When I wake up, my eyes burning, somehow, I realize that I'm uncomfortable and hot. Really hot, it's really warm in here. Also, to add, Gotham City in the middle of the summer minus an air conditioner is somewhere around a hundred degrees.

And when I try to get up, to move, to do anything at all—Oh, this is getting better. My wrists are tied. And when my eyes fully focus (as much as they can, anyway, I left my glasses in the car. Not a very good super villain with glasses…well, in my analysis, anyway), there's a giant mutant rat in front of me.

A giant mutant rat who I recognize as the—

Oh shit. I'm fucked.

See, this is where the plan goes wrong.

Check, get to MCU. Check, rattle off like a weirdo-freak and prove Cleave's—the Joker's plan was my entire fault. Check—get knocked out by a blow to the back of the head. The fatal flaw in my plan? I didn't plan the plan out after throwing myself at the mercy of the long arm of the law.

Or rather, the long wing of the law.

"Where's the Joker?"

The only thing is, just as always, when the Bat speaks, I can't understand a word. It's strained gravel mixed with hard cement and rolled across miles of tar. It's harsh to my ears, impossible to hear, and when my eyes roll upward I find that the fabric obscuring them makes it irritating to see.

"I'm sorry, are you trying to speak German? I didn't quite catch that."

His huge hand claps onto my shoulder and he leans over me, his eyes narrowed. His crystal blue, familiar eyes. I want to accuse him for selling my ass out at a masquerade ball to use as some play-hostage. I want to tell him he deserves to suffer for haplessly tossing my life into some sick version of pot-luck so he could play cat-and-mouse with my next door neighbor.

But suddenly, all of that seems meagerly insignificant in the realization that a man-bat is going to crush my trachea into submission.

"Where is the Joker?" his teeth clench, but I only stare up at him with a half scowl half sneer.

"Up your ass." I quip, calmly, and realize suddenly that those words were the biggest mistake of the century.

Without warning his deadly plastic-grip latches onto the side of the chair and I find my entire world turned upside down. Well, I find my plan turned right on its ear—and I recognize this with the explosion of pain at the side of my head. The chair bounces, but I'm like a stuck pig straight for the slaughter. Bat-ass just roars again, "Where is he?! Where is that monster!?"

My ability to see just swims into a thousand different sections, and then goes fleeting back into my own form of visual distortion. My head throbs, but I ignore it. Because pain is only the memory of what was once my life. As if I really sound like that. Damn emo kids.

"Tell me exactly where he is." The big bad bat rasps, and I just glare up at him exhaustedly. I try to get my lip to twitch, wondering if I shouldn't manage half a grin.

"I told you, bat-boy, hell, do you got some kinda wax in your damn ears? He's up your ass."

Apparently, my punishment is a huge black boot to my abdomen and I feel the back of my chair splinter when I'm forced against it. I wheeze, and I make a frustrated little sound. I feel like my intestines have just caved. Now we're cooking with grease; enemy to enemy.

I'd say there was a sick thrill in this if I didn't know it was all against me. I don't have a chance in ever-loving hell, now.

The damage he's doing isn't terminal and he knows it. He can gauge every hit with flawless finesse, and that's working out of my favor. It only means he can torture me to my breaking point, and know precisely where to stop. I stopped playing chess a long time ago, now it's battleship we're toying with.

"Where?!" He roars, incessant, and his fist slams onto the interrogation table. There's a harsh sound, and where his plastic-enforced (see: titanium-laden-kevlar) fist has so mightily stricken, there's a horrible little indent.

Fun-fact: I'll die before I give him up.

Let's look at the logic from my point of view for a minute, shall we?

My life in Gotham City totals up to a tally of nothing. I know no one. I'm a blip on the radar, I'm a useless little ant in an entire colony. I have no real life, no attachments, none but one.

If I live and Cleave's out of here, where does my purpose go? What? I spend the rest of my life in abysmal nothingness and wallow in the filth of Gotham, all the while knowing I was the end of my best friend?

Don't think me the hero.

Not even for a fucking second.

Don't stick that bullshit next to my name, like a saint, a twisted form of martyr. Don't flip to the tails side of the coin and say I'm doing this because I want to save someone else's life.

If I die, I don't lose a damn thing. I lose an existence that I don't really care about in the first place.

Look at me, sounding all depressed.

It's all you can do when bat-shit's cramming a boot the size of Tucson into your stomach and you're lurching and writhing and doing all you can to get your mind away from the here and now.

Oh no, we're not playing heroes and villains, no, not now.

Who's the hero and who's the villain here, anyway, Batman?

Neither of our methods are so pure, are they?

There's a line that blurs between who the monsters and saviors of Gotham are. This line split down the middle when Battsy went crazy, and now he's spilling right over into the villain's side. I won't lie that I half-believe that Cleveland's got this working of his own doing, a slow, tumultuous destruction of the Batman's soul.

Once again, don't I look like the decoy?

I certainly feel more like the pile of dangling beef in the butcher's shop. They pulverize that shit, don't they?

It's within a few moments of nasty back-and-forth that I realize something, and I see a glimmer behind the Bat's shoulder as he faces me. His hands curl erratically and sporadically into fists, his teeth clench and his eyes spark pure ice.

I choke something out, and from a previous shot to the mouth I can taste the copper that lines my putridly now-ruby teeth. I never realized how thick blood was, but it makes me panic in my pathetic, prone position on the floor. A brief gurgle rises in my throat.

"Wait! Wait! I have something to tell you," He stops, staring down at me until his lip curls back into a horrific snarl and his jaw leaps like some small, deadly animal.

In slow triumph, I rasp, "Hey, Battsy, what's purple and green and white all over?"