Chapter One

Owl

Dr. Susan Bohner was making her rounds at Arkham Asylum just like she did every work week. Today, there was a new name on her racket. A name, Susan was actually worried about having to deal with. Susan did not work Arkham's hard cases. She had never even seen people like Edward Nygma or the "Riddler" in person, never mind spoke to them. However, there sitting right on her patient list was the name "Elisaveta Lazarev", who was better known as the "Owl". She was the Penguin's right hand man. There were rumors about the two's relationship, but nothing had been determined one way or the other. Elisaveta's arrest and trial had been all over news. The evidence against her, while most definitely true, was anything but concrete. With someone as powerful as the Penguin gunning for her release, Susan was incredibly skeptical if the woman would remain in the "care" of Arkham for even half of her sentence.

Susan walked into her office with trepidation and found the woman already waiting for her. There weren't any cuffs, which made Susan a bit nervous, even if there was an armed guard waiting outside the room. Elisaveta didn't warrant that type of attention, which was why she was on Susan's docket. Despite her associations and unstable status, Elisaveta had been ruled mostly harmless. Even the non-corrupt cops had seemed to feel a little guilty putting the woman away, as they viewed her as one of Penguin's pawns. Whether or not that was true remained to be seen.

"Hello, you must Elisaveta Lazarev," Susan greeted, heading to her desk. She hoped that Elisaveta hadn't gone through her desk, but doubted it.

"Lissy," the disheveled woman corrected. Her eyes were foggy with whatever drugs she was being dosed with.

Susan made a mental note to instruct the staff not to drug Elisaveta without her agreement. It made for uncooperative patients. Susan had a feeling Elisaveta was the passive aggressive type.

"Is that what everyone calls you? I thought it was Owl." Susan said, testing the waters with Elisaveta, trying to get a read on her personality. If she was sarcastic, quick tempered, how she reacted under pressure

Elisaveta's reaction was a little bit boring, but boring was safe. "Only my mother called me Elisaveta." She informed Susan. Her tone was casual but there was something a little sharp in her eyes, underneath the drug induced fog.

"Your mother, yes," Susan shifted through Elisaveta's file, which was empty even by criminal standards (the high profile patients tended to have their pasts buried or erased). Susan managed to located the name, "Milena Lazarev. She died a few years ago, didn't she?"

"She did."

"I'm sorry for you loss."

Elisaveta's lips pulled together and she remained silent. Susan couldn't tell if Elisaveta cared about her mother or not. Her tone so far had been nothing but factual. While it was possible that Elisaveta didn't care, it was just as likely as she was hiding it. Working with criminals was twice as hard as the cases that Susan had back when she was in private practice. With civilians you could just assume they cared about their mothers.

"Why don't you tell me why you're here?" Susan asked, dropping the subject of Elisaveta's mother, but filing it away.

"Do you not watch news?" It was hard to tell if Elisaveta was being sarcastic or not.

"Yes, I do. I have your whole file right here. There's a lot here, Lissy."

"Most of it unproven."

"Not according to the courts."

"I was acquitted of most charges. The rest was circumstantial at best."

"Do you agree with that?"

"Is that why you're here?" Elisaveta's eyes narrowed, her brown irises seemed to blend with her pupil. It was rather unsettling, "To try to trick me into confessing?"

Susan shifted in her seat, "Anything you say is confidential."

"Unless you get a court order."

Susan had to nod her head, "I'm not here to gather information against you, Lissy. I'm not your enemy. I'm here to help. You don't have to talk about anything you don't want to."

Elisaveta looked away from Susan and out at the grey skies of Gotham. It was raining again.

"So, do you know why you're here?"

Elisaveta's eyes slid away from the window back to Susan with an accusatory look. It looked very childish on her face and Susan found herself biting back a smile.

"It's important for me to know if you know why you're here."

Elisaveta let out a small sigh, "I'm here because the courts found me guilty of bribery, forgery, and aiding and abetting to numerous other crimes."

It was almost alarming how little Elisaveta had been charged with. It was alarming how close it had come to a hung jury.

"That's a technical way to put it. But I'm glad that you're at least aware that you did something wrong."

"I get that what I did was illegal," Elisaveta corrected.

"But not wrong?"

"Is it wrong to do what you have to, to survive?"

Susan pursed her lips, "I believe you were doing more than surviving, Lissy."

Elisaveta gave a little shrug, "When you're from the streets, you have two choices. To play the game or to die. The choice doesn't change once you start to play."

That was a very fatalistic way at looking at the world. Susan struggled to think of where she should begin with someone like Elisaveta. She wasn't like most cases where the beginning was obvious like: why did you kill your mother, what drove you to place that bomb in the middle of the street. Susan didn't know where the best place to start was, but the easiest was the beginning.

"How did you first get involved in the mafia?"

"I didn't really have much of a choice."

Susan found that hard to believe. "How so?"

"My mother didn't exactly get into the country legally." Elisaveta confessed. At first Susan was surprised by Elisaveta's confessional until she realized that Elisaveta's mother was dead and there was no risk of deportation.

"There aren't a lot of jobs for people in that circumstance." Elisaveta elaborated

Susan frowned, "Your file says that your mother was a seamstress."

"She was."

"If she found legal work, why couldn't you?"

"It's different if you're working in the Russian district. They don't ask questions. They don't care."

"So why didn't you work for them?"

"I did, for a while."

"How long is a while?"

"I worked there from sixteen to twenty."

"What happened?"

"It went under."

"And after that?" Susan had a feeling she knew where this was going.

"I went from job to job for a while," Elisaveta shrugged. "The only job that sticked was as Fish Mooney's accountant."

"That's quite a shift."

"Not really."

Susan wrinkled her brow, "What makes you say that?"

Elisaveta frowned a little. It was clear to Susan that Elisaveta wasn't much of a talker and she was struggling to figure out how to keep Lissy talking. She flipped through Elisaveta's file to see if there was anything in there that could help her. Quite by chance, Susan found a small section that dictated what personal belongings Elisaveta had in her room. There were number of books and journal. Just because Elisaveta wasn't a talker didn't mean that she wasn't a story teller.

"Why don't you tell it like you would story?" Susan suggested.

Elisaveta arched one dark eyebrow.

"It's just us," Susan soothed, in case Elisaveta was the easy embarrassed sort, "It can be easier to talk about something if you tell it like a story."

Elisaveta gave another sigh but seemed to give in, "I'm not a snitch," she warned, "I'll skip around if I have to."

Susan nodded, hoping that Elisaveta would skip instead of making things up, "Whatever makes you comfortable."

"Alright... I guess it all started when I went out for coffee with Zara."

"Zara?"

Zara Gavrilova was not the type of girl who was friends with girls like Lissy Lasarev. They were complete opposites. Zara loved having all the attention on herself. She was friendly, talkative. Lissy felt uncomfortable around large groups, and groups in general unless she knew them well. She was reserved and more melancholy than anything.

However, they had been neighbors when they were kids and Zara was the type of girl that once she attached to someone, she never let them go. So even though they hadn't been neighbors since Zara had moved out of her parents' place when she was nineteen, Zara would show up on Lissy's doorstep every Monday evening before she had work and after Lissy got off work to drag her out for coffee.

It was the same routine every Monday until one day the gossip Zara loved to share with Lissy changed her life.

"You should have been at Mooney's Friday night," Zara said, which was how she started off every gossip session regardless whether or not the gossip in question happened on a Friday and knowing full well that Lissy had never and would never go to a nightclub.

Lissy took a long sip of her coffee, which was her signal for Zara to go ahead and gossip to her heart's content.

"So, I was on break and I went out back for a bit of fresh air. And before you give me a look, this was Mooney's. If it were any other nightclub, you wouldn't catch me dead," Zara laughed at her bit of black humor, "out back, but who in their right mind is going to attack Mooney's?"

Lissy wasn't all that informed about mob politics but she figured someone like Mooney had enemies and Zara could very well find herself between them and Mooney if she wasn't careful. Zara however, did not share Lissy's cautionary temperament and Lissy knew that wasn't going to change.

"So, I'm out back for air and I see Mooney's boys dragging this guy off. And immediately I'm curious. He's sort of old and they don't drag off just anybody. Mostly they just rough em' up right in the alley, yeah?"

Lissy nodded her head indicating that she was still listening.

"So, I head back inside because I ain't gonna stop them to ask questions. I ain't stupid. But when they get back, I'm still curious. I still have ten minutes of break, so I think, 'hey why not satisfy my curiosity' right?" after another nod from Lissy, Zara continued, "So I go buy one of the more friendly guys a drink. And I ain't even gotta ask what they were doing because they all saw me walk away and all so he just tells me. Guess what they were dragging him away for?"

Usually that was a rhetorical question but Lissy always missed those sort of social cues and Zara had just got used to it after their years of friendship, "Embezzling."

"Is that what it's called?"

Lissy nodded.

"That's my Lis, you know all those fancy words." Zara shot her a proud, little grin, "So yeah, he tells me that the accountant was embezzling. And I do mean was. You know that the people Fish's boys drag off don't usually come back, poor guy."

Zara shook her head sadly, though she didn't really care. For her it was just a bit of gossip. Growing up on Merry Fox Lane had desensitized Zara to most things, especially violence. Lissy didn't know why she bothered to act like she cared at all, but the last time she asked Zara had gotten angry at her. Lissy hadn't asked again.

"So that was my exciting week. What about you?"

"I got fired from the library."

Zara almost choked on her coffee, "Fired? Now that has to be story, you better spill."

"I don't get it," Susan frowned, "You had other options. Even without a college education you could have swung some job, why turn to the mafia?"

Elisaveta shrugged, "More room for advancement."

Susan's eyes widened. This was why cases like Elisaveta never came to her. It was easy to understand the damaged mind that drove someone to murder their wife. Elisaveta's "rational" explanations for her deviation from the law were harder for Susan to understand. Susan just wasn't buying that it was all just economic reasoning that drove Elisaveta to work for Fish Mooney.

"Weren't you scared? Your friend told you what happened to your predecessor."

"Why would that scare me? I wasn't planning to embezzle."

"He should have gone to jail not been murdered."

"I never said he was murdered."

Susan frowned but couldn't deny it. Elisaveta had been careful to leave that ambiguous, even if the truth was obvious.

"Still, most people wouldn't want to work for an employer who dealt with employees violently." Susan protested.

Elisaveta shrugged and didn't answer. Susan definitely wasn't buying Elisaveta's assertion that she had joined because she had to or because there were better opportunities there (although Susan supposed that a cashier would have never had the wealth that Elisaveta had acquired). There was another reason, Susan just had to find it.

"Why don't you tell me how you go the job?"

Elisaveta's gaze shifted out the window. She seemed to talk more when she wasn't looking directly at Susan. "On Tuesdays, Mooney used to do a hiring drive. People who wanted work would go for an interview." Elisaveta explained, "It made Mooney look good without her actually having to hire anyone most weeks."

"She never hired anyone?"

"No, she did. Thugs who probably didn't live the month. Maybe a waiter or waitress once a month. Usually it was musicians, comedians, people of that ilk, and if they were lucky they would get one gig. It just wasn't as nice as it was made out to be, is all."

"But it worked out for you."

"It did."

Lissy had told mother that she was going to a job interview, though she had been very careful to avoid answering where she was interviewing. She had only told her because her mother was keen to know where she went when she left the house and because honestly Lissy didn't really know how to dress herself for an interview with Fish Mooney.

The result of the conversation was Lissy being shoved into her only "nice" outfit: a black and grey, cap-sleeved, "shift-dress" that her mother had forced her to buy a year ago and a pair of white heeled ankle boots that weren't even Lissy's but Zara's. They were a size too small, if anyone cared for Lissy's opinion. She had even put that stupid product in her hair that made it resistant to the Gotham humidity that turned Lissy's hair into a frizzy mess. She was even wearing lipgloss. All in all, Lissy was dressed up and uncomfortable and she was hoping this wouldn't be a daily thing if she got the job.

There was no getting this dressed up (or at least it was dressed up for Lissy who hadn't worn anything resembling formal clothes since prom) and being early, so Lissy had been one of that last interviews of the day. The "meeting" wasn't held in Fish's office but on the floor of the nightclub which was empty since the club didn't open until much later. Fish was nursing a cocktail and chatting to lanky looking boy -

"Was that Penguin?" Susan cut in, almost excited. She didn't follow Penguin's exploits but she had heard about Penguin's rise to power. It was a rather fantastic story. Susan knew that the "Owl"and "Penguin" had been linked since the "early days" but she never imagined that they met during Elisaveta's interview.

"Oswald was working as Fish's umbrella boy at the time, yes," Elisaveta answered with an icy tone.

Susan stiffened and wondered at Elisaveta's tone. Why would the Penguin dislike a name he had given himself?

"Sorry, continue."

"Alright..."

Fish was nursing a cocktail and chatting to a lanky looking boy. Whatever charitable mood Fish had when the interviews began was nearly gone, not that Lissy noticed. She was fairly bad at reading people.

"What's your story?" Fish asked.

Lissy hadn't liked the question. So she had simply answered, "Another boring sob story. I need the money, and I'll give you good work."

Lissy hadn't realized that her answer had played to Fish's temperament. Fish had never liked people who whined or wanted pity.

"What sort of work?"

"I know you need a new accountant. I can do that work."

Lissy knew full well the information hadn't spread around yet. She was counting on it.

Fish gave a devious smile and set down her drink. The young man at her side arched both eyebrows.

"How did you learn about that?"

"It's a nightclub people talk," Lissy shrugged, not wanting to get Zara into trouble.

"To you?" Fish was right to be skeptical.

Lissy shook her head, "No, not to me,"

"Alright, alright," Fish was grinning, "A little gossip is fine, and that information wasn't anything I wanted kept a secret. You're resourceful, though, that's good. But, it doesn't tell me if you're any good with numbers."

"I kept Repin's tailors from going under for three years."

The young man leaned down and whispered something in Fish's ear, "My umbrella boy tells me that place still went under."

Lissy shrugged, "There was only so much I could do. He was a terrible businessman. You can test me, if you'd like. I'll pass." It might have been arrogant if Lissy's tone hadn't been so matter-of-fact.

Fish's umbrella boy shrugged in agreement when Fish glanced at him for validation. It had been common knowledge that Mr. Repin had been terrible at finances and too stubborn to delegate to Lissy every time.

"Alright then, you start tomorrow."

The only indication Lissy gave of surprise were two blinks, "Hours?"

"I'm flexible. You show up and get your work done and I don't really care about the when."

"Wages?"

"You said I could test you," Fish said, using Lissy's words against her, "We'll see how you do over the week, then we'll talk."

A/N: I'm not usually the type to give advice about how to read my story because I think that stories have to be readable without any help but I'm going to point out that Elisaveta cannot be fully trusted to be a reliable narrator. Also, Dr. Susan is operating with limited and imperfect knowledge. So do keep that in mind. ;)