The asylum at night was stifling, even the light, barely audible taps of her feet against the spotless tiles made her feel like she'd stood up in quiet church and started howling Metallica at the top of her lungs. No, not a church, Steph shuddered at the sound of squeaking wheels from down a darkened hall, a morgue, and her job was setting the corpses back in their graves.
During her frequent visits she'd thought she'd gotten over the heavy atmosphere, but Arkham under the non-light of her artificial night-vision was more than heavy, it was hollow, and cold and there was something missing.
She twisted sharply on her heel and let a batarang fly ahead of, clanging into a wide shape that dropped to the ground with a heavy thump.
"Get back to your cell Maxi Zeus." She demanded, skidding by and gripping a handful of the fabric at the fallen man's back.
She was supposed to be rounding up the less dangerous stragglers while Cass handled the heavy hitters with Dick and Damian. In Barbara's absence, Tim was trying to get the power grid back online after someone had blown all the guard posts to hell.
She'd seen the wreckages, watched the staff who'd been carried away on stretchers after that, so many of them under white sheets.
Maxi Zeus's eyes were glazed over while he reached one shaky hand hesitantly for something in the distance.
"Sorry." Steph whispered as she shut his cell door. Damn she'd rather have been tasked with taking on Killer Croc with Cass. Getting a few hits to the head would have maybe helped her forget some of the hollowed out husks of people she'd trapped back in those cells, god knew nothing else would.
Those thoughts were another door she had to shut as she kept moving on, her's was also supposed to be easier of the jobs, just rustling up stragglers who were too drugged to know better, it was supposed to be the job with the least risk. For once she was glad for them underestimating her.
'Night specs off.' Tim said and Steph plunged herself into darkness for the second it took for the hall lights to flicker to light.
"Did you get the cameras on yet?" Steph asked, her breath catching in her throat in the seconds it took his to answer.
'He's there.' The clacking of keys accompanied Tim's statement, 'Blackbat just punched out Riddler in case you're wondering.'
"Shouldn't the brat be taking on Riddler?" Steph asked, her spirits a little higher now that she knew Jason wasn't to blame for the deaths that night.
'Though it was beneath him, don't think Nygma's ever been more insulted.' She could practically hear the eye-roll through the comm, yup no love lost there. 'Hold on.' More clacking keys followed by a whoosh of air. 'Harley's on the move, heading for… Batman. Harley Quinn's heading for the infirmary.'
'I'm on the other side of the building, who's nearer.' Dick's voice was strained, the words accompanied by a low grunt. Oh yeah, if Cass took Riddler, then he and Damian were facing off against Croc.
'Batgirls the closest, but she's...'
Steph was already halfway down the hall, her heart beating too heavily in her chest to really hear Tim's orders.
'Steph, turn back, you can't deal with her alone.'
"Hey, she's just as blonde as me." Steph said, skidding around a corner, past another shambling inmate. "I can deal with her just fine."
'Stubborn…' If not for the cowl, Tim would have been pulling out his hair. 'Blackbat, wrap up and get there fast.'
Steph heard Harley before she saw her, that freaky chuckled echoing through the wide halls long before she caught a glimpse of blonde pigtails turning round a corner. She got her first full look of the Joker's girlfriend standing right outside the infirmary door.
Battle maneuvers forgotten, Steph sped up and rammed into the other blonde with all the strength in her adrenaline fueled muscles, sending them both all the way into the office at the end of the hall.
"Aw, Batchick, I was just checking on the BABY!" At the last word, Harley brought a steel chair down on Steph's head, knocking the girl to the ground before trying to walk out again.
Steph gripped the woman's leg tightly and pulled her down toppling he psycho down on top of her.
"Don't you dare." Steph's fist crashed into Harleys gut before the girl sprayed her in the face with a sedative.
"Awwww." Haley sank slowly to the ground, a loopy grin still on her face. "Now the Doctors gonna have him all to him…"
Soft snores still filled the room, but Steph didn't take the time to listen, walking off what she was hoping wasn't a sprained ankle as she headed back to the infirmary.
"Dealt with her." Steph said proudly, as she rested her hand on the door.
'I saw.' Tim sighed. 'You really need to learn that waiting for backup is a thing. Blackbat's almost there, so could you just…'
If her head felt better, Steph might have blown a raspberry, or maybe if her head was better, Steph wouldn't have felt the urge to blow a raspberry quite so keenly. Whatever, it wasn't important.
She pushed open the door.
"Where did he go?" She stepped into the room, almost running towards the empty space where once Jason's bed had been.
'Who? The only patient in that room right now is Hood.'
"I'm standing in the gap where his bed used to be, and he's not here." Steph's voice broke a little along with the cracking ice in her gut when she knelt on the ground next to the wobbly chair she'd been sitting in only hours earlier.
A chorus of curses erupted from the comms, but Steph's fingers trailed across the ground almost trance like, smearing the little flecks of coagulated crimson.
'He couldn't have left the island.' Dick said, none of his usual joviality present. 'Everyone split up and start looking, I want every inch of this place searched.'
.
.
.
They looked the whole night and part of the day, searching the whole place top to bottom at least three times between them before Jeremiah Arkham came in and demanded the return of his facilities. Apart from the blood droplets – from a nosebleed apparently – still pending testing, there was no clue as to where Jason went.
Steph sat numbly in the Batcave, watching through the hours and hours of recorded footage leading up to the breakout.
Tim couldn't find anything that even hinted at Jason messing with the footage. Explosives could be explained away as having been planted months ago, Jason was Robin at one point and that did come with a certain level of paranoia, he could have had them in place since before he'd even set foot in Arkham, but then where was the trigger?
And why did he wait so long before setting them off?
On the screen, the past Jason lay curled into a tight little ball after he'd eaten a bowl of mush under the watchful eye of an orderly with a clipboard. The audio was turned off, but the newer high quality cameras Bruce had sprung for after Talia's last visit provided her with enough crystal clear visuals that she didn't need to hear the sounds he was making through the hands clasped over his mouth.
If she'd had a plan in place that long she would have flown the coop long before things got that bad, and he hadn't.
Cass sidled up to her with the offering of a mug of hot chocolate, Steph took the beverage, but couldn't bring herself to look from the screen at the mini-marshmallow smiley arranged on top. Even the warmth of the mug made her stomach do some strange turns that didn't go unnoticed by her observant friend.
Cass reached over the chair, not Bruce's which was pushed into a corner in the man's absence, and twisted a dial while slurping from her own drink.
"Happier now." Cass said proudly, stopping on Jason sipping the tea Steph had brought over on her last visit before his coma.
Steph snorted at the proof that even Cass could read people wrong sometimes. Jason didn't look happy at all, he had a deep frown on his face and slapped a hand over his face every time Steph spoke loudly or gestured too widely. Every few minutes he'd shoot a long suffering look of resignation at her, like he still couldn't believe she was there, but was accepting of his fate until he woke up from the nightmare that was her presence.
"Oh God." Steph slapped a hand over her face, mortified at her own train of though. Spending so much time there had turned her into as big a drama queen as Jason.
Besides her Cass chuckled behind the rim of her mug. "See?" She forcibly turned Steph's face back to the screen where Jason had an arm thrown over his eyes.
On that day, she hadn't been able to see it, but from higher angle of the camera, Steph caught a glimpse of the small smile that was there one second and gone the next.
"Happy?" Cass said.
"Sure Cass." Steph looked over to where Tim was looking through the more recent footage of Jason's stay in the infirmary. "He still blew a bunch of people up a few days after that.
"I don't think he did." Tim was tapping his left temple with his index finger. He gestured lazily at his screen with his other finger.
Steph launched her chair across the console, Cass following close behind, catching the back of Tim's chair to bring herself to a stop while her friend settled on the other side of him.
The time stamp placed the footage at being just a few hours before the breakout, but after Steph had left. A man in a white lab coat leaned over the comatose boy in the bed, looked him over whilst fiddling with the equipment, and scribbled on his clipboard.
"So they would have picked something up if it was him?" Steph asked, she'd already known they checked up in Jason every few hours, she's been there for a lot of them and honestly it would have been a little weirder if they hadn't.
The man leaned over Jason and produced from the folds of his coat a long, thick needle that he jammed into the boy's neck?
"More like they made sure it couldn't be him." Tim said.
"But, that's normal, it's just the medicine they give him." Steph said, her thawed chest starting to ice over again.
"No it's not." Tim said. "Nothing on his treatment plan indicated he was being given anything intravenously and I don't know of any drugs that are given in those quantities on a regular basis."
"Enough of this already." Dick sighed tiredly, stepping freshly showered to the mini-fridge next to the console. "He's gone, and if he doesn't want us to find him, we won't let's focus on what we 'can' be doing, huh?"
"Sheesh, who died and made you Batman?" Steph rolled her eyes and looked back to the screen. It was kinda scary how Tim's flat stare could burn into the back of her head the same way his glare could. "What, to soon?"
"Waaay too soon." Dick smirked as he took a swig from the bottle he'd retrieved. The older man ruffled Tim's hair as he walked by them to the staircase. "Don't stay up too late."
Tim let out a whoosh of air and turned back to Steph. "Anyway, it might have been some new drug they were testing out, but for that they'd need to go through miles of yellow…" The computer beeped and a few taps of a button later the DNA results popped up on screen. "…tape. Yeah it's his. I'll run a test fro foreign substances too, get the results tomorrow." He yawned and tapped a few more keys before getting up and stretching like an overtired cat.
"Yeah. Night Tim, Cass." Steph looked back at the footage, watching the man turn away from Jason again. She slipped into Tim's vacant seat and brought up the video enhancement software, though she already had a pretty good idea of who it was, even if the others didn't really care.
Minutes later Jeremiah Arkham's face appeared through the pixilated mess that was the asylums standard security cameras, tucking that needle away. It was actually kind of funny, seeing as how the forms that would allow a change in treatment.
"Asshole." She breathed and kicked off against the console, launching her chair over to the costume she's just changed out of.
.
.
.
Steph's path through Arkham that night was a little different from her usual route. For one, she wasn't actually going through Arkham at all, just scaling up the wall to visit a very different room.
Man, as normal as Jeremiah Arkham's office was the first time around, it was twice as creepy when she actually looked at the little details she'd neglected before.
There were files not just in drawers, but piled under the desks as well, and a smell that belonged more in a chemo ward that an actual office, the asylum was technically a hospital, but still. It took one look at the chair for her to be thankful she'd opted not to sit in it before, with all those weird stains and tough looking leather restraints on the arm rests and legs.
Maybe she was being a little nitpicky, but picking out things like that made her feel a little less guilty for digging through the old man's stuff. With a remorseful look at all the files in the ground, she moved to the filing cabinets and really hoped Jason's would be one of the organized files.
"D," she whispered, sliding the cabinet open and flicking through their files, despairing when she saw how many entries had been committed as John Does. After half an hour of looking through the many files, she thought of maybe looking under R or H instead.
Footsteps outside the door alerted her to a presence and she silently slid the cabinet shut, slipping out the window just as the door clicked open.
Deep creases covered Doctor Arkham's brow as he dropped into his chair, massaging his temples with a heavy sigh. The file tucked under his arm was dropped to the table with a disgusted flick of his wrist, another John Doe, she read before he flipped the file open and began writing in it.
Steph held her position until her arms where going a little numb watching his moving hand closely.
'Batgirl what are you doing, I thought you were going home.' Tim's sleepy voice almost startled Steph into letting go of her grapple and tore a light gasp from her throat.
Jeremiah was on his feet in an instant, marching towards the window faster than someone as scrawny as him, regardless of age should have been capable of.
Steph could have leaped out the window and hidden herself, gotten out of there before Jeremiah knew exactly who had been in his office, but he'd have still 'known' there was someone in his office.
She'd leaped past him and grabbed the folder before she'd even thought it through.
"You!" He growled, his spindly hands missing her cape by an inch.
"Need to borrow this bye!" She let out the words in a rush before the cold night air was nipping at her face again and she was falling through the air.
Whatever he said in protest she didn't hear, the folder in her hands weighing down on her more heavily than the chill in her lungs.