Harleen Quinzel was a poorly processed mess. Though they had got her into asylum scrubs, it seems the guards had managed little else. Draped over the chaise longue like a doll that a bored child had tossed away in a tantrum, she struck a horrific picture. Her blonde hair fanned about her head in a matt of tangled curls like a devil's halo; while smudges of white greasepaint that no one had cared enough to remove bled down her face. She looked like the trash Dr Crane found in ever drugged-up killer's file under 'victims' and yet, as she turned her head toward the door and smiled, he found her disarmingly beautiful. Out of her ruined clown face, her blue eyes still shone bright, wide as a child's. Her smile, though now sober, was as warm as Crane remembered from his office doorway the Christmas before and, for a moment, it paralyzed him. Gripping the door handle until his knuckles turned white, Crane fought to silence his heart – to convince himself that this was merely just another criminal to evaluate. By the time he finally made his way to the table in the centre of the room, he had almost started to believe it.

With agonizingly patient movements, he unloaded his briefcase, setting each item out with the precision of a surgeon's assistant preparing their instruments. He slid a blank cassette into the archaic recorder and with more force than the task required, pressed on the start button. The cogs of the tape had turned fifty time before Crane spoke.

'Patient 0603216, Quinzel, Harleen F. Session one, November 12th, 2:44pm. Dr Jonathan Crane PhD evaluating, also assigned psychiatrist.'

'Patient is also under investigation in the case of the people vs. Mistah J.' Harleen added in a mockingly serious voice before she gave way into giggles – the noise a helpless marriage of desperation and insanity.

Crane looked at her, the disgust rising in his stomach and heating his blood. He was above her in every regard – intelligence, restraint – her faults fell against his merits again and again; and yet, it was the faulted and flawed harpy that had snaked her way under Crane's skin. She was a cancer destroying him from his core – despised and inseparable all the same. Crane could not decide which he hated the most – Harleen for her infecting imperfection or his own weak resolve for crumbling in the face of one bourbon-tainted kiss.

His hate settled into a cold reserve as he watched the disgraced siren choke her laughter with a bite to her bottom lip – the stark white of her teeth an insult to the ragged skin – raw and flecked with black where some careless person had attempted to remove her lipstick.

'Do you know why you are here, Dr Quinzel?'

Harleen stared at him, her smile gone. Raising herself up from the couch, she spread her palms out on the desk, levelling up to her former boss.

'We've known each other almost two years,' she stated calmly. 'When are you gonna start calling me Harley like everybody else?'

And then came the giggles again, shaking the moulding asylum air with their cheer. Crane clenched his fists to control his desire to reach across the table and shake her. She could not be so simple, so corruptible, that the painted madman could destroy her so completely. He could not stand the idea of wanting a person so weak.

'I do not think I have known you at all,' Crane replied, tone cool. 'You are not the same intern I believed to know when you first arrived at this asylum.'

Harleen's giggles waned, falling into a pitying smile.

'New and improved, sweetheart. I'm happy now.'

'You're a liar.'

Harleen blinked at him. She had clearly not expected a tough love approach in her former domain. If Crane was honest, it had not been his intention. He had planned to give her the most basic of evaluations and flee, and yet, to see her, so misguidingly content, Crane struggled to remain disinterested.

'A puppet may smile but that does not mean it cease to feel the nails holding his strings in place.'

'A bullied child might grow up to be in charge,' Harleen replied, voice now as cold as Crane's, though her smile remained. 'Doesn't mean he doesn't feel as alone.'

The tape recorder spun, its mechanical hum drawing out the silence as four globes of blue warred, unblinking. When Crane spoke, his professional curtness faltered, broken down with the hurt he could not express.

'Why, Harleen? Why did you help the Joker escape?'

Harleen didn't seem to notice.

'Because I love him.'

Her answer was simple and said with such conviction that Crane could not doubt her sincerity. It was another blow that he felt rip through him.

'And you believed he loved you?' Crane asked, turning his eyes downwards as he began to write in his notebook – his words carefully selected and sculpted. He had known Harleen's notes to be rushed and illegible – unable to keep up with the flow of madness she encountered and the tide of her own ambition.

'I know he loves me.'

Crane stopped writing. Her words were at odds with the battered body she uttered them from. Looking up, he resisted the urge to stare into her eyes and inspected the four long bruises on the right of her neck before his eyes darted to their brother on the left. They were the most recent in view though he knew from glancing at her file that they were not alone. Under her faded scrubs, Harleen Quinzel was an artwork of black and blue, her left arm bound in gauze – a blank square waiting for the artist's signature.

'Dr Quinzel, please state the full date of today and the season we are in.'

'A cognitive test?' Harleen asked, barely able to keep the scoff from her voice. It brought an air of her old self to her features – an indignant self-worth in the face of being doubted. 'I'm perfectly able to reason and remember. I know what life was like before the Joker. Everyone in this place looking at you like you were dirt under their feet – as if you couldn't possibly be smart because you were pretty and popular. It's not like that with the Joker. He shows you what the world is really like and it makes you laugh until it hurts.'

'He lied to you. Everything you think he showed you about the world, it's all a lie.' The anger shook in Crane's voice. The Joker had laughed at the civilized world and held up Harleen as his punch line – the deluded prophet of mental abandon. She was the archetypal spoilt brat, who, when the world failed to meet her expectations, had sought out a way to make it bend to her whim. But her escape had been in her captor and now Crane saw just a battered shell of a girl – too proud to forget her past life and too caught up with insanity to come back.

Harleen had tensed with his words and now trembled, her aquamarine eyes glimmering with the fire in her blood.

'You just don't understand love. It changes your world, Jonathan.'

And then she simply fell back onto the chaise longue, an absent smile on her face as if she had already forgotten the conversation. There was nothing more Crane wished to hear, and as his gathered up his belongings, the sting of her words settling into the furrows of his brow. He did not look back as he left the therapy room, each step he took now weighed down with every word Harleen had uttered. He did not love her, of that much he was certain and yet the idea that she might have one day broken through the ice that abuse and neglect had formed on him had been his glimmer of hope in the darkness. Harleen had come to closest of everyone Crane had ever met to believing he could love – that he was not simply an emotionless loner, driven by his work. She had believed enough to dare a kiss almost a year ago and yet now, she too found him unable of love. It made him believe the world might be right; and as he slunk into his office just a floor away from Harleen Quinzel, Jonathan Crane felt the most alone he had in years.