AN: SNOW DAY! Apparently, being twenty below and having severe weather advisories isn't enough to cancel classes, but eight inches in twenty degree weather is. Well, I'm not going to question it. It's awesome.

In other news, I'm still not getting alert emails or PMs. So if you've sent me a review reply or a PM after four o'clock on Monday, I haven't gotten it. Just in case someone desperately needs to speak to me (I can't imagine why they would) I'm making my email address visible on my profile, until everything's sorted out.

Thanks for the reviews!

Breaking out, Joker reflected, was barely more challenging than doing tying his shoes, when he put his mind to it. There was less blood involved when he was tying his shoes—usually, anyway, there had been that time in the nightclub—but the level of difficulty was about the same.

Which made him all the more pissed that everyone else in Arkham had managed it before him.

"They didn't even ask if I wanted to come." He turned the keys in the ignition, casting a glance to the nurse in the passenger's seat. "I'd say that's incredibly rude, wouldn't you, Annie? Can I call you Annie?"

He had no idea if Annie was her first name, given that she'd only ever told him her surname, Hearst. But she looked like an Annie, with her pale freckly skin and ridiculously curly auburn hair. And she always sounded so goddamn cheerful, the Joker could easily picture her singing "The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow." Besides, leaning over to examine the ID information on her pass key would take effort, and she was in no position to correct him, dead from the syringe stabbed through her eye and all.

Annie didn't answer, which was also incredibly rude, but for the sake of a civil discussion he let it slide. "You're right, it is hurtful. I mean, sure, I wanna kill Jonny, but I'd let them talk to him for a few minutes first, you know, say their goodbyes and all. They're definitely not gonna get that chance now." He paused, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel as he pulled onto the road. "Even Harley-girl abandoned me."

Harley. That one really did hurt, or came as close to hurting as things could for him. Harley was supposed to be his. He was definitely restricting her sex privileges for this. And her breathing privileges, for three minutes or so, until she got the point. Stupid little Jonny Crane, stealing his Bat and then having the gall to take his girl from him too. What did Jonny need Harley's attention for, anyway? It wasn't like he was going to screw her, the man was clearly camper than a row of tents, and even so, Joker had had to persuade him for weeks before he tried anything. No, it must have been out of pure spite.

Well, the Joker would show him. It would take nothing short of divine intervention to save the bastard's life now, at least nothing that he could see. Actually, divine intervention wasn't a sure bet either. After all, God wasn't what mattered in the universe, he and Batsy were.

"Though, it is kinda a good thing that they broke out, I guess. Otherwise we wouldn't have had the opportunity to get, uh, better acquainted."

Usually in the mornings, the orderlies put him in a straitjacket right before she came to inject him with whatever it was the asylum wanted in his bloodstream. They'd done that this morning, and he'd considered fighting, but the orderlies were armed with tazers. Being electrocuted didn't particularly bother him, but it would incapacitate him long enough to be thrown in lock-down, where escape would take even more effort. So he'd decided to pretend for a bit that good things came to those who wait—and what a load of crap that was, if he'd waited for Batman to notice him instead of killing Brian Douglas and the others, he'd still be waiting—and let himself be restrained.

As fate would have it, however, luck was on his side, as it so often was. The moment they'd finished strapping him in, the news came that his so-called girlfriend and the others had jumped the fence, and the orderlies had left to assist the search. Giving him enough time to free himself from the straitjacket. It wasn't hard to do, provided the person trying it was flexible, which he was. When Annie finally came back, it was no problem getting her close enough to be taken hostage, convincing the guards outside that they should hand over their walkie-talkies if they didn't want him to get all stabbity on her, and locking the guards in his cell.

He'd kept Annie as a hostage in case he ran into anyone else on the way out, but apparently everyone—including the idiots who were supposed to be watching the security footage—was still looking for the other villains. She'd given him the keys to her car and he'd given her a needle to the eye socket. And probably the brain, he'd gotten it pretty far back there. The optic nerve at least. She'd died at once but he'd swirled the syringe around the socket for a bit, just to be sure. Never knew when a corpse would pull a Rasputin, after all.

"You know, you're not a very good conversationalist."

She had nothing to say in her defense, apparently. He tended to have that effect on people, speechlessness. And also death. He supposed he'd have to carry on the conversation one-sided.

"Every heard of a blood eagle, Annie?"

She had not, it seemed.

"It was an execution method of the Old Norse people, see. Or, they think it was. Some say the whole thing was a myth. How it works is, you slice open the back of a person, cut their ribs off near the spine, and pull 'em out. You can also pull the lungs out if you wanna, or just pour salt in the wounds. And you can cut the guy open from the front if you want, instead of the back. Then you slice the sternum open, and pull the ribs back like you're doing heart surgery, only a lot wider." He took his hands off the steering wheel to demonstrate, braking just before they went off the road.

Annie's body shook slightly, almost as a nod.

"Right. Anyway, they call it a blood eagle because they look like wings, the ribs you've pulled out. So I'm thinking I might try that on Jonny. It'd be ironic, you see, because I used to call him 'angel.'" Although he hadn't called him that too many times, just toward the end when he'd really started to break. It was a shame, it honestly was, that Jonny's actions were forcing his hand this way, because New Jonny was a hell of a lot more interesting than his former self. If it weren't for his constant attention whoring, Joker would have liked him quite a bit. The man had fired a nail gun into his own hand, after all. That kind of psychosis was endlessly entertaining. But no, he had to go and break out again, and thus make Joker kill him.

And anyway, the blood eagle wouldn't be suitably ironic because he'd rarely used 'angel.' He didn't know any 'princess' tortures, though there was one for 'kitten.' He didn't own a cat's claws though, and didn't particularly feel like hunting one down. Joker had always been of the opinion that simpler methods of inflicting pain worked just as well as the elaborate ones. The equipment wasn't what made the act, the showmanship was. Why waste money on intricate devices when a cheese grater or a box of matches would do just as well?

But he'd be lying to say he didn't have favorite torture devices. Iron maidens were nice, and the terror of the thing slowly closing on its victim just couldn't be replicated by pounding nails into the skin or dragging someone face first into a jagged piece of glass. Catherine wheels had their appeal as well, though his favorite of them all would have to be the pear.

"Poire d'angoisse," he said to Annie, as if to clarify, though he hadn't been speaking out loud and had no way of knowing if she spoke French. "Or a choke pear. Not like an actual pear, though it was named after a French one that was near impossible to eat raw and tasted like death. It started out as a term for a gag, because it's hard to swallow, see, but eventually people decided that having a pear-shaped gag wasn't enough. Torture weapons are all about, uh, functionality, after all, so why use something that only shuts people up, if it can shut 'em up and hurt 'em at the same time?"

He paused for a second to let Annie take that in, swerved back into his own lane of traffic.

"So along came the pear as you and I know it. As I do, anyway. They'd put it in the mouth of a victim—any orifice they could fit it in, actually—at turn this key at the bottom. Now, the pear was made up of four or so separate pieces of metal, and when you turn the key, the pieces, uh, spread out."

He really liked that. If he were ever near a torture museum, he'd stop in and steal one. Too bad Gotham didn't have those. As far as he knew, torture museums were mostly in Europe, though Salem, Massachusetts might have one. Or not, he wasn't sure. Either way, he couldn't use it on Jonny, so it was irrelevant. Besides, death by evisceration or distention tended to make for an ugly corpse, and he wasn't sure he wanted that. Jonny's body might serve as an example, to show Harley what happened when people were disloyal to the Joker, and it wouldn't make the same impact if the body was unrecognizable.

Though if Harley found Jonny first, and was around when the killing occurred, it really didn't matter how the corpse looked.

Well, he could work out the details then. The important thing now was deciding on the method of death. Or not so much the method, as the broader umbrella it would fall under. There were five basic categories of torture: hot, cold, sharp, blunt, and loud. That was without counting things like starvation, tickling, or sensory deprivation, but those took longer, weeks often, and he didn't want to spend weeks dealing with that stupid little whore. The Joker would probably end up choosing sharp. Knives and the like always got the best reaction. All right, so he'd get his blades, track down Jonny, and improvise from there.

One thing he would not do, however, and of this he was certain, was put a smile on Jonny's face.

Jonny didn't deserve it. Joker glanced at his scars in the rearview mirror, dark and twisted in contrast to his pale, smooth skin. He hadn't put the makeup back on yet. Given his tendency to stick his head out the window as he drove, that was probably a good thing, but he missed it. This wasn't his real face, not anymore, but the mask they forced him to wear. The paint and lipstick made the outside match the in, and he wasn't quite comfortable without it.

The scars were a reminder, however, of that splendor he had, the power. Other people thought the scars were hideous, something to be feared. Other people were idiots. The scars were beautiful, a work of art. Like him, and what he did. Chaos was more than just destroying things. It took talent to twist his victims like he had Harvey and Jonny. Jonny didn't know how lucky he was, to have his push over the edge come from such an artist. Before he had been boring, as black and white as everyone else in this stupid little world.

Well, sepia, maybe. He'd had the whole fear toxin thing going for him, but not much else.

Then the Joker had come along and breathed life into him, taken a dull beige canvas and splashed it with color. Made Jonathan his creation, his influence greater than anyone else who'd dominated the doctor before. It should have been perfect. Then again, Joker should have remembered the cautionary tale of Adam and Eve, realized that sometimes the creation is ungrateful. Sometimes it finds the thing that will hurt the creator the most and does just that.

And he was hurt, as much as he was capable of being. Mostly angry, but hurt.

Not that all was lost. The creation may rebel against the creator, but the creator still holds the power. And can still exact punishment. Banishing Jonny from Eden, as it were. Only instead of sending him to the harsh outside world, he'd be sending him to his death. Harsh, perhaps, but it had been Jonny who'd brought this on himself.

Besides, there was beauty in death as well. Jonny was still his work of art, and he should be grateful for such a sendoff.

"Right?" Joker turned to regard Annie, looking for admiration rather than approval, and nodded her head when she didn't speak on her own. "Right."

AN: Joker is referring to the musical Annie, which includes the songs "The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow" and "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile."

Joker's favorite torture devices are my own. Yes, I have favorite torture devices. In fact, I was in a torture museum in Germany over the summer without a translator, and I was able to go through and explain to the rest of the group what each device did, as they were unable to read the German explanations. I don't know what's wrong with me, but this is how I entertain myself.