Things in Dr. Lily's Henchgirl Recovery Program were not going very well, which was rather like saying that the average category 5 hurricane dealt out a little bit of storm damage.
Chesterfield had gone home after his first morning of 'teaching' and had never returned. The art therapist had quit after one of the girls dipped her long, frizzy ponytail in bright blue paint. The woman had left a trail of blue droplets behind her for a full forty-five minutes before she discovered the damage and fled, sobbing. The chef that Lily had hired for cooking classes had never even shown up.
To fill the massive gaps in the schedule, Dr. Lily had opted for group therapy three times a day. Jackie drew her legs up into the tattered old armchair and rested her chin on her knees, watching the rest of the women indulge in their usual round of bickering while Dr. Lily tried desperately to regain order. "Ladies. Ladies, please," she whined.
Jackie did her best to tune them all out. She had more important things to worry about than who had short-sheeted Margaret's bed (Rose) or who had put the large dead spider on her hairbrush (Harley). April first was still a week away, and she hadn't come to any conclusion about what to do.
Freedom seemed like a beautiful, priceless jewel dangling just out of her reach. All she had to do was wait for it to come to her, and then she'd have a life again.
A life without Eddie. On the other hand, wasn't that the kind of life that she was living now? She'd expected him to break her out weeks ago. Okay, he'd been pretty beat up during the last heist, but he had to be fully healed if she was. She'd be ready to take her cast off any day now, and he hadn't even had any bones broken! Where was he? He should have been itching to escape Arkham as soon as he could.
Maybe he had. As much as she hated to think of it, maybe he'd already broken out of Arkham and left her behind, like the rest of the girls he'd tossed aside over the years. She'd thought that he loved her, but then, so did Delilah and the other two, and probably a good portion of the rest of his crowd of ex-henchgirls as well. And besides, he'd gotten rid of them after they failed him, hadn't he? And hadn't she gotten him caught? Wasn't it her fault that he'd been dragged back to Arkham again?
Hot tears of self-pity welled up in her eyes. She blinked them away before any of the other girls saw and did her best to distract herself from thoughts of Eddie.
That, at least, was easy enough. Margaret and Harley, cuffed into matching restraint belts, faced off across the circle of chairs. One too many cutting remarks and snippy comebacks had escalated their conflict to all-out war. They shouted at one another over the noise of workmen installing doors on their rooms. (Dr. Lily's no-door policy had been abruptly revoked when it was discovered that no doors meant no way of keeping homicidal henchgirls out of each other's rooms.)
"Drury is still out there," Margaret snarled, straining against her restraint. "He can't be Charaxes. He can't!"
Jackie buried her head in her kneecaps. If she had to hear one more word about Drury Walker she was going to scream. Of course he was Charaxes. Even Jackie had heard the rumors that Walker had sold his soul to a demon or something in order to be turned into a, well, a killer moth.
"Enough," Dr. Lily barked. Jackie raised her head to see a newly-arrived orderly standing by, one hand idly tapping on his belt pack full of every kind of medication that was guaranteed to short-circuit a rebellious brain. "I have had enough of this constant fighting," she snapped as Margaret and Harley glowered at one another. "You two are going to bury the hatchet right now."
"I'll bury a hatchet in her face," Margaret grumbled.
Dr. Lily snapped an imperious glare on the orderly. He unzipped the belt pack. As the pack opened, Margaret's mouth clamped shut. Lily waved a hand dismissively at the orderly, who resumed his position behind her. "The two of you - and you two as well," Lily added, glaring at Rose and Felicity, "are going to stop this fighting. Do you understand me?"
A stubborn silence filled the air.
"Do you understand me?" Lily repeated as the belt pack slowly began to open again.
"Yes," they grumbled obediently.
The pack zipped firmly shut. "Good. Now, our first item of business is - "
"Where's Alice?" Rose interrupted, glancing around the circle.
"Alice won't be joining us. Now -"
"Why?" Felicity said, leaning forward with interest. "Did you let her go back to the rogues' wing?"
"Of course not!" Lily pasted a sickly smile on her face and toyed with the pages on her clipboard. "We found a more...therapeutic location for her."
"Finally figured out that Jervis kidnapped her, huh?" Harley smirked.
The clipboard clattered to the floor. "You knew about that?" Lily stared at Harley, eyes wide with horror.
"Course I did."
"You knew she didn't belong here all this time and you never said anything?!"
"Course I didn't. She danced with my Puddin'," she sneered, as if dancing with her Joker deserved a much harsher sentence than a mere three months in an asylum for the criminally insane.
The main door of the wing slammed open. A man in inmate grays stumbled into the room, closely followed by a harassed-looking orderly. "You stay there," he ordered the inmate, who grumbled something under his breath as he leaned himself up against the wall. "Dr. Lily, I have a message for you." He bent down and whispered it in her ear.
"What?" she hissed, glaring at him with the kind of venemous stare that would have earned an inmate double meds.
"Carlson said to," he replied defensively.
She sighed. "All right. You can go." The orderly breezed past his delivered inmate and let himself out. "Come have a seat," Lily invited.
The inmate raised his head. He looked awful. An ugly greenish-yellow bruise lurked sullenly on his cheekbone, and his left eye was blacked in an almost perfectly fist-shaped a start of surprise, Jackie realized that the strange man was Grief.
More interesting than his injuries, though, was the complete disappearance of that bunny-rabbit helpless look in his eyes. What had happened to him since they'd come back from South Carolina?
He slouched over to a nearby chair and lowered himself gingerly into it, wincing as he tried to get comfortable.
"Rough week, Troy-boy?" Harley asked congenially.
"Yeah. By the way, thanks for leading the Bats right to me." He scowled at her. "I'll be sure to return the favor someday."
She shrugged. "Had to talk to ya somehow."
"You never heard of a telephone?"
"Sorry. Just tryin' ta help."
Dr. Lily cleared her throat. "I see you already know some of our residents. Ladies, this is Troy Grey. Troy, you know Harleen?"
"We've met," Troy said coldly.
Dr. Lily continued the round of introductions around the circle. When it was Jackie's turn, she gave him a little wave hello. He nodded curtly back at her.
"...and that's everyone," Lily finished.
"So what is this?" he asked bluntly.
"Oh. Well, this is the Henchgir...uh...Henchman Recovery Program, I suppose, in your case. We're here to help you stop being a henchman."
"Great. I'm not. Can I go now?"
"Troy, really," Lily said, as exasperated as anyone might be with a former colleague who had joined the ranks of the costumed ex-psychiatrists that infested the city.
"Really," he replied grimly. "I quit. So what happens next?"
Lily frowned at him. "After all you've done, I do not believe that you decided to walk out on Sorrow for no reason."
"No reason!" he yelped, before getting control over himself. "We had a fight. I left." He slouched lower in the chair, staring at his fingers as they picked at the fraying upholstery.
"What did you fight about?" Lily asked, a hint of concern in her professionally polished voice.
"I really don't think that's any of your business, Lily," Troy replied, using his own smooth and polished therapy voice without moving out of his sullen slump. He looked up, carefully feigned innocent curiosity widening his eyes. "What are you doing back with the henchgirls, anyway? I thought they moved you up to the big leagues."
Lily rose to her feet, lips pressed in a tight, thin line. "They moved me to where they thought I could do the most good," she said coldly. "I think that this is the wrong environment for you."
"I agree completely."
She stormed into the nurse's station and slammed the door.
One by one, the others got up and wandered off. Even Harley and Margaret, arms held stiffly in their leather cuffs, stalked off to opposite ends of the hall. Troy didn't appear to notice. He stared out the window, idly rolling a ball of chair fluff between his fingers.
Jackie edged over and slid into the chair beside him. "You look terrible."
"I feel terrible," he muttered, carefully arranging himself against the back of the chair. "Nightwing cracked my ribs."
Jackie hissed in sympathy. "Did they get Sorrow too?"
"Hell if I know." He began to rake a hand through his hair in irritation and jerked to a halt, grimacing with pain. "I haven't seen her for two weeks."
"Seriously," Jackie said, leaning closer. "You really left her? You weren't just saying that?"
"She wanted to stay in Gotham. Can you believe that? Batman, the cops, this place - all these horrible things keep happening to her and she refuses to leave. I mean, look what happened to me!" he said, gesturing at his multicolored face.
"Because you stayed in Gotham?" His eyes narrowed as much as they could around the swelling. "Just asking," she added defensively.
"It wasn't exactly my choice to stay in Gotham," he snapped. "And things would have been a lot better if Harley Quinn had stayed out of it." He drummed his fingers on the rapidly disintegrating arm of the chair. "I'm going to do whatever it takes to get out of here. You should too."
"Huh?"
"Get out of Arkham. Legally. Go back to a normal life. Get out while you can." He thumped a fist into the chair's arm, sending up a small puff of thick yellow dust from the rotting foam inside it. "All these people, these...rogues...Sorrow, the Riddler, the Joker, they don't give a damn about people like you and me. All they care about is what they want. I read about your arrest in the papers," he said abruptly. "We weren't back from the beach for even one week before you were caught. Look at you. You're in Arkham right now with a broken arm because the Riddler wanted to go out and rob somebody so badly that he picked the first target that came to mind. It didn't matter that you weren't trained. It didn't matter that you weren't ready. He wanted it so off you went, straight to Arkham. What's he going to want tomorrow?" He stared at her, bruised eyes locked on hers. "Are you really ready to catch a bullet just to prove that you love him?"
"I..." Jackie stammered. It wasn't right, what he was saying. Eddie hadn't done that. He picked the convention as a first, easy heist for her...hadn't he? Four days of training wasn't very much, but it was more than the nothing that Troy said she'd gotten. Eddie had done his best to keep her safe...
Hadn't he?
She examined Troy again. This man in front of her, this angry, sullen man, was not the Troy she'd seen a handful of weeks ago. What the hell had Sorrow done to him?
"I thought you really loved her," she said softly.
"I do," he said unthinkingly, then swore. "I did," he corrected himself firmly. "I did what I could for her. I tried to help her. I tried. I couldn't. She just...she just wouldn't listen. I can't do it anymore."
"And you don't know where she is?"
"No," he grumbled. "Neither does anyone else. That's how Harley got me caught - she came sniffing around, looking for Sorrow, and Nightwing followed her." He sighed, a short, sharp sigh that must have sent another shockwave of pain across his ribcage. "I don't know where she is," he continued, after a brief, red-faced pause. "I don't want to know. I don't," he insisted, with a firm voice that didn't match the lurking, desperate worry in his eyes.
An orderly poked his head into the wing, saw Troy in his chair, and started over. "You remember what I said," Troy said as he clambered to his feet. "Get over him and get out of here. You deserve more than this."
The orderly took his arm and guided him out of the door. Jackie watched them go with a profound sense of unease gripping her heart.
There were so many reasons to listen to him. No more being locked up. No more running down dark streets. No more worrying that every noise in the night was a hero about to break her legs. A chance at a new life, a job, a home of her own.
But...Eddie. And not just Eddie, but the rest of them, too. Well, not all of them - Joker was terrifying, and the Scarecrow was a jerk, but the rest of them were...well...nice, or at least a close approximation of it. Hadn't they all been welcoming from the moment that she walked into the Iceberg? Hadn't they talked to her and bought her drinks and been the one social group in her entire life that hadn't immediately closed her out?
Look at all that Eddie had done for her. Didn't she owe him? He'd kept her out of Arkham on Halloween. He'd gotten the ex-Qs to back off and get out instead of shooting her. He'd put up with her parents moving in and forcing him to go on their endless tourist trips.
On the other hand, look at everything that Eddie had done to her. Where to begin? He'd broken into her house and burned it down. He'd taken her to the opera, where he hadn't told her about the various traps he'd laid or that he planned to let Robin beat him to a pulp before taking him out, and her infuriated interruption of the beating had gotten her a free ticket to the Batman and Robin Broken-Arm Spectacular when they had eventually caught up with them at the convention. And the convention! He'd taken her there, mostly untrained, and expected her help regardless of whether she was ready for it. He'd nearly gotten her killed more times than she was comfortable thinking about. He'd taken away her real life, bit by bit, until all she had was him.
Didn't she deserve a chance to pick up where he'd made her leave off?
She wandered to the window, staring at the tiny green sprouts just starting to show on the hard, brown earth. Behind her, unnoticed, Harley Quinn watched her with suspicious eyes.
No season in Arkham was particularly good, but springtime was the worst. Winter and summer did their best to make the asylum unlivable by freezing and roasting everyone trapped indoors. Fall left inmates and staff alike impatient and frustrated under the influx of new interns sitting in on therapy sessions. But springtime - oh, springtime was miserable.
The sun shone brightly down on the asylum, the heat and warmth bringing all the flowers and plants back to life. Soft white clouds drifted in an impossibly blue sky. At any moment, baby bunnies would appear from their holes and take their first few tentative hops in this glorious new world. Life, hope, and joy sprung from everything the inmates could see out of their highly secure and sometimes electrified windows. Since none of the rogues were that big on life, hope, or joy to begin with, it wasn't nearly the pick-me-up that it seemed to be for the staff. The cheerfulness and whistled happiness of the orderlies as they went about their springtime business was enough to make any seasoned rogue wince with distaste.
Except, of course, for Poison Ivy, who traditionally spent the first few days of spring basking in the sun like an oversized green cat. Today she had pulled a pair of chairs over to the window, lounging indolently on one with her feet neatly crossed on the seat of the other. Lazily, eyes still closed, she twitched the top of her jumpsuit open a little farther. The gentle green curves of her skin glowed in the warm golden light.
Eddie sat stiffly in his armchair, examining Mike out of the corner of his eye. If the man stared any harder at Ivy's chest, he was going to pop an eyeball out of its socket. For the first time in weeks, he wasn't being watched. Now would be the perfect time to slip away, if it weren't for the dozen or so pesky guards that would be around at this time of day, not to mention the small army of orderlies and locked doors that he'd have to sneak past.
No, he couldn't leave, but at least he could relax enough to think again. He closed his own eyes, reveling in this tiny bit of solitude.
Springs squealed as someone sat down on the couch near him. "Hey."
Eddie slitted an eye. Troy Grey was perching on the edge of the sofa. A pair of bruises marked his face. From the careful, stiff way he was sitting, he'd had a recent run-in with the Batman or one of his irritating little associates. "Hello," he muttered, closing his eyes again.
"Are you escaping soon?"
Eddie's eyes flew open and immediately darted to Mike. The man was still ogling Ivy. It was highly unlikely that he'd heard him. And yet... "No," he said firmly.
"No?"
"No. How's Sorrow?" he asked, hoping to get him started on a monologue about how much he missed her or some other overly dramatic nonsense. He could certainly manage to nod and smile through a lovesick recitation without actually having to pay attention.
"How the hell would I know?" Troy snapped. "I don't know how she is. I don't care how she is. Why does everyone keep asking me about her? I bet no one comes up and pesters you about Jackie."
Eddie regarded him coldly. "No, they don't, because they know that I don't know. I haven't seen her since we were captured."
"Oh." Troy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "She's okay. Still has a cast on, but probably not for too much longer. I saw her this morning in the Henchgirl Recovery Program," he explained as Eddie listened curiously. "They tried to get me to join it, too."
"And they let you leave?" Eddie said, one eyebrow raised. Harvey's girls had flat-out refused to join the program, too, but they'd still been forcibly relocated.
"They had to. I'm not a henchman anymore." He gingerly slid back into his seat.
"You're not," Eddie said flatly.
"Right. I haven't even seen Sorrow for two weeks." He shifted uneasily. "No one else has, either."
"What?" Eddie snapped.
"We had a fight. Oh, you wouldn't understand. Forget it."
"And what, pray tell, wouldn't I understand?" Eddie said, dangerously calm.
Troy sighed. "She won't leave Gotham. But you won't either, so who cares, right? Let's just let Batman break our bones every few months and spend the rest of our lives rotting in a cell. Sounds like a great time to me."
"You left her because she wouldn't leave Gotham?" Eddie asked, ignoring his melodrama.
"Yes."
"You're an idiot."
"Me? I'm the idiot for wanting us to live a safe, normal life somewhere else?"
Eddie rolled his eyes. "So because you couldn't have your fantasy, you abandoned her."
"Oh, like you're one to talk."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You're the genius. You figure it out."
Eddie glared at him. He hadn't abandoned Jackie, he just hadn't saved her yet. His patience, which was worn down to the tiniest of thin threads, was beginning to give way. He darted a quick look at Mike. The orderly was still hypnotized by Ivy's bare skin.
"Look, I appreciate everything that you've done for us. For her," Troy corrected, when Eddie flashed him a skeptical look. "Now I'm just asking for this one more favor and you'll never hear from me again."
"Oh? And where will you go?"
"Why do you care?"
"I don't."
"Just break me out. Please. Please," he added hopefully.
"No." Eddie leaned back in his chair, eyes firmly closed. He didn't have a solid plan to escape yet, and even if he had, he certainly wouldn't want to discuss it within earshot of any staff, especially Mike. Go away. Just go away before he hears you!
"Oh, I see. Because you don't want to, you won't even consider it. You're just as selfish as she is."
Eddie's fragile hold on his self-composure snapped like a suspension bridge in a tornado. "Before you go throwing around accusations of being selfish, maybe you should look at yourself first. You want to leave Gotham and live a happy little picket-fence life? Sure, it'll be good for you. No one will look twice at you. What about her?" Eddie glared at him as he opened his mouth to speak. "Shut up. How long do you think she'd last among a bunch of bored housewives? How long do you think it would take for them to ask why she never took off her gloves? Five, ten minutes? What was your plan for her in your fancy new house? Keep her locked up and hidden away? She can get enough of that in Gotham, but at least she has friends here. You want to talk about selfish? You want to take everything away from her - her friends, her home, her entire lifestyle, and for what?"
"To get away from Batman! And Arkham! And all the rest of the shit that happens in this city!"
"If you think Batman wouldn't track you across the country to get her back, you are severely mistaken," Eddie pointed out. "Crane broke out and went straight, even got a job teaching upstate somewhere under a new name. Batman went up there and dragged him right back. A different zip code isn't going to save her from Batman." He narrowed his glare on Troy, who was starting to look a little pale. "And let me ask you this. Do you think she even wanted you around in the first place? Was it her that took you to the costume shop and dressed you up? No. You did it all by yourself because you wanted to, and now you want her to leave Gotham because you want to, and you want me to break you out of Arkham because you want to. You want to get out of Arkham? Get yourself out."
Troy's bruises were rapidly blending into the growing reddish-purple of his complexion. "I didn't do anything wrong!"
"Oh really? You're the psychiatrist. Tell me, how many times has she tried to kill herself? And you walked out on her. She's been missing for two weeks. She's probably dead by now, and by your own admission you don't even care. If that's not selfish, what is?"
Troy snarled something incoherent and flew into Eddie's chair, intent on punching the Riddler square in the gut. Eddie, who had been expecting it, twisted to the side and caught Troy in a headlock. The two of them twisted and writhed to the ground, lashing out at one another with all the pent-up energy available to two men who had been pushed far beyond the horizons of sanity by their incandescent fury.
A flailing elbow caught Eddie directly in the mouth. His jaw clacked shut on his tongue. Spitting blood, he surged up and belted Troy in the ear. Troy staggered backward. Eddie followed up with a firm shove to the chest that propelled Troy backward into a wooden chair, which tipped over and sent him sprawling on the ground. Ivy opened one eye just long enough to ensure that he wasn't going to bother her before returning to her sun-drenched doze.
As Eddie stepped forward for round two, Mike's sweaty, meaty hand wrapped around his arm. "Starting trouble again, Nygma?" he growled.
"This one started it," another orderly called from his kneeling position on Troy's legs. "Guess you shouldn't pick a fight with cracked ribs, huh?" he commented cheerfully as Troy wheezed beneath him.
Mike dragged Eddie over to the small nurse's window. Wordlessly, the nurse on duty passed him a selection of bargain-basement medical supplies.
As Mike grudgingly dabbed blood from Eddie's split lip with a folded piece of gauze, Eddie stared off into the distance. He wasn't thinking about the sting of rubbing alcohol on his face, or the warm metallic taste of blood in his mouth, or the sidelong stares of interest from the rest of the rogues' gallery. He wasn't certain if he could stand this building much longer. One lone word rang in his head, bouncing from neuron to neuron like a frisking lamb.
Escape.
(to be continued)
Author's Note: Batman's retrieval of Scarecrow happened in The Batman Adventures Annual #1. Drury really did sell his soul to a demon to become a giant moth in Underworld Unleashed, not that it helped him much, since he was ripped in half by Superboy Prime during the Infinite Crisis. Whoops. Alice first appeared in my story 'Rejoicing', where she did indeed dance with the devil in the pale moonlight - or the Joker, however you'd like to put it. All of the offscreen Sorrow/Grief/Harley stuff happened in a story that may or may not be posted depending on whether anyone wants to read it. If you like reading my stories here, may I politely suggest that you check out my tumblr and the small collection of other stories and Bat-stuff I've accumulated there. It's at checker-boards dot tumblr dot com.
