The Joker came into the room wearing a dark red vest – a shirt neatly tucked under formal pants of the same color, a moss green tie around his neck and polished black shoes. My heart skipped a beat upon first beholding him, imagining for a second it could be someone else… Upon recognizing him as the clown prince of crime that terrorized the streets of Gotham before his inevitable arrest, my heart still reacted, with a little girl's composition, to being in the presence of a handsome man.

Inappropriate, sure… but, again, more than a psychiatrist, I was a human being – a susceptible human being, often ruled by primitive instincts that knew no such distinctions as criminal records. Nature is what rules us in a basic level… and nature loves violence! Being aware of that and not freaking out in the inevitability of finding a patient's sociopathic drive interesting was the first step towards being a confident, composed psychiatrist.

Still, I felt myself creep and had to look away – That man seemed to stir a conflict between Dr. Harley and nature Harley much too often, and with growing intensity.

"To what do we owe the occasion?" I cleared my throat.

"The good doctor asked that I dressed accordingly – I decided to go with my favorite piece. What do you think?" He paced slowly before the table, looking fixedly at me.

"It looks extravagant!" I lied, to which he chuckled.

I did ask him to wear something over his torso on our last session – on the unfortunate day, I had been possessed by bizarre dreaming at home. A bizarre, twisted, hot dream in which I embraced death for the sake of pleasure, submissive to the first so long as I received the latter. Such dream made his bare torso look positively distracting, positively disturbing, and I asked that he would dress properly for the next session.

The piece, along with his green hair and extremely pale skin, made him look like a clown from some adult fantasy, however. More than that, it made him look exquisitely charming.

"Is that why you can't look at me properly?" he teased, then added quickly before I had the time to answer "I would have bribed the guard to bring me one of my favorite fragrances too, but I figured that would be overkill."

"How so?"

He turned, pleased that I asked:

"When you press too many buttons at the same time, doc, it's hard to tell which one actually responded…"

Pulling down the tie with an index finger, the vessels on his neck jumped out – half a card from his tattoo being made visible. My forehead sweated nervously – I think I preferred him when he dressed like an inmate.

"But enough about me – How have you been, Harley?" He stood in my view "Got up to check your locks many times this week?"

"It's Dr. Quinn, Joker. I mean, Dr. Quinnzel…" Of course the stupid slide wouldn't go unnoticed – but Joker was so kind as to laugh to himself, quietly, while I felt my temperature rise from embarrassment "And the answer is none, actually…" I had busied myself so much in trying to conceal my reactions inside my notes, that I myself was startled by my answer: it had been a quite peaceful week in that sense!

The joker bullied me so constantly about checking my locks, it made me more paranoid than the chaos in Arkham did by itself… But, out of so much persisting, I seemed to have grown tired of it – Looking up to his aware eyes, they shone with the pleasure of a good psychiatrist. Had he cheated me out of my fear?

"Then I was right to dress properly – It's a reason for celebration, isn't it, the evolution of paranoia!?"

"Did you do this on purpose?" I reclined back, finally giving him my full attention.

"Oh, no need to thank me, I was just trying to help…" he pulled a chair and sat down "As a reward for your progress, Harley dear, I will have a present prepared for you today…"

He lifted a finger before I could start a protest, seeing it coming, and continued, uninterrupted:

"It's impolite to reject a courtesy – You have to be grateful, for I won't admit a capricious girl throwing a tantrum over such a rare occasion as me giving away presents… Specially not my favorite girl: That would make me extremely mad with you!" His eyes chased down mine. "Ideally… you will think of it as a privilege: to be spoiled by me!"

I observed with intimidated, regretful curiosity how his entire demeanor seemed to change now that his exterior appearance matched that of a gentleman. New confidence inspired his speeches, and something about how naturally he did so told me this was the real Joker. Whatever unsophisticated beast came before that seemed but another one of his experiments…

"What if I decided I don't want to keep it – the present?"

"I'm sure the idea won't even cross your mind once you get it…" he smiled "But if you do so anyway… well, then I think a proper punishment should be in place!"

If this was another day, I would have held in a laugh – for Joker's wild fantasies often made me do so. But… now that he dressed as he did, as the joker I saw in the newspaper cuts, I thought him much more believable.

"Alright, I'll take it… let's see what you have there for me!"

He smiled, watching me fascinatedly.

"Look at us now, doc… Look at how unprofessional we are! Isn't this a delight?" He sighed, moving on his seat "You telling me I look extravagant, me asking you the questions… There is no line between us here!"

I lifted an eyebrow and listened patiently.

"Though you might look at me from your high pedestal of alleged mental superiority, you know deep down that what I say is true. Your subconscious mind knows it, if the awareness hasn't allowed you to see it yet! After all… you do miss me throughout the week, don't you?"

"I have to say, you are my most fascinating patient, yes…"

"And you are my most fascinating project! But are you sure 'patient' is the noun you're looking for? Do I look patient to you at all?" he joked.

"Would you have me refer to you as something else?"

"I don't know, would you?" He supported himself on the table, his hand played close to mine "Would you call me something else? …Something… vulgar… embarrassing… demeaning, for one or the two of us?"

Slowly, I retracted my fingers, fearing they might touch him…

"Would you call me by something that makes your chest expand, and the breathing become uneven?"

Did I breathe unevenly? I checked myself… it was only because his eyes were so close, peering down on mine as if I was locked! Probably detecting something on how my eyes shyly attempted to avoid his, he laughed:

"You have surrendered fear, but there is something else… something lacking, isn't it? What is it, Harley? And what do I get in return, if I figure it out on my own?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about!" I let out confidently, only to realize my voice was chocked, distracted, elsewhere… Joker grinned, his eyes narrowing.

"Don't you? Then I'll take the liberty to tinker with it… until, you know…" he grinned, enjoying the suspense "Until you feel it…"

"We should get back to the subject…" I interrupted.

"What subject?" Joker cocked his head sideways, his face closing in on mine slowly, carefully "We haven't done anything but chat for the last three weeks! See? This is how intimate we have become! I'm sure one longs for the other's company, for the other's conversation, for that window between the chaos where you can sit and talk about whatever you want… I only wish you'd acknowledge that, doc! I wish you'd say whatever you wanted to me, too… Like I do to you!"

"You don't think I do?" I answered, only because I was afraid of what my silence might occasion.

"Oh, not at all! I know sometimes you want to say you hate me, but only when I get too close to the truth you hide under that extra tight skin! I know sometimes you want to stab me in the heart or something, just to check if I really have one!" he grinned disturbingly, as if the idea appeased him "I know you want to say that I scare you, but thinking like that makes you feel a hot tingle up your spine, and you're afraid to like it! You want to say that I'm weird, but you don't really think so! You want to say that you're lost, lost, lost in these sessions and that you have no idea of what you're doing, but the unaware pleasure of getting up and coming to work every Wednesday keeps you from realizing you're drawing a blank here!"

I frowned – not because the joker approached progressively, not because his smile closed on my quivering lips, not because I could feel his hot breath kissing my face – but because my brain absorbed what he said, worked around it, and came back with no protests.

"Finally, you would love to tell me you had a weird, big-girl dream about me… That you can't understand why I'm in there, or why I'm in here, though you know the reason for both: It's the same! The crime, the danger, the violence…"

As the Joker himself got caught in the words he separated for me, it was easy to regain control over the taunting conversation – or to at least fight back from the uncomfortable silence:

"You think I'm attracted to the violence?"

"All of us which can't practice it are…" he chuckled lightly, confident on his statement.

"And to fear, too?"

"Fear releases adrenaline – It's one of the few wild emotions men today are still allowed to experience in civilized society, isn't it?"

"And is that why you are sending me a present? Because you believe I am attracted to you?"

I squinted my eyes – Joker got up and sat on the table, leaning down close to me:

"Naturally, one of us has to take the next step in our relationship. Oh, it's scary, I know – trust me, I do! But don't worry doc, I'll take care of you!"

One day off was fine. Two felt strange, and three were despondently curious. I sat by the window and watched the rain fall down – that season brought a lot of them, but all were watched through the thick bars surrounding Arkham. I realized, on those quiet three days, that I had barely spent any time away from my place of work since I started there. On weekends I was either there, studying my cases in my office, or hidden away in my bedroom reviewing and cataloguing files I had compiled on each patient – the lights I learned to adjust halfway out of darkness, like they were in the old asylum, because it was easier to concentrate then.

The background screams I had to go without – sometime a distant heavy metal playing on the computer, or any genre I disliked, was good enough to make me feel in the institution – it helped shut personal thoughts away.

And why did I suddenly love my job so much? I didn't. It wasn't satisfaction with the place that made me want to linger there rather than return to my own house – I just happened to have spent so much time inside, that I feared going back to my life and finding it meaningless. After all, what was the sense behind each ambition? What was the sense behind my existence out there, when inside, locked away, everyone seemed to exist just the same? I swear to God, sometimes those inmates were the happiest individuals I ever met… and who's to call them crazy? Everything seemed too relative… as relative as whether I wanted to get up and go out to do something around the city, or if I was just programmed to believe it is what normal people do.

Normal…

The tormenting short vacation (three days without working and a full weekend for myself) was occasioned by some sort of illness that struck the asylum – or so they assumed, as all of my scheduled patients for those days got transferred to the hospital.

As I sat upon the window sill perusing an old favorite reading I repeated every year - failing, however, to attribute much meaning to the loose words my eyes ran upon – I secretly, in a background thought, wished the Joker wasn't being victimized by the same disease that swept away my other patients.

He didn't, it's the truth – Healthy as a horse, and with a mind full of evil much more than of madness, as I was about to find out. He had not forgotten the promise of the gift, though I did… And all my patients being rushed to the hospital… Well, that was just the wrapping!

My present came in the form of a knock on the door just as I repeated reading the same paragraph again to absorb it. When I opened it, the present pushed me inside, grabbed me by the neck, closed the door behind us… The present made me scream, left me hysterical, covered in blood!