AN: Sorry if the switch between 1st and 3rd is confusing, but I feel like it works with Chris' mental state and how she views her different personalities/aliases.

Part One: Chapter Two

Snakes and Ladders

"I worked as a detective. Worked on the side of justice. I was a good guy. At least on the surface. Beneath...beneath I was a killer. I serial killer. I murdered for the fun of it. Fun... oh was it fun! Hearing them squirm and squeal! Humans... humans are so pathetic. So selfish. Me, I'm not human. Not like you. You call me a monster, and maybe I am. I don't want to part of your pathetic species.

So I tell myself I'm not human.

And ya know... sometimes I actually believe it."

2007

Detective Grey stepped into the Gotham Police Station with a confidant swagger to her step. Her stringy hair was pulled into a sloppy bun, colored like dried blood. Her piercing gaze caused the officers who glanced up at her to involuntarily shiver, drawing away from her dark brown gaze.

"Jill!" Called a uniformed man as he hurried up beside her. "We've got another one." He handed her a file, his face pale.

Jill took the file and pursed her lips. Flipping it open revealed a photo of a crime scene. But unlike most Gotham homicides (which were normally a simple gunshot or stab wound), this corpse had been hacked to little pieces.

I hid her pride of this particular work behind tight lips and a dull gaze. "So the Death Adder strikes again." She mussed.

"That's the fourth one." Said the officer. Jill glanced over him. He was a young thing, just out of his teens, with strawberry blond hair and a light sprinkle of freckles. Innocent. Probably never shot anyone before. Never had the blissful experience of killing another human. I pitied the child.

"Where was this one found?" She asked, though she already knew.

"On the east side of the Narrows. He keeps getting closer to the bridge. At this rate, he'll be killing in downtown soon."

I had to fight back an eye roll at the police's assumption that Death Adder was male. Stupid little children.

"So there was venom found in the body?" She asked, looking over the photo again.

The boy nodded. "Just like the others. Couple drops of death adder venom in the bloodstream."

Jill chewed on her cheek. Snake venom. It was such a fun way to kill. While death adder venom rarely killed, it was extremely painful and a great torture tool. In the four Death Adder kills, none of the victims had died from the venom, rather blood-loss from missing limbs or a slit throat, whichever came first.

Jill sighed, trying to keep up the tired criminologist act. "I'm gonna look these over. Get me when the body gets to the morgue." She instructed before making her way to her office. Inside I locked the door and let myself slowly relax. The office was small and dark, holding very few personal affects. Here, I could drop my act. I could toss away Jill's skin and be me. Jill, she was so simple, so weak. I could hardly consider her myself. No, she was a puppet, and I the puppeteer. I couldn't call Jill myself, she wasn't myself.

I sat down in my worn swivel chair and tossed to file onto my desk. The dark room was comforting and cool. It was a haven from the oppressive summer sun. Leaning over my desk, I snatched up a worn yellow folder filled to the brim with paper. Setting it in my lap, I flicked it open and started going through the information inside. Blurry photos, newspaper clippings, and scrawled out notes shuffled around as I sorted through them.

Titles such as "Gotham's Newest Hero; Rise Of The Batman" and "A Mist Of Fear Strikes The Narrows; Police Baffled" sneered back at me.

I pressed my lips tight together in thought. I was close, I could feel it. A smirk tugged at the corner of my lips. This hero, this Batman, he intrigued me. It was an intrigue I hadn't felt in three years, a feeling I sorely missed.

This Batman might prove to be fun, I mused. Maybe he could fill that part of me that I'd lost-no! Nothing could ever fill that void, not even Gotham's dark knight.

I threw the folder across the small office, shrieking in anger. My fists clenched and unclenched, shaking.

My heart twisting in turmoil, I spun on my heels and stalked out of the room. I needed to blow something up, or at the very least cut it into little pieces.

Luckily, there was a body waiting in the morgue just for me.

~Nine Hours Later~

Jill Grey was the good to Death Adder's bad. Two sides of a coin. The Yin to the other's Yang. It was the way she worked. Where there was destruction, there also had to be creation. That was the root of chaos. Good where bad was expected and bad where good was expected. To take you must also give.

Jill stumbled back into her small apartment int he west side of Gotham, dead tired from her day at the GPD.

They hadn't found anything on the body. Just a corpse carved like a domestic pig set for dinner. No prints, no traceable DNA, not even an idea as to what caused the actual death. Death Adder was flawless in their killings, leaving nothing but a gory mess.

Jill tossed her keys onto her small wood dinner table and fell limp on her overstuffed couch. She was so damn tired...

After a good thirty minutes of laying aimlessly on the sofa, Jill forced herself onto her feet and shuffled into her bedroom. The small room was dark and cluttered, though everything was organized in it's own messed up way that only the owner would understand.

Her bed was made and it appeared that no one had slept in it for weeks, maybe months. Not far from the truth...

Bypassing her bed, Jill made her way to the small bathroom connected. She flicked on the lights, blinking at the sudden brightness, and leaned over the counter. Her dark brown eyes stared sharply at her reflection.

Reaching up, she pulled her stringy hair out of its pony tail and let it fall haphazardly around her shoulders.

She reached up and let her thin fingers brush against the side of her lips. Opening a drawer, she took out a small glass bottle and opened it. Taking up a towel, she poured a small amount of the yellowish liquid on the cloth and started wiping it on her cheeks. Small bits of makeup and latex came off as Jill uncovered her scars.

"Jack and Jill went up a hill," She murmured, "to fetch a pail of water. But water it wasn't, blood instead, so pretty and filled with red. Jack and Jill, oh did they kill, filling that pail with red water. Then 'Bang" a shot to the head, and dear old Jack was dead, leaving Jill to fall down after."

She dropped the cloth in the sink. The makeup gone, her Glasgow smile was finally on display. Leaning forward to get a better look in the mirror, she pulled opened her eyes and fingered out her colored contacts. The two dark disks were gently set in a container waiting to the left of the sink. Her natural miss-matched gaze returned, Jill's persona melted away to become Chris once more.

I tied back my hair and turned on the sink. Then I pumped out some face wash and went about cleaning myself up.

That done, I left her bathroom. Inside my bedroom, I quickly undressed and slipped on a pair of boxer shorts and a tank top.

Finally, I made my way to my office. Inside I was met with a wall full of glass terrariums, each home to a deadly reptile.

I brushed my thin fingers over the glass, greeting each snake as I went.

"Hello Calypso," the pigmy rattlesnake. "Hello Zeus," the chain viper. "Hello Hades," the inland taipan. "Hello Scotch," the bushmaster. "Hello Pumpkin," the palbara death adder.

I paused at the last cage. "Hello Jack." I greeted. There was a hint of sadness to my voice as I gazed at my most prized snake. My gut clenched painfully as I looked at the beautiful reptile. The albino indian cobra stared back at me with bright red eyes.

I knelt down and opened a cabinet beneath the line of terrariums. Inside was a dozen or so white mice, ambling about, unaware of their fate.

I opened up the cage and gently picked up one of the rodents before closing it up once again. Standing back up, I opened up the lid Jack's cage and dropped the mouse in. I watched is sick amusement as my prized boy struck, devouring the rodent, still kicking.

I lay awake in bed, unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling.

Names, aliases, titles. They raced through my head. It wasn't what a person was called, I mused, but what they did that defined them. The problem with someone like me was that I was many people in one.

Jill was a criminologist, a detective and a police officer. One the side of righteousness.

Christina was a scared little girl, abused by the world and left to rot.

Death Adder was a serial killer, praying on anyone and everyone. The beast made no distinction between good and bad, simply killed.

Chaos, the force of nature that both birthed and destroyed. A killer who would stop a raping, cut off the offender's dick and let him bleed to death. But also the beast who would sever an infant's head and toss it into the lap of its mother.

But my favorite persona of all was Chris Napier, my true self. The person I always wanted to be, living forever till death do we part with the only person to ever understand me.

But Jack was gone, dead, and I was alone.

He'd been killed three years prior, lost in fire and gasoline. And I was forced to become not a person, but an idea. The light and the dark of Gotham, because without my other half, there was no one to balance me out.

One side to kill, the other to save.

Unknown to me, just a few months away, all that would be turned on its head when the dead came back to haunt the world and the glass unshattered itself.

The Clown Prince of Chaos would be born, and his Bloody Queen would rise from the ashes of the world we would burn.

And would it burn...