The frown on the shrinks face was a cross between that of a supervillian who'd just been foiled and a disinterested teacher who just wanted that disobedient child out of her class as soon as possible.
"I was hoping you were becoming more responsive." She pushed her wire rimmed glassed up her nose.
And Jason was hoping she'd be so deep in the belief he was that she wouldn't notice just how much he'd zoned out while she prattled on about Blondie's visits. Oh, the unfairness of the world that refused to give all things to all people.
"Batgirl keeps me up at night." He shrugged. "Maybe if I didn't have to go to the lounge so early everyday…" He held up his shackled hands helplessly.
"Your anti-social behavior is another that's been escalating as of late." Her sigh sounded more like a gurgling of air that the breathy expression of exasperation it was supposed to be.
A few weeks ago that sound would have spiked up a little worry, but he was fairly certain he wouldn't be around to feel any long term effects of her frustration with him.
"Would you want to be in a room with that clown?" He shot back, resisting the urge to role his eyes. Harley Quinn was pushing her luck with him more and more every day, and unlike his know it all shrink, he was pretty sure the Joker's deranged girlfriend was something to be very worried about indeed. Too bad she was a tiny woman and he looked like a thug straight out of an action movie.
Maybe Talia had a point about him putting on a different show working in his favor. John Doe, age twenty-five 'criminally insane' with anger issues couldn't get away with half as much as some of the other personas he'd adopted had.
Then again, avoiding a lecture from someone who thought they knew what they were talking about when they told him off for decking that annoying clown wasn't really worth the added trouble he'd have to go through when he got out.
The clock ticked along across from him while she carried on and on. It almost reminded him of that one time Dick had tried to lecture him back in the day; he couldn't really remember what it was bout, but he was sure it had about as much of an effect on him as his shrink did.
Forty minutes to go. He shifted his gaze around the room, going from the bookshelves that he'd be willing to bet was only there for show and the framed certificated on the wall, back to that ugly plush thing on the desk.
By his estimate, he'd have only a handful of sessions in that office, no matter how things went.
"What?" He asked when he caught her hand sliding over the neatly stacked papers on her desk towards him.
"A few sessions ago we spoke about the ramifications of your inability to comply with asylums protocols and you said you'd take my council to heart." There was a tilt to her mouth that made him decidedly uncomfortable.
It would have been smarter to nod along and promise to work on whatever the hell she was yapping on about, but that had gotten him nowhere in the months since his appeals had been shot down, and he was sick of playing along.
"Yeah, I remember that." His barring of teeth was only a smirk in the broadest term of the word, immediately pulling her out of her relaxed posture. "And I took to heart like that your 'protocol' is complete bullshit."
The way her face screwed up at that told him how badly he'd just fucked up, but he couldn't find it in himself to care. His smirk stayed in place while her frown twisted so far down he could have almost sworn her face was made from rubber.
The air of satisfaction, childish as it was clung to him for that last half hour. Her twitching made it clear that she only kept him there because she had to and she was as eager to get him out of her office as he was to leave.
Her pager beeped and she kept watching him while she reached down to bring it up, her eyes left him for only a second to read the thing.
"We'll be cutting this session short so I can meet with the director." She said evenly.
"By a full five minutes, wow." Jason waved his hands in mock excitement.
"Every minute counts." She smiled, the gesture actually reaching her eyes this time, and not in a good way, while a pair of guards came to escort him from the office. Jason felt a tension building in his chest that he usually only got when he was in that lounge. He was already out the door when she called out. "If you're curios we'll be setting up a date where you can speak with him and share your grievances personally."
The door slid shut before Jason could say anything, not that he would have if it hadn't. The guards didn't go right to his cell, instead marching him past the lounge again first, and despite his reluctance, Jason's eyes found the more heavily drugged inmates shambling from one end of the room to the other.
He followed their sluggish movements, took note of their empty eyes. His mind retained the mental image even after they'd passed by and gone back to the cell block.
When his door slid shut, Jason knocked his head against the thing with a metallic thud before he slid to the ground.
"Fuck it." He sighed, crunching the numbers to see by just how much he could speed up his timetable. The answer was not very much at all. He knocked his head against the door again, hard enough to rattle his teeth. "Fuck it."
.
.
.
The bodies had been cleared from the room, but the musk of rotting flesh remained. It wasn't exactly the kind of smell that could be covered up by some lemon-scented cleanser and the need to preserve what was left of the crime scene eradicated even that option.
Steph pushed her lips out so she could get a whiff of her berry lip-balm instead and got to work.
The other Bats didn't want her involved. Bruce said she was emotionally compromised, which made pretty much zero sense seeing how her only real connection to the case was the little kid she'd visited a couple of times in the hospital before they found his parents – both of whom were thankfully alive and not involved in the whole mess. The kid had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and her visits had been more for cheering him up than that she thought he'd know anything useful.
Know something useful he did though, even if the others were too busy 'looking at the bigger picture' to think so.
She stepped around the coagulated patches of sticky blood on her way through, scrapping the stuff out of her boots would have been a pain almost on par with the whole 'disturbing the crime scene' talk she'd get if she messed up. In her opinion, the CSI guys had already disturbed the scene plenty with their chalk outlines and myriad footprints.
Most of the bodies hadn't even been identified and the official law enforcement didn't really care to find out who they all were. Happy to leave the whole grisly mess to Batman, who wouldn't tell her anything about the case.
"Compromised." She scoffed, bending to examine the bases of all the walls, sliding her penlight along and taking note of the miniscule splatters of blood. "I'm not some kid that can't handle a little blood. I don't even know any of those people."
'They like hoarding there cases, you shouldn't take it so personally.'
"Huh." Steph scoffed. "That'd only help great if you'd tell me something O." She studied a wall that was a little more smudged than the others, and deep enough in that the smell almost made her gag. She fought that urge and tilted her head, bending down until her cheek was almost touching the gory floor.
Barbara didn't even try to pretend she knew no more about the case than Steph, and while the girl was grateful for that at least, she couldn't quite stomp out her displeasure at being shut out of yet another case.
She scraped away a layer of blood with the tip of her finger, revealing another, less recent stain underneath.
"Fine." Steph smirked, snapping a picture and looking around the room for anything similar. She didn't need them to figure out what was going on. She was a detective too after all, they could chase after the al Ghuls while she solved the case herself.
A loud scraping followed by retreating footsteps echoing through from the empty parking lot drew her from her investigation. Steph was on her feet and chasing after as fast as she could.
"Chasing a badguy." She said when Barbara asked if she'd found anything new.
The guy wasn't any faster than the other dozen thugs she'd chased down that night already, but his escape route did raise a few red flags.
"There any other exits to this place?" She asked breathlessly.
'Not that way.' The audio distortion made it hard to pick out Barbara's tone of voice, but the pause wasn't as easy to mask.
"What is it?" Steph lost sight of the guy for a second when he turned a corner and she sped up, eager to catch him before he could sneak out of her reach.
'Trap, get out and wait for backup.'
Barbara hadn't even finished talking when Steph had to twist away from the rod that sprang up from the darkness, a cry of surprise on her lips. She made a full turn on her heel and brought a hand to her chest for a second, taking in a deep breath.
"Too late." She flexed her fingers and reached for her gooperangs. More footsteps echoed in the darkness, as she slipped her night vision goggled over her cowl.
'Red Robin en route.' Tim's voice wasn't scrambled the way Barbara's was, but it still sounded almost as even. 'Stall.'
She almost didn't duck the first swing, getting the goggles onto place having taken up those precious few seconds.
"Hey!" She grabbed the next weapon that came and her and pulled its holder off balance with a sharp tug, pushing back again to whack the guy over the head with his own baseball bat. "I didn't say I was ready."
"Well we're ready." A scrawny guy said, swinging a chain at her, she tangled him up in it and spun around, using him to block the tire iron that came at her from behind.
"Couldn't tell by looking at you." She ducked low to the ground and struck out with a spinning kick to knock over the thugs closest to her. And electric gooperang flew and the echo of cries told her it had hit its mark. "Maybe I'm just confused, what exactly are you ready for?"
She was surprised to only see two thugs standing, one charges at her while the other went behind a pillar and disappeared from view. Her hand connected with his chest as she ducked and used his momentum to toss him over her shoulder.
He landed in an undignified heap with a fleshy thump, his weapon clicking loudly to the floor after him. Amid the groaning she paused to get a look at the five guys sprawled out all around her
"That all?" She blinked a few times to taker in the sight. Normally ambushes ended with a little more pain on her end. With a shrug, she reached down to pull the smallest of the thugs to his feet. "Hey, you wanna tell me why you guys are hanging around a crime scene."
"Has a message." He slurred, his eyes flicking fearfully around in the darkness.
"For who? I'm a great messenger." She didn't bother trying to look threatening when all of her attackers were immobile or had their own night gear smashed, turned out they were lucky.
Every light in the parking lot flashed on, the sudden brightness magnified by her goggles to a painfully blinding glare. She cried out and dropped the thug, hands scrambling to wrench the equipment off her head while fast paced footsteps approached from behind.
Before she had the chance to react, her face met something really, really hard, the pain itself was almost enough to knock her off balance completely. Her back to a wall, she tried to see through narrowed eyes while someone chuckled.
"Glad to hears it. We got a message fors your big bro in Arkham."
"Argh." Stephanie groaned loudly, shocking the man into taking a step back. She tuned out Barbara and Tim's attempts at communication and hung her head, out of exasperation more than the considerable pain and blood trickling from her nose. "I'm getting real sick of you creeps trying to get at that asshole through me."
Her vision was blurry, but she approached the man as steadily as she could, her fists balled at her side. The man stumbled back, sweat dripping from his pale flesh.
"Never mind the Hood, if my nose it broken, I'm tracking you down and turning you into a ball of mush." She pulled back a fist and crashed it into the guy's face before she'd even noticed he was nodding along. "Asshole."
'Batgirl, are you okay? I'm a block away.'
"Situation contained Tim. Get the cops." She brushed the blood away from her nose with a growl. "I'm going home to chew my way through a bottle of aspirin."
.
.
.
When Jason's fists reaction upon seeing her was to burst out in laughter while throwing an arm over his eyes she was less than impressed.
She stood with her arms folded across her chest as she stared him down. The sound died down after a minute, but when he lowered his arm and got another look at her, it returned to shielding his face while the laughter started anew.
"Get it out of your system." She said evenly, pulling a few boxes out of her bag.
He peeked over his arm again. "Jesus, you look like a fucking raccoon." He said through his chuckles. Almost anyone else and she would have smacked him upside his head. Still, it was better than the 'I told you to wait's' and guilty looks she'd gotten from Barbara and Tim.
"Did you have to make every thug in Gotham hate you?" She asked as she emptied out his porridge bowl.
"I told it was a stupid fucking idea to say you were my sister." He shot another look at her and his laughter continued, his whole body shaking with his mirth.
Steph was stunned for a moment by how young it made him look, or more like how much his actual age it made him look before she slammed down the refilled bowl.
"I hate you." She grumbled and tore open a pack of cards.
It just made his laugh harder for a bit before it turned into soft chuckled and eventually died down with a tired sigh. "Fuck, this is gonna be a huge problem when I get out." His eyes shot up to meet hers before he looked off into the distance, a small frown on his face.
"Your cute little notes about the Artful Dodger are more humanizing that having a sister." She rolled her eyes and emptied a few boxes of skittles on his desk.
For a second she could have sworn the tips of his ears turned red, then he sat up and fixed his eyes on the colorful arrangement on his desk. "Anyone see's those and I'll mail your fingers to your mother."
"Stop threatening to mail pieces of me to my mother." Steph divided up the skittles, doing her best to ignore the headache pounding behind her eyes. "It's not scary anymore and I'm too tired to pretend it is."
A frown spread over his face and he picked up his book, flipping through it with an absent frown. He was silent while she created two neat piles of candy and turned to stare at him expectantly. He seemed not to notice her for a few more minutes; his eyes roving over pages that turned too fast for him have really been reading them.
"Hey." She gently nudged him with her bo-staff.
"What?" He scowled at her, still looking a little dazed.
She shuffled the cards and dealt him five with a flourish. Instead of her usual corner, she dragged her stool to the other side of her desk. She looked sat down and looked over her own cards, discarding three and looking over at him expectantly.
"Poker." She said. "I got no homework and you read that book a zillion times."
"You want me to play cards with you." He said slowly, eyeing his cards suspiciously, one eyebrow quirking behind his long bangs. "For skittles?"
"Yeah." She nodded with a smile, starting to feel the effects of the many painkillers she'd taken. From the few visits she'd made to her father when she'd been younger she knew smokes and other, less legal things were common prison currency. She remembered trying to sneak some in once and being caught for it, confused as to why the prison guards were so mad at her for doing what her parents asked. There was no way she was doing that again, even if she could get away with it as Batgirl.
Besides, crazy as he was, she didn't think Jason would appreciate anyone insinuating he was a junky.
It took him way longer than should have been possible to pick up the cards, and he turned them over slowly, like he was expecting some kind of trick.
"Three." He said, handing over the cards and watching pensively while she took them and handed over the replacements.
She looked over her cards and studied his blank expression before pushing ten skittles to the center of the table. He inched the same number to her little pile.
"Three kings." She declared, flipping her cards around.
"Full house." He held his out to her.
Steph grumbled under her breath and pushed the skittles to his side of the table before returning the cards to the deck and shuffling again.
"I got a B minus on my book report." She said as she dealt them each a new hand. "He called me out on cheating, but he couldn't prove it."
"Guess how many fucks I give." He handed her two cards.
"All of them." She shook off his bad attitude and matched his bet of twenty-five skittles. "You're the one I cheated off, now I feel bad." She didn't say she also maybe felt a tiny bit bad for thinking he'd killed Schools, seeing as she was sure he's just get mad and he had kind of threatened the guy.
"How…?" His brows knitted together for a moment before he turned his somewhat incredulous look at her. "And you got a B minus? Your teachers must be as blonde as you."
"Oh, here come the blonde jokes, funny." She deadpanned, counting out her skittles. "I'd call a soulless ginger, but that'd only be half true."
"I don't fucking dye my hair, now stop implying that before I destroy you!" He clutched the cards in his hands tightly enough to bend them.
She made a show of squinting her eyes and leaning forwards before bringing a hand up to point at is hair, stopping just short of touching him. "Yeah…" she drawled, "your roots are showing."
"Shut up!" He smacked her hand away, his own twitching towards his hair.
She chuckled, heedless of the glare he sent her way while she showed him her cards.
"You're lucky this table's between us." He growled, tossing his own cards over to her and turning away from the game.
"Sore loser." She accused, collecting them and shuffling the deck again before adding the wagered skittles to her pile. She kept her tone light and dealt out the cards again, fully expecting him to ignore her in favor of the book.
He grumbled under his breath, but took up the cards again, albeit with the air of a martyr pressing the trigger to his own execution. "I swear, this fucking place. Keep letting you in here and still expect me not to go on a killing spree."
She rolled her eyes, to cover up her surprise and refrained from calling him a drama queen.
While they played she told him about the poker tournaments she'd participated in – and won many a time – back at the Gotham U. At first he was decidedly unimpressed, but near the end he began to smirk while she looked on in horror as her pile of skittles grew smaller and smaller while he kept he hardly even looked at his cards, keeping his eyes at some point behind her instead.
By the time she was left with only a handful of the candy, he looked almost not-angry.
"I was the champion." She muttered sullenly with a put upon sigh while he swept up half of her remaining skittles. "You can't be that good at poker, I bet you cheated."
She meant it as a joke, but his eyes widened and he failed to hide his shark-like grin behind a handful of candy. Her jaw dropped and she caught his eyes darting to that same point behind her again. "No." She said.
"Sore loser." He scoffed as she spun around.
Her open gape was reflected at her in the glass of the shower at her back.
"You cheated!" She most definitely did not pout while her knuckles turned while from the tight grip she held on her last skittles. "Give those back!" Her free hand shot in an attempt to reclaim the candy.
"I used the environment to my advantage." He shot back, shielding his ill gotten gains with one arm and pushing her back with the other.
"Hood, you asshole!" She growled, straining to reach the candy with her shorter arms while he gripped her head in one of his hands. Eventually she groaned and gave up, her arms falling limply to her sides. "One more game." She held up a finger. "Winner takes all."
"I don't want those." His face scrunched up in distaste at the half-melted candy in her hand.
"You didn't want any of the food I brought over before!" She shot back.
"My skittles." He said, wrapping both arms protectively around the colorful pile.
"Fine, I'll bet something else." She folded her arms. "Another book, any book you want."
That skeptical frown was back, and he looked at her contemplatively for a while. "Fine. I'll deal." He took the cards from her side of the desk and shuffled them for a while before cutting them, first in halves then quarters. His hands moved quickly, merging the cards and splitting them up again the way she'd seen the dealers do on late night reruns of poker tournaments.
"Show off." She muttered, getting a smirk in return as she slid her cards over, making sure to stand where he couldn't see them. "Okay, how bout, if I win, you have to answer a question and you can keep the skittles."
"You won't." He said, tossing away one card.
"Say I do." She pressed, holding her hands to her chest.
"Fine." His pushed his hair away from his face.
"One." She put up the card and held out a hand for a replacement. Slowly she dragged the card across the table, lifting just one corer to peer at the letter. Her chest tightened just a little, but she kept her face neutral.
"Straight." Jason laid his cards across the table with a smirk.
Steph put down her own cards one by one, starting with the ace of spades. With every card she revealed his smirk dropped a bit, king of spades, queen of spades, jack of spades.
"No." The word came out in what on anyone else she might have called a disbelieving gasp.
Her own smirk curled her lips as she flipped over the last card, ten of diamonds. "I still win."
All the tension drained from his posture and he sagged almost boneless against the wall, his teal eyes fixed on the cards. She almost thought she saw his lips twitch up, but it was covered over quickly by a scowl when he fixed those same eyes on her.
"You'd better not ask about my hair." He warned.
"Why did Talia visit you?" She blurted out the question before she could really process it, looking resolutely at the skittles on his desk.
Jason's eyes widened and he blinked owlishly at her. His hands came up again and he looked down at them while alternating between clenching and unclenching his fists. Then his eyes furrowed together and she was sure he would refuse to answer, but he let out what might have been a sigh had it been louder, and if possible his body grew even more limp.
"Tea." He said eventually, and Stephanie's eyes shot towards him, but he wasn't looking her way, laying on his bed, gazing at the ceiling with an empty stare. "And she told me to shave."
Steph chuckled nervously and nudged his foot with her own. "Come on, you're supposed to be serious here."
He didn't glare at her, or threaten her, but the look he sent her way somehow made her feel worse than if he had. She dropped down onto her stool and gathered up the cards again, shuffling them slowly while trying to pin point the source of the current tension in the cell. Angry Jason she could deal with, she didn't know what Jason she was dealing with right then and that kind of scared her in some nonsensical way.
"Hey." She said softly, shrinking a little when he didn't look at her. "How 'do' you shave when you're not allowed to have a razor?"
He lifted his head and his face scrunched up in that not-angry, skeptical way again. She shrugged and held up her hands before folding them over. While she'd never seen completely clean shaven in any of her visits, she also knew he couldn't have that perpetual stubble naturally.
"I have a whole hour left to wait for an answer." She reached slowly for his skittles.
He was up in a flash chopping down to protect them. "That question goes in the same pit as the one about my hair."
She held up her threw up her hands in surrender before lacing them in front of her to pillow her chin. "You admit there's a question about your hair?" At his suddenly ferocious glare she her face split in a wide, probably not as innocent grin as she was going for. "So what do you wanna do now?"
He poured a handful of skittles into his mouth and chewed slowly, his glare slowly morphing into an almost confused frown. "I just remembered I hate skittles."
"Goodnight Hood." Stephanie rolled her eyes and got her bag, leaving the cards on the desk when she marched to the door. She had a minor painkiller overdose to sleep off.