Formatting on this one might be a little off, an italics aren't working, but this is the only way will let me publish it. I'll did it up as soon as I can.

_0o0_

Gotham, a city where there were very few places you could walk safely at night. A city where even common citizens would sometimes take shots at their heroes.

Steph wished she could have said she felt comfortable going in full costume to a seedy back alley that would have been asking for trouble even in daytime. Swooping down from rooftops to deliver her righteous Batgirl fury was one thing, but going down to the street level with was essentially her own kill order in her hands made her understandably antsy.

The last time she'd run off on her own just to prove she could had ended… badly, so she'd swallowed her pride and asked for some backup.

"I'm starting worry the crazy is catching." Tim peered at the rusty red door, his mouth curled into the same frown he usually reserved for annoying pre-teen sidekicks.

It was nice to know he had her back, even if he was being a jerk about it, so Steph didn't bring up how she wouldn't have had to resort to shady alleys in the Bowery that looked like they spawned mutated crocodile monsters if he'd have looked at the bloody imprint she'd tried to show him.

"Just keep watch, kay." She said, dropping down from the fire escape they were perched on, preemptively cutting off his offer to accompany her inside too. Jason had made it pretty clear that his guy wouldn't talk to her if she was with another bat. It was a tossup on whether he'd talk to her alone as it was.

She pushed down her anxiety, doing a sweep of the alley, but leaving the many potential enemies where she saw them before raising one hand to rap confidently on the door, clutching the letter in the other.

The door creaked open a crack, flecks of red paint dislodging from its surface to drift down and settle on her boots, a single, bloodshot eye appearing in the small opening. The man tried to close the door as soon as he saw who was on the other side, but Steph struck out with a kick to his torso, pushing him into the darkness and hearing a painful clattering of broken glass from within.

'They think you're gonna go easy on em and they'll clam up.'

It was easy to cut off any sympathy she had for the man when she remembered that he was likely to be the cause of all the hit lists she'd be added to by the end of the night. Arms, hanging languidly by her sides, she stalked in with a steady gait.

"Nice place." She made a show of twisting her head round to take in her surroundings – a really messy, really cluttered single room apartment that smelled like mildew among other things – before lifting herself to sit on a relatively clean patch of countertop.

"You can't prove I did nothing." The pudgy man leaped to his feet, arms flailing comically as he screamed, a thin trail of blood dripping down his face. "You has no right ta…"

"Hush hush Billy." Steph rolled her eyes, keeping her expression otherwise blank and impersonal, playing up her inner-city accent a little. "I'm jus' here for a chat."

"Well I got's nothing ta say ta you bats." He growled, grabbing for a gun he thought she hadn't seen. A batarang flew from her fingertips, nicely slicing that option from his list of choices.

"You wanna tell that to my bro when he comes asking what the fuck you been doin' while he's in that nuthouse?" Steph casually tossed the folded piece of paper at him, not bothering to hold back her snort at the way he flinched when it batted against his forehead.

"Ya think I'm dumb enough ta believe that shit?" He sounded brave, but his hands were shaking while he unfolded the letter, not taking his eyes of her till she rolled hers and nonchalantly lifted the bag of multicolored pills she found on the countertop.

"Don't care what ya believe." She threw the bag at him, delighting in the way it split open upon hitting the wall and its contents clattered all over the filthy floor and the dealer who'd ducked out of the way. 'No puns Blondie' had never been so hard when there were so many good one's about trash presenting themselves before her. "All I care about is you telling me whose tryna make a play on his turf 'fore it has to get ugly."

He swallowed thickly, slowly pulling himself up and stumbling to the wall. It was almost funny how he was trying to look like he was casually leaning against the wall. "Already ugly darling." He folded his arms. "What's the Hood gonna do 'bout it?"

A mimicry of the smirk that scared the crap out of her graced her lips as she advanced towards the man, crunching the drugs underfoot as she did so, and retrieved the batarang lodged in the wall behind his head. "Whaddaya think?" She turned the cool metal over in her hands.

A crook had never spilled his guts so thoroughly for her before.

It was almost as satisfying as it was frustrating when she was given a slew of names and locations she'd have to follow up on later, people she'd never heard of and places she never would have thought to check up on her own.

He even offered her a drink, downing half the bottle himself when she refused. She was careful to keep any interest of her face while she continued toying with the batarang.

"I really hope you're not lying." She drawled, tucking weapon away when she turned away from her, the feeling that it had been maybe a little too easy settling heavily on her shoulders. She rested her hand on the door, an inch away from pushing it open and leaving, she cocked her head towards him, holding out her other hand expectantly.

At his bewildered expression she cleared her throat and wagged her fingers. "You think he'd forget?" She asked with a raised brow.

"Course not." The man smiled nervously, seconds later a tall stack of bills was dropped into her waiting hand.

"Seeya 'round Billy!" She smiled brightly and waved with the cash before actually leaving.

By the time she stepped into cool night air there were already several unconscious thugs littering the alley floor and police sirens followed not long after.

Tim waited for her at the top of the fire-escape, barely a sheen of moisture to shoe he'd pent the last half hour kicking ass in the alley below. She had such cool friends.

"Ninjas Tim." Steph said, thrusting the handful of pills she'd lifted from the apartment at him. "It's always ninjas lately. And I think we just busted a drug lord."

_0o0_

She would have been surprised at the kinds of things people could get used to if she'd stopped to think about how being in the asylum didn't really bother her anymore.

"What do you want me to do with all of this?" Steph asked, flipping through the stack of money.

"Buy a bouncy house." Jason was lying with his head hanging off his bed, resting his feet against the wall, glittery pencil tucked behind his ear and his book lying open on his chest.

"You're kidding?" She asked, just to be sure, because with the people she could never tell with the types of people she hung around.

Jason shrugged, letting his arms fall to the ground next to his head. "I really don't give a fuck, just didn't want that asswipe keeping it."

Steph shifted the books on her lap, having to catch a pen before it dropped to the ground. "Can't believe he was so scared, no one's ever been that scared of me before." She frowned disapprovingly at him. "You're a horrible boss, what do you do to those people. If I were human resources I'd sue you."

Jason snorted, turning his head away from her and pulling his upper half onto the bed, he paged through his book. "Did I mention I put heads in a duffle bag?"

"Yes." Steph groaned, rolling her eyes. "You also just told me to buy a bouncy house with your drug money." She couldn't reconcile even the idea of someone doing that with the guy scribbling down notes like a geek in front of her. Just as she was about to tease him for sounding like an edge lord he tilted his head, revealing a scar across his neck, reminding her that yes, he really was the person who'd put heads in a bag, and maybe even worse things besides that.

"You know you want a bouncy house," He said without a hint of humor in his voice while he chewed on the edge of his pencil, little bits of light reflecting onto his face.

She stared blankly at her schoolwork to avoid the headache she felt coming on just by looking at him.

Everyone said he was crazy, Tim took it a step further and called him deranged. Tim who was smarter than anyone she'd ever met, and even Barbara whose opinion Steph valued more than anyone in the world's.

A small smile lit up Jason's face for barely a second and he underscored a line in his book.

Tim also said that Jason was a blunt instrument, comparing him to a thug that used brute force to accomplish his goals. Scores of files that Steph wasn't supposed to read told a different story, not a good one, but one that contradicted itself at every turn.

Every time his name popped up he was like he was someone else, taking over the Gotham underworld, messing with Nightwing, trying to save an innocent Black Lightning from prison. Like Jason himself couldn't figure out who he was supposed to be.

She bit her lip to keep herself from talking, unwilling to risk asking any of the myriads of questions that lined up at the tip of her tongue.

"I took Robin to a bouncy house once." She said eventually.

"Bet he loved that." Jason snorted.

"Hey Hood." She packed away her schoolwork, bringing out a large bag of marshmallows and a blank sheet of paper. "You ever play ghost?"

He didn't turn his head, glancing at her out the corner of his narrowed eye, not impressed in the slightest. "I'm a zombie, not a ghost."

"It's a word game." Steph said. "We take turns saying letters and the first one to make a word gets a G then an H and an O, till you spell out ghost." She held up the marshmallows, shaking the bag imploringly. "It's fun."

Jason frowned skeptically, his hold on his book tightening. He sat up a little straighter, but bent his head over the pages immediately after, his hair shielding his face from view. "Fine."

"Jeez, you don't have to be so dramatic about it." Steph tore open the bag. "L"

"L." Jason turned a page.

"Challenge!" Steph cried, pointing an accusing finger at him.

"What?" Jason shut the book and turned to her.

"You have to prove you can make a word with the letters you chose." Steph explained, folding her arms to hide the heat she felt spreading across her cheeks as his scrutinizing gaze.

"Llama?" His face scrunched up a little, his eyebrows disappearing beneath his hair.

"Oh." Steph chuckled nervously. "Crap." She tossed him a marshmallow.

He squished the soft thing between two fingers, looking at it with the same frown she gave most of her math homework, before setting it almost gently on his desk.

"You start now." Steph wrote a G next to her name on the paper. "Oh, and only words more than three letters long count." She added, wagging the pencil.

"P." He tucked his book under his pillow and set the marshmallow on his desk.

Not an hour later he was smirking behind a wall of soft white sugar, and Steph had added about twenty words to her vocabulary, the least weird of which was 'fugacious'.

Playing ghost with a bookworm? Bad idea.

_0o0_

'I'm saying I wouldn't be averse to altering our previous agreement.'

'I can do it.'

'Be careful, boy.'

Jason kept his head down, surveying the halls he hadn't had the chance to walk through since he'd first been committed. Security in this area was supposed to be higher than the one he was usually locked in. Magnetic locks, biometric scanners, voice passwords, the works.

It was the place they held those of Batman's freaks who weren't exactly crazy, just too dangerous to keep in any prisons, or requiring special care. Last Jason heard, Victor Frieze was being held in one of the nearby cells. Ras al Ghul had been kept there too at one point.

None of the doors they passed even had the tiny cut out window that Jason's did. Just looking at the things had him feeling claustrophobic, even without seeing the insides that he was sure weren't much improved from the tiny closet like things he's seen in his Robin days.

As pissed as he was at Batman for putting him in Arkham, seeing those tiny cells reminded him that it could have been much, much worse. Hell, he'd have chosen Talia over those things.

They twisted around a corner and a plain wooden door came into view. It was so different from the others, that the first time Jason had seen it, he'd half expected some magician was messing with him.

Now though, as he was led towards it and felt an almost foreign tightening in his gut, he was sure he would have preferred facing Doctor Fate on the other side.

He was careful to keep any of those thoughts out of his face and the door swung open, revealing the orderly office within. He pushed into the rickety wooden chair on the other side, his arms pulled tightly behind his back and chained to a steel rung on the ground.

Jeremiah Arkham watched impassively from his plush high backed chair, chin resting on his clasped hands.

All of Jason's people training told him that this was a good time to shut up and keep his head down. He had a plan, he had means, all he was waiting for was an opportunity to present itself. Sitting through a session with Doctor Headcase himself wouldn't be the hardest thing he'd ever pulled off, right?

"Mister Doe." Arkham sighed once they were alone. "Truly, a disappointment a few months ago you were well on your way to being reintroduced to society."

Jason held back a scoff, he'd been further in his way that the 'Doctor' trying to stare him down.

It wasn't exactly a secret that Jeremiah Arkham himself had a few screws loose. The guy had always seemed to believe that he could rehabilitate the freaks that Batman was always tossing into Arkham. Everyone but the good doctor himself had no trouble penning that as his own brand of delusional ambition, or just about.

"Not it seems all I get regarding you are near constant complaints." The man sighed wearily and began looking through file with no name printed on the front. "In particular from your therapist, whose been nothing but accommodating during your sessions."

There were somehow still people who believed the director of the Asylum which bore his name had a chance at getting the job done.

Jason wasn't one of those people, he knew what the man did behind closed doors once he saw that his patients were beyond his help and he his own hubris made it impossible for him to believe.

"What do you want me to say, doc?" Jason's eyes were drawn to the small patch of sunlight peeking through the tightly drawn blinds behind the doctor. His hands twitched towards it, and for once in his life, he was glad they were tightly bound behind his back.

"Only what I want from all my patients." Arkham smiled 'pleasantly' leaning in just enough that Jason could see the tiny red veins encroaching on the edges of his eyes. "For you to take responsibility for your actions and accept our help." Here he spread out his arms like he was offering a warm embrace.

The whole display just crept Jason the fuck out, but damned if he was going to show it, not with that camera he could feel burning into the back of his neck.

"I did take responsibility for my actions." Jason relaxed into the uncomfortable chair, heedless of the armrests chaffing into the sides of his larger frame. "Confessed to every single one."

"That's only the first step my boy, and you know it." Jeremiah chuckled like he'd told some joke Jaosn was supposed to be in on. "You can't expect, after everything that we'll believe you're mentally stable." He flipped to a page near the beginning if het file, tracing the letters as he spoke. "You're kill count on its own would have warranted your admission…"

"I'm not the only…" Jason tried to cut but the doctor just continued on talking.

"Yes, they deserved it, I'm sure." He said, nodding indulgently. "And in that costume to boot, how many hours did you put into designing that, building up another persona to take the blame for your violent rampage?"

"It was supposed to be…" ironic, Jason meant to say, he hadn't put half an hour's though into the tacky outfit he'd fought Dick and the Princeling in, purposely tossing together the most ridiculous getup he could.

"Still you refuse to give us your real name." Jeremiah paged away from the extensive criminal record, towards pages of neatly printed numbers that Jason had never gotten the chance to take a look at. "It's as if this whole thing is just a game to you." He pulled of his glasses and shut the file, shaking his head forlornly. "Since you've been denied release to your preferred place of holding, a prison where anyone with half of this," the doctor waved the file at Jason, "would be killed within hours."

"They wouldn't have been able to touch me." Jason's nails dug into the flesh of his palms while he struggled to keep his calm, patches of green encroaching on his vision.

"Threatening the orderlies put in place to escort you to and from your sessions, outright attacking your fellow patients, one of which was woman who was once a highly esteemed doctor here herself and would have gone on to do great things if not for the interventions of a madman…"

"She'd have to have been a headcase long before Joker to even get near that Freak." Jason interjected.

"Even your own therapist, you've driven that poor woman to the brink of a nervous breakdown herself, Mister 'John Doe'." The emphasis on the name Jason had jokingly checked in with wasn't lost on the ex-crimelord, but was ignored none the less.

"I didn't do…"

Arkham slammed his hands onto the desk, the sudden change in his temperament enough to shock Jason into silence, even shrinking back a little when the man stood to circle the desk. "And without other outlets, you've turned your destructive tendencies on yourself, going so far as to starve yourself, and..." He yanked apart Jason's hands, pressing his own spindly fingers into the bloody palm, eliciting surprised hiss of pain from the teen. "Tell me this doesn't reek of mental illness." Arkham released the hands, wiping his bloody fingers on Jason's arm while he went back to his seat.

Jason made a deliberate attempt to not clench up his fists again, only noticing the stinging after the damned doctor had pointed it out. "I didn't mean to…"

"Responsibility Mister Doe." Arkham cut him off yet again. "None of your childish excuses will be tolerated in my office."

"Childish?!" Jason gave up on keeping his hands loose, what the hell did it matter if his hands got a little more bloody, not like it would change anything. "Maybe if you assholes didn't put fucking narcotics and god knows what else into that 'food' I wouldn't be throwing it all down the drain!"

Jeremiah didn't say anything at first, but Jason could see his last statement had peeked the doctor's interest. Jason could already feel the bile rising in his throat while Jeremiah wrote something down in his file.

"I think I see the problem." Jeremiah said at last, slowly closing the file.

"Yeah?" Jason suddenly felt very thirsty.

"You're issues with control, compounded with delusions of invincibility have you thinking the prescriptions assigned you by medical professionals are for the purpose of causing you harm."

'Delusions?' He knew for an absolute fact the things were causing him harm, but he didn't bother trying to reason with Arkham. The man had made it obvious he wasn't willing to listen to anything Jason had to say.

"We'll be updating your treatment plans." Arkham continued. "As you refuse the oral medication in any form, the only option remaining is intravenous…"

"Needles?" Jason blurted out, because fuck no. If that was the case he was definitely moving his plans up, he'd make an opportunity if he had to.

"Nothing for you to worry about." Jeremiah said, a condescending smile on his lips as he tapped the call button at his desk and spoke into a little microphone. "A few orderlies to escort Mister Doe to his cell please." The door opened seconds later, two huge guards that Jason had never seen before stepping through to untie him while the doctor seemed to have forgotten his very existence.

"Arkham." Jason called as meaty fists gripped his shoulders and hauled him off his feet towards the door. The doctor didn't respond, and Jason's attempts to break free were fruitless. "Arkham! Hey I'll eat the fucking food!"

All he got in response was a dismissive wave while the door closed on the doctor still writing at his desk.

Jason growled, but didn't resist being led back to his cell.

Not like Arkham's guards were anything special, he was confident he could fight off anyone who came at him with a syringe full of whatever new cocktail the doctor cooked up.

It would be fine, another week and he'd be out of that hell hole.

…'I wouldn't be averse to altering our previous agreement.'

He didn't need her help, he'd be fine.

'Be careful, boy.'