He shrieked, writhing on the floor, clutching the torn muscle. Two down.
The third one tackled her. She caught him by the ankle, looped her other hand under his shin, and grabbed her other arm at her wrist. She twisted his foot, hyperextending the ligaments in his ankle. She got up. He wouldn’t get up for a long time now that she had ripped a new one through his sole. Three down.
She locked an arm around the fourth one’s head, grasping his elbow with her opposite fingers. Brought her forearm down across his throat. Cinched it tight. Tugged on his elbow for leverage, further compressing his trachea. Caught her own breath. In three seconds, he dropped.
The wind flew from her lungs when the fifth jabbed her in the solar plexus and smashed her into the ground with his shoulder. Before he could fully flatten himself against her, she clenched her abdominal muscles and held her legs against his upper back. She slipped one foot under his chin, locked her hand behind his head, and pressed her shin into his throat. He scratched desperately at her spandex, shredding the fabric, digging his nails deep enough to leave several scarlet stripes along her legs if she made it to the morning. She pushed her free foot up on her choking foot. The scratches shallowed, then with a wheeze, his hands fell to his sides.
She ran right into the last thug. Doubled back. Dodged his cross. Ensnared his neck with one arms, grabbing her bicep with the opposite hand, and locking her legs around his waist to prevent him from throwing her off.
Nine seconds, she told herself, wincing at the sting as he raked at her forearms. Eight seconds, seven seconds, six seconds –
He tried to back into a wall. She yanked him away with a guttural yell. Compared to Clayface, this was child’s play. They almost hit the stretcher where Dr. Chen shuddered with his glazed gaze. She squeezed the thug harder, her lean arms searing from the effort.
Three, two, one!
He went limp and she released him, sinking to her knees, her chest heaving, her heart hammering against her sternum. She didn’t catch her breath so much as she coughed, each expulsion of air racking her bruised ribs, the skin on her forearms and calves just as shredded as her spandex pants.
“Don’t get too full of yourself, Bats.” Joker’s announcement cut through the black dots dancing in the corners of her vision. “I’m just softenin’ ya up!”
She retched, her solar plexus aching, shuffling one foot in front of the other, leaning against the wall, her heart shooting into her throat when she tripped over an unconscious thug and he stirred slightly.
“Think of this as a preview to the main event,” the clown prince of crime concluded cheerily as ever. “You’ll see!”
Batgirl fumbled with the buckles of Dr. Chen’s restraints. With a click, the cage lifted off his head and he sat up slowly. She caught him before he tumbled from the stretcher, holding him up by his underarms until he found his footing.
“I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I tried to tell you. I couldn’t speak.”
“You’re safe now.” She placed a hand on his shoulder, then threw his arms over hers. “I’ll have that clown recaptured in no time.”
She carried Dr. Chen to a corridor with four other doctors. Two crouched over an orderly, fortunately only unconscious.
“Did you find them?” The redhead’s brown eyes brightened at the sight of them, her hands clasped together before her chest. “Are they OK?”
Batgirl smiled warmly.
“Yes, you’re all safe now.”
“Batgirl!” Cash called, a familiar figure falling in step beside him. “We’ve got another problem.”
“I need to get back to the Mansion,” Dr. Young said sharply. “All my research notes are there.” Lightning crackled behind her and thunder reverberated against the walls. “We can’t risk Joker getting his hands on them.”
“It’s not safe, Doctor.” Batgirl patted each pocket of her utility belt. “The island’s a war zone.” She assured herself that she still had the tape recorder. “You won’t stand a chance.”
You aren’t going anywhere.
The doctor’s brow furrowed, indignation tempering her tone until it dripped with patronizing, performative patience.
“This is my life’s work, young lady.” She blinked incredulously. “You really don’t have the authority to –”
“I’ll get her there, Batgirl,” Cash cut in. “If you ask me, it’s about time for a little payback!”
“You don’t have to tell me twice –” Batgirl’s head whirled around at the high-pitched trill that shot through the speakers – “Who called the elevator?”
“Wasn’t us, it’s coming from the lower floor!” The redhead looked around, turning rapidly from side to side.
“Cash, take Doctor Young! Get her notes, then find somewhere safe to hole up.” Batgirl stifled a sharp sigh, stretched her arms, and drew her knees in a circle, preparing for another potential round of high-stakes Jiu Jitsu practice. “Everyone else, go to the Observation Room. Barricade yourselves in.”
She let the trill lead her to the open doors of the elevator. She scowled at the spinning Arkham logo on the screen inside it, then grimaced at the sign hanging over it.

The doors rattled and locked behind her. She hooked her thumbs through her utility belt to prevent herself from reaching for her batarang, lest it provide the Joker with inspiration for another jab at her expense. At the expense of all those she had failed when she hit that chain instead of him, and all those she had failed before she even wore the cowl.
“Too easy!” He had etched JOKER TV into the top right corner, having evolved from stand-up to a talk show host. “Think about it.” He grasped the screen’s base. “I’ve got you trapped in a little metal box. Hanging precariously over a deadly drop. What say I just blow the emergency brakes and drop you like a sack of puppies?” He threw his hands up. “Boom!”
Her heart halted for a split second, then plummeted into the pit of her stomach when the elevator trembled. She almost grabbed her grappling hook, but then Joker’s laughter tore at her eardrums.
“Only kidding.” He slapped his knee and leaned in. “Got a few more surprises in store for you.” His green irises and garish grin glinted with equivalent viciousness. “Prepare to face your fears.” The grin widened until it seemed on the verge of splitting his visage in half. “All of them!”
He howled with glee, the lower register to the symphony of screams leaking through the diamond-gridded walls as they shakily slid open. She coughed into her gloved hand at the acrid scent seeping into and singing her nostrils.
“Please, Dr. Crane, don’t do this!” someone shouted from the corridor’s end, drowned in the din of the other orderlies’ terrified cries while the intervals between the lights fading and flashing only lengthened. A raspy, warped voice answered through the speakers, the sound slightly distorted by their ramshackle condition.
“There is no Crane…” a raspy, warped voice answered.
“They’re all over me!” someone else sobbed from behind the glass panel to which Batgirl crept up, knuckles white under her gloves, her gut twisting, cold sweat trickling down her spine.
“...Only Scarecrow.”
No. No. She could handle thugs. Crawling through vents. Wrestling with Clayface. But she couldn’t handle this. She’d pick a one-on-one with Killer Croc over this. She couldn’t go back there. Not the night where she nearly lost her legs. Or the night she lost him.
One orderly batted frantically at his arms. Another huddled in the corner, holding his head between his hands.
A man slammed up against the glass, so starved that he seemed almost skeletal, frothing at the mouth, his sclera bloodshot. Rabid. Poisoned beyond repair. A premonition.
“Get me outta here!” he screeched. “Please, someone!” His nails had chipped off, bloodied and scabbed stumps from clawing at the glass. “Oh God!”
She flinched from the panel when a hooded, lanky, long-limbed shadow slithered over the tiles lining the back wall.
By the time she stopped gripping the bars of a gate and turned around, the gas had seeped into her system, and her surroundings shifted.

Chapter Text

Batgirl sat in an uncomfortable chair, enclosed in a small, soundproof room, her hands cuffed in her lap. A desk separated her from two other chairs that flanked an observation mirror. One for the detective. One for the police officer. Her, the suspect. No signs on the walls.
Gooseflesh prickled along her arms, icy air cutting through the cracks in her armor, and she had to squint so the burning bulb above her head wouldn’t fry her eyeballs. Her father had taught her why they set up the room this way. They designed it to maximize discomfort, powerlessness, exposure, unfamiliarity, and isolation. To add as much anxiety as possible.
It was working very well.
An older woman took the first chair. An angular visage. Sun-kissed skin. Disheveled, long, dark brown hair. A black coffee clutched in one hand and a clipboard in another. She sported a purple blazer over a white V-necked shirt with a crumpled collar. Detective Renee Montoya. The bad cop. Second only to Batman in terms of who her father trusted the most in this line of work. Which only meant…
Her father’s cane clanked rhythmically with every uneven step as he entered the chamber. Like a gavel. The second chair’s feet screeched against the floor’s surface when he pulled it over to sit at her side. The good cop. Probably the only good cop in the entire G.C.P.D.
“Morning, Batgirl. How are you –”
“I reserve my right to remain silent,” she said sharply, resisting the Commissioner’s attempt to build rapport.
Montoya slapped a portfolio down on the desk. Flipped it open. Pushed it over to Batgirl. It contained several photos from Arkham Asylum’s security feed. Her conversation with Batman. Her tying him up. Her in the elevator with Joker and Boles. Her strangling Joker with the Batclaw.
The Joker with his head tilted nearly ninety degrees. His neck broken. And herself looking down on him – no, laughing at him while Boles and North pinned her to the wall and secured the pair of cuffs she wore now around her wrists.
“So much for the code, hmm?” Montoya had a small sip of her coffee, then tilted her head, her mouth curled up at the corner as she draped one leg over the other and crossed her arms.
Batgirl’s lips instinctively parted to defend herself, but then she sealed them shut. But not before the Commissioner caught onto it.
He stood up slowly, towering over her, placing a firm hand on her shoulder, like he always did when he tried to help her with homework during grade school. Only he didn’t know he had ever tried to help her with homework. He was just invading her personal space to increase her discomfort.
“I can see where you’re coming from, kid.” His fingers tightened. “I mean, no one misses that psychopathic piece of shit. Hell, he crippled me right in front of my daughter.” A pause for effect. “She’s about your age.”
The room started to spin.
“How many people has the clown prince of crime killed?” He turned to Montoya. “Two thousand? Three thousand as of this year?”
“Three thousand –” she made a show of checking her clipboard “– including the second Robin.”
“He must’ve been like a little brother to you,” the Commissioner pressed softly, soothingly. He would have succeeded in lulling her into a false sense of security, if he hadn’t told her that whenever they played pretend.
Batgirl struggled to swallow.
“You know, my daughter has a little brother.” He patted her upper back over her cape, which seemed to weigh heavier by the millisecond. “He…he doesn’t live with her, but he calls every weekend. He misses her a lot. She’s gone missing.”
It’s just fear gas, it’s just fear gas, it’s just fear gas… Her temples throbbed. Saliva welled in her mouth. Her stomach convulsed. Her upper abdomen coiled painfully. Her father’s lopsided figure blurred. The ceiling rippled and spun faster and faster. Clockwise. Counterclockwise. Clockwise.
It’s just fear gas –
“We’re cutting you a deal, Bats.” With each word from Montoya, the thorns forming in Batgirl’s throat twisted further into the flesh of her esophagus. “You tell us where Barbara Gordon is, and we’ll cover up your murder of Joker.”
All her reason flew out the one-way mirror.
“I didn’t murder him,” she practically coughed out, curling in on herself, shuddering uncontrollably, her sweaty forehead on her cuffed hands. “I could’ve – I should’ve, but I missed – but I didn’t murder him. I didn’t break the code –”
Montoya shrugged and had a larger sip from her coffee.
“Evidence says a lot differently.”
The Commissioner crouched before Batgirl, both hands on her shoulders now, his expression earnest.
“Hey, hey, kid. It’s alright. We’ll get you water, okay?”
“I don’t want water, I want him dead!”
Montoya started scribbling on the clipboard, but Batgirl didn’t care anymore.
“Kid, kid, we’re on your side,” the Commissioner insisted. “We wouldn’t be surprised if the whole city were on your side. We just want to get your story straight –”
She couldn’t tell whether the words were erupting from her with a scream, or with a stream of vomit.
“I want him dead, dad!”
The tip of Montoya’s pen paused on the paper, then the writing instrument clattered to the tile when the Commissioner collapsed backward onto the table, his head resting on her cuffed hands, his cheek frigid against her knuckles, crimson coating the bat symbol carved into his chest.
And her cowl-clad face reflected in his lightless irises.
Before Montoya could call for a medic, bullets peppered the one-way mirror, glass shrapnel piercing her purple jacket, and then the only other good cop in the G.C.P.D. slumped in her chair, submerged in her own scarlet.
Joker stepped through, the shards forming a pointy-toothed smile under his soles as he leapt up onto the table, his tailcoats fluttering behind him while he twirled around, gleefully tossing his pistol in the air before catching it again and crushing Barbara’s cuffed hands under his black and white wingtips.
“And now –” the muzzle of his pistol sank into her belly – “for the main event!” He pulled the trigger.
And now, Barbara’s limp legs dragged behind her as she pulled herself over the cracked tiles of the hospital halls by her bruised, scraped elbows, a fresh sheen of cold sweat beading on her forehead, the wet warmth of blood leaking from the exit wounds in her lower belly and lower back, the clown prince of crime’s cackles echoing off the corridors that rapidly closed in behind her.
No cape. No cowl. Only her collared, button-up, mustard-yellow t-shirt for armor. A simple, stylish black belt instead of the utility belt that held her tonfas. A dark gray skirt, not spandex pants with knee guards. And brown, square-shaped glasses in place of her goggles, a normal watch on her wrist that couldn’t remotely control a Batcycle.
Weaponless.
Helpless.
The sound of scissors slicing through a newspaper slipped through the speakers, then a distorted remark from her father.
“Whenever we jail him, I pray, ‘Please God, just keep him there.’” And then, when he escapes, it’s ‘Please don’t let him do something too awful this time.’ I hate it.” The tape rewound. “Whenever we jail him, I pray, ‘Please God, just keep him there.’ And then, when he escapes…”
The clown prince of crime’s cackles became closer and closer, her legs heavy as lead, her arms aching, her movements slower and slower.
“Dad,” her six-year-old self and her sixteen-year old self spoke up at the same time, “just once, could you leave your work at the office and relax?”
Another rewind. This time, her mother’s voice melded with her own.
“Just once, could you leave your work at the office and relax?”
“Oh, look, you’ve got paste squishing out.” Her shoes tapped against the carpet as her younger self walked around their living room. “Don’t get it on your pants.”
Walking. How she had taken it for granted. Just like her mother had taken her father not sleeping with his partner behind her back for granted.
“Barbara, I swear, you’re fussier than your mother was,” he snapped. A record scratch. “Your mother – your mother – your mother –” The distortion lessened with each repetition.
Barbara looked up, nose-to-fabric with their couch’s behind. She grasped at the armrest, biting back an agonized scream when her dead legs further tore open the wound in her stomach, blood splattering over the carpet.
A knock at the door.
“Don’t,” Barbara rasped, “don’t answer it.”
Her dad set his scrapbook down and got up off the couch. Younger Barbara’s brow furrowed. She stopped stirring the cup of cocoa she had prepared and dropped it, dashing towards him, her fingertips barely brushing his shoulder.
“Dad, don’t answer it –”
Gunfire lit up the apartment. Barbara squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed another pained sob when she rolled behind the couch, further ripping at her abdomen, shielding herself with her elbows.
Then the carpet hardened into concrete. Mold and mildew marred the walls, the musty smell mixing with the metallic scent of the blood pooling beneath her and smearing her sides, her own guts spilling through her fingers.
White wingtips framed her head. Joker fisted her hair, craning her neck, forcing her to look at the boy he had strapped to a wheelchair with barbed wire.
No, not any boy. The Boy Wonder.
Jason.
Joker pointed a pistol at his temple.
How many times had she run this scenario through her mind while she tossed and turned in her bed, loathing the notion that she had a pillow to rest on while Jason only had a cardboard box when Bruce took him in, and now only had a coffin. Only it wasn’t just Bruce who took him in, was it? It was her. She was the one who accompanied him on his first missions. Convinced him to fight for the greater good. Lulled him into a false sense of security like a good cop putting his hand on the shoulder of a suspect in an interrogation chamber.
And no matter how many times she thought it over, how many combinations she considered, she couldn’t have saved him. By the time she pulled out her batarang, Joker would’ve already pulled the trigger. By the time she raised her knee to roundhouse kick the pistol out of his hand, he would’ve already pulled the trigger. Even if she managed to lasso the wheelchair with the Batclaw and roll that little boy the slightest bit forward, all the Joker would’ve done was adjust his aim, and pull the trigger.
But this time, he didn’t pull the trigger. He dropped the pistol a few feet in front of her, held his hands over his head, and sauntered behind the wheelchair.
“What the hell are you playing at?” she spat.
“Would you rather!” Joker clapped his hands onto Jason’s shoulders, squeezing the barbed wire further into the second Robin’s flesh. “An oldie, and a goodie from the swinging sixties…”
Jason didn’t even flinch. Judging by the J-shaped brand burnt into his left cheek and the horrific hunch in his spine, Joker and the other Arkham Asylum inmates had really built up his pain tolerance.
“And speaking of swinging –” Joker rolled the wheelchair into a metal contraption that resembled the massive claws on the cranes that came by to reconstruct the block after yet another gang war blew it to hell “– whaddya say I help him out with a little shove him to start him off?”
A chasm split through the concrete, unveiling several spewing and steaming acid vats while the contraption suspended Jason over it. And Jason just stared straight through her, relief flickering over his face like the Bat-signal faded in and out during the thunderstorms that never seemed to abate.
Joker circled the chasm and clapped his hands excitedly as Barbara pulled herself towards the pistol, elbow by elbow, the black dots in her vision and the numbing sensation in her legs spreading further with each miniscule movement.
“On the right, you have the control panel for this contraption.” He tapped the power box with the warden’s ruby-topped cane. “If you hit that lovely lever, it’ll lower your Boy Wonder safely and soundly to the ground, but not before I have to leave this party early.”
She picked up the pistol.
“If you hit me, I’ll be out of that smokin’ hot red hair for good,” he proclaimed, “but so will your beloved birdie.”
The clown prince of crime skidded to a stop mid-skip, intertwined his fingers, and cradled his chin on the backs of his hands.
“So…what’ll it be?”
The creases in the corners of Joker’s uncanny smile accentuated by the solidifying shadows.
She eased the pad of her forefinger onto the trigger.
Jason stared straight at her. And she didn’t even contemplate her choices. Didn’t need to. She had envisioned this dilemma every night after that night. She had the chance to save him. She could’ve saved him. She should’ve saved him.
She pulled.
The clown prince of crime’s corpse plummeted into the emerald hell, still laughing loudly, victoriously, even as the acid corroded his cheek, seeped through his bleached teeth, and perforated his serpentine tongue.
And Jason didn’t even scream as he fell with him.
She wanted to save Jason.
But more than that, she wanted him dead.
Barbara didn’t have time to throw herself into the verdant abyss before the last of blood, the last of her strength, and the last of her consciousness leaked out from her vertebrae.

Chapter Text

Barbara slowly sat up, a plastic body bag crinkling against the frigid slab beneath her, her breathing shallow, strained – no, strangled, her hand clenched in a fist over her racing heart.
She had to clap a hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming when Bruce’s voice blared through her earbud.
“Can you hear me?”
She staggered through the morgue doors, legs still stiff, her subconscious still believing she had been shot through her spine. She shivered uncontrollably, her eyes stinging from the cold sweat dripping into them, her arms wrapped protectively around her own waist. Kept touching her inner wrist. Dropping her hand. Touching her pulse again. And again. As if it would disappear if she didn’t.
“Barbara, what’s going on –”
“I’m, I’m fine, Bruce.” She tried to wipe the sweat away. Got more in her eyes. The sting sharpened.
“No, you’re not,” he said gruffly. “Have you found –”
“No, I, I haven’t, but – I said it’s fine!” she snapped before shutting it off and shoving it into the nearest pocket on her utility belt. She tried – failed to ignore the tremble in her fingers and the tremors running through every muscle. Almost tripped over a slouching security guard’s boots. He bled from a bat symbol carved into his chest. She shook her head furiously, desperately. Not bleeding, but dead. Just like Jason. Some sick part of her had hoped that seeing it twice would help it hurt less, but it had only reopened the wound.
“Having trouble figuring out what’s real and what’s just a figment of your twisted little mind?” Joker sneered through the speakers. “Same here.” A little laugh. “Just roll with it, little Bat. It gets easier once you give in. It really does.”
Oh, but she did give in. She shot him right above where his nose bridge began. Relished in the sensation of his brains splattering over her shirt. It was as easy as the pull of a trigger. But in an instant, all the catharsis dissolved like his skeleton in that acid, Jason’s uniform floating to the bubbling, greasy, crimson-stained surface beside the clown prince’s corroded corpse.
She tugged at a set of steel doors. Locked. Stumbled back. Paced around. Dug her nails into her ribs, into the grooves of her armor, like she gripped the handles of her Batcycle when she first rode it. Like it would throw her off and flatten her under its wheels if she released them by even the slightest margin.
A screen to her upper left lit up with Joker’s garish grin.
“Your precious Commissioner is just through the glass. Take a look!”
Her reflection warped in the one-way mirror as she stumbled down the hall, one hand splayed over her lower belly, the other braced against her lower back. The cowl seemed to sear into her skin. She couldn’t be Barbara right now, but right now, it was damn hard to be Batgirl. Batgirl was sharp-tongued, but smiley. Bubbly and bright. Batman became one with the shadows. Batgirl was the sunshine breaking through the storm clouds.
Batgirl wouldn’t shoot Joker point blank, even if it were only in a vision.
Batgirl would’ve chosen to save Jason.
“Harley’s under strict instructions to kill the old man if any of my guys even think you’re in the room. They’re patrolling down there. I’ve told them all you’re on the way.”
Quinn brandished an AK-47, pacing around the room, though not with as much pep as before Batgirl – no, Barbara embedded a batarang in her forearm. Now a strange, mossy poultice embraced the gash, blooming around the dried blood, sealing it shut.
“So, here’s the deal. If you can find a way to get to Harley without anyone realizing, I’ll give you your next present. Fail and the old codger dies.” Every burst of laughter stabbed deeper under her sternum. “Hell, I may even give you Harley! It looks like you could use a new sidekick.”
Jason looked right at her.
She couldn’t hold back the bile burning in the base of her throat anymore. She emptied her stomach into a cleaning bucket, the vomit scraping out her insides as it spewed from her mouth. Her esophagus constricted and convulsed worse at the scent of her acid. Vomited again. Her stomach was not as empty as she had hoped. As if emptying her stomach would empty her memory of Jason’s dull, distant stare as he dissolved in that vat.

“You know, you really should color that hair of yours,” Harley’s eardrum-eviscerating voice echoed. “All that gray makes you look so old.”
Barbara aimed her grappling gun at the rafters again. She had already missed three times, made several wrong turns, and almost bumped into seven thugs. Well, not all of them were thugs. Some of them were cops. Corrupt cops. Which made them thugs as well, she supposed.
Seven thugs? Seven? Seven times her father could’ve been shot through his stomach. Would he bleed out normally or would the stains take the shape of a bat? What if he didn’t bleed out? What if he just lost the use of his legs?
Oh my god, girl, get a grip!
She grit her teeth and fired the grappling gun at that dumb metal beam. It finally, finally latched on. Held on for dear life as it nearly pulled her shoulders from their sockets. Landed clumsily, but covertly enough, so Quinn didn’t notice her. Tried to take slow, steadying breaths. Emphasis on tried. The aftertaste of acid had her gagging each time. She seriously contemplated barfing all over the clown’s sidekick. Now, there was a hell of a practical joke.
But because she was a lady, she coiled her leg muscles, propelled herself off the beam, and drove her heel into Quinn’s jaw.
As Quinn flopped to the floor, Barbara landed ahead of her, her feet freezing to the ground when her scanner locked onto her father. Tied to a chair. His face marred with ugly, purple splotches. Wearing the same vest he did for her sixth birthday. Not bleeding out from a bat symbol in his chest. Her eyes started to sting, but not with sweat.
He smiled slightly.
“Not bad, kid.”
The moment they locked eyes, Batgirl locked in.
“Joker’s out of control.” She sawed at the ropes with her batarang. “He’s trying to prove something. I’m…”
I’m not sure I can stop him.
The Commissioner’s bushy brows furrowed. The ropes loosened. He slid them off his reddened, raw wrists, then clapped a firm, gentle hand on her pauldron, his tone paternal, but professionally paternal.
“You’ll do it, kid, listen…”
Six-year-old Barbara beat against Batgirl’s ribcage. She wanted to bury her nose into her father’s neck, press her cheek into its curve. Wipe the scarlet dripping from a cut on his temple. Cry. Apologize for all she said to him the night after her mother left with her baby brother. Without her. Tell him she wanted to go home. God, she just wanted to go home.
Batgirl stood stiffly at the Commissioner's side as he gestured toward the lower floor of the experimental chamber, which contained a rectangular prism filled with fog.
“We’re not alone. He’s got something else down there. I don’t know what it is –”
“What a blabbermouth.” Joker replaced the spinning Arkham logo in the screen above them. “Spoiling the surprise –”
“Shut the hell up, you fucking clown!” she shouted, slamming a fist into the glass, then struggling against the Commissioner when he grabbed her by the elbow.
“Hey, hey, it’s alright!” he chided softly, but sternly. “He must have another clue for us –”
“Clue?” she started to scream. “You think this is some sort of kid’s show? You think you can kill a kid? Torture a psychologist until she turns into another lunatic?” She wrenched away from the Commissioner and stalked up to the screen, repeatedly jabbing her finger at it. “You whitewashed piece of shit, when I’m through with you, you’ll never have the chance to screw around with people or their lives or the lives of those they love ever again, because I’ll end yours!” She punched the screen again. And again. And again. “I’ll end yours if I have to end mine to do it!”
“Oh. Am I getting to you?” Joker cooed as if he were playing peek-a-boo with a baby. “Am I? Good.”
Six-year-old Barbara broke through. Her father tried to put a reassuring hand on her arm, but she pushed it off and retreated into a corner, biting down on her glove. For once in her life, she found herself strangely grateful for the Joker’s loud cackling, because it covered up her crying.
“You’re going to love this next bit.”

Batgirl cautiously kicked in the creaky doors to the security room, peering over the Commissioner’s shoulder as his fingers flew over the keyboard of the closest computer.
“It wants Dr. Young’s log-in.”
Her scanner beeped, detecting movement in front of them.
“Never mind that.” She drew her tonfas and shifted into a defensive stance. “Get behind me. Now!”
The fog filtered away. Batgirl gasped at the sight of the emaciated man suspended with several pipes protruding painfully from his flesh, pumping him with molten, coppery-orange liquid. No, not any man. Eduardo Dorrance, also known as Bane. Groaning in agony. Helpless.
She pinched herself.
“I thought he broke out of Blackgate!” The Commissioner stumbled. Behind her. No snide remark about nagging as much as her mother this time.
“Cut me down…” Dorrance croaked. Batgirl could scoop soup out of his clavicle, stick all her fingers under his ribs, see every vertebrae, his bones straining against his skin as if they would tear through it at any moment.
“Who did this to you?” she whispered.
“Dr. Young. The bruja.” He drew in a raspy breath, winced with it. “She drained the venom from my blood. Must…stop…her…”
Batgirl made a mental note to add Dr. Young to her imaginary torture session with Quinn, and the psychopath currently flickering onto the screen in her periphery.
“Sorry, Has-Dorrance!” The corner of Joker’s mouth curled up in sync with a coy raise of his dyed eyebrows. “The good Doctor won’t be a problem much longer.”
He stepped closer to the camera, the comedian addressing another guest in his crowd. “How do you like my puppet?” He wriggled a remote. “What say we cut him down?”
Dorrance roared and writhed as the strange substance flowed into his bulging veins, his muscles swelling, his gaze neon green behind his mask.
A thought flashed through her synapses.
“Gordon! Run!” Batgirl screamed, barely resisting the urge to do so herself. Again, he listened. Incredible, how a cape and a cowl could transform nagging into an order.
Dorrance reached for her with an enlarged hand. She didn’t resist the urge to run anymore, but by then he had caught her by her cape. The world whirled around her. The brick wall bruised her back as her body broke through it. The red-hot pupils of the boiler room engines blazed, blasting her with a heavy, humid heat, then glaring off Dorrance’s armor as he ducked through the hole she had flown through.
“Play nice, ladies,” Joker purred through the speakers.
Dorrance loomed over her. She rolled away. Jumped to her feet. He barreled at her. Another roll. More acid bubbled in her stomach. She would throw up on him, but where that would shock and stun Quinn, that would only aggravate Dorrance more, and tire her out.
“Seriously,” Joker sighed sharply, “is that the best you can do, Bane? Let me lend you a hand.”
Her eyes widened when a boulder of debris arced through the air, swallowing her in its shadow, and plummeting towards her. She got out from under it. And not a moment too soon.
But the cape didn’t.
The fabric constricted around her throat. She choked, her heels hitting the boulder as the trapped cloth pulled her in. As Dorrance’s silhouette in the illumination of the flames grew larger and larger.
Oh, and ten more silhouettes. Like ten fingers. For the hand that Joker said he would lend him. Comedy gold.
You’ll do it, kid, her inner Commissioner insisted.
Her scanner zeroed in on the support pillar to Dorrance’s right. Then the pipes protruding from his armor. Then the tactical knife in her left pocket.
You wrestled with Clayface, you can do this.
She sliced through her cape with her batarang. Which meant she wouldn’t be able to glide anymore. She’d cross that chasm when she got to it. The ten thugs between her and Dorrance, chuckling as they closed in. She could handle five, but not ten. A flash bomb wouldn’t do. They were good for distractions, but these thugs had to be incapacitated. Bruce may have claimed that she was better than him, but he definitely had her beat in the stamina department.
She pulled on a gas mask and pulled the pin on her smoke grenade. The thugs coughed and hacked as it saturated the air with sedatives. She didn’t know if they would be strong enough to take down Dorrance. Definitely not. But David took out Goliath with a single stone. And she had a knife and a grappling gun.
The blade released with a crisp click. She leaped over one, five, nine bodies. Used the last one as a stepstool to throw herself onto Dorrance’s tank. She wrapped the pipes around one hand like a rein, shifting from side to side, dropping up and down as he barrelled into wall after wall. She grinned when he hit the pillar, then severed the plastic, hooked onto a gargoyle, and grappled off before the ceiling collapsed on them.

A sharp pain shot through Batgirl’s shoulder blades when she tried to push up against the manhole cover. She rummaged through her utility belt until her fingers closed on the cap of her bottle of painkillers. Popped one in her mouth. She let it liquify in her saliva, then gulped it down with a grimace. Tasted like shit, but felt like heaven in a few minutes. And to think she used to judge the kids who would sneak them in during the bathroom breaks at school.
She emerged onto the grimy grass and tapped at the remote on her forearm, calling her beloved Batcycle.
She shrieked when someone touched her pauldron, spinning to face the potential opponent, and drawing her tactical knife with one hand and a batarang with the other.
“Hey, kid, it’s me.” Commissioner Gordon held his hands over his head. “You OK?” He seemed strangely unfazed by the fact that she had two very dangerous weapons pointed right at him, but then it struck her that Bruce may have done the same in the early stages of his…career, for lack of a better word.
“I’m fine,” she said, too exhausted to snap. “Where’s Quinn?”
“Gone!” He pinched his nose bridge like he always did when he read in the paper that Joker had broken out for the hundredth time. “Must’ve gotten loose while Bane was throwing you around.”
She took him in, let herself really look at him for a moment. Not a Commissioner, but an aging father aching to return to his daughter, probably even more exhausted than her. The crinkles in the corners of his eyes. The graying bruise on his forehead. The cut across the bump in his nose.
“We need to get you off the island.”
“You’re the rookie, not me –”
Dorrance broke through the wall. Batgirl pushed the Commissioner behind her, bracing herself against Dorrance’s chest when he snatched her off the lawn by her collar, her legs dangling in a disturbingly familiar manner.
“First, I’ll break the Batgirl,” the monstrous man howled. “Then I’ll break the bruja!”
She roared in return, a numbing burn in her shoulder blades, her knees shaking as she strained to keep his fist from crushing her and the Commissioner under the reinforced steel.
Headlights flashed in the distance.
“No, Dorrance,” she snarled. “First, you’ll break!” She planted her feet on his chest and kicked him away with all her might, taking the brunt of the fall with her shoulder, and rolling up onto her knees.
When the smoke cleared and Dorrance batted the last of it away from his face, the Batcycle rammed him into the ocean, sinking into the waves with him in a spray of salt.
No, not just her Batcycle.
Her customized 1967 Yamaha YCS1 Bonanza 180.
If she hadn’t already dried out her tear ducts with her childish display after she gave Joker the satisfaction of getting to her, she would increase the salinity of that ocean by about fifty percent for that beautiful bike.
“Commissioner –” she unclasped her cape from her shoulders and folded it over her forearm “– get back to the mainland.”
“I don’t like the idea of leaving you here.” He fell in step beside her, limping along as she started to lead him down the docks, towards a small speedboat with a security guard waiting by the captain’s cabin.
“Yeah, well, I don’t like the idea of you dying. The radio claims he’s planted bombs all over Gotham.” Six-year-old Barbara hammered so hard against her rib cage she feared it would crack. “Gotham will panic; you’re needed there.”
I need my dad.
Her dad’s jaw tightened, and so did her throat.
“You’re too young for this.”
“We’re ready to go now, sir,” the security guard cut in. The speedboat’s engine rumbled like the ones in the boiler room, Dorrance’s flame-illuminated silhouette seared into her lids’ insides. Before she could walk away, her father spoke up again, every word punctuated by another punch from the child encased in her thoracic cavity.
“Bane called Dr. Young ‘bruja.’ What does it mean?”
She allowed herself to stop for a split second. Shot him a smile that would’ve been reassuring if it weren’t so strained.
“It’s Spanish.” Her stare settled on the lighthouse looming over the restless waves. “For ‘witch.’”

Chapter Text

In its first iteration, the cape consisted of a cape. What did it do, then? It looked cool as hell by mimicking the shape of the bat symbol when it billowed in the wind, the rain running off its waterproof surface.
At the time, Gotham itself consisted of the City Hall, the Police Department, the General Hospital, and Arkham Asylum, which was a wing in said General Hospital. A wing.
If you could believe that, her mother had laughed hoarsely. Barbara didn’t believe it anymore than her father’s claim that the divorce was aimable.
Barbara Sr. had concealed the strain in her smile well as she slipped an arm around Barbara’s shoulders, but the crackling fireplace, and the scratchiness in her throat betrayed the fight that the bedroom walls, the blankets, and the pillow she had pressed over her ears couldn’t muffle.
“She was my partner,” her father had tried to explain, “and we spent a lot of time together, and I made a mistake.”
Babs, focus.
“Your partner?” her mother screamed between her sobs. “What am I if I’m not your partner? I’m the mother of our daughter, I’m carrying our son!”
I said focus!
Batgirl set her tactical knife aside, several fabric strips cut from the back of her cowl arranged around her tattered cape and the aluminum tubing she had scavenged from the long-abandoned air conditioning system in a fortunately functional bathroom. For now, these scraps would have to serve as a makeshift frame for the improvements she had suggested to Bruce for the cape’s second iteration – a collapsible hang glider.
“Bruce, come in.” She tapped her earbud, then tied the pipes to the hooks on the inside of the sailcloth with the strips, tugging on the little bows to fasten them more securely.
“Barbara,” he barked, “are you alright?”
“I’m alright,” she answered numbly. “Now, I have instructions on how to bypass the code of the city computers. I need you to pull up all you can find on Dr. Young. Don’t forget the boolean operators or it’ll take forever. I’ll…I’ll…”
What would she do? Restock? Where would she restock? Where could she even go? She was on an island. Bruce was right. He had no damn idea how right she was. She wasn’t ready for this. Not in the slightest –
Bruce, bless his soul, sliced through the spiral.
“There’s a cave.”
“A Batcave?” The corner of her mouth curled up as she clasped the corners of the half-salvaged cape to her pauldrons. “On Arkham Island?”
“I built it years ago.” The icy calm in his tone thawed ever so slightly with his small smile, which she was still surprised she could picture perfectly, as if she hadn’t been trained by him for about a decade. “It’s best to plan ahead for situations like this.”
“How’d you manage to keep this a secret?” she gritted out as she clambered out of the manhole and dragged the cover over it.
“It’s me, remember?”
She huffed out a sound somewhere between a snicker and a scoff. “Then I suppose I’ll let you in on a secret of my own.” She stepped over some slimy ropes nesting at the end of an algae-encrusted bridge, the only barrier between her and the vomit-reminiscent water stirring slightly on either side of the decaying pathway. “Dr. Young’s been experimenting with Venom.”
“The same chemical that turns Bane into…Bane.”
“Yes, and Joker wants it, because of course that psychopath does.”
“Head to Dead Man’s Point in Arkham North, then contact me when you’re in the Batcave.” He sighed sharply. “I just found the first riddle, and I’m afraid that narcissistic maniac might’ve stumped me this time.”
Her brows knit together. “Really?”
“You’re really going to ask me that?”
Now she snickered.

She passed a pile of skulls, trying not to think about the fractures she had seen on Jason’s in the autopsy report, clawing onto a brick wall, gripping the balcony, pushing herself up, and sprinting over a small set of stairs.
She placed her right foot in front of her left, balancing her weight between them, balanced at the edge of the towering cliff’s foliage-swamped outcropping, a rippling, pitch-black abyss below. She pressed her arms to her sides, flexed her calves, then pushed off, diving into the darkness, and plummeting towards the shadowy waters.
A split second before she hit the surface, the cape opened, her heart dropping into her lower belly as the wind swept her upwards in a clumsy arc, almost carrying her past the opening to the Batcave on her glitching holographic map. The makeshift frame fell apart midair, and she spun wildly, the fabric tangling around her limbs and half-covering her goggles. She lashed out with her grappling hook, catching onto the ledge, and pulled the trigger that would retract the wire, careening into the cave’s maw. Pebbles sprayed into her face when she nearly bludgeoned her elbows and knees on the stalagmites upon crash-landing into the rain-soaked rubble.
She stood slowly, a beam of ghostly white light cascading along her disheveled red hair, her weary visage, and then the bat symbol on her cracked chest plate.
“Identity confirmed,” a robotic female voice recited, the similarity to her own unnerving her until she remembered that it was hers. “Disabling countermeasures.”
A rectangular slab of stone slid into the floor, unveiling a narrow corridor with tarnished chains hanging off the walls. The stone slab automatically slid up behind her the moment she took her first few steps inside.
“Security deactivated.”
The moonlight cast a cold, indigo hue over the chamber. As she crept up a steel staircase and tiptoed around the wires coiled on the octagonal floor, she spotted eight screens, a secondary Batcomputer, clustered over a desk to her right, a set of damaged pipes hanging over it, the power generators at little to the left of the dust-coated chair’s wheeled feet. The ninth monitor had been mounted in a corner on her far left. Her heart almost shot up from her stomach and out of her throat at the sight of a Batjet prototype – a prototype she had proposed – suspended beside her, its body hidden under a shiny, black tarp that matched the shade of its webbed wings.
Batgirl rooted around the lower floor until she found a fridge. From the chilly gusts leaking through the fractures in the cave walls and stabbing through the cracks in her armor, one would think it unnecessary. She gathered an ice pack from one drawer, beef jerky, vegetable chips, and bottled water. All non-perishable. Bruce really had prepared.
God, what she’d give for Alfred’s freshly-baked biscuits. Golden brown on the outside. Fluffy and buttery on the inside. Melting in her mouth with a small sip of bittersweet, creamy cocoa right off the stovetop…
The tough beef jerky and stale vegetable chips turned into a chewy paste that stuck to her tongue and could only be washed away by several swigs of water. She pressed the ice pack to her purple, puffed-up cheekbone, then numbed her nose bridge, then relieved her throbbing ribs. As the cold seeped in, so did the memories of the autopsy report sneak into her neurons.
Twenty-seven broken bones, including a shattered parietal. Shrapnel from his occipital plate had shredded his optic nerve. A hemorrhage in his frontal lobe. And his abdomen. Messy stitches she had stapled into his torso before the denial slammed into her like a crowbar wielded by a psychopathic clown. She would’ve given him her skin if a graft would’ve saved him. As if throwing a blanket of her own flesh over the scar tissue would somehow bring him back to life. And even if he did survive, he’d be seventy-two days bedridden, blinded, and permanently brain-damaged if he ever got out of it. Even if the outside healed, what would have happened to the inside? What would that broken boy say to her?
I can see through walls now. Jason, translucent, stretched out on a cot in the corner of her eye, turned his head stiffly, only his verdant stare visible through the layers and layers of bandages binding him to the bed. Through lies. His stare sharpened. Through your smile you use to hide your guilt and shame. You see me as a victim. A failure. A mistake that you could’ve made.
“No,” she rasped, “you’re not a failure, you were my brother.”
No, you’re right. The first layer peeled off, unveiling his bloodied lips, the gaps in his gums where teeth used to be. The truth hurts more than what Joker did to me – could ever do to me.
Bruce, bless his paranoid soul, had hidden a first aid kit in a cabinet under the main Bat Computer monitor. She loosened her arm guards' straps, dabbed alcohol on her rubbing alcohol on her agitated, scraped skin (ow), and carefully covered the rough, reddened areas with the bandages.
But what I see is, what the truth is, is that you’re the victim. He flashed a scabbed, scarlet smile at her. A victim of Bruce Wayne.
“Jason, stop it,” she hissed, telling herself it was from the sting of the rubbing alcohol, not her conscience.
Dick. Adopted co-dependent of his mommy and daddy issues. He sat up slowly. Your father. Crippled by a maniac of his creation.
“Bruce is our father, too,” she whispered, tucking her knees into her chest, rocking against the wall like she did the night before her mother left. “You’re his son, he loved you, he loved us.”
What kind of damaged individual mentors a child into the line of fire to begin with? Alfred did it.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Don’t bring him into this.” Her fingertips pressed into her scalp. “Don’t bring this back up for me, please.”
The garish grin shifted into a scowl. I was doing fine before Bruce brought me into his family. He staggered towards her, the bandages dragging behind his heels. I was alone before this family, but I was alive before I let this insane, messed-up family lead me to slaughter!
Instead of the paste, she tasted her own blood on her tongue now. No matter how much water she swallowed, she couldn’t wash it out.
Because he was right.
Doctor Quinn and Joker tortured him. Took from him, and took him from their family, their father. But who led him to that warehouse when he begged her to help him rescue his mother, even though Bruce ordered her to think with her head and not her heart? Whose compassion (or was it projection?) – the very compassion that the public praised – compromised him? Who provided him with the directions because she couldn’t stand to see that poor street kid cry after all he had already been through? Who couldn’t stand to see that poor street kid lose his mother, too, after all they had both been through?
Who led me to slaughter?
“I did,” she gasped out through the lump in her throat.
Acid crept across the octagonal platform, sweeping over Jason, sinking into him, and then, with a sickeningly familiar, strangled laugh, he dissolved.

Chapter Text

Three years ago…

Batgirl paced around the City Hall rooftop, her head turned away, her arms wrapped around herself, and her hand clenched around a batarang beneath one of her elbows. Her soles slammed into the concrete with each step, the frantic rhythm in sync with her hammering heart. A heartbeat that halted abruptly when a broad shadow with pointed ears stretched over her slender silhouette.
“You let him play you,” Bruce hissed over the distant rumble of speeding, honking cars below them and impending thunder above them. “He thinks he knows you, like there’s some kind of relationship going on. He led you like a lapdog –”
“Bull,” she cut him off. “I knew what I was doing.” She stepped forward, eyes narrowing, almost uncrossing the forearms she braced over her bat symbol before tightening it over her chestplate. “I was on the hunt, same as you.”
“No, you let your ego cloud your judgment.” His cowl crinkled where his brows furrowed under the dark fabric. “You should’ve listened to me.”
Her knuckles whitened around her batarang.
“I thought we were partners.”
“We are –” He broke his gaze away from hers “– but we’re not equals, not even close.”
Her eyes widened and she nearly dropped the batarang. She quickly sheathed it into her utility belt. Dug her nails into her palms instead. That cold, calm, detached voice echoed in her cranium. She singled out the word that cut her the deepest, that froze her every function like a virus did to a program.
Ego. As if this were ever about ego, and not about the bullet in her father’s kneecap, or the red, green, and yellow uniform he had encased in the center of his Batcave. Her blood boiled like chemicals in a vat. Like cocoa bubbling over the edges of a pot she had left on the stove because she just couldn’t think straight after her mother had pulled out of the driveway and out of their lives forever. Because she couldn’t even blame her mother after she chose her cheating father over her. And because the father she had chosen because she couldn’t look her biological one in the eye couldn’t see that this was about the vengeance that he continually denied her and himself with that stupid code.
“You sanctimonious, self-righteous bastard!” she shouted, her rage spilling out and splashing all over the concrete, mixing with the puddles at her feet.
“You’re not in it like I am, Barbara,” he said sternly, though with a sharpness that wasn’t there before. “It’s still a game for you, it’s still a thrill!” He turned his cape on her. “You haven’t been taken to the edge yet.”
No, you’re not in it like I am! She almost screamed at him. You couldn’t save him, but you wouldn’t have had to save him if he weren’t in danger. And I let him there. But if she told him that, he would never let her on the field again, and if he wouldn’t let her on the field, he wouldn’t be able to soak that soil with the clown prince of crime’s scarlet.
She huffed out a hollow laugh, threw her hands up in exasperation, and let them fall to her sides with a dull thud. “The edge of what?”
“The abyss.” The moonlight illuminated his profile as he regarded her in his periphery. “The place where you don’t care anymore.” The crinkles in his cowl wavered. “Where all hope dies.”
He faced her fully, and even with that cowl on, she could see that he saw right through her. She may not have screamed it out loud, but he knew why she had wanted her own cape and cowl so badly.
“We’re done here.” He headed towards the precipice of the building. “You’re off the case.”
“No,” she gritted out, “this isn’t over.” Her stomach ached worse than it did during the funeral. “You can’t dismiss me with some metaphysical bullshit.” She started to run. “Why are you doing this?”
“I told you –”
She circled in front of him, planting her feet, and squaring her hips. “This isn’t about me, this is about Jason. This is about your fear of losing me, too, and I won’t have it.”
He pushed past her.
“Then get out.”

Three years later…

“Barbara.” Bruce’s words were garbled even though the earbuds were in perfect working order. She would know. She had touched them up before the mission. “Barbara, are you alright –”
“You were, you were right,” she stammered, clutching her aching chest. “That night, what you said, about me, about him leading me like a lapdog, my ego clouding my judgment. You were right, I’m not your equal, not even close –”
“No, you’re not my equal,” he snapped. “You’re better.”

Three years ago…

Batgirl stood still for a split second, her ribs closing in, cutting into her conscience. Then she sprinted forward and seized him by the arm with a strength she didn’t realize she possessed, spinning him, forcing him to look at her, at the fury, the hunger for vengeance searing in her violet irises.
“How dare you,” she hissed, digging the talons of her gloves into his armor. “I’m in this because of you, I did what you wanted, even though I wanted to take my own crowbar to that clown!”
His fingers locked around her wrists. Her soles skidded as he shoved her away, but then her feet steadied and she charged again. He sidestepped her. Struck her between the shoulder blades with the heel of his palm. She whirled around. Her crescent kick clipped his abdomen, then her uppercut grazed his chin. Now he stumbled when she faked a cross, faked another kick, and then pushed through her supporting leg. She followed through with her hip, leapt up, and threw the edge of her boot into his jaw, flipping over him, and springing off her hands to stick a perfect landing.
She caught her breath, the shadow of the gargoyle above them (or was it hers?) engulfing his body in darkness while he laid in a cluster of puddles, his cape sprawled, defeated by his own training. She expected his jaw to twitch. Glanced at his limp legs, preparing for a potential sweep to her ankle. A flicker of pride at the fact that his student has surpassed him, perhaps. But no, he stayed still, his lips in a tight line.
A tight, trembling line.
You’re not in it like I am, Barbara.
She may have lost a little brother, but he lost a son.
Batgirl aimed her grappling hook at a far-off balcony and let the line pull her off the precipice before he could catch the tears glistening behind her goggles.

Three years later…

Her breath stuttered almost as badly as she did.
“What, what did you say?”
“You think I put that cape and cowl on you because you’re as strong as me? As scary as me?” he asked sharply. “No, I took you under my wing because you’re better with technology, with people, especially with Jason.”
The lump in her esophagus welled up with her tears at that name, and she couldn’t stop the sobs anymore.
“Yeah, and where did that get him?”

Three years ago…

Batgirl always thought of herself as the type to fly towards what terrified the untrained Gothamite, batarangs brandished, cowl on, and cape open. Yet now, all that Jiu Jitsu, Capoeira, and Muay Thai couldn’t protect her from whatever she fled from. What she couldn’t – wouldn’t name. Grief. Guilt. Rage. They all seemed too small words for the multipartite virus spreading over her network, wearing down every firewall she had put up, and further corrupting the code Bruce had installed in her before she even put on the costume.
The rain. The headlights. The streetlamps. The alleyways. The alleyway where Bruce first found that street kid stealing the wheels off his Batmobile. It blurred before her, shrinking and spiraling into her personal gravitationally completely collapsed object. An abyss than the starless sky. And at its center, the smallest tombstone in Gotham Cemetery.

<1974 – 1988>
Batgirl dropped the grappling hook, then dropped to her knees. The dew on the grass slipped behind her knee guards and soaked into the fabric. Into her marrow. Her veins. Filled her ducts.
<1974 – 1988>
He was fourteen. Barbara didn’t just lead a lamb to the slaughter. She led a fourteen-year-old boy right into the crimson-lipped wolf’s howling jaws. Not the Boy Wonder, just a boy. The instant she had handed him the coordinates to his mother’s location, she had signed his death warrant. She couldn’t even tell herself that she couldn’t have known. Bruce had warned them that it could be a trap, but even if he hadn’t, Barbara Gordon wasn’t an idiot. She had graduated summa cum laude from Gotham State University with a Ph. D and a doctorate in computer science. She was soft. She would always be that soft, sobbing girl trying to catch up with her mother’s car as it rounded the corner of the cul-de-sac.
What the hell was she doing here? What would wallowing in self-loathing accomplish? She couldn’t cry. She didn’t get to cry. Not now. Not yet. Not until she got the coordinates to that clown’s location.
So, Joker thought laughter was the best medicine. She would let him watch as she tortured Harley. Then she would wound him. Slowly. Severely. Until that laughter turned to tears. Until he pleaded with her to cure him with a batarang drawn across his throat.

Three years later…

No sound from the earbud but a dull buzz in the background. Then Bruce spoke with a tenderness that somehow stung worse than her bruised cheekbone.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Bullshit,” she shot back. “I told him how to get to the warehouse. I provided him with the map even though I knew Joker was waiting there for him. If it isn’t my fault, then whose is it?”
Her confession spewed up and out of her esophagus like stomach acid, and like any instance of vomit, she couldn’t stop it once it started. Burning. Bitter.
“Joker took that crowbar to him, but I killed him, and maybe I don’t want to be better than you. There’s no point in being the happy, hopeful morality chain when it feels like I’m betraying that little boy every time I laugh. I want to be let off the chain. Just this once.”
Her throat grew hoarse with the effort of holding back a scream. Or more tears. Probably both. “You say you’re a symbol of fear, but if the person who’s done the most damage to us, to our family, isn’t even afraid of us, then what is that symbol worth? Let me be that fear for once.”
She tore off the cowl and tossed it aside.

Three years ago…

But what would that accomplish? Could those tears bring Jason back to life if she watered this grass with them? Would he spring up from the soil in a clean uniform, gloved hands on his hips, his emerald eyes shining as fiercely as his mischievous grin to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, that he had the time of his life with her and Bruce, even if it were as short and malnourished as himself?
She knew she couldn’t stay here.
But she didn’t know where to go from here.

Three years later…

“I, I just feel like –” she dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve “– ever since we lost him, I’ve been lost, and, and…please, please let me be angry, let me break the code just this once.”
Her teeth released her inner cheek and blood filled her mouth. “I don’t care if you take me off the field forever, if I have to leave the cape and cowl behind once and for all.” She sucked in a breath, sucked in another sob. “Please, let me do what you can’t.” The sob broke free anyway. “Let me do this for him.”
“I can’t,” Bruce said softly, “and you know why –”
“No, I don’t know why.” The anger bubbled over like the hot cocoa she had forgotten on the stove. “I know why you don’t want to do it. Because you feel some sick sense of responsibility over what happened to him. What I don’t know is why you won’t let me do it!”
The silence sank into her like the stale air from the vents did in that interrogation room. An interrogation room that wasn’t real. It wasn’t real, for god’s sake. She really had to get a grip. Then it lightened – only slightly, but it lightened – when Bruce spoke up again.
“Because I’m not going to give you permission to put you on a path to serving twenty-five years at Blackgate when I’ve already dragged you into enough danger.” A near imperceptible tremor permeated his every word. “And if Jason were alive, I don’t think he’d forgive himself if you went to jail because of him.”
“Then why did you drag me into it?”
“You’re right, I made a mistake,” he murmured. “That’s on me. I tried to shape you into a crime fighter, like me. But you’re not me. After watching you with Jason…”
“I should’ve stuck to what?” she half-sniffled, half-scoffed. “Tech support?”
She couldn’t cry anymore, but she could tell from the sound of his cape brushing along insulation that he had sat against a wall.
“...watching you turn that street rat into the Boy Wonder, it was only then that I realized you should’ve been a rehabilitator.”
Her brow remained furrowed, but the anger ebbed as she looked up from the crossed arms she had propped up on her tucked knees.
“Not just for criminals, but for the whole system.” His pen scratched over a piece of paper as he worked through another riddle. “Designing a security system that actually keeps the inmates inside Arkham.” He clicked the pen in contemplation. “Updating how our artificial intelligence screens applications so we hire more cops like your father, and less pigs like Boles.” He tapped the paper with the pen. “But in order to rehabilitate the system...”
She looked ahead.
“We have to take it back.”

Chapter Text

“Dr. Young was heading up a project,” Bruce explained to Batgirl over the earbud while she logged in, relieved to be greeted with a spinning, rounded bat symbol rather than the harsh angles of the Arkham logo. “It was big, lots of external funding. Here are the last notes she filed.”
The notes scrolled along the side of the screen closest to her, too quickly for her to make sense of it. She would ask Bruce for help, but he was probably busy trying to make sense of an actual death trap right now, so she would let it download and review it later while she restocked her supplies.
“Looks like she was experimenting on the Arkham patients.” A loud clang rang out on the other end as Bruce evaded another one of Riddler’s contraptions, likely a claw of some sort, judging by how it scraped and screeched along the wall.
A diagram of an unnaturally spiked molecule blipped onto the screen. “This new chemical only barely resembles the original Venom compound.”
She leaned forward in her chair, her brow furrowing as she listened intently to Bruce’s discoveries.
“There are a number of changes that appear to amplify the strength of the drug. Multiple references to a Titan formula. Even a small amount could trigger a Venom-like transformation in the host –” The distinctive snikt of him drawing a batarang from his belt and tossing it Riddler’s distant, but equally distinctive sneering in the background briefly interrupted his broadcast before he caught his breath “– eliminating the need for the storage tank Bank requires.”
Which meant that if it were employed, Batgirl would no longer be capable of incapacitating whatever inmate volunteered for the first dose of monster juice with a simple slice through a plastic pipe.
Bruce had to hang up for obvious reasons, leaving Batgirl to lean back in her chair, propping her elbow on the table, and resting her chin on the knuckles of her clenched fist, her brow deeply furrowed. Then her eyes widened in horror as she scanned the information. The incomplete information.
No formula. Which meant that Dr. Young had hidden it. And if Joker got his hands on it, he could create an army of both unwilling and willing mutants, with the former likely being the majority because of his sadistic tendencies. She wouldn’t be surprised if he injected Quinn, too, just for the fun of it.
She fastened a new claw into the muzzle of her grappling gun. It glinted in the moonlight.
She could picture Quinn doing the same with a scalpel, a smug smile plastered over her deceptively cherubic face before she brought it to a shaking, sobbing Jason’s skin.
First, Batgirl would go after the doctor. According to the map projected from her wristwatch, she could head to the mansion where Young waited with Cash through the catacombs.
Then, once she had the bruja behind bars, she would throw the psychologist into the same cell.

Before Batgirl could slam her shoulder into the reinforced steel door, a scale-encrusted fist emerged into the window, a spiderweb spreading from where the gigantic knuckles collided with the glass.
“I will find you,” Killer Croc snarled at her from the other side, the tips of his teeth glistening with saliva, every drop blood-red in the merciless, rusty orange lights beating down on her back. “Rip your flesh like paper.”
She had never spun around on the ball of her foot and sprinted towards where she had first come from so fast. She would cross that beastly bridge when she got to it, and she was in no hurry to do so. She braced a hand against the nearest brick pillar and placed the other over her heart. Breathed in. Breathed out. Tried to recall the last tidbits of information she had collected before leaving the Batcave and entering the catacombs.
“According to Young’s bank records, there were multiple payments, starting from last April until two months ago,” she reported upon activating her earbud. “Then nothing.”
She stepped over a chattering teeth toy scurrying in aimless circles on the grimy, grated floor, then continued, “The payments came from a company owned by a Mr. Jack White.”
“One of Joker’s oldest allies,” Bruce muttered, his pen scratching over the paper as he worked through another riddle. “So, Joker pays Dr. Young to create his army and then all of a sudden he stops. Doesn’t make any sense.”
Batgirl tiptoed around a cluster of wires, then kicked aside a second chattering teeth toy. Then a third. She would make some snide remark about how the clown prince of crime needed to spend his funds more wisely, but then again, she blew a tuition’s worth of money for the cape and cowl alone.
She pulled down on a lever mounted to a reinforced steel door similar to the one from before, only with no window. And no Croc. She held her cape over her mouth and nose, coughing and grimacing at the pungent scent of the Main Sewer Junction. The revelation hit her like the sour smell of thousands of Gothamites’ bodily waste.
“What if he didn’t stop them?” she mused. “If they were declined? Young could’ve put a block on her account.”
Could she…could she have had a change of heart? Her brows knit together tightly and she shook her head. That didn’t change the fact that she had not only created the compound, but tested it on Dorrance. Who knew how many other inmates she had experimented on? Not ecoterrorists like Poison Ivy, uncontrollable mutants like Clayface, or killers like Komodo, but people who were simply mentally ill. Vulnerable. Stigmatized. Defenseless.
“Joker doesn’t like it when his partners try to back out.” Bruce crumpled up the paper and the pen started scratching more furiously.
She grinded her teeth. “So, he decided to get back to Arkham, find his formula, and create the army himself.”
“Exactly.”
When she had hacked into her email accounts, two messages stood out. The first was a resignation letter that dated last week. Sounds like she was trying to get away. The second was a message from Joker, well, Jack White. A long thread. Young was begging him to stop the experiment. Said it was too dangerous. Naturally, he didn’t listen. Threatened her family. Made a couple of bad jokes. Oh, and sent her a picture of a dead baby combined with another threat.


Another joke about wheelchairs, lovely…and a drawing of some kind of donkey. And the picture of the dead baby.
Oh god, a baby.
For a split second, Batgirl’s chest panged with a sympathy that shocked her worse than the jumpscare from Croc. No wonder Young was so scared.

Batgirl leapt from one platform to another, hurtling over a brick barriers, scaling a taller wall onto a bridge framed by rotting arches, rounding several corners, and falling through a tunnel until the hellish lights shifted into the ghostly, ghastly, dark blue shade of the Main Hall.
From the balcony, she could clock two staircases arranged at an angle that reminded her of the letter V, worn columns decorated with gargoyles, and several thugs flipping through a pile of portfolios, some spread over a small desk, and most carelessly tossed to the carpet.
Dun du-dun dun, the intercom sang cheerily.
Batgirl’s grip on the railing hardened.
“Joker here with a little update for you all. First the good news. We have Dr. Young. Bad news is, she’s not talking. She’s hidden a document somewhere in the mansion. I want it found!”
She could picture the clown prince sulking in the corner with his arms crossed, like a spoiled child who’d been given a time-out for the first time. That image had her closer to chuckling than any of his other jokes did. She could see why he found her misery, everyone’s misery so hilarious now.
What she couldn’t find hilarious was the fact that Dr. Young was in his custody, which meant that he had likely added Cash’s life to his kill count. And she could add that to her count of lives she had failed to save.
“I’ve got a plan or six to loosen her tongue,” Joker said giddily, “but in the meantime, search every nook and cranny. There’s a prize for whoever finds them.”
She had to find those notes before he did.
And her prize would be wiping that smug smile off his face after wiping the carpet with all those thugs.
She dropped a gas capsule into their midst. After the clouds cleared, she descended from the balcony, nearly veering into the wall, and bruising her knee against the desk’s corner because of the makeshift frame in her rapidly decaying cape. She gathered up the portfolios, arranged them into neat stacks, cracked her knuckles, and cracked the first one open.
Nothing. She moved onto the next set. Zip. And then the next. Nada. She scanned the last page in the last dossier from the lowest cabinet. Zilch. And not a moment too soon. In her periphery, she caught the thugs starting to stir.

Batgirl raced through a corridor with maroon walls and a discolored floor constructed from planks interlocking in a zig-zag pattern. A handy reminder of what to do should the thugs catch up to her and open fire. She checked over her shoulder now and then, but she mostly set her gaze on the two prisoners before her. A security guard and an orderly, both tied to their chairs, their backs to the giant, striped violet gift box between them that Joker had tied off in a bow with a light green, polka-dotted ribbon. She steadied her stance, readied her batarangs, and charged towards them.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out –”
She recoiled when three, icy blue lasers flashed into existence, blocking off the entrance to the library. The spinning Arkham logo in the screen overhead blinked out and Joker burst into sharp, derisive laughter as he replaced it in the center of the frame.
“Oh, how frustrating.” He gleefully slicked back his lime-colored hair. “Thought it was going to be easy, didn’t you?” He clapped his hands slowly. “Has tonight taught you nothing?”
Every muscle and tendon in her limbs tensed up from the effort of forcing herself to slowly walk away from his latest two victims, rather than giving him another good laugh by running up the short stone staircases.
“One minute thirty to go,” Joker jeered through the speakers. “Gotta say I’m getting bored already.” He clicked his tongue, mimicking the ticking of a clock. “Maybe I should just press the button and…Only joking!”
No, not a clock. A bomb.
As Batgirl passed two marble statues, she could’ve sworn their flowing robes momentarily shifted into a Kevlar vest and cotton scrubs. The fear toxin hit her harder than she thought, and she thought life had already hit her hard enough.

Batgirl grappled up into another vent. The tunnels seemed to tighten even more whenever she entered them. At this point, she had shed so much sweat that she wouldn’t be surprised if she would have to peel her skin off with her Batsuit. Assuming she lived long enough to take it off.
She sighed deeply when she could straighten her spine at last, shuffling up onto her knees and staggering to her feet, caged in the shadow of an impressively complicated chandelier that rivaled the one in Bruce’s mansion. From this height, she could imagine that the hostages looked much smaller under the floor between them. Too small. Like toys.
First, she would have to get rid of that barrier. She shook out her wrist, then unsheathed her batarang and let it fly off her fingers. With a crisp snap, it sliced through the wires holding up the lighting contraption. The dust from the debris swallowed up the security guard and the orderly.
A chandelier of regret crushed her chest. Shit. Shit! She really wasn’t thinking this through. Another miss. And what if she had potentially crushed innocents along the way?
Harsh chuckles poured in from the speakers surrounding her, every instance of his grating voice a grain of salt in her wounded conscience.
“Remember the hostages? They’re entering their final sixty seconds of remembering how to breathe!”
“Help us!” a hostage screamed.
Huh, maybe her aim was better than she thought. She coiled her legs and leapt off the edge, aiming her grappling gun at pillar, so she could swing safely through the hole she had created and land before the shaking, sweating orderly and security guard, doing her best to block out the message Joker had scrawled onto the giant gift box.

She contemplated sending him his own gift as a gesture of gratitude. One with yellow and purple wrapping paper, tied off into a beautiful bow at the top with a black ribbon, Harley Quinn’s head laid inside.

She slid her fingers onto the trigger of her refilled explosive gel canister, hating how her hands quivered as she flicked off the lid and jumped away, legs coiled in case she had to shield the hostages with her body. The security guard flinched. The orderly cried out.
Her heart halted when an enormous rubber fist sprang up, narrowly slamming straight into her bandaged nose-bridge. She could’ve sworn its knuckles were scaled. That a pair of yellow, slit-pupiled eyes glared at her from between the books on the shelves behind it. Then, she gasped for air and hammered her fist against her sternum, as if to start up her pulse again.
It wasn’t a bomb.
Thank goodness it wasn’t a bomb.
“Thank you, Batgirl,” the orderly breathed, his shoulders shivering with each strained inhale through his mask. “Are they all gone?”
She felt like a chandelier had been lifted off of her conscience.
She smiled warmly at him. Didn’t put on a happy expression like she put on this cape and cowl every night. Just let it happen. She didn’t have to conjure any brightness into her tone. It bubbled out naturally from between her curved lips.
“Yes, you’re safe.” She fished her tactical knife out of a utility belt pocket and knelt to cut through the ropes. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“It…it all happened so fast. Some patients broke in.” The orderly rested his hands on his knees, knuckles white. “Began tearing up the place. Like they were looking for something.” He glanced at the security guard. “Bill here fought back, but there were too many!” He swallowed hard. “They took Dr. Young. She rushed in here –” he wiped cold sweat from his creased brow “– and they followed.”
“I’m sorry,” the security guard continued hoarsely as Batgirl sawed through his restraints as well. “When I came to, we were all tied up.” He sighed deeply in relief and rubbed his wrists as the ropes loosened and fell off. “Doc Young was gone.” Then he crouched beside the orderly and placed a firm, comforting hand on his upper arm.
That stunned Batgirl more than the fact that the psychotic clown prince did not in fact have a bomb planted in that gift box. To think that this man had been a hostage himself, his wrists still chafed from his own ropes, and he had immediately, instinctually assumed the role of reassuring his fellow former prisoner.
Assuming she made it out of this asylum, she had definitely decided she would never return. Stick to tech support from now on.
But that guard and that orderly decided to return to that asylum every night. Knowing the risks. Knowing the prisoners could break out, but still doing all they could to not only keep those lunatics behind bars, but help them heal. And they had no cape. No cowl. Just a helmet, a vest, and a baton. And scrubs and a clipboard.
Sure, she saved them, but she should’ve been thanking them.

“Just shut the hell up,” a thug snarled. “We’re in control!” The chalky skull smeared over the upper half of his visage cracking a little when his nose crinkled with contempt. “Where did she go?”
The security guard curled up, desperately covering his face with his elbows, eyes wide and watery.
“I don’t know!”
“Answer me –”
Batgirl emerged from behind a pillar and lashed out with her foot, striking him in the jaw, glaring at the instantly unconscious thug as he flopped to the floor with a dull thud. Only then did she notice the massive metal collar around his neck. The lights it sported shifted from molten orange to lime green. A sound somewhere between a huff of laughter and a sob of agony played on a loop.
“What’s that collar do?” She wiped off the soles of her boots on the edge of the staircase, the repetitive motion helping to stave off the echoes of Jason’s cries of pain from her mind. “Why’s it making that noise?”
“It’s the suicide collar,” the guard replied grimly, “but it sounds weird.”
Her intestines twisted at that. “Suicide collar?”
“They’ve got some other name, but, well, we just use ‘em to monitor patients’ heartbeats.” The collar beeped, buzzed, and chimed rapidly. “If it drops too low, an alarm goes off and a crash team rushes in.”
Batgirl stopped scraping off her soles when a screen flashed to life in the corner of her vision, Joker leaning into the camera with his trademark grin and his arms folded behind his back.
“And so does my crew if you trigger one. How do you like them apples, Bats? Standing around in the…hmm, let’s see –” He scratched the hair at the nape of his noodle-like neck and his beady pupils darted down to where she supposed he had the monitors set up “– ah, the west wing.” He shook his head, his shoulders twitching a little as if he were a stray dog suffering from fleas. “They’d be there by now if they weren’t busy knocking some sense into Cash.”
So, they were beating him within an inch of his life, but she still had a chance to save his life, after all. That is, if they didn’t beat him to death first.
Joker raised his index finger. “I’ll tell you what, I won’t spoil the surprise and let them know you’re coming.”

Batgirl hefted her grappling gun to her sternum, spine pressed straight to the wall while she laid in wait for the thugs lazing around inside the records room.
“Hit him again!” one of them goaded. “Harder!”
She shot the claw at a ladder, which then tugged her onto and over the balcony before another cabinet filled with files. Her thoracic cavity clenched with every blow that the second thug landed on the officer.
“You’re gonna need more than that.”
Cash, to his credit, didn’t cry out, but that only bothered Batgirl more, because it meant that he no longer had the strength to do so, or he was used to this because of previous breakouts. Or both. She tucked her grappling gun into the harness between her shoulder blades and whipped out her tonfa.
“Why you…” the first inmate scoffed before turning to his teammate. “Get Joker on the radio. Tell him he’s not talking.”
“Tell us where the bitch went.”
Oh, that made her blood boil.
“Tell us, or we’ll cut off your other hand.”
And that made bile well in her throat.
“Do what you want,” Cash snarled in return. “I’m not talking.”
She kicked in the knee of the first of the six hostiles detected by her scanner, then swung her tonfa into his chin before he began to buckle over.
“Sure you will!” the second thug sneered. “Harley Quinn is on her way up here soon. She knows ways to loosen your tongue!”
“And you don’t wanna find out how she does it,” the first one added before Cash cut in.
“She can do her worst. I ain’t talkin’. Period!”
“Batman’s taken out one of your crew,” Joker announced cheerily. “Did you even notice?”
Make that two, she thought, wrapping an arm around her second opponent, pushing his head forward, and applying pressure to the sides of his neck until he went limp.
“You heard the boss!” another thug shouted in the distance.
The wind whipped through her hair as she grappled onto the gargoyle across from the balcony. She surveyed her surroundings, locked onto the thug marching over the stairs to her left, and opened her cape.
“Wake up, do you hear me? Wake up!” the second thug snapped from the balcony above her. She stayed in the shadows, gritting her teeth as she struggled to drag the third hostile behind a row of cabinets. Grappled onto the gargoyle again. Flew into the hostile on her right, angling her hips, so her kneecaps connected with his temple. She swiveled when a flurry of footsteps approached, her tonfa catching her fifth opponent in the nose bridge.
The last hostile lunged at her. She barely dodged his cross, his knuckles brushing her brow, then gripped his forearm, and yanked his upper abdomen into the same trusty kneecap, striking him in the solar plexus. She swung her other tonfa. He collapsed at her feet.
“Over here!” Cash called hoarsely. “Get us free!”
She did just that, letting the wire of her grappling gun carry her to where Cash and North were tied to their chairs, backs to each other. She brought out her batarang and cut through the zip ties as quickly as she could, keeping her gaze firmly fixed on their wrists, and then between Cash’s brows when he slowly stood so she wouldn’t start staring at the horribly beaten, bruised, and bloodied state.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She zeroed in on his wrinkled forehead, the only portion of his face left unscathed. “Where did Dr. Young go?”
“I told her to run.” He motioned towards the unconscious, slack-jawed thug behind him. “These guys came in looking for her.” He dabbed at the blood dripping down his upper lip. “I told her to go to her office and hide.”
If Batgirl’s cowl were living, its ears would’ve perked.
“Does she keep her records there?”
“I guess.” Cash shrugged stiffly. “She was pretty desperate to get in there.” He threw a thumb over his shoulder, drawing her attention towards a tight, dark path that disappeared behind the cabinets. “Her office is over there.”
But would she be there?
“How long ago was this?” Her fingertips drummed against the pommels of her tonfas. “I need to find her notes before Joker gets his hands on them.”
“20 minutes? Maybe more.” Cash grimaced with every micro expression. “What’s so important about the notes?”
“Joker wants them,” she answered dryly. “Stay here, I’m going to find her.”
Cash frowned, then winced again. “You sure you don’t want North or myself to go with you?”
She laughed lightly at that. “I just rescued you from six men who were twice my size, officer.” She placed her hands on her hips, her head held high. “I’m sure I can handle a doctor.”
Cash blinked, taken aback for a moment before the corner of his mouth curled up with the tiniest tinge of respect. “Then I’ll try the radio.” He nodded to North, who mirrored it. “See if anyone else is around.”

“Central control, please respond,” Cash’s voice echoed from the other end of the North Corridor while Batgirl jogged towards where she hoped she would locate Young’s office and its owner.
“Going after the notes yourself, eh, pup?” Joker hissed from the intercom. “Good luck.” The volume increased as he leaned in. “I’ve got a crew working over the Doctor as I speak.” She swore she could hear the cruel curl in his lip with every punctuation of his words. “They’ll squeeze the formula out of her soon enough.”
She passed another giant, ransacked pile of papers, then came face-to-face with a doorway engraved with a shape that resembled a bishop’s hat. She braced her hands against the lever and threw all her weight into her shoulder, shoving into it one, two, three times, but it was blocked. Joker droned on and on.
“Not to mention the army of clowns ripping this place apart…”
Oh, you’re one to talk.
“...one way or another, the formula will be mine. Why don’t you just give up? Go on, roll over and die for once! Be your little Boy Wonder!”
She grit her teeth so hard she thought she would grind her molars into granules, focusing on the soreness spreading over her upper arm, so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge the chasm that just reopened in her conscience.

Batgirl planted both her boots on the grating closing off the umpteenth vent she had crawled through, retracted her legs, and kicked out. The impact of the metal against her soles sent tremors through her kneecaps. She shook it off. Tried again. And again. Mercifully, it clattered to the tiled floor. She landed beside it, catching her breath while she absorbed the new environment.
The framed black mask behind her. The X-rays to her left. A cluster of cabinets against the right wall. The spinning shadow of a fan’s rotors swept over the ornate desk and padded chair every few seconds.
A monitor depicting a younger Young’s graduation photo, her father’s arm around her, the same smug smile, but one accompanied by a spark in her eye that had been replaced by an icy, secretive glint.
And an open safe. No sign of forced entry. Which meant whoever opened it knew the combination.
Batgirl slid into the doctor’s seat and pulled the keyboard over. She punched in a couple of codes that would bypass the authorization system and tap into the security feed.
Young looked almost ghostly white under the infrared lens. She constantly looked behind her between turning the safe’s lock and reaching for the contents. That confirmed it. She had the notes. Unfortunately, Joker’s thugs had her.
Batgirl activated the scanner. She calibrated the scanner to only show recent prints, and then zoomed in on the ones Young had left on the safe. A one-hundred percent match. Perfect.
“Bruce, I have a trail.”
“Good work. The GCPD found one of Jokers’ bombs downtown.” He paused. Batgirl prepared for the worst. He added, “It was full of marzipan and kittens.”
She rolled her eyes. “A twisted diversion, just as you thought.”

Batgirl followed said trail to the library, where the security guard she had rescued before snored loudly, slumped over in his chair while he partook of a well-deserved power nap after escorting the hostage to safety. She tiptoed past him and the collapsed chandelier, carefully easing a book, the cover also marred with Young’s prints, out from a shelf.
When she opened it, a piece of paper fluttered into her hand. Relief shot through her system like some sort of reverse adrenaline. She had found the formula. She didn’t waste any time, unholstering her explosive gel and spraying a thin layer over the file. She tossed it away, watching it burn up midair, unable to resist grinning at the nearest security camera as its ashes floated up into the fans.
“What’s that you’ve got there, pup –” Joker’s chair creaked as he recoiled from the lens in disbelief “– No! Not the formula. What am I going to do? Who can help me now?”
Her grin vanished at his next sentence.
“What’s that? How about our old friend Zsasz? Hmmm, I did bump into him on the way back from the Gardens, where no doubt he was acting out some twisted fantasy. Maybe he could get her talking?” A delighted bark of laughter burst out from the back of his throat. “I think he probably can! Great plan, pup.”
She knocked over the gift box with the giant rubber glove in her hurry to get the hell out of there.

Chapter Text

Lightning crackled with a force that had Batgirl’s every hair stand on end. Rain crept through the fractures in the ceiling, seeping under her Kevlar suit and becoming one with the sheen of cold sweat spreading over her shivering skin.
As she paced down the hall, a cabinet swamped with files chugged forward. Her feet froze. She braced for another trap, another announcement from the speakers peering down at her from where they were mounted on the ceramic columns at her sides, but it just stopped. And then the past started to speak.
“I’ll be in and out of the warehouse in five minutes, tops,” Jason insisted. “It’s just a simple rescue mission, nothing we haven’t done before.”
“There’s a reason Bruce doesn’t let us fight crime on our own,” her younger self had shot back.
“What’s the point of all that training if I can’t save my own mother?”
Two trash cans filled with crumpled newspapers. No, not just any trash cans. The trash cans Jason knocked over while swinging a wrench at Bruce after the disguised caped crusader caught him trying to steal the tires off the Batmobile. The date in the newspapers? April 27th.
“You can cut through here.” Her younger, stupider self traced over the holographic projection of the route to the warehouse with her pointer finger while Jason’s small shadow stained her desk as he watched from over her shoulder. “This is the first and last time we’re doing this, you understand?”
“That’s all I need, Babs.” He flashed her a dimpled smile that would soon be stained with the scarlet he would cough up.
Two more trash cans fell before her. Then another pile of papers tipped over. The rain hammered against her cowl, blurring her vision, chilling her to the bone.
“Robin, it’s been five minutes. Where are you?” she heard herself shouting over the comms.
More lightning crackled.
“Jason, come in!”
The hall warped into an alleyway, and in an instant, she wasn’t walking anymore. The pointed ears of her cowl whipped in the wind with her rust-red hair as she sped through the soaked streets on her Batcycle, the lifeless stare of the angel that stood by the entrance of the City Hall, the illumination of the dying neon lights like a fading halo around his head, still burnt into space between her shoulder blades. The sirens screamed and the curtains of cloud parted, the sliver unveiling into a misty, misshapen smear of a moon with a winged silhouette in the middle.
She stayed at the Batmobile’s side, its headlights blazing, and the brilliant rear lights on the back spilling streaks of red behind its tires. Her knuckles whitened under her gloves as she gripped the handles of her Batcycle, a customized 1967 Yamaha YCS1 Bonanza 180. One of the many perks of working with a billionaire, not including the fact that the work was life-threatening. She strained to keep up with her mentor’s several sharp turns without losing control and hydroplaning into an unsuspecting store window every time he cut another corner.
By the time she managed to break through the warehouse door, Bruce’s screams at her to stay behind him were muted by the pounding of her pulse in her ears, the frantic rhythm of her heart synchronized with each hit of the crowbar to Jason’s ribs.
Jason had crumpled against the wall, curled up in a fetal position on the floor, limbs twisted in the wrong way at every joint, the blood dripping from his lips the same shade as his uniform. His lifeless, emerald eyes were locked on the entrance she staggered through.
Bruce dropped beside him, cradling him to her chest, his head tucked into the crook of her neck.
Her stare fell on the birthday card beside the body, scarred with Joker’s clumsy handwriting and Harley’s elegant cursive strokes in crimson ink.

“Come on, Jason,” Bruce mumbled numbly, scooping him up and shuffling out of the warehouse. “I’m getting you out, we’re going to Gotham General Hospital, you’re going to be okay…”
She stumbled stiffly after him like a lost puppy, her gaze glued to the skinny stray in his embrace.
“How could he do this?” one nurse whispered to another as they wheeled the stretcher into the intensive care unit. “How?”
Lightning blinded her, then when Batgirl had blinked away the molten white, she had nearly bumped into another door. Not the door to the operating room where they were trying to treat Jason’s collapsed lung, but a bronze one.
When she threw it open, dry heat blasted her face, singing her nostrils and stinging her eyes. She stepped into a massive complex of ruined, inverted buildings, platforms fashioned from debris, and floating chunks of rubble that nearly took her head off as they flew by.
No, not buildings.
Her house.
“What are you trying to do?” her father rasped through the wind.
“It’s not what I’m trying to do, Jim, it’s what I am doing,” her mother replied calmly. Too calmly.
Barbara hunkered around the corner, observing her mother’s slender silhouette from the top of the staircase. And her suitcases. And her bundled up baby brother. Her father knelt before her, arms wrapped around her legs, looking up at her with a fresh film of tears on his whites.
“Will I ever see you again?”
“In court.”
Barbara hugged her knees into her chest. Her boots had become slippers. Her suit had turned into her favorite pajamas. The one with the birds. The wooden planks under her creaked loudly.
Her parents turned towards her.
Her baby brother began to bawl.
She awakened to the clock striking midnight. A clock? Why was there a clock? Why was she in the clock tower? The bell rang again and again. The pulsing in her ears became a painful throb.
Reflexively, defensively, she drew her batarang and tossed it towards the nearest rope. The bell clanged one, two, three times against the metal frame as it descended into the darkness, then hit the base with a resounding echo.
Fucking fear gas.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Joker crooned, “listening to Zsasz make the good doctor scream while you played around in Scarecrow’s world.”
Batgirl’s knuckles ached from how tightly she clenched her canister of explosive gel. She shook it harder, even though her biceps burned.
“How was it this time?” he taunted. “Learn anything about yourself? Oh, tell me. Pull up a seat! Talk to me! I’m all ears.”
He must’ve picked that up from Quinzel.
“Actually, that reminds me.” He made a show of scratching his chin for the camera. “I could’ve sworn I heard Zsasz cutting her ears off.” He grinned so widely she thought his face would split open at his jaw joints. “Certainly sounded like it.” He laughed harshly, then laughed even louder.
The door blew off its hinges. No sooner had she charged into the warden’s office than Zsasz dragged Young away and disappeared behind another corridor of cabinets, hissing at her like a vampire at sunlight.
“Stay where you are, Bat-bitch!” He unsheathed his pocket knife. “Listen to me carefully.”
“Help me!” Young wailed hoarsely. “Please, somebody help me!”
“Come any closer, and I’ll paint the room crimson with her blood!” Zsasz passed a statue of Sharpe, then waited before the fireplace, under a portrait of, yet again, Sharpe. Young struggled against him, desperately clawing at the uncannily long fingers he had threaded through her hair, streaks of mascara running over her tallied, scabbed cheeks. The smears of black were similar to a certain disgraced psychologist’s domino mask for Batgirl’s liking.
“I know you’re still out there.” Zsasz slurped up some of his saliva, then drew a cut across her clavicle. “Won’t be long and you’ll hear her final song!”
“Zsasz…what are you talking about?” Joker cut in. “Just kill her, she’s useless to me now –”
Her batarang hit the serial killer straight in a pressure point on his neck. Young scrambled to the side, her knees wobbling, her gloved hands still raised over her head. Then she lunged over Zsasz, furiously punching him in the chest.
“You monster! You evil, evil, evil monster!”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Batgirl said softly, but sternly, crouching to catch her wrists. “He’s going right back to his cell.” Young shook her head, but Batgirl kept her voice even. “You can stop.” She squeezed her wrists. “You can stop, Penelope.”
“Sorry,” Young croaked weakly as Batgirl took her by the elbow and helped her to her feet. “I’m so sorry…”
Batgirl raised a brow. “You should be saying that to Bane.”
“I know. I…Joker threatened me. I wanted to stop the experiment.” She buried her face into her hands, then wrung them, her fingers curled as if they longed to return to fists. “I tried to give him the money back.”
“You know you’ll still have to answer for your crimes,” Batgirl interrupted politely, but tersely. “Not all the patients here are like Bane, and a simple ‘sorry’ isn’t going to undo the damage you inflicted upon them for that money.”
“He wants an army,” Young muttered to herself more than anyone else. “A horrible, twisted force to destroy Gotham, but he couldn’t do it without the formula, so I hid it…”
“Save it for the judge.” Batgirl’s violet eyes narrowed. “Now, let me get this straight. He has Venom, and your formula.”
“God, he has gallons of the stuff.” Young walked up the stairs. Circled the couches. Walked down the stairs. Ran up again. “There’s a lab hidden in the Gardens.” Her voice rose in volume as her shock slowly wore off. “It’s locked off, but the security key codes for the entire island are in the Warden’s safe!” She headed towards a golden plaque.

Judging from the statue and the portrait, Batgirl wouldn’t be surprised if Sharpe had addressed that to himself.
“What else is Joker planning?” she pressed.
Young glared at her and huffed incredulously. “How should I know?” She fiddled with the combination lock. “You think anything he says makes sense?” She reached to open the hidden compartment, but then Batgirl hurried over and caught her wrist again.
“Wait.” She put her ear to the plaque.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Just because Joker didn’t put a bomb in that gift box didn’t mean he hadn’t set one up somewhere else.
Batgirl yanked Young behind her and unbuckled her utility belt, flipping through the pockets and pulling out a tamper and a projectile. She fastened them together, aimed the water disruptor at the plaque, grabbed her Batclaw, and turned to the doctor.
“Get to Cash!”
She didn’t need to tell Young twice. She latched onto the plaque with her Batclaw, opened the container, fired the projectile at the neon green smiley face painted on the safe, and then brought her cape up over her cowl. Long story short, she disrupted the bomb.
But she couldn’t stop the sheer force of the collision from knocking her feet out from under her. The back of her head smacked against the carpet. Smoke swamped her. She managed to crawl onto the stairs before her consciousness slipped through her fingers.

Chapter Text

“Poor B-girl,” Quinzel’s cheery voice rang out, every syllable bouncing off the office walls as a blurry blob with pigtails hovered above where Batgirl laid limp under the busted, blackened safe.
The disgraced psychologist blew a kiss at one thug in a suicide collar before bounding over to where another henchman had Warden Sharp’s arms pinned behind his back.
“Somebody help me –” The older man doubled over as Quinzel wound up the arm with her unbandaged wrist and jabbed her knuckles into his solar plexus. Then, his bald, bulbous head snapped to the side when she swung his stolen ruby-topped cane into his jowls.
“That old loony actually thinks he runs the place!” Quinzel jeered, twirling the staff in her good hand. “Talk about crazy!” She crossed one foot behind the other and bowed with a taunting tilt of her head. “Well, B-girl, places to go.” A slight sing-song lilt entered her tone.
“Get her, boys! If she gets up, knock her down, but not too rough.” She sashayed into the shadows with Sharp. “Mr. J needs her at the party.”
The henchmen's’ massive frames blocked off the ceiling rights. They loomed over her with a sadistic curl in their upper lips. The one on Batgirl’s right pounded his fist into his palm. The other rolled his bulky shoulders. The third readied his electric baton. The fourth, to his credit, quickly got his guard up.
Batgirl crunched her knees into her lower abdomen and kicked out, using the momentum to throw herself onto her feet.
She leaped to the left, jabbed at the third thug with her left foot, and threw a punch at the fourth. She didn’t need to hit them, just get one of them to lift their arms. As the third thug did so, and opened up his left ribs, she drove the ball of her foot into his intercostal muscles. Then, her uppercut connected with his chin.
Before he hit the floor, she ducked under the fourth thug’s cross. She nearly took his head off with a left roundhouse kick. Then, she jabbed at him. Shot a straight right hand out from her elbow, which she had tucked tightly against her lats. As he frantically dropped and raised his arms to protect himself, she forced him out of position to defend himself from a right foot to his groin.
One out of four down…for now.
A jab from the first thug grazed her cheekbone. She narrowly leaned away from it. Jabbed back. Clipped his nose with a left hook. He leaned back as well. Perfect. Her right kick slammed into his temple. One down.
The second and fourth henchmen seized her arms, trying to drag her to her knees. She flipped out of their grip. Let her epaulet take the impact before she rolled onto one knee. She lassoed the thugs’ legs with her Batclaw as they tried to crush her under their steel-toed boots. Their foreheads crashed together.
As expected, Thug Four unfortunately recovered. After she jabbed at him again, she lifted her knee. He braced for a right kick. Instead, she drew her right tonfa from its holster and clocked him between the eyes. Two down for good.
Two and Three untangled themselves from the Batclaw and tossed it aside. She jabbed at Three with her left club. Did the same to Two with her right. Lifted her left knee. He didn’t drop his hands. She grit her teeth, equally impressed and irritated at the fact that he’d learned from Four’s mistakes, but she bet he wouldn’t expect her next move.
She threw the tonfa. It spun through the air and smacked into his nose bridge, loudly cracking his cartilage.
She turned her right hip towards Three. For a split second, they both stayed still. He sneered. She smiled slyly. Threw out her hip. His glare glinted with triumph as he dodged what he thought would be a crescent kick to his left ribs. Dodged to the right. Where her right crescent kick and her spinning right crescent kick landed on his right ribs and his mandible.
Two wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, his hot breath billowing against the nape of her neck. She tried to step to the side, but his stance was too wide. Evidently, he had done this before. As he chuckled and flicked his tongue out against her skin, she shuddered in disgust. She knew exactly why he had been admitted to Blackgate. Well, if his mother didn’t teach him how to treat a lady, she would do the honors.
She swung her heel towards his groin. His breath hitched and he instinctively closed his legs. Now, she could step to the side, lower her center of gravity, and anchor her front leg, weaving her back leg behind it. In one motion, she dropped her weight into her front knee and hooked her arm through his elbow, using his own momentum to roll him into the floor. She shoved his face into the carpet, wrenched his arm, and knifed him in the lower back with her fingers, striking him in the sciatic nerve. She let him howl in agony for a while before she hit him in the head with her tonfa.
Four out of four down. Batgirl dusted off her cape, wiped the sweat from her brow, and threw a gas capsule over her shoulder as she contemplated how she would get past the security gates to the Garden. She knew the WayneTech security protocols were hack-proof. Hell, she had helped Lucius put them together. They consisted of a two-part biometric sequence meant to be generated by the warden using a code sequencer…
…destroyed by Joker in the explosion.
She needed the warden.
And Quinzel had the warden.

Batgirl traced the neon purple trail projected by the scanner in her goggles. With every step she took towards the gate up ahead, with every grind of the gears as it pulled apart vertically, her intestines twisted tighter.
She paced through the corridor lined with steel-reinforced cells. No one-way mirror. Just four ovular vents for air and a rusted crank. No, not just any corridor, the Green Mile. Also known as the Death Row.
The row where they should’ve thrown Joker.
She grimaced when the algae littering the grated ground fused to her soles. As she struggled to peel her boots away from the slime, her gaze lingered on the prints she had left in the stringy muck. And the prints that weren’t hers.
For a moment she imagined what it would be like to walk down this hall. To hear the rhythmic screech of the crank, then the screech of the hinges. The sliver light searing her dilated pupils a split second before cold cuffs bit into her wrists. Disembodied, gloved hands secured around her elbows. Marching up to the scarlet-lit, cylindrical chamber containing the electric chair. To death. Would she be relieved? Terrified? Or would her mind be too swamped with sedatives to register that her life neared its end?
Her feet froze when the slender silhouette in the chamber solidified into an older woman with flowing auburn hair, reaching for her as wisps of copper-tinged gas filtered in. Veins (or were they vines?) wound around her elegant, branch-like limbs, protruding from her pallid, olive-green skin.
“Stop! Stop!” Pamela Isley screamed hoarsely. “Batgirl. Please. You’ve got to help my babies.” She plastered a palm to the transparent barrier between them, her red, collared shirt now tattered.
Batgirl’s lips parted to shoot back with some snarky response about how she was a vigilante and not a gardener, but her vocal chords seemed to constrict around it. Usually, Isley’s words dripped with, well, poison. Sizzling and spewing with contempt for mankind, and especially men. But now, the snide seductress had dropped all pretenses, radiating desperation.
“They’re in pain,” she pleaded, “crying for help!”
I’d tell you to stay where you are, but it looks like this chamber’s taking care of it, the snarky part whispered from the pit of Batgirl’s throat. She swallowed it down. Had to swallow hard.
Isley raised her hands to the ceiling, her fingers curling like wilting tendrils craving the sun as she backed away. “Poor children! I’ll save you…”

Batgirl sprinted into the security room, heaving a huge sigh of relief when she discovered a scowling Sharp. Alone. Without Quinzel. She stooped to untie him before he could complain about how long it took her when she caught movement in the corner of the screen over his head.
Quinzel strolled down death row, hips swaying as she scatted along to the demented radio in her head.
“Harley!” Isley snapped, slamming her hands against her cylindrical chamber. Harley shrieked and stumbled over her mismatched boots.
“You have to help me,” the ecoterrorist rasped, leaning against the glass, her breathing shallowed by the gas seeping into her lungs.
“Ivy?” The psychologist’s expression softened slightly upon recognizing her former patient. “Gee, you look like crap! Maybe I can sneak ya some shampoo.”
“The plants! Can’t you hear them?” Isley started to slump, wheezing and gasping with every inhale and exhale. “They’re crying out to me in agony!”
“Yeah? Well, I don’t really have time for this.” Though Quinzel’s words were indifferent, they were surprisingly sincere, containing no trace of mockery. Her wince, and the way her hand flexed as if to reach back to her partner in crime betrayed how she truly felt about seeing her fellow doctor in such a damaged, dismal state.
“Please, let me out!” Isley pressed. “They’ll die without me!”
“I dunno, Red.” Quinzel unfolded a piece of paper she had fished out from her asymmetrical bra, scanning it intently, her shoulders stiff. “You’re not on Mr. J’s party list.” She turned to the side. “Oh well…”
Isley groaned in agony. “Ugh, please!”
Quinzel glanced at the leaves wrapped around her bad wrist. Her shoulders stiffened more. “Ah, what the heck…” She whipped around, her lips lifting into a strained sneer. “I’ll cut you a break!” She pranced over and swiped her stolen card through the lock.
The barrier retracted with a low hiss. Isley dusted the crimson residue off her clothes as she emerged from her prison, the algae blooming under her bare feet. She tossed her hair, tossing a smirk at Quinzel, her trademark huskiness masking the terror previously present in her pleas.
“That feels so much better…”
The two women’s stares stayed on each other for a smoking hot second. Isley looked Quinzel up and down. Quinzel drank in Isley’s legs. Isley bent her knees a little and blew Quinzel a kiss.
“Ah,” Quinzel sighed like a lovesick schoolgirl, “she’s a good kid.”
“I could watch those two all day!” Joker rapped on the screen, reclining in his chair, legs out, shoes on the table.
“What a riot! And speaking of riots –” His thumb bounced off a button on his remote “– here’s a little civil unrest I cooked up just for you!”
The footage cut back to the Green Mile. The reinforced steel doors screeched and crank. The prisoners leapt out of confinement, laughing incredulously behind their mesh muzzles.
Batgirl barely restrained herself from gagging at what the clown prince of crime had done to his mad dogs. Strange growths marred one’s scalp. Another’s fleshy arm dangled like that of a balloon man. Then, they hurried towards the camera. Towards the tower with her and Sharp.
Right, Sharp! With a swing of her batarang, she sliced through the warden’s zip-ties.
“He’s taken control of the security overrides,” he said sullenly, utterly drained of his narcissism. “I have the sequence generator, but without the terminal in my office, it’s useless.”
“The terminal has been destroyed.” Batgirl held her hand out. “Now, I’ll need that sequencer.”
“What?” He patted awkwardly at his suit jacket before wriggling the card out of his breast pocket. “Oh…yes, of course.” He watched warily as she tucked it into her utility belt. “It’s useless.” He winced while tentatively tracing the ugly wound on his forehead, and his bloodied lower lip. “Half the codes won’t get you anywhere.” He hunched over in the chair. “We’re trapped in here.”
“There’s always a way out.” Her jaw tightened. “Always.”
She held the device up to a power box to tune it, letting the green line on the sequencer’s screen ripple until it flickered out with a beep. She flinched from the sparks popping from the batteries. In her periphery, the azure lasers blocking off the exit fizzled out.
“You stay here,” she shouted over her shoulder at Sharp before descending the stairs. “Lock this gate when I leave.”
“Good idea,” he sniffed, his haughtiness restored to its full force. “Can’t have someone of my stature falling into their hands, now can we?”

No sooner had Batgirl stepped into the Main Cell Block when Quinzel slid across the tiles and gleefully greeted her with an off-kilter bow.
“Surprise!” She twirled one of her pigtails and tilted her head from side to side. “You know, I always thought there was a spark between us!”
Batgirl braced for the punchline. Quinzel coiled her legs and backflipped between the grated walls, flipping over a barrier and landing before another power box, which she smashed with a rather clumsy roundhouse kick.
“Well, now there is!”
Another security guard, gagged and bound to the grating, convulsed with every electric current that shot through his system, his muffled cries of agony clawing at Batgirl’s conscience.
“I know, I know. You’re shocked!” Quinzel batted her lashes at her. “Come and get me, B-girl.” Her smile melted into a satisfyingly unamused snarl. “I double dare ya.”
Batigirl’s heart dropped into the pit of her stomach as her feet left the floor, her grappling gun catapulting her onto a balcony with another four thugs. God, would this night ever end?
“You guys are idiots!” Quinzel jeered from the chandelier that she sat on like a playground swing. “The guns are everywhere.”
Batgirl reached for another gas capsule. A shiver shot down her spine. She had restocked at the backup Batcave, but she had severely underestimated the sheer number of thugs from Blackgate that Joker had smuggled into the asylum. She would have to settle for her remaining smoke bombs for now, which would only temporarily stun her opponents. She sicced one on her opponents, and then shifted her hands from her utility belt to the handles of her tonfa.
She rained hell on the nearest thug, ruthlessly barraging him with a series of strikes. High. Low. Side. Side. Low. High. Low. To his credit, he blocked most of them. Then, even more to his credit, he drove his forehead into her nose bridge. She stumbled away, eyes watering, blood streaming from her nostrils, slipping between her lips, and burning the tip of her tongue.
The thug’s fingernails sank into her shoulders. This time, when he craned his neck back, his forehead met the blunt end of her tonfa. She clocked another thug aiming for a low kick to her knee. She countered with a downward elbow. He howled, hopping one on leg and gripping his other shin. Before he could recover, she hit him in the throat.
“Oof!” Quinzel exclaimed in feigned concern. “You okay over there?”
Only then did Batgirl realize she could have broken the code. She stared at him, his limp legs, how his chest refused to fall or rise, her pulse pounding in her temples, every muscle in her limbs seized up.
In Capoeira, they called that technique asfixiante. For asphyxiate. It was illegal. And for good reason. The reason being that it did deep damage to the larynx and trachea if done correctly. And thanks to Bruce’s rigorous training, she had perfected it.
“Hey B-girl, go easy on my boys!”
The hairs on the nape of Batgirl’s neck stood on end. Her tonfa flew over her shoulder, backfisting (or back-clubbing?) another thug. She brought both her clubs up, landing blows to his temples. It wouldn’t knock him out, but it would definitely knock him off balance. She swung up. His head snapped back, scarlet spraying from his nostrils. He was out before he flopped to the floor.
The next thug’s knuckles brushed the shell of her ear. She stepped to the side, spun on the ball of her foot, and flipped her tonfa. Now, she grabbed the weapon by the shaft. She hooked onto his neck with the handle, yanking his nose into her knee.
Quinzel sat up slightly. “That’s not fair, Bat-brain!”
Oh, but it was fair. Maybe it didn’t have to be fair. Maybe Batgirl just did it because she felt like aiming for the nose this time on account of the numbness between her own eyes.
She whirled around and caught another thug by the arm. She twisted it behind him. Tugged hard. His shoulder popped. He screamed. She reversed her grip. Blocked another thug who proceeded to wrap his arms around her legs. She furiously beat her tonfa against his back. When that didn’t work, she dropped her center of gravity, rolled with the momentum, and pushed into his belly with her feet. The top of his head thudded into the concrete.
She flipped her other tonfa. Threw it in a wide circle. Outside to inside. The club nailed the second last in the chin. She hammered her other club into her last opponent’s solar plexus. He coughed, gasping for air. She jabbed it into his chest. She capped it off with a roundhouse strike to his carotid.
With a low creak from the chandelier, Quinzel gracefully dismounted from it and descended onto the platform. Batgirl struggled to blink off the sweat on her lashes, turning towards the blurred, pig-tailed figure.
“Was that as easy as it looked?” Quinzel hummed approvingly. “Well, it won’t be as easy trying to catch me!” She took a page out of Isley’s book and brought her fingers to her lips to blow a kiss.
Batgirl grit her teeth and staggered towards her, but by then, Quinzel had already dismounted from the chandelier and ascended into the rafters.

Batgirl didn’t have to turn on her evidence scanner to determine where Quinzel had run off. She just had to follow the peals of hyena-like laughter echoing through the corridors, which were followed by several sharp screams. Picturing her fingers threaded through Quinzel’s pigtails before repeatedly slamming the head of the clown’s accomplice into a pillar kept her going despite the cramps in her calves. The salty blood in her mouth and the sour bile in her stomach seemed to swirl together in the soft spot beneath her sternum. A choleric cocktail she wished she could shove down Joker’s throat for what he did to his doctor, and then force feed said doctor for what she did to Jason.
Two security guards hung from the rafters over two rippling pools, static running along the ropes constricting around their squirming silhouettes. Their arms were tied over their heads, their shoulders hunched painfully high. Just like Jason. Leave it to the psychologist to screw with her mind worse than a well-placed hit to her temples.
That psychologist cooed at Batgirl from behind a pane of glass in a chamber to her left.
“Look who’s finally turned up! The Dork Knight herself!” She rocked her hips before giddily clasping her hands before her midriff. “How’s it hanging, B-girl?”
Dork Knight. Dork Knight. Batgirl almost rolled her eyes so far she swore she could see where her optic nerve started. The clown girl said that as if she didn’t have a damn Ph.D., which technically made her more of a dork than the aforementioned B-girl.
“Got a little problemo for ya!” Quinzel pranced around her safe room. “See those two guards over there?” She lazily lifted a finger towards them. “I know. Shocking! How ya going to save them?”
Batgirl switched on the cryptographic sequencer.
“Wanna give that thing to me, B-girl?” Quinzel goaded, the flicker of irritation in her icy blue irises single-handedly soothing every ache in her limbs.
Batgirl’s glare traced the wires slithering into the left pool to a power box on the window’s left. The line on the cryptographic sequencer’s screen rippled. Then it straightened. The four green bulbs and neon blue bands on the device blinked out.
The first security guard gasped in both relief and disbelief as the sparks spewing from the water at his heels vanished into wisps of smoke.
“No fair,” Quinzel whined, “that’s cheating, B-girl.” She lowered her pointer finger and tapped a button on her remote. “Time to turn up the pressure.” A timer started to tick, its rhythm matching the frantic beat of Batgirl’s heart. “Two minutes and counting.”
Her batarang whirled towards the first security guard’s rope. The water sprayed around him as he splashed to safety. He spat out some mud while he crawled onto the tiled floor, gratefully taking Batgirl’s arm.
<1:45>
Batgirl helped the first guard to his feet, then she sprinted past the pane. She skidded to a stop before another flooded room without a window, nearly slipping on a puddle.
“You’re cutting it thin, B-girl.” Quinzel rapped her knuckles against the glass, one hand on her hip. “Power’s coming back on.”
Batgirl waded up to the power box, her jaw tight. The screen on the cryptographic sequencer rippled.
“Three…two…one…” Quinzel almost sang in delight.
The line straightened. With a low hum, the power box deactivated.
Quinzel huffed incredulously. “Great job, Bats. Power’s off below old Louie Green! Question is, can you get him down before it comes back on?”
<1:30>
The batarang sliced through the second rope with a spark of its own. Another splash. Batgirl crouched beside him, gripping his elbow and pulling him up.
Come on, come on, come on, she urged in her mind as the middle-aged man stumbled about and muttered about having bad knees. I have not one, but two psycho clowns to catch!
“Time for me to go, B-girl. I’ll miss you.” Quinzel tilted her head coyly. “Not.” She checked her watch. “Oh, and now you only have thirty seconds to get out.” She twiddled her fingers and sauntered off. “Bye bye.”
Damnit!
“We’re trapped, she’s locked us in with a bomb!” the first security guard cried, snapping Batgirl out of the red fog coloring the corners of her vision.
<0:21>
She rushed over to the final power box in the back corner. Her hands shook as she held the cryptographic sequencer. Watched the line as it rippled. Waited for it to stop rippling. Willed it to stop.
Stop, stop, stop –
<0:17>
The line straightened.
Yes, yes, yes! The power box burst with a flash of blue lighting. Batgirl yelped and shielded her cowl with her forearms.
“Move it!” Louie Green yelled as soon as the azure lasers over the only exit vanished with a hiss. “Get out of here! Now!”
Like he had to tell them. Batgirl remained right behind the two guards. The ground rocked under her boots. A wave of heat seared her cape when the chamber behind them burst into flame.

“I thought we were both gonna die in there.” The first security guard croaked, his shoulders still stiff.
“Well, you thought wrong,” Batgirl said with a sharpness that shocked herself, and then she scolded herself. It wasn’t his fault he had bad knees. She could’ve found the power boxes faster. Broke through the pane with explosive gel. Apprehended Quinzel right then and there. But she was too slow, and Jason’s murderer’s red right hand had gotten away. Again.
“Are you going after that crazy witch?” Louie Green pressed. “I saw her heading out of the door as we got out of the room.” Batgirl practically spat out her next words.
“I’m going after her and her big-mouthed boyfriend.”
“Good! I’ll go try and get the ventilation system working. If you find her, don’t go easy on her. For me.”
Some of the tension in her jaw melted away.
“I will,” she said more softly.
For Jason.
“You expecting congratulations?” the witch in question squeaked from a distant door to her left. A couple more chattering-teeth toys and torn-up newspapers circled its base. “C’mon. Try and catch me.”
The moment Batgirl reached the entrance, a blue-white spotlight of some sort swept over her, frying her pupils.
“Did you see her back there?” the first security guard remarked to Louie Greene as they marched down the corridor to her right. “What was that thing she used?”
“No idea. She saved our lives, that’s all I need to know.”
Batgirl allowed herself to listen, to let it sink in for one second before she glided down the stairs to the Main Cell Block.

Extreme Incarceration. Batgirl’s boots stamped against the grid of plexiglass squares beneath her, an octagonal watchtower reflected in the translucent surface. A cluster of stalagmites in the corner caught her eye.
“Here she comes, Mr. J!” Quinzel practically squealed from behind her computer, gleefully wriggling her hips.
“Excellent!” the clown prince of crime chuckled lowly. “I’ll leave it to you, then, my dear!”
“Yeah!” Quinzel half-laughed, half-snarled in response. She stabbed at the keyboard with her fingertips.
Four thugs emerged from Batgirl’s right. She chucked a pocket explosive at the stalagmites. The cluster burst into a cloud of shrapnel. The thugs shouted in surprise, then pain when the fragments of dry ice embedded themselves in their skin. Unfortunately, the force also threw Batgirl off her feet. Quinzel cackled at her from above.
“Oooh, that’s gotta hurt!”
Tremors shot through her skeleton when the plexiglass began to buzz. Batgirl thought of the neon blue lightning crackling across the pool under Louie Greene while he hung from that rope. Only now, she was Louie Greene, and the electricity would come from the cells right under her. The thugs shoved each other as they scrambled to get over a fence and into another zone. Batgirl fumbled for her Batclaw. The plexiglass glowed. The line tugged her towards the fence. She narrowly backflipped over it before her head slammed into the steel. And right before the zone behind her burst into sparks.
One thug let out a bloodcurdling wail as the electricity coursed through his nervous system, convulsing violently before collapsing to the ground.
Batgirl knew what Quinzel wanted her to do. What Quinzel’s bastard boyfriend wanted her to do. What they always wanted. For her to play their game. Just like Bruce.
But she wasn’t Bruce.
She didn’t give a damn about the thugs.
The thugs didn’t murder Jason.
She lobbed a gas capsule at the thugs, sheathed her Batclaw, and gripped her grappling hook, aiming it at the bars that Quinzel hid behind.
Quinzel looked up at the screen from which Joker smiled down at her. Defeated, desperate. Glistening with the same tears that beaded from her ducts when Batgirl’s batarang stuck a landing in her wrist.
“I’ll be on my way now,” the disgraced psychologist insisted, implored. Joker’s smile simply transformed into a sneer.
“Oops, change of plans, kiddo.”
“But I tried my best!”
Joker pulled away from the camera. “Sorry, but there is no prize for second place.” He scratched at the nape of his neck like a street dog with fleas. “I’m afraid you’re off the party list. Better luck next time!”
“No!” Quinzel almost sobbed, wrenching away from the computer and wiping her face with the back of her mismatched gloves. Then, she stormed away from the set-up, fists clenched tightly at her sides.
That sob. It stirred in the pit of Batgirl’s stomach for some reason. It…bothered her. Why did it bother her? The fact that it was so childish, perhaps? Did it remind her of how badly that psychopath had broken the only psychologist in Arkham that viewed its patients as people?
Or did it remind Batgirl of how Barbara Jr. had cried when her mother’s car drove out the cul-de-sac.
She shook her head sharply.
Focus! Don’t let her get away again–
Quinzel burst out of the metal doors to her right, flipping towards her, springing off her hands, twisting her torso midair, and executing a perfect helicopter kick that rivaled Bruce’s rendition.
“Die, you ugly bat!”
Batgirl’s jaw would have dropped if Quinzel’s heel weren’t on the course to collide with it. She dodged, adjusted her aim, latched onto her real opponent’s leg with her grappling hook. Her shoulders nearly popped out of her sockets as she strained to use the momentum to tug Quinzel to the right. She felt like two chandeliers had been lifted off of her chest when the woman’s domino-masked face smacked right into the fence.
Quinzel curled into the fetal position, clutching her bloodied nose. Batgirl waited for another stupid quip at an innocent’s expense. A dig at her failure to rescue the second Robin. But Quinzel just laid there. Limp. Unable to even look at her. Sniffling softly.
Batgirl hesitantly held a hand out towards her elbow. Her last act of mercy. Quinzel smacked it aside, her upper lip curling in contempt.
“Hey! Hands off the merchandise!”
Merchandise. Like a toy. To be played with as much as he had mentally bludgeoned her into playing other people with him.
Batgirl snatched the piece of paper sticking out of Quinzel’s collar.
“That’s my party list –”
“Shut up.” Batgirl held the edge of a batarang to her throat.
Quinzel shut up.
Batgirl scanned the crumpled names. Selina Kyle. Harvey Dent. Jervis Tetch. All crossed out. Basil Karlo. Waylon Jones. Oswald Cobblepot. Not crossed out. Arnold Wesker. Luke Oliver. Also crossed out.
She seized Quinzel by the collar and backed her into the fence.
“Why the smiles next to certain names?”
“You’re the detective.” The corner of Quinzel’s mouth curled. “You tell me –” She screamed when Batgirl stomped on her injured wrist, grinded her heel into the wound, and swept her scanner over her pinned hand.
“Bruce is the detective.” Batgirl pressed the batarang harder into her neck. “I’m the girl whose little brother you murdered.” She carved into Quinzel’s clavicle. “If you don’t want to be buried next to him, I’d recommend you comply.”
Quinzel’s voice stayed steady, but the color in her cheeks dimmed ever so slightly as she turned her nose up. “What happened to the no-kill code?”
“If Bruce were here, he’d restrain me –” Batgirl twisted her arm behind her back and pushed her halfway over the fence just as the deadly current under the Plexiglas exploded into azure flames “–but he isn’t, is he?”
Batgirl didn’t know how exactly Joker had killed Harleen, but if they had conducted (they weren’t the only ones who could crack jokes) their courtship at Arkham, he would’ve had limited torture devices. If she were a psychopathic clown with a warped sense of showmanship, she’d choose a flashy method. Like electroconvulsive therapy. And if some part of Harleen were still in there, the part that still remembered every one of her patient’s I.D.’s, she would crack.
“You won’t find Mr. J,” she cried out, “he’s in the secret lab in the Gardens and…Oh, crap!”
Batgirl grinned. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
“Damn!” Quinzel flinched from the sparks singing her domino mask. “Well, he’ll get me out! You’ll see.”
It would be so easy. All Batgirl would have to do is apply a touch more pressure and Quinzel would tip over the fence into the river of death rolling over those buzzing chopping blocks.
“Yeah…” Quinzel squeezed her eyes shut, her head lowered, her limbs limp. “You’ll see…” she sniffed, talking to herself more than she was taunting her captor.
It should’ve been easy.
Quinzel’s crying echoed through the first cell that Batgirl had found, the steel bars’ shadows dissecting her posture. When Batgirl activated the goggles in her cowl, Quinzel’s skeleton glowed with the neon blue light that could have claimed her life. But whatever torture chamber Batgirl had conjured in her mind every night after Jason’s death couldn’t compare to the one Joker had put her through.
Maybe she could have argued to Bruce that ending Quinzel’s misery would be more merciful than confining her to the origin of her madness.

Chapter Text

According to the scanner, Quinzel’s heart rate sat at ninety-one beats per minute, and she remained in calm condition.
Batgirl wouldn’t know that from how ferociously the clown princess had clawed at her arm guards a few moments ago when she swept her scanner over her hand. Like a cat being wrestled into a bathtub.
Or like an inmate being marched down the Green Mile towards the electric chair. Batgirl preferred the cat comparison.
Especially since the bold “3” painted over Quinzel’s cell already reminded her of a guillotine blade dangled over someone’s neck.
“Bruce,” Batgirl announced as she activated her earbud. “I have Quinzel in custody, and she’s been kind enough to inform me that her loony lover boy is stationed at a secret lab in the gardens.”
Quinzel had likely been everywhere on the island, so she modified the fingerprint filter to only show those that had traces of chlorophyll.
“In the emergency folder, I’ve attached instructions on how to re-route one of the Wayne-tech satellites to survey the asylum with your wristwatch.” Her brow furrowed. “Are you…are you available?”
On the other end of the earbud, Bruce seemed to be deep in debate with a distinctively smug, snide, smarmy voice. His knuckles crunched against said voice’s nose bridge. While Riddler yelped in the background.
“I’m available,” he gritted out gruffly. Then, he huffed in pleasant surprise. “That’s a lot of scanners.” He chuckled incredulously. “You really do think of everything, don’t you?”
“Where do you think I got it from?”
“You want the thermal one, right?”
“Yeah, how are the gardens?”
“Hot.” She could picture the corners of his mouth curling down. “I’d tell you to be careful, but evidently that isn’t your forte –”
She raised a brow.
“Says Batman.”
“Be smart.”
“Summa cum laude, remember?”
The Riddler’s rambling returned in full force, spewing his usual rhetoric about how the moronic Batman should’ve been groveling at his feet for the opportunity to witness his genius. Bruce sighed deeply.
“Gotta go.”
The earbud deactivated with a beep.
“Mr. J will be back for me later,” Quinzel seethed from the other side of the steel bars. “He’s only messin’ around.”
Then, she immediately dissolved into more sobs.
Batgirl glanced at one of the batarangs sheathed into her arm guard. She released it, its serrated edge glinting nearly blindingly in the flickering lights. Quinzel cradled her face in her hands. Her eyes were covered. She wouldn’t see it if Batgirl slid the batarang between the bars and drew it across her throat.
She thought of that bat-shape pooling over her father’s white button-up shirt in that interrogation room. The pictures of her throttling Joker in Detective Montoya’s portfolio. Even if she graduated summa cum laude, the likelihood of her finding work, particularly normal civilian work, after being convicted of murder would be very low. Assuming she wouldn’t be swept up in some woman’s gang the second she entered her cell block. Assuming she survived prison at all.
Fear gas. It was only fear gas.
This time, when she walked away from Quinzel, she didn’t look back.

“Oh, Harley was just the warm up, pup,” Joker hummed merrily, “and to be fair to the little scamp, she did an OK job. Let’s call it a B plus.”
You do realize the little scamp can hear you, right? Batgirl almost muttered to herself before realizing that he didn’t care if she could, and maybe even found it more fun to see if she would stay with him after knowing how he really felt about her. Actually, he had probably done this before, and she had stayed, which was why he felt comfortable doing it now.
“But between you and me,” the clown drawled, “I’m aiming for the A grade. Just got to mix up a couple more of these chemicals and I’ll be creating my own personal army.”
As Batgirl tracked Quinzel’s prints, her surroundings blurred. She blazed through the Main Cell Block, telling herself she didn’t see the dead security guard slumped against the right wall. Telling herself she didn’t hear the rearrangement of the Arkham Asylum intercom theme clanking clumsily along the keys of an off-key piano as she grappled onto a balcony that led to a moss-marred gate that she promptly blew off its hinges with a touch of explosive gel.
Every click of Joker’s shoes against the concrete echoed through the catacomb, his inverted reflection muddled in the ugly turquoise pool between them. Her own mirror image seemed close enough to seize him by his purple shoulder pad and hold him under those murky waters until no more bubbles floated to the surface. To flash her own smile at him as his scarlet one vanished in the muck.
“If you don’t stop yourself, I will,” she spat at him, winding the wire of her grappling hook around her wrist.
“Stop?” Her intestines twisted when Joker turned around with a paralyzed security guard, playfully letting the ghost-white, cloudy-eyed man’s head loll back and forth, his limp legs dragging against the algae in a demented dance. “But everyone’s dying to see what I do next!”
He kicked a power box into the pool.
Another game. Either she rescued the innocent, or executed the guilty. A simple assignment. A simple decision. But was there any way she could accomplish both objectives? There had to be a way. What use was graduating summa cum laude if she couldn’t put this clown out of commission, and ensure this man returned to his family?
She and the security guard snapped free from their respective spirals at the same time.
“Let me go!” he cried, finally lucid. “Let me go, please!”
“Really?” Joker leaned in, grinning against the guard’s ear. “If you say so, officer!”
The man screamed louder. “Help me, please!” The clown prince of crime practically sang in response.
“Whoopsie!”
“No!” Batgirl fumbled to unwind the wire of her grappling hook from her wrist, but by then, Joker had dropped the security guard into the crackling water. The man howled in agony as the electricity coursed through his nervous system, the harsh sound ripping past her armor and into the cavity that Jason’s death had left in her chest, his arms and legs contorting, his helpless stare locked on her.
Joker sauntered into a tunnel and shrugged dismissively between cruel, amused chuckles to himself. “I thought you’d think quicker than your old man.”
His nose wrinkled mockingly. No, not mockingly. Pityingly. As if the fact that she thought herself prepared enough to take on him were the worst joke he had ever heard.
“At this rate, you’ll never catch me.”
Batgirl untangled the grappling hook and shot it at him. The hooks latched into his kevlar vest. The rough wires rubbed the skin off her palms with every pull. She dropped to her knees, lacing one hand over the other, placing it over his sternum, and trying to pump the liquid out of his lungs. Now and then, she pressed her fingers to the pulse point under his jaw.
She caught onto Joker waving at her with a remote in her peripheral vision. The floor rumbled. She instinctively shielded the security guard’s body with her own, opening her cape over them like Bruce always did for her when an explosion went off during their early missions. By the time she had hacked out the acrid tang of smoke in her throat and wiped away the dust coating her goggles, a mass of debris had blocked off the exit.
She pressed her fingers to the soft spot under the security guard’s jaw. Nothing. She did the same to his wrist. His elbow. She cut away a pant leg and prodded at his knee. Removed his shoe. Pushed into the space beside his ankle. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
You really do think of everything, don’t you? Bruce chuckled in the back of her hippocampus.
She did think of everything.
But it still wasn’t enough.
Batgirl brushed her fingers over the security guard’s eyelids.

The fingerprints. She had to focus on the fingerprints. Not the ice-cold skin, the vein that should’ve pulsed still as a statue under it. The clouded sclera under the lids she had shut. The colleagues who would never have a cup of coffee with him again. The dog that wouldn’t be able to greet him at the door. The child and the spouse sitting at the dinner table, waiting for a husband and a father that would never come home.
She had to focus on the fingerprints, not how she had spent hours scrubbing at the red, green, and yellow uniform caked with viscera, as if that would wash away the vision of vacant emerald eyes sinking into a domino mask slightly smaller than her cowl.
Batgirl rounded an abandoned fountain overflowing with sickly yellow tiger lilies. The crisp scent of the petrichor released from the flourishing plants around her pricked her nostrils. Every time she blinked, the crumbling, corroded statues around her briefly transformed into the gargoyle – or was it an angel? – overlooking the City Hall. She hoped her father would be there and not at their apartment, wondering as to where the hell his only child had wandered off.
“Well, aren’t you the persistent one,” the clown prince crooned overhead. “Always one step ahead.”

“It won’t be long before I have an army of Titan monsters at my fingertips. Just imagine,” Joker prattled on, “me being carried through the streets, stepping over the corpses of all those innocent citizens…”
“We get it, asshole,” Batgirl grumbled as she rattled the rusted handle to the swirl-patterned door. “You’re an utterly remorseless, card-carrying waste of your mother’s womb –”
“It’s going to be glorious,” he gushed like a kid opening up his first present at a birthday party. “I can’t wait.”
“– who plays at being clinically insane to make up for the fact that the only person who ever loved you had to be brainwashed into it!” she shouted while repeatedly slamming her shoulder into the metal, pushing at it again. And again. And again.
She paused.
She pushed the handle down and pulled at it.
The door squeaked invitingly on its hinges, swinging open to reveal the jungle wonderland that awaited her.
Batgirl pinched her nose bridge.
What was that you were saying about graduating summa cum laude, Babs? she chided herself before rubbing her shoulder and strolling into the mini-forest.
Batigirl took in the colorful assortment of ferns and flowers clinging to the walls, careful not to trip on the various vines creeping across the staircases. She didn’t dare touch any of them. She may have been a computer science major, but the one lesson she had remembered from high school biology, aside from the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell, was that if a plant or an animal was pretty, it was poisonous.
“Help me!” an orderly hollered from her upper left. “Someone!” The chain of his hanging cage rattled on its hook. “Get me out of this thing!”
Batgirl grabbed her grappling hook, ducked under a cluster of leaves, and hurried towards them, but then she skidded to a stop when the Joker started to sneer through the speakers.
“Listen, the Bat is on the way. If you see her, send the annoying doctors to Hell.” Joker fell silent for a blissful moment. “That’s the down one, right?”
Another lovely silence as he waited for his thug’s brutish reply. Probably something along the lines of, Right, boss! I’d say I got it, but I don’t, because Batgirl’s gonna wipe the weeds off the wall with me.
“Good. And remember. If you hear a collar go off, Batgirl’s here.”
She recalled the suicide collars on the necks of Joker’s men. She would have to take out the operator first. Undetected.
I am undetectable. She hunkered down, set her sights on the vent to her left, and gently eased the tip of a batarang into the screws holding the grating in place. I am the shadows, I am the night…
She swallowed the lump in her throat.
And that guard will be the last person I let die tonight.
She ejected her Batclaw, but not fully. Just enough to release the hooks. She crept past the cages, lifting her cape over her face to better camouflage herself among the foliage. Then, she anchored the hooks into the crevices between the bricks of the watchtower, slowly and steadily scaling to the top.
Her breath halted in her windpipe when her soles slipped against the fungi under her toes. Her Batclaw skidded. Her other foot found only air.
As her heart abruptly rose into her trachea and then plummeted to the pit of her belly, she grasped for a batarang and dug it into a crack in the clay. She kicked wildly, her shoulders straining in their sockets. A throbbing ache bloomed across the muscle in the crook of her neck before coiling into a tight knot. She drew in harsh, strained breaths through her clenched teeth.
Feet first, she snapped at herself. Come on, you’ve climbed City Hall before. You can do this. You have to do it! She planted her feet into the few spots on the wall that weren’t plant matter. For Jason. For everyone. She bit her inner cheek at the burn in her biceps, but she pulled up.
She unfurled her cape and descended into the square-shaped opening in the corrugated roof, kicking the thug’s knee out from under him before he could whirl around. She acquainted her tonfa with the back of his skull. She had incapacitated the main threat, but the hostages were still in danger.
She nearly jumped out of her boots when a chattering teeth toy snapped at her heels. It let out a staticky laugh. She punted it aside, where some of its creepy friends rushed over to it. She braced for the Joker’s face to flicker onto the screen to her left, but mercifully, it only contained the spinning logo for now. The four yellow-green bulbs drew her attention to a tarnished lever\. Most likely the one that would cause the cages to fall. She steered clear of it and headed for the exit that connected to a balcony at her right.
“So, you figured out my puzzle, eh, Bats?” Joker’s words dripped from the speakers as she marched towards the neon red hostile on her scanner. “Well, good for you.” There were three. All armed. “Did you remember about my alarms?” The clown prince of crime scoffed scornfully. “You guys couldn’t stop a taxi. She’s here! Don’t let her find me!”
If the pointed ears on her cowl were real, they would’ve perked at that. The unmistakable little lift in his pitch. The fleeting tremble at the end of the sentence that she imagined every thug got when that signal hit the sky.
Fear.
As she knocked out the first hostile and dragged him behind a lichen-infested pillar, the second henchman muttered disdainfully to himself.
“She?” He hefted his gun closer to his chest. “She doesn’t stand a chance. Not a chance –”
A few teeth sprayed out from between his lips when she clubbed him in the mandible. “I don’t know,” she mused mockingly, “my chances look real good to me.”
The third hostile’s head snapped towards her.
“Have you checked the time sheets?” Joker cracked. “I’m sure there were more of you at the beginning of the day.”
She swept the third thug’s leg and brought her knee to his temple. His suicide collar sobbed in a manner that sent the image of a cell with the number 3 shooting through her brain.
Her skeleton seemed to rattle as loudly as the cages when they were transported along a branch-concealed conveyer belt in the ceiling and lowered into the aviary. She winced whenever they occasionally crashed together, but fortunately, the orderlies didn’t seem harmed. Well, not physically harmed. They had that sheen of cold sweat on their brows. And that look.
That clouded look.
Her fingers curled, itching to reach out and comfort them. Tell them that she’d be back as soon as possible. But what good would that do when Joker remained on the loose? When she wasn’t sure if she would be back?
She shook the thought away and leapt up the ladder to her right, her conscience clenching at their shocked, then panicked glances when she didn’t even spare them hers. But she had to focus. Concentrate. Be careful.
Careful not to get attached.
If she were Joker, she would want her lab to be heavily guarded. She would have to pick up Harley’s trail again, so she could find it.
She opened up a square-shaped door engraved with a neat grid of smaller squares, the Arkham logo nestled in the center. She instinctively flinched at the sight of the contraption inside. A box with three green buttons, two switches, a band of blue light, and two gas canisters with the Joker’s half-smiling, half-sneering visage painted in purple.
She noted the purple in her own uniform and made a mental note to change it into another color. If she got out of here and had the chance to change her uniform, that is.
She activated the cryptographic sequencer. Recoiled again when the bomb defused with a burst of sparks, smoke, and miniature lightning.
The floor rumbled. Then, a stone barrier to her bottom left retracted up into its frame, revealing yet another set of steel doors that split apart.
She drew her tonfas the moment Joker’s stare landed on her. Her blood ran molten hot through her system when the six deceased security guards strewn over the tiles like toys that he had grown bored of playing with caught her eye. The thugs flanking him tensed and shuffled into defensive stances, but the psychopathic clown’s grisly grin only spread as wide as his arms.
“Well, look who’s discovered our secret lab.” Joker straightened his bow tie, jabbed his index finger at her, and placed his hands on his hips (Was that where Harley got it from?) while the thugs lumbered in her direction. “Since you’ve made it this far, let me show you what we’ve cooked up.”
A shudder ran through Batgirl’s spine when the walkway behind her folded in on itself and descended into the darkness. Then, the warmth drained from her face when Joker pointed a pistol at her.
The temperature of her blood dropped from molten to below zero. Her left hemisphere screamed at her to remember her first lesson from Bruce. Any lesson. Run in a zig-zag pattern. Walkway was gone. Nowhere to run. Drop to the floor. His thugs were right there. A stomp to the head and she was a goner. Throw a batarang. The clown would shoot her before she could even unsheathe one.
He’s gonna shoot me. He’s gonna shoot me. He’s gonna shoot me! No, not again. Not again. Not again. Please, God, not again –
He turned the gun on the thug to his right. The big, burly man grunted and keeled over as a dart buried itself in his sternum. Then, Joker aimed to his left. The other thug doubled over as well. The two henchmen looked at each other, completely still for a few dreadful seconds.
Then, their mutual, agonized gurgling sliced through the silence. Their muscles writhed and bloated under their skin. Neon green lit up their bulging veins. Their backs tore over their spines, bone growths sprouting along their vertebrae.
Joker waved daintily at her before backing into a room of wooden crates-slash-presents.
The thugs – the beasts’ shoulders hunched forward, bloody saliva dripping from the enlarged incisors ripping through their inflamed gums. She thought of the police dogs she had trained with her father. How they would lift their hackles after he whistled. How they would tackle the dummies to the ground. And maul them beyond recognition.
Batgirl wouldn’t deny that she felt like a dummy for landing herself in these circumstances in the first place.
And especially after reflexively throwing her batarang at the lighter-skinned thug, who promptly constricted his enlarged bicep and shot his knuckles right into her solar plexus. She didn’t even see him charge.
She curled in on herself, arms wrapped around her midriff, trying to breathe. And failing miserably. He may as well have punched a hole through her diaphragm. And both her lungs for good measure. She tried to at least roll onto her knees. Also failed. Great, so he had melted every tendon in her limbs as well.
Get up! her left hemisphere hissed.
I’m doing my damn best! she mentally hollered in return.
She extracted the adrenaline, or as she had affectionately dubbed, adrenaline-pen from her utility belt. A weak whimper leaked out from between her lips as she slipped the needle into the fracture in her abdominal armor and sank it into her bruised ribs.
Her diaphragm inflated. Her heart seemed to beat hard enough to crack through her ribcage. Her limbs liquefied. She gasped for air between coughs that rocked her to her marrow. At least she could roll onto her knees.
She knew how Bruce would – could handle this. He would charge them right back, batarangs, fists, and feet flying. But she wasn’t Bruce.
The truth was, she would always be smaller and weaker than the average thug. Most of the time, her martial arts expertise would make up for that. But now, she wasn’t up against thugs. She was up against titans.
To take them down, she would have to get lucky multiple times. They would only have to get lucky once.
Her only viable strategy?
Hit and run.
The first titan’s knuckles scraped her cowl. She hunkered down and charged toward his legs. Her foot shot out. Her heel crunched into his knee. She aimed the blunt end of her tonfa at his temple.
Her heart hit her spine when the other titan tugged her away. The clasps of her cape clawing into her epaulets. She choked as the fabric around her collar contracted around her throat. Her feet left the floor. She flew into the wall.
The first titan’s shadow swallowed her. She crawled toward her tonfas. His fingers compressed around her ankle. Her blood vessels broke under the pressure, then the bone began to strain. Her heart pumped with panic, then even more adrenaline blasted through her circulatory system.
She twisted around and slashed her opponent’s calf open with a batarang. She managed to roll over and retrieve her tonfas before the second titan’s fist crashed into the power cell right next to her head. Shrapnel sprayed, embedding itself into the armguard she instinctively brought over her goggles. With another swipe of his mangled hands, he knocked her left club out of her grip. This time, her batarang slashed across his sclera.
She hobbled to her feet. The thugs weren’t far behind, but one of them had a limp as well, and the other couldn’t see. She had gotten lucky once.
She unleashed a flurry of batarangs upon them. Her stomach wrenched when they bounced off the titans’ massive, malformed bodies. She didn’t expect the blades to penetrate their skin, but they hadn’t even scratched them.
Bile burned in her throat when she clocked the first titan’s calf, the flesh stitching itself together, the muscle solidifying. The second titan snarled and shook his head, the pulpy remains of his damaged eyeballs plopping onto the plexiglas as new ones budded in his sockets. They advanced on her, her wasted batarangs trampled under their inflamed feet.
Her lungs seared with every inhale and shriveled with every exhale. So, she couldn’t slow them down. She could only incapacitate them temporarily, she had to save her smoke bombs for the rest of Joker’s men, and she didn’t even know if her gas capsules would work on their altered physiology. Copper trickled down from the gash over her left brow and into her mouth, sizzling in tandem with her saliva to create a rancid cocktail in her mouth.
The bruising around her ankle began to throb. Her legs buckled and her arms hung loosely at her sides. Even carrying her tonfas made her triceps ache. Her luck wore off with her adrenaline.
But as it did, her vision cleared, and the outlines of her weapons sharpened. Sharp like the edge of a batarang.
And as she raised her tonfas and aimed them at the approaching titans, she pictured the angels in the gardens. Imagined that it wasn’t her cape fluttering around her knees, but their feathery, mossy wings. Hell, she thought of the gargoyles hanging off the balconies of City Hall as well. She’d need all the supernatural intervention she could get.
She couldn’t incapacitate them…
…with the batarangs.
She threw the tonfas.
The first one struck the first titan between the eyes.
The second one met the second titan’s temple.
She dropped with them, her cape pooling around her like a halo. She slowly, stiffly shuffled over to their prostrate remains. She drew in deep, pained breaths, gradually gathering up as many batarangs as she could before they started to stir. She holstered her tonfas and clung to the wall. Tried to stand. Her knees buckled. Tried to stand again. Her knees buckled again.
She readied her grappling hook and shifted her weight onto her elbows and dragged herself back to where the walkway used to be. She pulled the trigger and let it carry her across the chasm. She only let herself let go when she felt the floor under her feet. Then her lids fell and she fell into a different kind of darkness.

“Barbara,” Bruce’s voice burst out of her earbud. “Barbara, come in.” His words wavered ever so slightly with worry. “Come on, I’ve only got a few minutes before I have to do another riddle –”
She jolted upright, then screamed when her bruised abdominal muscles seemed to tear themselves apart at the movement. She collapsed onto the cement, arms wrapped around her midriff, swallowing back sobs.
“First punch to the solar plexus, I take it?”
“Yeah,” Barbara croaked, “and I’m not taking it well.”
“No one does.” Bruce paused, his tone softer. “I can ask Alfred to put a hot pack on it if – when we get back.”
Batgirl braced herself against a column. “I destroyed the Titan production facility, but Joker escaped with enough to cause some real problems.” She cleared her throat. “They’ve been using a venom hybrid plant to create the Titan strain. The plant’s the key, and there’s only one person on Arkham Island who can help us – not that Poison Ivy will be very willing to help, but if her plants are at risk –”
“Breathe.”
She drew in a deep breath. “If her plants are at risk, she’ll listen. I have a sample of her pheromone signature on record. She’ll be somewhere in the Gardens. I’ll track her down, but first, but first –” she winced “– I could use a break. I could really, really use a break.”
“Use it,” Bruce responded sternly. A device of some sort beeped in the background. “Get some rest, and in the meantime, I’ll try to get through these riddles and get back to the island as soon as I can.”

The tendrils hanging from the overgrowth above Batgirl lingered on her shoulder, their touch seeping under her armor like the warmth of her father’s hand in her first fear-gas-induced vision.
“It’s alright, my darlings.” Isley sat at the fountain’s foot, caressing the vines that crept towards her, their slightly wilted leaves fluttering against her fingertips. “I’m here now, my poor darlings…”
The vine crawled along its mother’s arms, writhing and curling into the crook of the ecoterrorist’s elbow. It seemed to speak to her in a silent, pheromonic language that only she could fully comprehend.
“Yes, I know she’s found us –” Isley’s stare settled on Batgirl as she slowly approached them “– but I won’t let her hurt you.” With an elegant turn of her head, Isley fully faced her, a small, but vicious smile slowly spreading over her visage. “I’ll kill her first.”
As the vine lowered itself to the cobblestone and slithered into the bushes, Batgirl thought of how her mother’s fingertips would flutter against her palm before letting go of her hand, watching vigilantly as Barbara Jr. scurried off to frolic with the other children on the playground. But then, she shook her head slightly, shaking it off and steadying her stance.
“Isley –”
“Ivy,” the eco terrorist cut in with a contemptful curl of her upper lip.
“Ivy,” Batgirl quickly corrected herself, “I know Dr. Young mutated these plants to produce Venom.” She awkwardly leaned away from a stray vine prodding at the bat symbol on her chestplate.
“Yes,” Isley almost snarled in response, “and I heard it through the grapevine that you prevented the evil woman from paying the price.”
“She will pay, just with life in prison instead of her life.” Batgirl resisted the urge to let every muscle on her skeleton stiffen when Isley’s head inclined like that of a snake about to strike at a bat pup that had fallen from its nest. “Can you help me create an antidote?”
“Why should I?” Isley sneered. “Let Joker have his fun.” Her brows raised subtly and her lower lids twitched upwards in satisfaction at the thought. “I’ll enjoy watching you squirm.”
A swarm of vines seized Batgirl’s arms and legs before she could fumble for her batarang. Isley laughed lowly as the blood rushed to her head, the tendrils flipping her upside down while they wound and intertwined until her limbs numbed. She thrashed in the biological net, the small leaves plastering against, then suddenly squeezing her neck. Her fingers locked around the sinewy cords forcibly closing her windpipe. She gasped for air. Black and white dots danced before her blurred surroundings. With the last of her strength, she scratched hard at her noose, sinking her nails into the flesh.
A strangled sound of surprise sprang from her when Ivy hissed in pain, doubling over, and clutching her bicep. The plant screeched in alarm, released her, and returned to the fountain to comfort its mother.
“You’ve been in the dark for too long,” Batgirl croaked, “and every plant on this island will get the same unless you cooperate.”
Isley’s expression softened for a split second when some baby vines interlaced with her fingers, squeaking fearfully. Then, the shadow of warmth in her irises faded as it hardened into her usual hybrid of a scowl and smirk.
“There’s a plant growing deep in Arkham Island.” She straightened her posture, draping one leg over the other, and absentmindedly playing with the tendril. “Only it can counter the effects of this Titan strain.”
“Where can I find it?”
“Oh, in Killer Croc’s lair.” Her trademark smirk took over when Batgirl – like any sane person – grimaced at the notion of having to fight him. “You didn’t think it would be easy, would you?”
As Batgirl turned towards the tunnel that would lead her out of this botanical nightmare, her feet froze for a brief moment. Her head whirled around just enough to glare at Isley in her periphery. “Go back to your cell, or I’ll be after you next.”
That threat might’ve worked if it were Bruce delivering it, or if Batgirl weren’t wheezing from nearly being suffocated to death. Isley simply smiled and reclined on the algae around the fountain, twirling a tendril around her pointer finger.
“I’ll be waiting.”
She strided through the tunnel, then shuddered and picked up the pace when the overgrowth began to tug on her hair and lash at her heels.

Chapter Text

“Bruce, I need to find a way into Killer Croc’s lair.” Batgirl shook a few dead leaves off her soles. “If I remember the map correctly, it’s somewhere below Arkham Island –”
“Firstly, you are not fighting Killer Croc,” Bruce cut in. “Secondly, there’s nothing on the system about where he’s kept.”
“Firstly, I fought Clayface without you, and secondly, I also fought two titans without you.” She punted three more chattering teeth toys aside. “I found a door near the Batcave, but it’s shut tight. There’s gotta be another way in. I left Guard Cash in the Mansion. I’ll see if he can shed some light on where Croc’s kept.”
“Clearly, you were not listening, and you are still not fighting Croc.” Bruce’s fist crunched against a yelping Riddler’s nose on the other end. “You are waiting for me at the Botanical Gardens until I return.”
She deactivated the earbud and batted a few stray petals from the potted flowers dangling from the ceiling, blocking out the hooting and hollering of a gang of Joker’s henchmen on the other side of a chasm before her.
Those taunts immediately transformed into screams when she launched a gas capsule at them.

“I want her dead!” Isley shouted through the speakers. “I won’t let her hurt my babies again.”
“I can’t believe you let poor little Ivy crying in her garden.” Joker sighed dramatically over the intercom. “She looked so sad.”
Batgirl skidded to a stop, slipped on a patch of algae, and nearly landed on her bum when several leafy limbs smashed through the brick wall ahead of her, slithered across the cobblestone, and knitted together, sealing off the gate that she though would be her escape route.
Joker chattered on and on. “I gave her a little Titan. Gotta say, the results are a little different. Shall I give her another? I think she wants it.”
Batgirl dropped into an open vent and crawled through the corridor. More twigs scratched her cowl and clawed at her cape. Rubble rained down on her armour and dust coated her throat. She grimaced while she licked the grime of her teeth, spat it out, and tried to shoot her grappling hook, but a tremor sent the wire careening to the side, and her throbbing shoulder slamming into the stone. And when she emerged from the vent, she found that she had crawled full circle.
“They don’t call you Ivy for nothing,” Joker cackled, “do they, dear?” He feigned a yelp of surprise when the building quaked once more. “I was hoping for a forty-foot killer plant, but you don’t always get what you want, do you?”
Titan must’ve been having a different effect on Isley. Her plants weren’t withering; they were growing. Bright red bulbs dotted their stems. Layers and layers of leathery bark reinforced every young stalk that sprang from between the rivulets in their mossy skin. Soon, they would be out of control. They enveloped the asylum, one curled tendril resting on the clocktower’s pointed roof like a bored student’s lazy finger on the cap of their water bottle.
In the courtyard, an emancipated inmate poked and prodded at a further mutated bulb, which had circular, ebony, eye-like growths at its base and slender, yellow-grey teeth between its sickly purple petals. It released an iridescent spore similar to the ones Isley used to attack Gotham last year. The inmate shrieked as it hit him before promptly passing out.
At least, Batgirl hoped he had only passed out.
She could hope all she wanted, but she knew better.
They were deadly.

“Batgirl, I figured you’d be here about now!” Officer Cash called to her as soon as she stepped into the magenta-lit Bell Tower. “What’s the deal with the plants?”
“Bad,” she shot back curtly.
“Let me guess. Poison Ivy. She teamed up with Joker.”
“I can stop it, but –”
“There’s always a ‘but,’ isn’t there?”
“Where do you keep Killer Croc?” she asked more sharply than she thought she would, the snark in Cash’s voice hitting a nerve that she didn’t even realize had been exposed.
“That monster’s got his own special cell.” Cash instinctively clutched his tranquilising gun closer to his chest. “It’s right below the transfer room back in Intensive Treatment.” His shoulders were square, his head held high, but his pupils flicked nervously from left to right, then right to left. “Elevator goes right down to an old sewer.” A muscle in his jaw twitched. “We just drop meat down there every day or so and try to forget about him. It’s locked off. More security than the Joker. You won’t get in without the Warden’s permission. He has the codes.”
“Thanks, Cash.” She drew in a deep breath. Then, she drew circles with her knees, warming her hips up for another run to the other end of the Asylum.
“You know, a few of us could go with you.” The older, dark-skinned man’s brow creased with a hint of concern that belied his stoic expression eerily similar to that of another officer. One that happened to be her father. And fortunately, safely at City Hall.
“Don’t,” she said more softly, “and don’t go near the plants either.”

Dun du-dun dun, the intercom echoed through the eerily empty corridors. Except they weren’t empty. It tingled the tip of Batgirl’s tongue and burned along her nostrils. Sharp. Inescapable and unmistakable. Fear gas. The plastic over the ovular goggles under her cowl glitched, bands of static and distorted colors cracking the corners of her vision.
A red, yellow, and green uniform in a glass case. The deceased security guard’s clouded sclera. City Hall. A bat signal. The angels in the Botanical Gardens. Jason staring right at her. Quinzel’s fingerprints. A fallen chandelier. Her father’s pipe. Jason staring straight through her. An inverted bat signal – the face of the Scarecrow. The thrum of the Batmobile as it sped down the rain-slick streets. Her mother’s car disappeared around the corner –

“Can I keep her, sweetie? Please, please, please! I’ll feed her and walk her, I promise!” Quinzel squeaked incessantly, her bazooka slung over her shoulder.
Zsasz and Bane wheeled Barbara’s vertical cot into the asylum, Joker’s grisly, scarlet smile shrinking away as she struggled against her restraints.
“Hello, new patient!” Arnold Wesker’s voice crackled over the screen to her right. “This is Scarface. As you can see, Joker has assigned me as head of security. If you have any questions, please visit us at ‘www.ithinkimgoingcrazy…’”
“You have to listen to me!” an inmate shouted hoarsely from his cell. “It’s a mistake. I didn’t do it!”
“Keep your mouth shut!” a thug sneered while another officer called to her as they marched him away.
“Batgirl, they’re taking us out!”
“She don’t look so scary now, does she, Mr. J?” Quinzel hummed amusedly. “Not that she ever did.”
Barbara swore her windpipe sealed shut when Crane hissed to her – not through the speakers, but from her very subconscious.
“Just got to check your prisoner, dear.” He stepped into her periphery, hunched over a clipboard that he absentmindedly tapped with a long, slender, syringe-tipped finger.
“Whatever,” Quinzel sniffed, “just be quick.” Lightning flashed, temporarily whiting out the hallway. “She’s not looking so good.”
“No, she’s not.” Crane thoughtfully tilted his hooded head. “We really should feel sorry for her. She never fully got over the second Boy Wonder’s death. It left her quite insane.” She stifled a scream when he almost tenderly traced her clenched jaw with a needle-talon. “What is going on inside your head, Gordon?” He clicked his tongue disappointedly. “Ah, she’s long gone. A pitiful fate for such a bright young woman.”
“Cut me free!” another officer screamed.
“She’s all yours, Joker.” Crane nodded to the clown prince of crime, who had materialized to her right at some point.
“Oh goody.” Quinzel fiddled with the trigger. “C’mon, Mr. J. We’re ready!”
“I’ve waited a long time for this, pup.” Joker drew a pistol and anchored its muzzle between the ridges in Barbara’s abdominal armour. “Let’s start the party.” His upper lip curled like that of a rabid dog about to pounce on a starving rat. “With a bang!”
He fired.
Breathe, Barbara. Breathe! She screamed at herself, or rather tried to scream at herself. Soil slithered through her trachea, sealing off her nostrils, and swamping her bronchioles. Grains of dirt wormed their way under her fractured armour and scratched at her skin. She grasped fistfuls of it and groped through the pitch black that pressed on her chest and ribcage. Her pulse pounded in time with her shallow gasps, each inhale stinging her lungs.
And then, a sliver of light. She coughed until she spat out mud and wiped it from her lips with her arm guards. She told herself this would be just like crawling through a vent. Reach and pull. Reach. Pull. Reach. Pull. When she dragged herself out of her grave and onto the dying, yellowed grass, it vanished behind her.
Barbara stiffly turned, and then slowly trudged towards a ramp leading into a circular chamber blazing with blue electricity. A cluster of wires hung over her head. Like the “3” above Quinzel’s cell. Like the blade of a guillotine over a king’s neck.
Her stomach lurched when she almost stumbled into a spectre of a scrawny boy with short, disheveled hair, sooty skin, and dull green eyes in a rumpled red hoodie that seemed two sizes too large for him.
“Jason?” she asked raspily. “Jason, what the hell are you doing?”
A tire wrench laid on his crossed legs as he gnawed on a dead rat, its glistening guts spilling out from his chapped lips with every incoherent grumble.
“Hey, don’t do that.” She cautiously crouched beside him, tentatively touching his stained sleeve with a trembling hand. “Jason, you don’t have to eat that anymore, we’ll look after you –”
Her gloved fingers passed through him. Jason glanced at her, and for a split second, the haze over his emerald irises seemed to dissipate. But then, he sank his slimy, yellowed teeth into the rat’s flesh once more, nibbling at the bones, and lapping at its grimy fur.
Pieces of barely recognizable structures floated in the midst of the roaring storm that whirled around her. The Clock Tower’s base fused to the wings of an angel from the Botanical Gardens. A chandelier emerging from a giant gift box. Her house, but with its front door replaced by the iron bars of a cell. The handles of her Batcycle sticking out of the Courtyard’s cobblestone path.
“It’s just fear gas,” she muttered to herself as she approached the precipice of the grated island under her boots and pointed her grappling gun at another platform on the other side of the vortex. “It’s just fear gas, it’s just fear gas…”
As the hook latched onto a concrete ledge and the wire catapulted her across, the eye of the toxic tornado seemed to snag onto her cape with its pale, hollow pupil. The hook slid off. The wire loosened. She screamed. Then, she fell silent when the edge of the platform slammed into her sternum. She caught her grappling gun with one hand and fired again. Her heart slammed into the back of her spine. She rolled onto the rough surface and let her arms and legs splay over it. Let herself sink into its solidity, assuring herself that she had miraculously made it.
“What was that?” Crane’s voice cut through the howling wind, his syringed fingers curling over the blinds that flapped clumsily like a bird trying to fly away with broken wings.
And then, at long last, the words that she had been whispering to herself ever since the sadistic psychiatrist’s cursed substance had slithered into her system shredded through the fog.
It’s. Just. Fear. Gas.
And somewhere under the Master of Fear, under that Jack O’Lantern-esque burlap mask, raggedy hood, and needle nail job, was just a psychiatrist.
Barbara hunkered behind a cement chunk. Breathed in. Breathed out. Waited. And waited. And waited until Crane circled around to the opening of the platform, where an electric blue searchlight illuminated his enormous figure, exposing the skinny silhouette within.
She shot out from the shadows, drew her batarang, leapt up, and drove her knee into that skinny figure.
Batgirl shoved Crane into the wall, her blade digging into his neck’s notch, and her other forearm braced against his midsection. Before she could reach her tonfa for the knockout, his fingers flared, his needles extended, and they submerged themselves between her knuckles.
“I think –” The Jack O’Lantern burlap bag started to shift before her burning eyes “– you need a little more.”
This wasn’t fear gas.
This was his fear serum.
In other words, a concentrated dose.
“Tell me,” Crane crooned as he crawled through her subconscious, “what demons do you have left to beat? Shall we see?”
The sky rotated rapidly before it blurred into a filthy cyclone once again. Barbara recoiled from Crane, clutching at her cowl, her cold sweat fusing the fabric to her face. The island crumbled under her boots. And then, she fell.
“Are you enjoying the extra dose, little Bat?” Crane continued to call from the rift. “Oh, I won’t rush things this time.” The wind stripped the armour from her uniform as she plummeted further and further into the abyss. “I’m going to savor every moment of your terror as I slowly destroy you.”
She grasped at the bat symbol on her chest, but the Kevlar blocked her heartbeat. She couldn’t even feel the rhythm. Feel anything that would ground her during her descent. Nothing except for the convulsing ache in her chest that had accompanied her since her mother pulled out of that driveway. Carved itself deeper into her thoracic cavity every time she had to walk past that display in the Batcave.
“You’re fighting back.” Crane loomed over her and laced his syringes with her veins. “Good.” He unravelled them. “It can only weaken your resolve.”
No. The needles tore off her Kevlar vest and pried into the plates of cartilage between her vertebrae. As he pulled at them, her tendons turned to stone. No, not just any tendons. The ones in her legs. No. No! Please, you’ve proved your point!
“How much more do you think you can take?”
Please, no! No – She crashed onto another island. More bruises bloomed over her shoulder blades. It stabbed at her. It hurt her.
She could feel it.
“What’s wrong, dear child?” He clicked his tongue, the cadence like the ticking of a timer before a bomb went off.
Barbara pressed her hand to her heart. No more gloves. No more guards on her elbows and knees. The rhythm throbbed against her palm. Anchored her. The cracks in the mortar scraped against her leggings.
She looked for the source of the light gleaming off Crane’s respirator. Focused on the searchlight right under him. And just as she did when she crawled through all those vents, she dragged herself over to it. One elbow in front of the other.
“Scared?” Crane whispered into her ear.
“Yeah,” she gritted out, “but I won’t be the only one scared for much longer.”
She gripped the handles of the searchlight, pulled it upwards, and turned it right into Crane’s glowing eyes. The giant flinched from the rays as they broke through his palish skin and burst through the fissures in his skin. An explosion of blinding white enveloped them.
When Batgirl came to, she had Crane by his collar, a set of thick, iron bars the only barrier between them.
“How,” he choked out, “how are you doing this?” He struck her bat symbol with the heels of his palms, the sudden impact causing her to reflexively let go of him as he started to shout. “You’ve ingested enough toxins to drive 10 men insane. What are you?”
I’m vengeance, she almost quipped, but he had already darted away.
“Why fight it, Batgirl?” Crane scorned from a distant corridor. “You’re as crazy as the rest of us, and to prove it, I’ll flood the catacombs with enough Fear Gas to break the minds of everyone in Gotham for a hundred years!”
Batgirl staggered through another set of steel doors. If only her scanner could track voices as well as DNA. She braced a hand against a metal column to keep herself from slumping over and right into the empty elevator shaft. Her eyes trailed along the pulleys, mentally following them down to the little box where the Jack O’Lantern had caught before she could catch him.
No, she would catch him. She had a map with all of the Asylum’s shortcuts. He had bought himself five minutes at most. If she remembered correctly.
Did she remember correctly?
She pulled the map up on her wristwatch. The shortcuts were going to take much longer than she had anticipated.
Okay, so, he had bought himself fifteen minutes.
Especially now that pretty much every part of her body had been beaten black and blue. Including her brain.

Funny how it took stepping into a sewer system for Batgirl to consider incorporating a plague doctor’s beak into her cowl. And with every step, strings of slime clung to her soles. She tried not to think about how the stench that permeated her nostrils came from actual particles of human waste that had contaminated the oxygen.
Spiked vines sprawled over the scum-coated walls ahead of her, trickling down along the clay to gather around another toothed bulb. Their lime green veins illuminated the murky fluid with their bilious hue. She pinched her nose and knelt to study it further, but her hand froze a few inches away from its petal-like lips when Crane addressed her from in front of a massive, rusted fan on the other side of the putrid river.
“Too late, Batgirl!” He dangled a pouch full of fear serum over the filthy liquid. “One step closer and this goes into the water!” His syringed fingers flexed with twisted anticipation. “The cave will fill with your deepest, darkest nightmares and you will never reach your precious Venom roots.”
Batgirl slowly, painstakingly tip-toed along the slippery, muck-encrusted stretch of ground until she stood only a few feet away from him, her hands placatingly open before the bat symbol on her chest plate.
“There’s no need to do this, Crane.” She tried to speak softly, but sternly. Emphasis on tried, because she faltered when he backed even closer to the water, lengthened his spindly arm, and lowered the bag towards the liquid.
Before Crane could loosen his hold, Croc lunged out, his clawed hand breaking through the discolored spray to seize Crane by the waist. The Master of Fear released a piercing scream as the mutant raised him into the air, and then tore at the flesh of his torso. The bag of fear gas flopped into the mud, rolling to a stop at Batgirl’s boots.
Without thinking, she sent a batarang flying at Croc’s collar. The beast snapped and spat at her as the electricity coursed over his scales. He dove into the river with Crane still in his clutches, the psychiatrist’s cries quickly silenced under the writhing water.
Before Croc could resurface, Batgirl shook her head sharply to snap herself out of her shock and grappled over her own warped reflection. She tried not to pay any attention to the trails of pale pink in the froth. She ducked under a circular opening, nearly clipping a red sign with a skull drawn in white lines in her haste to put space between herself, Crane’s tortured howls, and Croc’s satisfied sniffs between crunches of bone between his teeth.
“Bruce, I’m heading into Croc’s lair to collect the plant spores Ivy spoke about,” she squeaked out, a little muffled from how tightly she pinched her nose. “He’s in some kind of old sewer network. It’s like a maze down here. But I have the schematics, so I'll be alright.”
“I told you not to go down here.”
Batgirl fixed a batarang-shaped scanner to a plastic pipe. “Bruce, I appreciate your concern, but you’re not my father, and even if you were, you of all people should know that I wouldn’t listen anyway.” She let go of her nose to give her fingers a break. Said nose promptly scrunched up and her fingers rapidly returned to their posts. “I’ve tuned the scanner to detect the spores required to make the Anti-Venom, so it should lead me straight to them.”
“What about Croc?”
She sprayed some explosive gel on the path. “Croc’s just an animal –”
“An animal four times your size,” Bruce almost shouted.
“Animals just need traps and the right bait,” she bit out. “I’ll be fine.”
“You will not be fine.”
“I’ll contact you when I’m done.” She hung up and headed down the tunnel. As her boots beat against the surprisingly solid floating platforms, she took comfort in the hollow thuds. That comfort, however, gave way to crippling dread when she realised that those sound waves would travel through the water and give her position away to Croc. Though every end of her nervous system shrieked at her to get herself out of the Asylum immediately, she wrestled her will into slowing down.
She pulled herself up and over a gate littered with ivy, instinctively taking care not to touch the plants though she had gloves on. The last thing she needed while facing down an animal four times her size was an itch that invited her to strip her own skin off.
She practically jumped out of her skin when Croc’s words filtered in through the thick, clay walls, which suddenly seemed much thinner.
“I’m hungry, Batgirl.”
She set her stare on the various vines and multicolored spores hanging from the ceiling of the chamber to her right. Her batarang glided in a graceful circle, looping around in the air, and smoothly cutting through the fibers. As she caught it, a spore fell to the wooden tiles. She squatted to pick the spores out of the fleshy sac and stuff them into the spare pockets on her utility belt. Unfortunately – which may as well have been a synonym for “as always” in a city like Gotham – it didn’t contain enough of the Anti-Venom mold. Which meant she had to look for more.

As soon as she had plucked the last of the spores from a second sac, Killer Croc’s fist busted through the piece of platform right behind her. Evidently, her slowest still wasn’t slow enough.
To hell with not moving too fast.
She started sprinting.
She shot her grappling hook at the pipes in the ceilings, her breath harsh and shallow while she rappelled across the river. Killer Croc’s tail splashed through the surface. She tucked her knees further into her chest. His scales caught on her cape, tearing off a handsome chunk of fabric.
She dropped onto the next platform. Milliseconds after she had gathered herself, Killer Croc had swum around and appeared behind another gate. His upper lip peeled back in recognition.
“Batgirl.”
The second he ripped the gate apart and charged towards her, the platform quaking, she clumsily tossed a batarang at his collar. It ricocheted off his shoulder. She stumbled again, swore under her breath, and flicked another at him. Bounced off his brow. Her third one, bless its non-existent soul, finally lodged itself into the wires wrapped around his neck. As he staggered to the side and collapsed into the river, she dashed ahead.
“I can find you, Batgirl!” The platform splintered over his spine when he shot through the stretch of wooden tiles before her, cutting off her escape. “You can’t run from me –”
“Oh, yes, I can!” She turned on her heel and ran in the other direction. Turned right. Leapt over a gate. Picked up the pace. Leapt over another gate. All the while, Croc punched through the platforms behind her. She gasped in relief when the thumping of her boots against the ground became muted. Solid ground. She was on solid ground. The exit grew nearer and nearer.
And then a rusted, circular grating closed over it.
She slowly looked over her pauldron. Croc rose from the river and prowled towards her, his tongue flicking over his teeth. Many, many rows of teeth. Teeth that were still stained from his last prey.
“My caves will be your tomb –”
And then, the curled nail of his big toe bumped the patch of explosive gel. The force of the blast knocked Batgirl into the wall, her chin cracking against the plastic pipes.
“No!” Croc’s roars faded when the floor fragmented under him and he plunged into the depths.
Batgirl’s ears rang. She groaned, shifting onto her hands and knees, and rubbing her throbbing chin. She heaved herself towards the circular grating and worked her fingers between its pointed feet. Her face contorted and her biceps burned as she channeled all her remaining might, which wasn’t much, into pushing it up. Once she had enough of a gap, she wriggled her knees under it, and pushed with her glutes.
“I will find you!” Croc bellowed from his new prison.
“Find your own way out first!” she hollered before rolling through the opening. When she righted herself, her head, arms, torso, and legs were intact, but the grating’s sharp feet had pinned her cape. She sawed herself free with a batarang and made a mental note to redesign the uniform with a retractable glider.

Batgirl had to hold onto the edge of the desk to keep herself from toppling out of her chair when Bruce hollered at her through the earbud.
“Barbara, come in!”
“I’m in, damnit!” she snapped, her fingers flying over the keys as the monitor before her blinked to life. “You’re really gonna give me hearing loss when I’m already risking my life for this mission?”
“You wouldn’t be on this mission if you didn’t –”
“I took care of Croc, and I’m close to creating a cure, but it’s been more difficult than I expected.” She scanned the spores and transmitted their images onto the Batcomputer. “The process is slow, tedious, and doesn’t produce much antidote, but –”
“You are not returning to those sewers, you hear me?”
“Wasn’t planning on it, and the chemical will definitely stop Isley. It may also reverse the Titan transformation. I need to run some more tests to be sure. I’ve set it up to make more, but I've got to get out of here and find Isley.” She glanced at the screen to her right.
<94% COMPLETE>
“The plants have already reached the Gotham River,” Bruce said sharply, “but you are staying put. I promised your father I would protect you –”
Several vines split through the ceiling, winding between the stalactites, and slithering between the chains, walkways, and waterfalls against the Batcave’s back wall. Batgirl ducked to the side seconds before the slabs of rock came crashing down where she stood moments before. Dust suffocated the chamber and stung at her eyes. Bruce’s voice barely broke through the cacophony.
“Barbara! What’s going on?”
“Well –” she coughed into her elbow “– the good news is, I’m not gonna have to find Isley.”
“Don’t tell me –”
“The bad news is, my equipment is destroyed, I have one dose –” Batgirl grit her teeth and fixed the canisters onto a spare gun’s nozzle “– and I’m not gonna have to go find her because she’s found me.”

Chapter Text

Batgirl braced herself.
She pinched her nose with her clean hand and plunged the other between the pulsing bud’s teeth, ripping out the spore encapsulated in its rotting petals. Then, it withered away with a few orbs of ugly green and yellow bioluminescence.
“Do you need me to run a simulation on the damage Ivy’s plants will do if they reach Gotham?” Bruce asked between punches to Riddler’s poor face.
“They won’t get that far,” she insisted, hating how shaky she sounded. “My antidote will stop them and Isley.”
“I’m here if you need me.”
She skidded to a stop before another mass of vines, spores, buds, and organic matter she couldn’t name (she was a computer science major, not a biologist) coating the wall. “Uh, Bruce? We have another problem.”
“What now?” Bruce punched Riddler particularly hard. “Two-Face? Some kind of giant Joker robot?”
“Unfortunately, nothing that simple.” She winced from the cuts that Croc had left on her calves. It appeared that when he nicked her cape, he had actually nicked her as well. And she hadn’t even felt it. Funny how adrenaline worked. “I’m at the Main Sewer Junction and it appears to be polluted with Titan.” Her brows knitted together. “Why? What’s he doing now?”
“I’ll look into it, and don’t try to get into his head,” Bruce grunted, Riddler’s suit rustling along the ground as he dragged him along on the other end. “That’s how he gets into yours.”
Batgirl hissed when the puddle she stepped into began to bubble. By the time she retracted her boot, it had chewed through her sturdy rubber soles and just singed her socks. “The Titan water appears to be corrosive, but it shouldn’t trouble my armor.” She scraped off the melted bits still clinging to her heel. “What have you found out?”
“I’m not sure you’re ready for this.”
“We’re well past that.”
“Joker’s pumping all the waste product from the Titan process into that chamber. It acts as a kind of natural storage tank. Once it’s full, it releases the water into the Gotham River. Normally, it’s safe, but…”
“Since when is Gotham ever normal?” She peeled the dried slime off her fingertips. “And how do I stop it?”
“I’m working on it.” Riddler’s limp body thudded loudly against the trunk of the Batmobile as Bruce tossed him in. “According to the plans you have on file, there are three control rooms, and the first is directly above you.”
“Sick, I'll shut them all down.” She leapt across a break between the two halves of a mossy stone ledge, hanging onto the thick layers of lichen for support while she scaled the wall.
“If the Titan formula reaches Gotham –”
“It won’t.”

“You do not listen to me,” Joker sneered in the distance with a slight sing-song lilt to his tone. “I said stop him, but you let her through. Try harder! Or I’ll…I’ll… I’ll hurt you. Badly.”
Batgirl pushed her shoulder into the metal gate with as much strength as she could muster without aggravating her sprain.
“And then what?” another thug interjected from the Pump Room below, deep in conversation with the other henchmen.
“He held him upside down and beat the crap out of him.” The storyteller shuddered. “The guy was a mess.”
“Did he pay up –”
Batgirl descended from the balcony and kindly introduced her knee to the closest henchman’s chin.
“She’s here!” one of the cronies shrieked.
“No shit!” his friend barked back.
“She’s making you look stupid,” Joker seethed through the speakers, “which admittedly isn’t hard to do, but that’s not why I put you down there.” Then, he started to almost screech at them and she barely stifled a snigger. “She’s trying to shut down the power. Do not let her!”
Me. Barbara Gordon. Straight-A student. The ray of sunshine to Bruce’s brooding darkness. Getting on Joker’s nerves.
The thugs before her readied their batons, likely stolen from another security guard. She adjusted her hold on her own and brought her tonfas into guard position. Then, for good measure, she lifted her index and middle finger off her right handle to beckon tauntingly at the camera in the upper corner.
Thug One raised his baton over his head. She took the brunt of the blow with her pauldron, caught his arm, and jammed her knee into his groin.
Thug Two grabbed her retracted elbow. She spun around, trapped his leg under her other arm, and cracked his collarbone with her other tonfa. Her knuckles stabbed into his ribs, his solar plexus, and then his inner thigh. She threw her weight into her back and crushed Thug One against the wall.
Thug Three leapt out from her left. She blocked one blow from his baton with her tonfa. She switched her grip, shielding herself from Thug Four’s next two attacks. She hit Thug Three in the jaw. He dropped. She struck Thug Four in the throat. He stumbled, tripped over his feet, and fell flat on his ass, kicking his legs out to scramble away from her.
Joker’s voice became increasingly panicked as she mowed through his men. “Is that clear? Do you want me to send Harley – oh, damn…she’s locked up. Do you want me to come down there?”
Thug Five let out a guttural war cry and charged at her from behind. She rotated through her hip, led with her heel, and slammed it into the side of his knee, breaking his leg. Without missing a beat, she turned to Thug Six, seized his collar, and threw him headfirst into the wall. Thug Seven wasn’t far behind him, but her tonfas wasn’t far behind either. The club crunched into his nose bridge. She danced around him while he writhed on the floor and unleashed a flurry of elbow strikes upon Thug Eight.
Thug Six grasped at her leggings. She whirled around, smacked him in the chest, and then, did the same to the space between his eyes. She kicked Thug Eight in the face, just in case, and staggered over her unconscious opponents to the power box, huffing and puffing hard enough to blow down a brick house.
She holstered her tonfa and unholstered the cryptographic sequencer, gasping for air while she waited for the wriggling line on the screen to straighten. It flashed emerald. A burst of blue lightning. Smoke curled around the metal rectangle. She stuck her middle finger up at the camera and picked herself up, activating her earbud.
“That’s pump 3 disabled,” she reported, her breath slowly steadying. “I’m going to head back up to the surface and try to lure Ivy into the Batcave.”
A long stretch of static filled the lapse in their rapport. Then, Bruce practically spluttered out, “You plan to lure a metahuman ecoterrorist into your only place of refuge on the entire island?”
“That’s only the first bullet point of my plan, and if I told you the whole thing, you’d never let me go through with it.”
Another painful pause.
“What’s the plan?”
“What’s that? You’re breaking up. Makes sense I’m in the basement. Must have a poor signal.”
“Barbara, what’s the plan?”
She shut the earbud off, shot her grappling hook at the balcony, and let it carry her towards the rusted, dirty door from where she entered the room.

“I am everywhere,” Isley coldly declared through the decaying lips of the buds littered all over the courtyard. “My babies know your every move.”
Batgirl’s shoulders stiffened as the icy water from the puddles under her boots seeped through her half-dissolved right sole, but she kept sprinting towards the Arkham East back entrance.
“You and your kind are arrogant enough to think that you can destroy us.” The circular growths on another bulb seemed to rotate in their sockets, its scarlet stare settling on her. “You will fail and we…we will become the most powerful force on the planet.”
Batgirl flinched when the bulb released several spores. They surrounded her, searing her cape, burning into her armour, and withering her cowl. When she tried to bat them away, her hands blistered in her gloves. She grit her teeth and pushed against the door with what little strength she had left, stumbling into the building.
She wriggled her fingers between the rotting lips of the first bud she spotted and tore out its entrails. As it screeched, Isley snarled and spat with it.
“You will pay, Batgirl, for hurting my babies!”
Oh God…and I thought my mother’s tendency to treat plants like my siblings was bad.
She darted to the right and shimmied into the open, tilting her head up towards a walkway that led between two towers.
Her glare flitted over to the mutated bulbs. Their bulging xylems and phylum. The pulsing – no, the painful convulsions. She thought of how the thugs’ bodies contorted and how they howled in agony after Joker shot them with Titan.
And then, she heard it. The very words that could serve as her ticket to defeating this psychopathic clown and finding her way out of this hellhole.
“When I finish with Batgirl, I’ll be coming after you, Joker!”
“Will you really,” Joker jeered in response. “Well, that’s gratitude, isn’t it? Women! You give ‘em presents, experimental chemicals, and nice costumes, and they still turn on you!”
“So close, you left out subjecting them to horrific psychological abuse,” Batgirl muttered under her breath, “and poisoning their kids…”
“Well, good luck to you, toots. I’ve got an army, a city-sized dose of Titan, and a bag of weed killer.” She could picture Joker punctuating that phrase with a sweeping, sarcastic bow. “Come and find me when you’re done with Bat-brain. It’ll be fun. You can bring the wine, I’ll make the salad.”
With that, the speakers fell dead silent.
Batgirl ran a few mental simulations. Joker had tortured and killed Batgirl’s younger brother. Joker had tortured and metaphorically killed the only psychiatrist that Isley liked, if Batgirl correctly recalled the reports that Quinzel had written on Isley’s misanthropy. Joker had crippled Batgirl’s father. Joker had also crippled Isley’s children. In conclusion, she and Isley had excellent reason to team up – temporarily, of course – and take Joker down.
So, he had an army.
But what if she had Mother Nature?

“So, you’re here at last,” Isley mused in a register that managed to somehow be coy and mocking at the same time. “Do you like what I’ve done with the place? My babies are growing, Batgirl. Come and see.”
Batgirl slid under a low-hanging barrier of swollen, inflamed branches and orange leaves, finding herself in a flooded corridor framed by intricate metal archways miserably mimicking a canopy. Across the pool, another bloated bulb sat beneath a vigilant bunch of vines dotted with glowing mushrooms.
“Are you ready for me? Do you think you can handle me?” A sinewy limb shot out of the dark, damp tunnel behind the bulb. “I’m waiting in here.” It swayed seductively, its tip moving in a manner that seemed to teasingly motion for Batgirl to approach. “Come to me!”
She released her line launcher. She held on tightly while the wire brought her over the water and into the musky corridor. Her eyes widened when the wire retracted abruptly, almost slamming her face-first into the wall. She lashed out with her leg at the last second to push the surface away from her. As the wire shrank into the line launcher’s muzzle, she sprinted up a stairwell and turned into a section swamped with strange, neon pink flowers.
“Are you scared, Batgirl?” Isley hissed from up ahead. “You should be. You’re only a girl.”
Batgirl turned right. Then, left. Another left. Then two more rights. Her scanner locked on the sinewy limb as it slithered off each time she thought she might reach it. Then, her feet froze to the tiles.
Two catatonic security guards waited between some long abandoned benches, their sclera stained a fierce lime green. Even though their mouths were sealed in tight lines, Isley seemed to speak through their pores.
“I’ve got myself a little security, Batgirl,” Isley drawled, “and if anything happens to me, they die.”
Before the security guards could charge, Batgirl brought out her line launcher in one hand and a gas capsule in the other. As soon as she tossed the capsule at them, she fixed her gaze on the sinewy limb on the other side of the concrete canyon to her left, pinched her nose, and zip-lined across it, her knuckles pale around the handle.
No one else can die tonight, she told herself, her chest aching at the thought of the guard that Joker kicked into another pool. No one else dies tonight.
She landed in a moss-suffocated chamber and lowered herself to the level of another vine nest. She peered over her shoulder as she readied her first dose of Anti-Venom and prepared to insert it into its veins.
Then, as she had suspected, Mother Nature found her.
“I won’t let you destroy it, Batgirl,” Isley said sternly, but softly, as if she were scolding a child.
“I told you to go back to your cell.”
“I was a fool.” Isley’s slender shadow loomed over her as she circled the younger woman. “I thought the plants were in pain –” With a flick of her wrist, an army of tendrils broke through the floorboards, wrapped themselves around her legs, and lifted her up, her arms spread like Christ on the cross “– Now I realize they were evolving, growing stronger…”
A massive bulb about a hundred times larger than any of its siblings that Batgirl had seen around the compound – large enough to swallow her whole emerged from the wrecked ground, its petals flared, its fangs dripping with acidic nectar. Isley’s expression unfurled as well into a vicious hybrid between a smile and a sneer. “...and now, we’ll grow together!”
The tendrils tightened around Isley’s throat and catapulted her into the flower’s maw. When the petals opened once more, a translucent eye with a slitted pupil leered at Batgirl from within its filaments.
She knew what Bruce would do in these circumstances. Try to pierce her pupil with a batarang. Try to spray it with explosive gel. Hit her where it hurts.
If Isley wouldn’t listen to him and go back to that cell, he would force her into that cell.
But Bruce wouldn’t have taken her under his wing if he didn’t want her to be better. She couldn’t just be another dark night. She had to be…she had to be…
For a split second, she was sixteen years old, riding her Batcycle for the first time, tearing down the streets of Gotham and into an alleyway.
Jason shivered in his uniform, shielding his head with his elbows. A group of gangsters cackled at him as they closed in on his scrawny, curled form.
Her Batcycle’s engine roared behind them. The color drained from their faces. She rammed into their leader. He flew into the wall. The others yelped like wounded dogs and fled the scene. As she dismounted from her vehicle and offered Jason a hand, he flashed a huge gap-toothed grin at her.
“Some Boy Wonder you are,” she cracked, throwing his arm over her shoulder. “Your codename should be Damsel-in-distress, not Robin.”
“Ha-ha, very funny, but you aren’t the only one with jokes.” Jason lightly punched her in the bicep. “Guess that would make you my knight-in-shining-armor.”
Batgirl blinked and he was gone. She didn’t know why it still shocked her. He had been gone for years now.
“Gotham will be mine.” The flower’s roots coiled in anticipation, waiting for her first attack, the acidic nectar dripping onto the tiles and bubbling on the cement, ready to devour its next meal. “Do you hear me? My plants and I will tear your precious Gotham to shreds.”
Batgirl steadied her stance. Drew in a few deep breaths. She had failed to be Jason’s knight-in-shining-armor, but now she had a chance to not fail Bruce. Her father. Her cesspool of a city.
She stared right at the flower. Then, she unclasped the nozzles containing the antidote from her utility belt and looked on calmly as they fell at her feet. For good measure, she raised her hands over her head.
The flower’s anthers stood on end and Isley huffed incredulously. “You’re even more of a fool than most of the men I’ve devoured.”
“You’ve got some great threats going, really, and you’re right –” Batgirl shrugged and sighed “– I am just a girl. I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I shouldn’t even be here, but I took Joker’s bait. I let him lead me right into this trap, and now, well…I’m in deep shit, which is appropriate, since I’m about to be fertilizer for your fibrous friends.”
The flower’s slitted pupil narrowed even more in suspicion. “If you want me to feel sorry for you, I’m sorry to inform you that your efforts have been wasted, which is fitting, given how wasteful your kind has always been.” The filaments twitched in mild amusement. “You’d have better luck with Quinzel.” The filaments fluttered. “At least she also has a savior complex.”
Then, the flower’s vines snaked over the tiles and swathed Batgirl’s torso, forming a mesh over her eyes. Batgirl grimaced but leaned in towards the harsh sound of Isley’s laughter.
“Says the woman who routinely declares that all plant life is her children.” Her grimace became a grin. “Tell me, if you love them so much, why are you listening to your ego instead of them –” she gasped when the vines constricted with enough force to nearly crush her ribcage.
“Says the human.”
“Joker’s human, too,” Batgirl croaked, “and yet, you’re telling me you trust him more than what your babies’ pheromones are telling you?”
The vines interlocked over Batgirl’s mouth. The vines tugged her towards the eye of the flower. Isley tilted her head at her from behind the ridged, orange sclera, her nose wrinkled in barely restrained revulsion. Then, her stare shifted to the spore that Batgirl had retrieved from a bulb clenched in her fist.
“What is that in your hand?” Isley’s vines wound even tighter. “What are you playing at?”
Batgirl opened her hand. She didn’t remember much from biology, but she remembered her mother’s fretting over the plants that she kept. Or rather, the plants that she had failed to raise. And this spore had all the symptoms of impending death. Discoloration. Necrotic spotting. Withering roots.
“No…” Isley paled at the sight and the limbs around Batgirl’s limbs loosened in an instant. “Oh no, no, no, my baby. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, my baby…”
“You should’ve been asking what Joker was playing at.” Batgirl cradled the spore in her palm. “What did he tell you, huh? That the Titan formula had more nutrients that would enhance your plants’ poisonous properties? You of all people should be aware of what happens when you give a plant too many nutrients.”
Isley’s stare hardened as she tenderly pried the spore from Batgirl’s palm with another vine. “I’ll kill him right after I kill you.”
“But then who will cure your children?”
“I’ll only say this once again before shoving you down my esophagus.” The tendons around Isley’s throat flexed as she swallowed uneasily, though to her credit, her voice stayed as steady and venomous as ever. The slitted pupil slid towards the discarded nozzle of the antidote. “What are you playing at?”

Chapter Text

The pointed ears of Batgirl’s cape and cowl whipped in the wind with her rust-red hair as she looked over the rest of the asylum from the rooftop of the Arkham North building, the illumination of the toxic green and dark purple fireworks like broken halos against the misty skies. She ran her fingers over each pocket of her utility belt, mentally taking inventory of every tool she had in her arsenal. Batarangs, low. Explosive gel, smoke bombs, adrenaline needle, and gas capsules, low. Five doses of Anti-Venom, including the one she had promised to someone else. So, only four. Low.
Then, the loudspeakers around her crackled to life.
“Batgirl! I know it’s been a long, hard night, but good news. The party is about to start! We’ve got something for everyone! Music, dancing, chemicals that create monsters. You don’t want to miss it.” The clown prince of crime’s low drawl transformed into a sharp snarl. “So, get your ass over to the Cell Block, or you’ll miss your final surprise.”
She swooped out of the shadows and glided down into the courtyard. She whirled to the right when one of the loose inmates from the Green Mile charged down the cobblestone path, arms wide, his decaying teeth bared in a demented smile. She promptly swept his foot and drove her fist into his jaw as soon as he had sprawled onto the rain-dampened grass. She had bigger fish to fry.
She marched towards the copper gates that would lead her into the Visitor Centre. Into her second-last destination of the night. If she survived what Joker had in store for her, that was. If not, it would be her last destination. Her scanner caught six hostiles on her radar. One held a sign messily scrawled over with the words MONSTER SALE.
Strangely enough, the thug with the clipboard didn’t address her in a particularly hostile manner.
“Guest list only!” he announced with a surprising degree of professionalism. “If your name’s not on the list, you ain’t going in.” He glanced at her. “Let’s see. A, no, that’s not right. B…B, Bane…Ah! Here it is, Batgirl.” He dipped his head and gestured grandly towards the entrance with his free arm. Then, his bushy brows shot upwards, he fixed his gaze on her, and a grin spread over his greyish visage. “Hey! Looks like you’re the guest of honor.” He looked over at his buddies. “Give her a big welcome, guys!”
The others hooted, hollered, and whistled as she seized the handle and walked right into what she was sure would be the worst trap of the night. And that was saying something, because this night was the second-worst night of her life.
The first being the night they buried the second Boy Wonder.
She stared straight ahead, doing her damn best to ignore the clapping and cheering of the other thugs – some wearing conical birthday hats, which she would’ve allowed herself to chuckle at if she weren’t so fed up –in the corridor that brought her to a second set of gates, these ones steel.
At the very end of the visitor room, a mannequin decked out in a copy of the Joker’s suit. It had a cubical, yellow-green TV with crooked antennae instead of a head. She held her breath, waiting among the wooden chairs and glass screens that separated the inmates from whoever was also insane enough to try and talk some sense into them.
“Are you excited, Bats?” Joker’s face burst onto the screen in a flash of static. “I mean, we’ve been building up to this point all night.” His jaundiced eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you’ve not been looking forward to it.”
“I know I have,” she murmured as he shouted it at the same time.
“Surprise!” With his trademark theatrical flourish, he lifted the TV off his head, and her breath hitched. It wasn’t a mannequin, after all. It was him. It was really him. Jason’t killer. Right behind the glass. She could take the broom to her right and break through the glass and it would be easy. It would be so easy to –
He jumped out of his chair and turned towards the TV, cheerily chatting with his own recording. “Everyone always said I should be in television.” He turned the TV, and himself, towards her. “You don’t want to miss this. Really. It’ll be a blast.” He set the TV on the chair and hunched over to perform a drum roll between its antennae. “10…9…8 –” he lost patience and rattled off the rest in rapid succession “–7, 6, 5, 4…”
It’ll be a blast.
Only then, did it hit her. She scrambled to get out of the impending explosion’s range, but the corridor caged her in.
“...3…2…1!”
Smoke. Fire. Her eardrums burst. White flooded her vision. The inside of her skull screeched like a distorted police siren. The world blurred and became monochrome. She fumbled for something, anything solid with her trembling hands. By the time she set her eyes on the chamber where Joker had been only seconds ago, the television no longer occupied the chair. She stumbled blindly into another hallway. Then, into a tunnel.
When the color drained into her periphery and the space around her cleared, she discovered that she had staggered into a lightless room.
And in the middle of the debris, Joker reclined on a makeshift throne of rubble, cradling Arnold Wesker’s Scarface puppet on his lap.
“Why didn’t you stop Batgirl?” he scolded.
Someone’s hot breath billowed against the nape of her neck. She backfisted the thug before he could lay a single, grimy finger on her shoulder.
“Me?” Joker squeaked to himself as he parted the puppet’s painted lips. “It was your plan, you goofy clown!”
She threw a second thug over her knee and backfisted the third, her walk towards the throne unbroken. Joker clicked his tongue disapprovingly and shook his head at his newest toy, already bored of it like a spoiled toddler.
“Ahh, I’m sending you back to Ventriloquist where you belong!”
He tossed the puppet aside, where it clattered to the concrete at the toes of Batgirl’s boots.
She flinched when another Titan emerged from the dark spot beside Joker’s throne. Her heart sank into her stomach when she recognized the facial structure under the ridges across the chained, dark-skinned subject’s scalp. Then, she couldn’t deny it any longer when she read the name tag on its stretched-out Kevlar vest and police uniform.
Cash.
“You had to spoil everything, didn’t you?” Joker spat at her as he paced behind the barbed-wire balcony of his trash tower. “Beating up Bane, feeding Scarecrow to Croc –” He flopped onto his throne, half-lunged out of it, and then slouched in it again “– slapping around Harley – my hobby, by the way – and ruining all my lovely Venom plants.”
“It’s over, Joker,” Batgirl seethed out.
“It’s over?” He beamed at her. “Why, my dear delusional wannabe Dark Knight, it hasn’t even begun!”
He wrapped his fingers around a dirty lever and cranked it back.
Cash’s collar clanked against the ground. His chains coiled at his bare feet soon after.
Another Titan – North, it seemed – lumbered in beside him, followed by four other thugs, which were, thankfully, not mutated.
She thought of Dorrance screaming in anguish as the Titan coursed through his veins for the first time. Crane’s howls as Croc fed on his flesh. Quinzel sobbing behind the bars of her cell. The horror in Isley’s eyes as she saw her baby dying right in front of her. The mascara staining Young’s cheeks as she spoke about the emails Joker had sent her. This wasn’t just about Jason anymore.
Batgirl cracked her knuckles, craning her neck to yell at the clown prince. “You said it yourself, Joker – let’s get this party started!”
She elbowed the first thug in the gut, threw her weight forward, and sprung off her hands, catapulting herself over the charging second thug. Once she landed on her feet, she spun around on the balls of her feet. She drove her knuckles into the first thug’s solar plexus, and then his throat. Then, she rotated through her hip and swung her boot into the second thug’s chin.
She dodged a cross from the third thug, ducked a crescent kick from the fourth thug. She danced around them, watching what remained of Cash and North in the corners of her vision. She seized the third thug’s shoulders and used him as leverage to vault herself above him and his partner. As she rolled over their backs, she unclasped a gas capsule from her utility belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it at their feet.
As the third and fourth thug keeled over, the mutated security guards roared at the strange substance irritating their eyes, swiping wildly with their swollen hands, and almost stomping on the recovering first and second thugs.
She landed three more kicks. One to the first thug’s ribs. One to the third thug’s inner knee. And last, but certainly not the least, one to the fourth thug’s groin. She caught Cash barreling towards her.
When she stepped to the side, she stepped right into North’s line of fire. Or line of fist, she supposed. His fist collided with the Kevlar wrapped around her midsection. Her body folded at the point of contact.
Her spine slammed into the floor. The first thug grabbed her leg. She twisted around at her waist and trapped his head in the crook of her other knee. Then, she brought both her legs in and butted him between the eyes. His grip on her leg slackened. She wriggled away a split second before North could smash her skull in with his heel.
Cash snatched her up by her cape. He roared at her, strings of saliva trembling between his teeth. She recoiled. This time, her spine slammed into the wall. She dropped in front of the fourth thug.
When he dug his nails into her collar and lifted her off the ground, she struck him in the temple with a hook. They both dropped in front of Cash. She shoved the fourth thug off her, leapt to her feet, and unsheathed her tonfa.
“Sorry, officer,” she huffed before rapidly pummeling him in the shins. She unclasped her last capsule, pulled the pin, and covered her face with her cape. Which had been damaged so badly that it could be considered more of a half-cape.
This time, when she caught North in her periphery, she jumped away from both of them. She sprinted forward, coiled her legs, pushed through her soles, and leapt onto North’s hunched back, holding onto the fleshy growths tearing through his uniform. With a roar of her own, she wrestled him right into the rampaging Cash. Their thick skulls crashed together. She let go of North, rolled on her shoulder, and came up on one knee as they both slumped to the floor with the unconscious thugs.
“Nicely done, Bats.” Joker’s silhouette, watered down by the sweat dripping off her lashes and into her eyes, offered her a few muted, slow, sarcastic claps. “You deserve a prize!” His neon green glare glinted. “Your old pal, Commissioner Gordon!” He hit a button under his armrest.
A hatch in the ceiling popped open. Then, an older man fell from a thick cable that promptly snapped taut, suspending him just out of Batgirl’s reach.
This could not be happening. This should not have happened. He should’ve been at City Hall, safely out of the psychotic clown’s reach. If the clown could reach him, he could reach City Hall. Which meant he could reach all of Gotham.
Which meant all her efforts were for naught.
“Say,” Joker droned, “he looks all run-down. Let’s pep him up!” He yanked a Venom gun out of his holster and pointed it at the Commissioner.
At her father.
A flash flood of her fragmented memories filled her mind. Scissors slicing through a newspaper. A knock at the door. Her father setting his scrapbook down. Her father getting up off the couch. The screech of the hinges. A pale finger on the trigger. Him leaping in front of her without hesitation. Blood bubbling from the bullet under her father’s knee. The bullet he had taken for her.
Now, when Joker pulled the trigger again, she didn’t hesitate to leap in front of him either.
The needle embedded itself in the center of the bat symbol on her chestplate. She ripped it out of her pectoral as soon as possible, but her blood had already begun to boil.
“Barbara!” her father bellowed, thrashing in his harness.
Her heartbeat hitched.
Not Batgirl. Not Bats. Not pup. Barbara. Her mother’s name. Her name. How long had he known? Since the first time she put on her costume and snuck out of her bedroom window? How many years had he pretended, played the part, letting her do what she felt she needed to do even though he’d already lost his wife and his son? How could she have forgotten that although he wasn’t the world’s greatest detective, he was a detective, too? She would’ve laughed if every muscle and tendon on her skeleton weren’t splitting at the seams.
“Dad,” she choked out, “get away.”
“Ooh, here we go!” Joker squirmed excitedly in his seat. “We’re going to have some fun now, kiddies!”
If she were Bruce, she would have the strength to resist the change.
But she wasn’t Bruce.
“That’s right, give in.” Joker’s shadow swallowed Barbara. Then, he kicked her in the stomach. A strangled sound leaked out from between her lips as the Venom spread faster, carving into her bronchioles. “And I thought teenagers were more rebellious. Well, you learn something new every day!” He whipped a feather out of his breast pocket and tickled under her nose. Then, when she didn’t react, he immediately tossed the feather away.
“Oh, you just had to ruin my big night!” he whined while he paced around the chamber, fists clenched at his sides. “Months of planning down the crapper!” His garish grin contorted into a childish scowl. “I just wanted to bring down his grim facade and for once let him see the world as I see it, giggling in a corner and bleeding. But you’ve denied me even that.” He flipped the gun around in his hand and jabbed the muzzle into the vein under his chin. “I have nothing to live for!”
He pulled the trigger and fell to the floor, arms and legs sprawled out like one of those starfish Barbara had to dissect in high school.
He gasped like a fish out of water.
When his eyes opened, lime green lightning streaked his whites.

Chapter Text

Helicopters circled the compound, rotors thrumming, searchlights swamping the scene of countless crimes.
“Arkham Asylum remains under lockdown, its staff at the mercy of the rampaging inmates. Just ten minutes ago, we received this taped message.”
“Greetings, Gotham, Joker here. Arkham is mine. Soon, I’ll unleash madness untold onto the streets of Gotham. But first, direct your eyes to the rooftops and witness the final destruction of your beloved Batgirl!”
“We’ve been circling the tower since – Wait! There! Joker is making his move!” The camera zoomed in on a grated walkway engulfed in flames.
Joker crawled into the frame. His green hair had crystalized into a tumbleweed-like horn on his head. His skin peeled off his torso, exposing slabs of his angry red intercostal muscles. Spikes jutted out from his bumpy forearms and bony elbows. His vertebrae had sliced through his back and formed a ridge that could rival that of a Spinosaurus. All that remained of him was that garish grin, trapped between his inflamed, spongy lips.
Barbara stirred slightly in his enlarged hand at the hum of the helicopter hovering over them. Her lids fluttered, then she flinched from the blinding light stabbing through the narrow slits between her lashes.
“Showtime, Batgirl!” Joker lifted her into the air. “Let’s give the tubes something to talk about!” His fingers clenched tighter around her armour and her breath stuck in her windpipe. Then, he tossed her to the rooftop arena, stifling an agonized groan when her bad shoulder slammed into the steel.
As she struggled to sit up, her vision slowly sharpened. She laid limp in an octagonal ring enclosed by barbed wire. It took all her willpower not to recoil from the painted portrait of Joker under her boots, only half-concealed by her ripped cape. She shifted onto her side, her blood burning, the Venom still pulsing through her system.
“Two freaks in a fight to the death!” Joker declared, the shadows of his spine slicing through the searchlights, a few giant gift boxes flanking him. He leaped into the pit. The wooden planks rocked upon impact. Before Barbara could find her footing, his foot crunched against her chin. A tornado of stars swarmed through the pitch black sky. Joker bathed in the illumination of the helicopters, arms spread wide, green eyes gleaming. “And for one night only –” he held up his pointer finger “– please welcome our special guest referee…” He motioned towards a frail figure in an electric chair.
Her father screamed as electric blue currents ran over his harness, convulsing uncontrollably in his seat. A few more shocks and he would be dead. Before she could even cry out to him, Joker had her in his clutches once more.
“So…come on! Change! Get crazy!” He squeezed and her skeleton strained under the pressure. “You’re a smart kid, you know it’s the only way to beat me!” He drew her closer, his nose wrinkling, the corners of his eyes crinkling in sadistic satisfaction as he hid this last part from the cameras. “You know you want to.”
“Not…the only…way…” she seethed out before unsheathing the antidote gun from her utility belt and sinking the needle into his bicep.
Joker howled and threw her aside. Sparks burst from the barriers as he crashed into them. As he dropped to his knees and flailed on his own drawing of his face, the howls mutated into piercing peals of laughter.
“You, you wasted the antidote on me?” he gurgled, foaming at the mouth. “Now that’s funny!” He gasped for air and dug his yellowed nails into the gaps between the planks. “Hysterical! But you still spoiled my fun! And for that, I’ll paint Arkham red with your blood.” He rose from the floor and loaded another dose of Venom into his gun while another group of his thugs gathered by the barbed balcony to cheer him on. “Now, let’s get ready to tango!”
“I’ll rip you apart for all of Gotham to see!” As he started to transform, Barbara rolled away from his blows, her muscles scalding, cold sweat still streaming from her pores, from the effort to fight the Venom in her veins. He roared in frustration as he swiped clumsily at her before his lime green irises lit up.
“Excuse me, Bats!” He climbed onto the balcony and kicked a few gift boxes off the edge before nodding to his henchmen. “In you go, boys. I’ve softened her up for you.”
Softened would be an understatement. Every bit of tendon, cartilage, and flesh under her skin seemed to have decayed, decomposed, and liquefied. The meager twists of her waist that she had performed to distract the clown had taken quite the toll on her. Enough of a toll, in fact, that she didn’t even have the energy to defend herself from the thugs with which she should’ve wiped Joker’s hideous, chalky caricature.
“Here it comes.” Joker cackled as his men relentlessly rained punches and kicks to her already bruised and battered body, as she could only tuck her knees into her chest and shield her head with her elbows. They goaded each other on and cooed at her sarcastically, tugging at her hair, trampling her cape, and groping at her cowl.
“You okay, Batgirl?”
“Do it again!”
“Gonna smash you into pieces!”
Another thug untied the bow of a gift box. A large chattering teeth toy sprung out and scurried around them, snapping at Barbara’s boots and painfully pinching at her leggings.
Joker leaned against the arm of Commissioner Gordon’s electric chair. “So, Mr. Referee, how was that round for you?”
Her father mumbled under his breath.
“What? Speak up!” Joker yanked him forward by the nape of his neck and mockingly leaned in.
Her father spat a loogie right into his face. Joker yelped like a wounded dog, wiped it off with a flick of his wrist, and slammed his thumb down on a remote. The chair zapped loudly. Her father screamed louder. The thugs hit her even harder as she grasped for her grappling hook. Joker’s jeers overshadowed it all.
“Oww, that’s gotta hurt!” He flashed a winning smile at another approaching helicopter. “Hey, is that Jack Ryder’s chopper I see?” He began to posture, pose, and parade himself in front of it. “People of Gotham! Enjoy your evening. It will be your last! When I am done here, I will march on Gotham, flanked by an army of brutal monsters. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”
She tried to wrap her fingers around her grappling hook – at times like these, she wondered whether she could invent a hook that would help her grapple with the blood of the Boy Wonder on her keyboard – but before she could pull it to herself, one thug jammed his heel into her knuckles, crushing her knuckles, and punting her weapon away. She grabbed a tonfa with her good hand, but another thug tugged it from her trembling fingers. Two more thugs clutched her legs and lugged them out until they were straight. The thug with the tonfa pounded the edge into his palm as he approached her.
Joker faked a yawn. “You bore me, Bats. I think that was my round –” he moved his thumb over the button on his remote again and beamed at the barely-conscious Commissioner “– don’t you, old man?”
The thug brought the tonfa down on her knees. Her vision blurred and her bones fractured more and more after each blow. Her father jolted awake, a tortured, hoarse sound the only sign of life to escape from his throat.
“Hello!” Joker called. “You in the copter!” He waved at it and flexed his gruesome arms. “Are you getting my good side? You better!” Then, he craned his neck to taunt her. “If I can take whatever Batman throws at me, what makes you think I can’t take whatever you’ve got? He never lets me win, but because you stole his invitation, I finally will!”
Then, Barbara spotted a small plant creeping through the cracks in Joker’s portrait, and the coppery taste of her own blood on her tongue seemed to sweeten.
“Jack Ryder,” Joker continued to croon at the helicopter, “Can you hear me? I’ve got another message for all my adoring fans in Gotham. Batgirl, like the Boy Wonder before her, is gone.” He glanced at her from over his scaled shoulder. “It’s a shame, I know, but don’t worry. You should run. I’m coming for you next –”
Massive flowering vines, no longer blistered and discolored, but glossy and a vibrant verdant shade, shattered through the octagon and enveloped Joker in their sinewy grasp. Firm, shiny white roots burrowed into his shoulder blades and broke through his ribs. The triumphant hoots of the henchmen caging her morphed into horrified shrieks and desperate pleas for help.

Three hours ago…

“I’ll only say this once again before shoving you down my esophagus.” The tendons around Isley’s throat flexed as she swallowed uneasily, though to her credit, her voice stayed as steady and venomous as ever. The slitted pupil slid towards the discarded nozzle of the antidote. “What are you playing at?”
“I’m not playing, Isley –”
“Ivy.”
“I’m not playing, Ivy.” The muscles in Batgirl’s jaw twitched. “He’s killing your babies, just like he killed my baby brother – the Boy Wonder.” She inhaled deeply through her nostrils in an attempt to stop the tears from beading in her waterline. “I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. I’m just asking you to help me hurt that clown as badly as he’s hurt the ones I love, as he’s hurting the ones you love.”
“And you’ll cure my children?”
“As long as you don’t let your children carve into Gotham.” Batgirl inclined her head forward, her jaw set. “It’s a fucking cesspool of a city, but it’s still my city, and if you value the lives of your children…”
Isley leaned towards the curved wall of her ocular cockpit, the flower’s sepals waving gently while she scrutinized Batgirl’s violet gaze for even the slightest sign of deception. And in doing so, she forgot to conceal the flicker of vulnerability in her own irises. Then, it disappeared and the corner of her mouth curled into her usual, smug smile again. A few vines intertwined around the handle of the antidote, lifting it off the floor, and pressing it into Batgirl’s palm before setting her on the ground.
“So, since we’re working together for now, have you and Quinzel ever…?” Batgirl smiled nervously as she made a V with her index and middle finger and placed it over her chin.
The flower flared and Isley’s eyes flashed. “What was it you said about being fertilizer for my fibrous friends?”
“Nevermind, nevermind.”

Three hours later…

A massive bulb about a hundred times larger than any of its siblings that Batgirl had seen around the compound – large enough to swallow several thugs whole emerged from the wrecked ground, its petals flared, its fangs dripping with acidic nectar. And Isley did just that, her expression unfurled into that trademark vicious hybrid between a smile and a sneer.
“I told you I’d come after you.”
More vines snaked over the tiles, swathed Joker’s torso, and wrenched the Venom gun out of his hand.
“Oww, get off me!” The clown prince of crime writhed and wailed in anguish, his mutated muscles rippling painfully and ripping through his skin as he struggled to finish his second transformation while in Isley’s inhumanly mighty embrace.
A stray tendril tightened around his throat. Acidic nectar dripped from her anthers and into Joker’s big mouth.
“When I get out of this, I’m going to rip your pretty head off, so hit me with your best shot, Isley –” His wails melted into weak gurgles as the substance dissolved through his tongue.
The vines tugged him towards the eye of the flower. Isley tilted her head at Joker from behind the ridged, orange sclera, showing off a garish grin of her own.
Barbara’s limp legs scraped against the ground as she dragged herself over to the electric chair. Her good hand flopped onto the armrest. With the last of her strength, she contracted her bicep, and pulled herself up enough to check her father’s heartbeat. As she did, she thought of the security guard, begging for his life one moment and then gazing at her with empty eyes the next.
“I’m so sorry, dad,” she mouthed, her voice stuck in her throat. She pressed her fingertips harder into the soft spot under his stubbled jaw. “Please, I’m sorry, don’t leave me. She…she…”
…she already left us, I can’t take it if you leave me, too.
It pulsed.
A set of warm, sturdy arms cradled her and curled around her legs, the antidote-infused plant juices seeping through the fabric and soothing the flames engulfing her knees. A split second before she passed out, as she turned towards the flower looming over her unconscious, but living father, she thought she recognized the woman. And recognized her soft smile.
Not her mother, but a mother nonetheless.

Chapter Text

“We’re fine, Bruce,” her biological father assured her unofficial adoptive father from over the police station phone. “The GCPD finally has control over the asylum.” He slumped into the chair beside the cot, rubbing his temple at the high-pitched beeping of the heart monitor. “Doctors are treating the injured, but it looks like it’ll take some time.”
Barbara blinked and rubbed her eyes. She sniffed, then her nose scrunched up at the stale smell of the hospital. The cot creaked as she lifted her blanket with her good hand and winced at the sight of the casts around her legs.
Her father jumped in his seat, stifled a curse, and motioned for her to lie back down. She just snatched the phone from him, too tired to care about the fact that she was croaking into it more than she was speaking.
“Are all the criminals in custody?”
“Yes, including Isley.” She swore she could hear the slight smile in Bruce’s voice. “Nothing a set of brass knuckles laced with explosive gel couldn’t handle.”
“And the Venom-enhanced inmates?”
“They’re returning to normal, though for some –” she swore she could hear his smile fade “– the process can be quite painful.”
She pictured Joker seething in a bright orange straitjacket with white stripes, strapped to that mobile medical restraint despite all his planning, a muzzle firmly fixed over his acid-mauled mouth. Maybe that was a punishment more fitting than death for him. “How’s Riddler?”
“He’ll survive.”
She huffed out a laugh. “So, you beat the shit out of him.” She winced at the dull throb in her legs. “Been there, done that. Almost feel sorry for the guy.” She rolled her eyes at the thought of that raging narcissist unleashing another one of his smug, smarmy monologues through her earpiece. “Almost.”
“Shame about your Batcycle,” Bruce remarked, bringing her back to reality. “You want a new ride? I’ll handle the medical bills, too.”
“Actually, can you bring me my Batlaptop prototype?” She cleared her throat, nodding gratefully to her father as he passed her a paper cup of water. “I have some ideas for how to update the asylum’s security system.”
“As soon as you’re recovered.”
Her father glared sternly at her and mouthed, “As long as it’s not on-site.”
She shot him a thumbs up. Her good thumb, to be specific.
“Get some rest, you deserve it.” With that, Bruce hung up.
“All units, all units,” a voice blared through the walkie-talkie on her father’s hip, “the Second National Bank was just robbed by Harvey Dent, AKA Two-Face. Two officers down. The suspect is fleeing in the patrol car…”
Her father’s face fell. He shut off the device and tentatively placed a light hand on her shoulder. She grimaced. He switched it to her good shoulder.
“I gotta take this –” he squeezed firmly, the heat from his hand melting the tension in her stiff muscles “– but I’ll take a break right afterwards.” He drew in a deep breath. “I’m…I’m sorry.”
Somehow, she had the sense that having to answer the call of duty wasn’t all he was apologizing for.
“Hey, I have no right to judge.” She brushed her good thumb over his knuckles. “I’m the one sneaking out of my bedroom window to fight crime –”
Her father threw his arms around her. Her breath hitched. Then, she rested her chin in the crook of his shoulder and pressed her cheek into the side of his neck, relishing the sensation of his palm moving in slow, soothing circles over her bruised upper back.
“I promise,” he repeated firmly.
Then, he reluctantly let go, hobbled out of his chair, and readied his cane. As he walked out of the room, barking into his walkie-talkie, Barbara noticed that he seemed to be leaning on it less.
As she stared straight through the plain, white wall before her, it became one of bricks. One that a familiar figure leaned against.
“Letting Isley loose?” Jason teased, emerald eyes sparkling behind his black domino mask, his yellow cape billowing in the wind. “Some Batgirl you are.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She forced a chuckle. “You’ll always be my damsel-in-distress.” She swallowed the lump in her esophagus with her first gulp of water. She looked away from him. Looked down. Looked at him again. Looked away again. Jason’s brow furrowed, the gap-toothed grin melting off his face as he plopped onto the foot of her cot, swinging his legs.
“What’s wrong?”
“Jason, I…” She inhaled deeply through her nostrils. Exhaled shakily. She wiped a stray tear from the inner corner of her eye. Wiped away another. “I’m, I’m sorry I couldn’t save that security guard, and I couldn’t save Crane, just like I couldn’t save you –”
He scoffed and shook his head incredulously. “Wow, and they say I’m his cockiest sidekick. The bomb was gonna go off in five seconds. You were at the police station. Not even Bruce could cross that distance in time.”
“Don’t,” she snapped, “don’t even joke about that.” She scrubbed her face with her sleeve. “It was a trap, and I knew it was a trap, and I led you right to him.”
Jason fell silent for a moment. Then, he scooted over on the cot, the paper crackling under his weight.
“Babs, you and Bruce saved me the second you brought me out of that alleyway, and don’t underestimate me.” He lightly punched her good shoulder. “Even if you didn’t give me the coordinates, I would’ve hacked your Batcomputer with those nifty tricks you taught me and got them myself.”
He threw an arm around her and leaned his head against hers. “Sure, you couldn’t save that security guard, but I’m not the only damsel-in-distress out there.” He spread his arms wide, like a baby bird about to jump out of the nest. “Think about all the other people you saved. Cash, North – and not just the good guys either – Young, Dorrance, Isley and her plant babies.” His gap-toothed grin returned in full force. “Your mom would be proud…”
He turned her towards the window and pointed at the bat signal, the bright beacon still standing, even as the dark clouds closed in.
“...so don’t lose your shine, knight.”