Author's Note:

Alright, so here's Chapter 2! :P I had other plans for this chapter, but then I started thinking: Okay, so this occurs, what? Around four/five-ish? It gets a whole bunch of media attention, so by nine/ten it's out of control. So Aisling is being sent to an asylum at that time, but after the drive it's around, what? Two/three in the morning. As much as I love writing snarky dialogue, I don't think anyone can function properly at three in the morning. So I made this chapter a little more realistic by, you know, making the character tired.

P.S. Thank you for the review/comment ShadowCat98. I was snickering the entire time when I read it! :P And don't worry, I'm not a fan of Bieber, either! His singing makes my brain hurt… a lot -.-)#

Hymn for the Killers and Liars

/Chapter II: Protocol/

Aisling was crammed into the back of the police cruiser for four hours, at least. Four hours of her sitting on an uncomfortable seat with her wrists clamped behind her. 240 minutes of a painful silence when the two cops couldn't decide on an agreeable station and kept the radio off. She didn't know what was worse: the boring car-ride or the destination they were heading to. The cops spoke with each other, but rarely, so Aisling drew her attention to the window beside her. There was nothing interesting to see, but at least the blurs of the objects passing were a decent distraction.

Her feet were aching. She wasn't about to complain about it, but it wasn't every day when someone kicks a metal barrier. She was still dressed in the ridiculously gaudy white uniform. The white t-shirt was baggy (like a one-size-fits-all type of garment), the slacks with the stretchable waistband uncomfortable and rubbed against her skin. The hospital was too cheap to get the socks with the rubber grippers, so they gave out plastic footies that made your feet sweat. She was practically barefoot, and she had cracked her heel pretty hard on the metal.

She absently massaged her right foot, flinching at how tender it was. It's definitely going to bruise, she thought grimly. Outside of the window, the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING sign glimpsed past in a green blur. "That's one good thing, at least." Her voice was acutely sour, even if she was speaking in relief. The cop in the passenger seat chuckled at her utterance, swung his arm around the back of his seat and gave her a jovial look.

"What's that?" he inquired. Under his cap, Aisling could see his bushy brown eyebrows raised.

She looked at him ludicrously. "I'm not in that hell-hole anymore," she responded slowly. Wasn't that an obvious answer? She thought. Or was it rare for someone to be glad to be out of a mental institute?

"Yeah, but you're leaving to go to another one," he replied smugly.

"Knock it off, Cole," the other cop sighed. "Why bother prodding her?"

The cop referred as Cole snickered. "Because it's fun, Henry. You should try it sometime," he joked. With his free hand, he gave the cop a light punch to the shoulder.

Aisling couldn't see Henry's face, but by the way how his head tilted, she figured he had rolled his eyes. "Yes, because pestering someone is so entertaining. Do us all a favor, Cole, and grow up." Aisling decided she liked this guy as she silenced herself from giggling.

Cole clutched his chest in mock humor. "You wound me, friend," he pouted. When his companion did laugh at his joke, his pout drooped to a frown. "What's twisted your briefs in a bunch, Henry? Your wife get mad when you didn't take the trash out again? Or did your kids keep you up all night?"

Henry glared at him. "Or maybe it's because I have a friend that doesn't know how to shut up," he retorted. "Tell me¸Cole. Do you ever plan on settling down?"

Cole gave him a goofy smile, and placed his hands behind his head. "Nope. I'm going to be a bachelor for the rest of my life!"

Aisling laughed at that. "What's so funny?" Cole piped defensively. Underneath his cap, she could see the slight tint of pink that glowed on his cheeks.

"Oh, nothing," she giggled. "I'm having a hard time picturing you as a bachelor."

"No one asked you! And what do you know? You're just a girl with a twisted mind."

Aisling's lips rounded into an "o" shape and her eyebrows knitted together. "Low blow," she noted, feigning a hurt expression. She saw the guilt that sparked in his face, and she relaxed her features. "Don't get so defensive," she added enjoying how evenly flat her tone became. She also enjoyed how flustered that made him, because he turned into a lovely shade of a tomato.

"How about we just continue this drive in silence?" Henry pitched after a few moments. His eyes flickered to the rear view mirror and caught Aisling's hazel eyes. It was nothing like a pleading look, but like a glare that a parent would give to a child for being disruptive. Aisling opened her mouth to retort something, but gave in and returned to looking out the window.

Skeletal fingers danced off of her shoulders, tracing imaginary lines across her flesh. They were freezing, leaving a trail of ice that made her hair stand on end. She tried to pull away from their touch, but she couldn't move. Her arms were pinned to her sides, locked by some invisible force. She wanted to scream, cry out in fear. But the cold were knives stabbing into her flesh. It drew her breath short, strangled the scream from her throat before it could be produced.

Around her was complete darkness. It was the type of darkness that you couldn't even distinguish yourself from it, even if you waved your hands in front of your eyes. A thick black cage that devoured her as she struggled to keep her pounding heart calm, struggled to distinguish reality from her paranoid imagination.

Her feet were bare; she could sense that by how the frosty air tickled the skin between her toes. The floor was hard, flat and cold. A draft had skittered up her spine, hitching her breath short. She could feel no wall behind her, her hands locked mid-air.

She gasped as she felt liquid puddle around her feet. It oozed in between her toes and wrapped around her ankles. The instinct to move flooded through her body, and she struggled to move. But her feet were like her hands; frozen and locked in place. Her face felt wet, warm. Perhaps she was crying, but she couldn't see anything. Just the unforgiving darkness that had devoured her.

Click.

The next moment, an explosion of light appeared before her. Red and yellow billowing towards her, streaks of orange and white rolling in the wave of color. Her hands were released and they swung at her sides. For some reason, she found comfort in the colors that raced towards her. She opened her arms wide as if to embrace it. She closed her eyes, overwhelmed by the light. But as it neared, she recognized an enormous amount of warmth. Intense heat that burned her flesh.

Fire.

She was no longer comforted, but terrified. She stepped backwards, went to turn around. Her feet squished loudly, drenched in whatever liquid that had covered them before. It stuck to her feet, webbing her heels to the floor. Panicking, she looked down. But what she saw made her gasp in horror.

Her feet were soaked in gasoline.

Aisling gasped out loud, her head picking up so fast that she smacked it against the window. She recoiled from the blow, clutching to her forehead, her heart pounding painfully in her chest. She was practically hyperventilating, and it took a few moments for her to calm down. Still locked in the holds of the nightmare, she didn't recognize where she was, and struggled to stop herself from crying out. Only when did she see the back of Cole's head did she remember where she was: she was in the back of a police cruiser, traveling from one mental hospital to another. She was blamed for something she did not commit, but was deemed responsible nonetheless.

"Have a nightmare?" Henry asked. He was still driving, but he had taken his cap off. He had one hand on the wheel, the other in his clipped black hair. In the mirror, Aisling could see the dark circles under his eyes.

"Sort of." She rubbed her hand against her face, her fingers combing through her wild black hair. She wished that could comb through her brain, try to get the dark images that were floating around in her head.

"You were shuffling and muttering to yourself," he explained. "My kids act like that," he added. He ran a hand across his face, his forefinger and thumb circling around his eye sockets. "Whenever they have a nightmare, anyway. They flip around in their beds and knock off all the sheets before they yell. I swear, they're like alarm clocks at three in the morning."

Speaking of time – Aisling glanced at the clock on the radio and watched as it ticked to 2:37. "Would you have me scream to wake you up?" she asked. Her tone was strangely soft, considering how acidic it had been a couple hours ago.

He shook his head, a tired smile playing on his lips. "No thanks. It would probably wake this bastard up." He jabbed his thumb at the sleeping Cole beside him. He was slouched at an odd angle, his head resting on his arm and the passenger window. "Asshole. He fell asleep only a few minutes after you did."

"He was supposed to switch driving with you, I take it?"

He snorted. "Supposed to, anyway. But I guess him sleeping is better than him complaining. I hope he gets a cramp in his neck."

"How much longer?" she asked. She wondered how pleasing it would be to kick at the fencing again, see how much Cole would jump, but found herself too tired to move. Having no seatbelt on, she was curled quite comfortably on the seat.

"Only a few. We got into Gotham about ten – twenty minutes ago."

"Wonderful." Her tone was too soft and she felt too exhausted for her sarcasm to be effective.

Henry glanced at her through the rear view mirror. "It doesn't have to be permanent, you know." Aisling looked at him curiously, well, mildly interested anyhow. "Not everyone is sent to Arkham. Usually they send them to the Williams Medical Center. Others go straight to the Blackgate Penidentiary."

Aisling was not familiar with either name. "So? Does that mean I'm the sort of 'special' crazy, and they're taking me straight to the asylum?" Again, her sarcasm fell short due to her lack of focus on the world around her. Damn, had they slipped pills to make her this drowsy? Later, Aisling was going to replay the scenario in her head to see if there was something she might have missed.

"No. It's just… there was such scene at the hospital that they didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to handle the mess, and the only solution was send you as far away as possible from it."

"Send me away?"

"If you were sent to Blackgate or Williams, detectives would be able to investigate and interrogate before you were even assigned a room. Arkham is… more secure."

"I wonder why."

Henry was frowning. "Yes, it houses some horrible criminals. But you aren't being placed there to be thrown to the dogs (Aisling always found the cliché ridiculous, and she flinched when he said it). They're taking you there so you can be protected from media attention. There will be an investigation – there's no doubt about that – but it will be less stressful on your part."

She watched him carefully in the mirror. "I bet J-Jay wasn't another part of the persuasion." She was tired albeit, but she could still find hate inside of her drowsy. Her soft voice had become sharply edged, her hazel eyes narrowing into thin slits.

Henry attempted to feign confusion, but Aisling saw past his mirage. He knew exactly who she was talking about; he just wasn't going to say anything about it. "Who?"

She blatantly ignored him, and looked out her window. "He was always such a dick. Bullied everyone around like he was the Grandmaster or something. When he was pinned with blame, he would hide behind Krutchangas and hiss lies into his ear. Bastard always used that fat tongue of his to get himself out of trouble."

"Sounds like a horrid man."

He wasn't looking at her when he said it. She couldn't help but feel disgusted by how he tried to appeal to her after blatantly lying. She didn't respond to him, but allowed her gaze to drift towards the window once more.

"We're here."

Aisling looked up and felt the color drain from her face. Just outside of the cruiser, ARKHAM ASYLUM was barely visible on the metal fence. The gates were daunting as their cast shadow hung over the vehicle. Henry must have called into the intercom, telling that he was here with Aisling. Her eyes were locked on the gates, however. She didn't hear his voice echoing in the speakers, but heard the soft squealing noise as the gate opened. How the metal doors slowly opened to reveal an old gravel road, a set of old buildings peeking just above the tree tops in the horizon.

She felt somehow betrayed when she watched the two cops leave her. Cole was still drowsy from his nap, so he just kind of looked at her before he turned around. Henry wasn't any better. He simply tipped his hat towards her, said goodbye. Told her to follow protocol and she'll be fine.

Protocol. Yes, she definitely felt betrayed when she heard the word come from his lips. So there she was, walking towards a building with her hands still clamped behind her back. Behind her, a lone guard walked with her, his hand resting ever so slightly on his pistol. Not just that, but behind her, she knew she had at least one sniper trained on her. Henry wasn't kidding about security, considering they had at least four lookouts in the area they were in. As they neared the door, Aisling glanced at the wooden sign beside it. INTENSIVE TREATMENT. The guard muffled a yawn as he opened the door for her, allowing her first to enter.

Protocol, huh?

The rest was much of a blur to Aisling. It was three in the morning, and she was having a tough time trying to keep herself walking. The guard guided her down a long tunnel-like room. Cell Block Transfer, Aisling thought she saw. All she knew was that the guard spoke through an intercom, told them he had her with him, and a huge mechanical door opened in front of them. After what felt like miles of walking down a dimly-lit hallway, they came to another door that opened for them. Next they were in an elevator and descending. She tried to see if she could lean against the wall, close her eyes, but the guard prodded her out of the opened doors.

Outside of the elevator were two more guards, who took Aisling by the arms. Said something about giving her a cavity search, but decided it was too late. Aisling didn't look like she had any weapons on her, anyway. After all, she was only wearing an oversized t-shirt, crinkled slacks and plastic footies.

The next moment, she was sitting on a cool bench, awaiting for a doctor to examine her. Three had ticked to three-thirty, then four. The doctor pulled her into a small room about fifteen minutes after four and placed her on a chair.

"Hello AYS-ling." She was so tired that she didn't even catch how horribly the doctor had pronounced her name. "How are you feeling?"

Aisling's hazel eyes were clouded, lost in the deepening purple bags that had formed in her eye sockets. "Tired." She did not even understand the meaning of sarcasm anymore. She might as well have been pleading by how pathetic her voice was, how she felt.

"Do you know why you're here, Ms. O'Haney?" the doctor asked.

She shrugged. The doctor turned around and said something to the guard, but Aisling did not hear her. She was already leaning forward on the desk. Her arms felt like pillows as she placed her cheek against them. All she wanted to do was sleep…

Again she was torn from her spot, jarred from unconsciousness. A guard was already taking her through a loop of hallways. Took another elevator, another long hallway… She didn't even realize she was outside until she felt a bug smack into her face.

"Where to?" she think she asked. At this point, words and conversations were as clear as the people on the Sims games.

"The Penitentiary." Too big of a word for Aisling to understand in her state, but she figured it was the huge building to their right. Her feet dragged across the linoleum floor at the main entrance of the building. The guard babbled with a haggard-looking woman behind a desk. There was a big beep, a mechanical gate opened, and she was forced to walk again. Follow the white line, she remembered being told. Or was that before she entered this building?

She couldn't remember.

One good thing about being transferred at four in the morning was that the prisoners were oddly quieter than usual. No one noticed when a woman with wild black hair walking, her shoulders slouched and her head tilted downward. She watched as the square tiles drifted past her feet, how her body felt heavier and heavier the more she moved. When she did look up, it was when a cell door was opening up for her. The guard placed her on the bed (it was more like her falling onto it when he released her arm). By the time he had turned to shut the cell, she was sleeping on the creaky mattress.