03 / NONE OF WOMAN BORN.

TINA TASTED BLOOD.

Her own, for once, but something bitter and bloodthirsty ached in her teeth as if begging her to bite. She had dug her teeth into the pink flesh of her bottom lip to satiate the urge, but it did nothing to combat the cruel emptiness in the pit of her stomach. A flicker of rage sparked to life in her veins, burning white hot as it was carried from her heart all the way down to her fingertips. Each time the clock on the wall ticked, it was like metal striking against flint.

Tina held her breath and tilted her head up, up, up, until her neck started to ache. She let out her breath carefully, imagining that she was expunging the static ringing in her ears with the carbon dioxide. This just happened, sometimes—hours, days, even weeks where Tina felt more knife than woman, where her edges were sharp and jagged and hungry. Without the last of the sedatives dulling her mind, she had nothing left to work with but rage. In this state, the tiniest of things could set her off.

Like the ticking clock in the group therapy room.

Like the repeated click–click–click of a pen.

Like the flickering, muted screen of the television.

Like the latest news segment: a standoff between the Red Hood and the Joker, Sionis and his men being held hostage by the latter, on the Gotham Bay Bridge.

"Six hours and forty–three minutes." Lonnie mused, rocking his chair back onto its hind legs and balancing precariously. He had abandoned his notepad on the ground beneath his chair, and was instead clicking the pen again and again and again. If Tina had not been sitting opposite him, she would have pushed his balance off and watched as his head hit the ground, cracking and spilling out blood and brain matter across the tiles. "That's pretty close to seven hours. Do you think we win the bet?"

He clicked the pen again. Tina bit down harder on her lip, until the skin split and dripped blood over her paper.

"Nah." Bennett replied, drawing a graphic cartoon of her slamming a baseball bat into a woman's head. Chicken scratch letters labelled the crushed–in head as MOM. "I know for a fact you lost the bet."

Lonnie clicked his pen once more for good measure, before throwing it at her head. "And how the hell would you know that?"

Bennett caught the pen and lobbed it back at him, sticking out her tongue as it hit him in the cheek. "Because I bet it would take six hours and forty–five minutes for Sionis to regret breaking Joker out of Arkham."

The clock on the wall ticked, loud and piercing like a gunshot, cutting through the static between Tina's ears.

It all clicked into laser focus: Red Hood—a newcomer, worthless, a wannabe wanting to be one of them—had spent the past couple of weeks ripping Sionis' empire out from under him, and Sionis had broken the Joker out of Arkham as if taking a dog for a walk, hoping that Joker would take care of the infestation for him.

Because that was never going to backfire.

"Serves him fucking right." Tina spat out, averting her eyes from the television screen for the first time since the news had started to glare down at her feet. She pressed her pen hard enough into the paper that it tore and ripped under the nib with each line she drew. "Next time I see Sionis, I'm gonna shoot out his kneecaps."

Doctor Finch—she had forgotten he was there, as usual—clicked his tongue in disapproval. No one paid him any attention.

(Doctor "Please, call me Henry" Finch was not a bad person. He was, in truth, the nicest person in Gotham, and that was his downfall. There was not a mean bone in the man's body, not even a particularly firm chunk of muscle. He believed in understanding and gentle words and encouragement. He frowned upon doctors being strict with their patients, even when the patients had shown higher levels of responsiveness to stricter tactics. He preferred to let his patients control the conversation; something about their autonomy, or making them feel comfortable, or whatever.)

(In a private one–on–one setting, this might have worked. In a group setting, with four teenagers who egged each other on in the best and worst of times, it made him utterly worthless.)

"I'll hold him down." Sienna reached over and poked the leg of Tina's plastic chair with her foot—not hard enough to knock off her balance, but hard enough to give her a jolt. "And then Hood too, if you want. For trying to take the Joker from you, and then for failing to get the job done."

That blistering lightning rage burned through her veins once more. With knife–sharp calm, and the rest of her frozen in place as if she had just stared into Medusa's eyes, Tina unclenched her jaw. "Good." She said, quiet and foreboding, the roll of thunder on the horizon to mark an approaching storm. "He doesn't deserve to kill him."

"Besides," Lonnie cut through with a sweeping wave of his pen, as if conducting some invisible orchestra. His arm extended across the circle, just in front of Tina's face, and she snatched the pen from between his fingers so she could smack his hand with it. "Hood can try as hard as he likes, but he won't be able to kill him. None of woman born shall harm the Joker."

Sienna kicked Lonnie in the shin, her eyes darting towards Tina's white–knuckled grip on the stolen pen, before an argument broke out. Sienna and Lonnie started to shout at each other, and then Bennett joined in for the hell of it, and then Doctor Finch was waving his hands and encouraging them to talk it out without the raised voices. It all faded to volcanic static in Tina's head. On a whim she looked down at her lap, at her notepad, at what she had been sketching absentmindedly the whole time.

And on the paper, she saw it: a dagger, its handle pointed to her, begging her to take it.

WHEN YULIA BOROVSKAYA—not Novikova, she had refused to take the name of a family that wanted her money and blood more than it had ever wanted her—discovered she was to have a girl, she knew then and there that she was cursed.

The Novikov family was old, ancient; it had placed its hands on the shoulders of kings and emperors, and warmed those same hands on the flames of fallen civilisations as they burned. In such an old family, a firstborn daughter was unlucky, unwanted. If she had been born second, it would've been fine. But a firstborn daughter was a cancerous tumour meant to be cut out, thrown off of the top of mountains, disposed of and never remembered again.

Yulia had kept the curse from her husband, from her in–laws, from everyone but the doctor who had told her—and even his silence had been bought with honeyed words and a diamond necklace 'accidentally' left behind that he could give to his wife—until her husband found the ultrasound image hidden in the pocket of her fourth–finest winter coat.

Anton, who had married not for riches or love but rather for the wolf–hungry look in Yulia's eyes that perfectly mirrored his own, had held her hands as he promised that the two of them would make a firstborn girl into something other than a curse. She could still be shaped into a weapon, into something of worth: an arranged marriage, a famous career, an empire of wealth and power with a man at its head and her whispering into his ear. They would raise this girl, and they would raise her right.

(Pyotr and Kamila never knew that their first and only grandchild would be a girl. Four months before Yulia was due to give birth, they vanished without so much of a shadow or a rumour left behind. One month after Khristina Antonovna Novikova was born, as the brutal Gotham winter relented to spring, their bodies were found at the bottom of the Novikov Manor lake.)

(The police, pocketing the flash of green that slipped out from the sleeves of Yulia's fourth–finest winter coat, said that the ice must have broken as they were walking across the lake.)

And yet, even after Yulia and Anton decided to keep their girl and ignore the curse, she still had to be cut out.

A complication with pregnancy—Yulia's brittle bones, her diets, the protests of her body and mind from nine months without a cigarette—had landed Yulia in hospital three weeks before her child was to be born. The baby was distressed, the doctors told her, dumbing down their words for a woman who spoke better English than they expected and would have liked, and she can't breathe.

The operation took two grueling hours. The doctors were forced to cut and carve through Yulia to save the baby. A curse, after all, one that came into this world barely breathing, bloodied and screaming.

Yulia had never truly forgiven her daughter for the jagged scars cutting across her once perfect stomach, for forever blunting her weapon of choice: the beauty she presented others with, skin and lips and teeth to distract from the knife behind her back. She toed with her ballerina en pointe across the fence between loving her daughter and hating her, living through fantasies of her daughter being the woman she had always wanted to be and fantasies of her daughter kicking and flailing as she held her head under the water in the master bedroom ensuite bathroom.

(Tina, too, toed the line between loving her mother and hating her. Sometimes in her worst moments, Tina remembered a man from a charity skate event she had done, one of the last times she had been on the ice before Bruce took in a circus boy who was too rough around the edges, a boy her parents whispered about behind closed doors, coming to the conclusion that skating was too close to circus arts and had suddenly become unfit for a girl of her status. The man had watched her, and her alone, through the performance, and had tried to pull her aside for a private talk before her father had whisked her away. In the middle of the mayor's speech, the man had a heart attack, and everyone had been too busy swarming the body like vultures to notice how Yulia's hand slipped from Tina's shoulder to the small of her back in a comfort.)

(And yes, Yulia had done worse for less; and yes, Yulia had forced her to turn and jump and practice practice practice until Tina had collapsed on the same lake her grandparents died in, but—her mother had protected her, and wasn't that what mothers were supposed to do?)

(Tina's parents would take her from the ice soon after this, but they had also taken people from this world for her, and she was grateful, Mother, promise—)

The click of a pen breaks through the static.

Tina looked down, expecting to see her notepad and whatever she had scribbled while her mind was in the static.

It was not ink but red that greeted her, a red too vivid and striking for something out of a pen. Blood, bright and brutal and spraying across a paper–white face, and garish lips the same shade split and peeling from a beating earlier that night. Teeth, stained with red, gnashing and aiming for her wrists. The Joker, trapped beneath her; barely breathing, bloodied, and screaming.

None of woman born could kill the Joker.

But Tina had been cut from her mother's womb like a tumour. Like a curse.

As the blood filled his lungs, and the Joker gasped his final breaths—forcing his screams into a cackle, one final attempt to have the last laugh—she pushed the pen hard enough into his neck that it hit bone.

Hands gripped her arms and legs like vices, pulling her off of the Joker—off of the body—and pinning her against the wall. Doctors and guards swarmed her and the body alike. The corridor was soon overwhelmed by noises: the sirens, yells, gasps, screams. Cheers. Blood pooled across the tiles, soaking her white socks red.

Tina stared down at the body—no, at the mess.

And then, she started to laugh.

FOOTNOTES / the number three has a lot of significance in the (actual) tragedy of macbeth: the three witches, macbeth's three titles (thane of glamis, thane of cawdor, and king), three apparitions, three shouts of "macbeth!", three murderers and three on–stage murders. it was only fitting, then, to have tina kill the joker in the third chapter. in the first version of this fic (i will always be holding space for fortune favours), tina killed the joker in the prologue, but this time around i wanted to establish more about arkham—and, of course, with the new macbeth theme tina gets to enjoy the rule of three.

anyway, this chapter is a good deal shorter than usual, but it's also one of the most important and one of my favourites. hopefully the next one will be longer—and it might even feature a certain someone 🤭—and the wait for it shorter, but i make no promises.