"You're like me, aren't you?"

He told her, just before they came, just before they got separated being put into separate cars, never talk to him.

"Hey. You're very pretty."

Never look at him. Never talk to him.

"Does he ever call you pretty?"

As they tore them apart, he called out to her, never speak to Jonathan Crane.

"But it's not because of your body. No. I see it, in your eyes, a brilliant mind, there in your eyes. It is beautiful."

She turns to him, through the little cracks in their walls, she can see him, and he can see her.

An hour ago she had on white make up trying her hardest to be like him. She had black lips and black eyes, smeared across her face as the scars smeared his. An hour ago she was free, she was with him, and they were running on rooftops, stolen money flying out of their pockets, a gun in her hand, a knife in his. An hour ago, she was the happiest she had ever been. He was laughing that wonderful laugh, he was holding her hand, leading her into the night.

"Not that your body isn't beautiful as well." He coughs.

An hour ago the Batman came, and he just lit up and tried to hug the vigilante. An hour ago they fought and played together, and the Batman took them home. And just as the cops were tearing them apart, as they were dragging him away from her, he yelled at her, "Never talk to Jonathan Crane!"

She turned to see Crane through the cracks in their walls. His glasses reflected the moonlight, as if they were his very eyes, lifeless, merciless. But he drew away from the cracks and she could see his form as he stood, thin, lankly, harmless. He was so small as he stood it seemed a gust of wind could take him away, a little push would have shattered him.

She had heard of Crane long before her days of crime. As a psychology student she had heard what he had done to his own students, pointing a gun at them, scaring them to prove a point. She never deciphered what that point was, people didn't seem to care about it when recollecting the story to her. But it was the most important thing, was the point worth it? Did it come across? She wondered what fear meant to him, but she was too much of a coward to pursue it herself. No, her destiny she felt would be less ambitious, she'd live her life, helping the mentally unstable, nothing too out of the ordinary.

Nothing like him.

"My name is Jonathan Crane." He tells her. "My friends call me Scarecrow."

"That's impossible." She turns away. "You have no friends."

She chuckles to herself, a joke, he'd be proud. But Crane doesn't laugh. He stares through the cracks, his lanky frame about to break under itself. He coughs again, pushes up his glasses.

"Well, if you call me Scarecrow, then my friends really will call me Scarecrow." He tells her.

He pushes up his glasses once more.

"Damn it, they took away my contacts." He sighs.

She tries to ignore him then. She thinks only of him, the Joker who only laughed when they came for them, who only spat in their faces as they put the straight jacket on him, who only smiled as they dragged her away. Don't worry, Harley, he had said, just some time to take a rest.

Then he said never speak to Jonathan Crane. But he creeps closer to the wall, she can feel his eyes staring at her, her shape silhouetted in the moonlight. She feared he'd stare at her all night, she'd go to bed and he'd watch her sleep, and he'd be there when she awoke.

She thinks of the Joker, how unafraid he was of this place. But he doesn't know it like she does. He doesn't know what the doctors say once the patients are gone, what they think of them.

"Please talk to me." He asks her. "Please. There is a lack of good conversation, as you can imagine. You cannot discuss the fallacies of human assumptions with a madman, you know."

She sees the Joker in her mind's eye, that wonderful smile, so fearless, so brave, so confident. Everything she wasn't, everything she wanted to be.

"You're like me." He tells her.

"What are you?" She asks.

"Sane."

She turns to him.

"We are sane." He nods. "We just decided to play their game, because, I suppose, it makes sense to be crazy in a crazy world."

He puts his fingers to the cracks, trying to reach through them.

"The entire world is an Asylum, this one is no different than the one outside of it. You and I know this, but the people who deny it call us as mad as everyone else in here."

He shakes his head.

"I'm not mad. I've just seen the wisdom of the madman, just as you have." His eyes move in the night. "Just as you've fallen in love with him."

She suddenly turns to him, her hair flying through her shoulders. He smiles at the strong reaction, mistaking it for a sign of affectionate curiosity.

"Please. Talk to me." He says so desperately, so meekly. "My name is Jonathan Crane, my friends call me Scarecrow."

She thinks of Joker. She imagines his voice ringing through the walls. She knows what they're doing with him then and there. She knows what the doctors think. He's deep in the secret rooms Crane made himself, trying to get tortured out of his madness. But he's strong, and he laughs at them, he always laugh.

So she laughs.

Deep and low she laughs. Then she creeps up towards him, laughing louder, and louder still. He backs away from the wall but she presses her forehead against the concrete, her eyes piercing through his pale and thin skin.

"You wanna talk?" She mocks. "Fine. We can talk. Already I can diagnose you ten different ways, and give you twenty different drugs, that together could finally calm you down long enough for you to maybe resemble something normal and let you gain some friends. But I bet you've thought of that already. I bet you've taken all the drugs you prescribed for yourself, so afraid, afraid you were becoming like them. Then that fear took you over, and now that's all you can see, and the only way to survive is inflict it on other people. You're not sane, you just like to think you are."

She laughs. That psychology degree never going to waste.

"And what of you!?" he screams back at her. "Falling in love with a homicidal maniac, a terrorist. Can you even see it?"

"See what?"

"The blood on his hands! He's killed children! Mutilated women! Mercilessly and without second-thought. He'd kill you too if you gave him the opportunity! You want to be free like him, but you're not damaged enough yet, so you let him beat you, you let him rape you, and you wait for that --"

"HE HASN'T TOUCHED ME!"

He can see her furious eyes through her golden hair, shining. She could have killed him with her stare alone, her fists could have crushed him, her hands choked the life out of him. He was a skinny thing compared to even her, barely any flesh over his bones, like he could have blown away in the wind. She stares at him through the crack, wanting nothing more but to kill him. The months she'd spent learning how to take a life, learning how life is worthless, she could do it, she felt, and she'd make the Joker proud.

"Don't you think I know he doesn't give a shit about me!?" She screams through the crack. "Don't you think I know what he's done!? That all that blood is on me now too!? It's too late to go back, Jonathan Crane, you know that!"

Her eyes make him speechless, she steals his voice. He's left to surrender to her attacking words that stab him like the high school children that had posted him to a stick and left him in a cornfield. She reminds him briefly of the cheerleader from all those years ago, he had stared at her apparently too long, and she had instructed her football playing lackeys to put him on that stick and let him hang all night. He remembers how beautiful her hair was, golden like Miss Quinzel's. How horrible her faced looked when she screamed to get his slimey hands off of her. How furious she was, and how vile she was laughing at him as he kicked away at the stick he hung upon. He remembers how wonderful it felt to strangle her in the middle of that cornfield, dressed in that awful scarecrow outfit they'd put him in. He remembers how beautiful her scream was, how soothing it sounded to him to know that he had hurt her in ways she could never hurt him.

Harleen Quinzel had stopped her screaming, she pulled off her shirt and stuffed it into the crack so he could no longer see her. She strutted around her cell, going over the past few months in her mind, trying desperately to rationally think irrationally. Often times she'd stop because the psychologist in her would mock her for her folly. She would tell herself she knows better. But then her heart would sing, and say it knows best, better than all degrees and all schooling. She loved him, that was that, and she wanted only to be like him.

"Harley?" Jonathan Crane's muffled cry slips through the cloth blocking them. "Miss Quinzel, I'm sorry." He puts his head to the wall. "Really, I am, I had no right to say that. I just was overwhelmed, overjoyed you were beside me in this asylum."

But she doesn't listen, she goes to bed, thinking of her Joker. Jonathan Crane doesn't stop all night. He whispers sweet nothings into the room even as she slept, pleading for her forgiveness, trying to explain himself.

That morning guards came in for routinely inspection. Jonathan Crane was awoken by the screams of his new neighbor. The guards had grown violent and touch in Arkham, as they rightfully should, the weak easily perished in the madness held by those walls. But she was not expecting it. They came in, banging the wall to scare her into the corner like an animal. They grabbed her and looked at her exposed body, screaming why would she do such a stupid thing as take off her shirt. She punches one, and the other chokes her into the wall with his knife stick. They mock her, they mock her Joker. You and that clown, they say, you're nothing, but freaks. She recites for them tales of anarchy, she explains the only way to live in this world is as a freak. She repeats the Joker's teachings, and they beat her for it.

"Hey, stop it!"

Came the small voice of Jonathan Crane.

"There's no need for that with her." He explains as the guards come out to stand before his cell.

"Oh, yeah? You would know, wouldn't you, Doc?" The guard slams the knife stick at Crane's bars.

"How's your daughter, Officer Barkley? Has she come home yet from running off with that bastard child from down the street?"

Crane smiles a numb and dull smile, the guard, Barkley, stares down at him in shock.

"How did you know that?" The guard asks.

"It is my job to know what a man fears most. And I hear you praying to a God that doesn't seem to be there for your baby girl to come back home, but she hasn't. Aw, how sad. She's gotten lost in a big town like this."

"Shut up."

"Maybe if you didn't yell at her so much, she'd still be alive."

"Shut your mouth!"

"Because that's it, isn't it? She's in a dumpster somewhere, abandoned by everyone that loved her."

They hit him for a while. They beat down on his ribs and his bones, and his skin easily bruises, the frail little thing he was. He curls up in the corner, screaming at them, it must make you feel so good beating the crap out of a scarecrow like me, he laughs at them. Harley watches through the crack in their wall and she laughs too.

They can't get the two to shut up, even as they beat them. Finally the two guards retreat, time demanding that they do so.

"That's why no one wants to talk to you." She says. "You latch onto anything and twist it into fear."

"It's what I do."

They laugh through the crack in the wall.

"What a thing to live by." She says through her laughs. "Fear."

"Fear is powerful. It can inspire, it can destroy."

"So can love."

"Mmm, seems we have our areas of expertise."

"Indeed, it would seem so, Dr. Crane."

"I like that."

"What?"

"You called me Doctor, and you weren't being sarcastic."

He smiles at her through the crack, and she smiles back.

"It's a crazy world we live in, isn't it?" She sighs. "Where a man can dress like a bat and truly believe he can stop crime, and he's praised. Meanwhile you got perfectly reasonable people like you and me, thrown in here?" She laughs a little. "Have you met him?"

"Who?"

"The Bat?"

"Here and there." He nods. "You don't forget a man like that. A man so twisted and so…I don't know, I want to say dedicated."

"He and Mister J, they're two of a kind, I swear. He loves the Bat more than anything else in the world."

He sees her shrink through the crack in the wall. She doesn't frown, she still smiles, but she lets go of a heavy sigh that makes her seem that much smaller. Her eyes became sad even as she smiled as she was taught to.

"The Joker is…intriguing." He says.

"Don't try to diagnose him." She shakes her head. "The man defies all diagnosis. He's a force of nature, he's chaos incarnate, he can't be stopped by drugs, he can't be tamed by medicine." She sighs. "He's always going, and going, and going, and you can't keep up with him, but you try, that's all you can do, try. His is a madness undefined, perhaps it's sanity." she shrugs.

He stares at her, and sees the familiar face of a woman thinking about another man. She lifts her head with a laugh, as if recalling a distant moment in her past where she was with the Joker in a moment of perhaps sincere bonding.

"Why do you love him?" He asks her. "Despite everything. I see your guilt. I see your fear."

She looks up, suddenly with those horrible piercing eyes that could kill him. She goes on the defensive again.

"I know, you're afraid that you'll never be like him." He tells her, shaking his head, and the eyes turn away.

"I think deep down, I always hated authority. I hated school, I hated my parents, all I wanted to do after high school was disappear. I wanted to turn into vapor and end myself, just so I wouldn't have to carry myself through more schooling. I…I was in a state of such hopelessness because of what society was forcing me into, and all I saw around me were these equally hopeless people, just going through the motions of living. We're all dead, Dr. Crane, we're all dying, but he's actually alive. And living in such a world where everyone around you is dead, he doesn't value their lives." She shakes her head. "Still, sometimes hard to shake off a night of 'happy-fun-family-murder-time.'"

She wipes the hair out of her eyes, he wants to do it for her.

"I just want to feel, like I can do whatever I want. Like I'm free from everything everyone expects of me. That's why he has no name. That's why he burned his fingerprints off and filed down his teeth, and pokes himself in the eyes, just so there's no remarkable trace left of what he was and who he was. The name carries expectations, he had a human name and he had human responsibilities to the world. Now he's just the Joker, he has no purpose, no meaning, he's so free and so happy…"

"Harley…"

She looks up.

"I hope you do become like him. For your own sake."

That night he sat on the floor beside the cracked wall, and she on the other side of the wall. They listened to all the screams that echoed in the asylum. He identifies each person accordingly with their cry, and together they diagnose the mad and write up perscriptions in their heads that should help them fit into normalcy. They argue about the best way to treat some patients. Finally she falls asleep around three am, exhausted. He cries out her name, wanting her to wake, but she doesn't. He thinks of how young and pretty she is, so much younger than he.

She made him question why he's alive. It seems all she wants is to live a meaningful life without meaning. He lays beside her, a wall between them, wondering what is it that he lives for.

He had a mother somewhere, didn't know if she was still alive. The father was dead and in the ground, he was dead the year he graduated high school, the year he was dressed up as a scarecrow and hung to protect the corn.

He falls asleep too.

"NO! DON'T LEAVE ME! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME IN HERE! NOT IN HERE! JOKER!!!"

He jumps to the sound of her screaming voice. He gets up and sees through the crack Harleen Quinzel on the wall, hanging to the bars of her window, screaming into the night. He can hear police sirens, he can hear gunfire.

"JOKER!!!" She's crying. "WHAT ABOUT ME!? PLEASE! DON'T LEAVE ME HERE!!!"

The Joker was escaping. A bomb went off that shook the asylum. It knocked her off the wall, threw her to the floor where she was still crying.

"Harley?" Jonathan Crane asks.

But she can't hear his quiet voice. Not with the sirens screaming for her Joker, not for the gunfire aimed at him. The escape alarm sounds. Joker's gone, he outside running, escaping, and he's leaving without her.

Jonathan Crane watches as Harley hits her fist on the floor and cries.

----------------

Next Chapter coming soon.

Please R/R