Therapy, the three-hour long bane of Jason's life at Arkham.
He spent most of his sessions listening to the ticking clock and thanking every single one of his lucky stars that the place was too understaffed for him to have more than two of them a week.
At first he'd played along, made up stories about his childhood to explain his 'homicidal tendencies'. He knew enough about psychology to make it look good, believable without really giving anything away. It hadn't taken long to pass all of their psych evaluations and get declared mentally fit enough to stand trial.
Then Bruce had shown up and blown all of his plans out of the water. No, he'd told the Arkham faculty, the Red Hood wasn't sane, he was just manipulating the system to make them think he was.
He'd tried coming up with other plans of escape, each on more vicious than the next. Arson, poisoning, a mass breakout, but he hadn't gone through with any of them. Then came the anti-psychotics and a number of other pills that were supposed to 'help' him. His refusal culminating in drugging every piece of food they put in front of him.
Now, more than a year since he'd been brought to Arkham, he was too physically weak and out of the loop to pull off most of those old escape plans.
He was left with three months to get himself out or he'd be stuck in some other prison five times harder to escape from than Gotham's most famous revolving door would ever be.
And all of it had started in that little office with a woman jabbering on about the string of mental disorders some anonymous doctor ( of course he knew it was fucking Batman ) had provided them with.
Jason told himself he didn't care. He wasn't crazy and no amount of medical text books were going to make him believe he was. Wanting to burn the office down was a normal reaction to a place that, with each visit he began tasting another drug in the little food he ate.
He only half listened to the psychiatrist, responding as little as he could get away with while he glared at the camera they thought was so well hidden.
'Are you happy now Bruce?' He wanted to ask the man who'd stuck him there. 'Is this the help you think I need?'
"I hear you've been getting regular visits from your sister." The psychologist said, looking at him with that feint smile that made the back of his brain itch. "Do you have anything to say about how that's been affecting you?"
"She's annoying, tell them not to let her in." He said, deliberately undermining her attempts at making eye contact by reading one of the framed certificates on her wall.
"You know, a good support structure could be just the thing you need to start making some progress." She scribbled down something on her note pad. She did that a lot, but Jason swore she was just doodling, she couldn't be reading that deeply into everything he was saying.
"Sure." There was a multicolored bird plush on her desk. It looked ridiculous, like something a senile old woman had knitted in the dark. His eyes must have lingered on the thing for too long, because the shrink noticed.
"Would you like to hold it?" She asked. "It might make you feel better."
"No I don't want to hold it." Jason squared his jaw and shoved down the growl that tried to force itself out with his words. Being treated like a psycho was almost understandable, but if they started treating him like a five-year-old, he was dusting off the plans that involved arson, lots of arson.
She wrote something else down and Jason scoffed. What profound wisdom could she possibly find in him not wanting to play with a toy? She shot him a curios look, but he pretended not to notice.
"That's all for this session." She said, pressing a button next to her desk. "You'll consider what we talked about?"
"Yup, sure." He stood and let the guards escort him out. He had no idea what she was talking about, but it didn't matter. He wasn't staking any of his new plans on outside help, he just wanted the quiet of his cell so he could think and maybe come up with a way to gather the information he needed.
.
.
.
Stephanie was a little more nervous waiting in the guard booth than she had been the last time. When she'd shown up and been told she'd have to wait because he was scheduled for therapy (and no claiming it was a family emergency wouldn't help) she'd wanted to leave right there.
Everyone was so on edge after Talia, then she'd heard that Bruce had shown up to interrogate Jason about it and she'd gotten curios. As far as she knew Jason didn't have any more to do with the league of shadows than the others.
The fact that Bruce had asked her to keep an eye on him since he wouldn't suspect her didn't have anything to do with it.
Waiting would have been a lot easier if she could have done it in the actual waiting room, but visiting hours were over and Schools had said leaving her in the unguarded area was too much of a security risk.
Schools. She could feel the guys eyes ogling her even after she'd draped her cape over herself In a very Batman-esque way. She didn't want to risk not being allowed back in if she left and went back later, so she was stuck having to endure. She made a note not to come around that time on a Tuesday again, and sent a text to Barbara for Jason's schedule just to make sure it wouldn't happen again.
She got out her phone and tried to look professional while playing a game she and Tim had been competing on while she waited. Schools tried to get close enough to talk to her, but she turned her screen away from him and apologized for being too busy to chat with him.
When the doors slid open for the umpteenth time and the creepy guy walked too close to her on his way to do the security check she was just about ready to up and leave.
School's smirk dropped when Jason stepped through, flanked by a pair of anxious looking guards. Steph practically jumped from her seat and skipped over to him.
He arched a twitching eyebrow at her, and she shrugged, her eyes drifting to Schools who's hands were shaking a little when he swiped his keycard to let them through the next door.
Jason rolled his eyes and shifted his feet like she'd just thrust upon him the most tedious task in all of the multi-verse. Even she didn't know what she was asking, or that she'd asked at all until he did it.
Jason paused next to the guard, squaring his shoulders in a way that made him look even taller while Steph peeked out from behind him.
"Don't." Jason said, squeezing his fists so hard his knuckled cracked before he stomped off.
That was all it took to turn the guard into a teary eyes wreck, Schools bottom lip was quivering while he nodded, his eyes almost bulging out of his head. "Y-yes sir."
Jason was halfway to the next door when he had to turn back to his terrified escorts and jerk his head for them to follow.
Stephanie felt a grin practically splitting her face in two when she skipped ahead to walk next to him and they led the way to his cell. As soon as the cell door shut behind them, she burst into a fit of giggles, even if it didn't fix the problem forever, the look on his face had been the most satisfying thing she'd seen all week.
"Oh my god Jason, you are so scary." She let out an exited little squeak. "Did you see his face? Man, I wish I really had a brother like you, do you have any idea how many pervs I wouldn't have to deal with?"
"Whatever Blondie." Jason lay back with his arms tucked behind his head, directing his eyes to his ceiling instead of her, but there was a barely visible twitch of his lip that told her he wasn't as indifferent as he seemed.
"So scary." She whispered and pulled the stool over to her usual spot. "I could just hug you right now."
"Don't you dare." He bit out.
"I said I could, you know if not for the scariness factor. Hey have you ever watched Friday the thirteenth, cause I could swear they had a telepath look to the future and name him after you, you're so scary." She pulled out her homework; Bruce had said doing non-crime-fighting related things around Jason would humanize her or something, she was just happy to have an excuse to finish her schoolwork without them judging her.
"Hey, you won't believe what happened to me and Tim the night Talia was visiting you." She said, propping her books awkwardly on her lap and trying to find some way to position her pens so that they wouldn't roll away.
Jason didn't tense up when she mentioned Talia, but his hand did move a little towards his throat where she noticed a few purple splotches on his pale skin.
"We thought they were setting up a bomb in the Bowery, so me and Red Robin went to defuse it, but we weren't fast enough and it went off. He tried to be all hero-ey and play human shield for me, and the 'bomb'…" She made air-quotes even though he wasn't looking at her, "… went off, but it wasn't really a bomb, or it was but not the explosions kind and everything got covered in this gross smelling orange slime."
"I got some on my shoes too, and I spent the whole night washing them, but I think I can still kinda smell it." Her face scrunched up at the memory. "Red Robin was this close to burning his whole costume till Penny-one offered to get it out for him."
"I took a picture, wanna see?" She asked, getting out her phone and dropping her books to the floor to move closer without waiting for an answer.
Jason cracked open his eyes to look at the picture. His lips curled into a more obvious smirk and Steph's grin widened.
"It's times like those that make this whole Batgirl thing so worth it." She rolled her eyes and stepped back to her books. "Except that now everyone's all uptight about the league of assassins showing up again. Talia's a terrible mother."
"You shouldn't talk about things you don't understand." The underlying emotion in Jason's voice surprised her, he reached down and picked up a pencil that had rolled near his bed.
"Er, right I forgot you were friends or something." Stephanie went back to her stool and gathered her books to her lap just as Jason snagged a loose page off the ground.
"We're not." Jason said, rolling so he was lying on his chest. He pressed the paper on the wall and began drawing a grid. "You know the date?"
"What?" Steph blinked, staring at him like he'd grown a second head, according to some things she'd heard from Dick, that happening wasn't as improbable as some other things.
"Day of the month, Blondie." He repeated, looking at her though his orangey bangs.
"The eighteenth." She said after a few more seconds of staring. "What are you doing?"
"They don't keep calendars where inmates can see them." He replied, filling numbers into his grid.
"That's kind of weird." She cracked open her textbook.
"Hm." He shrugged and stuffed the page and pencil under his pillow before lying down again. "Tell that to Calendar man and Two-face."
She wasn't sure about letting him keep something he could use to stab someone with, but as far as she knew he's never hurt a guard before, and she didn't want to jeopardize him actually acknowledging her existence just yet by asking for it back.
"Do you ever wonder why Gotham gets all the weird villains?" She said, fishing another pencil out of her bag to start on her homework.
"Birds of a feather." Jason said. "Superman fights aliens, Wonder Woman fights legends. You see the pattern."
"You're saying Batman's crazy?" She frowned at him bemusedly.
He looked back at her with an identical expression and brought up his index fingers to make bat ears behind his head.
"Okay, maybe you have a point." Chemistry was one of the easier subjects thanks to the little detective training she had, so she started on that. For a while, the only sound in the room was her pencil scratching along her paper.
Jason looked like he was sleeping again, and she looked up from her work every few minutes to watch him. His face didn't relax completely, that line between his eyes a permanent fixture even when the rest of his body was mostly relaxed.
If she listened to his breathing instead of the other sounds that filtered through, she could almost find it relaxing too. Just doing her homework while he pretended to sleep.
When her chemistry was mostly done, she looked around the little cell again. The others she'd peeked into on her previous visits had some personal touches to them. Colorful blankets or a picture stuck to the wall. The most personal thing in Jason's cell was the bottle of soap she'd seen in the little shower when she'd been looking for his hair dye.
"I bet you get really bored." She said, stuffing her homework back in her bag.
Jason didn't reply, but he did let out a huff that could have been either amusement or annoyance.
"What kind of stuff did you even do when you weren't plotting?" leaned back against her the wall, balancing on the back legs of her stool.
"Not allowed to do anything here." His pillow muffled his words as he rolled over.
She rolled her eyes and lifted her bag off the ground. "Murder and mayhem can't be your only hobbies. Penny-one said you used to like reading."
"I might use the pages to start a fire, or compress them tightly enough to make a weapon."
"You like music?" She tried.
"Nothing with electrical components of any kind."
"Come on if they were that controlling no one would ever break out." She tried to sound flippant when she tapped on the door to leave.
He used his fingers to make the bat ears again. "Can't be too careful with the psycho zombie, huh?"
A feeling she couldn't place settled heavily in the pit of her stomach and didn't quite sit right.
"Night Hood." It was hard to imagine sitting in one room for hours at a time, even with something to keep her occupied, that it was Jason's whole life was a little disconcerting.
He didn't say anything, but she though he she heard a sigh when he shoved his head under his pillow as she left. She chalked it up to Jason being a little less grumpy than usual and blamed it on the therapy. Maybe visiting just after his sessions was a good idea after all.
When she heard the crinkling of paper she just assumed it was him looking at his calendar again.
She was barely out the building and Oracle was in her ear, asking for an update.
"He didn't say anything about Talia." Stephanie said, shooting a look at the foreboding building over her shoulder. "But he's talking again, so there's that if you can think it's helpful."
'Batman wants you to head to the cave for a briefing.'
"A briefing?" She frowned, slipping her helmet over her head. "Geez I'm not freaking super-spy behind enemy lines O."
'As far as he's concerned you might as well be.' There was a hint of laughter in Barbara's scrambled voice.
"Fine, I hope he knows he has to feed me if he's gonna keep me there all night." Stephanie sighed in resignation and sped down the narrow bridge back to the mainland and Batman's home base.