Disclaimer: Although this story is mine…any characters or places from the original DC Batman universe do not belong to me. They were created well before I was born…or even my mother for that fact!

Please let me know what you think, read and review.

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Something Not Quite Right

Jess looked at her watch. 10:30pm. This was ridiculous. It was almost a week since she had started working at Arkham and still she was staying late into the night to finish reports and organise Dr Brightside's previous work. The man may have been a good psychologist but his writing style left a lot to be desired.

Sitting back in her chair she stretched her legs beneath the desk and let her head fall back as she ran her fingers though her hair. Massaging her scalp she sighed and closed her eyes.

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"Excuse me, Doctor Cunningham?"

"Huh?" startled Jess sat bolt upright in her chair and rubbed the back of her neck. "What?"

"I'm sorry if I woke you but we need you in cell 5. There's been an incident," the young orderly said in a concerned tone.

Without another thought the young doctor grabbed her jacket and left her office, hastily following the orderly through the wide corridors.

"What's happened?" Jess enquired as they approached the room in question.

"I think it best if you look for yourself," the man almost whispered stopping a few yards from the door.

Jess slowed her pace and walked assertively through the open door. She had seen some disturbing things since coming to Gotham City but the scene before her truly made her stomach turn.

Pushing her way past two nurses and the Chief Psychiatrist she came upon what could only be described as the result of a massacre. The cell had once housed two fairly reasonable patients. It was now covered with the bloody remains of one of them.

"What the hell happened?" she gasped.

"We don't know," the psychiatrist answered from behind her. "All we know is that there was a certain amount of noise in the night and this morning the nurses found the room like this."

"Didn't anyone check during the night? Aren't they supposed to do rounds?" she motioned to the nurses.

"Yes but this wing generally gets checked every hour, not every fifteen minutes. There's no-one here that needs to be checked that often. The inmates here are generally compliant and less of a danger to anyone than those, say, in isolation."

"I know that but surely if the noise was sufficient to be reported then a nurse should have checked the…"

"It's not that easy," one of the nurses piped up. "If we reacted to every noise in this place then we would never get any work done!"

"That IS your work!" Katrina snapped. "Do we know which of them this is?"

"We do. This is Ricky Moffet. His cellmate, Carl Jeffries, was found cowering in the corner of the room covered in…well…Ricky."

"Can I…?" Jess nodded towards the blood-splattered tiles.

"Of course,"

As she examined the lumps of flesh around the room she tried to hold her breath. The stench of copper in the air was so pungent that she could almost taste the blood around her.

"So what are we saying happened?" she asked cautiously without turning to face her colleague.

He paused before answering, "We don't know yet, so for the moment nothing."

"Ok," Jess started to leave.

"Oh. And Doctor?"

Jess stopped in the doorway, "Yes?"

"I suggest you start paying more attention to your patients' needs and behaviour. Carl is one of yours isn't he?"

"Yes," she was confused. How was this suddenly her fault? She turned to leave before adding, "Speaking of my patients, I want to assess the Joker today. I'd like to see how he is coping without his medication. I just thought I'd run it past you. Give you notice before I obviously put the whole of the Asylum at risk by requesting he leave his room."

"I don't appreciate your sarcasm Doctor Cunningham!"

"I don't appreciate you trying to intimidate me!" Jess quipped suprising herself. "The actions of a mental patient are not reflective of their counselling. Perhaps you should assess his medication. After all I'm not permitted to prescribe or unprescribe medication, am I? Perhaps you should keep an eye on the rest of your colleagues, not me!"

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Clutching the Joker's files in her fist Jess tried desperately to calm herself down. Her altercation with the Chief Psychiatrist earlier had left her a little shaky. It wasn't like her to react the way she had and she got the distinct feeling that she was going to have to deal with the consequences later.

She pressed her back against the wall and tried to steady her breathing before entering the room to assess her patient. Perhaps it had been the exhaustion that had made her so irritable this morning. Or perhaps it was the sensation she got everytime she had to spend time with the guy. He had a wonderful ability of making her feel so insignificant that she would almost doubt her own decisions, and that was no good. Although he wasn't actually her boss she did feel as though he was her superior and in a way felt as though he had more of a right to an opinion than she did. Perhaps he was the reason why she would spend hours in her office after her shift had ended and retype files just so that she could understand them. Why was she trying to prove herself to be a better doctor than he was?

"I don't know," Jess sighed as she entered the room. A guard stood with his back against the adjacent wall between herself and the Joker. The patient himself was sat upright bound in a straight jacket and strapped to the chair as per their last meeting. "How are you feeling?"

The restrained man lifted his head to look at her face but did not speak. His dark eyes had gained a small spark of emotion since the last time she saw him and Jess made a note of it.

"Well, at least I know you can hear me now,"

The Joker sat silently staring at her. As she sat across the table taking notes on his reactions and physical appearance he began making notes of his own- mental ones of course. He noted her hair colour, blonde, and the way she spoke. He also noted the way she moved, something wasn't right about her. Even through his slightly aching eyes he could tell she was worried about something. The last time he had seen her she had seemed so small, even to his muddled brain, but now she seemed uptight.

Was it because she was suddenly unsure of him? No, it was something else. Even so the Joker figured that he should play her little 'he doesn't need medication' game, even if only to get back to the way he was before. He had to gain her trust…somehow. He had to behave. For now.

"…any symptoms at all that you're uneasy with? Vomiting, headaches…"

While he had been lost in thought she had been talking. He thought for a moment before forcefully clearing his throat. "Yeah," it was more of a noise than a word but nonetheless the doctor wrote something down in her files.

"And?" she raised her eyebrows and almost smiled slightly.

"Errrrrrm, headaches…right in my um, right in my eyes,"

"Ok, anything else?"

The Joker cleared his throat again and tongued the scar on the right side of his mouth slowly. "Itch…itching. Everywhere!" he croaked.

"Is that it? Nothing else? No vomiting or bleeding from any part of your body?"

"No," again his tongue on his scar, "I don't know if I'm bleeding…I can't…um…cant see…" he nodded towards his restraints lazily.

Jess turned to the guard, "Have you been with him all day?"

"Since this morning,"

"Have you escorted him to the toilet?"

"Yes when I came on shift. I didn't go in with him though!"

"So you wouldn't have noticed anything with his…"

"No," the answer was short and sharp and Jess decided not to pursue the matter any further.

"I'm going to need a blood sample from you to determine what concentration of drugs is still in your system. I also need to assess your physical appearance; bruises etc. Some of the drugs you were given can have serious side affects and seeing as though you're permanently restrained in some way or another many of those side affects may have gone unnoticed. Is that ok?" she lifted her head and looked straight into the Joker's eyes.

He didn't answer immediately, instead simply held her gaze and smiled sickly at her. His intention had been to smile sweetly however his scars made that extremely difficult, he hoped that she didn't get the wrong idea and remedicate him. "Yes."

"Right," Jess smiled at herself while writing in the file before motioning towards the guard with her biro. "Could you escort him to one of the sedation chairs please? I just need to get some more staff…just incase."

"Which one?" the guard had already started to move the Joker.

"Whichever's free, I'll check where he is when I get down there. Don't allow him to go to the toilet either, we'll take a urine sample while we're at it. I'll be about half an hour; I just need to check on another patient first."

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"May I see him?"

"Of course Doctor," the portly matron opened the door to the isolation cell.

How could anyone stay in these rooms? If they weren't crazy to begin with they would gradually get there what with the dirty white tiles and tiny thirty-foot high windows. The room was almost dark and had no bed. Jess could just about make out the shape of a man huddled in the far corner of the room rocking back and forth.

"Carl? It's Doctor Cunningham, I've come to see how you are feeling,"

There was no answer, just the incessant childlike whimpering.

Jess turned her attention to the matron, "Has he been sedated?"

"Yes, he seemed ok when they first brought him down, just a little shaken. But when they started explaining why he needed isolating he just freaked out…tried bighting one of the nurses, she had to have a tetanus shot! He's been like this ever since."

"Did you remove his bed?"

"For his own safety, yes," the matron nodded and the two women made their way out into the corridor. "He kept saying something about monsters," she locked the door behind them and turned to face Jess.

"Monsters?"

"He said that it wasn't him, he said it was a clown. Said that the guy came in the middle of the night and told him not to move,"

"A clown?"

"I think it was a clown…he was screaming lots of things but I definitely remember him mentioning a clown. An evil clown. You know for the past few months I've had nothing but this crap, everyone's killing everyone else and then they send them down here. All we do is sedate them and send them back under suicide watch."

"Suicide watch? Why?"
"It's a technicality. If word got out about the number of inmates committing murder in here they would close us down, then we'd all be out of a job! If you ask me," she lowered her voice dramatically, "I think there's something else going on."

"What do you mean?" Jess frowned, not quite understanding the woman.

"It's always been busy down here but they generally get sent here for acute observation. You know; suicide attempts and such. That's why they leave on suicide watch, to make it seem legitimate. If the police knew how many murders had taken place in here in the past six months they would investigate and then the top dogs would be under scrutiny."
Jess still didn't understand, "So you lie about why they're down here to keep from being investigated?"
"Yeah, it's our instructions. That's why I think there's something else going on you see? There's something not right, especially when they didn't even report Dr Brightside's death. They said he did it himself!"

"I thought his throat had been slit?"

"Precisely my point!"