01 / TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW.

ARKHAM ASYLUM, HELL ON EARTH.

And despite what you might believe, hell was not hot—hell (Arkham Asylum, whatever) was cold. Burning, freezing, blood–draining bone–aching cold. The kind of cold that crept into your veins and left your every move sluggish and drawn out. The kind of cold that left your skin rough and brittle, your lips chapped, your hair sticking up. The kind of cold that had bodies preserved enough to keep them from rot. The kind of cold that killed you.

Arkham Asylum killed you. At least, it killed the person you used to be and replaced it with someone you didn't recognise.

The snake–like rattle of a styrofoam cup drew Tina's attention, and she stole a quick look at the nurse holding it out to her. Her gaze then fell to the four pills sitting at the bottom of the cup, reflecting the harsh fluorescent lights in their gelatin coating. Her mouth felt dry, and her vision felt as sharp as the edge of a knife and twice as painful. Poison. Medicine.

She took the cup before the nurse could rattle it again and poured its contents into her mouth. She toyed with the idea of hiding the pills under her tongue, of spitting them out into her hand the second the nurse turned his back and hiding them in the waistband of her linen pants until she got back to her cell after breakfast, where she would stash them under her bed with the others. Poison. Medicine. Medicine. Poison.

She swallowed the pills and stuck her tongue out at the nurse for proof.

He waved her away, jutting his sharp chin in the direction of the cafeteria breakfast line behind him as he started preparing the next patient's medication. And that was that. Medicine. (Poison?)

The razor edges of her vision blurred, a cloudy veneer sinking into her optic nerve. It was through a haze that Tina joined the line, watching it shuffle forward step by step, patient by patient. A body sidled up next to her, a hand brushing the back of her arm. "Didn't want to put up a fight this morning?"

Dark hair, darker eyes, an even darker sense of humour. If Tina was a forest fire, then Sienna was a thunderstorm; brutal, loud, unforgiving. She was the kind of girl you'd fall in love with at a mere glance, and then stare after dumbfounded as she ran off with your wallet and watch clutched between acrylic nails. The doctors said she had a problem with impulse control, the doctors said she was an adrenaline junkie, the doctors said she was a kleptomaniac. Tina's completely unprofessional diagnosis was that she was an explorer. Sienna liked to climb up to rooftops, sneak into buildings, wade through sewage—which, yuck. Try being in love with her after that—just to see what she could find. Sienna liked finding places, finding things.

The doctors, the police: they liked to call that trespassing, or robbery.

Tina turned her head just enough to stare at Sienna until her eyes started to ache, and then for a few seconds after that. "What's the point?" She shrugged, moving down the line at a petty pace. "I refuse my meds, they'll put them in the food. I refuse to eat, they hold me down and force me to take them. Might as well just save myself the trouble."

Another body slipped into the line, pressing up against Tina familiarly. "Please. You just don't want them to hold you down and sedate you again."

Forest fire, thunderstorm, hurricane. Lonnie Machin whirled into your life with all the subtlety and nuance of a bull in a china shop, nothing but passion and fire and a crave for destruction in the name of justice, of hope, of something better. That was the thing about Lonnie: if you got close enough to see past the violence and destruction, you would find nothing but good in him. All he wanted for Gotham was something better, something good. The kicker was, no one saw past the anger. No one was brave enough to listen to the quiet in the eye of the hurricane. They just saw the violence, the destruction, the anger. After all, breaking the law in the name of justice was only excusable if you were rich enough to put your money behind your morals.

Lonnie didn't deserve to be in Arkham, but as selfish as it might sound, Tina was glad he was.

The three shuffled down the line, a misshapen lump of adolescence and arms pressed together, using each other's presence as a tether to what was real. The shared body heat helped stave off the unrelenting cold, even if just a little. The warmth of another body made loneliness feel a little less lonely. The warmth of another body made hell a little easier to bear.

"You look tired, Miss Novikova." The click of a tongue, the quiet thunk of plastic landing on metal. Tina let heavy eyes rise to look at the lady behind the glass and the tray of food she clutched between latex–clad hands.

"You say that every day, Netty." Tina offered her the best smile she could muster, which really was just turning up the corners of her lips.

"More sleep, Miss Novikova. You look like one of those dead things from my daughter's video games." Netty clicked her tongue once more, before sliding three trays one after the other through the partition in the glass.

Tina murmured her thanks as she, Sienna and Lonnie made their way over to their usual table in the middle of the cafeteria. Each step they took was slow, calculated, in perfect time; they didn't want to drop their trays but they didn't want to part from each other's warmth until they went to sit down.

The second they collapsed into their usual spots, Tina curled against Sienna's right arm and stuck her legs out under the table to hook her socked feet with Lonnie's. She stared down at the tray and its contents: a piece of buttered toast on a paper plate, a plastic cup of fruit salad, a pouch of plain yoghurt and a bowl of oatmeal.

Something about the food felt off to Tina, or maybe that was just the drugs—medicine, poison, medicine—weighing down her synapses. She hated the pills. The doctors said that it had proven helpful, that the lethargy was just a side effect, an easy tradeoff in place of turbulent mood swings and the intrusive thoughts and the dead people that kept coming to visit her.

She hated the pills. What was the point of help if it felt this heavy? What was the point of fixing her if she only felt worse?

"Netty the lunch lady is right, you know." Sienna shifted under Tina's weight as she tipped her fruit salad into the oatmeal unceremoniously and began to stir. Her other hand absentmindedly ran through the tangles in Tina's hair. "You do look like a zombie."

"I don't think she's been sleeping well." Lonnie pressed down gently on Tina's foot with his own, a reminder that he was there—that she was there. "I don't think she's slept well since we came back."

The words drifted over Tina's head, her mind grasping at the loose strands too late to catch anything. It was as if there was a honey–thick syrup between her mind and everything else, keeping her from breaking through the fog. She kept staring at the food, willing herself to move, but it felt as if her body and mind had become two separate things and her body was refusing to cooperate.

"I don't blame her." Sienna muttered around a spoonful of oatmeal and honeydew, adjusting to let Tina sink deeper into her side. "Someone's been screaming bloody murder in the women's ward. Hard for anyone to sleep."

"Sorry." Tina mumbled, voice just loud enough for the others to hear over the lively cafeteria chatter. "Hate this place."

Sienna hummed forgivingly, fingers still gently running through Tina's hair. "You were the one screaming?"

Tina nodded and finally managed to summon the barest dregs of energy left in the deep recesses of her mind to sit up a little, though most of her weight was still draped over Sienna's arm. "Yeah. Been a bad week." She answered, to which the other two nodded and left the matter there to rest. They didn't need more explanation than that. They never did.

She picked up her plastic spoon, toyed with the oatmeal, with the shiny packaging of the yoghurt pouch. She pushed the little plastic cup of fruit salad around the bowl of oatmeal once, twice, three times before dropping the spoon altogether and reaching for the piece of toast. She held it, gripping it tight enough that the crust gave in with a crunch not unlike bone. "The food looks fake. Like plastic."

"It's not. Eat something." Lonnie nudged her foot with his, pressing his toes against the sharp bone of her ankle. "Even just the toast and fruit."

Tina nodded and took a bite of her toast, her movements slow and mechanical. She swallowed, and took another bite. Then another. And another. "New bread." She said quietly. "Tastes different."

Sienna and Lonnie nodded in agreement as they went back to their own breakfasts, content with Tina seeming more present in her body. She ate her toast in silence, not quite happy but certainly not feeling any worse. It helped, knowing her friends were right there, that they could cut through the cruel confusion of her own thoughts.

There was a sharp buzz, and then the sound of the cafeteria gate behind them creaking open, and Lonnie—who sat opposite the girls and therefore had a perfect view of the gate—put down his spoon and raised an eyebrow at whatever he saw. Sienna gave him a curious look, while Tina finished off the slice of toast without ever once shifting her gaze from the tray.

"Well, well, well." Lonnie leaned forward conspicuously, hiding his mouth behind a pale hand. "Would you look at that? Fresh meat."

Tina and Sienna turned around with the kind of synchrony usually reserved for twins, watching with curious eyes as two guards pulled someone—someone new, someone fresh, someone their age—into the cafeteria. The new girl looked nothing short of unbothered as she was unceremoniously frog–marched over to their table. One guard cleared his throat. "Junior varsity, this is Bennett. She's joining the youth and adolescent program."

Tina perked up, lips pulled apart in a smile with too much teeth as she craned her neck to peer up at the guard. "The same program that Vale called—oh, what did she say again?—'the perfect breeding ground for a new, harsher, deadlier kind of criminal'?"

"Let it go, Novikova." The other guard rolled his eyes, though he showed no attempt to hide the fond twinkle. "You need to get over that damned article already. Vale writes like she shits: out her ass, and you know it."

"She called me a terrorist, Ricky. A terrorist. A psychopathic, megalomaniac, nutjob terrorist whose parents should have died sooner." Tina muttered mutinously, stirring her cold oatmeal until it looked like wet paper. "And she said that I was a nepo baby. At least she had a point about the terrorist thing."

"Aren't you technically a nepo baby?"

Tina let her gaze shift from the guards to the girl that they were loosely holding in place. Short, dark hair that curled behind her ears and a gap–toothed grin. Fingernails chewed to the quick, a hole in the side of her nose that marked a recently removed piercing, and hairs on her arms standing to attention from the cold. The kind of girl that Arkham Asylum chewed up and spat back out wrong.

Admittedly, Tina was excited to see how this girl survived—changed—in hell.

"First off, my parents weren't terrorists and you can't find anything that will prove they were anything less than perfect citizens, and second off, I've never used their alleged underworld connections in my illustrious life of crime." Tina answered back, voice laced with amusement instead of snark. "So, technically, not a nepo baby."

"Denial is the first stage." The new girl—Becca? Betty?—shrugged off the guards with a feline ease and slid into the seat next to Lonnie, crossing her legs up on the bench as if sitting on the floor in grade school. "Bennett."

Tina ignored her, going back to staring at the oatmeal. It had the colour of wet cardboard and the consistency of concrete in the mixing chamber, and in all her staring it had already gone cold. Tina was no chef, but even she didn't think oatmeal was supposed to look like that.

"Lonnie. And that's Sienna, and Tina." Lonnie introduced for the three of them as if there were any need for introduction, waving at each girl with a spoon. Sienna offered Bennett a wave. Tina blinked at her oatmeal, before shifting her eyes up to the new girl. She stared, open and uncaring, dissecting Bennett with a scalpel gaze.

Bennett blinked, unperturbed. "You're staring."

"She does that." "I do that." "She does that."

Bennett blinked again, before shaking her head and laughing to herself in disbelief. "God, you three are just as nuts as the papers say."

"You're nuts too, 'else you wouldn't be here." Tina muttered, returning her gaze back to the oatmeal. She stirred it once, twice, three times, until she decided that the bowl clearly wanted a staring contest with her. She stared at it until her eyes burned and she was forced to blink—that makes 4–0 to the oatmeal—before reaching for the fruit salad instead.

"So, what's your deal?" Sienna leaned as forward as she could without making Tina lose balance and fall face–first into the metal bench, propping her chin up on her other hand. "Murderer? Arsonist? Addict? Terrorist?"

Tina grumbled something sounding like a curse on Vicki Vale's bloodline under her breath, and Bennett just shrugged. "Turns out if you steal enough cars with the sole purpose of crashing them, eventually someone decides to catch you."

"Sienna, you can't just ask people what they're in the nuthouse for." Lonnie scolded with a mock wag of a finger, unhooking his foot from Tina's to kick Sienna in the shin. "That's basic manners."

"Just small talk, Lonnie, getting to know the new girl." Sienna kicked him back. "Besides, if she's here to join the youth program, we might as well get all the boring details out of the way."

"Nothing boring about crashing cars." Tina shot back, sitting up properly as she picked all of the strawberries out of her fruit salad and dumped them unceremoniously on Lonnie's tray. "In fact, I think—"

"You don't get a say when it comes to cars." Lonnie kicked her in the shin, and then kicked Sienna again for good measure. Bennett stifled a laugh. "You're the worst driver this side of the bay."

She was about to kick him back and deny such blasphemy—clearly, Lonnie had never been in a car with Harvey, who would flip a coin to decide which way to turn while already halfway through the intersection—before the gate buzzed and swung open for an orderly to step through with a yell of "Paper's here!"

Tina leapt up from the bench like a rocket and bounced over to the orderly, going to snatch the paper out of his hands before stopping herself and calmly taking it with a quick thanks. As she walked back to the table, she ripped out the pages with the crosswords and puzzles and shoved them into Eddie's already outstretched hand, before sitting back down and pulling her legs up under her. "Vale, Vale, Vale." She muttered under her breath, flicking through the pages.

Sienna snatched the paper out of her hands and began to flick through it herself. Lonnie gave an over–the–top sigh and reached out a hand to rest on Tina's shoulder. "Tina, honestly. Let it go. Vale's a good–for–nothing gossipmonger who has had it out for us ever since she asked you for a comment and you told her that it didn't matter what you said, she was such a shit journalist that she would just twist your words to make up her own narrative. Stop being dramatic."

"I'm not being dramatic." Tina mumbled mutinously, shoving Lonnie's hand off of her shoulder. "And besides, not like I was wrong."

"Hey, you know what's actually dramatic?" Sienna let out a low whistle, placing the paper face–up on the table for them to all get a look at. "A duffel bag full of heads."

The quarrel with Lonnie suddenly forgotten, Tina craned her neck at a painful angle to look at the paper, eyes widening to the size of saucers. "And they call me the terrorist." She muttered—which had Lonnie and Sienna rolling their eyes because really, when was she going to get over that?—and grinned with all her teeth. "At least I'm not committing mass murder and dismemberment over drug territory."

"You guys aren't all into the drug thing?" Bennett asked in genuine curiosity, taking a quick look at the paper herself. "I figured, since you've worked with Black Mask a few times before, that'd be right up your alley."

"What are you, some kind of super fan?" Tina snorted, raising her gaze from the paper for a split second to kick Bennett under the table, though admittedly more gentle than she would have if it was Lonnie or Sienna. "Nah, we don't get our hands too dirty with the drug trade. Just because we occasionally work with Sionis, and he's technically our landlord, doesn't mean we approve of that stuff. Especially if it involves selling to children."

"Apparently, this guy takes the same stance. Doesn't want any of his crew selling to kids, or even near schools." Lonnie interjected, sliding the paper over to Tina as if to say see? "They say he goes by the Red Hood."

"Like the J—" Bennett started, only to be cut off by a socked foot colliding with her shin and pointed looks from Sienna and Lonnie. She chanced a quick look at Tina, who was too immersed in digesting the paper to have heard what she said. "Like the old criminal gang?"

"Just because he doesn't sell to kids, doesn't mean shit." Tina shrugged, sitting up properly. "If he's picking fights with the big leagues as soon as he debuts, it won't be too long before he's either at the bottom of the bay or strung up at City Hall as an example. Hell, if we weren't in Arkham, I'd probably offer to kill him just for the absolute cheque Sionis would write us. Besides," She paused, scooped a chunk of melon into her mouth. "Eight heads in a duffel bag? That's a bit much, even for me."

Lonnie rolled his eyes, and opened his mouth as if to counter her point, but before he could even say a word he was cut off by red siren lights in the corridor and the intercom crackling to life. "ALERT IN INTENSIVE TREATMENT. CATEGORY 5 PATIENT IN TRANSIT. PACIFICATION SYSTEM ACTIVE. SHOOT TO KILL PERMISSIONS GRANTED."

Tina went as stiff as a corpse, and Lonnie and Sienna exchanged concerned looks as if they knew exactly what this meant. "Tina..." Lonnie started, but was once more cut off—this time, by an all–too–familiar maniacal laugh.

"Visitors, you say?" A grating, aggravating, nails–on–chalkboard voice came from just around the corner. "Now, who would want to see little ol' me?"

The entire cafeteria went dead silent, all eyes slowing turning to focus on Tina like twin pairs of spotlights. She was frozen solid, every nerve ending on edge as if she was standing on a cliff about to jump, before a white face and red lips split apart in a painful grin came into view. Lonnie and Sienna reached forward, but their hands slipped through thin air.

Tina had shot out of her seat like a bullet ripping from the barrel of a gun, lunging for the nearest security guard and wrestling him for his keycard. The cafeteria immediately broke out into roars of encouragement, egging Tina on as she slammed her knee between the guard's legs. He crumpled, giving her the perfect window of opportunity to snatch the keycard from his pockets and sprint for the gate.

"You'd think they would have learned to not move the Joker through the asylum during breakfast hours by now." Sienna sighed into her oatmeal.

There was more shouting, and a crazed laugh echoing through the halls, before three other guards all piled on top of Tina. They grabbed a hold of whatever limb they could and forced her to her knees, yelling for another guard to bring a sedative. She let out an angered scream, her eyes never once leaving the Joker. "I'll kill you, you fucking hear me? I'LL KILL YOU."

"Business as usual, I suppose." Lonnie muttered around a mouthful of toast as he watched Tina struggle and writhe in the guards' grip.

Sienna leaned over to a mildly perturbed Bennett and clapped her on the shoulder. "Welcome to Arkham Asylum, hell on earth."

FOOTNOTES / i don't think i've churned out a chapter this quickly in a very long time. the power that tina holds over me is incredible.

anyway,  i just wanted to make a quick note that tina's experience with meds/the  asylum is a product of her relationship with arkham and her own  experiences/upbringing, and furthermore is based in fiction. i fully  support medication and treatment (though i do think there are systemic  issues with a lot of psychiatric wards—some of these, as well as canon,  shape how i depict arkham asylum). if you are on any medication and you  do experience significant lethargy like tina, or other adverse effects  that prevent you from a high quality of life, please discuss with your  health practitioner before discontinuing your medication. do not take tina's advice or actions as an example to follow.