House of Cards

by Evelyn Brightpaw

My version of how Harleen Quinzel became Harley Quinn. A Nolanverse retelling of the Animated Series episode "Mad Love." For full appreciation, go read the "Mad Love" comic or watch the episode. Please read and review! More chapters to come!

6. 6: Paradigms

6. Paradigms

"We were born with a curse. It has always driven us to thoughts which are forbidden. It has always given us wishes which men may not wish. We know that we are evil, but there is no will in us and no power to resist it. This is our wonder and our secret fear, that we know and do not resist."

- Ayn Rand, Anthem

Thursday morning arrived cooler and damper than usual for August; it had started raining the previous night while Harley had been reading Anthem and hadn't stopped until just before sunrise. Harley had welcomed the unseasonable shower - rain and a glass of wine did wonders for her ability to plow through a book. It had been a much shorter read than she had expected – the actual text was just over a hundred pages, the other two-thirds of the book turning out to be a second annotated edition and a whole load of commentary. Harley had read research articles longer than that. It had taken her maybe a couple of hours, and that included all the times she stopped to pee or pour herself more wine. She had finished the whole thing in one sitting. Skipping all the commentary had helped, of course - and the Joker had been very specific about that. The first thing she had seen when she'd opened the paperback hadn't been printed text - it had been a word scrawled large in red Sharpie across the first page, letters that had received multiple passes of the marker to make them thick and unmistakable: REDACTED. It was the Joker's handwriting, she had been sure - who else would it be? - and the rest of the text around the word (a short plot summary and a quote from the author or a reviewer, she'd assumed) had been blacked out completely. On the blank inside of the cover there had been more writing in marker, small close capitals with sharp edges and varying degrees of slant:

DON'T READ THE INTRODUCTIONS

OR ANY COMMENTARY

I'LL KNOW IF YOU DID – J

Out of curiosity, she had flipped through the next few pages and sure enough, every prefatory page - all twelve of them, to be precise - had been marked through with a large red X. Of course, she could still have read the text through the marker, and the Joker would have known that. It was another test. But she had understood his reasoning. He wanted her opinions - unadulterated, and without any bias that might seep into her understanding of the text from the opinions of scholars or the author herself. And since this was a school edition of the book, a copy intended to be studied and discussed in a classroom, it was well stocked with scholarly opinions. So, she had dutifully skipped all the essays and reviews, and she felt her reaction to the text was all the more honest for it.

When she got to Arkham that morning, Harley did yesterday's leftover paperwork at lightning speed and then tucked Anthem into her leather portfolio before heading out of her office to find Dr. McKnight for morning rounds.

"You do your homework, Quinzel?"

Harley pulled up sharply in the doorway, one hand still on the knob, a startled squeak almost escaping her throat. Dr. Leland was waiting for her in the hall outside the office, her arms crossed, one eyebrow up, and Harley had a momentary sensation of being back in high school facing down Sister Rachel in AP English. It wasn't even ten o'clock in the morning yet, and this was way too early to be talking to Leland. She'd barely finished her coffee.

"Yes, ma'am," Harley replied instinctively, and pulled the corner of the book up out of her portfolio as proof.

"Yeah, he said you'd be finished with it already," Leland grumbled. Harley didn't need to ask who he referred to; Leland looked peeved that he was keeping so involved in the session scheduling process.

"Well, it was a pretty short book," Harley said apologetically as she pushed it back down into her portfolio. Leland pursed her lips and gave Harley a flat look, but didn't press the matter.

"Come on, let's do it, then," she said finally, and she was already moving down the hall before Harley had processed what she'd said and closed the office door behind her. She had to scurry to catch up; Leland was taller and had a longer stride, and she always walked like a member of a king's bodyguard on her way to arrest a traitor.

"Are we going straight into the session?" Harley panted, finally catching up. Leland nodded brusquely.

"Yes. Doctor Burton doesn't come in til ten-thirty today, and we are going to be locked in and moving before he sets foot on the floor." She gave Harley a conspiratory glance that would have been a smirk in any other person, and Harley relaxed a little.

"Hoping to keep it from becoming a sporting event today?"

"And every other day after, if there are others." Leland paused just before they got to the nurse's desk and the metal detectors. "You think you can keep this up past today, Quinzel? He's a lot to deal with."

"I think…," Harley began, trying to choose her words carefully. "I think as long as the Joker seems to want the sessions, and as long as he's talking, and we see any sort of positive response… I think we have a responsibility to keep it up. Don't you?" Leland looked her over appraisingly, then shook her head in an if you say so gesture.

"We'll see, I guess." She started walking again, and Harley followed. "I'll ask you again when we're five sessions in and he's tap dancing on all your remaining nerves. See if you've changed your mind."

They had reached the metal detectors by then; Harley put her portfolio in the check basket and proceeded through, trying to prepare her thoughts as she went. She flipped through the major points of Anthem in her head, and the little mental checklist of interesting ideas and points she'd thought of as she read the night before. The book hadn't been what she'd expected. Of course, her expectations hadn't been all that precise, but she'd had an idea from listening to college friends discuss Rand's work that she was going to be slogging through something highly political and subtly pretentious. What she'd gotten instead, to her pleasant surprise, was a good old dystopian fiction in incredibly simple language. The philosophies in it might have been grown-up, but an elementary school kid could read the words. The narrator lived in a collectivist society in an unspecified future, spoke only in plural pronouns, and had a number instead of an individual name. In his society, the group was all important and the individual didn't exist. But the narrator had a shameful secret - he was beginning to have thoughts of himself as an individual person, a cardinal sin. She had been four pages in and already known where the story was heading - and what the Joker had wanted her to glean from it, she thought. The narrator was going to have to make a choice between remaining a part of his society and surrendering his sense of Self, or becoming a free individual and losing his place among other people. Sounds pretty familiar, she had mused. If the Joker saw himself as the nameless narrator of Anthem, then he wanted her to understand his view of the society they lived in as the same type of dystopian oppression, and that he saw deviance from that norm as a virtue. It certainly wasn't a new thought, but the fact that it had shown up in a book he'd specifically wanted her to read had made her give it even more weight.

When they arrived at the observation room, James was already waiting by the door. He looked like he had been pacing nervously and had stopped himself abruptly to avoid looking nervous. He also looked like Leland had caught him beforehe'd had his morning coffee, too; there was something both frazzled and sluggish about the way he was blinking.

"Doctor Quinzel," he mumbled as Leland slipped into the observation room - probably to check it for betting clipboards or for doctors who didn't belong. Harley leaned close to James.

"She can smell anxiety, you know."

"It's just too damn early, and I wasn't expecting to do this before I saw the bottom of my thermos," he replied dazedly, then immediately blanched as he realized he had cursed in front of her. "Sorry. I just… God, I didn't go home until after ten last night, I was comparing handwriting samples until I thought I was going to go blind, and….oh, geez, I just don't understand why we're doing this so early in the morning."

"Apparently we're avoiding Doctor Burton," Harley intimated, and James chuckled sleepily.

"Yeah, well, considering he's even less of a morning person than I am, I'd say this is the best time to do it." He stifled a yawn. "I just want my coffee…."

"Go get it and drink it while you're observing me," Harley said. "You've got a few minutes." James shook his head.

"No liquids in the observation room - supposedly to protect all those dinosaur electronics. Half of which don't even work anyway. Besides," he went on, smothering another yawn, "I don't have a few minutes. Joker's already in there waiting for you."

"I… what?" Harley said, nonplussed. She hadn't expected the Joker to be brought into the room before her, and she wasn't sure she liked it. It somehow gave him even more of a comfortable upper hand than he already had. James nodded.

"Cash just took him in there. Apparently he was waiting by his cell door at morning bed check, holding out his wrists for the cuffs. Said you'd be finished with the book, and-" he fought through a third yawn - "...and there was no reason to wait."

"Great," Harley mumbled. And in a way, it was - for the first time in the weeks he'd been there, the Joker was actively seeking out therapy sessions. But Harley was certain that Leland and Arkham wouldn't be happy about the Joker calling any shots in this arrangement - and that they'd also be nervous about him being so eager for anything.

"McKnight?" Leland beckoned from the observation room door. "In here with me. Go on in, Quinzel. They're waiting for you." She ducked back inside without waiting to see if her orders were being followed. James shrugged apologetically and rubbed a hand over his eyes.

"Good luck," he whispered, then he followed Leland into the observation room. Harley pursed her lips.

"Yeah. Thanks," she muttered. Then, after a couple of deep breaths, she tapped her knuckles against the therapy room door.

"Hey, Doc," Cash said brightly as he opened the door for her. It seemed he was a morning person, if nobody else was. "Saved a seat for you," he quipped, and she gave him a nervous smile as she stepped past him into the room.

The Joker was sprawled in the bolted-down patient chair in the pose she was coming to see as characteristic of him – ankles crossed nonchalantly under the table, fingers loosely woven together and draped across his ribs, like the therapy area was his personal living room and she and Cash were guests who had come for tea. His head was tilted up and to the right, staring the patch of blue sky trying to peek through the smog outside the tiny window. Harley nearly stopped breathing when she saw that he was wearing a simple white t-shirt instead of the standard all-over-orange scrubs or the jumpsuit she'd grown accustomed to. Of course, it made sense that the patients would have white cotton tees to wear under their hospital uniforms; but seeing the Joker in his was just so …incongruous, and so normal looking, that it almost derailed her. Plus, it was a V-neck, and Harley could just make out a hint of chest hair poking out of the crook of the V. That coupled with the current angle of his jaw was almost enough to induce a heart attack. Harley was suddenly glad she hadn't made it to a second thermos of coffee. The extra caffeine would have pushed her over the edge.

"Good morning, Joker," she said, sliding herself into the chair across from him. She nodded to Cash, who nodded back and then let himself out into the hallway. The Joker didn't move from his contemplative pose, but one eyebrow lifted a fraction, and she saw his gaze flicker briefly in her direction.

"Ya know, ah…," he began, still looking out the window, "Ted Bundy drove a Volkswagen too. Interesting choice for a forensic psychologist."

Harley froze in her seat. A sensation like being squirted with an icy water hose rushed down her spine, and she fought off a shudder. How did he know what she drove? He had said it as though he could see her car through the window he was staring at, but this therapy room overlooked only the Narrows River and a lot of dead grass and barbed wire, not a parking lot – and besides, it was too high in the wall for him to see anything but sky through it anyway. Had she mentioned her car before and forgotten? Had he gotten someone to tail her? Did he have accomplices on the outside collecting info for him? Harley started running all the possible scenarios – and then the Joker's head rolled back to center, and he met her eyes.

He was giggling.

"Oh…. hmmh… oh, Doc, you should see your face! Mmh…mmh-ha-ha-HA-HA-HA!" His feet tapped against the floor with pent up hilarity, and he kept giggling as Harley's expression shifted from consternation to wry neutrality. "Why do you people always jump to the most, ah… ex-TREME assumptions, hmm? Mmh-hmm…wh… whoo-ha-ha-HA-HA!" He kept laughing just long enough that Harley started to get nervous about Leland stepping in, and then the giggles died down into a few scattered errant chuckles. "I, ahm… I don't have super powers, Doc," he grinned. "You park on the side of the building below my cell window."

"Oh," Harley sighed, ashamed of how obviously tensed her shoulders had been. She straightened her portfolio against the edge of the table to have something to do with her hands. "Well," she managed, forcing herself to look straight at him. "My car choice had nothing to do with Bundy or psychology, I promise. I'm short – in case you hadn't noticed. It was the only car on the lot with a dash that I could see over without a booster seat. Must be nice to have never had that problem." She flicked her eyes from his face down his long torso and then yanked her gaze up again as she remembered how dangerously he was dressed. When she got back up to his eyes, she saw they were sparkling in a way that said he had made the wardrobe choice on purpose.

"Not a fan of Bundy?" he smirked, and Harley wondered if this was what he considered small talk. She sighed and decided to play along.

"I just… don't get it," she said honestly, crossing her arms. "The whole Bundy obsession. I've never understood it."

"You have a, ah…. moral op-po-si-tion… to women throwing themselves at the hot serial killer?" he said, still smirking.

"He's not even that cute," Harley said automatically, and then felt her jaw clench as she remembered that Leland was listening behind the glass. God, please let her consider this rapport-building and not grounds for stopping the session, she hissed internally. The Joker looked like he was having to work hard to hold back another round of giggles. "Well, he's not," she reiterated, taking the book out of her portfolio in hopes that it would steer him back to a safer topic.

"Bad boys aren't your type?" the Joker prodded, not allowing himself to be steered in the slightest. Harley sighed.

"If I wanted a bad boy, I'd go for something in the Nikki Sixx category," she said flatly. "I prefer the ones who are self-destructive messes, as opposed to the ones who take it out on other people." The Joker narrowed his eyes at this, as if he had several things he wanted to say and couldn't decide which one to lead with; but he paused just long enough for Harley get in ahead of him, and she jumped on it before he could get them any further off topic. "NOW," she said firmly, plopping the book into the center of the table. "I believe you wanted to have a book club meeting. Unless, of course, you'd rather talk about whether or not Richard Ramirez was cute too?"

The Joker glared at her for a second, and she thought she saw a flicker of irritation cross his face at being preempted. Then he reached out with cuffed hands and turned the book around so that the cover was facing her. "I want to know how you felt about it," he said flatly, crossing his hands over his ribs again as he settled back into his chair. His voice had less of its usual theatrical quality now, and Harley saw the same cool, deep, pervasive intelligence come over his eyes that she had seen the day before. She took a deep breath.

"Well, I think…. I think I understand your point," she began. "The collectivist—"

"Noooo, no, no…," the Joker interrupted, shaking his head. "That's what you thought. I want to know …what you felt. What was your… gut response? Your …visceral, imMEDiate reaction? I want to know… the first emotion that book made you feel."

Harley started to think about a response, and then realized that thinking was exactly what he didn't want her to do. Instead, she said the first thing that came to her. "Well, my gut reaction was that the main character was an idiot for just assuming that the Councils were right without questioning their actions."

"Oooh," the Joker rumbled, animation returning to his face. He sat up a little straighter. "Did that make you angry?"

Harley thought about it. She had spat the word idiot a little more sharply than the rest of the sentence, and now that she considered it, she realized that it did make her angry. "Yeah," she nodded. "Actually, it did. I hadn't thought about it before, but I think I always get a little mad at brainwashing in books and movies. It gets under my skin."

"Why?" The Joker was fully sitting up now and beginning to lean over the table, and Harley could see that this was the most fun he'd had in weeks. She shrugged.

"Because it's wrong—"

"No," the Joker stopped her, cutting her sentence neatly in half. "That's the pat answer, the easy answer. No..., no, no. It makes you angry… because it gets salt into the wound." He looked at her expectantly, his head tilted slightly to the side, as if waiting for her to have some revelation. When she only wrinkled her brow at him, he hissed air out of his nose pettishly and lifted cuffed hands to gesticulate. "You're angry because it's too familiar," he explained, "because you RECognize them and you don't like it. You're angry with the Councils because you've met those people in real life, and you're angry with the Narrator because he's the part of yourSELF that you hate."

Harley opened her mouth to respond and then shut it again. He wasn't entirely wrong. She had met brainwashers before – had been asked to choose between a few of them in elections, actually – and she supposed he was right. That was a little too much like real life for comfort. But she didn't think the second part applied, and she told him so. "I don't see myself in the Narrator," she said finally. "I'm not brainwashed."

"No?" the Joker said lightly, pleasantly, as though they were discussing tea and not heavy philosophy. "Then, ah… why did you im-ME-di-ate-ly answer my question with a value judgement?" He tucked his bottom lip under his teeth and raised his eyebrows, waiting for her to come around to his point.

"What?" Harley asked, not following. The Joker sighed.

"Because it's wrong," he quoted, repeating her answer to her. "Wrong is a value judgement, and it's not one we make based on our own experiences. If I say pizza is good, well… that's a value judgementI made based on eating it myself. But if I say… stealing… is wrong…." His fingers fluttered around as he searched for the rest of his sentence. "It's because someone told me that. Who told you brainwashing was wrong? Hmm? Your mommy? Your bubbe? Father Mulcahy? 'Wrong' is part of a moral code. And that…." He made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pointed at her, clicking his tongue against his teeth. "That's the oldest form of brainwashing in the world."

Harley tilted her head back a little, understanding what he was getting at. She nodded her slow "therapist nod," the one that conveyed comprehension without agreeing or disagreeing. "You're talking about social norms. The ways we're coded to behave around each other based on our culture." The Joker tilted his head toward her slightly, so she went on. "So you believe that pervasive social norms are no different than the way the people in Anthem are brainwashed into behaving? That our coded behaviors are the same as this type of blind collectivism?"

"Ah, aren't they?" the Joker asked blandly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "The only reason it takes the Narrator so long to question the Rules, even though he's miserable," he said slowly, his eyes never leaving Harley's, "is that they're the only thing he knows. Because they've been there since he was born. Like when you were in diapers, and your Mommy lifted your fat little hand and made you wave at people to say bye-bye – and you've been waving bye-bye when someone leaves ever since. Or when you get uncomfortable seeing a naked person because twenty-something years ago, your Mommy put your clothes back on you and spanked you for taking them off – forever cementing the idea that naked is bad. And we get PUNished for not following the Rules, just like in the book – oh, we may not get EXiled for it, but… every office in America has that one guy who eats lunch by himself because nobody can stand to be around him… because he breaks too many Rules. He stands too close. He interrupts. He, ah… talks over the cubicle wall while you're trying to listen to your book on tape. He's …weird. And eeeeeverybody participates in ostracizing him, because we're not just coded to follow the Rules, we're coded to be snitches too."

Harley had an immediate and uncomfortable flashback to that Kevin guy in her World History lecture at GSU – the one who kept trying to show her his (terrible) poetry while she was trying to take notes. She'd had to move seats five different times before he got the hint and stopped trying to sit by her.

"Okay," she said after a moment of thought. "I'll go with you up to a point, but here's my issue; what you're describing is an unspoken collective agreement among the people in a society. Unlike in the book, we don't have a Council or a governing body determining what we should think."

"Ah," the Joker chuckled, clearing his throat as though that was so stupid he could barely respond to it, "have you ever been in a church?"

"That's—"

"Or a school?" he pressed on. "Or a court?"

"That's not the same," Harley finished saying, and the Joker raised his eyebrows in an if you say so expression.

"It's only different…" he rumbled, leaning closer to her over the table, "because you've decided to believe it is. And you decided to believe that… because that's what they told you." He sat up straight again, cracking his neck dramatically before sliding back into his original lounging position in the chair. "Ministers, and teachers, and cops, and lawyers, and parents…. They're the Council. They teach you what to think before you're old enough to do it yourself. And they do it because when they were in diapers, someone taught it to them. And so on, and so on. And they want …exactly … what the leaders in Anthem wanted – to keep everyone toeing the line. Following the Rules. And to do that, they have to make you think that what they want is what you want. To make sure you're never really left to your own devices."

"But technically, that's impossible," Harley said, leaning over the table herself now. "Right? I mean, you're always alone in your own mind. It's the one place that belongs completely to you."

"Is it?" the Joker said softly, and Harley saw the ghost of a grin beginning to pluck at the scarred corner of his lips.

"Well… yeah," she went on. "Even if you tell someone what you're thinking, it still only comes out in whatever format you present it in – like, if I describe a picture I see in my head, something will always be lost in translation when I try to put it into words. The only person who will ever really see that picture is me. The only person who will ever really experience the thought I'm thinking is me. So our thoughts are completely ours. They can't be anyone else's, because they change as soon as we try to share them. The originals are un-shareable."

"Very Plato," the Joker quipped, the ghost-grin now starting to become a real grin. "But very wrong."

"How?" Harley pried. The Joker let his eyes wander up to the ceiling as if looking for inspiration.

"Well, ah…. you're only alone in your head… if nobody else's thoughts are in there with you. So… anybody who's got someone else's ideas in their head – something they were taught, something they read in a book – their, ah… their mind isn't completely theirs anymore, is it?" He snapped his eyes back down and locked them with Harley's, and she was struck again by the hot intensity of his gaze.

"So then we're all screwed, right?" she said softly. "According to you, nobody is a pure, unadulterated individual. There's no such thing." The Joker shrugged, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear.

"Maybe somewhere, there's a …feral kid living in the jungle who's been… raised by wolves… or something, never been to school, never had parents who could speak. Maybe that kid would be completely their own person. But not here. Not in… civilization." His nose wrinkled ever so slightly with contempt as he said the last word, and Harley was pretty sure he thought the concept of civilization itself was a bad joke. She studied him for a minute, letting the silence build between them while she mulled over his statements; she couldn't let it go on too long, of course, or the people behind the glass would start getting antsy, but there in the room, across the table, the quiet was almost comfortable. She followed his eyes with her own and felt like he was watching her thoughts occur to her – as if there was a screen in her forehead where he could see each new realization bob up to the surface. It was a very naked way to feel… but it was a nakedness that no longer felt foreign or disquieting as it might have the day before. His face, and his scars, were completely still, something that rarely happened. She became aware of a faint shadow above his lip and on the curve of his chin and realized for the first time that nurses would have to shave around those scars for him, a thought that made her more than a little uneasy if she lingered on it too long. Suddenly, she caught herself staring at the perfect cupid's-bow shape of his upper lip, and she gave her head a little shake to bring herself back to the conversation at hand.

"I was wrong," she said simply, and the Joker's eyebrow lifted the tiniest fraction.

"Yeah," he agreed automatically, then scanned her face to see what particular wrongness she was referring to. "What about?"

"Last night, when I was reading, I thought you were trying to say that deviance from the norm was a virtue," she explained, putting her papers back into her portfolio as if to show him she was rejecting them. "I had enough notes to write an essay on the subject. I thought you were saying that rejecting the collective norm and following your individual deviances was the only way to be free. But now I think what you're saying is that there is no such thing as deviance at all. We can't really be deviant, because we're all running on the same program. Even you."

"Bingo, Doc," the Joker grinned, and Harley thought the expression on his face this time was one of almost honest happiness. "We aaaaallll put our pants on one leg at a time – because we've all been assigned a pair of pants, and they're all the same cut." He narrowed his eyes at her cheekily, knowing only she and Dr. McKnight would recognize his use of her own words from earlier that week.

"So what about people who break the rules on purpose, then? People who are visibly deviant?" Harley asked, grinning back at him now. His face was dancing with expressions as it always did when he was fully engaged in a train of thought, and the energy was contagious. He chuckled, waving his cuffed hands dismissively.

"They're pre-TEN-ding," he said, nodding in agreement with himself as he said it. "Aaaalll just a big game of make-believe. Kids playing dress up. And you wanna know the funny thing? They're all pretending the exact… same… way. Somebody rips a hole in the knee of their jeans, and a week later, there's a whole fashion movement behind it. A bunch of teenage girls decide to stop wearing corsets, and a generation later, somehow corsets themselves are associated with deviance? How many members does a counterculture have to have before it becomes just a culture? No. No, they're just pretending to break the rules. Pretending to care about the rules enough to break them. Pretending that this whole arrangement is the natural way of things. And it's not. The only real way to be deviant is to stop pretending at all." He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, like the whole thing was endlessly irritating to him. His cuffed hands plucked at the collar of his shirt, tugging it down to sit lower on his collarbone. Harley felt her diaphragm clench at the extra skin this revealed. She swallowed hard, suddenly and uncomfortably aware of how attracted she was to him – and, even more uncomfortably, how hard she was having to work to pretend she wasn't. And oh, boy, wasn't that unpleasantly relevant to the conversation at hand. She shifted in her seat just like he had and hoped that hadn't been exactly what he'd wanted her to do.

"How are we supposed to stop pretending, then?" she managed to say around the dryness in her throat. "If our heads are full of nothing but what we've been taught to pretend, how do we stop?"

"Well," the Joker said brightly, "the, ah… the first step is admitting you have a problem."

"You mean first, we have to learn to identify which thoughts belong to someone else, and which ones are our natural instincts?" she translated, hoping Leland couldn't see the tension in her shoulders through her white coat. The Joker leaned lower over the table, making sure she could see into the gap between his shirt and his chest. He breathed deeply, letting her get the full impact of his lungs expanding against the soft white cotton. Then he grinned.

"And thennnn," he rumbled, his voice taking on a teasing sing-song quality, "then you have to learn to stop feeling guilty… for what's natural." He looked her straight in the eyes then, and she knew he was speaking entirely to her. This wasn't about philosophy anymore, although it would sound that way to Leland and any other observers; he wanted her to admit to herself that she was attracted to him, and to recognize any guilt she felt about that as a social construct she'd been taught to follow. Harley tore her eyes up from his collarbone and steeled her face against any rogue expressions.

"I don't know, Joker," she said lightly, trying not to let her voice shake, "I come from a long line of Irish Catholics. I'm pretty sure my guilt is genetic." It would have been a great joke if she hadn't been so tense; and he did at least chuckle a little under his breath before he answered her.

"And, ah… and how old were you when you first felt the …pressing need …to atone for something? Hmm?"

Harley thought about it, glad to have something to distract her from his exposed neck. If she cast her mind back far enough, of course, she could remember countless times she had been punished for something when she was still pretty small, whether she'd understood what she was being punished for or not; but when had she first felt intrinsically guilty about something? Not just afraid of being punished, not just aware that she had broken a rule, but guilty based on her own internal compass?

"I was five," she said finally, leaning on her elbows. "I picked up a penny I found in the grass at a pool party I was invited to. When I showed it to Mom later, she told me that was stealing because I took money from someone else's house. I dropped the penny down the AC vent in my bedroom that night because it felt dirty to touch it after that."

"See?" the Joker quipped, holding back another giggle. "You, ah… you had five good years before they managed to rub the guilt into you. That's not genetics. It's not a natural feeling."

"Technically, it was stealing," Harley pointed out, and the Joker rolled his eyes.

"You were five. You saw something shiny on the ground and you grabbed it. Imagine, making a five-year-old feel bad about their own basic nature?!" His fingers were gesticulating faster now, and the chain attached to his cuffs clinked merrily against the table edge. "Ooh-Shiny is probably one of our most basic human instincts. We're just MAGpies with opposable thumbs instead of wings. Why should you feel guilty when you act on instinct? Animals don't. You ever hear a bear apologize to the salmon it's about to bite in half? No? And you won't. Animals don't feel guilty. They kill things, and they eat them, and they screw whenever they feel like it, and they sleep whenever they feel like it, and they steal each other's dens and burrows, and they don't… feel… ANything. We are the only animal who had to go and …inVENT a way to feel bad about our natural behaviors. And then once we invented feeling bad, we had to go and invent religion and laws to make ourselves even more miserable as punishment. To make ourselves… atone… for it. And then we pretend that makes us better."

"Like the Narrator becoming a street sweeper," Harley murmured, thinking back to the first chapter of the book. In a dystopian world where professions were assigned by a council, the Narrator had dreamed of becoming a scholar but had instead been assigned to clean sidewalks. Feeling guilty and ashamed of himself for daring to have individual desires, he had happily accepted this undesirable assignment because he wanted to atone for his sin of dreaming. As she said it, the Joker tucked his chin down toward his chest and smiled a very small, dark smile.

"Did it work for him?" was all he said.

"No," Harley replied, her thumb straying down to fan the edges of the book's pages as she pondered. "In the end, his innate desire to be a scientist overrode his learned desire to atone for his deviance."

"Theeeere it is," the Joker sing-songed, leaning forward on his elbows until he matched Harley's pose exactly. "That's the point we've been circling this whole time. It doesn't matter… how much effort you put into the pretending… or how much you try to atone. How much you want to be what they want. Our true natures will aaaalways come out. So why fight the inevitable?" As he finished speaking, he shifted his cuffed wrists forward just enough that he could reach the book that lay under Harley's hand between them. His right hand inched out and came to rest on the book's cover, and the tips of his long fingers landed gently on Harley's, mercifully hidden from the observation room glass by Harley's body. His skin was dry, soft, and inexplicably hot, and for one panicky second, she had to fight the urge to lean in and press her breasts into his hands. When she had managed to lock that mental door and started breathing normally again, she raised her face to his and saw that the same liquid heat she had felt seething behind her own eyes was pouring out of his, too. Why fight the inevitable, Doc? that look repeated. Why fight when you can't win?

"Maybe because you don't like where the inevitable is taking you," she answered uneasily, and the Joker held her gaze for another few seconds before abruptly pulling back his hands and relaxing his face back into its characteristic nonchalant smirk.

"Well, ah…," he acquiesced, spreading his hands in an equivocal show of palms, "you can either go down fighting… or you can just go down. But gravity… always… wins."

They stared at each other for another quiet moment, but this time instead of a comfortable silence, it was one palpable with tension. Harley wondered how long they had been speaking, how long she had been engaged with him without even thinking about the reactions of the people behind the glass. She wondered if Leland and McKnight had caught any hints of what had actually passed between them over this table. She was just starting to worry about whether or not there was a concealed camera on his wall, facing her direction, that would show all of her incriminating facial expressions, when the last thing he had said ran through her mind again. You can go down fighting, or you can just go down. It jogged something in her memory, and she collected herself enough to break the silence.

"Well, since we've come to the subject of downward trajectories…" she said, clearing her throat as she heard a little creak in her voice. The Joker's eyebrows came up again, but this expression was one of light curiosity. The intensity had drained out of him as quickly as water out of a sink, and he had slapped on his Well-Behaved-Patient face. Harley reached into her portfolio and pulled out the last page of her notes. She sat up straighter, grateful to have somewhere else to take the conversation, somewhere that didn't leave her feeling quite so out of control. "Since I think we've exhausted our book club discussion, and you've gotten all the commentary out of me that I can give, I think it's time you pay up. A question for a question, remember?"

"Mm-hmm," the Joker rumbled, tapping his fingers against the table.

"And you promised to be as honest about this as we were about the book. Right?"

"Ask away, Doc," he said brightly, carefully not promising anything of the sort, at least, not today.

"Alright," she said, "then I want to talk about that." She kept her eyes on his even as she pointed down to his cuffed arms, and for a split second she thought she saw something that might have been fear flicker across his dark irises. Then he glanced down and realized she was pointing at his right forearm, not at his left hand, and she heard a hiss of air escape his nose. He's relieved, she realized, and she was glad she hadn't played that card just yet.

"Fine," he muttered. Reluctantly, the Joker tugged at his chain for some slack and pulled his wrists to one side, laying his right arm along the table and exposing the tattoo that Harley had very nearly missed during their first close conversation. It was small and unobtrusive – just three words: LONG WAY DOWN, written in a newsprint-style font along the outside of his arm. She stared at him, waiting for him to say something, but he just looked at her quizzically. "Well… what about it?" he said finally. "I want to talk about that doesn't count as a QUES-tion, Doc."

"Okay, fine," she smirked. "What's the story behind that tattoo?"

"What if it doesn't have a story?" he countered, and she gave him a stern eyebrow in response.

"Well, then your answer will be pretty short," she conceded, but she was still staring him down with her disapproving-teacher look. "But it's been my experience that while a lot of artwork tattoos are just that – artwork – most tattoos of words have some kind of story about why you got them. So that's the story I want. When, where… and why those words."

"You look like you think you already know," he said cheekily, and she thought maybe he was avoiding answering until he could come up with something safer than the truth.

"I have some ideas," she nodded, "but you're stalling. When did you get it?"

The Joker hissed air out his nose again, irritated that she was getting so directly to the point. He made a sucking noise against his teeth in what she could only assume was a show of displeasure. When he finally answered, he looked away from her when he spoke. "College," he spat distastefully. Harley had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning.

"And when was that?"

"Ya know," he rumbled, looking back at her, "this is starting to sound like more than one question."

"Mm-mm," she shook her head. "The one question is: What is the story of that tattoo? Now, if you'd just tell me the story, I wouldn't have to keep adding subsidiary questions as prompts, would I? So. When was college? What year are we talking about?"

The Joker stared at her blankly for a few seconds, as if deciding whether it was worth the effort of coming up with a lie. "2001," he finally growled, turning back to look out the window grumpily. "And, ah… there's no story. We were hammered and the mall was closed, and we were looking for something to do. Satisfied?"

She wasn't, but she could live with it for now. Plus, she was starting to enjoy the power reversal. "Why those words?" she pried.

"You're the one with the notes," he said, hissing the last syllable. "If you know what it is, why don't you tell me?"

"I do know what it is," Harley nodded, one finger on her page of notes as she wiggled it back and forth across the table. "It's the name of a Goo Goo Dolls song. Should I assume that song has meaning for you?"

"You know what happens when you assume," the Joker sneered, still not turning his head but eyeing her in his periphery. Harley smiled wryly.

"Would it have anything to do with what you said just a minute ago? About gravity being inevitable?"

"It might," the Joker said to the wall.

"So I guess you've believed that for a long time, then," Harley said quietly, and this time the Joker turned back to face her. He looked like he was trying to decide which would be more satisfying – closing his eyes and telling her his life story, throwing her against the wall and tearing her shirt off with his teeth, or just killing her with his bare hands. Harley had the uncomfortable feeling that the odds were pretty dead even among the three options.

"Believed what?" he said, his voice disturbingly empty of its usual lilt.

"That our natural, default state is unavoidable?" she went on, treading softly now. "That once we tip over, we're guaranteed to hit the bottom no matter how hard we wave our arms… and that the harder we try to be something we aren't… the further we have to fall. That it's a long way down."

The Joker didn't answer her immediately. He kept staring at her, chewing on the scar tissue inside his cheeks, his eyes half-lidded and glassy with suppressed emotions. Harley was struck yet again by how thick and dark his eyelashes were, the beautiful chocolate brown of his eyes, and how they would constantly look like bedroom eyes if there wasn't such a black hatred seeping out from behind them. His top lip flattened against his front teeth and then popped back into its usual place, and Harley thought he might be regretting his choice to give her such free rein to speak – and that he was deciding whether or not to keep his side of the bargain after all.

"Congratulations, Doc," he said finally, not sounding congratulatory in the least. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat again, and this time it looked like genuine discomfort instead of an excuse to draw her attention. He flicked his eyes over everything in the room but her. "You want a… a prize for being right?" he spat. Harley smiled slowly.

"Nah, being right is the prize," she answered teasingly; then she let her smile soften into something more gentle. "Thank you," she said, simply and sincerely. The Joker didn't move except for a slight flare of his nostrils at her words. "Thank you for keeping your side of the bargain, Joker."

"Hmh," was the only response she got from him, but it was dismissive rather than aggressive, and she accepted that as another victory. Time to quit while you're ahead, her brain whispered frantically, and she figured she should probably listen for once. She began to stack her papers more neatly inside her portfolio, tucking the book into the front cover pocket, and she felt the Joker's eyes on her the entire time, tracking her every movement. When she had closed the portfolio and flipped up its magnetic latch, she got up from the table and walked over to the intercom button beside the therapy room door.

"Officer Cash?" she spoke into the metal square on the white wall. "We're ready for you now." There was a beeping and clicking as Cash came inside, and Harley walked back to the table to collect her folder. Cash had to hoist the Joker up onto his feet; the prisoner seemed intent on moving as little as possible, and his eyes were still locked on Harley, still fixing her with a dark stare that could have been either lust, homicidal rage, or a complete pretense – it was impossible to tell. Harley cleared her throat. "When do I get my next homework assignment?"

For another tense moment or two, she was afraid he wasn't going to answer her – that she had been on the money enough today that he'd decided to call the whole thing off. Then something flickered across his eyes, and his face returned abruptly to its accustomed animation.

"I'll, ah… I'll send it to your office," he quipped, the barest hint of a smile tugging at his scars. "Don't call me, I'll call you." Then Cash was tugging on the chain he had transferred from the table to his belt, and the Joker allowed himself to be led out of the room, giving Harley one last look over his shoulder as he went. Harley took a deep breath as their footsteps retreated down the corridor; the air seemed thinner now that the Joker was no longer in the room. She caught the closing door with her foot and slipped out into the hall, pressing her portfolio against her chest with hands tense from nervous energy.

"You ready to debrief, Quinzel?" Leland said from behind her, and Harley jumped a little, turning to see Leland still scribbling on a legal pad and James closing the door of the observation room behind him.

"Sure," she replied, resisting the urge to turn around for one more look at the Joker's retreating silhouette at the far end of the hall. "I think we have a lot to talk about."

"You bet we do," Leland muttered, capping her pen. "Come on." And as was her habit, she turned sharply and began marching toward the security doors without waiting to see if she was being followed or not. Harley looked at James, and he took a deep breath, shoving his hands into his pockets.

"Think she'll wait two minutes so I can finally get some coffee?"

"I wouldn't count on it," Harley smirked, and they both turned and began powerwalking down the corridor in Leland's wake.

---

Leland was already flipping back through her notes when Harley and James hurried into her office a minute later; but she was standing at the conference table instead of her desk, and when she waved them in, she indicated two seats at the table instead of the interrogation chair in the center of the room. Harley took this as a good sign.

"Alright, Quinzel, let's start from the top." She had flipped to the beginning of her notes and finally (mercifully) took a seat at the head of the table. Harley and James sat down on either side of her, facing each other.

"Are we going to review a tape?" Harley asked, noticing that there was no TV in the immediate vicinity. Leland shook her head.

"Damn VCR puked its guts out last night while Dr. Aftab was doing an emergency session with John Dee," she muttered, clearly upset that nobody had fixed this before she got there this morning. She leaned back in her seat and pulled a bottle of water from a mini fridge Harley hadn't even noticed was there. "You want one?" she asked them both.

"Yes, please," Harley replied, taking the bottle as it was passed to her. James declined, and Harley saw that he was eyeing Leland's coffee pot in the corner.

"They did get a digital recording," Leland went on, "and I can get you a DVD burned by the end of the day, but for now we'll just focus on our immediate impressions – and making sure you're psychologically intact."

"I'm… psychologically tired," Harley said honestly, trying not to think about the fact that what had exhausted her was the sheer effort it had taken not to stare at the man's chest. "But I haven't been eviscerated yet, so that's nice."

"Yet," Leland muttered, giving Harley a meaningful look before tilting her legal pad up to read from it. "He rattled you a little with that comment about your car, though." It wasn't a question, so Harley nodded equivocally.

"I was a little concerned," she admitted, "until I realized that he had just seen where I park. I'm awful with directions, so it had never occurred to me that the side lot I park in is on that end of the hospital."

"You gonna start parking somewhere else?" Leland asked, eyeing James darkly as he slipped out of his seat and made for the coffee pot. Harley shook her head.

"No, I don't see any reason to. I was only worried by the notion that he might have someone following me on the outside. But him watching the parking lot in the morning because he's bored is a valid and non-worrisome reason for him to know which car I drive. Plus I think if I moved now, he'd take it as a sign of weakness."

"Probably right," Leland agreed, taking a long drink of her water. She tapped one line of her notes with her pen. "I don't like that Bundy conversation he tried to start, but you pulled out of it as quick as you could, all things considered."

"And it's nice to know," James chimed in, coming back to the table with a full mug, "that you aren't attracted to serial killers." He grinned at Harley, and she gave him a nervous chuckle in return. No, because the Joker doesn't fit the criteria for a serial killer, her brain supplied, and she took a big gulp of water to drown the expression that almost showed on her face. James didn't seem to notice; he was smiling apologetically at Leland over his coffee. "Hope you don't mind me using one of your mugs, Doctor Leland."

"I mind you using my coffee more," Leland sniffed, "but since you didn't take the last of my Coffee Mate, I guess I'll get over it. Besides, that one's not my mug, it's Burton's." She drew a line under something in her notes, and Harley and James both looked at the coffee cup; it was hand-painted, with the words "There Was A Fish In The Percolator" scrawled on the outside and what appeared to be the tips of a fish tail sticking up out of the liquid on the inside rim.

"Oh, yeah, definitely Burton's," Harley mumbled. James winced.

"I guess today is just Take Shots at Burton Day, then."

"Good, it's about time somebody did," Leland said, with the barest hint of a smirk. Then she capped her pen and looked straight at Harley. "Alright. You tell me how you think your book discussion went. And be honest."

Well, let's see – I managed to keep myself from crawling across the table and licking him, so I'd say that's an achievement.

"Well," Harley said, clearing her throat to dispel her intrusive inner monologue, "better than I think Doctor Arkham would have expected, since he's made it clear he'd rather have me making lanyards." James snorted into his coffee at that, and Leland almost smiled.

"How lucky we were that today happened to be his day off," she said airily, marking a few points on her legal pad with asterisks. "Do you consider it a successful session?"

"Do I?" Harley specified. "Yes. There are people who would probably disagree; not a lot really happened in terms of actual therapy. But we have to keep in mind that with the Joker, our goals are different than usual. You can't really conduct therapy with someone who doesn't want therapy, who doesn't think they need it, and we might spend months or years just getting him to that point. So then if our goals for the Joker are to keep him engaged, keep him civil, and gain more understanding of his condition – so maybe one day we can treat him – then yeah, I think this would have to qualify as successful."

Leland eyed her for a moment, then gave her a slow nod. "Fair enough. Do you have any concerns you want to discuss? I know he didn't exactly show his teeth today, but we have to be sure he hasn't exposed any psychological vulnerabilities – any at all – that he might exploit in the future. Something that might not be a problem now might be what causes you to crack three sessions down the road."

Yeah, the problem is that he's hot and I can't go more than five minutes without thinking about it.

"None that I'm aware of," she smiled. She had to get rid of this inner monologue as soon as possible, before it got her in trouble. Inner monologues were for Ally McBeal.

"Well, then we'll start with mine," Leland said, and tapped her pen beside the first asterisk on her notepad. "I have some positive notes and then some questions that I'd like to go over with you. Now I know Doctor McKnight isn't your superior, so do you mind if he sits in on this, or would you prefer if he left?" James stopped halfway through a gulp of coffee, accidentally making a slurping sound, and Leland frowned at him.

What, and be alone with you? Harley's inner monologue sassed, and she bit the inside of her cheek.

"Not at all, Doctor Leland," she said aloud. "In fact, I'd welcome Doctor McKnight's input. Three brains are better than two."

"Okay, then," Leland nodded. "Positive note one: I was happy to see you stand your ground philosophically. There was a point where he tried to tell you why you thought what you thought, and you didn't let him lead you. You corrected him. More importantly, I was happy to see that he let you correct him, and he didn't throw a fit or turn vicious. That's a marked improvement for him."

"Is it?" Harley asked. James nodded.

"When Johnstone tried to correct him once during a session, he got this nasty look in his eyes and then started tearing into him psychologically. That was right before Johnstone put in for his vacation."

"If he's going to let you have a real debate with him, then we might actually see more honest to God conversations happening like today," Leland agreed. "Second positive note: you acknowledged what he was saying, defined it and explored it, without expressly agreeing with him. That's good practice. It makes the patient feel heard and understood without supporting their erroneous belief. Keep that up, and we might stick you in a room with Crane and see if you can get anything out of him while you're at it."

"Um… thank you…" Harley smiled, not really sure how to take compliments from Leland, and not really sure she wanted to divert any of her attention to someone like Crane.

"And, third note," Leland went on, "I'm not actually upset about the long pauses I saw in certain parts of the conversation. Arkham would have gotten nervous about it, but I actually think it was a good sign. You weren't just answering him with a kneejerk reaction to everything he said, you were taking your time, thinking about your response. That's a good trait when working with a manipulative subject."

"I'm glad you thought so," Harley replied nervously. The fact that Leland had noticed the long silences rattled her; and if Leland only knew what had been hanging in the air between them during those pauses….

"Now. Constructive criticisms," Leland plowed on, oblivious to Harley's unease. "This one might not be a big deal ordinarily, but I do want to know where you're coming from. You were pretty quick to admit you were wrong in your initial read-through of the book. Do you think that's a safe admission to make with him?"

"If this were a conversation with someone I met on the subway, it'd be considered an admirable trait," Harley countered, glad to have a question she could answer confidently. "Actually, if this were ordinary therapy with a client on one of the lower floors, it would be encouraged. I don't think the Joker should be treated differently. I always want to admit when I've misunderstood something, with any patient – even the Joker. Especially the Joker. I think one of the things he hates more than anything else is people pretending to be better than they are. He's intelligent enough to pick up on it if I'm wrong about something, and if I lie and say I wasn't, I think it would just piss him off. I think the only way I'm going to get anywhere with him is to be completely honest."

"I agree," James added between sips of coffee, and Harley tossed him a quick grateful smile. Leland marked her notes.

"Okay. I just wanted to hear you defend it, make sure it was an intentional strategy and not just an oversight. On that same note, is that what led you to give him a real anecdote from your childhood?"

"Yes," Harley nodded. "Same concept. If I want even the slightest hope of him telling me real information about himself, I have to be willing to divulge some personal details of my own. Within reason, of course," she added, seeing the slant of Leland's eyebrows. "I don't plan to tell him where I live, or who I'm dating, or give him any traumas to play with. But I don't think there's much he can do with the fact that I was raised in a Catholic home, or that I accidentally stole a penny when I was five."

"You'd be surprised," Leland mumbled, scribbling a sentence between paragraphs of her notes. "Man's the MacGyver of psychological torture. Could make a shank out of just about anything." She was still writing and giving her paper a dark look, but she didn't seem to be telling Harley to stop being honest, so Harley took that as permission. Grudging permission, but permission nonetheless. After a moment, Leland stopped writing and dotted a very firm period at the end of a sentence. "One more critical question," she prompted.

"Okay…."

"Why the abrupt transition from the discussion of the book into the personal question you had planned to ask him? You seemed to be on a roll, and then after he made that pronouncement about gravity, you both got quiet, and when you came out of it you were talking about his tattoo."

"Oh…," Harley frowned, conscious of her effort not to squeeze her water bottle convulsively. "Did that come across as abrupt? I didn't realize, on my side of the window."

"Let me know what was going on in your head during that gap," Leland shrugged, "and I might be inclined to overlook it."

"Umm," Harley started, trying to look like she was formulating a professional response. For a second she could feel the soft heat of the Joker's fingertips on the back of her hand again, and she dropped that hand from the water bottle into her lap, irrationally worried that Leland could somehow see his fingerprints on her skin.

Why fight the inevitable, Doc?

"Well, to be honest, Doctor Leland?" she began, her throat getting dry again in spite of the water. "I saw a shift in his body language, maybe in his eyes, I'm not sure; but it gave me the impression that he intended that to be the end of the discussion. I felt as though he had said what he wanted to say on the subject, and that if I tried to continue that line of discussion, he would either start spouting nonsense or get irritated and shut down. I'm afraid I can't really tell you what it was that tipped me off—"

Sure you can, it was the fact that he had a grip on your hand, and that you couldn't tell if he'd rather screw you or kill you.

"—but there was just a subtle change in his demeanor that might not have registered to someone not in the room with him."

James put down his coffee and nodded. "No, I know what you mean. There was something about the way he shifted his position at that point in the conversation that made me uncomfortable. I think you read him right."

"He makes me uncomfortable in every position," Leland said dryly, "but I see your point." She wrote some more notes at the bottom of her page. "I'm not going to complain about it, then. I'd rather you follow your intuition and keep a close eye on his body language than keep plowing blindly ahead, right into the knife he's got waiting. If your gut tells you to change the subject, then do it." Having made that pronouncement, Leland then flipped to the second page of her notes. "Alright. Now we talk about the real meat of the session. Did we learn anything about him today? Do we think anything he said was true? What did we gain?"

"I've been waiting to talk about this part, Doctor Leland," James grinned, pushing Burton's mug aside. "I don't want to get too excited too quickly, but I think we should be thrilled at the amount we got out of him today." Harley saw a look of vindication all over his face, and she remembered again that he had really put himself on the line by convincing Leland to involve her at all. He was just as invested as she was.

"Yeah, but what did we get?" Leland pressed. "Let's pick it apart."

"Well, we got a year and a circumstance for the tattoo," Harley said. James shot her a grin.

"Which, by the way, not one of us had ever been brave enough or interested enough to ask him about."

"It was a gamble," Harley shrugged. "I was taking the chance that it could have been linked to a part of his past he didn't want to talk about and that he'd shut down. But I know the song it refers to, and I had a hunch it was a philosophical statement."

"And now we know he was in college in 2001," James smiled.

"If he wasn't lying," Leland reminded him sternly, "which is a big If."

"I don't think he was," James countered. "Not about that, at least. Harley?"

"I think he was telling the truth," she said quietly, rolling the lid from her water bottle back and forth across her palm. "He was too uncomfortable to be lying. He started off trying to stall me – I think he was playing for time to come up with a story – and when I kept talking, kept interrupting the process… when I wouldn't let him stall, he answered, but his whole body stiffened up. And he wouldn't look at me. It's the first time I've seen him not use eye contact to his own advantage."

Leland narrowed her eyes. "Okay. So if he's telling the truth, depending on how old he was when he started and whether or not he finished in four years, that puts his birth date …when, some time between '77 and '84?"

"Narrow that to '83," James said. "State laws. He had to be at least eighteen to get a tattoo – if he's from Gotham, anyway, which his accent makes me think he is."

"And he said they went because the mall was closed," Harley pointed out. "Upperclassmen didn't hang out at malls, at least in my experience. He was probably at most a sophomore, more likely a freshman."

"Yeah, first thing you do when you get away from home," Leland nodded. "Get drunk and get inked. Okay, so we think he might have been born between '81 and '83, then."

"God, he's my age," Harley mused aloud. "We might have been on campus at the same time, for all I know."

"Let's stick with what we do know," Leland reminded her. "I'm not familiar with the song. What does it tell us about him?"

"It's mid-90s," Harley explained, "sort of grunge-punk. Alternative rock."

"The Nirvana-type of crowd?" Leland asked, and James nodded.

"I'd say if we saw him back in high school, that's who he'd be hanging around with."

"And you think the lyrics line up with the philosophy he was preaching today?"

"More or less," Harley shrugged. "It doesn't really spell it out, but I always thought the song was about someone who's been betrayed or lost faith in someone they thought they could count on, and it's sort of yanked the rug out from under them. They don't know what to believe in anymore, and they don't really want to continue living in that reality. The line you're not supposed to be that way gets repeated a few times."

"You think the Joker had the rug yanked out from under him?" Leland asked, and Harley nodded.

"Maybe more than once."

"And if it happened before he went to college," James pointed out, "then we're talking about parents. Who else can hurt you that badly before you turn twenty?"

"Yeah, I keep going back to that repeated line. You're not supposed to be that way. That sounds like something a kid would say about their parents."

"You think you can get him to talk about his parents?" Leland proposed. Harley thought about it for a minute.

"Not for a while," she said after some consideration. "Maybe eventually, after we've done multiple sessions and he's more relaxed about giving me information. And I'd have to ease into it. He's told multiple versions of how his face got cut up, and one of them included an abusive father, so maybe I could start there and sort of tiptoe up to the truth. But I wouldn't plan on it being any time soon."

"Well, he's a lifer and you're not even thirty yet, so I'd say time is the one thing we've got plenty of," Leland grimaced. "Assuming, of course, that you still plan on this being a long-term adventure?" Her face was professional, but something about the set of her mouth hinted at a smirk, and Harley grinned.

"Absolutely. As long as he's not crawling across the table and bashing my face against it, I see no reason to stop."

"Great," James said into the coffee mug, preparing to tip the last drink into his mouth. "Now all we have to do is mollify Arkham and Burt—"

THUNK.

All three of them jumped as the door to Leland's office smacked open, and Dr. Burton stomped in as if magically summoned by James speaking his name into his personal coffee cup. He looked a little more frazzled than usual, if that were possible, and there was a splotch of something spilled on his white coat. There was a tri-folded document in his hand which Harley noticed was printed on Dr. Leland's signature yellow paper. When he got to the conference table, he smacked the page down on the shiny wood veneer in front of Leland and glared at her.

"Supervisory review?" he spat, sounding incredulous and more than a little pissed. Harley scooted her seat a couple of inches away from him on instinct. Leland capped her pen calmly and began to flip pages closed on her notebook.

"Oh, good, you can read," she said nonchalantly. "I was beginning to wonder, considering how many of my memos you've ignored."

"You're calling me up for supervisory review? What the hell for?"

"Doctor Burton—" James began, but Burton waved him silent, eyeing his coffee mug darkly.

"Go away, kid, the adults are having a conversation," Burton growled. Harley shot up out of her seat at that, ready to tear into him, but Leland held out a hand toward both of them. She looked as though she had been waiting to have this showdown for quite some time, and she wasn't about to share the battlefield with anyone else.

"Doctor Burton, you are edging closer and closer to something more serious than a supervisory review," Leland said flatly. "You're under review because of your decision to turn a colleague's therapy session into a sporting event. You're lucky it's a review and not a disciplinary action."

"For the fucking pool?" Burton wheezed. "Well, then you'd better bring up everybody else on that clipboard while you're at it, unless this is a targeted attack just for me. You plan to pull Jeremiah into the principal's office too?"

"Burton, you better get a handle on your mouth before you cuss your way right into a suspension," Leland snapped, moving her notepad to her desk so he couldn't see anything written on it. "I don't have the authority to call up Doctor Arkham, but you, I have jurisdiction over. Pool was your idea, and you solicited everyone else to place the bets. I'm cutting off the head of the snake." She picked up a small leather book that Harley assumed was a planner and flipped a few pages. "Now," she said with false cheeriness, "what day and time would you like to schedule your review?"

"I don't believe this," Burton muttered, looking around the room as if searching for someone who was on his side. Leland shrugged.

"Okay. We'll put you down for this afternoon at one o'clock." She made a note in her planner. Burton just stared at her.

"I can't do anything today at one, that's when I do the Joker's therapy session."

"Oh, I think the Joker has had as much therapy as we can handle today," Leland replied, snapping the latch on her planner. Burton crossed his arms.

"What are you talking about?" he sneered; then, suddenly, he seemed to become solidly aware of Harley and James being in the room, and the import of what he had interrupted appeared to hit him. "Did you have a therapy session without me?" he hissed. Leland shrugged.

"Since you appeared not to take the first one seriously, I didn't see any need to involve you in this one. Especially since you're currently under review."

"I'm his lead therapist!" Burton scoffed, waving the yellow paper. Leland's hands went to her hips, and Harley gulped.

"Technically, I think you'll find that I'm still his lead therapist," Leland said darkly, "and that you were just someone I outsourced him to in an effort to see if different therapy styles would help."

"Really?" Burton sputtered. "Different therapy styles? I thought it was because he was too much for you, so you passed him off so somebody else would have that F on their report card instead of you!"

"Boy, you want that insubordination mark in your personnel file, don't you?" Leland snapped. "For your information, Doctor Quinzel has shown some success today, so it looks like my outsourcing has finally paid off. As far as I'm concerned, she's going to be the only one doing sessions with him for quite a while, and if you don't like that, you can just sit in your office and never even observe another one."

"He's my patient!" Burton practically squealed. Harley watched as something in Dr. Leland's eyes seemed to flash and then harden; then she leaned slowly over her desk.

"Not anymore, he's not," she said calmly, and then whipped around and took a folder off the shelf behind her. "I'm pulling you off the Joker's case as of today. You've admitted before that you don't think he'll ever respond to you, so the only reason for you to throw this hissy fit is because you want to protect your ego. Well, your ego is not my problem." She sat down firmly in her chair, flipped open to a specific page, and reached for her bottle of Wite-Out. Burton gaped at her.

"You're pulling me off the case… in favor of an intern?" He jabbed a thumb in Harley's general direction, and Harley had to resist the urge to run across the room and break it. "She still has to go to seminar, for crying out loud! She's probably never even set foot in a therapy room before she got here!"

"Actually, she put in more clinic hours than you had at the GSU student health center while she was finishing her graduate work," Leland said, not looking up from the chart she was merrily removing Burton's name from. "You'd know that if you actually read the departmental e-mail I sent out the week before she started."

"I don't believe this," Burton repeated under his breath. He looked like he wanted very much to ball up the supervisory review and toss the yellow paper at its author like a tennis ball. Instead, he shoved it unceremoniously into the pocket of his white coat. "I'm going to Doctor Arkham about this," he said. Leland capped the Wite-Out and blew a puff of air onto the page to dry it.

"Good. While you're there, tell him to get a copy of the DVD of Harley's session today. See if he thinks your ego is worth more than the information we got from the patient." She didn't even look up from her drying forms as she said this. Burton glared at her until it became apparent that she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of watching his dramatic exit, and he eventually just shuffled back out into the hallway, muttering something that sounded like unbelievable under his breath and slamming the door behind him.

For a minute or two, all three of them stayed still and listened to the clock over the filing cabinet ticking away crisply. Then Leland rubbed a hand over her face and made an irritated noise down in her throat. James put out one finger and began turning the empty coffee mug in circles on the conference table.

"You want some aspirin, Doctor Leland?"

"I want some of that Glenlivet I bought yesterday," Leland murmured, "but I can't have that til I get home." She stood up from her desk, put one hand to the small of her back, and let out a puff of air that moved the edges of her hair away from her face. Harley rubbed her fingernails against the back of one of the conference chairs nervously.

"Do you think he's going to get Doctor Arkham to pull me off the case?" she asked. Leland sneered.

"You let me handle Arkham. I don't want you worried about anything except how to get the Joker talking about his history, and getting through whatever it is he wants you to read next." She tapped her forms to see if the correction fluid had dried; apparently it had, because she flipped the folder closed and came around the desk, her arms crossed. "You did okay today, Quinzel. I want us to be able to keep that going. Go back to your office, have some alone time before lunch. I want you to do some reflective writing like they probably made you do back in school. You might come up with insights about today's session that haven't bubbled up to the surface of your brain yet. And hopefully it'll lead you into some ideas about how to get more information from him in the future."

"Okay," Harley nodded. She picked up her portfolio and water bottle from the conference table. "Um… good luck with Burton and Arkham," she grimaced sympathetically, taking a few steps toward the door. James shoved Dr. Burton's mug into the back corner of the coffee nook and followed her. As they walked past Leland, Harley paused. "Oh, and – thanks, Doctor Leland," she smiled, "not just for letting me try, but for having my back, too."

"Hmm," Leland responded, heading for the coffee pot to make a new batch. The sound was dismissive, but there was a hint of a smile with it. "Yeah," she mumbled, dumping the filter into the trash. "Wait and see if you still want to thank me after round two."

"Pretty sure I still will," Harley grinned, and she and James left the office, closing the door on the sound of Leland's muttered threats to her coffee pot.

---

The parking lot on the southwest side of the Arkham grounds was a bright field of winking sun flashes on windshields, almost too bright to look at without getting a headache, and the Joker gave it only the most cursory of glances before going back across his cell to stare out into the hallway. The sun would be drying up the last of the overnight rain and steaming up the pavement around the cars, and for once the Joker was glad that his window didn't open. Gotham after a rainstorm always smelled like something dead that had been dredged up out of the river, and when you coupled that with the cloying heaviness of the damp air, it was almost enough to make you puke.

The Joker leaned against the reinforced glass in the door and watched uninterestedly as three orderlies went scrambling down the hall. Somewhere a panic button was blaring its WAAANNNHHH WAAANNNHHH noise, screaming into the void, but the Joker barely registered it. That was Rhonda's end of the hallway. Rhonda's favorite pastime was trying to bite nurses' fingers off. Since it happened nearly every other day, it had stopped being entertaining about a week after he'd gotten there. His eyelids drooped to half-mast, and he looked out at the corridor without really seeing anything; his mind was somewhere else entirely. Not just any Somewhere Else, of course, but a very specific Somewhere Else. And he wished it wasn't, but at the moment there was nothing he could do about it.

God, she was hot when she decided to play hardball. He wasn't sure if she knew it or not – if it was a calculated move she was making, like it had been a move on his part to show up in just his t-shirt, or if it was something about herself that she was unaware of – but calculated or not, he had the unsettled feeling that little Doc Quinzel had come decently close to having the same effect on him that he was trying to have on her. When he'd put his hand over hers he'd been able to feel how close to that precipice he'd dragged her, could almost see one of her feet dangling over into the void… but he'd also felt the ground give a little under his own foot, and thaaaaat just wasn't allowed. He was still in control of the situation, but only as long as she was the only one trying to douse a hormone fire. If they both were, well….

If it was both of them, they might end up burning down half the city.

Now theeeere's a thought.

The Joker made a face at his faint reflection in the glass. Yes, it was a thought, alright, but he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with it. If he ran with that thought, he'd have to spend the foreseeable future walking the knife edge of control and yielding that he was on right now, and he didn't like the sound of that. He didn't like the sound of any plan that involved giving her anything else to play with. Give and take wasn't exactly his forte; the taking part, he was very good at, but giving was dangerous. Giving had to be done as little as possible.

Oh, is that what you were thinking when you just casually handed her the truth about your tattoo?

"It wasn't casual," he muttered, fogging up the glass in the door. "I had to give her something."

Did you, now?

"Yes," he hissed, clicking his tongue impatiently. He needed this voice critiquing him like he needed a hole in the head. It wasn't ideal, but it had to be done. It wasn't like he planned on telling her the truth for every question she asked – probably not even for most of them – but if he didn't toss her a little scrap of honesty every so often, if she didn't seem to be showing results, the Boss Docs would get cagey and yank her off the case. She'd get a new caseload of three or four boring "safe" patients, and he'd get shunted off onto someone like Johnstone or Kabir or – God forbid – Arkham himself. No, no, no. No. No, he had to throw her a bone just often enough to keep her looking like their best option.

Why?

The question came out of nowhere, and he turned sharply enough that he bonked the glass with his forehead. He scowled darkly at the now-smeared reflection. Why? Well, why not? Did he need a reason? Was there a reason to do anything in this place other than to entertain himself?

No, but if you just wanted to play with someone's brain, you could do that to any of them. What makes her so special? Other than her legs, of course.

For a moment, the Joker considered ignoring the question entirely; he'd had a talk with himself already about staying away from the topic of Doc Quinzel's legs, and he didn't need to start down that path again. He watched as Dr. Leland went stomping down the corridor past his door, Officer Cash following behind her snapping orders into a walkie-talkie. Rhonda must be having a grand old romp if they were calling in the Big Guns. But he just couldn't get interested in the chaos outside his cell; he was too distracted by the question his brain kept repeating, as if it could annoy him into answering. Finally, after avoiding the topic as long as he could, the Joker let his forehead rest against the glass again and coughed out an irritated chuckle.

"Because she's still got a little chaos left in her, that's why," he muttered to his reflection. The legs were just cake decoration. Quinzel was special because all the rest of the docs in this place were fixed data points, but she was still a …moving target. He knew exactly what answer he'd get to any question from any doctor in the whole ward – except her. He could write a script for McKnight, if he was so inclined (and if he was allowed to have pens). But even when he was firmly in control of the session

yeah, you sure looked like you were in control

she was still capable of surprising him. When he'd agreed to let her ask him one question at the end of each session, he'd had a list in his head of things she'd probably get around to asking him. She'd naturally wait a while to bring out the heavy ones, of course – she wasn't going to ask him how he got his scars, for instance, until they had, ah… built a good rap-port, and… developed more trust, oh-ho, hee-hee, ha-ha. But he'd figured she'd still want to start digging up things she could bring back to Leland, things they could use to "fix" him. Where he was from, what his childhood was like, did he love his mommy, did he hear voices, did anybody ever Touch him in the Bad Place and turn him into a psychopath – the sort of background details people always wanted to know about serial killers and social deviants. And maybe, if she got really ballsy, she might eventually get around to asking about the mark on his finger. She certainly made a habit of re-mind-ing him that she could ask about it. She'd actually almost unnerved him today when, just for a split second, he thought she was actually going to go there. And then of all things, she'd asked about his tattoo instead. He'd been knocked off rhythm enough by the bait and switch that he'd told her the truth out of simple surprise.

If she can surprise the truth out of you, then you'd better be glad it was just the tattoo she was asking about. Imagine where she'll go next time.

"She'll go easier," he murmured to himself and to the voice. She might be a little more unpredictable than the rest of them, but he knew her well enough to know that she'd pull back in the next session, ask something safer. She wouldn't want to press her luck. Buuuuuuut…. "Imagine…where…she'll go," he repeated aloud, and it was an intriguing line of thought. She was cautious, sure… but she still had the balls to communicate things with her eyes that her supervisors couldn't see, and to let him touch her without diving for the panic button. She'd had the guts to ask him something that could have made him angry, and that was with Leland watching behind the glass and all their words being recorded on a tape for the official record.

Imagine what she might say if nobody was listening?

"Hmmh," the Joker chuckled to himself, a little rumble of laughter beginning to bubble up from somewhere in his stomach. That would be the trick, getting them to let her have unobserved sessions with him like a real grown-up doctor. But if they could swing it… if he could have her for one hour with nobody listening, not even the tape recorder…. "Maybe she might tell me the truth," he murmured, and his smeared reflection grinned back at him in the reinforced glass. What he would need, of course, was some inspiration, some way to make it happen.

Out in the corridor, the siren was still braying its WAAANNNHHH WAAANNNHHH up and down the empty halls. The Joker suddenly found the noise tiresome and abrasive; he was about to go back to his cot and try to drown it out with his thin excuse for a pillow when he saw a scurry of movement at the limit of his field of vision. The blur looked very much like orange prisoner scrubs, and the Joker pressed his face back against the glass to see if something interesting might finally be happening after all. He wasn't disappointed. After a minute or two of stillness, he saw the scurrying again, and then Rhonda came into view – army-crawling down the corridor with all the seriousness of a grunt in basic. She had taken off her orange scrub shirt – if she'd ever had a bra, that was gone, too – and had tied the fabric around the lower half of her face like a mask. One of her wrists was bleeding from where she had obviously slipped out of a cuff. Her wild tangles of frizzy hair flopped one way and then another as she glanced repeatedly over her shoulder, watching for any orderlies who might have figured out which way she had gone. As the Joker watched, she seemed to decide the coast was clear and stood up on feet that were bare and smeared with something that looked suspiciously like her own feces. Now he could see that in her right hand, she held a ragged bundle of wires and plastic bits that looked like they had been ripped out of some machine. She made eye contact with him through the door glass then, and when he raised an amused eyebrow at her, Rhonda held out her prize for him to get a better look. A rectangular plastic button came into view, dangling from one of the longer wires, and the Joker realized that what she was holding was the guts of a soda machine that she had disemboweled. Clearly she thought she'd accomplished some sort of life-or-death mission, because she shook the wires violently in his direction and screamed in triumph.

"I found her, down the main hall!"

"Shit, she went down Main, come on!"

Both Rhonda and the Joker snapped their heads toward the other end of the West unit as a herd of orderlies rounded the corner and came for her at a run. Rhonda tilted her head back and gave a feral screech before launching herself into a sprint in the opposite direction; but the second she'd taken to scream had been enough for the two fastest orderlies, one of whom had a large crack in his glasses, to catch up to her. They lunged at her and caught her under the arms, holding her still long enough for three other orderlies and a nurse to skid into view and pile onto her as if she were a football. The nurse produced a full syringe from some unseen bag or pocket, and the Joker assumed said needle went somewhere against Rhonda's anatomy, because when the five-orderly pile-up dissipated, Rhonda was a vaguely complaining ragdoll being held up by the orderly with glasses. The bundle of soda machine wires dropped from her loosening hand and landed on one of her smeared footprints on the tile. As the sedative took full effect, she rolled her head back toward the Joker's cell door and garbled something nobody could understand; but the Joker had already slipped further back into his cell and planted himself on his cot, out of sight of those in the hall. The last thing he needed right now was to make eye contact with any orderlies or nurses. What he needed was to be left completely alone until they came to take him to lunch. He had some thinking to do.

Somewhere down the hall someone turned off the siren, but although he'd been keen to drown it out a few minutes before, the Joker now hardly noticed its absence. He was too deep in thought for that. The seed of an idea had sprouted, and what he needed to do now was spend some time alone with it – grow it, feed it, and then hack it into some shape that he could make use of. Chewing lightly on the scar tissue inside his cheeks, he stared straight ahead at the blank wall on the other side of his cell, picturing the frayed sheaf of wiring that had been clutched in Rhonda's hand. An observer could have been forgiven for thinking he was a sculpture and not a living person at all. Time ticked past without him being aware of it; out in the corridor, the sounds of Rhonda and her captors shuffled down the hall and died away. A while later, there was the sound of a janitorial cart squeaking along to clean up her mess. The Joker heard none of it. His mind was Somewhere Else again – but this time it was exactly where he wanted it to be.

Half an hour later, a slow grin spread across his face. He relaxed then and stretched out on the cot, his wafer-thin pillow wadded up behind his neck, smiling darkly as he drifted into a semi-doze to wait for lunch. He had an idea now, oh, yes, and it was a good one. Fully formed and ready to implement – when the timing was right, of course. Doctor Quinzel wasn't the only person who could make risky moves. She wasn't the only one who could play hardball. That was a two-person game.