"Face the camera."
She adjusts her position, holding the small sign bearing her name and number against the chest of her black and white costume, the material soiled by now with only god-knows-what. Oh, and blood. There's quite a bit of blood. Her hair is disheveled, her bottom lip is split from when she was knocked into the window and her makeup is smeared and rubbed off in places, revealing pale skin under blank white paint.
The camera flashes to capture her mugshot.
"Turn to your right."
She obliges and stares at the wall ahead of her, as the camera flashes and burns an unpleasant glowing blue spot in her peripheral. What's next? Prison? Arkham? Police officers walk in the room and cuff her hands behind her back again, instead of in front so that she could hold the sign, and she shuffles out to her cell to wait for trial or movement. Schwarzwald knows that Joker is probably not too far away, probably going through the exact same process. She wonders if he's having fun.
She doesn't have to wait long to find out.
"Schwarzy; small world, isn't it?" He says through the bars of his isolated cell, Schwarzwald now abandoned in the cell beside his. She can barely catch sight of him on her right, as he leans close to the bars to get a good look at her, as she's doing with him. Yup, he looks like he's having fun. He also looks like hell, just like she does. His hands are chained in front of him, feet shackled, now down to his patterned vest and without gloves. They took his shoes too; looks like they found out he had blades in them. Schwarzwald almost starts snickering at his socks, because, God; they're hideous.
"Damn straight." Schwarzwald sighs, shuffling over to the small bunk bed. She's apparently dangerous enough to warrant her own cell. It's small comfort as the police officers prowl by like jungle cats, giving the two of them venomous stares. Some of them even bark out insults, calling them freaks and clowns, telling them they'll rot in Arkham for the rest of their miserable lives. There's a concrete wall between Schwarzwald and Joker, though their beds are against the wall that separates their cells.
"Sleep tight, you freaks. You're getting shipped off for holding in Arkham tomorrow. Not that anyone doubts you're going to rot there." An officer tells them, sneering, and they ignore him completely as they move to sit or lie down. He looks like he's about to say something else to get their attention, but a moment later someone walks in with a bottle of champagne and all the cops celebrate. The two clowns don't get anything.
They stare at one another from across the transport van. Bulletproof steel. Armed guards sitting beside them. Chained wrists, ankles, everything.
"Great day out." Joker notes, nonchalantly. It's a wonderful day out; blue sky, nice and warm with a nice breeze, people recovering from a second ages-long reign of terror. Wonderful day out.
"I know, right?" Schwarzwald answers, twiddling her thumbs. She's nervous. Very nervous. Arkham Asylum? What would it be like? Would she be shanked by crazed prisoners? Tortured by insane, vindictive doctors? What would happen to her? She worries, panics, but examines her fingernails to keep cool, at least in appearance. The alternating blacks and whites of her nails is a calming pattern.
"Look alive, lunatics. We're here." A guard says, holding his shotgun tighter as the imposing gates open for them, and Schwarzwald's pulse quickens. She can't see it, but she can hear the gate. After a moment or two of more driving, they stop again and the doors come open. More guards, except their uniforms are emblazoned with the word 'Arkham'. She walks out first, helped by a jab to the back with the shotgun the guard is toting, letting them lead her towards the towering building before her, and hesitates at the door. The place looks like a castle that Vlad Dracula would be proud of.
"Don't worry," Joker tells her as he walks past and through the doors. "We're in Wonderland now. No place in Gotham saner than here." He disappears in the doorway and Schwarzwald walks in after him, as doctors begin to swarm like wasps.
Schwarzwald sits in her room, hair damp and staring at a padded white wall. They've washed the paint from her hair, which she sort of expected, and now it's damp honey blond again. Her makeup is gone and she looks like any normal woman again. They took her contacts, them being purely decorative, and now her eyes are a lurid green again. They took her costume and gave her comfortable, baggy, white cotton clothes, the patient uniform of Arkham, apparently.
Oh yes, and she's drugged out of her mind off of tranquilizers so that they could do all of this to her. She just stares ahead, blankly, blinking now and then but mostly just staring like a zombie. There's noise outside her door and she staggers over to it, drunkenly, staring out the tiny window in the thick metal door. This is apparently a hallway for patient rooms, or maybe it's a hallway for isolation? Maybe these rooms are for the ones they say are the most dangerous? She's not really all that dangerous, not unless Joker tells her to be. Maybe they're moving her later. Or maybe she's here in this puffy white room forever. Until her trial. And then she'll come back.
She can't see anything outside her room. Who's moving? Who's out there? She hasn't got a clue. So Schwarzwald shuffles back to her bed and stares at the ceiling as if it's a Van Gogh painting.
Two months later, there's her trial. It's a media circus, though most of the reporters are probably here for Joker's trial, happening not too long after hers. Still, she's the woman who went mad and joined up with the Joker; she's a sad, sad little creature sitting in her nice suit that's been loaned to her, blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, green eyes wide and alert. Her government-appointed lawyer sits next to her, nervous, knowing that there's only one way she's going to ever possibly win this case.
Schwarzwald, once again Michelle King, pleads not guilty by reason of insanity. Joker might not want to admit it, but Schwarzwald knows she's crazy.
It's not hard to prove it, either. The prosecution tries to show that she was in her right mind the entire time. But then they have footage of her running around in her Schwarzwald getup, generally acting insane. And the defense has Julia's old therapist, when she was still Michelle. She's still legally Michelle, but not in her mind she's not. Michelle is gone and Julia is only a disguise. The shrink testifies about her general dissatisfaction with life in general, and Julia is almost happy that she was so forthcoming with the therapist who now talks about her random babbling of rather…irreverent things, at times. The state mental health doctor who interviewed Julia before her trial gives her own evaluation of Julia's mental health.
Needless to say, it's not that good.
"Stockholm syndrome, with a very close attachment to the Joker," She says, reading from her papers. "She's said that she wishes to work for him until her death, as payment for…she says she's repaying him for helping drive her insane."
She shows the Rorschach inkblot test results. They're not very good either.
"When it came to this one, she said, 'Two puppies running away from an explosion'. With this one, 'Pagliaccio, crying for himself'. Here, we had, 'Cats screaming like babies in the night'. This one prompted, 'Dead dog in alleyway, tire tread on burst stomach'. And with this one, it was, 'two angels screwing in the stratosphere'. The Joker gave a similar response with that last card, almost to the word."
She testifies. She calmly states that she's completely insane. They ask her how she knows this, and she gives a great Cheshire Cat smile, and says, "Oh, we're all mad here." They make her get down after quoting the Lewis Carrol.
Charlie testifies next, and is the prosecution's glass cannon. He tells her that the smiling woman named Julia gave him a button to press that would get rid of the mean boy who hurt him. The jury turns hateful eyes to Julia, who stares very blankly at her lap.
The defense strikes back. They go through all the long, drawn-out processes, and by God, they pull out the biggest guns they have. The next witness they call is the Joker himself.
He's still blond and pretty, and Julia stares because she's probably never going to get another chance like this. She guesses that he's around twenty eight, maybe early thirties. He might be younger than she is. That makes her feel very old, and very useless; a thirty four year old woman can't keep up with someone that may or may not be younger than her. Of course, this is Joker that she's thinking about; she knows that he's still going to be superior to her no matter how fast or strong or crazy she gets, so she's kind of accepting of that.
He's just so damn pretty, though.
The media goes wild when they find out that Gotham's biggest psycho and his blond ditz lackey are in the same court room, and the trial turns into a soap opera with all the sob stories given about her history of sexual abuse and kidnapping and all that, her horrible and unhappy life living simultaneously in the gutters and in the stars, how the evil, horrible psycho Joker kidnapped the poor woman and warped her mind beyond repair.
The trial is a soap opera. Joker turns it into a circus.
He, very casually, explains that yes, he made her this way, and that yes, he had fun doing it. The defense outlines that Julia can't help herself that she's mad, can't help what she does, because Joker manipulates her mind, poor fragile girl that she is. Joker illustrates this himself when he tells her to bark like a dog, and she does. It's blackly hilarious.
Nobody wants to cross-examine the Joker. And so they don't.
The trial wraps up after two weeks of testimony in the court war for her sanity, and the jury spends fourteen hours deliberating. Joker waves to Julia and she waves back. She's in a suit. He's in his white Arkham jumpsuit. She's probably going to be in one too, later on. The jury comes back, and it's unanimous. Guilty. It's only half a day before the sentence is announced.
"Michelle King, you are to be sent to Arkham Asylum for the rest of your days, to be treated for your mental illnesses."
Well woohoo. She's going back to Arkham, just like the Joker is. There really isn't any argument what his trial is going to end in. Again. Julia wonders if they'd have decided her mad quicker if they'd have let her wear her costume, like she asked. Probably.
When she gets back to Arkham and is officially committed, they immediately perform a psychiatric evaluation.
"So…Ms. King…" The doctor begins, as Julia sits in her chair across from him. She's very docile, shows no threat of attack.
"Call me Julia. Better yet, call me Schwarzwald." She states, innocently enough, twiddling her thumbs. The paint is chipping off of them. That's a shame.
"Your name is Michelle King. Not Schwarzwald." The doctor corrects her, writing something down. She shrugs, but obviously doesn't believe him. He continues. "What is your family status? Marital status?"
"Single, and my biological parents are dead. My adoptive parents are dead too. I'm dead to my adoptive brother, who is alive but hates me. No kids, nothing like that. I'm not in a relationship right now. Not romantic, anyway." She narrates in a dull monotone, and the doctor can't tell if she's imitating him or not.
"And all of these symptoms began when?"
"Well, they've probably been there the entire time. Probably. Maybe. I don't know. I think. Anyway, it all started as a child. I really wanted this puppy, see."
"Please take this seriously."
"I know someone that would probably punch you in the face with a knife for being so serious. Not me though. Anyway, I grew up a poor Latino child in the Bronx. I had to prostitute myself for money to pay for my druggie parents and my crack baby little brother's medicine. My horrible parents spent all the money for his medicine on more crack, but that's not the point. Eventually I went to school, but all the mean children called me a mick or spick or something. It might've been 'white nigger', though; I can't be too sure. But I knew I was always smarter than them, oh, I knew; when we took a field trip to tour through this college, I could see a half-finished equation on the board, a real difficult math equation, like…trigonometry, even. And I could solve it. With my mind."
"Mm…hm…" The doctor answers, scribbling something down and staring at her from over the top of his glasses. He can't tell if she's joking or if she's serious. Julia continues onwards.
"Then when I was in high school, like any other redheaded white girl in Gotham City," She's back to reality again. Maybe she's lapsing into psychosomatic delusions? He'll have to note that one, too. "And then I had a stalker. He was creepy, too. Broke into our house one day, we had a nice mansion in the Beverly Hills, and killed my parents with a garden hose. Oh, and my crack baby brother was dead by now, too. Just throwing that out there. Yeah, he killed them with that machete while wearing the hockey mask, and camo pants, and…where was I?" She stares at him, blankly for a moment.
"Camo pants."
"Oh, right. He kidnapped me and locked me in his basement, and raped me every night for three years. I didn't see the sun for those long three years. Then…I killed him and escaped." Julia becomes morose, serious at this, staring at the floor. The doctor begins to think that she's getting serious about this again. Then she starts talking.
"I went to clown college after that. Lovely place, that is. I'd show you my jester's license, but I'm afraid I lost it when I was clowning around."
She takes this moment to smile like a fool and play her invisible roll-on snare drum. The doctor's seen ones like this before; he's already suspecting that she's lost touch with reality at some point in time. It's only under the influence of the drugs they've given her that she really lets down her guard and shows this. He nods, and waits for her to continue.
"Aw, you're no fun. Anyway, after that, I was working as a clown. Clowns clowns clowns; did you ever know that I used to have caulrophobia? That's right; I was terrified of clowns as a kid. And then I became one. Funny! Anyway…yeah. I worked lots of odd jobs until I met the Anderson family. They were nice. Jack and Alma Anderson, the two nicest people you ever met. They eventually adopted me officially. Then they died. Everyone I love dies!!"
She wails the last part, suddenly, and after a moment, she opens her eyes to see the doctor sliding a needle into her arm. She lets him do it.
"What was that?" She asks, when he's done and disposes of the needle.
"Tranquilizer." He answers.
"Oh…okay. Anyway?"
"Then they died."
"Everyone I love dies!!" She wails again, and the doctor writes more on his sheet. After a moment, she pops back to normal and begins talking freely again. "After that, Nathan kicked me out of the penthouse. And I had to get real jobs. Clown, bookkeeper, dinner whore. Yannow."
He waits for her to continue, already seeing her beginning to relax, and her eyes glaze over.
"After that…I did that for awhile. And then Joker kidnapped me. And then more things happened. And I helped…do something. And got caught. Then me and him wore nurse's uniforms to blow up a hospital…I think. After that he got arrested and I escaped. Then he caught me and killed my dogs. Then I escaped again. Then he caught me again and beat me up. Then Michael Keegan…oh yeah, he's the guy that made me out to be a crazy bitch. That hurt a lot. Then he tried to kill me and I had to shoot him. Then I found out that his sister is blind and crippled and is probably going into the poor house because of me."
She stares off at the wall, blankly, and the doctor waits. After a moment, Julia looks back at him again, suddenly.
"And then I went crazy. Joker helped me back and I went crazy and I kind of liked it. It was fun to go crazy like that…I didn't care about anything anymore but the fun. Didn't have to worry about…responsibilities…guilt…I was happy."
He continues to write about her general status. Her appearance, mannerisms, the fact that her memory seems…fading. Everything he can observe. When she finishes, he sets the clipboard down and calls in a nurse.
"I think that will be enough for today, Ms. King. You're going to want to rest in your room, after all." Julia nods at this, dazedly, and for the first time in a long time, tries to coherently remember how her life has played out, in chronological order. She can't. There are blank spots, and all that she does remember can't be connected in chronological order. She tells the doctor this, as the nurses lead her back to her room. When she's being escorted, she passes Joker walking with a very pretty blond woman, and it looks like she's a doctor here. They look very comfortable with one another.
That's sort of weird.
Julia doesn't think about it much longer as she walks into her room and lies down on the bed, proceeding to stare at the wall again. It's floating like waves.