"Harl?" came Molly's muted, gentle voice from the open doorway of Harley's cramped office.

It felt like it had been a lifetime since she'd spent any significant time here. She remembered loving being so close to all the action, spending long hours reading over the cases of other mad men in between sessions - but the thrill of having an office and friends had somehow quickly worn off. Before she knew it, it had become months since she'd last seen Molly, let alone spoken to her. And even with the girl standing at her office door, Harley still only gave her to the most casual of glimpses as she compiled several stacks of paper into a thick file.

"Oh, hi Molly," she finally said, nonchalant and more curious about why she was here in the first place. After only a few seconds of eye contact, Harley went back to rifling through her papers, trying to get herself organized following the trial. So much useless information had been included in the Joker's file for his recent court date, but now that it was all done and over with, she was happily purging the excess. She'd been so busy since yesterday that now, as the sun was setting through the small window, half-hidden by a shelving unit, Harley was just making her way to the Joker's first session as a semi-free man.

So she didn't pay much attention to the way Molly was fiddling awkwardly with the cuticle of her index finger, seeming to focus on picking away the dry skin. Finally, Molly gathered up the courage to speak. "I just wanted to say congratulations, you know?"

From where Harley had been standing, behind her tiny, laminated plywood desk, her head jerked up to look at the other woman, squinting over the bridge of her glasses as they sat perched upon the very tip of her nose. "Oh?" She couldn't help but find this little tidbit interesting, considering Molly's opinion on her objectivity.

Clearly struggling to swallow her pride, Molly shifted against the door frame and nodded a couple of times, hesitantly. "Well, yeah... I mean, I watched you work your ass off to keep the guy in here. No matter what anybody thinks of him, it's hard to believe that he belongs anywhere else."

That was the truth. If there was one place that the Joker would never find himself, it was rotting away in a cell. That is, if Harley had anything to say about it.

"Well," Harley started, forcing a smile across her fiery red lips, "I'm glad you approve. I can't help but think that there are a lot of people who are beginning to believe the same thing." She didn't just think it, she knew it. That very morning, there had been an article in the Gotham Times painting Dr. Harleen Quinzel as the matron saint of battered minds. She was touted as a hero, saving a sickly man from mortal peril, and casting her objectivity upon the jaded citizens of a jaded city. Everyone would be impacted by it, save for one.

Save for Molly.

"Oh, I never said that it was impossible to believe...only that it was hard." Molly stood, believing herself vindicated in her beliefs. Though she had occasionally shown pity for the Joker, it was easy to see that it came nowhere close to sympathy, particularly as she stared down the young doctor, arms firmly crossed across her chest.

Harley's large, darkly shadowed eyes sharply narrowed. Them is fightin' words. "Oh? Well then, please, Molly... enlighten me as to how you can work in a mental facility and still believe a patient to be completely responsible for the crimes he has committed." She had developed quite the silver tongue as a result of the Joker's subtle teachings, and enjoyed deploying them against this unsuspecting girl.

Molly appeared physically struck by the question. Harley's tone had been so cold and so unfriendly that Molly had a look of total confusion to hear it fire out of Harley's mouth. Regardless of her shock, she answered without hesitation. "C'mon, Harl! It doesn't a take a rocket scientist to see that he's been manipulating you all along. You think if it was anybody but you that he would have spouted off the same steaming pile of bullshit?"

She seemed convinced of the idea that Harley had only questioned herself once. The conclusion Harley drew then made her confident enough to chuckle in Molly's face as she continued collecting her case files. "Oh Molly...you're right! God, you're so smart!" The compliment was backhanded to say the very least. Sarcasm ran so thick through the statement that it could have slithered after Harley across the room as she stepped away from her desk and toward the door. "That's why you're the doctor, and I'm the nurse, right?"

Molly's expression flattened. It was so easy for Harley to see the disappointment in the poor girl's face that it sent the cool chill of victory down Harley's spine. She just had to continue. "You know... I can't help but be flabbergasted by the fact that you - someone who has spent absolutely no time with the Joker - seem to know so much about the way his mind works. You'd think with that kind of insight, you would have stopped hitting the cabernet long enough to actually pursue your doctorate." Harley spat at her like a cobra spits into the eyes of its prey, and slid past her into the hall, file in hand.

Starting for the elevator, Harley felt Molly's eyes following her down the hall. Not to be overcome, Molly inhaled deeply through her nose, her chest puffing out as her lungs swelled like overstuffed balloons.

People in the nurse's station at the end of the hall were looking up to stare. "Harley!" she called. "You are the Joker's victim, just like everyone thought you would be...but he's not killing your body, he's killing your mind."

Upon hearing her, something stopped Harley dead in her tracks. Though her feet told her to move forward, step into the elevator, and forget all about Molly, some demonic force twisted her spine, turned her around and pushed to to stride right up to the nurse, pushing a finger in her face. "You don't know what it is," Harley said slowly, "to hear one man say one sentence, and feel as if you've spent your life with your eyes closed. I've learned more about the Joker, more from the Joker, than you'll ever learn about anything in your pathetically minuscule lifetime." Her voice reached some indistinguishable pitch, and her tone touched slightly on her mother's east-end accent. Where months ago her anger might have scared her, she now embraced it.

But while she might not have scared herself, she certainly scared Molly, who now stumbled against the door frame of Harley's office, trying to pull herself back into her comfort zone, even as the enraged doctor pursued her. "You don't know anything," Harley told her, "and the next time you try to school me on my job, it'll be the last conversation we ever have. You got that?"

Wow! Harley thought to herself, and although her face did not convey her amazement, she loved the feeling of power that shot from the nerve endings in her spine, through her limbs, and across the sinuous appendages of her hands. This was how the Joker felt every time he had it up on someone. The fear in Molly's face shone on her like the warm glow of a hot sun. It gave her life, breathed air into her lungs, lit a fire in her heart. It proved to be almost too much to take, and before the other girl could muster the courage to respond, Harley turned and walked away.

"Please close the door to my office when you're done shuddering in the doorway, would you?" And as quickly as a fading nightmare, she disappeared, the elevator speeding her up to the seventh floor.


The Joker had been waiting for her. He sat as he always did, feet firmly planted on the floor and hands folded in front of him. Due to the lack of dangerous circumstances of late, no guard stood outside to lend Harley peace of mind – and she didn't need it. The Joker took care of that for her.

She had appeared almost joyous when she swung open the door to their usual interrogation room, and he had pondered the look on her face briefly before putting on a grin of his own. Her clipboard in one hand, her labcoat securely hanging around her shoulders...everything was the same as it had been, except this time he was just a little more free, and soon, free altogether.

"Ahh..." he cooed, almost expectant of yesterday's outcome. "Someone went celebrating after the good news. I'm amazed you're not more hungover." Surely that hadn't been the case, though. Harley didn't seem to have one outlandish bone in her body.

She slid out of her labcoat the way she always did and draped it over the back of the aluminum chair. The smile on her face suggested pride, but it was it was an emotion he'd seen in Harley only recently, and there was no way her pride from yesterday's victory in court could have carried over to today. If the Joker knew one thing about pride, it was that it was fleeting.

"Me? No, no...not me. I was just, in a good mood." She pulled up her shoulders in a blithe expression. "I just really let someone have it, and it's sick, but it gave me this amazing feeling, like nothing could ever touch me now."

And if the Joker knew another thing about fleeting emotions, it was that confidence often fell into the same category. "Hm! Well, that's good news," he started, scrunching his face into a falsely thoughtful visage. "I guess my job here is done."

She shook her head, scoffing as she placed her clipboard upon the table. "Ha! You wish... If anything I'm going to be under even more pressure to maintain something resembling progress. You and I were lucky, we got by on the skin of our teeth. I deserve an Oscar for the amount of bullshit I fed the judicial system on your behalf."

Perhaps it would have been easier to break Harley's good mood had the Joker not spent the last five months convincing her of his flippant nature, but right now, he was dead serious. His face scrunched up once again as he shook his finger at her. "No... I don't think you understand."

"What's not to understand?" She erupted, still riding a high like a some unicorn galloping over a space-blown rainbow in some cheesy eighties music video. "You and I have beat the system!"

"Harley..."

"We don't have anything to prove to anyone anymore!"

"Harley!"

"We can be as free as we want..." Her joy and excitement peeled away like the layers of an onion. And though she maintained her composure, something in what she'd said dipped beneath the surface of her naiveté.

He piqued a brow, and leaned toward her ever so slightly. "Free, inside cinder block walls?" he asked her finally, relishing the way her face faltered - you can see in someone's eyes the exact moment their heart shatters into a million pieces. He could see that confidence in her crumble, and in the middle of his chest knew, knew that he was only one who could bring her to her knees like this. It was not justice, or fear of prosecution, or lost money, or social disassociation that had sent her fleeing from her course.

Now she understood, and understood further as he went on. "You know what I miss? Fresh air, a rare steak, the way the pavement crunches under my feet. I miss gasoline, and the way you can feel the heat of a fire on your face." He turned away from her, and rolled back in his chair before suddenly coming forward again. "But you know what I miss the most? I miss the dignity." He growled through clenched teeth, flourishing his fingers against his collarbone before his next point. "Because there's a certain amount of pride in what I do, you've seen that for yourself. Just now... that joy in your heart..." He trailed off, both of his hands rolling over one another before his chest as he took in a deep breath. "When you know you've just ruined someone's day."

Face blank and mouth agape, Harley only shook her head, gathering the will to speak. "Don't do this..." came her most meager of whispers.

"Do what?"

"This...don't do this now. Don't prove them right. Don't sit here and strike this house of cards I've built..." And as if some dormant dragon had burst forth from its rickety cage, her tiny fist seemed to materialize out of nowhere and pounded against the tabletop, and she rose from her chair. "That I've built! Convincing the world you didn't have a leg to stand on when you had two! You have no idea what I've done for yo, Joker. You think my job is to sit here and get schooled by you?" she demanded, pointing her finger at him much as she'd done to Molly just moments ago.

He rose on those two stable legs of his, and Harley was greeted with the fact that she had no fear when he pierced her with his downward gaze. "Well then, why are you here?" he finally asked. "To profile me, learn my mannerisms for the betterment of mankind?" he asked in a sing-song tone that riled nausea in the young doctor. "You're dreaming if you think you had any other intention than to learn from me. I know that. You know that. You came, and I taught you, and now that I've taught you, you need to know more."

"I spent five months investing my faith in you!" Harley spat back. Her voice was a growl, now, venomous and cold. "Listening to you, writing you down to figure you out! You can say you want about getting your freedom back, but we both know why you're really leaving."

The Joker took a step to his right. Harley quickly followed suit, and before the two were completely conscious of it, they were circling around the table, one slowly chasing the other in an intense game of cat and mouse. "Oh? So enlighten me, doctor," he asked, tone just as cruel, his eyes narrowing as he tried to predict her intended revelation.

It was like some pent-up bout of madness within her, or some bloodthirsty jungle cat, or some rabid beast just lifted that clenched clipboard over her head and sent it hurtling across the room, exploding in a shower of paper that swirled around them like snowflakes. Her hair had been tossed about in the flurry, endless strands of melted chocolate that splayed and wavered in the heat of her rage. "You've spent your life evading detection from the police, from anyone who came close to you. You held all the classic defense mechanisms: the outrageous clothing, the boisterous attitude, right down to the face paint. But in here, you're stripped, you're nude, you're ugly and raw, and the world can see you here. You're a canary in a cage... but you're still the center of attention. You don't hate it here as much as you thought you would."

The temperature of the room shot up as the Joker's anger became evident. He remained calm but stern, circumventing the table in a long, thoughtful gait. "Oh that high powered perception of yours...it's like a laser. More! Tell me more!" His mocking hand beckoned her, as if he meant to grapple with her, but with each step she continued to evade him.

"You can't be ignored - you have, from every angle, people observing you, trying in vain to understand you - entertaining you. This is the best gig in the world. It doesn't get any better than it does here!"

"Shut up..." he growled.

"No! I will not shut up, because you're a coward, Joker, you're a coward because it doesn't matter how good the song and dance is! It doesn't matter how all these men fought to understand some shred of you and failed. It's not worth running away from, it's not worth leaving alone."

"Shut up!"

"You want out because the one thing you didn't expect was to come in these rooms and look someone in the eye who understood you at your core...and not for the make-up, or the green hair, or the lies, or the madness, but the philosophy, the truth... the truth that hurts so much more than lies ever could." Harley didn't falter so much as she froze, stranded in time. Her mind was a flurry of ideas. They showered down like rainfall, hitting the ground in slow motion, and it was as if everything he ever said came rushing back in a flood. It knocked down the pillars in her mind where logic, and reason, and education had stood and pushed them down in a rage of white water.

But where time had stopped for her, it only raged on for the Joker, who swiftly took her by the shoulders to shake her. His grip on her was so tight and so unforgiving that it threatened to break her in two. "You know that feeling? You understand me soooo deeply? Then why? Why do you need me here to lecture you on the importance of these convictions, hmm?"

When he shook her, her large, watery blue eyes jostled with the onset of captured tears that perched themselves precariously on the edges of her eyelids, threatening to topple over and expose her weakness. She only stared back, and his face twisted and contorted into a displeased snarl, a sudden far cry from his previously consuming rage. Curiosity plagued him far more then he would have admitted to, but as she stood there, caught in some internal hurricane, there was a pang in his chest that physically struck him, like an arrow.

It was sudden and it was painful, and it told him the truth... the truth that hurt more than a lie ever could. He knew, without a shadow of a doubt that, after spending all this time trying to figure him out, she'd finally realized something about herself... something he hadn't put his finger on yet.

"You can't go..." she confessed, through heavy saliva and heated breath.

And now Harley was the enigma, so much more than he had ever been. She, on the verge of tears, stood vivified in self-revelation, and he...now he was the one who wanted so badly to know what she had discovered in that frozen moment in time. He, who had spent his life vindicating his own existence, needed to know, had to know why she needed him.

Now, for the first time since she'd seen him... the eyes that stared back at her were not black, hollow holes of voided emotion, but an almost luminous, chocolate crimson that desperately searched her face for answers. "Why?" he whispered, low and quiet. And when she failed to answer him, he placed his hands on the sides of her face to keep the blinders on him, and him alone.

"Why?" he asked again, trying in vain to suck the desperation out of his voice.

The silence was the loudest the two had ever heard, and while it stretched on, their minds were screaming. Screaming to know, screaming to be heard, screaming to be put to rest, though none would come.

In his desperation, the Joker had pushed her back against one of his reviled cinder block walls, and they listened as the seconds ticked past as though shaving years off both their lives. They rolled past the way office hours do – long and punishing. As if time wasn't already short enough. Beneath where his hands had landed on his face, he felt her tears trap themselves between his fingers, warm and cold at the same time.

After a moment more of waiting, there was some release when she placed both her hands on his forearms - not in any attempt to pull him away, but perhaps just to validate his presence there. He could feel the cold clamminess of her hands through the canvas of his jumpsuit, and he wouldn't have cared, except for the fact that his nerves were going off like sparklers on the Fourth of July.

Letting out a shivering breath, the muscles in her neck tightening, and with her expression somewhere between lost and astounded, she whispered, very clearly:

"You can't go... because I'm nothing without you, and I feel like I'm so much right now."

And while both of them tried in vain to adjust themselves to the atmosphere that the truth had created, they could only stare back at one another with the same look of mystification and astonishment. But for one to understand the implications of such a thing to say, one must first understand the Joker, and as Harley had a firm understanding of these implications, she swallowed, hard... hoping the feelings would somehow get choked down as well.

"I can't do this... I can't be what you want me to be... unless you're here."

"No..." he whispered, his eyes half-lidding, his head shaking several times from left to right. "I don't believe that..."

Her tiny, feminine sniffle, filled with loss and defeat, seemed to will him forward, and she nodded again to convince him.

"No... I don't believe that for a minute," he whispered in a tone that was so alien, and yet right now so expected. There was a kind of affection in the way his hands slid down to her neck, the way his fingers laced into the hair at the nape of her neck, the way his thumbs arched underneath her soft jawline.

And although they continued this nearly silent argument for a few seconds – the gentle bobbing of her head, and his attempt to reassure her - there was an aggression buried deep below all this tenderness. Aggression that might have pulled its way to the surface, had it not been for the fact that Harley suddenly felt herself pinned to the wall under the sudden weight of his lips against hers.

They had not been shocking, or crude, but simply brought silence to her aching mind, and lent a tremendous comfort to a breaking heart. There was something immensely crooked about his kiss that she'd never felt before, that made it uniquely his. It was, at once, both intensely disturbing and wrong, and surprisingly passionate, nearly gentle.

There were a number of surprises that Harley would pretend she hadn't imagined afterward – how, as she had stared back at him in shock, his eyes were closed, and appeared as peaceful as when he'd been sleeping. There had been no anger on his face, no hate, no other ideas at that moment. She'd been surprised at how he'd calmed her jumbled mind with this most idyllic and unexpected of gestures. But what surprised her most of all was that after the initial shock, after the sharp gasp of breath she'd taken in through her nose - she too had closed her eyes, and threw away everything she'd ever worked for: her ethics, her education, her career, her life. She knew this was wrong, and immoral, and went against the grain of everything she'd ever been taught...

But she knew, without a shadow of a doubt in her mind, that she never wanted to kiss anyone else's lips but his.

Her heartbeat slowed, the worry melted away, and when he finally pulled away, he only did so by an inch, close enough that she could still feel the warmth of his breath against her neck. From where he lingered, a shuddering breath escaped her and her eyes remained closed. Her hands still loosely clasped his forearms, doubtless because she needed something to hold on to.

"I shouldn't have done that..." she whispered.

"You shouldn't have done that..." he whispered back.

"But I did..."

"But you did..."

He pulled away a few more inches, and looked down at her, petite and minuscule beside him - and yet foreboding, dangerous, and above all those others beneath him. To the Joker, the natural order of things was himself at the lead, and the rest fighting to catch up. But this girl...

This girl...had come closer than anyone else.

They stood that way for a long moment, her eyes peering up at him regretfully, and his peering down at her intently. He drew a slow, deep breath. "You haven't lost all faith in me have you?" he asked in something resembling his normal voice.

His misplaced commentary never went unnoticed by her, but she answered the question nonetheless. "I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who would call me stupid, but I guess it's all downhill from here..."

He smiled, one of his genuine smiles, and reached his hands a little further into her hair. "Is that so?"

With his question somewhere between a purr and a sinister growl, she couldn't help but feel a little unnerved by the affection. For his sake, she considered it a moment longer."I trust you..."

"Good..." His tone had been flat, but it wouldn't matter, because she wasn't going to remember it.

Without another second's hesitation, the Joker took a hefty handful of her hair, swiftly stepped to the side, and effortlessly brought her head down against the metal table.

There was a loud thud, and a rumbling as the metal vibrated like a thunderclap. The sudden impact knocked Harley out cold, but the Joker carefully wrapped his arms around her limp body and lowered her onto the floor. Once she was there, he smoothed out that splash of chocolate hair, and settled her into a comfortable position. Then he reached up to take the swipe key she carried with her from the breast pocket of her labcoat, still draped where she had been sitting a few moments ago.

Standing, he made his way to the door, and glaring out into the empty hallways of the building he hated so much, he found himself hesitating. He stood, wide and menacing in the frame of the door, but turned to glance over his shoulder to where her tiny body lay on the floor, out like a light.

But within a few seconds, his features hardened themselves again, and he turned and swept out from the room.