AN: I promise that my week's disappearance wasn't some cheap attempt on my part to heighten tension; I spent all weekend at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, and you can read about my exploits there here: lauralot. livejournal. com/ 6395. html I even got to meet Batman's voice actor. It was awesome. Anyway, before that, I was caught up with school and other such distractions, and I was also at a bit of a loss for where I wanted this chapter to go. To be honest, I still am, but I'm going to start writing anyway and hope that something awesome comes out.

Note: This chapter begins place a few hours before the end of the last chapter, when Ruth and the others discovered that the Joker was missing.

Thanks for the reviews!

"And when the evening comes we smile; so much of life ahead

We'll find a place where there's room to grow, and yes! We've just begun."

—"We've Only Just Begun," The Carpenters

The Joker's dog was missing.

Don't say that. You don't know that. And no, Zachary didn't know it. Not for sure. Of all the things he did know—that he had to feed the Joker's dog nightly or risk punishment that would either leave him dead or wishing that he'd been killed, that the Joker had said he could break out any time he wanted and Zachary wasn't about to test him, that he'd already pissed the clown off by going AWOL for three days—he had no way of knowing that the dog was missing. Yes, sometimes—maybe even most times, these days—it ran up while he was coming in to work the evening shift, but he didn't feed it until his shift ended, so he had no real reason to worry. He was being paranoid. That was all.

Then again, as he'd been told in training after Crane had poisoned the asylum, paranoia in Arkham could be what kept you alive.

Stop it. He had enough on his plate without psyching himself out over this. All the cleaning that needed to be done back at the house for the barbeque tomorrow night, Cheryl nagging him to transfer even though she knew that no one was hiring, the ear tubes he'd have to pay for if Madison got one more infection, and all the other shit he found himself wading through. He'd go out at midnight and the damn dog would be there just like always, and life would go on as before. So what if he hadn't seen the dog last night?

Last night. With Hadley.

Don't. The dog was fine. It had to be. So Hadley had roughed it up a little, and he wasn't even sure of that. It was twisted, but life went on. The dog wasn't the issue. The issue was facing the Joker after he'd disappeared for three days. There was no way to avoid it. Not when it was his job to patrol the high security ward. Though the cameras in this hallway always just happened to be malfunctioning, so—

"Happy Independence Day, Zachary."

He froze. Zachary could see the clown leaning against the tiny window of the cell from the inside, hair hanging in his face. If he really could break out whenever he wanted, then he hadn't. Yet. But he had seen Zachary, and there was no use pretending that he wasn't there. That would only piss the Joker off, and that was the last thing he wanted. "That's not until tomorrow," he said, because he had to say something.

"You haven't come to see me." There was something wrong with the Joker's voice. He wasn't drawing out his words now, or smacking his lips. It would have been normal on anyone else, but on the Joker, it made the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

"You were sleeping." He was, on the first two nights. Zachary had tried to rouse him, even gone inside and tapped his shoulder on the second night. The fact that his efforts weren't long-lived didn't mean he hadn't tried. Zachary didn't know if he'd been sleeping the third night. Hadley had intercepted him before he got there.

"You didn't wake me up." The Joker didn't make it an accusation, only a statement, and the statement made Zachary's blood run cold. Shouting would have been less frightening than this. "That hurts, Zachary. I thought we were closer than that."

He couldn't speak. His mind ran through excuses, each less plausible than the last, but his throat wouldn't move to form the sounds.

"Know what you should do to make it up to me?"

Any defense he might have given disappeared from his brain, replaced by memories shared with his wife and daughter intermittent with images of how broken and mutilated his body would be once the Joker was through. He was going to die. He was going to die and he'd never see his daughter grow—she wouldn't even remember him, not when she grew up—and his wife wouldn't be able to support her without him, and he'd never have a beer with his friends or a walk with his family or a phone call with his parents ever again. "Please—"

"You need to let me out of the cell."

There was a thread of hope, suddenly, and he grabbed hold of it like a lifeline. The Joker could get out of his cell at any time—if he was let out. And Zachary, for all the stupid choices he'd made in getting involved with the clown, wasn't suicidal. "N-no."

"Excuse me?" There was a flicker of his bizarre pronunciation. Even more bizarrely, it was almost comforting. At the very least, Zachary was back on solid ground.

"I'm not letting you out. I—I'll lose my job." And my life.

"Zachary." The Joker turned his head to stare out the window. His eyes bored through the glass, cloudy and double-paned though it was. "I don't think you get it. I'm asking nicely now, but one way or another? I'm getting out."

"Then do it yourself." Shit. He'd done it. He'd challenged the Joker. Door or not, needing to be let out or not, he'd pay for that in blood if the clown got the chance. It wasn't safe in this ward now. Fuck his paycheck, he'd report to the main desk sick and see about a transfer tomorrow—

"So, uh…how's Madison?"

"What?" He'd been turning to go, to run. To get out of the high security ward and never look back. Now, his legs might as well have sprouted roots into the floor tiles. He couldn't move, couldn't even try to.

"Madison." The Joker made it sound defiled. "Your little girl? Just turned three, didn't she?"

"I—that—" And he thought he'd felt fear when he was the one being threatened. He tried to swallow, but there was no liquid in his mouth and it ground his throat raw. "I don't h-have a daughter."

"Well, that's a nasty accusation to make about your wife." The Joker's eyes sparkled, but there was no good humor in them. Just a hunger, bloodthirsty but, even worse, cunning. "What, your baby girl's blonde, so her momma's cheating? Give it a few years; I'm sure it'll, uh, turn that same mousy brown shade you're sporting. I mean, first you throw her a party with ice cream cake and a piñata, and then you try and call her illegitimate? I'm sensing some commitment issues, friendo."

Madison. The Joker knew what sort of party Zachary had thrown his daughter. He couldn't know that. He couldn't; there was no way—unless he'd heard it from someone else. Anyone else. Zachary had told other orderlies about his family, mentioned them to nurses. The Joker could have heard it from one of them. He must have. "You don't know anything about my daughter."

"I know that you gave her a name meaning "son of Maude."" The Joker smiled for the first time. It wasn't a happy smile; it was only there to show his teeth. "I take it etymology isn't your forte. I know that you got her first tricycle for her third birthday, and that it's purple with silver streamers. And I know that she's got light blonde hair about, oh, this long."

There was a drawer built into the door of every cell, to transport medications or trays of food or anything else that a patient unable to leave the room might need. The Joker shoved on it from the inside, pushing it out to reveal what Zachary took to be an empty drawer at first. Until he got closer, and saw the hairs on the inside. There weren't many, but they were long, much longer than the Joker's. And a much paler blond.

Just like Madison's.

Zachary raised his head. The Joker met his eyes.

"Open the door."

He did, and the clown pulled him inside.

Zachary Stewart would not be discovered until 3:52 AM on July fourth, in the solitary confinement room of the high security ward, dressed in the Joker's asylum uniform. Upon his discovery, he would be hospitalized for a fractured skull and jaw bone, as well as numerous abrasions and contusions over his entire body.

The body of security officer Jackson Kendall would be discovered in the security room at 11:16 PM July third, by Doctors Jeremiah Arkham and Ruth Adams, with his arms severely lacerated and his carotid artery cut. Beside him, the doctors would discover security officer Richard Moss, whose jugular had come within two centimeters of being sliced and whose femoral artery had been severed. Moss had fashioned a makeshift tourniquet on his leg with his belt, and would spend an hour in the ICU in critical condition before expiring. The security room's window had been shattered, and glass slivers would be found on the floor, but not enough to account for the entire window. The security cameras had been deactivated, and upon review of the tapes, investigators would find footage of a long-haired orderly moving down the halls, careful to keep his face turned away from the cameras, stopping once in the medical supply closet before continuing on toward the security room. Shortly thereafter, the cameras went black.

The remaining glass shards, as well as the missing medical supplies, would be discovered in the basement of Arkham Asylum, alongside the body of orderly James Hadley, at 3:16 PM on July fourth.

Gray.

All that he could see was gray, and the gray was moving as he breathed.

Hadley blinked. His head was throbbing with every breath, aching in time with the movement of wall of gray, and his vision slid in and out of focus. He felt hung over, but if this was the effect of drinking, he'd never been this drunk in his life.

Dust. His eyes focused long enough to register that. He was staring at a pile of dust. Beneath the pulsing in his head, there was cement, cold and rough, under his body. He was lying on his side.

The hell? He'd been in the hall, hadn't he? To start his shift, to see the clown, rubbing his face in the grave he'd dug for himself…the walls of the wards weren't bare concrete. What was this? Hadley tried to raise himself up on his elbows, crashing back down as his head pounded with renewed fury. "Fuck."

"Oh. So you can talk. Thought I might've broken your jaw."

The voice was familiar, but his head was spinning and he couldn't place it. His eyes scanned the room, but between the dim lighting and the way his vision wouldn't stay steady, he couldn't see anyone. Hadley closed his eyes, waited, opened them again. The room was clearer now, and empty.

"I broke Zachary's jaw, ya know."

The basement. He recognized the staircase and the exposed piping on the floor. This was where Crane had dumped his shit into the water system. They'd boarded up the doors after the cops had searched the place, removed the basement from the elevator to keep any other sick fucks from using it to drug the city. But it was still accessible through a staircase in one of the janitor's closets, and someone must have dragged him down those stairs. Headfirst, from the feel of it.

"He was quite the Chatty Cathy before I got down to biz-ness. Most of it was so boring—all don't kill me or think of my family or stay away from my little girl, but there were parts—little, in between parts—that were absolutely enthralling."

Hadley staggered tohis knees, searching for the source of the voice. It was coming from behind him, by the sound, but the trauma to his head must have fucked with his hearing, because behind him there was nothing but a wall.

"He had this great little story, for instance, about last night. Seems he was just gonna go home for the evening when some brazen, uh, upstart cornered him in the hall and threatened to beat 'im senseless if he didn't 'fess up to what he'd been doing for his clown friend. Fancy that, huh?"

The Joker. Hadley bolted to his feet and regretted it immediately when the world swam before him, then faded completely in a flood of blinding pain. The Joker was one thing when Hadley was in his cell without a concussion—the time he'd caught him off guard being the exception that proved the rule—but here, injured and out of his element—Shit. His vision cleared again, and he scanned the space before him, looking for cover. The door wasn't far.

"Actually, it wasn't a very nice story at all." The Joker's voice was flat now, and right behind him. It didn't make sense—it wasn't possible—but Hadley had one shot at escape and now wasn't the time to get technical. He ran, adrenaline overcoming the pain in his head. The door was five steps now, two steps, open—

And a pair of hands shot out from the other side, slamming him back against the railing.

The world disappeared again. When it came back, there was a face over his. He didn't recognize it at first, not because it wasn't familiar—how could anyone forget those scars?—but because he'd never seen it look that way. The Joker was always wearing a shit-eating grin, and twisting his face when he wasn't. Here, his expression was smooth apart from downward-slanting eyebrows, and his mouth was set in a line.

It occurred to Hadley, as his recognition dawned, that the Joker could throw his voice.

Fuck.

"You killed her, you sick bastard."

A dog. Unbefuckinglievable. The sick fuck had killed people, had tried to murder him, and he cared so much about some mutt? It'd be pathetic if it wasn't his life on the line. "You tried to—"

The Joker's fist slammed into his chin, jerking his head sideways. The pain was bad enough to make his eyes ring, stars exploding across his eyes. "You wouldn't dare try to justify yourself if you knew what I'd lost."

Hadley spat blood; one of his teeth had been knocked loose. He attempted to sit up, and the Joker didn't move in retaliation. Now if he could just catch him off guard, get in a few well-placed kicks. The Joker was strong, he'd given him that, but he was only human, and any human would go down with the right force. "I don't care what you've lost."

"You wouldn't." And then the clown's hands were on his throat, squeezing the life from him. His head was jostled by the movements, sending white hot bursts of agony throughout his body. He tried to claw at the hands around his throat, kick out against the body holding him down, but his lungs were burning for air and his strength was fading.

And then the Joker's hands were gone, leaving him gasping for air.

"Know how long it takes die of strangulation? A few minutes, with the right pressure. Know how long I'm gonna take to do you, honeybunch?" He leaned down, whispered in Hadley's ear. "A few hours."

He lashed out in desperation, arm slamming against the Joker's throat. The Joker fell back as Hadley scrambled forward, trying to regain his footing, but the Joker's foot caught his ankle and sent him crashing back down. The Joker twisted, and there was a sharp pain, then a burning in Hadley's hand. He looked down to find a shard of glass embedded in the back of his hand, and from the feel of it, it went straight through to the other side.

"You know, I really don't like you," said the Joker, and then his foot was in Hadley's ribs.

The minutes after were a blur, full of kicking and crunching and screams that started in his lungs and died in his throat. He was on fire now, not just his hand but his whole body, and although he'd rather die than give the Joker the satisfaction of screaming, his head was spinning and his nerves ablaze, and it was only the lack of breath from the kicks to his stomach that kept him from shrieking out loud. The world began to tilt and he vomited, vaguely aware that the Joker was pulling him up so he wouldn't drown in his own puke.

"I've got this great trick," said the Joker, as he hauled Hadley's head back, "that I do with a pencil, but you wanna know what? It works with glass too!"

Something was shoved against his eye, and there was a moment of resistance and indescribable pain before it forced its way inside, leaking fluids from the socket as half of Hadley's world went permanently dark.

The fingers of Hadley's right hand had been sawed off, as the officers who would discover the body the following afternoon noted. There was a tourniquet tied at one end around his wrist, to limit the blood flow to his hands, and tied at the other end to the railing, to keep his hand above his heart. The autopsy would reveal microscopic shards of glass in wounds, and the severed fingers collected at the scene would reveal that the thumb and index finger were removed one joint at a time. The top knuckle of the middle finger on the left hand had also been removed, but the assailant had either lost interest or become annoyed with how quickly the glass shards dulled, because the rest of the fingers were intact.

There was a bloodstained intubation tube near the body on the floor, and the autopsy would also reveal scraping inside Hadley's throat, indicating that the assailant placed it inside his victim to keep him from asphyxiating on vomit, or—judging from the depth of the cuts on Hadley's torso—to keep him from suffocating on his blood.

The orderly's body was covering in contusions and lacerations, and on the back of his left thigh, a large and jagged patch of skin had been removed, along with the musculature beneath it, in some points. An analysis of the corpse's stomach contents during the autopsy would reveal that the Joker had forced his victim to consume his own flesh. Apart from the missing eye, fingers, and stretch of skin, the damage done to the body appeared to be limited to deep cuts and beating, until the assailant had slit his throat. The autopsy would note the laceration across the throat to be relatively shallow, indicating that exsanguination may have taken some time to occur, depending on the amount of blood loss from before.

Further examination would reveal that several of the contusions had occurred post-mortem, suggesting that the assailant continued to beat his victim after the time of death.

"You should sleep, Jonathan."

If Jonathan heard, he gave no indication, flipping a page of his book. Linda tried to remind herself that it was rude to roll her eyes at a mental patient, but the part of her mind that needed to be a bitch in order to make it through the night argued that he wasn't looking anyway, and so she gave into the urge to roll. She couldn't fault Joan for providing him with his books—certainly, it was better than leaving him to sit and hallucinate and whisper about birds—but she didn't want to turn off the lights only to have a lecture about her disrespect for intellectual development, as she'd had before the "birds" had started up the night before.

"Jonathan."

"It's too loud for that," he muttered, pushing his glasses up on the brim of his nose.

So he was hallucinating again. Not surprising. Linda felt a mix of pity and exasperation. "Is it the birds?"

He looked up with wide eyes. "What birds?"

Great. "Never mind, I was just—"

The door to the infirmary was pushed in with enough force to bounce it against the opposite wall, and the Joker stepped inside. If not for his scars, Linda wouldn't have recognized him, partly because he was wearing an orderly's uniform, and partly because he was covered in blood. "Joker?"

He gave her a wave, with a smile that might have looked charming, had it come from someone who was familiar with a toothbrush. And who wasn't covered in blood. Linda couldn't tell if it was his own and she was hesitant to find out. "What happened?"

"Not much. Komdu sæll, Scarecrow."

Jonathan looked up for the first time since the door had opened. "What?"

"It's Icelandic."

"I see." He returned to his book.

The Joker's smile widened. "I'm breaking out of this place, Jonny."

Linda moved backwards, reaching a hand behind her for the phone on the desk.

"Mmm-hmm."

"Wanna tag along?"

AN: All right, I know that We've Only Just Begun (www. youtube. com/ watch?v=RvBCl3CBMXA) doesn't exactly have the right mood for this chapter, but I can't hear it without associating it with the film version of 1408, and there, it was quite creepily used.

No, the Joker didn't break out and go stalk Zachary's family. I assume you all know where he got the hair?

I hope you don't mind that I didn't write out the process of the Joker's bloody revenge. My conscience and my limited ability to write action sequences interfered.

"You wouldn't dare try to justify yourself if you knew what I'd lost" is a line of Harvey's from TDK. If you've ever read Calvin and Hobbes, remember the strips when Calvin stole Susie's doll, so she retaliated by stealing Hobbes, and Calvin had a line akin to "This was hilarious until she did the exact same thing to me"? That's about how well I think the Joker would take the torments he inflicts on others turned back at him.