Sad Clown

Blackjack's notes--Wow, this is an old one! I wrote this one about 6 years ago, before I had a clear understanding of what 'fanfiction' was. It's based on the movie timeline, so how to fit Harley in when Joker's been dead since the first one? Well, this is what I came up with. Aah, it's interesting retyping this. I should get back into the old fandoms some more.

Chapter One--Sweet Sorrow


The large bells of the cathedral toned to the sleeping city that it was midnight. No one was awake enough to care. No night owls stirred their coffee while watching stand up comedians on the late shows. No preadolescent girls stayed up late at sleepovers, giggling over their teenybopper magazines. No college kids cross-dressed for a night at the Bijou and their favorite B-movie. This was a night for restful quiet, for sweet dreams, for curling up with your loved one.

The young woman standing alone in the middle of the street had no loved one. She paid no attention to the yowling cat scratching at the locked door of a deli, or to the playful pigeons in the street ahead of her. She only stood, and stared at the bells.

People said he was a madman, she thought, but who isn't these days?

In her line of work she saw a lot of madmen. She was a doctor at the most famous mental institution in the world, and she saw many a tragic case come through the steel gate in which was etched the words "Arkham Asylum". Most people responded well to therapy, but some...She shook her blonde head. No use dwelling on the past.

You always dwell on the past, Harleen. Why should now be any different?

She didn't want to walk forward. She knew she would be given grief by what she would find there, but her long legs moved her ahead to the cracked spot in the pavement. He had fallen to his death on this spot, caught by the leg while climbing the ladder to his helicopter. Tantamount to murder, in her mind.

Gotham had kept the cracked cement as an account of the maniac who had terrorized the city. A sick, sick way of remembering, like making the threater where Dillenger was shot a historic spot. Whoever thought this one up should be locked up--they're sicker than he ever was! A monument to a reign of terror--but did they ever consider the feelings of those who knew him?

She had first met him only a few weeks after her employment at the asylum had started. She was struck by how...*calm* he always was. But that wasn't the only thing that caught her attention. He was tall, with piercing eyes that seemed to change color in varying light. If eyes are the windows to the soul, Jack Napier had his blinds drawn. Even in such expressive eyes, he kept his emotions well hidden.

He had been very suave, and always seemed to know the right thing to say. No one else could cheer her up like that. No one else had ever, in her entire life, made her laugh and had her mean it. When he burst out singing "Make 'em Laugh" during a session, doing all the Donald O'Connor dancing and pratfalls, she laughed till she cried, and he reached over and wiped the tears away with the handkerchief he kept in his shirt pocket.

"True comedy hurts to hear, but it brings you back for more," he told her. She was supposed to think that statement insane, nothing but mad ravings, but...she didn't. Why would she think it insane when it was so true? Maybe it was strange, but she saw nothing wrong with Jack Napier. He was smart, witty--inappropiate at times, but no more than most people--and oh so handsome! The only oddity she could find was that his hands were always cold. "Cold hands, warm heart," he told her, and she believed it. He had never given her reason not to believe it; so she signed his release forms and sent him on his merry way.

What happened next went beyond every imagining she ever could have had.