I own nothing.

Rated T for my standard stuff

For angel-gidget: have a very sincere birthday story! Happy (belated) birthday! And sorry this is kind of dark…you know me.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who grew up in a big, glorious city called Gotham.

It began with a theory, the mission that took her away from me.

Gotham City was an enormous place, full of glittering high rises and gorgeous neighborhoods. You couldn't drive down the street without seeing hordes of shiny new cars, and even the scuffed concrete pavement seemed to glow in the sunshine in some special way that no other place had. And the people were nice, too—most of them, anyway.

They called it the "Cataclysm", the event that was supposed to change the world permanently. We had next to no information about the actual plan, or when it was to be executed, for that matter. All we had were the names of some contributors and where they were located. We needed an inside agent to root them out and make them squeal. We needed a spy.

There were a few people who weren't so nice. Crazy people, mostly, but some of them were smart. Some of them were people who were just desperate to help their families, or to help themselves. Some of them were just raised thinking that was the right way to live. But others…others were just bad people. Those others were the ones who would steal money from a poor, single mother trying to feed her children, who would shoot an old man just to watch him bleed and die. And they all did it for the same reason—they just didn't give a damn.

I wanted to go inside. I had done this sort of thing before, and on the same level; I could handle the time limit on getting results. But they said no. They said that they would need me to supervise the operation, and that I would have to plan everything out and work up a strategy. After all, I was "the best candidate for such a task". That was how everything began to fall apart. The only thing left to get was a volunteer, and they chose the one person I didn't want it to have to be—Tam.

The worst of them all was a man all dressed in black, with pointy ears and red eyes and fangs like a bat. He would come out at night, to try and hurt people, and sometimes he managed to actually find some prey. They were mostly hurting, desperate people just trying to make a few dollars for their families, to keep their loved ones alive. But he didn't care, this bat-man. He just wanted to shed blood. He just wanted to see them cry. And every day, more and more children began to go hungry, because he kept gaining a family of his own that was willing to help him out.

It worked, for a little while. Tam was able to garner information that we could never gain ourselves by infiltrating the one most precious base of all our enemies—their minds. Entering through the dream state to extract the needed information proved to be an effective method. The one thing I never bothered to really take into account, though, was the possibility that it could work the other way around, as well. I never planned to use my backup when it came to the concept of our own inside agent being turned against us, of an idea being planted into her mind that could get us all killed.

Of the bat-man's little clan, there was one who stood out…one who gave him a run for his money in terms of cruelty. He was a young man, red and black and feathered like a red robin. He liked to torture people, liked to make them scream. He helped to perpetuate the fear that gripped the people of Gotham City like a vice. And I stood up against him. I decided to stop him.

She was made to think she was living in a vastly different world. They turned her mind inside out, manipulated her…controlled her. And she became…she became a killer for them. And the worst part was I don't even think she realized what she was doing.

The red robin took a particular interest in me, called me his "honey" and his "sweetheart". It was sickening, the way he tried to make me think he cared. It was all just a ploy, just to get me to trust him. Or maybe he was just being sardonic. I never could decide. And anyway, I didn't care. He had to be stopped.

We're supposed to be hunting down the people that did this to her, but we can't do that if we have no information. Plus, it doesn't help that it seems like Tam kills another one of us every other week, but that's for another day.

I'm going to kill him, the red robin. I'll kill him and every last one of his pseudo-family members that dares to cross me, because the people of this city don't deserve to suffer anymore. I'll make the girl's story end happily, because that's what heroes do.

I swear to God, Tam. I'll kill them all if that's what it takes to get you back.

Bat-man clan, beware, because I'm on my way. I'll make sure you have nothing left to rule if that's what it takes to stop you.

End?