A young man sat in a sparse room, with plain, white walls and cold, hard floors. The only light slinked through the bars from a bare bulb flickering in the hallway. The bed was no more comfortable than sleeping on a wire hammock and the standard issue blanket felt like a hessian sack. This was a minimum security room in Arkham Asylum, the mediums were upstairs and the maximums were underground.

The guards were cruel and brutish, hardened from years of inmate abuse and attacks. Almost everyone at Arkham Asylum was totally insane, but the ones who were sane were the most dangerous.

The buzzer sounded and he stood and faced the wall, his back to the door.

"Don't move, you piece of shit", a guard slammed the boy face first against the side wall of his cell. He breathed heavily through his nose, while the guard held his arms behind his back and continued to push his face into the concrete.

Another man entered, "Prisoner, do you have any information regarding the Joker's escape? You were observed talking to Harleen Quinzel earlier this week"

"I-I don't know nothing, sir, I don't know nothing!" the boy was flustered, and his words were slightly garbled from his face being pushed into the wall,

"what did she want then?" said the second guard,

"she asked me where Eddie was sir, that's all"

"hmm, well then, we'll pay a visit to Nigma next, then" the guard took his hand off the boy's face and kicked him in the back of the knee, the boy's leg gave way and he fell to the floor. He was left there, on the floor like a piece of old garbage.

The boy was alone, a sixteen-year-old that no one cared about. He had been in Arkham for six months now and he was the youngest prisoner in the facility. He did not regret, nothing could make him regret his crimes but he wished he could have been free for longer. In the beginning he thought that someone would come for him, a boy that he knew, but his hopes had crumbled eventually.

Arkham gave their patients drugs three times a day to keep them subdued. The 'medication' was hidden in the tasteless slop that was served here. When he arrived, for the first four days he refused to eat. He was ambushed by four guards while he slept and tranquilized with a needle carelessly stabbed into his neck. He woke an hour later strapped to a table with tubes down his nose. He could still hear the voices telling him that it was his own fault and that this was for his own good. The boy never missed a meal again after three days left restrained like that.

He hated how helpless he was in Arkham, every second of his life here was monitored and controlled. It was tedious and it made him agitated. The guards here all thought he was a young goon from the Jokerz gang, and although he was a member, he was really so much more.

They thought of him as a stupid low life criminal so that's what he acted like. How were they to know that he'd gone to the best private school in Gotham or that he had killed two people by the time he'd reached fifteen?

As the lights in the hallway clicked off and darkness surrounded him, the boy, Cole, vowed that this would not be his life for long.

Cole woke suddenly to a loud buzzing, the start of another monotonous scheduled day at Arkham. The only things that ever changed were killings, escapes or visits from Robin and Batman. Not that they ever talked to Cole but they were frequently returning escapees.

Robin was a brilliant puzzle for him, once he had saved Cole from a partially brutal bashing from his father. Of course, it took a more permanent solution than a boy wearing a colorful costume to stop Gregory Leer from laying hands on his son. Robin represented what he wanted to be, not a fighter of crime but the pinnacle of strength and influence, a source of fear for the weak.

Cole had been in Arkham Asylum for a month before he got to see Robin again, he was a splash of red and green on a plain white canvas. A light in the misty fog of this place. There he was, marching behind Batman, on their way to the maximum security floors. Robin looked like he was a little older than Cole was, maybe 17-years-old. He was lithe but muscular and appeared as though he could take on the world.

Cole hadn't been able to think about anything else for weeks. He didn't know what it was about Robin that had this affect on him. Maybe it was because they looked similar, maybe it was that Robin had the freedom to go and do whatever he pleased or maybe it was because they were so completely different in their morals.

Seeing Robin had been the only bright spot in Cole's life for almost three months and it was becoming a worrying obsession.

Author's Note

OK guys, this is my updated version of this chapter as of 17.7.2017. I'd love any feedback that you have, I'm really sorry for the long (2 year) wait, I just kind of fell out of writing during my last year of school and didn't pick it back up. But, I'm going to Europe for a holiday so that should give me some time to re-write some of this stuff.

Please read and review. Thanks