Alternate summary: A jinchūriki receives an invite to the Tragic Backstory Flashback in Return of the Joker and breaks it over her knee. (Cross-posted from Archive Of Our Own.)

Notes: The working title of this work was "It don't bite—YES IT DO. YES IT DO." Yep, it's a Vine reference. Kei generally has a hard time assuring people that the kaiju literally living rent-free in her head is a nice guy, really. Mostly. Probably an even harder time after this.

(I am exorcising childhood demons through writing and you're all invited to the party.)

This story takes place vaguely around/after chapter 105 of Catch Your Breath. Kei's 18 at the moment and has just barely started poking at being a teacher.

Content warnings for: Descriptions of blood, gore, violence against animals (offscreen), violence against children (offscreen), electric torture (offscreen), emetophobia warning, and potentially more if people feel like letting me know what they'd prefer to see tagged.

Kei woke up facedown on a concrete floor, a headache squeezing her skull and the smell of blood in her nose. Scrunching her face in disgust revealed a cooling puddle, half-dried and tacky, under her head. Getting her elbows under her chest to heave herself up, despite the warning tingle in her left arm? Ow, even when she tried to take a clearer breath through her mouth. Her sleeves seeped and squished as she shifted, shuddering as a breeze crossed her damp body.

There were several things wrong with this picture.

One: Ow. Her headache was weakening with each throb in her temples, like her chakra cycled in time with her pulse. Even the seal work on her left arm throbbed, separate from her burning flesh. Like she'd…overloaded it somehow.

Two: Isobu's voice was absent. There was no waiting lecture in the back of her head. The thrum of his chakra was at a low ebb, though still pooling around her injuries and stitching her back together.

Three: "Ow" wasn't just a migraine. Her cautiously probing fingertips came away wet and sticky from the back of her head, and pressing made her see stars even with her eyes closed. Even half-healed. The cold concrete almost felt good under her sore head.

Four: Isobu's silence was getting more ominous by the moment. By now he'd normally have at least yelled at her for lying on the ground like a lump.

Five: Fucking ow. Pain blazed through Kei's head again when she tried to lever the rest of the way upright. She ended up gasping into her knees, feeling the ground's chill seep up through her pant legs.

Isobu? Kei pressed one sleeve against one caked-shut eye, trying to find a drier spot to make any progress at all. Her eyelashes stuck unpleasantly to both the cloth and her wrist when she gave up, swearing under her breath. What happened?

Isobu didn't answer. Very deliberately didn't, stonewalling her outright, which was a red flag big enough to make bulls in the next city take notice. Kei knew that emotional resonance backward and forward by now.

Eyes still shut, Kei felt around her pockets until she found a handkerchief, cupping it between her hands until she could remember the hand seals for a basic water condensation ninjutsu. Nausea threatened immediately; water likely pulled indirectly from all the blood somehow made the smell worse still. If this was all hers, she was probably lucky to be alive.

Oh god there was blood in her ears. Kei swiped at her head again, feeling the texture fall in damp flakes, and swallowed against the sensation of bile rising in her throat. Rubbing her eyes made them burn. Still, she needed her face clean.

Cleaner.

To see whatever had happened.

It was still a few minutes until she finally opened her eyes. Until she winced, against the interplay of her headache and the strange glare coming off one of those mirror-like umbrellas common to film studios. It was on the floor, half-crumpled, with the handle snapped. Broken glass led off into the distance.

More V2 jinchūriki claw marks clambered up and down the walls and turned the room into something akin to the cratered face of the moon, and bigger gouges left in solid material were definitely from Isobu's tails bashing against everything until he won. In some spots, it looked like Isobu had specifically stuck their shared arm through concrete, torn the supporting steel out, and then simply used whatever he found as a club.

Though maybe he'd just been trying to destroy things. The ceiling had actually collapsed in places, thanks to his love taps, leaving insulation, tubes, and gypsum tile bits everywhere.

Some particular objects stuck out amid the rebar-strewn rubble. A silver tray and its contents were strewn across the floor; broken syringes, scalpels, and orange bottles of pills crushed underfoot. A whole branch of evil-looking chemicals was reduced to hundreds of shards of glass, covered in strange chemicals and in some cases hissing into the floor. A steel cart had been smashed flat. Part of a solid worktable—material unknown—was jammed into the opposite wall at shoulder height and creaked as it slipped into gravity's grip. One of its legs was practically sawdust beneath it.

There was a flat-heeled white shoe, almost certainly a woman's, lying on the floor near Kei's path. As though whoever owned it had run off like some morbid Cinderella.

All in all, Kei could only assume this was absolutely her Carrie moment. Or Isobu's. Covered in blood and amid destruction, Kei sat in the middle of a crime scene with an unknown number of bodies hidden in the set dressing. At minimum, the crime was her very own attempted murder. Assault, definitely. She just didn't know what the other violence might look like yet.

Mostly because she hadn't gotten up and looked.

Kei shivered. Ran the handkerchief over her face again, this time noticing when it came away more brown in the crappy light than red. The injury underneath—a formerly broken nose, probably from hitting the ground the first time—was still tender, but on the mend. Not worth worrying about.

What was worth worrying about: Where the actual fucking hell was she?

Konoha didn't have this smooth, industrial concrete. Nothing she could willingly slide on without removing the top layer of her skin. Half of the roads in even the main parts of the village were just incredibly compacted dirt. It allowed shinobi to use the material as a resource for Earth ninjutsu if anyone really needed a secret weapon at the last possible second. And poured material was expensive anyway.

Except maybe some really weird parts of old Uchiha territory, particularly around the Naka Shrine, there was nowhere structured like this back home. Like, this building had clearly been used for something, but then abandoned, and then…set up as an amateur film studio? Urban exploration wasn't really a thing in Konoha, because hiring shinobi to dismantle bits of "cityscape" no one cared about was generally easier. Even accidental sometimes.

And there was no way she could just…sit here on her ass and stare into space after an Isobu rampage. Even if it helped her injuries knit together faster. She didn't really care if the scar on her face had company. She needed to figure out what happened.

Okay. First things first.

Kei went over her ears again, this time with both hands covered in summoned water to actually unblock them.

And with her ears clear, she could hear someone breathing besides her. Ragged, maybe crying between each breath, but an actual person had survived the massacre. Maybe because Isobu hadn't bothered shredding people who cowered fast enough.

Just…around the corner. A dozen meters never felt so daunting.

Abandoned concrete building, film studio, weird electric bullshit— The hairs on the back of her neck rose in pointless alarm. Even with Kei's super-duper extra-strength concussion on the way out, Isobu clearly had enough power to make everything quiet again. Permanently. The blood on her now probably wasn't going to magically get even worse. So why did those stray details make her nervous?

It gave her Orochimaru lab vibes in a bad way. Built as much to contain the experiment as to keep others out. Pain was written into the walls and, today, it was all awash in blood. Her blood? Some, at least. Maybe that was the threshold keeping her in check.

Isobu? Was he accidentally setting her up for a horror movie reenactment for the ages? And not as the protagonist.

There was a rumble in her chest. One titanic red-gold-red eye opened and fixed on her, overlaying her real vision with a projected image. A huge, armored hand slid slowly across the sandy beach in Kei's mental world, until the equivalent of his pinky finger nudged against Kei's mind like a shifting boulder.

Hey. Kei reached back. Talk to me.

It would be better if you saw for yourself.

…You could have phrased that more ominously, but I'm not sure how.

Another near-tectonic shudder coursed through their shared chakra coils. Flashes of sense-memory—screams and the salty tang of blood—bubbled up and into her brain, but they disappeared like foam. Those snapshots made Kei's stomach twinge uncomfortably, but no further explanation followed.

Without easy options, Kei lurched to her feet with her hand on one of the gouged walls. Her fingers curled into the cracks even as she clamped another hand to her aching temple. Blood squelched in her sandals as she made her way toward the sound of another person, one unsteady step at a time. She left smudgy handprints on the wall the whole way.

She nearly tripped over the first corpse.

It wasn't a human.

Kei cataloged four paws, a stubby tail, and a spotted coat. And an awful lot of red running down the underside of the animal, even in the "emergency only" levels of ambient light. The average quadruped had a skull attached to the spine at the rear instead of the underside, but the head flopped when she carefully nudged the maned back with with one foot. The rear legs were shorter than the forelegs, so that detail and all the others only left "hyena" as a likely candidate for this species.

Vividly: The sensation of fur and muscle and bone under her hand, then squeezing until something vital cracked. Then ripping the critically injured hyena—she could still hear its cackling—open like a fish.

There was a split leather collar on the floor nearby.

Kei shuddered. She'd mostly gotten over her aversion to hunting as a genin. Some missions demanded tasks like killing boars for ruining farmland. Sorry, piggy, no root vegetables for you. Other times, food supplies went a little short and local animals were on the menu. But this? This wasn't a predatory attack. Not a hunt.

Mostly because Isobu didn't eat.

She kept going. Toward the light. Toward—whatever was there. "Help" seemed like a pipe dream. Following the destruction was the only recourse. Ahead, light spilled from an open—destroyed—doorway.

And there was still more mess. And a blood trail here that was more distinct, going from the door and off into the direction of concealing darkness. Lingering water—leftover from one of Isobu's attacks?—dripped from the ceiling.

Someone had tipped over a spotlight and shattered the bulb, leaving another pointed uselessly at the stained ceiling. A series of car batteries and generators were dented and occasionally torn open by claws Kei knew only too well. Sparks still fell out of their guts. Their cables were severed and lying everywhere like loose soba noodles.

Then she came across the second corpse.

It was…certainly something that used to be a person. There were intact hands and feet, still wearing white rubber gloves and a shoe that matched the one she'd found earlier. The visible bits of skin were paler than hers by a couple of shades, or so it seemed amid the carnage. Scraps of white fabric were visible between the reddish brown mush that was…definitely pulped human flesh in partial lighting. Going by the position the corpse was in, Isobu had clearly gone in through the back, landing twin claw-blows on the shoulders and applying force until ribs buckled like toothpicks and organs squished and spilled everywhere.

Victims of large predator attacks were left more intact than this. Even if the bear ate them.

And from the smell, some of those bits were definitely from perforating the abdominal wall and intestinal tract. Both kinds. Spools of ropey innards made up most of the middle mess. The sick, sharp smell of a burst stomach was all too clear.

Then Kei threw up.

Later, she'd be able to say that jinchūriki physiology played havoc with her recovery rates from major injuries, but the real killer was the leftover concussion. At this stage of her recovery, a rotting steak would've knocked her on her ass exactly as hard.

It's not like you haven't seen worse, Kei hissed at herself once the heaving was over and only coughing remained. Silently, in case whoever was there was actually listening, like it mattered at this point. Her lunch was a lost cause.

She'd cut her teeth on the Third Shinobi World War, for fuck's sake. Half her early missions involved running around cleaning up after adult shinobi were done gutting each other for the day. In areas where the fighting went on for weeks, she'd retrieved decayed corpses that fell apart in her arms like butcher's leavings. Stuffing loose bits of bone and flesh into a mass grave of war dead, likely to be flooded before it was filled? An old hat. This was supposed to be nothing.

But still, the smell got to her.

Kei rinsed out her mouth four whole times with water ninjutsu, then spat one last gob of bloody saliva when her taste buds stopped their rebellion. A clumsy wave of her arm sent all the water and the mess broadly back the way she'd started—away, because at this point she didn't fucking care.

Some of the blood followed it. Mixed into a horrible, disgusting, souplike liquid. Some chunks were unrecognizable.

With her good hand clamped over her nose, Kei squinted at the corpse again.

The head was gone. That injury was neat. Clean, unlike literally everything else that had happened to this corpse. Like someone had removed it with all the fanfare of a child snapping the head off a chocolate Easter bunny, while leaving the body for a wood chipper. Isobu's strike was something they ordinarily reserved for other super-tough opponents, obliterating spine, larynx, and all the intermediate bits in one go. He'd done it so neatly there was barely a stump left.

None of this changed the fact that the splatter mark on the floor gave away the amount of force involved.

The smell still permeated the air, though Kei was careful to breathe only through her mouth this time.

Another memory hit her then—of cold floor and scraping and the grinding pain of being dragged across an unforgiving floor on her face—

Ah. There was a blood trail, leading toward the light. Or maybe away from it. The longer streak of blood was now mixed in with vomit and yet more blood, muddying the evidence. The splatted corpse in the middle didn't help.

So, she'd…started around here? Been hit in the head by something or someone, then been…dragged back? And then Isobu burst out of her like an intentionally malevolent bomb.

Fuck, her head still hurt. Her arm burned. Some sharp pain in her back gave away the presence of a shallow stab wound, probably from one of those scalpels. There was a time and a place for this shit. CSI-ing through a brain injury could wait until either she didn't have one or she…uh…

Until never. Part of her wanted nothing more than to curl up on the floor and join the crier, whoever that was. There was solidarity in suffering, and they were both messes. Everything hurt.

But the light awaited. Time to see if it was salvation or an oncoming train.

For a solid few seconds after her eyes adjusted, Kei didn't know what she was looking at. Almost as though she'd been struck over the head again, or rebooted like a cheap PC, or maybe Isobu's emotions were leaking through the seal with enough speed and depth to drown out her own thoughts. Then it bled back in, ringing in her ears and in her brain worse than any blaring siren.

Then she staggered forward, catching herself on the side of the metal operating table bare inches from the still-living captive's twitching fingers.

To fully restrain a person, the methodology depended partly on the occupant and partly on the resources at hand. Larger or stronger prisoners required more effort. Four points minimum to start; one binding for each potential flailing limb and maybe one thicker belt to keep the torso pinned to a chosen surface. Sometimes a belt at the neck or forehead. Then one could choose to keep adding more until, eventually, a prisoner could only be moved with a full Hannibal Lector rig. On a hand truck.

There could be reasons for it. Sometimes. Given Kei's context clues, though? Benefit of the doubt was flying out a window at top speed.

Her brain still felt like a skipping record, but now the needle caught.

To keep a kid with red-and-black costume colors and mask from moving, they'd gone with five straps—wrists, ankles, waist—and two massively upscaled metal clamps attached to the bed instead of a limb. Each clamp linked to a thick black cable, severed half a meter from the source, but the far end still spat sparks. The cables, too, led to heavy gray machines with ominous-looking displays Kei couldn't read between her burgeoning rage and pounding headache.

On top of them were bare steel structures that kind of looked like screws, but huge, and topped with globes that looked like something out of an old Frankenstein remake. To hold electricity? Or at least look good on film, with the lightning playing out over big wires and scaring people.

More than scare an audience.

To torture a kid. Hook him up to the remaining power grid—the switch in the corner was set to On—and watch him scream.

And there was a fucking camera on a tripod on the floor nearby, in expensive pieces. At least, the legs were—now that her eyes hated light a little less, parts of the actual device seemed intact. Blood on the casing or not, there was a red light still glowing on it. Which meant there was a pretty good chance the person-now-corpse outside was filming all of this a couple minutes ago.

Including the part where Isobu showed up.

And now.

"Let me just, uh—let me get you down," Kei managed, once she'd gotten her voice back. English seemed safest, accent be damned. "G-Give me a second."

Half the mask on the kid's face had started to peel at the corner. It was one of the classic rounded Robin domino ones, and a brown eye peered blearily at her amid tears. Though his chest heaved in a pattern between gasps and sobs, and he dangled from the restraints with every limb as dead as a doll's, that stare refused to falter.

It was like the scattered fragments of thought and emotional distress snapped themselves back into place; here, there was a mission.

Here, there was someone in worse straits.

She could help.

Getting down onto her knees, Kei pried the clamps apart first with her bare hands, Isobu's chakra surging easily to meet her request. Leaving them on the floor, her next task was to cut the straps. Hopefully, the kid wasn't too badly hurt.

Ha. What was she even thinking? He'd been tortured. "Okay" was in another country.

With nothing more than brute force, Kei snapped the straps keeping the kid's ankles down first, giving him a better chance to regain his balance. Clambering up from there, she also unbuckled the bulky belt pinning his torso. The leather had actually cracked from stress, or maybe age. Age would be kinder.

Anything that wouldn't have meant the damage was from this kid trying to escape his torturers for that long.

"…ack…?" the kid croaked as Kei ripped the straps at his wrists from their bases.

Then he slid down the length of the tilted table as though his limbs were jelly, forcing Kei to catch him partway to keep him from ending up on the floor. The whole angled setup was perfect for recording maximum possible humiliation for the kid and emotional torque in whoever saw the film later, but was worse than useless for any positive outcome.

"Sorry," Kei said as she settled him slowly on the floor, with no better options than to prop him up against the table where he'd been fucking tortured. Her hands still left disgusting rusty smears on every surface she touched, and that included the kid's bare bicep and the straps and the operating table's cool metal surface. "I, uh, didn't catch that."

"Y-You…came b-back—" The kid swallowed, shuddering though she tried not to touch him. His whole body slumped back, then sort of gradually slid toward her as gravity won out. "H-how…?"

The blank in Kei's memory was an utter abyss. Isobu still hadn't said anything. The camera was still running, undaunted.

"Not important," Kei said, quickly enough that her surprise probably wasn't obvious. She should get the broken straps off him, too, but maybe with shears. If she could find any before her chakra control stabilized.

"…S-said…k-killed you…?" Unsteady breathing continued. At least he was coherent. Somehow.

"I'm tougher than I look," Kei replied, guessing at the ends of the sentence that had disappeared on the way out. And carefully neglecting to explain all the blood. "And you'll—" Um. She didn't actually know if he'd ever fully recover, but… "You'll be okay. I'm here to help."

The kid—the Robin— almost melted into Kei's hesitant shoulder pat. She'd sort of pressed his loosened mask back into place, looking for any way to reassure him that he was safe, and maybe it worked. Or maybe the stress and adrenaline and leftover pain was kicking his ass.

She hoped he didn't dream.

Kei knew she wanted that for herself right now, with bone-deep certainty. Her imagination had a nasty tendency to fill in gaps with unnecessary creativity.

Isobu knew almost everything Kei did about Gotham. She hadn't been shy about sharing well-worn stories out of boredom and the expectation that nothing she said would ever be relevant. Or, if it was, then two heads were better than one when it came to puzzling out most problems. Even if one half of the equation preferred to point and laugh. Most of the bits he didn't understand were a matter of juggling the intricacies of human society, which he didn't care for much.

She knew this moment. She knew that, somewhere, there was a cheap, lopsided title card with the words "Our Family Memories" written for the unfinished film, because she'd seen the completed one a lifetime ago. One much more traumatic upbringing later, and it was still a wonder that "kid is kidnapped, tortured, drugged, experimented upon, and eventually forced to be heir to a monster" had made it past the censorship board. It didn't even get into the body-snatching.

It was so much worse in person. To be here, at ground level, roped into participating even in this most destructive of ways.

Even if she caught it early.

The Joker would not be coming back from wherever Isobu had stashed him. All it cost her was a skull fracture, concussion, and maybe a couple of important-for-context memories.

Isobu's chakra rumbled in her chest.

As Kei took off her stained jacket and summoned water for a very forceful rinse cycle, every hair on her entire body stood on end in the still air. Or tried to. Sticky dried blood still clung to her body like a bad memory. Wearing only a tank top, one compression sleeve for her left arm, and an old pair of Konoha uniform pants, the cold was unavoidable now. Her sandals provided no protection. The fine mist spray of leftover Water ninjutsu almost distracted her from the itching need to be clean.

And from the way the kid's crying started again. It was the same voice she'd heard before. Hurt beyond enduring, exhausted, desperate for any reprieve.

She'd managed to give him that much.

Kei wrung out the jacket with the kind of thoroughness only a Water specialist could manage, letting the mess drain onto a floor she didn't care about, then tried to tuck it over Robin like a makeshift blanket. He curled a little into it, though it probably smelled terrible, and Kei got to work cutting away the remnants of his captivity.

Having capped out at a hundred and seventy-twoish centimeters years ago, Kei was very tall for an ethnically Japanese woman. She could look most men in the eye without needing to tilt her head, sure, but most of her friends were around the same size. Until she got her students, the majority of children she saw regularly were toddlers and didn't mess with her self-perception much.

Robin felt small. She had to pry the straps up away from his gloves to get a clean cut, and his wrists were undoubtedly badly bruised and possibly burned beneath the material. From struggling. He didn't resist when she needed to move him, completely pliant in a way that would scare anyone with basic reasoning skills. It sure pinged Kei's brain in a bad way, but so did literally everything about this situation. What was one more warning klaxon among many?

He shouldn't trust any stranger right now. Not even one he vaguely recognized from a couple of minutes and a lot of violence ago.

But—

This was a kid.

A well-trained, talented, scrappy kid, but a kid. Who'd been through the kind of hell Kei actually didn't wish on her worst enemies, narrowly escaping a fate even worse.

Kei favored dealing a quick death, even when faced with a true, uncompromising enemy. A clean stroke or a sharp stab. Not this.

"Hey," Kei said once she'd cut his ankles free of the leftover bindings. "Robin, right?"

Robin's head lolled her way, with just enough control to tell her he was listening. His confirmation was a wordless hum. Even that much seemed more an effort than was fair to demand of him.

"I—can I call someone, for you? Um. I hope Batman is monitoring emergency lines around here, since I definitely don't have his number…or a phone…"

Generally able to trust police about as far as she could throw them—MPs included—her first instinct was to wash away the crime scene and pretend it hadn't happened. Like, "Sorry, officer, no idea where the missing persons met their extremely messy ends. I'm generally not going to be helpful with your investigation, nope. Got better things to do. I will be available for comment never."

Ha. A GCPD officer could beat someone for that shit, internal affairs be damned. A lot of them probably would.

But Kei hadn't precisely…hidden much about herself, up to this point. She hadn't been capable of it. The showstopper monster transformation was about as extreme as such reveals got. Used as an opening number and with an actual body count…well. There were few bloodier choices she could have made even with full cognitive faculties.

Knowing who Batman and Robin were beneath their masks was comparatively small potatoes.

Probably.

Every version of Bruce Wayne she knew of had a spectacular weakness labeled "personal problems." Like going down a checklist designed to inflict trauma, this situation sat firmly under that umbrella. Kei had already made herself a little too unforgettable to escape scrutiny.

"…ving?"

"Huh?" Kei leaned closer and turned her head to hear better.

Robin croaked, "You're…l-leavin'…?"

"Oh." Yeah, great plan, Kei scolded herself immediately. Sure, make the traumatized kid think I'll ditch him with the corpse confetti. Genius. Aloud, she hurried to say, "No, no, I'll stay. Sorry."

Robin sighed and leaned more toward her. This dislodged the jacket blanket, so Kei caught him with one arm and looped the cloth around his shoulders in a feeble attempt to help.

Not washing off the blood was a mistake, Kei thought. Even if "being the Joker" wasn't a bloodborne illness—and Kei was pretty sure it wasn't—she kept shying away from actually letting Robin touch it.

Or touching him with it.

Same difference. All gross.

After a second of that futility, Kei decided he could just wear the jacket and save them both some useless flailing. Getting Robin's arms through the sleeves was awkward, but he was something like half a foot shorter than her, and her lounge clothes were nearly always about three sizes too large. She zipped up the front easily and sort of watched him turtle up in it, disappearing up to where his mask crossed his nose.

It felt like the most comically miniscule assistance Kei could possibly offer. Not for the first time, that gut-churning uselessness and leftover adrenaline did loops around her entire autonomic nervous system. Her entire brain was full of TV static and bumblebees.

Up until maybe ten or fifteen minutes ago, Kei's only expectation had been to stay on medical leave and out of trouble. Physical therapy appointments were the main demand on her time. She'd wanted to be comfy after working her busted-up left arm to the bone to try and get any functionality back after her last catastrophic injury—which was pretty much a given when fighting Orochimaru. Dressing down and taking the evening off to read a novel felt earned. She definitely remembered putting a kettle on the stove.

And here she was. Definitely in the wrong place at the right time. There was no way of telling how anybody else would weigh in.

At least she hadn't taken her shoes off before ending up in this shithole.

We should leave.

You were quiet for a while there.

Aaaand then Isobu cut her off again. Fantastic. He didn't give up on supplying her healing body with chakra, though, so Kei couldn't really complain.

Well, she could, but it'd be petty.

"But maybe we should get you somewhere else," Kei said aloud, drawing Robin's wavering attention back. "To find a phone or something."

There was a movement from Robin that could be interpreted as a shrug, but the bulky jacket made it hard to tell.

"I could carry you?" Kei suggested. She hadn't entirely intended to phrase it as a question, but most of the pain already in progress was something she could push past. She'd had worse. Recently, even. "If you want."

She could just barely see Robin nod after staring for a few moments. If he was that exhausted, Kei didn't mind doing the literal legwork around here.

After a couple of seconds of indecision, Kei gathered Robin into her lap over the protests from her lingering injuries. Sure, her left arm was fucked, but her left arm would remain so no matter how she moved someone his size. She just had to make sure her right arm did most of the work. And she pulled the hood of the jacket over his head so he saw a little less blood for a while.

"Okay, one, two—" And Kei hoisted Robin up into a bridal carry, angling him against her chest and neck to try balancing properly. Carrying him on her hip was an impossibility due solely to his height and current fragility. Even like this, her left arm could handle his legs' weight better. "And we're good. I'm going to find a phone, all right?"

Robin's head moved under the hood. Probably a nod.

"Okay. Maybe try to nap 'til then." Maybe by the time she found a way to call for help, she'd work out where the hell they were. "It'll be better when you wake up."

"Gotham City 911 Emergency, do you need police, fire, or medical?"

"Yeah, uh, there's been a murder? Wait, two—I mean, I assumed there was only one—okay. Um, so we need police, medical, and Batman. Not, uh, quite in that order. Batman first would be best, probably."

"Ma'am, what's the address?"

"Um. The old Arkham Asylum. I don't know the numbers, but I found a phone that still worked. Somehow."

"Okay. Is anyone injured?"

"Two. Me and Robin. The, uh, the others are…not an ongoing concern. At least, not anymore."

"Okay, please stay on the line so I can ask a few more questions."

"All right—"

[Batcomputer auto-transcript excerpt of 911 call at 12:42 am on 04/23/200X. Flagged terms: "Batman," "Robin," "injured," "Arkham." Retrieved: 12:43 am on 04/23/200X. System-wide alert activated.]

Notes: I actually do like hyenas. They're fascinating animals, and Bud and Lou are kind of adorable with Harley. She should have themed pets more often. And take them with her in any custody dispute. But I don't think Isobu was going to be nice to anybody or anything between him and his goals, and it'd be unreasonable for people to expect him to.

If there was ever a moment it'd be reasonable to think DCAU's Batman would kill a dude his bare hands, it'd be this movie. And nobody (besides himself) would blame him.