AN: Still don't own Batman or any of its characters/settings. If I did, I'd have better things to do with them than write fan fiction.

He came to in the infirmary ward, a doctor setting his arm. Crane wasn't sure if the pain alone had woken him, but it had certainly helped. Why the hell didn't they give me morphine before they tried that? he wondered, biting his lips bloody to keep from crying out. It's not as if unconsciousness stops pain receptors from firing.

They didn't care. He answered himself, the voice coming from near that dark spot in the back of his head. They couldn't care less how the patients feel, as long as they're still living and the doctors are still in control. It was true. Jonathan had never worried about inflicting harm on his charges back when he was administrator. He'd relished it, actually. The threat of pain caused fear and their fear gave him power.

Being on the receiving end of the power trip though, that just sucked.

He'd swallowed enough blood to induce nausea by the time the cast was on his arm. And that was when the nurse chose to show up with the morphine. It would have been funny, Crane supposed, if it had been someone else. "Here you go, dear," she said, sticking him just above the cast. He could barely feel the sting of the needle, over the pounding ache below it.

"About time," he muttered, wondering how long it took to start working. He wasn't sure if the nurse had heard him or not, but she turned to face him. Her brows furrowed as she touched a gloved hand to Jonathan's lips, surely Joker red by now.

"Did you bite yourself?"

What kind of a question was that? As if he'd started bleeding spontaneously in the middle of being tortured. "No, it happened by itself." His voice didn't sound as sharp as he thought it would be, and the agony in his arm had lessened slightly. The drugs must be working. Thank God.

The nurse sighed. "I thought they should have drugged you before they set the bone. I'll get you a tissue, dear." She walked away, Crane's view of her retreating back blurring as if he'd taken his glasses off. By the time she came back with the Kleenex, he was out.

"Dr. Crane?"

He wasn't quite asleep anymore, and he didn't think he had been for awhile, though it was hard to tell. He'd been lying in a drug haze for at least an hour, somewhere between sleep and full consciousness. Morphine induced? Definitely, but it was comfortable. The first time he could remember that he hadn't dreamed about the Batman, and now here was this voice, ruining it.

"Dr. Crane?"

Jonathan tried for a "piss off," but that seemed like it would take too much energy, so he settled for "eh," hoping it conveyed how very much he did not care to interact with this person. As much as one syllable could convey that.

"Dr. Crane? My name is Harleen Quinzel."

His eyes shot open, snapping shut almost as fast. He blinked a few times against the harsh daylight in the ward, then sat up, looking to his companion. What was so special about this woman that drew the Joker's interest? All he saw was a vague blur.

Oh. Well, the glasses would help, Crane chided himself as he fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table, sliding them on somewhat awkwardly without the use of his left hand. He turned back to her. She was twenty-something, as he'd thought, with blond hair pulled back and glasses. Attractive, but not spectacularly so. And he didn't think attraction mattered to the Joker in the first place. So what made her so important?

"How long have I been in here?" he asked. He vaguely remembered waking up briefly just to be doped again, but the ward's clock was out of view and he couldn't see the sun's position through the windows.

"This is your second day. You slept through all of yesterday. It's about one now."

Jonathan blinked. "They kept me two days for a broken arm?"

"For observation. You were having night terrors while you were out."

Shit. So the drugs didn't stop the nightmares, though they did keep him from remembering. It was bad enough that he was still so frightened by a costumed vigilante, but to know that he'd humiliated himself by having screaming fits in front of the doctors was insult to injury.

He glanced back at Quinzel. Behind her glasses, her eyes were as wide and blue as his own, furtively scanning his face, no doubt taking in the blush he could feel there. Lovely. So now not only did she know he was having nightmares, but also that her knowledge of it upset him. He hated for the psychiatrists to have anything resembling personal information about him; just a crack in the armor for them to dig their nails in and rip apart. God, if she asks me about it I might have to kill her. He couldn't of course, he didn't feel like spending months in solitary, and the cast on his arm was deterrent enough, imagining how the Joker would react to him killing this woman. Still, the urge to let his dark side take over was growing.

"Were you dreaming about the Joker?" she asked softly.

"Huh?" He blinked. The Joker? Even he wasn't anything compared to Batman. At least the Joker had never reduced him to a hallucinating, cowering mess, broken bones aside. Besides, what would make her think that? The question was so bizarre to Jonathan that he forgot to be angry at her.

"No. Why would I be?"

Now Quinzel looked surprised. "I thought it would be natural. He did break your arm, after all."

"Yes, but—wait, how did you know that?"

"They didn't tell you?" she asked, brows raised. "The Joker's the one who brought you down here."

"What?" She couldn't be serious, could she? Obviously, the Joker was insane, but there was madness and then there was madness. No one would be crazy enough to drag his own victim over to those in charge and say, "Hey, look what I did."

On the other hand, this was the Joker.

"You were unconscious. He brought you into the infirmary and told the doctors he'd broken your arm. He's in solitary confinement now." She paused. "They really didn't tell you that?"

So the clown really was that crazy. Jonathan was grudgingly impressed. "I spent yesterday unconscious. I doubt they would have told me if I was awake, anyway."

Quinzel leaned forward, a loose strand of hair falling in front of her face as she wrote something on the notepad resting her lap. "Does that bother you? That they don't seem to care if you know what's going on?"

Christ, psychiatrists. He'd never realized just how insulting it was to have someone prying into his innermost thoughts until he'd been the one lying on the couch. If there was one good thing to come out of the night when Batman had force fed him his own toxin, it was that he wasn't one of those pretentious bastards anymore. Not that he'd spent a lot of time drilling patients about their feelings anyway, especially towards the end of his career. He'd had other things to focus on.

At that moment, there was nothing he would have liked more than to tell her exactly where she could shove that notepad, but he doubted the Joker would take that well. If he wanted to keep his right arm unbroken, there was no way out of this but to answer. Crane sighed. "Look, Dr. Quinzel—"

"Call me Harley. Everyone does."

"Harley, then. Look, I'll be honest. I don't like psychiatrists. I don't think there's any point in talking to you right now, and I don't believe it would do either of us any good even if we went over every aspect of my life five times with a fine toothed comb. Well, maybe you, because at least you would have proved to your superiors that you could get your patient to talk, but at the end of it all I think I'd be in the same place I am now, so I don't see the use in trying."

She blinked.

Fuck. And that, idiot, he told himself, is why honest is not the best policy. She's going to leave, and the Joker's going to want to know why. And he'll ask why by breaking your other arm, and then one of your legs. Probably both. He might even carve up your face, if he feels like it. He cleared his throat. "Er…what I mean is—"

"No, don't apologize." She waved one hand as if smacking the excuse away. "I want to know how you feel. It's not something you should think you need to cover up. If I do or say something that makes you uncomfortable, I want you to tell me, okay?"

"All right." God, this is turning into some sort of After-School Special. Because just killing him wouldn't have been painful enough, thanks to the Joker he had to sit through this drek? He did not want to talk and bond and heal and love. He wanted to get out of this bed and make this girl scream, give her a glimpse of the mind she was trying to get into. Can't do that, he reminded himself, biting down on his lip and tasting the dried blood there.

"You," she said, flipping through his folder, "have been through many different doctors, haven't you?"

"Scared them all away." Like I'd love to do to you.

"Mm-hmm." Harley looked back up at him, her eyes meeting his. None of the Arkham staff ever did that. It made Jonathan uneasy. "I imagine it would be hard to trust anyone when you never know how long they'll stay."

Am I supposed to respond to that? He shrugged, waiting for her to go on.

"Now you mentioned early that speaking to me would "prove to my superiors that I can get you to talk," right? That's not something I care about, Dr. Crane. I'm here to help you with anything you're going through, not to make a point, understand? And I'm not going to leave, even if you think that this is fruitless. All right?"

Lady, I may be on morphine, but I'm not high enough to believe that. Oh, it was tempting to say it. But he nodded instead. "Sorry."

"Don't be. There's nothing to apologize for." Her eyes drifted down to his cast. "Can I ask why the Joker did that to you?"

Now how was he supposed to answer that? If the Joker didn't want Crane scaring her off, then he must want this woman to stay at the hospital. Jonathan doubted she'd respond well to "he wanted to threaten me into behaving so you'd hang around." That would probably put her on the next bus out of town.

So, lying then. He looked away from her, blinking a few times before open his eyes to their widest and staring down at his bed sheets, frowning. "I don't think I'm ready to talk about that yet." His words were as soft as he could make them and still be heard.

"I understand." He heard her stand. "Well Doctor, that's all the time in this week's session, but I'll see you again, okay?"

"All right." He could feel her eyes on him, but didn't face her until she'd turned and headed out the door.

He was moved back into his own cell by nightfall. Still receiving morphine, though milder than before, he drifted off easily enough, and woke just as easily to find someone sitting on top of him, holding his cast-wrapped arm up.

"Joker?"

"Yep."

Crane tried to pull back. He felt a light slap against the side of his head and gave up.

"Calm down. I'm signin' your cast, you'll ruin it if ya move around like that."

"You're what?"

"Signin' it. See?" His own arm was shoved into his face, then quickly tugged away again. "Sorry. Forgot ya can't read without your glasses. Well, it says "Get well soon-J," and under that I've drawn a smiley face."

"Wonderful," Crane said dryly, "though I take it you didn't break out of solitary just to apologize."

"Ah, so the scarecrow does have more than straw in his head. Didn't scare my girl off, didya?"

"No. I was probably the most responsive patient she's had in years."

"Good." Crane saw the blurred outline of what had to be a hand reach out, ruffling his hair. "'Cuz if ya hadn't, I'd, uh, have to have taken this off-" Here he tapped against the cast, "And broken your arm in a few more spots."

"Lucky me. But why did you break into my cell? Couldn't you have just checked Quinzel's notes? Her office is closer to solitary anyway."

"Kinda lacks the personal touch, don't ya think? I wanted to make sure there's no hard feelings after the other night. And maybe I already checked, or that's my next stop."

"Ah."

"Now." the Joker ran his fingers through Crane's hair and down to the bandage covering the fingernail cuts in his cheek. "Didya have any other questions? 'Cuz I'm getting kinda tired of answering them." He pushed down on the bandage, nails etching into the surface.

"There's nothing else."

"Good." And then, just as quickly as he'd jumped Jonathan the night before, he was gone.

Crane lay awake for some time after that, mind working through the morphine. So Harleen Quinzel was a new, idealistic psychiatrist that the Joker had taken an interest to, and he played a part in this somehow? The Joker wanted to met her, that was obvious, and Crane was fairly sure he knew why. From what he'd seen in the past few days, the Joker was a manipulator, and a naïve young doctor could fall for his lies. So where do I come in?

He pondered it for a while until the answer came to him. After the Joker, Scarecrow was the most dangerous "super-criminal" housed at Arkham. Nigma didn't kill people, and was fairly easy to catch once the bat figured out his riddles, and Isley only went after plant-related things. Scarecrow and the Joker were the only two that terrorized indiscriminately, and the Joker was the bigger threat as Scarecrow only sought to strike fear, whereas Joker did whatever he felt like.

So if an ambitious young doctor did have her eyes on an incredibly dangerous patient, like the Clown Prince of Crime, and managed to convince her superiors that she could handle an extreme case, they'd want to try her on something lesser to begin, wouldn't they? Meaning that, if he was right, Crane was the only thing between the Joker and whatever he wanted from Dr. Harleen Quinzel.

Not that he was stupid enough to stand between the Joker and his goals, but it would be interesting to see where this led, to say the least.

AN: Thanks for the review, First Lady Lestat! I'll try to have the next chapter up soon.