A/N: Okay, yes, I admit it, I'm creating my own personal continuation here. There's references within this chapter to an episode that hasn't been written yet.

Part Two: This Time, It Hurts

She's already decided to just not wake up ever again. It's proving difficult to follow through with this determination, however, what with the beeping of machines, the drawn out sea-sounds of her own labored breathing, the dull pain in her arm. It's not too bad really— she's felt worse. She's not sure of the cause of it, because she's sure she should have died, she's sure whatever blow she was dealt was a mortal one. So she holds out against the awakening, pretending to be dead.

She can't sustain it for long, though, as the lights beating at her become brighter. Against her will, her eyelids flutter open to slits, then widen. She's in a hospital. She's reasonably certain heaven isn't a hospital, and presumably hell isn't one either, therefore she must not be dead after all. It's a shame, really. She was looking forward to the rest.

She goes to put a hand up to her face, reflexively, to scrub at the papery skin there, and look at her fingertips. But she can't move. She tries again. Nothing.

"We don't like to encourage our patients' delusions by allowing them their costumes and disguises. Their masks." A woman in a white coat stands in the doorway, and as Harley looks at her, dazed and headed for a panic, she enters and stands at the foot of the bed. "But you know that. You remember it, don't you? Harleen?"

She's a doctor, that much is sure. An identity badge hangs around her neck, and names her Joan Leland. She takes in the blank stare of the woman in the bed, and amends her words. "I'm sorry, you'd probably like me to call you Harley. But, again, we don't encourage our patients' delusions. Please, I know you're still in there. Respond to your name."

The woman's voice is calmer than her beseeching words would imply. What Harley gets out of it is that Doctor Leland believes she, Harley Quinn, to be someone other than she is. Which is of course completely crazy. Harley wants to tell her so. She takes a breath for the phrase—

"You know," she starts, as flippantly as she can, "I think you're—"

And then stops, because after all, this Doctor Leland does look familiar. Those dark eyes, that serious nose. That expression of self-righteous worry. The woman doesn't look like she's laughed in thirty years.

"Where am I?" is what she ends up with.

"You don't recognize it?"

For the first time, she manages to move her head, to send her gaze around the room, and then it dawns on her. This is not the first time she's been in this infirmary, the dingy once-white walls telling of too many years of use, and abuse and neglect by janitors and patients alike. And, she realizes, it's not just because she's drugged or in pain that she can't move: she's strapped into the bed, because someone is afraid of what she might do if she gets loose. Rightfully so, she thinks, loftily. But this is no place for confidence. How's she going to get out of here this time?

"Welcome back to Arkham," says Doctor Leland.

Harley leans her head back against the pillow. "How'd I get here? I don't remember turning myself in." It's a remote possibility, of course, but still a possibility.

"How do you think you got your injury?"

"My injury?" Oh yeah, her arm. She lifts her head and gazes at it with woozy eyes. "Fell off the swings?" she offers with a weak smile.

"You were shot," Doctor Leland says, without preamble or any softening of her voice. She goes on to describe the facts: that the bullet missed her heart, sparing her life, but was angled upwards and shattered the medial side of her shoulder-blade, passing further up and out of her body just below her clavicle, piercing muscle and tendon and rendering her arm useless for quite some time, until she could heal. The reason she wasn't whimpering in pain was because she'd been doped up quite well; the fact that she was relatively clear-headed despite the drugs was something that Doctor Leland wanted to explore, as it seemed to indicate either a highly developed consciousness or habitual drug use. The fact that the bullet didn't kill her was attributed to carelessness, rather than deliberateness as to aim.

"Whoever shot you didn't even bother to look," Doctor Leland informs her. Her eyes were so keen that Harley has to look away, so she does, examining the ceiling with all evidence of fascination. "Do you know who it might have been?"

"Same guy who shot Lincoln?" suggests Harley. "Whatsisname? Booth."

"That seems highly unlikely." The doctor is trying to get a reading on just how crazy she is; Harley's had enough interrogations like this to recognize it when she sees it.

"That's what they say about all conspiracies," she whispers.

Leland folds her arms.

"Harleen, do you recall what you were doing at the time of your shooting?"

Harley actually puts her mind to this one, as it's a question she'd like answered. She remembers burning dinner, for certain. And then there was a plan that wasn't a plan— there was a series of actions that were dedicated to a single purpose— or something like that. Anyway the boys been getting ready to go out, leaving her behind, and she had the usual trouble with the concept of alone, so she took the note from her underwear drawer and set it lovingly on the bed, and then with secrecy had begged Gorgeous to let her play point man, in the plan that wasn't a plan. Yes. That was undoubtedly what had occurred.

"No," she says, innocently. "I was just minding my own business."

Leland is getting fed up with her, she thinks. Her smooth, calm, measured voice gets a little testy. "You were participating in a plot to abduct the Commissioner. Somehow our informants never caught wind of this, and it was carried out."

"You know why?" If her arm wasn't strapped down, she would be lifting it to point a finger at Leland; but it is, so she can't. "You know why you didn't hear about it? Because Mr. J doesn't plot. Doesn't plan. Doesn't scheme. God knows he's told us that enough by now— you'd think you would have picked up on it." She flops her head back against the pillow and sighs, allowing her face to relax into a smile. "He's a free agent, and does what he wants when he wants to do it. That's all."

"Apparently what he wanted to do was shoot you," says Doctor Leland.

Harley considers this.

"It's in the realms of possibility," she admits. Doctor Leland, clearly expecting her to be more shocked by this, gives up and sits down at last.

"Alright," she says, and she looks tired. "Why would he want to do a thing like that?"

Harley shrugs as best as she can. Her dead arm is weighing on her like a brick on her spirit, and she regrets not being able to move. She's always been a fidgety sort of person, and being in a bind like this is cramping her style. "Could be all sorts of reasons. I do know it's not because I burnt dinner though. He thought it was funny this time. Because I left the eyes in."

"Harleen," says Doctor Leland, and shakes her head. "I'm concerned about you, I think you should know that. This relationship— any relationship in which you might be shot at any time, for any reason, is not a healthy one. By definition. Being shot does not do the human body any good."

Harley giggles. "This is a funny thing to be lectured on. You know, you remind me of my sex ed teacher when I was in school."

Leland looks at her gravely. "I'm serious, Harleen. After all, with your training, you ought to recognize that this can't go anywhere good. And with your— history—"

Harley shakes her head this time. Her smile disappears.

"See, that's where you're wrong. The history doesn't matter, nothing matters. He doesn't care, he told me that from the start."

"That could be the problem," says Leland gently, but Harley goes on.

"History means nothing to him, he makes up his own all the time and there's no reason why I shouldn't. To match. Like my face. And it's not that we're not going anywhere good, because we are somewhere good. We're wonderful. And furthermore, he never would have shot me if he read my note first."

Leland just sits and looks at her. "Your note?"

"I told him the truth, as I saw it," says Harley, archly. "History repeats itself. I think it'll be a boy. I want to call him Frank, so he'll have a chance at being honest."

Light shoots through the doorway, hits him in the face with an almost physical presence. He winces into awakening.

"Rise and shine," says a voice; one which, last time he heard it, was resonating tinnily through the speaker grille at Arkham. He'd gone to see one masked vigilante and ended up sparring with another; the Joker was the one who informed him that his cell-mate, Batsy, had flown the coop. The clown even implied that he'd helped the Bat out. The wording vague enough to cause worry, there had been a few tense weeks and late-night searches, but when no pointy-eared corpse had bobbed up in the river, it had been let go. Still the fact remains that Batman hasn't been seen since he escaped Arkham, though there was one inmate that insisted she saw him return one night.

The Joker, on the other hand, seems to pop up all over the place since his escape, like a broken jack-in-the-box, like a bad penny. Like a misplaced punch line.

Gordon opens his eyes as far as he can; which isn't very far. They're swollen and bruised and it hurts to try and use them. There's a rope wrapped around his middle, hogtying him to the chair, but his hands and arms are free. He lifts his hands to his face, dabs gingerly at various spots to see how much blood is still flowing; none, it seems, though there's plenty crusted and dried at the corners of his mouth, under his nose, stiff and uncomfortable in his mustache. The Joker comes close and bends down, inspecting him for the same purpose, nodding deeply and seriously as though he's a doctor with a worrisome patient.

"Hmmm," he says. "That looks fairly nasty. Could get infected. Does it hurt?"

Gordon stares at the painted face two inches in front of his nose. The Joker arches his eyebrows at him, and Gordon lifts both hands to one side, clasping them together, and swings them into his enemy's chin, knocking him backwards to the floor with not much more than an, "Oof!"

"Feels better now," says Gordon.

The clown looks up at him wryly from his position sprawled gangly-legged on the cement, his coat swirled around him. "See, that's why I left your arms out of the rope, so you could get this foolish notion of revenge out of your system. You took the opportunity, that's— great." He stands, brushing himself down and settling the coat more neatly on his shoulders, smoothing his hand over his hair. "Now we can get down to business." He pauses, puts one finger to his lips as though in thought. "Well— business for you. Pleasure for me. Business is my pleasure. That's why I never bother to take vacations. You've heard that evil never sleeps, Commissioner?"

Gordon nods, because he's not only heard it, he's experienced it first hand.

"Well, uh," the Joker says, carefully, tilting his painted face to one side, "I'm an insomniac."

Gordon huffs out something akin to a laugh, or at least a chuckle. "Tell me something I don't know."

The Joker purses his lips, looks thoughtful. "Okay. Uh— if you wrap your hand around your elbow you won't be able to make your fingers meet."

The Commissioner stares at him, point-blank, deadpan. The Joker licks his lips, squints at him. "Are you so jaded, Mr. Gordon— uh, Jim— that you're completely unafraid of me?" He gestures at himself with both hands. "Do I mean nothing to you, me, the architect of terror in Gotham?"

And then Gordon laughs.

"Wake up and get out from under your rock," he says. "You're not the only ball game in town. You're a man with problems, sure, so are we all. But Gotham's underbelly attracts guys like you. They're streaming into town every week, you could set your clocks by the terrorist threats. Right now out there there's more people who take pleasure in badness than there are people who take pleasure in doing good." He shakes head. "You may be a handful of trouble, Joker, but there's buckets of it waiting in the wings."

The Joker stabs a finger at him, to pass the time while he thinks of what he wants to say. "But I am the one who has you tied up."

Gordon has to admit that this is true. "So tell me." He shrugs. "What's the plan?"

His enemy rolls his eyes. "Always with the plan. Everyone's always asking me, what's the plan? What's the big friggin' deal about plans, anyway? Do they cure cancer or what?"

Gordon raises his eyebrows, consciously mocking the look that the Joker had given him a moment ago. "So you're telling me you don't have a plan?"

The Joker pauses, flexes his hands, then relaxes, and grins.

"As a matter of fact," he purrs, "this time—"

He robs the rich to feed the poor

Then robs the poor again

Lock up your precious things, you girls,

Keep close watch on your men