The change is slow.
She tries to integrate herself into the strange social circle of psychologists from the moment she arrives.
Not with him – never with him – getting in his good graces was so far out of the question from the start, and once there, it would put her from the rest – but certainly with the others.
So when she begins to spend more and more lunches away, opting to overview her patients (or the one in particicular) it is… odd.
More lunches away, and she is more withdrawn. She'll answer any question given to her, and all with a note of cheer, but she stops initiating conversations, only scrawling notes enough to fill up the bindings.
She works herself to the point of exhaustion, but keeps that smile fixed on her face. This does not stop her from tripping over air one day, spilling papers everywhere. He helps her on the pretense of a rare moment of humanity, but more for the opportunity of seeing what has had the woman so occupied.
It takes only a moment to scan the papers he hands back to her – always a quick mind he's had. Many of them are worthless, of course, but some of them – "likely a grain of truth within the stories, whether he knows it or not, but is also feeding lines meant to play on sympathies" – some of them have merit.
He makes a note to broach the subject with her, see what information he can glean at some later but not too distant date.
She is Harley Quinn before he can ask her about it, and it is many months before he sees her again.
[A/N: Secular (astronomy): of or denoting slow changes in the motion of the sun or planets; (economics) a fluctuation or trend occurring or persisting over an indefinitely long period. …felt like that should be stated, since it's not what leaps to my mind when I hear the word.
Also, I guess I'm switching between different origin stories. Sorry for the apparent lack of consistency. . Hope you enjoy anyway!
…such a long note for such a short chapter.]