"So?" Jason said as soon as Kairos dropped down on the balcony just as the sky got dark the following evening.

"Can you at least let me empty my urine bag first?" she said, walking straight to the bathroom.

Jason grimaced and followed. "Urine bag?" Sure enough, Kairos pulled off her left boot and from the leg of her suit removed a plastic bag full of yellow liquid.

"How else do you think I stayed in those air vents for ten hours?" she asked as she began emptying the liquid into the toilet.

"That's commitment."

She smiled a little but didn't look at him, concentrating on the task at hand. "Batman always said commitment was training for two hours every morning before work."

"Batman needs to pull his head out of his ass," Jason said without hesitation. "Okay, the urine bag is empty. What did you find out?"

"Geez, can't I change first?"

Jason growled and stalked out of the bathroom and around the room until Eerie came back out in civvies. "I got you some food," he said, gesturing toward a stack of take-out boxes. She looked in each of the boxes before selecting the croque monsieur with fries. Then she plopped down on the bed, opened her laptop and inserted a small card in the side. After a few seconds of watching the footage that started playing, Jason realized that this was the feed from her mask and cowl. "You talk to yourself while you watch people?"

"It's easier than trying to write it all down," she said, chewing on a bite of sandwich, "and this way, I have faces to put with everything instead of having to know or remember everybody's names."

"So what did you find?"

"I don't think our guy is in law enforcement," she said, scrolling through the footage with the audio muted. "All these folks seem to be normal. I mean, as normal as cops ever are." Jason felt his face fall. Back to square one. "But," Eerie continued, apparently finding the moment in the footage she was looking for, "this guy is most certainly weird."

Jason watched the video. He recognized the commissioner from the photos Eerie had show him earlier, but the guy across the desk was a mystery. "Who is he?"

"Deputy Mayor Rene Georges. Apparently this meeting happens every day."

"Why would the deputy mayor meet with the commissioner every day?"

"Exactly," Eerie said through a mouthful of fries. "This guy is full of bad vibes. He stopped to talk to a few of the officers on his way out, and each and everyone of them exuded the same sense of, well, devotion, even when they were just exchanging pleasantries."

Bingo, thought Jason. He got up and started pulling out his guns from their various hiding places.

"What are you doing?" asked Eerie.

"I'm going to pay Monsieur Georges a visit."

"No you're not."

Jason spun around and glared at her. "Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?"

"Someone you made a deal with," she answered in a level tone, but he could see her hands tremble slightly. He was scaring her, but he wasn't sure if she was scared of him hurting her or if she was scared of him killing someone. She was right about the deal though; he had given his word not to kill anyone until she gave the go-ahead. He sneered. "Fine, then I am going out to find something that will get me drunk while you research all your stupid fucking shit!"

He made a point of slamming the door behind him as he stormed out, though he immediately regretted it. It did not fit with the low profile of two happy tourist couples they were trying to maintain. By the time he finished his first whiskey at the first bar he found, he regretted a lot more. Sure, Eerie was being kind of a whiny bat bitch, but she was trying to do the job right. And while he felt it in his bones that the deputy mayor was an evil piece of shit, it was possible what Eerie had seen was the result of the guy being well-liked. Giving her a couple more days to guarantee who the target was wouldn't hurt anything. Jason could be patient.

After his second whiskey, Jason realized that he also didn't like the idea that Eerie was scared of him. Sure, he had a temper and, sure, he'd tried to kill bats in the past, but that was long time ago, and besides, he'd never really hurt a member of his own team. Not that they were a team.

He paid his bill at the end of the third whiskey and decided to head back to the hotel with a peace offering. Whiskey, he had found, could smooth over any number of misunderstandings, and he exited the convenience mart with a terribly expensive fifth of bourbon - American liquor was like gold here but he didn't know anything about the local brands. When he got back to the hotel room, Eerie was exactly where he expected her to be: sitting on the bed in front of her computer. She jumped a little when he came in. "Look," he said before she could make a sound, handing her the bottle, "I was an ass, so I brought you this." He had never been good at apologies, and he'd drunk enough not to be drunk per se, but a little fuzzy around the edges.

Eerie tentatively took the offering and pulled off the brown bag. "How did you know I like bourbon?" she asked, looking at the bottle.

"I didn't," he said, "but you work all the fucking time and you need to lighten up."

"I'm not sure you're the right person to be giving lectures about being obsessed with work," she said, "but I have a policy about never looking gift bourbon in the mouth." She unscrewed the lid and drank straight from the bottle. Jason was relieved; halfway home he had remembered that most girls he'd seen drink hard liquor insisted on mixing it with Coke or some shit, but Eerie didn't seem to mind it straight. She didn't even make a face. She screwed the lid back on and shifted the laptop so he could see the screen. "I've been looking into Georges..." she began.

"No," said Jason, "no work. Tonight, we drink." He shut the laptop and put the bottle back in her hands. She looked confused. "God," said Jason, "can we please just fucking drink? We're friends, right? Friends drink together, right?"

He really didn't want to explain that he felt guilty about his outburst, that he really did want them to be friends. Luckily, Eerie didn't question further, taking another drink from the bottle, but she pulled it away when he reached for it. "You look like you're a few ahead of me," she said. "You have to let me catch up."

"I've merely taken into account our differences in weight and alcohol tolerance," Jason said, stretching to grab the bottle.

A couple hours later the bottle was missing over half its contents and Eerie was giggling uncontrollably as Jason told her about his former fighting mentor who was addicted to energy drinks. "And then he puked hot pink all over the car!" Jason concluded as Eerie laughed a silent, body-wracking laugh that mimicked sobs. "That dumb fucker needed that shit so bad, he didn't even realize that I had poisoned it," he said, then mentally smacked himself; talking about killing people always made bats mad. Eerie, however, was perhaps too drunk to notice his slip, as she continued her giggle fit. When she calmed down, she lay flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, hands grabbing at her short hair.

"What did he do?" she asked.

Shit. She had noticed.

"Human trafficking. Child prostitution."

"Oh."

That was not the reaction he was used to getting. He braced himself for the lecture that always came, but Eerie just lay there scrunching her fingers in her hair, probably silently judging him. "What the hell is your problem?!" he spat.

She rolled over to look at him, confusion all over her face. "What did I do?"

"I'd rather have the stupid ass lecture than all this silent judgment bullshit."

"I'm not judging," she said plainly.

"Well why the fuck not?!" She was pissing him off, fucking with the rules.

She sat up, swaying just a little and closing her eyes like she was having to think hard about finding the words. "Batman espouses ideals that culturally we deem 'noble' or 'good' or 'just'." Jason could almost hear the scare quotes in her voice; she was definitely using her I-have-a-college-degree voice. "We validate Batman's choices by telling ourselves that the means are just as important as the ends, that if we wanted a good democratic society then we have to rely on the democratic institutions in place. And I agree to a certain extent. But I also think that the culture that tells us that Batman's choices are 'right' is fundamentally flawed. It is sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, and a whole slew of other things." She opened her eyes and looked at him. "Simply put, Batman will never know what it is like to be a woman in the world. He will never experience the fear of going about everyday life that women sometimes do." She paused and looked away again. "I mean, this is just one thing among many; Bruce may have tried to give himself a full range of experiences, but he will never be black or gay or poor. And for these reasons, I'm not sure that I like that he has the authority to say what is 'right' all the time." She paused again, then searched around the bed for the bottle. "I can't believe I just said that," she said before taking a drink.

"Yeah, you're getting real fucking confessional," said Jason. But what she had said made sense; even in his days as Robin, he had chafed under Bruce's protection of criminals, in part because Bruce seem so far removed from the damage that the drug dealers and pimps did. He could talk about seeing the worst of Gotham, but it didn't really mean anything until you had lived it. His mind flashed to his mother with a needle in her arm, but he quickly pushed that away. Eerie nudged the bottle at him and said, "You're turn."

"Hm?"

"You're turn to confess something. And don't just tell me about something bad you did; you have to say something you're scared to say."

"The fuck I do!"

"Friends, right?" she said, waving the bottle in front of his face.

Jason glared but took the bottle. He thought for a second. "I...I regret going after the Robins," he said quickly and took a long drink. "It was a waste of my time," he finished, trying to maintain some sense of bravado. It didn't seem to matter; the next thing he knew, Eerie was on top of him, pressing her lips to his. She pushed her tongue into his mouth, and he found himself pushing back, dropping the bottle to grab her waist. Too long without, he thought as he felt a pressure in his nethers, and ignoring the question of what exactly was going on or why, he resigned himself to an entirely pleasant fuck with a rather attractive girl.

Until Eerie suddenly broke off the kiss and pushed away from him. "Fuck!" she said repeatedly as she pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her face against them.

Jason jumped up off the bed. "What the hell did I do?!" he almost shouted.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry, I'm just...fuck...I just don't do casual sex and I don't know what this means and I've fucked it all up and I'm so sorry I'm such a fucking idiot and I don't know what the fuck I was thinking fuck fuck fuck now I'm having a fucking panic attack." Eerie had started pressing her body even tighter into her knees as she said this.

Jason took a deep breath. The rest of it he had no idea about, but a panic attack was something he could handle. He sat back down on the bed and said, "Okay, take a deep breath in...now let it out slowly...deep breath in...now let it out..." Over and over he repeated until Eerie stopped looking like she was trying to keep her body together by sheer force of will.

After about ten minutes, she looked up from her knees but still faced away from Jason. "Thanks," she said in a small voice.

"I saved Roy from mercenaries. It's nothing." He paused. "Do they happen often? The panic attacks?"

"Usually not, as long as I take my meds."

"And have you been taking them?" The last thing he needed was her projecting weird emotional shit everywhere.

"Yes."

"Good," he said, feeling like a nurse maid. "It's time to go to sleep." He went to the bathroom and threw some water on his face after taking a piss. Holy shit, he thought. What a nightmare. Some part of him, the part that was convinced he was a completely unredeemable fuck-up, felt completely validated that kissing him had given a girl a panic attack. The rest of him was just tired, too tired to think about the whole mess tonight.

When he came back out, he was relieved to find Eerie in the bed, curled up facing away from him. He self-consciously settled himself on the small sofa with his jacket as a blanket.