AN: Wow, it's been a ridiculously long time since my last update (by my personal standards, that is, I realize two weeks really isn't a big delay). I'd like to say I was busy doing something world-altering or so completely overwhelmed with life events that I didn't have time to even look at a computer, let alone turn it on and getting writing, but the fact of the matter is I've had writer's block. I then tried to curb that writer's block with a one shot, only to suffer from writer's block on that as well. Apart from a few days where I've had legitimate excuses (visiting my sister, trying to give blood and going into shock as a result), I've been gone just because my brain has refused to work. I really hope that's not the case anymore.

Thanks for all the reviews, and I'm sorry it's taken me this long to get around to the replies!

The Joker pulled the cell phone from his pocket and checked the time.

Five minutes until noon. Assuming the phone was accurate. It was the one he'd found in the glove compartment of the car he'd set on fire two nights ago, the one he'd stolen from the woman behind the counter at the florist's. The Joker didn't have a cell phone of his own or, more accurately, he didn't have a permanent one. It was beneficial to have a phone on his person, and at least one lackey needed to be aware of the number for the purposes of relaying information, but if that number fell into the wrong hands, it would be all too easy to for a plan to fall apart. The Joker preferred to operate with stolen phones, and switched them out every week or so.

If the time was accurate, and Alberto Maroni was still asleep on the other side of the bedroom doors, the man must have had one hell of an Independence Day.

Before the Joker was committed, he'd have thought little of a don sleeping in. Well, toward the end of the clown's reign of terror when Maroni's car had gone bouncing across the pavement and deprived the Italians of the most intelligent mob member in Gotham City, then yeah, sleeping on the job would have been a pretty stupid idea. But back when Sally had still be alive and well and not selling out his clown friend to the GPD, then the Italians had been by far the most powerful of Gotham's crime families, even with the pressure from the cops and the Bat. In those days, sleeping in made sense. Now that each of Gotham's crime syndicates had been crippled by the loss of their funds and the city, as Ballard had informed him, was in a bloody struggle for control again, anyone who wasn't out taking charge either had no head for business, or a spectacular hangover.

The Joker was willing to assume the latter for now. True, this on top of stealing the clown's henchmen was just asking for a paperclip to the spinal cord, but maybe the replacement Maroni was relatively new to the business. There was no sense in getting off on the wrong foot.

He raised the hand that didn't have a Glock in it and knocked out the first measure of Il Canto degli Italiani.

There was a gruff and less than amused voice from the other side of the door. "Unless you've got Excedrin, fuck off."

Well, somebody had woken up on the bitchy side of the bed. He didn't even bother to say please. The Joker decided it would be better for business relations if he didn't begin with a lecture on etiquette, and settled for knocking again. "You, uh, decent in there?"

"Who the hell is this?"

"Avon calling."

"What?"

The Joker, deciding that Maroni had had enough time by now to throw on a robe or a smoking jacket or whatever else dons wore, threw open the door and stepped inside, gun first. Behind him, Ballard and the two other henchclowns that hadn't been left guarding the hallway followed with their own pistols in hand. It had been Ballard's idea to call the others yesterday, despite the Joker's misgivings on interrupting everyone's holiday. The man had acted as though lives hung in the balance. Typical. He couldn't take a few months' vacation without everyone turning into neurotic wrecks.

Alberto Maroni, who wore a robe, not a smoking jacket, was staring at them with a look that wasn't quite fear or anger, not yet. More than anything, he looked gobsmacked. And, as the Joker had guessed, hung-over, judging from his pained expression, unkempt hair, and squinted eyes. He had his brother's eyes, though he was broader built and his hair still retained most of its color.

"Uh, hi," said the Joker, when it became clear that Maroni was not going to be a gracious host and start the introductions. "Sorry to barge in like this; we'd have called first but, uh, the number's unlisted. I'm, well, I'm guessing you know who I am as I know who you are, but I doubt you know my associates, so before we get to business I should—there's no need to pull out a gun, Al."

Maroni, who had been sliding his hand none too subtly into the nightstand drawer, froze. The fear was in his expression now. Both fear and anger, but the fear was winning out. "You—"

"All have guns?" the Joker supplied, waving his own. Maroni flinched, which was completely unnecessary. It wasn't as if he'd had his finger on the trigger. "Right, but we didn't intend to bring 'em out. It's just that, uh, your security wasn't pleased that we'd shown up without an appointment, and things got kinda.." He gestured with the gun again. "Messy."

"You killed them?" And now the anger overpowered the fear. The Joker was surprised at the flicker of annoyance he felt at that. Maroni had men by the dozen, and he'd still felt compelled to take the Joker's. Not that he had any attachment to them, not that he wouldn't cheerfully dispose of them himself if he thought it would be to his advantage—or just plain fun—but it was the principle of the thing. Maroni's new recruits belonged to the clown. And if there was one thing he hated, it was sharing.

The Joker placed his free hand over his heart and winced. "Nice. Our first face to face meeting and you're ready to assume the worst. We just pistol-whipped them a little. They're probably just asleep." He pondered that, licking his lips. "Most of 'em, anyway. Now, as I was saying, I believe introductions are in order. The one standing by your armoire is Ballard. The two in the back—" he paused, giggled. "Oh, you'll love this. They're Ricky and Fred, respectively." He forced his hand over his mouth to stifle additional laughter. "Get it?"

Maroni stared blankly.

His face fell, the gleam going out of his eyes. "Never mind. So, Alfonso, Ballard, Ballard, Alfonso. Alfonso, Rick—"

"Alberto," Maroni said, without so much as an apology for interrupting. The state of society these days. "And what the fuck do you want?"

The Joker tried that "inhaling and exhaling very slowly" thing Ruthie had done so often in their sessions. "I want my men back," he said, managing to keep his tone level. "You don't need them. We can put this little incident behind us and start—"

"No."

"No" was a word the Joker had grown accustomed to when it came from Ruth Adams. From anyone else, it made his teeth grind. "Excuse me?"

Maroni pulled the gun from the drawer, pointing it at the clown. "They're mine now. Get out."

The Joker was willing to accept the possibility that he'd temporarily stopped understanding the English language, as there was no way anyone, new to leading the mob or not, would be stupid enough to talk back to him. "Come again?"

"You heard me, clown." He had the gall to sneer. The Joker's hand clenched around his gun. Inside the glove, he could feel the cuts reopen for what had to be the ninetieth time. "Sal might have been stupid enough to get involved with you, but there's no one left who'll play your games. Gotham moved on while you were in the nuthouse, and no one's suicidal enough to give control to a psycho like you." He raised the gun, took aim at the Joker's head, despite all four guns trained on him. "Get it, freak?"

The Joker stared. He lowered the Glock, watching Maroni's smirk grow ever wider as he did. "Yeah. I get it." With a shrug, he stepped to the side, turning for the door. "Hey, Allan?"

"Alberto." Christ, his voice was so saturated with smugness that even hearing it made the Joker gag. "What?"

Without turning, the Joker flicked his wrist back and fired. There was a scream of pain and two crashing sounds. One for the gun that had fallen from Maroni's hand, and one for Maroni himself hitting the floor. The Joker spun, blowing out the other kneecap before the man could start the crawl toward his weapon.

"You know," the Joker began. He felt the sudden urge to spin the Glock on his finger and did so, grinning at the expanding bloodstain on the rug. "My mom used to say, if you can't say something nice…"

Jonathan Crane, for the first time in what seemed like decades, wanted to talk to someone.

Physically, he wasn't sure he was up to a conversation. The atenolol had cut back on the majority of the dizziness, but he still felt disoriented if he stood up too quickly or even turned his head too fast. He seemed to be developing the flu as well. Or maybe that was an exceptionally bad cold or withdrawal. Whatever it was, he ached all over and needed a sweater in the middle of the summer and was barely managing to keep down what little food the twins had forced into him with their hair-petting and their fork-guiding and their black nail polish.

Jonathan had never worn nail polish before, and if this was anything to go by, he never wanted to again. He'd leaned as far away from the stuff as he could with one girl holding his hand down and the other advancing on him with the bottle, and the smell had still be enough to make his head reel. What's more, while Joan's nail polish had been glossy and reflected light, the black kind cancelled it out, so every time he looked down it seemed as though each finger had a black rotted hole at the tip. Maybe they did. He wasn't about to touch the stuff and find out. The ever shifting pattern on the bedspread was bad enough without troubling himself over flesh-eating bacteria.

Joan. He blamed Joan for his compulsion to talk. Well, Joan and Lucy and Thomas and maybe even the Joker, but mostly Joan. It was Joan who'd sat him down in her office for centuries—or possibly hours, which seemed more logical now that he thought about it but certainly wasn't how it felt—each day and talked at him until he would mumble something back. Strange had done the same thing, but as Jonathan was asleep at the time, it didn't count. No, this was Joan's fault, and it was because of Joan that he found himself acknowledging the twin that had sat down beside him some time after they'd forced him to have lunch. It was the short-haired one, the one who looked like a brunette Tinker Bell and who, on occasion, left fairy dust behind her as she walked. Or maybe she was throwing handfuls of glitter. She was surreptitious about it if she was.

"Yes, Scarecrow?" She had four knitting needles in her hand, and Jonathan tried to work out the logistics of that before being struck with the fear of being stabbed in the eye with one—they were sharp on every side—and tried to shuffle back out of range of the bamboo instruments of death and crafting. But being still cold and miserable and dizzy, he only managed to scoot an inch or so away.

"I thought the other one did fabric things." It was the short-haired one that cooked, wasn't it? Because she was the loud one and the one who kept panicking every time he didn't inhale the dishes put before him in less than ten seconds was awfully loud about it. It was the long-haired one who kept bothering him about burlap and straw and fingerless gloves. Probably. Their hair did change lengths at odd intervals.

"She does." The twin—Anika—slid one needle back and forth, back and forth, the yarn winding around like a snake. He tried moving his eyes away from it and found that he couldn't. It was like hypnosis, only it didn't inspire outrage and a sense of violation and the desire to kill anyone in the area who had an ambiguous European accent. "'Gail's the one who's really good at making clothes. Usually I just make scarves or socks, and I'm slow about it."

"Oh."

He got the sense that she was smiling at him, though he couldn't look away from the yarn to confirm it. It was a dark blue yarn, with deeper indigo strands through it, like the tentacles of an eldritch abomination rising out of the water. Like Cthulhu in a scarf. "You must be feeling better."

Jonathan was not feeling better, but he imagined telling her that would end with him having his hand held or more bandages going on his arms to rub uncomfortably between his skin and his shirt. Or all three of them hovering over him again, the twins' faces contorted with what was either worry or humor and the brother looking completely apathetic. He doubted he could handle that, so he managed a noncommittal shrug. Even moving his shoulders made his stomach churn.

"Do you want a pair of socks?" Anika asked. The hand that had been moving one of the needles stopped, ending the arc of the yarn. The sight gave him a horrible sense of vertigo, perhaps because the bedspread between them had lengthened and her hands were now stretching farther and farther away.

"Eh?" It was all he could manage. It was about on pair with his therapy session discussions, really.

"You like socks right?" Funny, how her voice was loud as ever though she looked so far away. Jonathan felt as though he ought to excuse himself and get to the nearest bathroom before he was sick all over the blankets, but he couldn't remember which way the hallway had been and he didn't see the entrance. "I just started this one, but I could make you one instead. We have lots of yarn."

"Ah." All he needed was an "uh" and an "ih" and he'd have worked his way through all the vowels. Which was actually more than he'd done in most sessions with Joan.

"What's your favorite color, Scarecrow?"

Colors. What colors did he like? Orange and white were too much like the uniforms and the walls in Arkham. Red was like blood. Purple was the Joker's color. Yellow and brown were too close to cornfields, and so was green. Blue…well, now he couldn't look at blue without thinking of Lovecraftian sea monsters and anglerfish. "Gray."

"Gray?" She said it as though he'd just admitted to setting kittens on fire.

"Dark gray." Her hands were closer now, and she'd started rolling the yarn between her fingers. This time, it made him feel seasick instead of relaxed.

"We've probably got that," Anika said, after several decades of awkward silence. "But just gray? You don't want any stripes or designs or anything like that?"

He shrugged again and regretted it instantly when the motion made bile rise in his throat.

"What are you two up to?" A voice from behind. Female. Probably the other twin, but he was too busy trying not to vomit to confirm it.

"I'm making the Scarecrow socks. He said he'd like some."

There was a hand on his shoulder, and Abigail leaned down to smile at him. Her teeth reflected the overhead light, glittering like a shark's. "You must be feeling better."

Jonathan tried to answer but only managed to be sick on the carpet.

The Joker hadn't settled for shooting Maroni in the kneecaps. It wasn't enough that the man would likely never walk again, not without crutches. Not for the Joker, and not if someone had the gall to call him a freak. Ballard had witnessed enough murders to know there would never be a good outcome from that.

Some of those murders must have been worse than this. Ballard remembered vomiting after a few, and one that had left him shaking and on the verge of pissing himself. Those must have been worse, whatever they were. But looking at what the Joker had done to Alberto Maroni, it was hard to remember them.

Shattering the kneecaps hadn't satisfied him. He'd destroyed the joints entirely, and he hadn't used a gun to do it.

One leg was broken at the knee, the shin bent at a ninety degree angle. Bent the wrong way. The other barely resembled a leg anymore, just a mass of bruised, bloodied flesh with the bone exposed through the deepest of wounds. That had been the leg that knocked Maroni out mid-scream.

At least with the Joker's other vicious assaults, the victims had died.

Maroni was only unconscious. The Joker had even taken the effort to rummage through the man's closet for belts to use as tourniquets. He was crippled for life, pale from blood loss, and surely as mentally scarred as he was physically wounded, but he was still alive, and it wouldn't be long before the guards they'd beaten unconscious woke up or Maroni regained consciousness and grabbed the phone the clown had left right beside his hand. The Joker had even shoved a few pillows under his head to reduce the chances of shock.

To make an example of him, Ballard thought, willing himself to stay calm.

"He's got a violin."

Ballard turned. "Boss?"

The Joker emerged from the walk-in closet, instrument and bow in hand. "A violin." He placed it on his shoulder and gave the bow an experimental slide over the strings, resulting in a sound not unlike a cat giving birth. "You don't mind if I take this, do you Alejandro?"

Maroni didn't stir.

"Great. Consider us even." He ushered Ricky and Fred through the door with the bow and beckoned for Ballard to follow. "Pleasure doing business with you." There was another burst of sound and Ballard didn't have to turn back to know that the Joker was experimenting with the violin again.

Ballard was going to need hard drugs to wipe Maroni's image out of his head, and he ought to pick up a pair of earplugs while he was out.

AN: The Joker's getting the name wrong partly out of disrespect, but also partly because I just don't think he cares. In TDK I've noticed that he never really looks at anyone while he's killing them, as though it's not the killing itself that's so important so much as screwing around with them in the buildup. So I figured that if he can't be bothered to look at someone, he probably can't be troubled for names.

Ricky Ricardo and Fred Mertz were the two lead male characters on I Love Lucy. The Joker finds the coincidence in the names of his henchmen hilarious, but no one else gets the joke, poor guy.

Il Canto degli Italiani is the Italian national anthem.

"Avon calling": Avon is a makeup company that was known for going door to door selling products.