Note: This is who I picture in my head when I write Sana Khairi: (h t t p : / / i55 . tinypic . com / o6jy48 . jpg) - remove all the spaces. The actress is Archie Panjabi. She can currently be seen as Kalinda Sharma on The Good Wife. A very awesome show that everyone should watch. :)

sensitive bore, markedly more: chapter three
batman begins/dark knight, batman, sana, 2,475

Rumors of security breaches at Arkham had been taken more seriously since the Joker had become a resident. Guards were required more intensive training. Background checks and application requirements became more stringent. Bruce Wayne, himself, had donated a significant amount of money and resources to improve security following the murders of his friends.

Despite these measures, neither Batman nor Commissioner James Gordon could ever allow their minds to remain at ease. The first time they had held the Joker in their grasps, he had escaped custody mere hours later. The man - the monster - could not be contained, could not be caged. Gordon had the distinct impression that the Joker had only remained in Arkham as long as he had because he wanted to be there.

If that were true, both men could only imagine one reason behind it. "He's planning." The look on Gordon's face had spoken shades of fear and revulsion when he had said that. Batman had silently agreed. They made their own various plans and contingencies to prevent the Joker from escaping. Batman had a few ideas for the Joker as well which Batman had decidedly kept from Gordon in case the Commissioner happened to share his trust once again with more unworthy colleagues.

In the end it had all been for naught. The southern corner of Arkham now laid in rubble and Batman suffered what he suspected were two fractured ribs. Including the escaped patients and the injuries and violence they would soon inflict, there must have been people left in that part of the hospital before the explosion had gone off. The only thing that had kept him from spiraling into a deep melancholy while he attempted to get a track of the Joker's location was to list the many ways Batman could inflict pain on the Joker short of killing him. Bruce didn't like the idea at first but hated the Joker enough not to disagree with any of it.

However, once Batman discovered that the Joker's trail was leading him to Wayne Chemicals, Bruce began to agree with some of Batman's dark imaginings. The monster was in Bruce's domain. It was his company. His father's company. The clown was intending on sullying one of the few things in Bruce's life he had to lie about the least.

Batman had been so focused on taking out the Joker that he had been taken surprise when he found out Crane's involvement, but after the fact Batman could see the likelihood of the Joker seeking out Crane to work with him (for him?) as he'd done with other criminals before. The woman certainly hadn't been expected. He was certain she was the woman from a meeting Bruce had mostly slept through earlier that day. If there was a connection between her and the Joker and Scarecrow, he couldn't begin to see it. By the time the Joker and three of his thugs were on the ground he found that the woman finishing her own battle. Batman realized his injuries from earlier must have affected him more than he had realized if he hadn't been able to take the fourth one out earlier.

Batman finally turned to acknowledge her and was greeted by the pepper spray. "That's a thank you?" He rasped while staring down the short woman.

"Oh-ho-ho-ho! This is too good, Batsy. What did I tell ya? Give 'em enough time and they'll all see us as freaks to - " Batman slammed the Joker's head against the wall leaving him with a satisfying silence.

Sana jumped at the sudden, violent action and took in a sharp gasp of breath. This brutal man was whom Gotham had once set it hopes upon?

"I'm not going to hurt you." If he expected a response from her, he certainly didn't get it. What could she say to that? To be honest, she didn't even know what she was doing at the moment. "What are you doing here?"

"I work here!" Sana spat out in anger, forgetting the fact that her head was throbbing, she could taste blood on her tongue and she should be very scared at the moment rather than blathering hysterically. "I work here! And you all come in with guns! And make-up! And paper dolls! And capes!"

I should have tried harder with Mom and Dad. I could have been a better sister. Aziz deserved so much better from me. I should never have quit the cello, been more outgoing, made more friends, traveled, finished college. Should've-should've prayed more...

She quickly put a stop to her hysteria by biting the inside of her cheek and taking in two large gulps of air. Okay. Are we good? Yep. We're good.

Batman stared at her for a long moment while Sana struggled with her emotions. She was afraid, but worn and tired. It would be easy to distract her and remove the canister from her hand. So Batman began to ask her questions, which were somewhat repetitive and circulatory, about her presence here and what she had seen. She stammered and fumbled through her responses, but her answers remained consistent.

"I wasn't helping them, if that's what you're getting at!"

Sana's arm was beginning to slacken, but she didn't want to switch the spray to the other hand in front of him. Would he come at her? Attack her like he had some of the other men here? But he had tried to help her in the beginning, hadn't he? He had disarmed the man that had been holding her earlier and pushed her to the corner of the room.

"It's possible." He took a small step in her direction. "You were coerced," he suggested. "They made you come here."

"No! I heard them coming down the hallway and hid in that closet until they found me!" The anger had quickly receded when she thought of what he would do to her if he decided she had been aiding his enemies. "My purse!" She looked in the direction Crane had been before he had fled the room. To her relief he had thrown it on the ground. "He - the doctor - found my purse and figured out I was here."

Seeming to believe her, he nodded and turned away from her towards the direction of the computer. Sana felt silly rigidly holding up the weaponed arm towards a man on the other side of the room, so she lowered it for the time being but didn't release the canister.

Batman studied the screen as he worked something out on the keyboard. Sana took this free moment to make her escape from this nightmarish room. She wasn't aligned with the men in this room or with the Gotham police. In other words, she was not one of the main players in the game of dominance over Gotham. No, what would Batman care if she skipped out the room right now.

Sana began shuffling to her right to collect her purse before leaving. Batman did not need to know her name or where she lived, and it was a small blessing that neither Dr. Crane nor the Joker had looked through her belongings before Batman had arrived.

"Wait," he said to her sharply and she froze. "They - " he paused, then began again, "I assume you have the passphrase."

"What are you looking for?"

"I need to know what they came here for."

"Oh, well..."

"Yes?"

"Well, we're not supposed to share it with non-employees." Sana cringed the second she had finished her sentence. It was an automatic and very stupid response, but, later, when she would go over the events of evening in her mind she could have sworn that Batman's lips had turned upwards for a fraction of a second.

"Then you enter it." He motioned towards the computer.

Help a cop-killer with his vendetta against a mass murderer and a mad scientist? Sure, why not.

Sana nodded. "Only... if you... stand over there." She pointed to what seemed to her a safe distance away from the desk. To her surprise, he agreed. As they circled around the mahogany desk, she made sure he was directly across from her during the move. However, it left her closer to the Joker and one of his thugs than she would have liked.

"Do you have an idea what it might have been?" She asked once she was seated. With some reluctance she let go of the canister and set it next to the keyboard. He could probably kill her with his pinky toe if he so willed, with or without the spray, but better to keep it close by than be without it.

"I'm familiar with the system." It occurred to her that it wouldn't hurt to play nice either in case he found her expendable. That would be the smart thing to do, right? "I might be able to find it faster than you." She peered up to his stony expression, waiting for a word.

"They managed to order something through Wayne Chemicals."

That helps some... Chemicals has been breached. Wendy and the IT department need to know. The supply department too... Sana switched over to the intake/outtake database while suppressing the urge to shudder at the low timbre of his voice. She had to get him to sympathize with her. Isn't that what people did on television when they found themselves in situations such as these?

Oh, she was dead. Dead, dead, dead...

"You know, this is my second time seeing you today," Sana began conversationally.

From the way he moved she had learned that his suit restricted him from turning his head. In lieu of that option, he turned his whole self sharply away from looking over the clown gang on the floor and towards her causing her to shrink back deeper into the chair.

"I - I wasn't - I saw you at Wayne Enterprises." The man did not move an inch, but something about his gaze darkened. "On top of it actually." Sana's speech began to pick up rapidly in speed. "But then you flew off of it - I mean, glided or whatever it is you do. I mean no one can fly! You jumped off of Wayne Enterprises onto another building nearby."

Without taking a breath, she decided to stop that line of conversation and go back to their first topic of the evening. "And is there anything else you can tell me? We receive thousands of items in our shipments each month."

After a moment of hesitation - likely thinking about what a pathetic hostage he'd stumbled upon, Sana surmised - Batman handed her a small piece of paper across the desk. Where he had pulled it out from she couldn't tell. Even in the light he looked like a column of dark mass. She took it from his hand careful to only touch the paper.

"It may have been one or more of these."

Sana nodded refusing to look anywhere near his eyes. She looked down a long list of words that looked like a long jumble of letters. But very science-y and chemical-y looking. She worked at a Biotech company, but had little expertise in the area itself. She compared the chemicals and instruments received at the company with the ones he had listed.

"We've received shipments of most of these..." Her eyes fell over a name on the computer that gave her pause.

"Get up."

"Wait a minute..." Sana trailed off. She was now truly engaged just as much for her curiosity as his. The silence went on for a minute or two. When he attempted to question her, she cut him off with an annoyed, "Hold on."

A few minutes passed in relative silence, broken briefly by one of the gang members gaining consciousness. Sana jumped out of her chair, but the situation was quickly taken care of by Batman knocking him back out. Sana cringed at the fierce move and sat back down.

"Needs to learn about pressure points like Xena," she muttered inanely.

"What?"

Sana muttered curses to herself now with a heightened anxiety.

"What?" he repeated. And was it her imagination or had his voice turned into more of a growl?

"Fourteen."

Her thoughtless reaction surprised her. She glanced up to see if he was annoyed (and/or wished to throw her out a window), but he remained as unreadable as ever. The man gave her a blank stare that she found unable to break for a long stretch of a minute until she quietly ventured, "I, uh, I found something."

Batman was by her side before she realized it. He grabbed the spray and kept it out of her reach. Sana froze.

How long will it take before anyone knows I'm missing?

"What is it?" His voice was uncomfortably close to her ear.

Had she not been terrified as she was - had it been someone other than him - she would have reacted visibly, but the uncertainty of the situation kept her from responding immediately in any way until something kicked in her brain.

"This man," Sana said as she raised a shaking hand to the screen. He was too close. Everyone in this room was far too close to her. "Michael Pearson, he's listed as ordering seven of the items you have on your list. It says he put in the order two weeks ago, but that's not possible... I went to his funeral last month." Sana dared to meet his eyes. "To do this someone would have had to physically come in to Wayne Chemicals and enter Mr. Pearson's name and password."

"This couldn't have been done from a remote location?" Again, Sana's stomach made nervous flips in her belly as he leaned in closer to look at the screen.

"No, well, maybe. I don't, um, I don't know. I don't know much about the programming," Sana admitted, "but I know the database used by Wayne Chemicals was designed to be a closed-off system."

Batman responded with nod and said, "You should leave." He returned the canister to the desk and moved away from her. Sana felt a large amount of the tension leaving her immediately, but she was left with an inexplicable unease.

That's it?

She watched him pull out a string of rope from some mysterious place on his person and proceed to tying up the gang members until he noticed that she had not moved from the desk. "Is there something else?"

"No, I - "

A sharp, piercing pain stopped her world.

Sana choked on a breath. Her body couldn't decide whether to inhale or exhale. A cry lay tangled in her throat.

What is this?

A monster rose to her side, his laughter tearing apart her world. She moved her eyes towards the source of the pain and sobbed at the sight. There it was. A knife pinning her hand to the mahogany desk.