AN: I had all of spring break to hammer out twelve pages of short story, so of course I crammed it all into the last three days. At this point in my life, I think I'm flat out incapable of learning from my procrastinating ways. In other news, due to classes, you probably won't see me again until Saturday.

Thanks for the reviews!

"Oh, you're so condescending, your gall is never ending; we don't want nothing, not a thing from you.

Your life is trite and jaded, boring and confiscated, if that's your best, your best won't do."

—"We're Not Gonna Take It," Twisted Sister

The orderlies had stopped chasing Gilda.

The Joker didn't know when that had happened. One day, she'd been diving between cars and bushes and altogether reenacting a one dog version of "The Great Escape," and the next, she'd been jumping onto his lap and licking at his straitjacket for the entirety of his time outdoors. And it had been from one day to the next. The Joker may be unsure of the date, but if the orderlies had stopped fighting the good fight, it would have to be because of an order. If the gorillas that flanked him were anything like the ones that visited his cell in the night shift—and as far as he was concerned, they were interchangeable—then they wouldn't be about to let bruised egos or repeated trials to no effect counter the magnificent force of their pigheadedness. They could split their skulls against the curb diving after Gilda, and they'd still limp into work the next morning with a bandaged head and a strengthened resolve.

It was funny when it was people kicking him in the stomach at night. When they were cutting into his Gilda time, it just pissed him off.

Gilda put her front paws against his shoulder and raised herself up to lick his face. Her tail was wagging back and forth against his knee, and he twisted his other leg out from underneath the dog so that he could pet her as well as was possible with his arms forcibly crisscrossed over his torso. The Joker had decided that he was not a fan of straitjackets, bondage potential aside. He ought to mention that to Ruth again. He'd almost entirely stopped complaining about it—except on Thursdays—after he'd been let out of it during sessions, but it was severely impeding his doggie-snuggling sessions, and Ruthie needed to do something about that.

After all, she must have been the one to make the apes leave Gilda alone.

It wasn't that Gilda had grown on her. Ruthie was a fish person. Cat people, he could find a common ground with. Bunny people, even. But someone who chose a fish for comfort and companionship, out of all the animals available, legally or otherwise? Some said it was impossible to reason with sociopaths. The Joker found it impossible to reason with fish people. No, Gilda hadn't grown on Ruth. His doctor still looked disgusted every time the puppy licked his face, and seconds from vomiting whenever the Joker kissed back. She really wasn't all that good at hiding her own biases.

But personal feelings aside, they were speeding through his evaluation period like fire through the mob's finances. It would seem that she'd decided to leech onto anything that he reacted positively to, apart from yesterday when he'd gotten his hands on a box of crayons and decided to decorate the walls of his cell in green and violet. So maybe the removal of the straitjacket wasn't such an irrational wish after all.

"Where did you find those crayons, Joker?"

Last he checked, crayons were washable. There was no reason to be harping on about it a full day later. Ruth needed some sort of stress management program, or the opportunity to relieve tension by throwing a few grenades. Her blood pressure would get outright unhealthy otherwise. Dogs had the right idea. They didn't let anything affect them; not money, not class, not even hygiene. They could all learn from Gilda's example. "Good girl. Good puppy."

"Joker."

"What?" He lay back on the grass—Gilda jumped off his chest and took advantage of his new angle to lick at his skin with renewed vigor—and tried not to laugh at Ruth's frown. Her complete lack of progress with him had to be eating at her already. There was no reason to be cruel. Well, beyond his own amusement, but Ruthie was one of the few human friends he had in the asylum, and relations were strained as it was. "I found 'em, I colored, and the janitors washed it off. No harm done."

"I don't keep crayons in my office." She hadn't started breaking the filters off her cigarettes yet, so she hadn't completely fallen apart. "And neither does the infirmary. And the only other place you're out of the straitjacket besides your room is the showers. So unless you worked your way out of the straitjacket in the hall, while you were surrounded by orderlies, none of whom bothered to report it, and wandered around without being caught on camera, someone brought them to you."

He probably could squirm his way out of the straitjacket if he was so inclined. But that would be Inappropriate Behavior and mean no puppy time. The Joker sighed. "You got me. It was a Christmas gift from the Salvation Army."

"In June."

"Yep. I was as surprised as you are." He rolled away from Gilda, biting at his lips to keep from giggling. It might be written off as mad laughter, but he'd like to keep what little intimidation value he had left with Ruthie and not reveal that he was ticklish. Considering how much of his face was numb due to scarring, Gilda was remarkably adept at finding the sensitive spots.

Deprived of her playmate, the doggie trotted over to Ruth. The psychiatrist didn't offer so much as a pat on the head. How rude. The fleas weren't that bad. "I think that an orderly brought them to you."

"This may have escaped your notice, Ruthie, but the orderlies aren't as fond of me as, uh, you or Teresa or any of the other lovely nurses. They're not gonna go out of their way to give me presents." Gilda hovered around Ruth for a second more, dipping her head in rejection as she turned away. Two seconds later, she caught sight of the Joker and perked back up, her tail almost thrashing back and forth.

"No, I don't think they'd give you something because they thought you'd enjoy it." She crouched beside him, as close as Gilda, but not snuggling or licking or doing anything else fun, just staring at him as if boring her eyes into his face would reveal anything. How delusional. "I do think that you could frighten someone into bringing you things."

"It's good to know that you've come to trust me so much in our time together." All right, so he'd been bored and Zachary had been right there to assure him that he'd fed Gilda tonight and the rec room with its crayons—triangular to keep them from rolling, and only eight per box, what a waste of a color spectrum—was just down the hall and he'd been so bored. Where did Ruth get off, strutting around on her high horse and acting as though he'd done something wrong?

"Are you going to tell me that you didn't?"

The Joker glared at her, which would have been a good deal more impressive were Gilda not licking at his eyebrows as he did. It wasn't the correctness that pissed him off; it was the presumption. They sat across a desk from each other for an hour and a half each day, took a few walks, and she assumed she could read his mind. Just on the little things, but as anyone with a paper cut exposed to lemon juice or kerosene would attest, sometimes the little things hurt the most. He may be stuck in Ruthie's gray little world, but his mind was his own private, Technicolor space, and no one else was privy to it, unless that someone else was wearing Kevlar armor and graphite bat ears. No one else was worthy. It would make him common, if she could understand him, ordinary. Which he wasn't, and she couldn't, and it was outright insulting to suggest otherwise.

Sometimes he wondered if Ruth could manage to look so composed after she'd been pushed headfirst down a flight of stairs. He usually had these thoughts at the same time he wondered how many angles her spine could bend at after that sort of damage. These thoughts usually came when he was alone in his cell, bored out of his mind, like an abrupt wave of fury that wanted to lash out at anything and everything in his path. Physically, that meant the walls. Mentally, it was anything, from the Batman to the cafeteria food to Ruth to his jumpsuit or to the feel of the floor. The waves had come outside of Arkham as well, but the tides hadn't been half as frequent or as lasting. So much for serving the mental health needs of the community.

Another swipe of Gilda's tongue pulled his hair over his eyes and Ruth pushed it back again. True, she pulled the hand sanitizer from her bag and wiped her hands free of dog saliva and hair grease seconds later, but he could appreciate the gesture. If he pushed Ruthie down the stairs Teresa and Linda probably wouldn't talk to him anymore, and his new doctor wouldn't let him see his puppy. And Ruth was amusing to talk to, when she wasn't laboring under the delusion that she had any insight. So it was for the best to keep her around, presumption aside.

"I'm walking down the hall." It was dream, over and done with, and when Jonathan was under, as he was now, his rational side had a chance to flourish without his mind racing too quickly for logic to catch up, so he was able to realize, for once, that it was only a dream. But real or not, his heart was racing.

Racing wasn't the right word. It wasn't as fast as it would be if he were fully awake, but it was faster than it ought to be in such a relaxed state. Hypnosis, he'd found, was something like having a cavity drilled under nitrous oxide. All the thoughts and worries were still there, but they were buried deep beneath a haze of calm that made it hard to remember what the fuss was. He wasn't dissociated from his body, not exactly—he maintained enough insight into his condition to realize that—but he didn't really feel it, not as he would when awake. There was an idea of location and weight, but the heartbeat stood out, and the heartbeat threatened to clear the haze that kept all the awful things under the surface, where they didn't hurt as much.

"Breathe, Jonathan."

Jonathan breathed, listening to his heart, trying to will it to follow the tempo of his breathing. It didn't, but it did slow.

"Where are you now?"

"I'm by the broom closet." His breath caught, heartbeat flooding back to its prior speed. He knew he was lying in a chair, that much he could feel, but at the same time, he was in the hall, by the closet that the janitors never locked, that had no smoke detector, that always smelled of nicotine. There were noises from within, like chalk scratching across a blackboard or talons on skin or nails raking over drywall, and he didn't want to be near them. He wanted to run, but he couldn't bring himself to move in front of the door and his feet wouldn't leave the spot when he tried to turn.

"What's special about the broom closet?"

"It—" He couldn't say it. The sensation was beyond words. To anyone else it was just a room, as the basement of Arkham Asylum was only a basement, except to the patients that he'd escorted down when he still had his position, and that he'd exposed to his toxin. It was only a basement—only a broom closet—to them. But for those who knew what lurked beneath the surface—

"Jonathan?"

"I'm scared." Someone in the room shifted. He was surprised to find that he could hear such a subtle movement over his heart, which was now hammering.

"I'm going to raise your hand in a moment, Jonathan, and I want you to let all of its weight lie in my hand. Do you understand?"

"Yes." He felt a hand on his wrist, and knew that the contact ought to bother him, but with all the other anxieties threatening to wake him up entirely, he couldn't be bothered to care.

"When I let go, and you feel your hand fall, I want you to send a wave of relaxation throughout your body, from your head to your feet, all right? Breathe, and let your body relax."

He let go. Jonathan breathed. The haze thickened.

"Good. Now, I'm going to do the same with the other hand."

His opposite wrist lifted. There was a horrible electronic clanging and Jonathan's eyes flew open.

"I'm sorry." Joan dug into her purse and pulled out her cell phone as she stood. "My grandfather just had surgery this morning—I left the phone on for—thought it was on silent—I'll be right back." She was in the hall in a matter of seconds, the door clicking behind her.

Strange dropped his hand. The bit of his mind that wasn't fully awake—vastly in the minority and shrinking by the second—remembered that he should be relaxing, but the rest of him was too busy panicking that someone was touching him and that he'd allowed himself to be tricked into this again and that lunch had been overcooked today and Joan's skirt had been a shade too light to really match with her shirt and that he'd let himself be brought back into a nightmare. He was lying back one second and sitting rigidly upright the next, as far back as he could move from Strange without getting up from the chair.

"It's all right, Dr. Crane."

Jonathan had always thought, before he overdosed on his own toxin, that "seeing red" was only an expression. It wasn't. How dare Strange have the gall to mock him by calling him doctor? Hadn't he suffered enough? There was a noise outside that could have been Joan talking, or could have been a flock of birds, and all Jonathan could think of was how much he wanted the man to have his eyes pecked out and be left to bleed to death, preferably facedown in ditch water.

"May I ask what's significant about the broom closet?"

"I should think," said Jonathan, his voice so cold that he could feel ice in his throat, "that a medical professional would know that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

"True." He was so calm, so infuriating. Jonathan wished he could shatter the man's glasses and shove the shards into Strange's vocal cords. But that would scratch against Jonathan's fingers and he hated seeing his own blood. "But if the cigar occurs in more than one dream, then it tends to be something m—"

"Do you think that because you can get people to sit half-asleep in your office, it gives you some deeper insight into their psyche?" He had said that, hadn't he? That, and not "I hate that closet because it's where it takes unauthorized cigarette breaks"? He must have. He couldn't stop now, couldn't repeat to be sure, or he'd lose face in front of the man he was berating. "You must realize how unreliable your line of work is, unless you're a complete fool."

He shrugged. Damn him and his comfortable chairs. "It can be, yes, if the hypnotist's suggestions are not worded in a—"

"You speak as though you're above that. As if you've got some greater control. But you don't; it's nothing more than sleight of hand and the power of suggestion, not any power or talent of yours."

Something in Strange's face suggested that either the shadows were moving of their own volition again, or that he didn't like being told that he didn't have power. "Hypnosis is in the mind of the patient, Dr. Crane. If you truly didn't want it to work on you, then I would be unable to put you into a trance. Clearly, that isn't the case."

Jonathan decided that the rest of the session would best be spent in the hall with Joan, even if there were crows lurking behind the door.

"Do you ever get tired of laying there like a pussy and letting us beat you?"

The Joker was tired of many things. The colors white and orange—were they trying to make these jumpsuits unforgivably hideous?—steamed broccoli, which the cafeteria served seemingly every other day, monitored showering, and yes, having people kick him in the ribs ad nauseam. But more than any of that, he was tired of Hadley's broad, sneering face.

He wanted to put his foot through the man's teeth. The Joker knew he could do it, if he tried, but he wanted the thanks he gave to his dearest friend and closest orderly to be exquisite and slow, perhaps drawn out over days. Anticipation was half the fun, so they said, and he wouldn't want to deprive Hadley a second of the experience. And if he tried it here, it would be two seconds of bliss before the other orderlies gave him worse. The pain wasn't bad, but the humiliation…

Besides, Hadley wanted someone to fight back, to feel helpless. The Joker didn't have a problem with supporting that sort of behavior in theory, but when applied to himself, it was quite a different story. "Nope. Does your lady ever get tired of your, uh, frosting the cake before it's baked?"

A fist to the head for that. In the back, where his hair would cover the bruises, but the force was enough to make him see double for a good five seconds. Of course Hadley wouldn't like an insult to his manhood. If the top dog couldn't pleasure a woman, how could he keep the pack in line? The Joker shook his head, giggling and ignoring the foot someone launched between his shoulder blades. "Thanks, I had an itch I couldn't quite reach."

"Laugh it up, freak. You're going to rot in prison until one of them puts you out of your misery, and no one in there's ever going be scared of a slashed-up fag like you." Another wide sneer. Hadley needed to floss much more thoroughly. "Scares you, don't it?"

And again with the assumptions. Beating him was one thing. Insinuating that someone so low could know his mind was an unforgivable offense. The Joker would have to take his teeth out one at a time for this.

AN: "We're Not Gonna Take It" (video. google. com/ videoplay?docid=-2469482454724947120&ei=B3ShS-HvEY6mqgKCmJywBg&q=we%27re+not+gonna+take+it+music+video&hl=en#) is by Twisted Sister, and one of those songs that I think most everyone knows. It is also greatness in musical form.

The things the Joker lists that dogs don't care about are things that weren't important to classical Roman and Greek Cynics, who named themselves after the Greek word for dog. The Joker is very much a cynic in the modern sense of the word, which is, I think, part of the reason why so many dog analogies are made to him in TDK.

The more I write Ruth interacting with the Joker, the more I see their relationship as something akin to an exasperated mom dealing with a severely behaviorally disturbed kid.