An update on Christmas AND New Years? Pretty neat. Anyway, just popped in to wish everyone a good 2016! Hope you enjoy the new installment of POV!

Dick had half a mind to go back to sleep when he awoke in Barbara's bed. Things were a lot less complicated in his dreams. But he had already spent who knew how long in a dream-like horror state, and he had no intention to stretch that out longer, so he was putting his feet down on the scratchy carpet before he was fully prepared to face the world.

Getting up was a bit nauseating, but overall, things were pretty clear mentally. It was the emotional part that he was having trouble digesting. His skin prickled and itched and his lungs stuttered something strange at the surreal knowledge that he was in one of his best friends' house. It struck him then that he had no idea how long he had been in the cell which only snippets of memories like straight out of a horror film described to him, and Dick tried to make it to the door to go downstairs and ask, but he found himself crumbling in the middle of the room on his way there. His legs were jelly, and his ribs hurt. It was hard to breathe. His head throbbed. His entire body was weak.

The air was warm, while he had been so used to cold, and he found the temptation to grab Barbara's blanket hard to resist because his body still felt like it was supposed to be cold. The carpet was rough but welcoming, and the sounds of the house were most comforting, filtering to his ears from the kitchen downstairs. Someone was laughing, probably Barbara, and the tension of his lungs eased a little at the sound.

It was more than surreal. It was unreal. But it was a good kind of unreal. He was tense, and he couldn't seem to relax, he felt like at any moment something would jump out to hurt him, but he fell asleep before he had properly awoken nonetheless.

Dick was being shook what felt like seconds later, and the smell of bacon drifted up to him from the carpet. He turned his head lazily to see a sizzling plate of bacon, eggs, toast, and orange juice sitting innocently beside his head. It was so stereotypical that he wanted to laugh.

Barbara was kneeling beside it. He stared at her, opening his mouth to say hello, but words still didn't seem able to come out. She looked sad and said nothing either, but she checked his forehead and helped him up just the same. She plucked a bottle of Ibuprofen from her dresser, too, but one look at Dick's horrified expression had her quickly dropping it into a drawer again and shutting it tight.

She stayed leaned up against her bed and not looking at him as he ate, however suffocating it made the atmosphere. He wolfed the food down too fast, feeling like a void had opened up at the bottom of his stomach, but the second that he had eaten only half, he felt like his skin was going to rip from being stretched so tightly over his body and he was puking into the toilet too soon afterwards.

While vomiting unattractively, Dick felt fingers brush his bangs and the hair at the sides of his face back. He hadn't had a haircut in a long time, and his locks were just long enough to swing in front of his mouth and eyes. When it seemed that he had finished, the toilet roll beside the toilet was slapped and Dick managed to rip a good length off. He wiped his mouth and the seat, dropped it into the toilet, flushed it, and put the lid down in embarrassment all without looking at his helper higher than her knees. Not even when she kneeled down beside him.

Cautiously, Barbara took the corner of Dick's shirt (it was much too big for him, probably her brother's, but he was just thankful that it wasn't anything from the asylum) and waved it, silently asking for permission to lift it up. Dick raised his arms in response, and Barbara uncovered just enough to see his stomach and the bottom of his lungs. There was a gasp of breath, and he was abruptly being gathered in an all-engulfing hug.

"I didn't- I didn't know-" she stuttered.

It seemed like a lot of people didn't know and were sorry about it. "Thanks," he said in response. Barbara backed away, holding his shoulders. She frowned.

"What?"

"For holding my hair, though I guess that was supposed to be the other way around." Since Dick had started to talk, he didn't really want to stop, because when he wasn't talking he was thinking. He definitely didn't want to think.

Barbara didn't seem to know what to do with Dick's sudden change in nature, so she rolled her eyes. Classic Babs. "You're welcome?"

"And thanks for trying to get me help, I guess, even if it almost got me killed. I'm going to be mad at you for a while, but I can't really think about it so I'm not mad at you right now. Though, I'm not going to thank you for calling me insane, even if it was kind of justified." He didn't remember much of what had gone down to get him in the asylum, but he did remember being called insane. He could sense that he was breathing too fast. He must have been on the verge of a panic attack, but it was all distant, as if it weren't really happening to him but only happening in a movie.

It made him feel like he was in a daze, but that was okay, because things were easier to do when he didn't think that they were actually real.

Barbara bit her lip, and Dick should have been prepared for when she started to cry. She hugged him again, quicker that time, before releasing him and poking him hard on the forehead, probably because she was too afraid of hurting him to do much else. "Where did you even learn how to do a backflip?" she sniffled.

"Wikipedia."

She gave him a look. It made Dick smile through his own tears, even if just a little.

Bruce Wayne was not a happy man, as a general rule.

Most people who blamed themselves for their parents' deaths enough to get dressed up in a bat costume every night to beat up petty thieves dressed as cats and less petty, usually sociopathic villains who dressed up as scarecrows or clowns normally weren't.

He had been unhappier than usual for the last few months, and that was pretty unhappy. Actually, professionals, along with Alfred, called it 'depressed'. Bruce was well aware of that fact.

Bruce hadn't known what to do when his ward's - to hell with it, his son's - best friend had died in an especially gruesome manner. And it wasn't to be thought that Bruce hadn't felt the loss at all, either. The kid had been barely sixteen and Bruce had been the one to tell him to do the job that had led to his death. Not only that, but apart from Dick, Wally had been the one on the team that Bruce knew most personally, considering the boy's close relationship with Dick. If Wally had known their identities and Bruce had been allowed to drop his Batman act in order to actually talk to Wally without the boy fearing for his life, they might have developed some sort of relationship.

In truth, Bruce had liked Wally.

When Wally had died, Dick had become the sort of person that reminded Bruce of himself. A little more lethargic, the death having motivated him to not caring about life rather than caring too much, but he had so closely resembled Bruce at that age that Bruce was at a loss. He had just been learning how to act like a father, or trying to, in the more traditional way for Dick. He didn't know how to act like a father for himself. That had been Alfred's job, and Bruce was certainly no Alfred. So Bruce had decided to leave it up to the butler, and he had been so uncertain about his own role and what his own role entitled that he had distanced himself completely.

Then, Dick had been happy again. Bruce had known that he should have been relieved at that, he knew that he should have rejoiced. But he had been in his line of business too long to just let it go at that. He had known that there was something more, and though he had been proven right, he had finally let go of the matter only right before the full truth had been revealed. A lie by omission was still a lie. The second that he had found something that he had deemed logical, he had let it rest at that. He had let that lie tell him not to listen to Dick, his partner, his family, whom he trusted nightly with his life without ever thinking about it, and he regretted that more than he had regretted anything in a long time.

It was his fault that Dick had nearly died.

Before that? It had been his fault that Dick had learned to hate him. Alfred had been right, as he had always been. Bruce had let his own habits come in the way of communication, he had gone back to being the lone wolf, and he had allowed Dick to misread every intention of his. Everything that he had done in order to try and protect Dick had been misinterpreted as trying to hurt Dick, until the point that all those interpretations weren't even Dick's doing. It was his medication's. Medication that Bruce had let get dished out all because he had refused the communication that was the only reason Dick had bonded with him in the first place, the communication that Bruce knew was so crucial but he still kept forgetting about.

Everything was all due to miscommunication, and that was all Bruce's fault.

So, Bruce may not have been good (or at all passable) at mending broken relationships, but he was damn good at something else.

"Why?"

His growl echoed in the small GCPD interrogation room as he stood imposingly in the doorway, the heavy door resonating shut behind him.

Harley's mouth hung open just the slightest bit. "Huh?"

Bruce was attempting to contain his frustrations when he yanked a projectile out of one of his many pouches and threw it at the sole camera's wires, moving a chair to jam the door. There was brief banging from outside and a shout or two, but it eventually fell quiet, and Bruce was satisfied that the one man he trusted in the police force happened to be a man of position.

He admitted that maybe he wasn't the best at reigning in his frustrations sometimes.

"Why did you put Dick Grayson in an insane asylum if you knew that was nothing was wrong with him?" He had to remain at least relatively patient. Harley didn't know that he had a personal connection with the boy. But considering that Joker was in no doubt somehow involved, Bruce had a hard time reminding himself of that.

Harley looked genuinely confused, but then smiled brightly as she seemed to understand something. "Oh, he's insane. Maybe he wasn't that insane when he came for treatment, but you gotta understand, he's seeing things that ain't there! No mind, if he wasn't insane b'fore, he's insane now."

Bruce wasn't going to strangle her. He wasn't. "You went to school for psychiatry. You knew that Dick didn't need the medication. I won't ask again. Why did you do it?"

Harley frowned. "You put Mister J in that place! It was unfair that I couldn't put somebody you love there, too. Now you know how it feels!" she crossed her arms and scowled at the table, plopping back into her seat.

What?

Bruce felt the anger drain completely out of him - or maybe it was just put somewhere else to draw upon later.

"What are you talking about?" he demanded slowly, stalking towards the table. Harley pouted. She seemed to be doing a lot of that. Bruce had to remind himself that she was a smart, full-grown woman who was a medical school graduate. It was hard to believe.

"Wally and all," she said with a dismissive wave of her wrist. "I was just watchin' TV, like any normal person onna Friday, and Mister J hadn't shown up in a long while, and then they was talkin' about Robin, your little birdy-boy, tryna stop some robbing but getting some girl killed, and they was talking all about Wally. 'Oh boy, yeah, little babe Jr. started crying and Robin asked if Jr. could see Wally, wowza. And Robin was yelling all over the place for Wally, Wally must be Batman, but nah, Wally ain't no Batman. There wasn't nobody there, just Robin and he kept talking about Wally, like he was some invisible man."

Bruce felt the blood freeze up in his veins. He hadn't even thought about Dick's psychiatrist when the news had gone up. He had just been relieved that Dick had been too embarrassed to talk about Wally at school, considering Barbara didn't seem to know a thing.

But the only person other than Bruce, Alfred, Barry, and Iris who knew that Dick had been seeing a dead boy named Wally was Dick's psychiatrist, Miss. Frances.

A.K.A. the Joker's girlfriend, Harleen Frances Quinzel.

When Bruce offered no response, shocked as he was and immensely grateful that his paranoia had him knock out the room's camera along with its microphone, Harley lifted her eyes to look at Bruce. "And so, y'know, you're probably Bruce Wayne or something, but when I went to Mister J to tell him the good news, lookie I've got Batman's name, he's like, 'What'd'ya mean? Batman's name is Batsy!' He wasn't gonna listen to me, didn't wanna know your name. You're as much a mask as he's a clown."

Harley had known that Batman and Robin were Bruce Wayne and Richard Grayson since almost the very beginning, and she had said nothing.

But court was next week. The date had been moved up due to Batman's sudden intervention and the materialisation of Dick, who was in need of urgent medical attention. The day before, S.W.A.T. had taken the asylum by storm, only to reveal illegal drugs and chemicals that were obtained without license, along with a history of malpractice and the confession that the workers assumed everything they did to their patients was by consent simply due to their patients' initial admittance into the facility, although it mentioned nothing of that sort in any of their license agreements or contracts. It was a small asylum, too, off the main roads of Gotham City and almost completely out of city limits, isolated and overlooked.

Harley's lawyer would be there soon, and 'why' was a common question. Harley had said nothing because she had never been prompted. No one had known that she was in possession of Gotham's biggest and most yearned for secret.

But she would be prompted in court. Bruce had days. Or maybe just minutes, with the way that the banging on the door had started up again.

He stepped forward faster than Harley had time to react and hauled her up by the front of her striped shirt. "You're not going to tell anyone about this. Not a word in court."

Harley stuck out her tongue. "What'r'ya gonna do? Kill me?"

Bruce's eyes narrowed. "No. I'll kill the Joker."

Harley rolled her eyes. "You don't kill!" she exclaimed, as if exasperated with the entire conversation already.

He had to think. Fast. What would Harley listen to? Well, the Joker, but-

Actually...

"I haven't killed the Joker because I didn't want to," he said lowly, like it was their own personal secret, drawing his face closer to the woman's and forcing a wry and somewhat crooked smile onto the corner of his lips. He hated it. "The game's been fun. But it's not so much fun anymore when I can't play it, because it won't be just me and him after this. He's right, you know. I'm not the Batman without the Joker."

Harley drew slightly further into herself with a contemplating, less convinced frown. "But, you don't kill...," she said warily.

Bruce's fist that was holding Harley up curled, but not in anger. It curled in pain, and his lips with their smile ached. "I killed my parents," he whispered. He dropped his smile at the same time that he dropped Harley. "And I liked them a lot more than I like the Joker."

He was about to remove the chair and sweep out the door, but there was one more question on his mind. Harley was sitting on the ground, trembling with the thought of what Bruce had implicated, and Bruce was standing in front of her, his heels facing her shaking knees as he turned his head to look at her over his left shoulder.

"Why was your apartment trashed, if you were working with the Joker and not against him?"

But Harley only drew further into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees and rocking back and forth, and Bruce knew that he could do nothing about what that situation suggested. At least, not right then. He had more important priorities.

She was crazy. Joker was crazy. There was no cure for the insane.

And that was exactly what Bruce was worried about.

I'm a big fan of the theory that Joker has gotten close to finding out Batman's identity a good plenty of times, maybe he's even found it out, but he just has no interest in it. It's more fun when they're playing their parts. Outside of them, Batman is just a regular person, and there's nothing in it for the Joker there. The Joker is obsessed with the Batman - not Bruce Wayne.

Also, if you haven't noticed, my versions of Harley Quinn and the Joker come from Batman: The Animated Series. That was my favourite portrayal of the Joker. I don't honestly believe that the Joker should be unnecessarily sadistic. In my mind, he's just crazy. He does what he want for his own amusement, he doesn't go out of his way to bring pain to people because that gets old pretty quick. He does what he think is funny, and if people die in the process, all the better.

Thanks for reading!