The GCPD Receiving Hospital was unusually large. It had to be. In a city where justice was often dispensed by highly trained vigilantes with a penchant for breaking faces, nearly every criminal not apprehended by the police themselves required some significant medical attention before they could be transferred to a proper jail.
Fortunately for Jackie, as they wheeled her down the ancient antiseptic-drenched floors, she was the first catch of the day. This meant that the doctors on-call, eager to escape their mindless tedium by patching up perpetrators, were ready and waiting when she was handed over to their care.
She was tempted to think that it was actually better than going to a hospital as a non-felon. Indeed, the last time she'd been in an emergency room, for a searing pain in her back that turned out to be a kidney stone, she'd waited for hours while the seriously bleeding and broken hordes had been triaged ahead of her. And when it was finally her turn, there was a stack of paperwork the size of a small novel to fill out before anyone would help her.
Here, there was no paperwork. There were no lines. And maybe the doctors onstaff weren't the nation's best and brightest, but they were certainly competent enough to set her broken arm and wrap a bundle of plaster strips around it. They even gave her some painkillers, which eased both the pain in her arm and the growing storm of anxiety building in her gut.
After her arm had been cared for, they parked her in the lobby of the hospital and left her under the watchful eye of a guard. She supposed they were waiting for someone to come and pick her up and take her...wherever she was going.
The painkillers let her think about her destination without the risk of breaking into tears or hysterical screaming. Eddie had said they wouldn't be caught. Eddie had promised that they wouldn't be caught. But here she was, locked to a gurney in a prisoner's hospital, waiting to be taken...somewhere.
Where had they taken Eddie? He was certainly hurt enough to need a doctor's care. She sighed as she realized that they must have taken him directly to Arkham. Arkham had a medical wing, didn't it? She thought she remembered Crane and Dent talking about it at the Iceberg one night. So if Eddie was in Arkham's medical wing, but she was here, that meant...well, she wasn't going to Arkham, that was what it meant. No Arkham, which meant plain old normal terror-inducing jail for her.
It made sense. That was where they'd put all the rest of them. Claudia and Delilah and Tiffany, Liz and Paula, and all the rest of the Riddler's legion of ex-henchgirls had ended up in normal prison. And now Jackie was on her way there too, because she'd done a terrible job as a henchgirl and let Eddie get caught.
The painkillers wanted to take her away to a soft, fluffy, carefree land of daydreams. Jackie firmly closed her eyes and let them.
The Riddler shifted uncomfortably under his thin blanket, cursing the wrist restraints that kept him from easing a wadded-up wrinkle of his hospital gown out from under his back. Around him, the small population of Arkham's medical wing muttered dreamily in their drug-induced slumbers as drowsy nurses checked vitals and changed bandages.
The trip to Arkham, stuffed in the Batmobile's front seat, hadn't exactly been pleasant. Batman had refrained from any further vengeance once he'd been tucked (well, shoved) into the car, which was nice, but the man hadn't bothered to stop the car from bouncing over speed bumps and maintaining high speeds as they rounded corners, antics that Eddie and his array of new injuries were not pleased with. Fortunately, Batman had remained stoically silent along the way, only speaking when it was time to hand his battered, bleeding charge over to the orderlies at Arkham.
As they'd gone through the normal nonsense of intake - taking his clothes, tending his injuries, and making him answer those stupid 'what's your name/who's the President' questions - he'd kept an eye on the doors, waiting for Jackie to come through them.
She never arrived. Hours had passed - hours in which he'd been strapped to this infernal bed and forcibly medicated - and she still hadn't shown up. It was three AM - what was taking them so long?
He flopped his head back on the pillow and let out a short, exasperated sigh that quickly turned into a pained grunt as his injured head reminded him that fresh contusions did not appreciate being banged around.
"Edward, it is three o'clock in the morning. Must you make so much noise?"
Eddie examined the man in the bed next to his. It was hard to make out much detail in the dim light. He was on top of the blankets, secured to his bed only by a set of leg restraints. His arms, upper torso, and head were almost completely covered by yards and yards of gauze bandages. The only clue to his identity was the shock of carrot-red hair sticking out of a gap between some of the bandages.
"Jonathan," Eddie greeted civilly. "What happened to you?"
"I was in the midst of an escape and found myself trapped in the janitor's closet. I had a rudimentary toxic formula half-concocted in a bucket when they kicked the door down and knocked a few open bottles into the mixture." The Scarecrow scowled at his padded arms. "Have you ever mixed ammonia and bleach?"
"One of the girls did once," Eddie said, lungs tingling at the memory.
"This was worse," Crane said flatly.
Eddie glanced at the clock again. When he looked back, he saw a pair of crystal-blue eyes watching him curiously through their mask of bandages. "Why do you keep looking at the clock?"
"They haven't brought Query in yet."
"You honestly think they'll send her here?" The Scarecrow coughed a short, humorless chuckle. "Edward, Edward, Edward. You know they don't send your girls to Arkham. Your girls tend to be stupid, not crazy."
"Jackie is not stupid," Eddie snapped, squirming irritably beneath his thin blanket.
"You actually care about this one?" Crane sighed. "You know what a liability that is. Look what happened to you. If you'd used her as protection like a proper henchgirl you'd be on the streets right now."
Eddie did his best to ignore him. Oh, Crane had a point - henches were, as a rule, hired to keep you safe from Batman. What good was a henchgirl who couldn't fight Batman?
On the other hand, what about the slew of ex-henchgirls that he'd hired and fired through the years? They had all been fighters, every last one of them, and every one of them had proven to be almost impossible to live with. They pestered him while he was writing riddles, refused to pick up after themselves, and committed a collection of other domestic felonies that made it a pleasure to leave them in Batman's hands while he got as far away from them as he could.
Jackie was different. She cared about him - not his money, not his reputation, but him. She'd saved him from Batman - okay, maybe not this time, but she'd certainly succeeded in the past. She had the potential to be a very useful part of his professional life (not to mention the fun she brought to his personal life).
And if they didn't bring her to Arkham soon, he was going to have to go looking for her.
"Awake already, boys?" A nurse stood at the foot of their beds, arms folded. "Let's just get you back to sleep."
Before he could protest - not that it would have stopped her, anyway - the nurse slid a syringe into a port in his IV. The world gracefully faded away.
In many ways, jail is more dangerous than prison. Prisons have the luxury of separating their inmates by the severity of their crimes, dividing up the petty thieves from the serial killers.
Jails, however, hold those that haven't been to trial yet - and that meant that everyone shared the same space, hired killers and DUIs alike. To prevent too many accidents (or "accidents") from happening, the Gotham wardens had implemented a color-based jumpsuit system to easily identify the notorious from the nobodys.
Jackie had been transferred from the hospital to a jail after a surprisingly brief wait in the hospital's lobby. When she'd arrived, bleary-eyed and nauseous with pain, they'd walked her through the endless minutiae of the booking procedure. They'd taken fingerprints, both from her good hand and a set of substandard blotchy ones taken from her immobile broken arm. They had taken everything of hers - her clothes, her shoes, and her unicorn necklace - and locked them in a plastic bin. Then, wrapped in a hideous mud-brown and blaze-orange striped jumpsuit, they had led her to a cell in a dimly lit hallway and shoved her inside.
She staggered to the bunk bed and settled down in the bottom bunk, trying not to hear the cell door as it locked firmly behind her with a solemn-sounding clank. Sleep. That was all that mattered now. She curled on her side, propping her broken arm on the thin pillow, and tried to relax.
The garish jumpsuit was actually quite comfortable. Unfortunately, the small bunk built into the wall of her cell seemed to be padded with the same concrete that formed the walls. Between the hard, narrow mattress, the throbbing of her broken arm, and the ratcheting snore of her top-bunk cellmate, things were not restful in the slightest.
Morning arrived with the glare of fluorescent lights at six AM sharp. "Rise and shine, ladies," a CO bellowed, rattling cell doors as she sauntered past them. "Let's go!"
Jackie's bunkmate hopped lithely to the floor, rolling her neck as she sauntered over to the sink. With a cupped hand, she got herself a drink from the stainless-steel sink. She turned back to the bunk, humming cheerfully to herself, and froze as she saw Jackie curled in the bottom recess of the bed.
The girl's eyes flicked to her brown-and-orange jumpsuit. "Didn't know I had a new cellie," she said uneasily.
Jackie swallowed hard, unsure of what to say. "I, um...just got here last night," she explained. "You were asleep."
"Figures." The girl considered her for a moment, realized she was no threat, and stuck a red-and-white striped arm out to Jackie. "My name's Taylor. Oh!" she gasped, as Jackie eased herself to a sitting position and winced as muscles stiff from the Robin-Rogue Fun Run protested the movement. "Your arm!"
"It's okay," Jackie lied, pain lancing through her arm.
Taylor shook her head. "You keep that arm still. Broken bones hurt. Believe me, I know." She pulled her fingers through her long brown hair, gently working out the tangles as she talked. "So who did it? Cops?"
Jackie cleared her throat, uncomfortably remembering her abortive attempt at escape. "Robin," she said in a small voice.
"Robin? Like, the Robin?" Taylor whistled, impressed. "Is he cute?"
"I, uh, didn't notice," Jackie mumbled.
"Probably too busy protecting your boss," Taylor nodded, ferreting a tight tangled knot out of her hair with deft fingertips. "I thought about being a henchgirl, but the costumes all looked so silly. No offense," she said hastily.
"No, none taken," Jackie said automatically. "How'd you know I was a henchgirl?"
"Your stripes. The jumpsuit," she clarified at Jackie's blank look. "Brown and orange is for anyone who hangs out with rogues. They sort everyone by stripes here. Black-and-white is for the small fry - y'know, the prostitutes, the shoplifters, the potheads. Red-and-white is the next level up, murderers, rapists, that kind of stuff. Orange-and-white means trouble. Those are the ones that are crazy enough to attack staff. You see orange on someone, you watch out."
Jackie glanced down at the orange stripes covering her own jumpsuit, then at the red-and-white ones covering Taylor's. From the sudden closed look on the girl's face, it would probably not be the smartest idea to inquire what exactly had landed her behind bars.
"Thanks for telling me," she said, raking her hand through her own hair.
"No prob," Taylor said, pulling her hair into a ponytail with something that looked like a sliced-off segment of a tube sock. "So who's your boss?"
"The Riddler," Jackie said.
"Yeah?" Taylor blinked, processing this information. "Must be fun, working for one of the big names."
"Yeah. Right up until the bats show up," Jackie said, giving up on her hair.
"I hear that."
The cell doors swung open and the short corridor filled with women chattering amiably with one another. "C'mon," Taylor offered. "Breakfast time. Cellies got to stick together, right?"
"Right," Jackie agreed, limping after her.
Breakfast was barely deserving of the term 'food'. Powdered reconstituted scrambled eggs lay in a liquidy heap next to a greasy slice of bologna. Water in a paper cup and a slice of margarine-smeared bread completed the feast.
Jackie poked miserably at the food. Taylor and the two women seated across from them laughed. "Not quite what you're used to, huh?" the large latino woman to the left said, tearing her bologna into bite-sized pieces.
"No," Jackie agreed, taking a tentative bite of her bread.
"Least you won't have to eat it long. They don't keep you types here anymore," she went on, waving an explanatory hand at Jackie's brown-and-orange jumpsuit. "Not since those last three broke out."
"So where do they keep...my type?" Jackie asked.
"Stonegate. Where else?" the woman shrugged, taking a bite of egg.
"Is it your first time? It is, isn't it? Who do you work for?" The other woman, a wiry little thing with a fluffy crest of bright brown curls, looked eagerly at Jackie. "It must be really good, being a henchgirl. Do you get to -"
"Jennifer," Taylor interrupted. "Ease up."
Jennifer pouted, shoving the too-long sleeves of her orange-and-white jumpsuit back up above her elbows to reveal heavily tattooed arms. A skewed portrait of an infant was wrapped around one forearm, while the other bore a cryptic jumble of numbers and letters. "I was only asking. I coulda been a henchgirl, you know. The Scarecrow almost hired me," she said proudly.
"He did?" Jackie asked dubiously.
"You calling me a liar?" Jennifer demanded.
"No, I just...he doesn't like people that much."
"Well, he wasn't that excited about it or anything, but I talked myself up to him, you know? And he said he could probably find a use for me in his lab."
"Oh. I see," Jackie said, realizing that the job description for the position offered by Crane was probably 'Guinea Pig' rather than 'Henchgirl'.
"Yeah. So which one do you work for?" Jennifer pressed.
"The Riddler," Jackie said, trying to maneuver a piece of wobbly egg onto her fork.
The latino woman snorted. "You too, huh?"
Jackie didn't sigh, though she desperately wanted to. One of these days people would get tired of pointing out to her that she was just the latest link in the seemingly endless chain of Eddie's henchgirls. "Yeah. Me too," she said shortly, forking the egg into her mouth.
"You friends with those other three?" she asked abruptly. "Delilah and the other two?"
"Who?" Jackie said, trying to decide whether the bologna was safe to eat. "Oh, them. Not exactly. After they broke out of here, Delilah tried to shoot me in the head."
"That girl is disrespectful," the woman intoned.
"Did she sass you, Rose?" Taylor asked eagerly.
"Nah, not me. She called one of the hacks a pig and blamed someone else when the hack turned around. Good thing for them they broke out. Wasn't going to be too much longer before they made the wrong person angry." Rose took another dainty bite of her egg. "They ever show up back here, the hacks are gonna have a lot to say to them. Made 'em look pretty stupid, those three, sneaking out like that. So now you henches get moved after a day or two so you don't get past 'em like they did."
"Baker?" Jackie twitched nervously and turned around to see a slender hard-faced woman in a blue uniform standing directly behind her, arms folded.
"That's me," Jackie mumbled.
"Here." The woman held out a small paper cup. Two pills rattled around inside it. Jackie recognized them as her beloved, wonderful painkillers and immediately gulped them down. "Good. Come with me."
Jackie eyed her breakfast, debating whether she wanted to protest being pulled away from it, and slowly got to her feet.
"Good luck, kid," Rose said.
"When you get to Stonegate, say hi to Tricia for me!" Taylor called, folding a piece of buttered bread neatly in half before shoving it in her mouth.
The woman in the uniform shooed Jackie in front of her. Head held high, trying to hide the spasms of terror shaking her body, Jackie padded out of the cafeteria.
(to be continued)
