After snooping through that incident report Barbara felt like she should just go and talk to Alex herself about what happened, hear his side of the story. She waited until her lunch break to head down to the RSS and when she got there she found Alex behind his desk glaring at his computer screen.

"No Tina I don't want to download your fucking music share drive; you can shove it up your ass!" He ranted oblivious to her walking in.

"Umm, is this a bad time?" Barbara asked, wondering what he's doing.

"Huh? Oh hey Barbara! No, just doing some bullshit cyber awareness annual training." He replied somewhat embarrassed that She'd walked in on him in the middle of shouting at his computer.

"Did you need something? Wait, don't tell me you're here to enlist cause I'm going to tell you right now that you're making the worst decision of your life if you are." He continues.

"No no, nothing like that. I just have a few questions for you if that's alright."

"Sure, what about?"

"Well my dad and I were talking last night and he told me about how he'd meet you a few years ago when you stopped Harley Quinn from breaking Joker out of Arkham and since I'm studying forensic psychology I thought that I could ask you about her for reference." She lied.

Alex closed his computer and leaned back in his chair, taking a deep breath as he considered her request. There was an awkward silence as he continued to compose himself, no doubt reliving the memory in his head. Finally, he leaned forward and shook his head. "Alright, go ahead."

"Ok, dad said that you two were friends. How closely would you describe your relationship was?"

"We were best friends, grew up on the same block. She didn't really care for her parents and her siblings were rather annoying from what I remember. Anyways I didn't have any siblings of my own so we kinda looked out for each other. We stayed friends through school then she went off and studied to be a criminal psychiatrist which sounded pretty cool when she'd tell me about it and I went off to the Marines. I remember she'd always try and pick my brain, see if the military was having any psychological effects on me, which at the time it hadn't, not until my deployment but I'm jumping ahead of myself. Jump forward a couple of months and I invite her as my date for the Marine Corps ball, that's when our relationship went from being just friends to… I wouldn't say boyfriend/girlfriend or friends with benefits. I didn't ask for any more than she was willing to give but there was something between us." He explained, a saddened but thoughtful expression on his face.

"I did love her once, but my deployment was coming up and I couldn't put her through that. Maybe If I had she'd have never…" He trailed off as he stared at his desk.

"I'm sorry, we can stop if this is too much." Barbara offered, feeling sorry for bringing up any regrets he had, but he gestures for me to keep going. "Did you see it coming? When she snapped?"

"No, at least not immediately. There were some red flags, the way she'd talk about Joker was odd but I just thought she was excited with the supposed progress she was making."

"You didn't believe that she was actually curing him?"

"I wanted to, how could I not support her? But assigning a new doctor to one of the most dangerous patients? That's crazy and they set her up for failure." So he partially blames the Arkham staff for what happened, that seems fair. If they'd have assigned her to a simpler case first perhaps she could have been more ready.

"How did you feel when you realized that she'd been responsible for the breakout?"

"How did I feel? Betrayed, hurt, enraged. I felt like it would have been better to die in Afghan than to come home and witness that."

"And what do you think of her today now that she's a criminal?" Barbara already had her own opinion of the Joker's lackey but hearing a former friend would be interesting.

"I tell myself that Harleen Quinzel died in the explosion that freed Joker, that he and Harley Quinn killed her and that makes going on easier if she's dead. Cause Harley Quinn might look and sound like her but she's not the woman I knew four years ago." That's an odd coping mechanism, but Barbara guess it would offer some ease of mind to see Harleen Quinzel and Harley Quinn as two separate entities.

"Do you think that it's possible she could be redeemed? That she could be Harleen Quinzel again?"

"I…I don't know the answer to that. How much of Harleen is left in her? And is that worth saving? Even if she did come back she'd have to spend the rest of her life in a prison. I'd like to hope that one day she'll come back but I know deep in my bones that she'll never be the same. No it's easier to think that she's dead and remember what was."

"If you could say something to her right now what would it be?"

"That I'm sorry I wasn't there to protect you, that I miss you, and that I want nothing more than to bring you back." He answered sadly. It was saddening to know that he held himself responsible for her actions, that her descent into madness was a failure on his part.

"I, thank you Alex that's all the questions I had. I need to head back to the library now, maybe I'll see you there later?"

"Yeah, yeah count on it. I uh, I got some thinking I need to do." He says as Barbara leaves him alone with his thoughts.

...

Fuck. Those questions Barbara had asked Alex earlier about Harleen had gotten him thinking. He had actually admitted that he wanted to save her when for the longest time he'd thought of nothing more than putting a bullet in her skull. He guessed that deep down inside he still cared for her, even if she no longer gave a rat's ass about him. Could she be saved though? That was the real question.

Joker would need to be taken out of the picture to start and Alex had already thought of multiple ways he wanted to kill him. Shooting his face several times with a shotgun until it was a bloody pulp would be a good start and then he'd finish by strapping the body to enough C4 to send it to the moon. Yeah that'd work.

Alex knew he couldn't let this get personal though, he was here to carry out the governments orders and that meant taking down ALL of Gotham's criminals, including Quinn. He had to remind myself that he need to be able to pull that trigger if he had to and he guessed that could count as saving her depending on how one looked at it. Fuck this was hurting his brain. Damn you Barbara for digging up these buried feelings! Guess he'd have to cross that bridge when he got to it.

…Mission Complete…