The nurses who were working the day he arrived had told her about him, long before his file ever ended up on her desk.

Everyone was both amazed and disgusted, the latter for the obvious reasons, the former simply because he had managed to survive what surely would have destroyed anyone else. He'd faltered initially, though; had gone under twice on the plane from Baghdad, twice upon his arrival at Hines, but been revived. But about one day into his stay at the hospital he seemed to drag himself off the doorstep, so to speak. No one knew exactly what made him change his mind, made him want to hold on again. Those nurses had seen so many soldiers die… they recognized death, the smell, could see when they simply wanted to… give up the ghost. He was there, and then suddenly he was not. It was just another mystery about the Captain. At that time, no one had even known his name.

He had grown steadily stronger, his wounds healing when he let them, and soon he was well enough to leave his room. He'd struck up the friendship with Nunez and Smith almost immediately, and in the following two months managed to make it through five of the hospital's finest psychiatrists without an inch of progress between them.

Now she understood why he had developed such a reputation with them.

His moods were erratic, he had a definitive impulse control issue, and he was manipulative, she was learning that quickly. He enjoyed causing discomfort and confusion in his attending physicians and fellow patients. Combine his intelligence, the training he had received…. Well, they'd created a monster, to put it simply. Trying to control the Captain at this point was like trying to reign in a hurricane: absurd, impossible, and you'd most likely die trying to do something that stupid. The only power they really had over him was what he was allowing them, though she didn't think the higher ups would like to see it that way. But how long could they really control a man like that, a 'killing machine' as he'd said? What was really stopping him from taking all of their training and turning it against them?

Harley was sure that was why men like the Colonel found him so threatening.

She was going to have to keep her cards much closer to the chest from now on. She had seriously underestimated him. Anything you say can and will be used against you, she thought. It was a hard balance to strike, keeping a safe distance from him while still trying to win his confidence. She couldn't let on how much he frightened her, or things would quickly go downhill. The really scary thing was she had no idea exactly what that meant, all she knew was that she had to keep the balance of power in her favor, had to.

Thus far, she had managed to keep herself in check, but she was supremely disturbed to find that her inexplicable attraction to him had not lessened, for all that she found herself afraid of him at times. The simple fact of it made her want to question her own sanity. This man had been lethal long before the military had gotten their hands on him, and yet she found herself staring at the strong lines of his shoulders, the quirk of his lips, the dart of his tongue like a pink punctuation mark, every few sentences.

She felt very close to losing control of the situation but she no longer had the option of passing his case on to someone else. She was just going to have to try to hold herself together. She couldn't help him when she too was falling apart. And she had to be at the top of her game… From what she had heard so far, the man had years of trauma in his history, not even including the incident that had sent him here to Hines in the first place. She was in over her head, no doubt about that. Standen expected her to fail, which meant her only course of action was to prove him wrong, save both herself and the Captain.

Harley wearily looked up at the clock. 8 PM. She'd been here for thirteen hours now.

If she wasn't careful, this job was going to put her in a padded room right beside Jack's.

OOO

Captain Napier was returned to the general population of the hospital the day after Major Thomas had been transferred to the VA Hospital one state over. No one knew exactly who had asked for the transfer, Thomas or someone else, but no one really questioned why it had been asked for, that much was obvious. For the first week, everything seemed normal. Nunez and Smith welcomed him back with open arms, and the three returned to their daily poker tournaments in the cafeteria. Their presence seemed to do him good, and some of the manic energy left him over the following days. However, that did nothing to soothe his fellow patients, who regarded him as a bird might a snake: a deadly presence never to be forgotten or trusted. They gave him a wide berth wherever he traveled in the hospital, but that seemed to be exactly the way he wanted it, and things in the hospital continued on much as they always did.

The next four sessions were particularly illuminating, and Harley learned more of his childhood and teenage years. When he was seven, the kind man who owned the diner his mother worked at became his stepfather, and they moved to the north side of the island. By that time he was already in the fifth grade, and understandably had few friends beyond his mother and the Rottweiler named Rufus that quickly became Jack's the instant he moved in. He was distrustful of him at first, but it became apparent with time that he was a good man, and treated him and his mother very well.

Harley thought it must have been a good influence on the child he had been to finally have a positive male role model in his life.

He developed quickly, and graduated from high school at the age of 15, entering Gotham University at 16 on an academic scholarship, and leaving again at the age of 18 to join the Army. No doubt the decision had something to do with his mother's death from cancer a few month's earlier, but he never mentioned it, sharing only the conversation he'd had with his stepfather ("You get outta here, boy…. Get outta here and don't ever look back on it… Let this city burn to the fucking ground, but don't ever look back…")

He finished his college education at West Point through a distance-learning program with George Mason, graduating Valedictorian with a major in chemistry, and a minor in physics. He applied and was accepted into the Van Patten project between the ages of 19 and 20, and had been a part of that elite group for 8 years now, in that time earning his Master's in Chemistry, and a score of other achievements in his chosen and highly classified field of Weapons Development. At the age of 26, however, they brought him out into the field full time, and for the past two years he'd been serving in Iraq as the leader of a small group of Special Forces operatives.

The last two years on her timeline, 26 to 28, were woefully sparse; he glossed over the details, and sidestepped every attempt she made to learn about his activities during that time. He would say only that he'd been sent there to train them, and that was as far as Harley could make him go.

He spoke flatly about the men he had killed, however, without the least hint of the remorse and regret that plagued the other soldiers she counseled. He said he remembered almost all of their faces, and while that information disturbed her, it also intrigued her, and further testing revealed he did in fact have a nearly photographic memory. When asked to look at 30 objects for 3 seconds, he could recall 29 on average; with 60 objects, he could recall 57. He could do fuel consumption algorithms in his head and each day revealed some new and fascinating aspect of his personality. Harley found it easy to forget that she had been afraid of him only a few short days ago, and began looking forward to their sessions more and more. He wasn't going to hurt her; more than anything she believed that he truly was coming to regard her as a friend, was beginning to trust her. She would never be able to help him as just his doctor… she had to become something just a little bit more.

Their regular sessions had become fruitless, however, and by the time of their eighth meeting, Harley decided to try something a little different. When he arrived that morning, she waited until he was seated to throw the cards at him. He looked a little startled as the pack hit him squarely in the chest and bounced into his lap. He picked it up, looking at it quizzically, before turning the look on her, one brow arched. She just grinned in return.

"Teach me."

He frowned for a moment, then opened the pack, shaking them out into his left hand with a swift skill she could appreciate: it was something he'd done many times before.

"I'm sure the US taxpayer's would be thrilled to hear they're paying you to play poker on the clock."

"Well, we've talked about everything that can be talked about, we have to do something to fill the time." His lips were quirked in that eternal smirk, eyes turning up to regard her. He didn't need to look, and her eyes drifted down to watch as he parted and shuffled the deck with precision.

"You're good at that."

"Well, they've always said I was good with my hands."

It was entirely inappropriate how much she enjoyed their time together, but none of her other patients were nearly as interesting as the Captain, and none of them could quite compete with his wicked sense of humor.

"No response to that, Doctor? It's no fun baiting if you don't bite."

"I can't let you win all the hands, Jack."

"You'd might as well get used to it." He grinned back to her, and counted out five cards for each of them.

"Sure you aren't just a little overconfident?"

"Am I?" He said, and laid out an impossible hand, all 4 aces.

"You cheated!"

"Alright, you deal.."

"Fine." She wasn't nearly as proficient at the cards as he was, and he watched her in obvious amusement as she clumsily cut the deck and then shuffled it, counting out the cards.

"You'd never make it in Vegas, sugar. I've already seen half of your cards."

"How? I've kept them turned toward me this whole time."

"While you were dealing," he says, and lays down three of his cards, smoothly picking up the three she pulls off of the deck for him. "You're a liar, you know."

She stopped, hand poised in the air to pick up three cards of her own. "Why would you say that, Captain?"

"You don't need to me to teach you anything."

She frowned as she laid her cards face-down on the table. Nothing. He laughed and threw down a pair of deuces.

"Maybe you need me to teach you how to cheat. Or if you want to keep losing all day, we can make this really interesting."

"Wh—" But she didn't need to finish the sentence, the lascivious look he was giving her said it all. She blushed furiously, and tried desperately to ignore the little ball of warmth that was growing in her belly. "Now, Captain, that's inappropriate."

"Appropriate is relative, Harl, most things are." He tilted his head, leaning back in the chair and steepling his hands together. "You can't pretend you don't know how every man in this hospital looks at you."

She snorted. "I'm quite aware of how they look at me… like a piece of meat, little else. No one takes you seriously when you look like I do."

"Now, see me, I try not to take anything seriously, Harley, you should really look into it." And with that, he gave the chair a whirl, hair flying out around him wildly. She laughed, watching him. He was such a strange blend of menace and childishness that it was nearly impossible to sort the two out. "My mother gave me the best advice I've ever gotten from anyone. Throughout life you'll always have a choice, either laugh or cry. Always laugh, sugar, always."

She nodded. "I can see that."

"I always laughed… and now I'm always smiling, too, he made sure of that, didn't he?"

She froze in her chair, afraid that if she moved the entire moment would unravel.

"Who gave you those scars, Jack?" she says quietly, eyes widening as his turn back to her, but without the slightest hint of mirth now, the change in his mood sudden and complete.

"Do you know what it's like to scream till your throat is bleeding, Doctor? What it's like to hear a grown man cry, scream, beg for you to make it stop, to help him, but you can't, because you can't even help yourself? Do you know what that's like?"

"No… I don't."

"I do."

She swallows slowly, licking her lips carefully. "You… don't have to talk about it, if you don't want to."

"We'll broach the subject eventually," he says, almost savagely. "You've got a knack for opening me up, Doc. But I would suggest you be sure you're ready, before we look behind Door #1, hmm?"

It was true, of course; she didn't think she was ready at all.

OOO

Their session essentially ended on that note. They played a few more hands, and Harley even won a few, but nothing of any value was said. He seemed very cold as he left, and Harley could barely focus on the rest of her day, she was so upset by her blunder. If she'd ruined all her hard work with one stupid question… she was…well, she didn't know what she was going to do, but she felt like screaming, she was sure of that. The ever-present chignon was giving her a headache, and she pulled the pins out one by one, tossing them disgustedly into the paperclip bowl on her desk. Her final patient of the day, Charlotte Turner, had left her office at 5:15, and at 5:20 Harley was staring moodily at the corner of her desk, a single thought circling through her head over and over. You idiot, she thought despairingly, and scrubbed her hands over her face, looking again at the pack of cards still sitting on the desk's corner…

She couldn't let it end like this.

OOO

There was no use trying to walk quietly, her heels tapped on the floor and echoed up and down every hall she walked through, and finally she reached her destination, the third wing of the hospital, on the fourth floor, room 407. She stared at the door for some time, but finally gathered the courage to knock after a nurse and several patients looked at her strangely as they passed by.

"Come in," was the disinterested reply from inside, and as she opened the door and stepped inside, she found he hadn't moved a muscle to face whoever was entering his room. He was stretched out on the bed, arms behind his head, ankles crossed, and she knew this was a mistake the instant she breeched the room, her eyes drawn inexorably to the scars on his chest, stomach, arms… or more unsettlingly, the skin beneath them.

He moved finally, pulling his arms down and propping up on his elbows.

"Enjoying the show?" He said, in an amused tone, and she could barely bring herself to look back to his face, the knowing look in his eyes.

"I… I just wanted to apologize for today… for upsetting you."

"If you're really so torn up about it, I could think of a few ways you could make it up to me." The blush was burning in her cheeks again, eyes darting down to the floor, losing sight of him. It was a mistake. She lost her balance when he was very suddenly in front of her, teetering on her high-heels and falling backwards into the corner by the door.

"Well, I wasn't talking about that, but if you insist…" He grinned widely at her, and her tongue felt as pliable as a brick as he moved smoothly forward, and his fingers ran back through her hair casually, brushing pieces behind her ears. "I'd like to go outside. I'm so sick of looking at these walls I could scream."

She blinked, thankful for the change in subject, and dragged the shattered pieces of her self-control back into a semi-organized heap somewhere in her mind.

"Yes, I'm sure that can be arranged."

"Such a sweet girl," he purred, hands sliding down to cup her face, and she could not pull away enough to stop him. "You needn't be afraid of me… You're more important than you know, hmm?" She drew in a shaky breath, trying carefully to get her fingers beneath his, pry his hands away… she couldn't think when he was touching her.

"Ah, ah.. no, no, look at me." Her eyes had been flitting wildly again, and she remembered the first moment she'd ever seen him, how shocked she had been, but now that face was very close to hers, and it wasn't fear she was feeling. She finally dragged them to a stop, focusing on him. "Do I make you nervous? I think you're… shaking just a little… but I wonder… what scares you more? What I might do? Or what… you might do?"

She closed her eyes tightly at the first warm puff of breath against her lips, unable to believe this was happening, but abruptly there was nothing there at all, and her skin felt conspicuously cold where his hands had been. When her eyes snapped open, he was on the other side of the room, stretched out again as though he had never moved at all.

"I'll see you on Monday, Harley…" He grinned, as smug as the cat who ate the canary, and she quickly turned and fled the room without fulfilling the purpose she'd come here for in the first place.

Back pressed to the closed door, she groaned, hands over her face. Jesus….. she was really in over her head