This is not a comedy, although it was intended to be. I dedicate it to Niki, my own Al and second Robin. May she pants many and never die.

I don't own Batman or any of his pals. I don't own Cillian Murphy's face (I would be much prettier if I did) although I am perfectly willing to put it on my Scarecrow. I don't even own Herbert West. Sue me only if you're desperate.

A Savage Pantsing

Alice had a death wish. That was the only thing I could think.

I was a third-year pre-med student when Al blew into my life like some female Herbert West. She showed up at my apartment in the middle of the night, asking if I needed a roommate. I wondered if she'd heard that my old roommate had cracked under the pressure of fall exams and would be spending the rest of the year in Arkham, but as it turned out, Al was a transfer student from Gotham City College, on the other side of town, and she had been going door-to-door hoping for a stroke of luck so she could avoid a commute. That's the kind of girl she was, proactive in her own weird way.

Thick, horn-rimmed glasses and a button-down shirt made her look pretty harmless, so I decided to give her a chance. It was the best, and worst, decision of my life.

Her major was psychology, and I was pre-med, but we had the same ultimate goal: psychiatry. Gotham University was the perfect location for us, within walking distance of both Gotham General and Arkham Asylum (although any idiots who tried walking home from either one after dark usually got no less than they deserved.) The reason Al transferred to Gotham U, I learned, was because she had landed a very prestigious undergrad internship working under Dr. Jonathan Crane at Arkham.

My psych professor had encouraged me to apply for the same internship the semester before, but I decided I'd rather have a job than an unpaid internship, since I enjoyed eating and sleeping inside a building. I did get to work around the famous Dr. Crane, though. Not that he spent much of his time in the laundry room, but I did see him around every once in a while.

Al's internship started in mid-December, so she and I rode the bus home together every night for a couple of weeks without getting to know each other. It wasn't until Christmas Eve that we had our first real conversation.

I was sitting in the living room, drinking cocoa, watching the snow fall, and feeling depressed.

You know how the snow falls in some places, in big, thick flakes that create these sparkling snowdrifts that transform the world into a winter wonderland?

The snow doesn't fall like that in Gotham. In Gotham, the snow looks dirty before it ever hits the ground. It's never powdery, always wet, and Gotham snow never sticks. It just turns the sidewalks to ice.

Al came in from that miserable weather smiling. From the depths of my usual holiday depression, I decided that this could not stand.

"What are you still doing here?" I asked. "I thought you'd be spending Christmas with your family." She didn't lose her smile.

"Dad's in prison. You must have heard about the arrest. Very high-profile."

"Wait, you mean you're Big Al Hare's daughter?"

"Yep. Broke his heart when I decided not to take over the family business." She sat down next to me and stole my cocoa. "How about you? Any skeletons in your family closet?"

"Just my family." She choked.

"Sorry. You're an orphan?" I shrugged.

"Not quite, but I haven't seen my dad since I was a kid. Would you like some hot cocoa?" I asked pointedly as she took another sip from my mug. She didn't take the hint.

"How about your mom?" None of your business, I thought. My mother was dead; she had spent the last years of her life in Arkham, something I didn't want to talk about to a total stranger. When I didn't answer, Al said, "Mine ran off with Dad's accountant, so he took a hit out on her. Bet you can't top that."

Fair enough; I didn't try.

On Christmas Day, I went with Al to visit her father in prison. He was a very nice middle-aged man who called his daughter Princess and told me I was a charming young lady. I thought she was going to slip him a pack of cigarettes, but before we left, he was the one who gave her a wad of cash and told her to buy herself something nice. When I asked her about it later, she laughed and told me he didn't smoke.

After that, we went across the street to the park. It's sad when the prison is in a better part of town than the hospital and the university, but that's Gotham for you. Al rented two pairs of ice skates and tried to drag me out on the pond. I declined, so Al skated by herself for an hour while I drank apple cider and watched the snow fall. It was the nicest snow I've ever seen in Gotham.

We had a lovely Christmas, and thus our friendship was begun.

We walked over to Arkham together the next day, trudging through the frozen slush that would be melted and gone by noon. Some places look picturesque with a little snow, even Gotham snow, covering the sharp edges.

Not Arkham.

When I was a little girl, the other kids used to say the place was haunted. I believed the ghost stories. Who wouldn't? The place was bleak, it was dark, it was the stuff of any child's nightmares. Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself would have cringed to walk through those foreboding iron gates.

"How did you end up working in such a doomful place?" Al asked as she punched in her security code. The old oak doors swung open on their own like the bad special effects in an old horror movie.

"It's just a building. I stopped believing in ghosts a long time ago." We flashed our IDs at the security guard, even though he knew us both. I usually spent a few minutes chatting with him; he was a nice guy with a large family he was very proud of. That day I was late, though, so I just waved and let him corner Al with baby pictures while I headed down the back stairs.

I envied Al. Her job wasn't all fun and games—she had to tour the violent ward with no one but skinny little Dr. Crane, whereas I had two mammoth orderlies backing me up when I went in to change the bedding. But sometimes Dr. Crane sent her for coffee while he made those rounds, and she did spend most of her time in the front offices, which might not have been cheery, but at least they had some light. I was stuck down in the basement, next to Ward 5.

Back then, Arkham was divided into four separate wards. Recovery Ward was for patients who were expected to be released soon. "Soon" could be relative, of course—my mother stayed there for nearly two years before she released herself—but the patients there were rarely a danger to themselves or others. They were the only ones we called patients. The inmates of the Long-Term Ward were the incurables. We considered some of them pretty big-time criminals in those days, before Harvey Dent lost face and the Joker discovered the ultimate punchline. Ward 3 was suicide watch. It had no permanent residents, but it always seemed to be full. Go figure.

The High-Security Ward, a.k.a. the Violent Ward, was the place where no one wanted to go. A few of the inmates were rich men who knew their only choices were Arkham or the chair, and paid well for the privilege of a private room. We all knew about them, and no one really begrudged Dr. Crane the extra income. After all, it was safer to have them in there than out on the streets, and it wasn't like anyone had ever escaped Ward 4. Not yet.

But there were other people in Ward 4. One who attacked a nurse and tried to eat her tongue. One who left a permanent dent in the padded wall with his face (or someone else's, we were never quite sure.) One who gouged out his own eye with a plastic spork because he was tired of the color of the walls. Just standing in the hallway outside the rooms, you could almost feel them clawing at you. The ones who weren't insane to begin with got there pretty quick.

The screaming never stopped.

I figured that was where the stories about Ward 5 began.

Supposedly, there was a fifth ward in the basement of the asylum, accessible only by a set of hidden stairs in the boiler room. It was supposed to be worse than Ward 4. I couldn't imagine how.

Some people even said that the Dracula Man (who we'd come to know as Batman later on) was an escapee from Ward 5, the victim of some crazy experiments gone horribly wrong. I didn't believe in caped mutants and mad scientists in the basement any more than I believed that the souls of the damned wandered Arkham's shadowed halls, but I will admit that I felt a moment of fear every time the pipes moaned or the ducts made the screams from the Violent Ward seem to come from directly under my feet.

That day, it was relatively quiet.

There were four industrial washing machines down there, and I was always stuck with the one closest to the boiler room because I told them it didn't bother me. That wasn't exactly true, but I was willing to pretend for the kind of money they paid us. Even with the good wages, more than a few lower-level employees got scared off during their first few days on the job. But I've always considered myself practical enough not to let a few spooky noises and crazy superstitions scare me away from a steady paycheck.

I knew this was going to be a good day when I went to get my cart and heard nothing but the rattling of the pipes. Then I learned that I was assigned to Recovery.

Recovery was the easiest ward to work, although I honestly preferred Long-Term or Suicide Watch, and sometimes switched with the others when they were too stressed to deal with the real crazies. But Recovery was fairly nice, considering. The paint might be peeling from the walls, but at least they still looked like the walls of a decrepit old mansion that had been loved and lived in long ago, not just a loony bin with no room for hope and no need for charm. The windows there were barred, but big enough to look out of, although there wasn't much to see. Some of them even had curtains, though any patients who had been in the suicide ward learned that Dr. Crane considered curtains a privilege, not a right.

He felt that way about a lot of things, including elevators, apparently. Ours was broken, so I dragged my laundry cart up half a flight of stairs before my orderlies showed up to help me. Bob was a man old enough to be my grandfather; Frank was my age and built like a brick wall. We called them Master Blaster behind their backs, but they were my favorite guys to work with because Bob and I could keep up a conversation while Frank beat the unruly ones into submission. Not that any of the more rational ones ever tried anything with Frank the Tank in the room.

"Quiet today," old Bob said as Frank took the cart from me.

"Yes, sir," I answered. "I'm glad they give us a break every once in a while." He glared at me like I was a fool for even thinking such a thing.

"Young lady, I done worked here since before you was born. I know what quiet means, and it ain't no rest for the wicked. Ain't that right, Frank?" Frank grunted. "You mark my words, that young Crane fellow will be calling the old black-and-whites 'fore the day is through."

"Maybe so, Mr. Bob." (He never did tell me his last name, but he got awfully miffed when a young person called him by his first.) "Anyway, if anything is going to go horribly wrong, we probably ought to get the sheets changed first."

Bob muttered something about whippersnappers and suffragettes but let it go at that, a sure sign that he was feeling the weather in his joints. When he was in a good mood, he could harangue me for hours.

The first room in the Recovery Ward belonged to a pair of elderly ladies, one who heard the voice of God through her hearing aid, and one who had shot her grandson's puppy in the head because, and I quote: "It was a bad influence, leading my sweet little Eddie down the wrong path with those other hooligans and their evil rock and roll drug shows."

The puppy-killer was nowhere to be seen, so I greeted Mrs. Robinson, loudly, so as to be heard over the voice of the Lord.

"Vera ain't here," she said helpfully as I began stripping the beds.

"Yes, ma'am, I can see that. Do you know where she is?"

"Jesus done told me she ain't bent for Heaven."

"Well, does Jesus know where she is? You know she isn't supposed to go out on her own.

Mrs. Robinson sighed and gave me a watery look that could have meant almost anything.

"She went to the bathroom."

That satisfied me; I couldn't really blame the old lady for wanting to use a nice clean toilet instead of a rusty bedpan, or worse, the bed I was currently fitting with crisp, white sheets.

"They found her not five minutes ago," Mrs. Robinson continued, mumbling to herself now. "Up all night crying, she was. Saying her Eddie wanted her to die. Jesus Christ Almighty Hisself told her to keep it down. She didn't listen."

I dropped my sheets.

"Told you," said Bob.

When I ran back out into the hall, I saw the people clustered around the bathroom door. Doctors, nurses, patients, all crowded together. Chaos. There was Dr. Crane, his gaze intense, and Al, looking more upset than I'd ever seen her.

"Suicide" was a whisper that went through the crowd like a contagious disease.

"I didn't think it was possible to kill yourself that way," Frank said, his deep voice hushed and fearful. Standing on my tiptoes, I saw what he saw: a little old lady in a musty gray bathrobe the exact color of her straggly, wet hair, slumped over the toilet like a co-ed who'd had too much to drink.

"Happened here once before," Bob said…

…and suddenly I was nineteen again, sitting in the new administrator's office, feeling an unreasoning fear of his piercing blue eyes as he patiently, even kindly, explained that my mother…

…and then I could almost see her, my sad, beautiful mother, sneaking out of her room at night to kill herself, stuffing her socks into the drain in the bathroom sink, patiently waiting for the water to rise, plunging her face into the icy water…

"…before your time," Bob was saying. "Real pretty young thing. She used the sink, though. Too good to die in toilet water."

I turned away from them, leaning on the wall for support, as Bob launched into a story about a man who saved his own urine in a hidden bedpan, but ultimately failed to drown in it.

"Awful, isn't it?" Al said, coming over to join me. "She was so jumpy yesterday, Dr. Crane switched her to a stronger sedative. She should have been getting better, but some of the other patients say they heard her screaming last night." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "You don't think it was more than just suicide, do you?"

"There was no sign of a struggle," I said.

"How do you know that? You just got here." I shrugged.

"Lucky guess."