A/N-as always, I own nothing but my hat. The song is by the fabulously fun group, The Four Postmen; in other words, it's not mine.
Additional A/N-This story was originally meant only as a one-shot, until one of my friends read it on my laptop one night as said, grinning..."This is great! When's the next chapter coming out?" Wulfgar, Dawn-Marie...this one is all your fault, you fabulous betas, you...
The light in the cell block came on with a low, buzzing hum. It would slowly work its way into you throughout the day, until you were certain that when you laid down to sleep at night and the lights shut off, that buzzing hum would still be inside your bones; a faint vibration that would make its way into your dreams and taint them with a film of sound that kept you from truly resting.
In his cell, the Joker blinked his eyes open to see the familiar cinder block and concrete walls that surrounded him; their surface pitted from time and the efforts of previous occupants to leave something behind to mark that they had existed in this place.
Now, that really was a joke.
Existence…in this place? No such thing.
No one existed here. They were merely waiting, their bodies in storage while their minds planned.
And such plans! Escape, certainly. But also theft, murder, revenge, fear, torment, and FUN. After all, the Joker reasoned, if it wasn't fun...what was the point?
The guards were walking down the aisle between the rows of cells, calling out to the inmates around them.
Get up!
Why?
Can't sleep all day…get out of those beds and get moving….
What's the point? We aren't moving anywhere…
In the surrounding cells the Joker could hear groans, whined complaints, and a few curses and threats as inmates began to rise from their bunks and move about their cramped cells. Space was always at a premium in Arkham Asylum, and when you didn't dare put more than one inmate in a cell…you made the cells half the size of the typical two-inmate cells.
One nearby cell, however, only had a few coughs and some throat-clearing coming from it as its occupant began the day's routine.
The cell-block's songbird.
No one really knew why she was down here, they had never heard of her when they were out in the 'real world', the world beyond the walls of Arkham Asylum; and none of the newer inmates—the ones who had joined their ranks after the songbird's arrival—had heard of her either.
If they hadn't heard of her before, they all heard her now.
She sang.
All day, every day. You never could tell what the next song would be, or if it would be the previous song again, like a cassette or CD stuck on repeat. Pop, country and western, blues, old torch songs, jazz, even gospel came from the songbird's cell. The week that she had sung nothing but Disney songs had been kind of hard to take. If 'It's a Small World' had been sung one more time...well, it would have been very messy on the cell block. And now she was getting ready to sing, again.
In a strange mood, the Joker leaned towards the songbird's cell.
"Hey," he called. "Do you take song requests?"
The humming that had been one of the signs that the songbird was warming up for her day's performance for her captive audience stopped. There was a moment of quiet as he waited for a reply.
"What?"
"I asked if you take song requests," the Joker repeated, patiently. Honestly, the songbird had no idea how hard it was to act this calm and rational. It went against everything that he felt should be normal.
"I heard you; I was just surprised." The voice was quiet for a moment before she spoke again. "Why do you want to know?"
The Joker thought for a moment. Why did he want to know?
Asking her if she took song requests had been one of those 'spur of the moment, why not?' decisions that he often made. It wasn't that her singing was bad—not something that he would ever have paid to go listen to, probably no one else would have either—but it wasn't like she had a voice that was screechy or painful to listen to, and she could carry a tune and stay on key.
"Is the reason, um, important?" he asked, tilting his head in the direction of her cell. "I just wanted to ask; that's all."
"Hmm."
There was nothing more from the other cell for a while; and the Joker was thinking that if he wasn't going to have his question answered, at least he had found out how to get the songbird to stop singing.
"What's the request?"
The question surprised him. Was she considering it?
"Chainsaw Juggler," he said, naming the first song that popped into his head. Not that she would know it, almost nobody knew of it and he'd never found anyone who had heard of it that knew the words—
"By The Four Postmen?"
She knew the song? Oh, this was good.
"Yeah," he answered, drawing the word out a bit. "That's uh, that's the one…"
"The last time I sang that song, Dr. Chilton transferred facilities," she told him. "Went to work with serial killers in Baltimore, I was told. Of course, it may be because I sang only that song for approximately three weeks in a row…"
This was better than good; this was wonderful.
"I'll take the request."
The Joker could almost hear the smile in her voice. What did that smile look like? Was it as wide as his? For that matter, what did she look like?
She continued speaking. "Who knows…" she was saying now. "…maybe we can get a sing-along started; have the others here follow the bouncing ball. If you think you could find something to bounce..."
Oh, yeahhh… He could find something to bounce. So many things bounced…heads, hearts, livers… Okay, maybe not livers. But there were plenty of options roaming the halls of Arkham.
And then he heard it, slowly swelling in volume until it rang and echoed down the hall of the cell block; the sound rebounding from the pitted grey concrete walls that were never touched by the sun.
What ever happened to the Chainsaw Juggler? He was a good friend of mine. And where did you learn to kiss like that said the man to his German Shepherd…
A/N-just a little plot bunny that I woke up with. I had to trap it before the others saw it and started arguing over who gets written first...
