Chapter 3

The folder with the files and notes...

Harleen glanced around the dank room, lost. Her fingers were interlocked together so tightly in her lap that she could feel her long thumbnails almost penetrating through the thin layer of skin on her forefingers, yet if it was enough even to break through and draw blood, she couldn't be sure. For some reason, she couldn't feel anything below the neck.

It occurred to her belatedly that she'd forgotten the notes and his file, that she'd left them in a pile on her messy desk. She could feel a disconcerting squeezing sensation in her chest, as if someone had reached right through her and were now gripping at her heart in their hands. She felt suffocated. Discombobulated. Unprepared.

Now, she regretted more than ever the fact that she had senselessly left all the case files and notes of the patient on her desk.

She thought she had been prepared for this, that she was ready to put all her hard-earned work and study after majoring psychiatry at the University into practice, only nothing could ready her for this. She wondered if this was normal, if this was what everyone went through when they found their soulmate, so unexpectedly and at random. Did they feel just as lost and shocked as she did? Or was it just only her?

She assumed her predicament was rare, one of a kind. How many people could say that they crossed paths with their soulmate while they were there to treat them as an inpatient at a lunatic asylum?

She felt a tight pressure around her skull, as if an elastic band was wrapped around her forehead, making her head jerk and shake uncontrollably when she mustered up the courage to glance at the patient again. She found him watching her intently, his grayish-blue eyes focused on nothing else but her face as though he were memorizing every part of it, something like mirth dancing in them.

It seemed The Joker was holding in his breath as he leaned forward in his chair, as far as his restraints would allow, his eyes seeming to be searching her face for something it revealed about itself.

What was he looking for? Harleen wondered, her head twitching again as she swallowed against a dry lump that had formed in the back of her throat. Did he even know what the tattoos meant for them?

Did he know what it meant- just what they were destined to become? Or did he not even care?

Sociopath, she remembered suddenly, one of the diagnosis in his case file. He was a sociopath.

Did he even feel anything at all about this? Was he even capable of it? Feeling deeply about somebody at all?

His violet lips parted, metal flashing on his teeth as the noise erupted out between them, bouncing hauntingly off the four walls in the room, "Ha. Ha. Ha." The laugh was slow and deep, resembling a growl.

Harleen thought it sounded triumphant, as if the patient was feeling happy about something. Like he'd accomplished a secret mission and Harleen was the unknowing butt of the joke.

As she forced herself to not shy away and withdraw from his gaze, she could feel her tummy start with that warm, tingling sensation again. The apples of her cheeks lifted as the corners of her lips twitched. Immediately conscious of what she was doing and of how it might be interpreted, that she may be encouraging him if she let herself do it at the sound of his laughter, she pressed her lips together tight, refraining from letting her smile show.

Yanking her fingers out from their stiff, interlocked position in her lap, Harleen rested both elbows on the cool steel table, mirroring him, her spine arching off the chair towards him herself, her armpits feeling damp with sweat.

"Didn't you...uh... hear me the first time, Doctor?"

She hadn't even realized how close she was getting to him when she felt his hot breaths blow against her forehead and her nose from across the table, tickling her when he spoke the words.

A loose strand of her blonde hair blew in front of her glasses, a tendril she'd missed when putting her hair up that morning before coming into the asylum for the meeting. Their heads were barely inches away from each other's, his eyes boring into hers. It was as if she was having some sort of out-of-body experience, as if she was being drawn to him, pulled to him like a magnet.

"I asked if your friends call you Harley?" He clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth loudly, his voice shaky with amusement. "Kitty cat got your tongue, Doctor Quinzel?" He laughed again, and Harleen noticed how he pronounced certain words with dramatic flair and overemphasised them. "Thought all you Doctor types were supposed to be real... real intellectuals?"

Just like that, she snapped out of it. The question seemed to bring Harleen out of whatever trance she was suffering through, and she pulled back, pushing her spine back into the hard chair.

She felt embarrassed, mortified at how quickly she had seemed to forget herself and just where she was. She was at Arkham and he was her patient. The guard was still standing outside the door, watching over them and their interactions.

It was inappropriate, what she'd just done, in getting close. She didn't even know how it had happened, but all she could rationalize it with, was that she felt an undeniable, instant pull to him. It was terrifying, but she felt it there in the atmosphere, calling her to him.

She cleared her throat loudly, bringing up a hand to tuck that small piece of wayward hair back behind her earlobe. All the while, she could still feel him watching her, staring, observing...

His words came back to her, those six words she had memorized by heart and had stuck in her head ever since she was 22 and the mark had first formed across her belly, in the vibrant green ink.

She used to be so excited at the idea of finally understanding what context the question would be said in once she'd found her soulmate.

She knew now what context those words were said in and Harleen realized how naive she must have been. The question was a knowing taunt as it left his mouth and it soured and marred whatever little romantic notions she'd had.

It was as if he knew all along what she had been waiting for her soulmate to say and now he was rubbing it all into her face spitefully. He was making fun of her.

Determination filtering through her, Harleen set her jaw, swiveling her eyes on the man in front of her.

"Oh, I... I don't have a lot of friends," she admitted once she felt capable of speaking again, pleased when her voice sounded stronger with a hint of a bite, her Brooklyn accent becoming more pronounced with her anger, "So I wouldn't even begin to know what people dare to call me behind my back."

"Well, Harley... you got one now." His tone sounded as if he believed he was doing her a great service, and when Harleen brought her gaze back up to him, The Joker had his head angled to the side as he seemed to watch her every reaction.

This was not at all what she had expected to happen. Admittedly, Harleen had fantasized about this moment; both, meeting her soulmate and having her first patient as a real psychiatrist.

This was going so far against how the script had played out in her mind, of both scenarios. For one thing, the lines between patient and soulmate were blurred.

Her eyebrows darted up as she rested both elbows on the steel tabletop, suddenly alert. "I got one, what?

"You know, a... a friend. 'Ol buddy, ol' pal, ol' friend of mine'." A rumbling dismissive grunt left his throat as he rolled his eyes and smiled at her. "Whatever you wanna call it..."

"Well, that's all very sweet of you, but I'm not exactly here to make friends with you," she pointed out gently, her voice far more hesitant than she would have liked it to sound.

But it was true; She wasn't here to be his friend or anything of the sort. It was an immediate conflict of interest; She had procedure to follow, and yet, she was expected to follow that procedure when he was supposed to be the very same man she was supposed to have a future with?

Harleen felt thrown off by the unforeseeable dilemma, to the point where acting normal was becoming increasingly difficult. It became hard to concentrate and do her job properly when, at the back of her mind, her head was reeling by the discovery that this man, out of all the other billion in the world, had happened to be her soulmate.

She glanced in his eyes tentatively before turning her head down, focusing on a stain on the steel table instead.

It was so much easier to maintain her professionalism when she didn't look directly at the man. She had to steer it onto the right path again. She had to take control of the situation.

"I'm your new psychiatrist, and firstly... before we get started," - she could see the written policy of Arkham's procedure at the back of her mind, her voice robotic and rapid as she said it by heart- "I feel I should warn you that whatever you say to me, in here, in confidence during our three forty-minute sessions weekly, it... it won't..." She paused nervously when she heard the bemusing sounds he was omitting; a reflection of what he felt of her statement.

The sounds he was making made her feel strangely warm inside. Harleen hadn't heard anything like it before. When she glanced at The Joker, she felt suddenly remorseful, as if she was intruding in on something private and was being rude, yet he seemed almost peaceful and serene.

"It... it won't be repeated to..." She fell silent again when more gurgling sounds left him.

He reminded her then of a cat in human form, comfortably basking in the sun, making repetitive throaty purring sounds while he leaned forward in the chair towards her, his head tilted as far back as it would humanly go, his entire throat bared to her.

She could see his lips were open in a somewhat peaceful grimace, the faint gleam of silver from his row of teeth as he kept his eyes tightly closed, his eyelids dark with black makeup.

Harleen caught glimpse of the soulmark tattoo in cursive blue on the side of his pale throat again as her cheeks burned. Should she put an end to their session already? She wondered, her eyes falling down to the time on her wrist-watch. Was that what he wanted? Their session had barely even begun, but it was obvious they wouldn't be getting anywhere today or make any significant immediate progress. The patient was bored; His behavior said as much.

Just when Harleen considered calling the session short and drowning in her failures, The Joker startled her by speaking. "Keep... going...with the chit-chat, Doc," he grunted out in a drugged out, husky voice.

He was like a boy she knew in school, Harleen thought. One of those boys that loved being the class clown, always being outrageous and doing disruptive things to annoy the teachers and people in authority. She almost laughed to herself. Harleen had always had a soft spot for those types of boys.

His eyes were still clenched closed as another noise left him. It sounded like a frustrated groan. Harleen watched as he jerked his head to the side, rubbing his earlobe against the rough fabric of the straitjacket desperately.

Tearing her eyes away from him, Harleen nodded once, despite knowing he couldn't see her. "Um, as I was saying, whatever you tell me in our sessions; it won't be repeated to nobody- unless its something that's like a threat to yourself or to me or anybody else here in the building, of course."

She let her blue eyes glide over to the patient again.

Harleen couldn't tell whether he was truly listening or not; He was grunting and mumbling, his bleached forehead crumpled in what appeared to her as irritation as he kept swiping his ear against the shoulder padding of the straitjacket while he rolled his head around on his neck.

What was he doing? Harleen couldn't help wondering. It was as if the patient had an extremely bad, severe itch that was bothering him. Was that why he was scratching his ear on his shoulder the way he was? Because he couldn't do it with his hands and fingers, seeing as they were restrained?

Harleen felt a wave of unstoppable pity course through her as she watched him battling with relieving an invisible itch. She supposed she could imagine how horrible it would be, needing to scratch something and not being able to.

She shook the thought away, using her fingers to correct her glasses. "Um, so... as I was telling you, I take patient confidentiality extremely seriously, so I just want you to be aware of that before we begin." Inhaling in deeply and steeling herself mentally, she risked a peek up at the patient again.

The patient. She would only dare let herself think of him as the patient. Not her soulmate, not anything else. Just the patient.

"I know that you've probably heard that loads of times from your previous two times of being here, but it's sort of compulsory to warn you." When he gave her no verbal cue to continue, she frowned. "You following me and what I'm telling you, Mr... Joker?" She rested her hands on the table, leaning slightly forward in the seat again.

It was the first time she had allowed herself to address him by his name ever since stepping foot into the room with him. It seemed to roll off her tongue pleasantly, making a tingling sensation prickle and dance across her skin. She saw The Joker abruptly stop sliding his ear back and forth on the stark-white fabric of the straitjacket as the name left her mouth, his lips curling into a wide grin as a long, deep groan of appreciation left him.

When he reopened his eyes slowly to focus on her, Harleen felt suddenly as if he was a wild animal. It was as if he wanted to devour her up, like she was a piece of meat, his grayish-blue eyes twinkling.

"Name sounds good on your lips, Doctor," he rumbled out longingly. "Just like a lullaby." His eyes lit up, an unidentifiable emotion forming in them. "There is something you could do for me, Doctor Quinzel. An... itty-bitty little favor. You wanna be a doll and do it for me?"

Harleen hesitated, deliberating. She turned her head towards the window, checking to see whether the guard was still there. She could see the man through the glass, his arms folded over his uniform. He was monitoring them, ensuring everything went to plan and that The Joker didn't step out of line with her.

She dragged her eyes back to the patient in front of her, feeling disgracefully curious. "What?" she asked, licking her lips.

"Well..." He licked his own lips with his tongue, moistening them as he moved his head from side to side, and she thought she heard his neck crack along with the movement. "If you'd be so kind..." She saw his eyes dart to the window himself, seeking out the guard. "I got a little, uh... problem that Doctor Quinzel can cure." His eyes returned to her, his voice going high, deeper, with excitement. "You want to get rid of it for me?"

Harleen felt a different sort of mischievous thrill shoot through her at what was happening; Something she hadn't felt before. Whatever he wanted her to do, whatever favor, it made her feel deliciously naughty. As if she was being deviant; the chance of them getting caught and the repercussions she would have to face exhilarating.

She figured the chances of him becoming a danger to her limited. He was restrained in the straitjacket, after all. They also shared soulmarks; a sign that they were destined to spend the rest of their future together, no matter how odd it was that he was her patient and, by all medical prognosis, insane.

Harleen hadn't heard of any soulmates dying at the hands of their marked one. It seemed a simple enough risk to take. Besides, what was the worst that could happen?

Harleen sat up, resting all her weight on her elbows, her glasses falling to the edge of her nose. "What exactly are you wanting me to do for you, Mr Joker?" Mr Joker. It felt awkward coming from her voice. She wished he would demand that she call him by something else.

He clenched his eyes shut again momentarily, a heavy long grunt escaping his mouth as he sighed at the use of his name falling from her lips.

Harleen found it rather nice. He liked the sound of her voice. She could tell, and maybe, if she was honest, Harleen found herself just as fond of the little noises he made.

"I got a bad case of the tingles." He laughed shortly, then snarled through gritted teeth in annoyance, hitting the same ear against the padding of the straitjacket. "You wanna make it go away for me? Hmm?"

"Where?" she asked uncertainly. "Your... your left ear?"

"Oh, no. No, my..." He trailed off into a low murmur that she couldn't hear, but she realized she hadn't needed him to completely explain the origin of that tingle.

Harleen felt her heart burst and sing silently at his words. So she wasn't the only one, apparently. Every now and then, her stomach would give off a light fluttering sensation over the permanent mark, as if it was simply responding to The Joker's gruff voice alone.

She could only just imagine how difficult it must be, not being able to soothe the itch, the burning. It was reassuring to her that she wasn't alone in this, that he felt certain things as well. He may be considered a dangerous sociopath, but he couldn't be all that, could he? He felt it, too. He had to.

"Sure. I suppose I can do that," she murmured, agreeing.

She darted a look at the guard again, then she stood, moving from her chair slowly, her heels clacking on the concrete floor as she edged towards him.

The Joker watched her every movement with his eyes. She saw them rake down her body, taking a hungry inspection of her dressed in her blouse and neat skirt, before they returned to her face again. He lifted his chin high in the air, baring his throat and mark to her.

My name is Doctor Harleen Quinzel...

Tentatively, she reached out, her fingers outstretched. The instance her fingers brushed against the Adam's apple of his throat, she felt the pale muscles twitch as he swallowed, a low intake of breath leaving his lips. His capped silver teeth seemed to grin and wink at her, as did his eyes, when she glided her hand across to his mark. His skin felt smooth and cool beneath the tips of her fingers.

The light bulb above them on the ceiling creaked and made a sizzling noise, but Harleen paid that no mind. She found herself too wrapped up in the moment.

"Feeling better now, Mr. Joker?"

"Oh, yes. You're so good. So... good."

When she reached the beginning of the soulmark, another hiss left him, a growl that sounded both of pleasure and relief. He closed his eyes again, tilting his head like a dog that enjoyed having the spot between his ears scratched, as she traced along the cursive blue lines that spelled out her name with her fingers.

Just like hers, the ink felt layers deep into the skin. She could feel reverberations through his throat, and then realized curiously that it was because he was moaning quietly. He enjoyed her touching him, maybe as much as Harleen thought she did, surprisingly.

It was then it happened.

The light bulb made another sizzling noise, then it shorted out, the round bulb smashing into little pieces, sending shards of glass shattering around them as the entire room fell into a shadowy darkness.

Harleen moved back in her heels unsteadily, an uncontainable shriek of fright leaving her as instinctively she reached up with her arms, covering her face and her hair so that she wouldn't get cut. Through the loud sound of her heart hammering in her ears like a hammer being beaten against a rock, her breaths laboured, she heard The Joker cackle, his laughter like a soothing balm over the unexpectedness of what had just happened.

Feeling brave enough, Harleen brought her arms down, sliding one hand down to cover her chest in alarm while the other she moved over her hair, sweeping pieces of glass away. She wondered if it had been the skin-on-skin contact between them that had been the main cause of the lightbulb shorting out and smashing, sending glass dancing around them.

If so, how could touch be so enticingly destructive?

Here's another chapter. :D Hope it was all right, super nervous yet again. Whoa, thank you all so much for being so kind! I am so blown away! Thank you! Again, I would love to know your thoughts and feelings. Liking it? Hating it? Things I need to work on? Any advice? It's most welcome as I'm not sure if I'm doing justice to the characters and their story.