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Chapter Five: Not At All A Dream

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.


The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars


Did wander darkling in the eternal space,


Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth


Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;


Morn came and went --- and came, and brought no day,


And men forgot their passions in the dread


Of this their desolation; and all hearts


Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light

Lord Byron, Darkness

It hadn't been, Crane reflected three days later, that bad.

Yes, the Joker had fought like a tiger on PCP, as Crane stood there, blank as plain paper, blood running down his torso, until someone finally tried to touch him and he in turn tried to bite off their ear.

He had been subdued embarrassingly quickly – most of the orderlies had at least four or five inches on him – but he'd got in a few good blows here and there. He'd broken someone's nose, and the ear guy was clearly going to need stitches.

He had stopped fighting when he realised how pointless it was, and the only thing that distracted him from the sheer skin-crawling horror of having people touch him post-attempted-rape was the spectacle the Joker made.

Frankly, what a show.

He killed three men and he didn't even have a weapon.

Eventually – by eventually, Crane meant "about three minutes, if that" – they gave up and tasered him repeatedly. It took a lot of shocks. He was still fighting tooth and nail after the first two, and wasn't even unconscious until the fifth, cackling all the way.

Tasers were new at Arkham. Crane suspected that the growing "supervillain issue" may have contributed to this.

Crane would have enjoyed the other man's pain, if he had not just been his unwitting – maybe even deliberate – rescuer.

And the man clearly got off on pain.

An interesting observation, and perhaps a useful one, although he couldn't imagine how.

Nevertheless, knowledge is power and all that.

They dragged him away, and Crane could have sworn there was a smile on his face.

Could have been the dried blood, of course. Difficult to tell.

Three days later and here he was, straitjacket free and actually eating in the "cafeteria", (he always put it in quotation marks in his mind, he doubted that anything that came from there could really be defined as food, and was continually surprised that it was legally so), and yes, he was using a spork, and it was humiliating, but it was better than nothing, and it was certainly better than eating jelly with his fingers. That had been truly humiliating.

"Barry" died, of course.

He needed emergency medical attention within the first few seconds, attention Crane had been unwilling to provide. Crane was certain that the incident would be written up as "neglect" of some kind, a full investigation would be promised, and never take place. The midnight beatings of inmates would continue, and life would go on as before.

But Crane wasn't punished, largely because his and the Joker's stories matched. Perfectly. The Joker claimed that he'd heard noises from his cell across the hall, and had broken in to save Crane from being raped.

Crane hadn't even known that the Joker was imprisoned across the hall, but he claimed that in his humble, (and also previously professional), opinion, (which ought to count for something), he believed that the Joker was trying to save him.

Apparently, Arkham staff had become even stupider than he realised post-his-downfall, because they believed not only him, but the Joker as well.

How could they believe the Joker? Had they met him?

But they couldn't punish Crane for his own attempted rape, not really, so after a day in the infirmary and lots of pain medication that he needed but didn't want, because it clouded his mind and made him slur, he was let loose, with the insane asylum equivalent of a pat on the head.

But even the Joker wasn't punished, not really, for it appeared that a new recruit he had hired shortly before his, um, villainous rampage was even more of a naive idiot than he had previously expected. And he hired her because he thought no girl of her personality and disposition would even be able to countenance suspicions of what he was really doing to his patients.

Dr Harleen Quinzel.

Treating the Joker. This would not end well. For her, at least. He was sure that the Joker would get whatever he wanted out of the equation, he always seemed to.

"Harley", as Crane remembered that she liked to be called, (sometimes even by patients, how unprofessional), apparently decided that what the Joker was trying to express had been "healthy and positive", he had just gone about it in an "unhealthy and negative" manner.

Violent murder was "unhealthy"?


Well...

Crane braced himself for a colloquialism.


... duh.

Although, he supposed, perhaps he was not the most competent judge of "healthy". He had spent several weeks as a sometimes co-existing split personality.

Hence, the "we" of earlier was not an entirely excellent sign.

But the worry that had coiled in his stomach mere days earlier was now replaced with anticipation.

After a week of solitary confinement they were occasionally going to let the Joker associate with the other inmates. Only the high security ones, of course - the ones that maybe stood a chance at self defence. Which they didn't, anyway. Because it was the Joker. Honestly, how stupid were these people?


Great idea, Arkham. Let the most dangerous man in Gotham loose among murderers and rapists. I'm sure that won't end in tears. Why don't you give him some TNT and a pack of those cards he loves so much while you're at it? If anyone could ferociously slaughter someone with a deck of cards, it would be him.

But he couldn't complain. Not really. They were letting the Joker out and he might have someone here to really talk to for the first time in quite some time, and that even made the indignity of eating with an instrument with a portmanteau name worth it. Or at least almost bearable.

So, finally having someone else to talk to was like a dream come true. Only better. All his dreams were nightmares, full of dark and fire and fear. Yes, this was much better than a dream.

Crane waited, and although he didn't smile, his eyes became that little bit more frosty.


I wonder what his feelings are about biological weaponry and its practical applications?

I love Lord Byron. Obsessively, manically, and totally. Suggesting to me that he wrote "soppy love poetry", (which has happened on more than one occasion), buys you a one way ticket to butt-kick city.

At least they didn't taser Jonathan this time. He doesn't seem to have much luck when it comes to tasers.

The "jelly" and the "spork" are a reference to "the Joker Blogs". I noticed that although they gave the Joker only food that he could eat with his hands, (jelly, apple, and something else that I don't recall), they (somewhat unwisely) let the Scarecrow have a fork. I downgraded it to a spork because: a) sporks are funnier, and b) I personally wouldn't give Jonathan a fork. It's an instrument that even a small but determined person could do a lot of damage with, and giving it to an evil genius who might want to escape your institution just seems... ill thought-out to me.

I don't think the Joker cared less whether Jonathan lived or died. He was almost certainly trying to break out of Arkham entirely, but decided that busting into a cell during a beat-down would be funnier. Coincidentally meeting Gotham's only other (surviving) supervillain was merely a bonus.

May I say at this point, to avoid the hating: I ADORE HARLEY QUINN. I DO, I DO, I DO. I am sorry that Jonathan was so dismissive of her, but I have to say that I do imagine that she must have been very naive to have ever fallen in love with the Joker, and must have also allowed significant boundaries to be crossed, (like letting a high-security patient call her by her nickname), also.

Yes, they're letting the Joker out to play. Yes, this is a mistake. Yes, more people are going to die. And yes, both the Joker and Scarecrow are going to find this very funny. (Scarecrow? Yes, you're going to meet him, if infrequently in this fic. For the sequel I have planned, his role will be larger.)

La la la la...