PART I.
Arkham asylum is a long term facility. Five stories, two wards - curable and incurable. A small solarium on the ground level that burnishes painted nettle and pelargonium, all fenced in by black iron bars. A large kitchen and lunchroom where the patients eat in shifts of 50 - the kettle goulash is best served with twenty armed guards, all pointing their mossberg 590 pump-action, open choke riot shotguns at the crazies while they eat. There are two sets of locker-room style showerstalls and bullet proof glass for the staff to stand behind when they turn on the hoses and spray down the patients. The curable's are allowed four one-hour days a week in the gym with tranquilizer-armed doctors and light equipment; the incurable are allowed one one-hour day a week in the gym with a small brigade of armed officers and a cardiovascular workout tape to follow along with (no equipment, there was an unpleasant jump-rope accident involving a doctor several years back..) Morning starts at nine-AM; lights-out is at nine-PM. Bedchecks at one, three, and five. Medication is administered as needed every two or four hours by one nurse and three guards (who usually employ their clubs and fists at these times). Each patient, curable or not, is assigned a behavioral psychiatrist who speaks to them one hour every day in a special holding block - there is one table, two chairs (one of which is equipped with ankle and wrist braces to restrain the patient) and a two-way mirror where a secondary doctor and several guards watch & take notes.
The Joker has sat in this room for one hour every day 432 times (so far), and the leering staff promise him an eternity more. They have changed his attending psychiatrist five times due to malfuntions in the restraint-straps of his chair and resulting pencil, hairclip, and nametag accidents that have sent the prior case workers to hospitals of their own. Before their timely (and bloody) exits they brought with them diagnosis of: narcissistic depression characterized by limbic-cortical dysregulation, borderline personality disorder (usually the result of childhood trauma), and schizophrenia in a colorful array of variations. Joker laughs at all of the new ideas they give him - there are so many ways to explain why he is the way he is, and frankly he likes them all - if he's got to have a past, afterall, multiple choice is the only way to go. FMRI, PET, neurocognitive tests, neuroimaging, transcranial stimulation, cognitive behavioral therapy - and they've promised him electroconvulsive therapy, if he's good.
One, two, three guards enter the waiting block where joker is strapped in and one, two, three trigger-happy fingers. They call him a high risk factor since the last worker swallowed his own name tag. He smiles to the three sets of eyes boaring into him, waves with his fingertips - it's all he can move with these new straps they've installed (but where there is a will there is a way)..
She breezes past the three of them and seats herself across from Joker without introduction. Blonde hair, slim, pretty little face: positively boring, boring, boring to be her (tag reads Dr. Quinzel). Boredom is easy to recognize. Boredom, the Joker thinks, is even better motivation than moral dictum and it really has the power to inspire.. creativity. Where there was boredom, there was potential. He licks his lips as she turns and regards the officers with irritation written across her face in what must be a silent continuation of a prior argument.
Oh, he gets it. She doesn't need protecting. Only she does. Only she does. When Joker sees a pretty lady he can't decide if he wants to kiss her or kill her - no reason why he can't do both (it depends on the day and his mood, really, and how much energy he wants to invest in a person he doesn't really care about). Kissing took more effort than the killing in most cases; girls were their feistiest when threatened with the likihood of having red grease-painted lips mashed against their own, nevermind joker tended to nibble and bite and lick when he got excited - sticking in the blades came much easier.
He comes out of it realizing the guards are gone and that the dear, dear doctor is looking at him.
"My predecessor's last written recommendation was to start you on 500MG of Ziprasidone - do you know what other medications you are currently taking?"
"Twenty questions, beautiful. You ask me, then I ask you."
The doctor rolls her eyes and returns to the pressed-chip clipboard, thumbing though the topmost pages, speaking as she does so: "that seems unfair - you have the advantage of getting honest answers from me."
"Truth is.... errr.." Joker smacks his lips and screws his eyes up as if he's trying to recall something important. "... relative."
"Truth is absolute - your memory seems relative."
Joker cackles at the idea of anything being absolute. The idea of true things - of constant things - lets loose from him snorting and gagging and wild, raucous laughter. Behind the two-way mirror he imagines the guards gripping their guns like holy mother mary and feels suffered, having never being thanked for all the spotanaity he gives the Arkham staff.
The doctor talks right through his laughing fit, flippantly listing the handful of anti-psychotics he is being fed daily by way of gun-butts to the head and shaky, unsteady nurse hands digging in the syringe needles.
"... frankly I don't know how you're even sitting up right now," Dr. Quinzel concludes of the Chlorpromazine, Promazine, and Paliperidone cocktail pumping through Joker's veins.
"No time to, er, sit things out doc. There is work to do!"
"You mean your chaos agenda?"
"Agenda implies planning, and I am really more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kinda guy! I like to think of it as, oh, the cities scheduled...awakening. Gotham has such potential, don't you think? It's citizens just need to, oh," he wiggles his fingertips expressively, "..be all they can be!" Joker strains against the chains holding his ankles and they lend an awkward rustle to the deranged opera playing in his head - an aria of burning building and mutation and peeled-away skin to see all the ooey, gooey goodness (badness) inside.
"Your chaos seems like an agenda. Honestly, with what you did out there noone is really surprised by what you've done in here, are they? Predictable anarchy, that's what I would call it."
"Doc, baby, love of my life. Ask me about my scars." His hair falls into his eyes from the small, energetic jerks he is exerting against the restraint cuffs & he can feel the skin on his wrists splitting - the key to freedom, he has found, is disregarding the initial pain that comes with gaining it.
She isn't looking at him anymore, instead her face is turned down and she scribbles here, flips a page, scribbles there, flips a page. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. Her right hand has a rather unimpressive rock and her hands themselves look all-together bony, like she doesn't enjoy enough good meals. Dr. Quinzel has the flat, bored look of a corpse going through the motions. Joker rattles his teeth together, but she still won't look up at him.
And then he gets his hand free - he wonders what the doctors behind the glass are doing that they don't see the significantly large puddle of blood forming under his chair, it makes him want to ... laugh .. but sh, shhhhhh... the good doctor is writing with her pretty face and boring ring and pointless, going no-where life.
There are so many good ways to do it. The pen is easiest, but he's done that one before. He wonders if he could beat someone to death with only one hand and a clipboard before the guards come in with their pain and punishment. There are the heels she's wearing, one good thumpy thump to the head, or the sheer silk pantyhose that reach up and up and up, oh, tied tighty-tight around her neck. Thinking about it all has him breathing heavy and as he makes his move he knows today, today is a kissin' day. The killing has to come to Joker in a flash; his victims deserve more than pre-meditated murder, don't they? He wants to see the life drain out of Dr. Quinzels eyes properly - there's a dance to do before the sweetest moment.
What he grabs with his right-side lunge (the best he can do still strapped in tighty tight) is her hair - and he hauls her over the table and right into his lap with it. He grabs onto her face and growls like a dog (dog will hunt) and mashes his lips against hers. They don't allow him his makeup in Arkham, so it's just the smooth scar surfaces and his wet, eager mouth and his bitey-bitey teeth.
But then, OH, then Dr. Quinzel surprises him (noone has surprised him since the bat.man) - Dr. Quinzel responds with her tongue in his mouth, oh oh oh, and her right hand with the rock fumbles with his neck - Joker knows when he is being choked and kissed (that will leave a love bruise or two or three!) and he barks into her mouth and moves his bloody hand out of her hair and goes for -
There are three - no, four guards who tackle the pair of them. 'Get him off her, get him the fuck off her!!!' one of them yells as he pulls the good doctor to safety. A gun settles down on Joker's larynx (a familiar feeling, like home sweet home) and two guards stand infront of Dr. Quinzel with their - oh, those are nice, M16 assult rifles with grendel cartridges - pointing straight at Joker's laughing hee-hee-hee and haw-haw-haw face.
An attendee, who doesn't dare come into the room, is trying help pull the good doctor out and into the hallway - before his lights go out, Joker sees he bit her lip with a little too much enthusiasm - but not to worry, most of that blood is his...
Before she dips out of sight she takes a staggering look at him and oh, now, that is an expression full of life and confusion and regret and loathing.
PART II.
In the reflection she watches her shaking fingers touch the torn (literally torn) bottom lip. Twenty-three non-absorbable sutures to be removed in three weeks; the gash itself is nasty looking, right through the bottom lip and a quarter-inch below.
"It could have been a hell of a lot worse," the head of the department says from behind her. In the mirror she sees him slide a hand down his mouth, looking haggardly to the supervising shift leader. "I told you sending a woman in was-"
"You're not taking this away from me." She is resolute. "I have worked too hard to have this taken away, slagging around with the incurable on basement level - I have paid my dues!" She is near tears as she thinks of the misfortune that is her entire life.
The shift leader, a sullen man with four decades of experience in psychiatric medicine under his belt, he chuckles. "I say if she wants the Joker, she can have him." His tone is venomous - he'd be all the happier for one more casualty if it meant getting her out of his wing. He knows it, she knows it.
"Someone had better get those fucking straps down right. I don't care if you have to barb-wire him in place I don't want that fucking freak breaching again. Or I swear to god, humane treatement under the A.S.P.I be damned, I will take his behaviorals away!" The head of the department has three children who receive birthday cards from the secretary on their father's behalf. He's got a wind-worn bald spot coming in on top and a few ordinary-looking mistresses on the side. He also has a sweet little wing of the hospital with it's own sweet little staff - from 1AM to 4AM the lights flicker regularly from power surges & the mortality rate of Arkham asylum is higher than you'd think, even for an institute comprised largely of the criminally insane. Lucklily the majority of deaths are those with no family or friends to miss the dearly departed (or inquire as to how a patient dies in their sleep by electrocution or severe head trauma).
If you asked the Joker (she imagines) he might say that sanity is as relative as truth. One man's trial and error is another's tickled torture. But Dr. Quinzel isn't listening to the two of them argue anymore, instead she turns back toward the mirror. It's in small changes, one thing out of place, that a person can find a fresh face.
.
.
When the Joker opens his eyes he hurts all over (nothing new). Arkham staff is nothing if not sadistically meticulous in doling out punishment (the reason Joker is sure this will make a fine second-home). He can't tell if it's day or night, if he's been sleeping for minutes or hours (hours if his split head tells him anything..). With the way his forehead is dried sticky-blood to the floor he takes a guess that the medical staff wasn't leaping and bounding to attentive care, as the good doctor no-doubt received. He doesn't really think of her, just the enjoyable sensations of fist-fight love. The Joker, he doesn't like to think of himself as a violent person - he can take as good as he gives (if anyone would just play his game). Volatility: that was what dames needed more than long legs and big empty eyes. But big empty eyes, that didn't hurt either.
.
.
Her home, well, their home - it's a two-bedroom, one and one-half bath penthouse sweet on Main&2nd. Paid for largely with her fiance's salary - he likes to tell her he will take care of the big bills and that she can contribute by buying groceries and paying the day-to-day errands as they run their course, you know, the small stuff. Dr. Quinzel (Harley) is usually sitting in bed, highlighting some obscure text in medical books when he comes in (always late). He shrugs his tie down, drops it on the ground, and kicks off his shoes. Asks her what she's reading and half-listens when she answers. Breakfast, lunch and dinner have never been an issue in their four-year courtship because neither of them have ever had a schedule that allowed them to eat together. On the off occasions they meet at a restaurant, Harley always finds herself made uncomfortable by how unfamiliar he looks chewing, or his tipping method (which she has noticed depends on the gender of their server and, if it's a woman, how goodlooking she is). She is also made uncomfortable when he says how glad he is that they are one of those couples that don't have to talk all of the time - call her crazy, but she has the feeling that it's his polite way of asking her to shut up.
Tonight is like the last night is like the night before is like the last few years. With Behavioriam: the power of behavioral change (by John B. Watson) in her lap, dozens of page corners turned down neatly as markers, he comes in without a real hello. Digs a finger into the knot of his black and sangria tie (sangria being two levels lighter than maroon and, for ties, a very important difference). Harley wonders, if she counted the seconds in her head, how far she would get before he notices her mouth. It's not an altogether unhappy pairing, but it does feel more like a convenience for two people who are lonely and don't want to bear the burden of it all alone.
Perhaps (and she has used this excuse to an almost ridiculous degree) she is foolish to expect more than she gets from him - which is a few words about his long day before he sits down on his side of the bed and, his back to her, sighs one time. He clicks out the bedside lamp.
"You weren't using that light, were you?" he asks. Harley quietly closes her book and looks into the darkness.
"No."
The worst part? That she knows he doesn't realize just how mean he is. That even if she brought it up all he'd say is that it's common for couples to settle into routine. That you know a real (meaningful) relationship when the adrenaline and excitement wear off and the couple can still tolerate one-another - to learn to coexist comfortably, now that's love.
Her lower lip aches - the vicodin was probably wearing off. Her fiance is already snoring.
.
.
Wednesday is soup day. If a holiday has the good fortune of falling on a wednesday the patients get a stew or a chowder, but otherwise it's vegetable beef (more broth than soup) and two slices of whole-wheat bread. Joker doesn't take schedule with either of the Arkham branches, he has his own doctor staff and his own guard staff and his own nurse staff - the numbers aren't always even, though. Some he kills off (and it's hard to fill the gaps that accumulate, even with bonus pay, because most people agree that money isn't much good if you're dead), and some quit due to nerves and horrifying nightmares. A number of Arkham's Joker-entourage have also cited, on their two week notices: regressive bedwetting, medically unexplainable impotance, severe depression, insomnia.
Sitting alone at one of twenty-seven tables in the 800 sq/ft cafeteria his face is already such a mess that it's hard to fully appreciate the damage Joker takes from the staff - a few abrasions don't look like reason to worry when set against his backdrop of home-surgery scars (or so the majority of stories go..). On this particular wednesday Joker eats his soup slowly - his jaw, a nurse noted at wakeup, had been dislocated in the prior day's shuffle. He doesn't feel one way or another about it, though. Justice was hardly just - if the staff didn't mistreat him he might lose faith in his lack of faith regarding humanity.
Twelve guards locked and loaded - there was always a large audience through the course of the day when Joker was shuffled from one room to another. He smacks his lips and watches them, and they watch him. He considers pretending to drown in his own soup for a little goddamn entertainment, when the double-door entrance swings open, both doors hitting the wall and reverberating an unpleasant sound that Joker lifts an index finger to and conducts like a concerto, broth drooling down his chin. The guards, he notes, mostly divert their attention and nudge and whisper amongst one another. Joker knows what makes men do that. Heels clacking down the cement floor, and is that a hint of.. gardenia? He looks over his shoulder and, hee-hee, ho-ho: the good doctor. Her mouth, oh, it looks devastating with those stitches - a definite improvement - surely he'd be remiss if he didn't paint in that blank and dreadful canvas a little more.
Quinzel, she stops at the shift supervisor and begins a quiet, heated argument. Joker hums into his vegetable beef - suspects the whisper-whisper has something to do with the administrator's morning visit to the Joker (wherein he had grasped Joker's dislocated jaw very tighty-tight and told him that therapy just didn't seem to be doing him much good and what was the point in continuing?) Joker hums louder, over the rising voices that argue for his entitlement to humane treatment: there's a song.. he just can't seem to remember the exact tune.. louder and louder, hum bum bum hum - louder until it's all he hears. It makes him think of his childhood, being argued about right where he can hear, being argued about like he isnt even there. The song in his head is just noise, now, louder and faster and louder and faster and before he knows what he's doing, hee-hee-heee and HAW-HAW-HAW.
.
.
When Joker opens his eyes he is in his evening best (double-weave duckcloth straitjacket with eight friction buckles) - two leather straps blanket him to a hospital bed. Dr. Quinzel is touching his face - his scars - but the moment his eyes open she jumps back and her hands clutch awkwardly together. It makes him laugh a little, but then, most things do.
She tries to clear her throat - to remain the concerned psychiatrist - "have you always had these kind of manic outbursts?" but there is a clear, warm-knife-through-butter horror on her face. Joker looks up at the ceiling and thinks (there are vague flashes of humming, of his plastic fork, of jumping up and the administrator's face contorting .. but then came the sedative darts and an almost shrapnel-worthy walther-pneumatic pelting).
"Did I get him?"
Dr. Quinzel, the good doctor, she just looks at Joker so that he turns his head and looks back at her. With or without realizing it, her hand goes to her sutures and there is definitely something intimate about being maimed in an orderly fashion - attacked one day and the next you're looking back, into the same eyes, calmly. The promise of integrating chaos into an every-day schedule. Her heart beats faster. A 50/50 on life or death.
Maybe it's better to die living than live every day dead. Maybe she is just sick of worrying about taxes, drycleaning and manicure appointments. Maybe, in studying psychology the whole of her life (in the words of someone late and great:) the abyss is finally staring back into her and she's realizing she likes it. Maybe the Joker's face just gets her off.
Whatever.
Harley goes to the Joker and she leans over. He smells like sweat and dirt & he chatters his teeth & all the straps and jackets and restraints and guns in the world could never make her feel safe around him.
Maybe that's the maybe that hits the nail on the head.
"You know, the secret to getting out of a straight jacket is to dislocate a shoulder," Joker breathes against her cheek. Then he licks her chin and still-fresh wound and top lip. When they kiss it hurts her and when they need to breathe neither pulls back, they just pant into one another's black-hole mouths and it's slippery saliva and not completely nice. They are both angry and disappointed by life, and they both just need something to justify the terrible way they feel by doing terrible, terrible things.
PART IIII.
Clown prince of crime and the ace of knaves, harlequin of hate and mogul of montebanks. His titles are as ambiguous and varying as his past(s), but what the Joker is, more than a killer or a psychotic or a bad (bad) villain in a good story - he is a wild card - an unreliable narrator. He thinks, the good doc sitting across from him with her pen and paper and big doe eyes, that whatever seperates truth and fiction isn't actuality, it is the recollection of that actuality. The Joker, well, he reckons himself a complex character and having one past, one reason, one goal - it's boring (how does anyone stand it??)
She twirls the pen between her bony little fingers and continues reading off about this thing called operant conditioning - she says, breathlessly, that Joker hasn't been rewarded for the good he's done - she wants to introduce positive reinforcement and positive punishment into his daily cycles at Arkham. Joker admits to her, with some great heaving sadness from his lungs (as though exhaling those old, painful ghosts) that indeed, indeed! His father had never acknowledged his accomplishments and that being good never really seemed to pay off for him. Those big, bad things he's done, Harley Quinn tells him (aggressive assault with a plastic eating utensil the most recent), they are just fixed action patterns: easy enough to condition right out, like training a dog not to bite.
Grasping her hand, he tells her he wants to change. He wants, dramatic facial contortion, to be well - to be normal (if ever there was a more macabre word in the english language!) Harley Looks toward the mirrored observation deck with a shining, brilliant smile on her face for those watching doctors - that with positive reinforcement and a promise of help here he was, grasping her hand in a non-violent affirmation of commitment to a program.
Joker admires her self-admiration - thinks it suits her: that self-involved pat on her own back for all the good she is doing. What he looks forward to the most (the very, very most), stroking the top of her hand gently, gently - is breaking her completely. The hairline is there, the fracture - waiting to be picked at, chipped like brittle porcelain, to crumble piece by piece. It's really something beautiful, to lose everything and (just ask him) become something so much more for it. He is sure that in some vague version of himself, once, he had been happy, but can't imagine what kind of droll fellow he would be if he had remained happy. Happiness isn't hip (jive), and it isn't cathardic: it is a stalemate.
This is the Joker: evolutionally quite sound in his own madness and determined to fufill the public service of helping everyone around him evolve along, too. Harley plays her part trustingly because without trust society would break down into chaos and anarchy and he appreciates that. Sometimes that is the most savage attack (although the aformentioned aggressive assault with a plastic eating utensil ranks high, high up on the list).
Joker is in control, Joker is the doctor and the doctor is in. When he is through with her she will know (not think, but know) that all people are rotten, no matter how many times you chant say it aint' so.
Everyone will disappoint you.
All of your dreams will burn.
Be the master of your destiny, he thinks, feeling her fingers play in his - drinking in her praising expression. Destroy yourself, or else have someone do it for you (the latter is taking the hard way, and why walk when you can take the bus?) Harley though, for now, she can use the excercize. Can't you see the humor in it?
He hopes she remembers to thank him when this is all over - most people don't.
.
.
There is a part of him that she sees, that she imagines she sees like noone else has seen (could see). Joker gives himself to her sincerely, disclosing his most personal of secrets that doctors before her marked as margin scribble in medium-weight black inkpen: trust nothing he says. But those people didn't really try, she decides with resolution - they didn't try, so they didn't deserve the rewards.
And helping Joker, it was a reward. In her seven years of practicing psychiatry, Harley has spent six of them in Arkham asylum and five years, 356 days of those as a secondary, on-call psychiatrist to the incurable, who drooled when they laughed and ate their socks (occasionally asking for mustard to enhance the hosierie's natural flavors) - there was nothing stimulating about a person beyond all help. But with Joker. With Joker.. who wasn't beyond help.. couldn't be (and noone would ever make her admit otherwise), well, the stimulation was endless.
She smiles and blushes, looks down shyly even though it's just her there, sitting on her Sculley & Sculley grande creme silk upholstered couch. His case file is scattered over the coffee table (picking out a coffee table had taken her fiance three months, and when Harley saw the eleven-hundred dollar receipt her first reaction had been to laugh because neither of them drank coffee. He had not seen the humor in it). Black and white mug shots stare back at her, always smiling, always getting the humor - it was poignantly romantic, she thought, and resolved herself to smile with him.
Harley has had crushes before, sure. What girl hasn't? She doesn't pay much attention to any of the testimonials, or the novel-worthy collection of papers accessing Joker's state of mind - those people were hardly her intellectual peers: street-beat cops (everyone knows Gotham is rife with dirty cops) and two-bit psycho-analysts (everyone knows Arkham is another way to say 'barely any credentials required').
Between topsheets spelled out in bolded typewriter (arial font) and gruesome crimescene snapshots (cadavers with mouths that hang in rigamortis razor-sliced smiles), Harley catches glimpses of her own relection in the table's glass surface, her haggard lower-lip shadowed. She thinks it differentiates her.
In her entire life Harley has never stood out.
Someone had once told her (or maybe it was a line from a movie, she can't remember) that if you can ever really love a person it's because they reflect you. Incurvatus in se ipsum: love that is bent towards self."
.
.
There isn't alot he can do, strapped into a straightjacket and buckled down to the bed and this dame pressing down on him and invading his space. He's trying to figure it out, why she's doing it, all while swallowing her mouth and the little sounds she's making. Noone gets this close, not on purpose. She's just so sloppy: out of breath and missing his mouth, trailing her wet, slimy little tongue over his scars without even wanting to know how he got them.
And her hands, her hands!! Touching all over and getting caught in his hair and if he has the unfortunate nerve to try & catch his breath or just pull back (good golly sakes), her fingers creep up to his mouth and literally pull at his lips and the doctor, she nibbles like he nibbles and then she isn't on his mouth at all anymore (leaving Joker kissing the air for half a second), but skirting his jawline and his neck and then his earlobe with such raspy little noises.
It's enough to drive a man mad (or more mad).
When she pulls back she's pink and flushed and for all his humor and spontinaeity, Joker just stares at her (maybe even a little confused). Then she wipes her mouth off on his cheek and the rest on the back of her hand. All of his parts, god help him, they work - they work, and as if in silent acknowledgement both their eyes travel down, down.
"Why stop now," Joker manages.
Then, then Dr. Quinzel slaps him across the face, hard enough that he tastes blood and it mingles with what he still tastes of her and he likes it. He lets her know with a bark and a yip and something darker, back behind his eyes as he glares up at her.
"The guards say you've been on your best behavior, your best-" (Joker tongues his bleeding lip with a wondrous expression as she speaks) "-which is why I can't understand your little outburst during second-check."
Oh, right. That was why he was buttoned and belted. For a moment he'd forgotten he was in Arkham - this kind of thing, between he and his doc during sessions (as of late) on the outside, out there in Gotham, this could pass for a healthy relationship. In his city, with his people. He knew a fellow or two who would pay good money for this kind of thing, and more. Joker, though, even he could see that having a girl stomp him with a stilletto and handing her cash, well, there was something screwed with that).
Which is why he'd tried it a few times, and then a few more.
Which is why he decides, right then and there, that he likes Harley Quinzel.
Screwed things are his forte and she is really missing, ah, a few nuts and bolts where keeping it all together is concerned. Increasingly, even.
"So, to punish or reward me, doc?"
"I thought I was doing both."
"My sentiments exactly."
She breaks a look at the steel doors - she always has a forlorn, puppy-dog expression when their hour is up. Which is why he keeps telling her she ought to find a way for them to be together, really. He'd come out and say it, "bust me out of here, beautiful!", but he wouldn't want her to feel like she's being used (of course, vanity aside, everyone uses everyone else).
Everything is going just fine: she gets to think she is helping him and at the same time he gets to surprise her with disappointment - just enough that she is learning to accept it. It's that look of complete devastation, after two straight weeks of no violent outbursts, when an orderly is getting rushed by her on a gurney with his neck bleeding out, that really revvs Joker's proverbial engine. Why, if he wasn't strapped down...
"I've been thinking about what you said, about us... about our predicament. Being in two different worlds like we are - that really does need to change."
When she looks back at him there is something darker behind her eyes, this time.
PART IV.
As manic personality shifts go, Harley has seen a fair amount of them nearing her two month mark on Joker's case. As a result of this growing, intimate knowledge she has received three broken fingers over french-fry condiments (the consequence of, ultimately, suggesting Joker try a spicy mustard packet off her cafeteria tray in favor of his usual ketchup), one fractured lung by broken rib (really only a side-offense to Harley due to her being in the wrong place at the wrong time), much lost hair (Joker yanks her around by it for all sorts of reasons both good and bad), the entire spectrum of possible trachea damages: from irritated epithelial covering all the way up to a splintered hyoid bone (the most damaging being due to an argument in-session over the correct pronunciation of mischievous).
She has seen him play good cop / bad cop all by himself to two-way mirrors (he loves to entertain the Arkham staff). She has seen him try to kill a man. She has seen him succeed in killing men, plural. Harley has seen Joker punch himself, she has seen him cry for no good reason, she has seen him act out Shakespearean plays under four foot long, 40-watt fluorescent tube bulbs that silhouette all of his scars. Joker has played Bach concertos with his chewed, scabbed fingertips (when he runs out of nail he settles for skin) on the stainless steel table top. He has psychoanalyzed Harley herself in regard to a faultered relationship with her own father and the way she thus relates to all men (and adopted what she penned to her key-lock journal at home as a 'very adorable german accent' to do so). He has listed to Harley, in no particular order, his favorite authors and his favorite serial killers and his favorite chefs (all mixed together in a Bundy-Milton-Puck stew).
Some days he is listless, some days he is inspired, some days he is completely insane (although most days he is atleast a little insane). If at any time you give him what he wants, be it a book or art supplies or even makeup (she has gotten that string pulled just once) he decides on what he wants next before he enjoys what he's got. And just when she is ready for anything he will do nothing at all.
It had only been in the last few weeks that her fiance at home had finally started noticing the indecently habitual injuries (his awareness prompted by eyepatches that caused her to clumsily knock over expensive lamps or injured wrists that kept her from tidying up after him), and he had adamantly expressed that he was going to have a talk with whoever was letting her work on this case which she was so obviously unfit for. This sprang forth from Dr. Harley Quinzel her first act of violence or rage outside of the Joker (whom she had thus given a fair-amount of fighting back to). She grabs her fiance by his celadon and olive tie (wincing when she does from injured knuckles, courtesy of Joker's jaw), and she tells him if he ever sets foot into her hospital... if he ever interferes with her work..if he ever tries to take her away from Joker..
At which point she doesn't have to continue in her stammering because while she has punched, clocked, clawed, bitten, kicked, kneed and twice stabbed Joker, she has never threatened her fiance. Of course, she doesn't even notice the little things she does when she talks, those small nuances she has picked up from her pet project in Arkham. The (quite frankly) frightening little smile she keeps on her face and the warning little hand gestures and the shift-eyed glances to make sure there is something around with which to smash in his face if she's got to. Face smashing seems like a rather drastic measure to be forced to, inititally, until you consider where she works and who she cares for and then it's just a survival method - one she has used a few times and you might be surprised to know Joker has three false teeth. Losing them had not stopped him at those times, but if you manage to hurt him enough you can usually curb the maniac mode into, instead, fits of laughter. Joker thinks it's hilarious to get seriously injured, especially by a little girl.
Back to the story.
Harley's fiance breaks her hold on his tie (he looks distraught, but she couldn't tell you if it's over her behavior or the now-mussed and wrinkled silk). He backs away from her calmly.
Now he sleeps in the guest bedroom with, atleast on the night she tested it, the door locked. Because they rarely have time to see one another outside of their sleeping and waking Harley stops thinking about him all together, which really isn't that hard because she's a career woman and she's got alot of important work back at the hospital, anyway. Sometimes though, as the days roll along, she thinks about funny poisons for the boxed foods in the pantry - not killing poisons but things that are drawn-out like a poignantly timed punchline (all the world is a stage, and other inappropriate, macabre quotes that ebb at her sunconscious).
But slowly poisoning her fiance over a series of vomit-filled months is just one of many passing thoughts she has. It amuses her because, before meeting Joker, she realizes she didn't have many thoughts at all. Those small moments of clarity swell her with appreciation (deviantly misplaced or not). Now she is considering methonols versus cyanides and 'did you know (she says to Joker one lazy afternoon) that hospitals use cyanide sodium nitroprusside to relieve blood pressure?'. Joker tells her sure, he knew that. But does she know that the japanese, during WWI, used cyanide to try to cure leprosy?
"I can only think of one cure that might have yielded," she responds, perfectly good-humored. Joker smiles at her and acts-out a few death throws.
And this is the first real conversation the two of them have. She isn't wearing her engagement ring anymore because it doesn't stop either of them from doing what they want to do, and he isn't trying to stuff their hour of therapy with as many bullshit explanations for his dementia as he can twiddle-dee dream up because she doesn't care.
Neither of them has ever felt more honest, or more sincere.
.
.
Harley doesn't stop wearing her ring entirely. Joker isn't the kind of guy to get hung up on the details, or to get jealous in any romantic sense (he does get jealous when he imagines the bat.man fighting other criminals), but she doesn't stop wearing the ring and he knows it.
He supposes it's a good thing, those morning she comes in with sleep-indentions of the goddamn thing pressed into her skin, indicating she'd maybe only taken it off before coming in to work.
She is hopelessly delusional to still want her former life. Which again, he supposes might be a good thing.
She has, to her credit, really picked up some interesting topics to discuss with him and though he's privvy to most of it, she is younger than he and still has much learning to do - all grievances are forgivable so long as you correct them (his mantra). He puffs at the idea, even, of a protege (spare the rod and spoil the child, though). They discuss cat paws and heretic forks (iron pikes and flesh-cleaving chains) and Joker hears unmistakably dreamy sighs in her voice. Not for midevil torture, surely, but that she is filling herself up with all the things Joker cares for seems utterly romantic to Harley Quinzel. He, on the other hand, thinks it's rather queer. If you asked him he'd say that he thinks he is far-more sound in the mind than his good, good doctor.
Joker has been particularly brutal with his entourage, and as such there aren't enough PHD'd doctors to observe his sessions from behind the glass. Maybe he'd planned it that way, but he likes to imagine it comes to him naturally, in artful strokes of his proverbial paintbrush. Eventually, he knows, there will be some aspiring career that would benefit from figuring him out and all of these taped sessions are going to get reviewed and receive puzzled silence when what plays back isn't honest, 21-st century therapy, but instead Joker telling Harley how to make a bomb out of a car battery, if she was so inclined. Or Harley breathlessly re-telling a sexual dream to Joker. Sure, she tarts it up with Freud and Jung, but she is meticulous in describing the way she'd slid into Joker's lap, or licked his tongue. Of the way he'd torn open her chiffon blouse and the noise the buttons had made when they skipped across the floor (she leans in close to make her sound-effects, and it's something like an X-rated storybook at bedtime). Joker licks his lips and he leans in closer too, willing her to go on. In the dreams she takes her manicured nails with the frosted french tips and drags them across scrapnel pellet wounds on Joker's back. In the dreams he doesn't even bother taking off her skirt, he just pushes it up and yanks her panties to one side.
Joker isn't your typical pervert so he doesn't really sit around and think about these things but god, Harley is positively impressive with her Freudian interpretations so that it's hard not to get inspired by the way she tells it.
.
.
The inevitable fact they will be found out is why Joker reasons to guess that when Harley, after a particularly moving indulgence of her latest dream, tells him that tonight is the night, he takes it to mean she is finally going to get him out of Arkham.
He had dutifully swallowed his night-time sedatives for the nurse (new girl), and then dutifully wretches them back out in the corner. He feels good about tonight. Tonight is a good night. He doesn't really think of Harley, or whether he will kill her or not once they are out. Although she is all he has in Arkham, she is hardly the big picture. She is hardly what he's going to be focusing on out there (which may save her life in the end). He wouldn't entirely mind stopping by her place on their way out - just to see how obsessively she has plastered grainy photocopies of his face to her venetian eggshell white walls (and for the record there are fifty-three of them glued, stapled and tacked up). And maybe to beat Harley's fiance's skull against the carpet until his brains leak out (she no doubt has expensive, thick padding in that carpeting so he reasons that he's going to have to be very intense to fracture and break bone against it).
Joker is caught up in lusty equations of pounds of pressure exertion in relation to mass and weight when the keycard reader outside his door lets loose a monotone beep and his padded door pushes open. He stands up immediatly and, hospitality in mind, reflects that were there anything in his room besides the bare cot on the floor and a small puddle of water and pills in the corner, he'd have straightened up for Harley's arrival.
Despite the warm weather out (although Joker has been known to lose track of months), Harley pushes into his room wearing a long, hot-looking coat. The lights are controlled by a panel outside, which Harley hadn't cared to turn on so that, the heavy door shutting on it's own, they stand in the dark together.
"What's the holdup, we've got to go." Joker doesn't even stop to think that Harley hasn't planned his big escape. That she hasn't incapacitated the guards at each checkstop between floors and found some clever way to take down the grid that the cameras are on. That, if Arkham is anything like other maximum security hospitals, the laser fingerprint pads that control the elevators and the silent alarms have been methodically taken down. She will also, naturally, have seen to the exit of choice and it's laser scanner - sophisticated things, those: a scan of the eye to authorize exit clearing. Scanned any person passing and, if someone were to try to pass unscanned or if a scan came up with negative clearing the four-inch thick iron rails slammed down over the exits in a matter of seconds (Joker had first read about those technological improvements to Arkham when he could still register as a free man & an unfortunate negative scan had severed an inmate attempting break-out top to bottom, right in half. Poor fellow had almost made it).
Suffice to say, security for the criminally insane is tight.
These things do not seem beyond what Harley is capable of because anything is possible if you're determined (call Joker the master of motivational speaking). Being capable is only a matter of preparation, afterall. He has been capable in all his misadventures because he had studied floor plans, he had read about nautical engineering (how many gallons of fuel was it going to take to blast out the hull of a liner-sized barge). What else did Harley have to do, anyway? What had she been spending all of her time on out there if not preparing?
Harley stands in the dark, silently. There is a nervous catch in her breath when Joker presses for them to leave. He is instantly annoyed by what it signifies if she isn't grabbing his hand and running with him out of the door.
"Lucky for us I pack light," Joker goes on, clapping his hands together.
There is the sound of Harley's ridiculous, hot-looking jacket being hugged tighter against her body, as if she is realizing that she and Joker are not at all on the same level of understanding what tonight is the night had meant.
Joker takes a step forward in the darkness.
"Doc?"
Harley's heels drag backwards, and there is the definite sound of her back hitting the door in a kind of frozen-horror. Even if she wanted to she couldn't get the heavy door open quick enough.
"Aren't we going?" He presses. Of his many mood swings Joker has an intimate dark side - a person might be surprised to know that the majority of his actions are not as bad as they could be. He is rarely at his worst (go on, laugh). Harley, knowing him so well, has had the good fortune of seeing some of his worst behaviors. So, unfortunately, she has a few ideas of what Joker might be like if disappointed.
"M...Mi.....mistuh J.." Her voice is abnormally high and in the height of this final, real fear her educated, calm tone finally breaks to what is apparently a brooklyn-based accent. "I didn't know that's what you.."
"You didn't realize I wanted out of here?" Joker asks her. He knows her height (5'3) and can tell where she is so that when he reaches out to touch her cheek he doesn't miss.
"You didn't mean to break me out at all." Joker sing-songs in a positively flat monotone.
"You meant, doc," his finger skirts down her jawline and neck and dips down beneath her jackettop where there is only bare skin to greet him beneath, no clothes.
"To fuck me."
At which point Harley begins to really worry, because she sees that fucking (as he'd put it, apparently), on a scale alongside freedom in Gotham city, must look pretty trivial.
She is left in daft silence, piteously, one-hundred and three pounds shivering under a thin layer of waterproof cotton. The little hairs that have spilled out of her tight ponytail to lay lazily across her face move with Joker's breath.
He takes hold of her hands, which clutch the buttoned jacket, and slam them by the wrists, over the good doctor's head.
"I can't even begin to imagine how boring it would be to fuck on a schedule," Joker drawls, pressing his dry lips against her forehead with his height advantage, thinking of what's to be done.
"I thought you were beginning to see the big picture. That you appreciated spontinuity." The calmer his tone goes, the faster Harley breathes and the faster Harley makes herself think.
"But you.. Mistuh J, you're surprised--
--aren't you?"
The Joker pauses where he stands.
"Unpleasantly so, yes."
Harley summons more courage than a girl of her stature, in her position, ought to have, and gingerly pulls her wrists out of the Joker's hands and steps around him. They circle one another in the dark. She knows enough of the Joker (if she knows anything at all) to liken him to a dog - fear is a scent he recognizes easily, and it is a scent he enjoys like no other.
"And I don't like your language. And if I ever did come here for that kind of thing, I'd have turned the lights on so you could see what I was letting you have."
Joker cuts her off with a little chuckle; he doesn't believe her any more than he'd believe she was wearing something under that jacket in her naive idea of sexy gestures that she must have honed from movies and magazines, but he appreciates the effort she puts into appearing strong. Joker likes a strong woman.
"Where'd your accent go, love of my life?"
Harley's chin is raised proudly, but even though he can't see her she cuts her eyes away from where she imagines he is by his voice.
"My fiance-" she pauses and considers throwing in an ex-fiance for correction's sake, but knows it really doesn't matter, so she continues. "For our first anniversary, his gift was speech therapy. Thought I'd sound more professional without the accent.." She shrugs.
"Well talk normally," Joker interjects with a sigh. "Otherwise I'll feel like I am speaking to a well trained animal."
Harley considers him for a moment, and she considers leaving without another word - given Joker lets her leave and that's a 50/50 gamble. She considers that she really does want him and she really had come there to fuck him and that like anything else in his complicated persona that was only going to happen by some bizarre turn of events - Joker was completely indignant of simple situations. She also considers, now that he has suggested it, all the things she will need to get into order before breaking him out.
There is the shift against the outside of the door and then, together, they both stop batting one another around with word games. Infact, they both stop breathing.
"Night check.." Joker mutters to himself - his tone is critical and reprimanding for having forgotten about those. Harley's stomach twists and she knows, because there is a card reader to get in and out of the room, that she has -maybe- sixty seconds before the red light changes to green, the locks shift, and artifical light floods the both of them. If she is discovered. If they know where she is, at this hour.
"Kill her." Harley breathes. She doesn't regret saying it because it's the only thing that can be done. She is puzzled by the epiphany of simplicity - of doing the things that have to be done regardless of their moral weight simply because they have to be done. She considers it even as Joker shoves her by her shoulders to hide behind where the door will swing open and mashes his mouth eagerly against the spot between her neck and her shoulder and ghosts his hands, once, up the length of her body to feel out it's bareness beneath the jacket.
As soon as the door opens Joker barrels into the night-shift nurse (nothing new, she will make the twenty-second nurse from Arkham to top the 'in memorium' page of Gotham Times). He lands on top of her as they skid a few feet across the floor courtesy of her back and, without hesitating but to give her a comforting smile (boy, does he know how to give a comforting smile), Joker jams his thumbs into her eyesockets.
There is absolutely no part of Joker that is thinking of Harley's wellbeing, lets be clear. He simply thinks she has a purpose yet to serve (and now she knows it). It's all very self-serving, trust him.
Harley is already around the door and running down the hall. If her assumptions are correct the nurse, like any nurse, would have hit the call button on her wristlet if she'd had the opportunity and that meant she had under a minute until lockdown. No-way she was going to make it to the elevator so, instead, Harley throws herself into the maintenance stairwell. Before doing so she turns to get one look at Joker, and is slightly disappointed that he isn't staring after her poignantly - instead, he is fixated on the fresh corpse beneath him and if Harley really squints she thinks she sees him wiggling his thumbs around in the wet, bloody holes he's put in her face. The strangest part (if it gets stranger than that) is that Harley likens Joker to a kid on Christmas for what his bright, pleased expression is worth.
Even so, her heart flutters with schoolgirl-crush adrenaline at the excitement of it all - for weeks she will fall asleep thinking about how it felt to have Joker shove her out of view, as though protecting her.
Lockdown for the third level sounds behind her, and she has got four long staircases to ascend in heels before she gets back to the parkinglott garage. She figures she ought to get the security recording for Joker's solitaire ward, and for the elevators. The security room is on her way, she reasons, and the nightshift guard (Gus) has always been friendly towards her (he might even have a crush on her, as passing crushes go). She thinks for a moment, then takes off one of her heels and runs her thumb across the spiked tip; kind of dull, but she is getting good at improvising.
She does wish, though, that she was wearing something under her coat because she's getting rather cold.
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mozart) wrote,
