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!

9. 9: Cognitive Dissonance

AN: If you hate slow burn, I'm sorry. (Not really.)

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9. Cognitive Dissonance

"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

In the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning, a gentle breeze began to dance its way up from the southwest, crossing downtown Gotham to filter softly through the apartment blocks on Cherry Street. It lifted the fronds of the potted fern outside Harley's bedroom window and brushed them against the glass, the summer-dry leaves making little skittering noises against the windowpane. The first hints of peachy sunrise were beginning to prod at the dark blue-gray sky over Cobble Hill and the East River in the distance, but the apartment behind the window was still dark and silent save for the strident ticking of the clock above the dining table in the next room. The plush toy Charmander sat perched on the corner of the dresser, standing sentinel over the wild tangle of sheets where his owner slept, deeply but fitfully. Harley was not aware of the breeze, nor the clock, nor the impending sunrise; she was too deep inside the dream.

The rec room was empty except for her – and him.

The bulbs had finally blown, all except the one closest to the door, and that one was flickering rhythmically, in time with her breathing, as if biding its time before it too would sputter out. The high rectangular windows, meant to let in light while being impossible to fit through or see through, were weakly illuminated by a waxing moon that cast the whole room in a blue filter like a heavy-handed cinematographer turning a day scene to night. Down the long room it made a spectrum from flickering light at the door to deep blue shadow in the recesses behind the game tables, inky blackness pooling in that poorly-planned corner where almost anything could happen. If the guard sat in the corner on the left side of the door, he could see into that dark recess. But the guard was not there. The other patients were not there. It was after midnight, after lights out. No doctors were behind the observation glass. The night staff didn't even unlock the rec room, not when patients were supposed to be asleep. Nobody was there, except for her.

And him.

The Joker stood beside her in the dimness of the rec room, and she was afraid to look up at his face; the bare skin of his upper arm was inches from her shoulder, and the heat from his skin was enormous, demanding all her attention. The smells of hospital detergent and hospital soap receded, and the smell of his skin swelled and overwhelmed her other senses. When he turned to face her, his heat seemed to spread, and she was drowning in it. They had to leave the rec room, it was time to go back to his cell, but there was no orderly or guard to take him. She reached out to take his arm herself, and the skin was soft and hot and supple between her fingers and the hard muscles of his shoulder, and she couldn't take him back to his cell, not like this, because he was naked, and they would ask her why.

He was different than the pictures she had seen in his file, stronger and healthier now than when he had been arrested, his injuries healed and his ribs no longer showing, and the moonlight and the flickering bulb turned his body into a smooth bas-relief of tantalizing highlight and shadow, emphasizing the shelf of his collar bone, the angles of his shoulders, the gentle slope down to the flat of his belly, the sharp cut of his hips. As he breathed, the light caught the brassy curls of hair on his chest, and she caught her own breath before it choked her. She kept her eyes on his chest because she couldn't trust herself to look down. "Let's go," she whispered, and although she knew she shouldn't, she took a step closer to him. The heat from his naked body touched every part of her, causing her to break out in goosebumps, her hair to stand on end, and it took her several long moments to realize that she could feel the heat so keenly because she was naked too.

His hands were on her then, taking the clip from her hair, tracing the shape of her breast, pressing in the small of her back to bring her closer, closing around her wrist and pulling her own hand out to touch him. Her fingers skimmed the edges of his chest hair, brushed over his nipples, and she felt the skin on his ribs break out in goosebumps to match hers. He pushed her into the corner, the dark end of the room that could only be seen from the guard's empty chair, and his hands seemed to be everywhere at once – tracing the curve of her hips, curling into the hair at the base of her skull, massaging her breasts, dragging thumbs along the line of her collar bone, opening and closing against the soft circumference of her buttocks. The heat and the intensity of him were such that she couldn't even feel the wall behind her, although she knew it had to be there. The wall and the force of his body were the only things keeping her standing. His lips followed the hammering pulse in her neck, hot breath flowing into her hair and down over her shoulder, and his hand slipped between her legs, moving without hesitation or searching, like he had been there before and knew the way by heart. Her knees turned to water and she clutched at his neck and shoulders as if to keep herself afloat in the ocean of heat and desire he had unleashed. His fingers seemed to be beckoning her to come even closer, and she was so dumbstruck by the sensation that she almost didn't notice when he pulled his hand away; then she could feel him suddenly against the soft skin of her hip, hot and hard and silky-smooth, electric with his own desire and so arrestingly present that she only barely felt her feet leave the floor as he lifted her into his arms and began driving her, powerfully and steadily, toward madness.

"Joker," she whispered, or thought she did; it might only have been in her head, because there was no sound from him except his thick and ragged breathing in her ear. When she said it again, he pressed her harder against the wall and growled.

"My real name," he hissed in her ear, his voice shaky with exertion and desire. "Call me by my real name."

"I… God, I… I don't know your real name," she managed to gasp. He pressed her even harder, and for a minute she thought he wasn't going to answer – might not be able to answer. Then he put his lips against her ear, taking a deep and irregular breath as, on the other side of the room, the last remaining fluorescent bulb crackled and went out, plunging them into darkness.

"My… my name is—"

Harley came violently awake, tangled in her sheets and disoriented as the faint traces of sunrise began to seep into her darkened bedroom. The blue digital face of her alarm clock was the only thing she could see clearly in her blurred post-dream vision, and it said there were just twelve minutes to go until her alarm. She seized her pillow and launched it across the room in a fit of frustration, clipping Charmander's tail and knocking him off the dresser as it went. It was twelve minutes until her alarm, and then she was supposed to get dressed and put on eyeliner and get coffee and a bagel and then go sit in an office with Leland while they watched the Joker on a video and talked about him like he was nothing more or less than an ordinary patient, and she was expected to be able to do all that with a straight face? After having that dream?

"I am not supposed to be having dreams like that about patients," she muttered to her silent bedroom, grabbing her other pillow and squeezing it. "This isn't supposed to be happening." She knew it, and she knew she was doing her best to keep it from happening, and it was happening anyway. And she wasn't sure what was more frustrating – the fact that she'd had the dream at all, or the fact that it had ended before he'd answered the question. Not that the answer her dreaming brain would have supplied would have been correct, but still. Harley stared blankly across the room, her gaze fixing on the portfolio of notes sitting on top of the chest of drawers, her eyes going hazy and unfocused as she unintentionally slipped back into the dream world, trying to fill in the unfinished scene even as the dream started to become fuzzy around the edges.

When her alarm went off twelve minutes later, Harley put the pillow over her face and screamed a muffled scream; then she sighed and went to get ready for work.

---

Leland didn't wait for Harley to come to her after she'd signed in; actually, she didn't even wait for Harley to check her door box or turn on her computer or even throw her breakfast wrapper in the trash. She showed up on the threshold of Harley's office exactly two minutes after Harley had gotten off the elevator, notes in one hand and an empty VHS sleeve in the other.

"Debrief, Quinzel," was all she said, and then she spun on her patent leather heels and disappeared with military efficiency. Harley had just enough time to register what she'd said before the sound of her heels faded down the hall, and just enough presence of mind to throw her bagel wrapper in the trash and pick up her portfolio before scampering out of the office after her, still chewing the last bite. By the time she made it to the other end of the office corridor, Leland had (in defiance of the laws of physics, Harley was pretty sure) managed to seat herself at the conference table with the remote in hand, her notes open, and the video on the portable TV screen paused on a softly flickering image of the Joker playing therapist, with his hand stretched out and Harley's pen balanced in his fingers. James was sitting on the far side of the table, stirring his coffee absently as he stared at the paused video, and Leland didn't even look up from her notes as she pointed to the seat opposite him. Harley gulped and took the seat.

"Good morning, Doctor Leland," she said tentatively, not liking the way Leland put down her pen as she finished. Leland pursed her lips.

"I guess you know what we're gonna talk about before we even look at the discussion part of the session?"

"I guess we're gonna talk about the pen," Harley sighed, glancing back over at the TV screen. The Joker's arm was extended, and the smooth line from wrist to elbow to shoulder and down into the chest made Harley's muscles tense and her breathing hitch; she hadn't been able to get the dream out of her head, and now all she could think about was what lay under that white cotton shirt. She didn't trust herself to carry the conversation. "Um… would either of you like to go first?"

"Holy Moses, Harley," James said quietly after a few seconds, and Leland let out a humorless chuckle.

"I second that," she said stiffly. "Are you losing your mind, Quinzel?"

"I know you told me he used your pen to write your assignment," James added, "but you didn't tell me how long he had it."

"Or that he just grabbed ahold of it without him asking or you offering," Leland finished, and they both looked at her expectantly. Harley thought for a moment about how best to answer, then she shrugged.

"I… what can I say? I mean, I have to have a pen with me to take notes. Maybe I should have kept the pen in my lap when I wasn't using it, instead of on the notebook. Hindsight, right? But in both my defense and his, he behaved himself really well. He used the pen for its intended purpose, he didn't make any threatening gestures with it, and he gave it back when he was done."

"And what would you have done if he hadn't behaved?" Leland prodded.

"I would have used the panic button," Harley replied, shrugging again. "That's what it's there for. I'm not downplaying the seriousness of it, Doctor Leland – but I'm more concerned with my own lack of attention that allowed him to take the notebook than I am about the danger of the pen itself." That was, of course, not strictly true; she had been plenty worried about the pen in the moment. But she didn't need to tell Leland that. James and Leland shared a look.

"Harley, he could have killed you with that pen before you had a chance to hit the panic button," James said. "That doesn't concern you?"

"He could have, but I don't think he would have," Harley countered. "I think he's having too much fun with our sessions to want to kill me. And if I ever feel that changing, I'll put an end to the sessions before anything has a chance to go sour. But until then…." She trailed off, making a vague gesture toward the TV.

"Until then, you're willing to let him hold a pen and take the chance that it's not gonna end up in your throat?" Leland pried. When Harley shrugged, she sighed and returned the gesture. "Well, it's your neck. As long as you know what you're risking." She wrote something else in her notes, and then chuckled to herself. "Tell you one thing, you're the only doctor on this ward with the balls to let the Joker use their pen."

I'm also probably the only one having sex dreams about him, too, but let's not write that down, Harley thought as she chuckled along with Leland nervously. James smiled into his coffee, then he stopped and put down the mug.

"Hey, he had that notebook a lot longer than it would take to write a few words. What was he doing, anyway?"

"Drawing," Harley replied, glad to change the direction of the debriefing. She pulled her notebook out of the portfolio and let them see the last used page, with the Joker's assignment and the intricate doodle sprawled across the top. James made a face.

"Is that… is that supposed to be Casey Jones?"

"It's not a terrible illustration," Harley said indifferently. "I knew exactly what movie scene he was drawing, so it was effective, at least."

"Never heard of him," Leland dismissed, "so I don't have a clue what we're looking at. Myself, I'm more interested in the assignment. You read it yet?"

"I haven't even found it yet," Harley sighed. "I went to the main branch of the Gotham Library downtown after work Friday, and I tried the branches in Cobble Hill, East Parkside, and the GSU campus library over the weekend. None of them had it." She felt the frustration bubbling back up, melding with the frustration of the unfinished dream that morning. Amok was beginning to seem like a figment of the Joker's imagination. Harley hadn't looked through that many card catalogs since she'd written a literature review for Abnormal Psych, and she was staring down the barrel of a long week of even more card catalogs, if her first tries were any indication. She was going to have to spend all her afternoons this week library-hopping until she found the stupid book, maybe even hitting bookstores if she got desperate, and she had a feeling she would be; she'd never looked for a book in four different libraries and still not been able to find it. And every day she went without the book was another day until her next session with the Joker.

Maybe that's a good thing, her inner voice whispered. If you sat down with him this morning, you might just drool on the table. Maybe looking for the book will give you a chance to cool down.

Yeah. Or maybe it might make her worse.

"The library in West Village always seemed to have things I couldn't find other places," James was saying helpfully, bringing her back into focus. "Maybe they'll have it?"

"I'll try them next," Harley nodded. "I'll hit every library in Gotham, if I have to, until I find it. Bookstores too, I guess, if I can't get it for free. Although I'd really rather not have to pay for the privilege of getting in a room with the Joker."

"Oh, he'd love that, wouldn't he?" Leland smirked, and Harley returned the expression, trying not to think about how much she would actually pay to get to him, if she had to.

The three of them spent the next half hour running through the session tape, and although the spotlight of Leland's criticism was now off her, Harley still found herself watching the video with her muscles clenched and her breathing shallow. Every time the Joker dropped his voice into a certain tone, all she could think of was his ragged dream-voice in her ear. Every clear shot of his hands reminded her of his hot grip on her breasts. And every time he shifted in his seat, stretching his torso or adjusting his legs under the table, Harley had to fight to keep from being dragged straight back into the dream, to keep from imagining the pressure of his hips holding her against the wall. She nodded and replied and gave all the right answers, and to her great relief, neither James nor Leland seemed to take notice of her inner turmoil. When Leland stopped the tape just before the end, Harley relaxed in spite of the next question she had to answer.

"So tell me, Quinzel," Leland said, raising one eyebrow. "What the hell possessed you to tell the Joker you had a dirty dream last week? Hmm?"

"That… was his wording, not mine," Harley defended weakly. "I only said that there was an element of sexuality to the dream. And I was hoping to be vulnerable enough that he might mirror me and do the same."

"I think that's a little too vulnerable," James said hesitantly. "You're vulnerable enough just being in a room with him."

"Everyone has sexual dreams from time to time," Harley shook her head, "and I don't think the Joker was expecting me to say it. And I think we get more out of him when he's reacting to something he wasn't expecting."

"Except you told him you dreamed about a toxic man," Leland rumbled, "and now he's gonna play like you were dreaming about him. Or about Doctor Burton." She said this last wryly, and Harley seized on the joke before anyone could think about the words that had come before it.

"Doctor Leland, if I ever have a sexual dream about Burton, I will personally hand in my resignation and check myself in as a patient." This broke the tension, and all three of them laughed together as Leland went to take the tape out of the VCR.

"Lord, if that ever happens, you'll need more help than Arkham can give you," she muttered. They all chuckled again; then James finished off his coffee and gave Harley an odd look over his empty mug.

"Who, um… who were you dreaming about, then?" he asked, then seemed to realize the impertinence of the question and started wiping up a drop of spilled coffee that didn't actually exist. "I mean, if it's something you feel comfortable sharing…." Harley sighed, wishing again that she could find James more than just adorable.

"Oh, just…," she began, wondering what wouldn't come across as a lie. "Just a guy I went to college with," she said finally, and she was able to say it with enough confidence that both James and Leland were none the wiser. It wasn't exactly a lie, she reflected, given his age, given what they'd gleaned from earlier sessions.

For all she knew, it was probably true.

---

Over the course of the next four afternoons, Harley visited libraries and book shops in Fort Clinton, Red Hook, West Village, Grant, Chelsea, Chinatown, and every other neighborhood in Gotham, working through a list she had printed from the Internet and steadily marking them off one by one. Most of them had no record of Amok in their card catalogs, and most of the librarians had never even heard of it. At the library in North Point, a very helpful assistant named Margaret was able to tell Harley that the book had been in their catalog about five years before, but that it had been pulled from circulation last year for unspecified reasons. At the library in West Village, the head librarian gave her a troubled look and insinuated that she'd better look elsewhere. A bookstore on South Channel Island had a book with the same title, but Harley was dismayed to discover that the author's name did not match the one the Joker had aggressively underlined in her notebook. By Thursday, Harley had begun to wonder if she would ever get to her next session with the Joker at all.

"Why don't you try online?" James suggested cheerily over lunch that afternoon. He was in a good mood – Arnold Wesker had opened up significantly in group that morning, Dr. Burton had threatened retirement out loud, and Rhonda had gone five and a half days without having an episode – and it had made him brightly optimistic about everything. "You could probably get a copy cheap on eBay, or you might even get lucky and find a version you can read online for free."

"Yeah, you're probably right," Harley smiled back at him, momentarily sharing his optimism. She shared it until that evening, when she actually sat down and typed the book and author into Google.

Half an hour online told her everything she needed to know about why she'd been having so much trouble. It turned out that, in the first place, there were several books called Amok, and if the Joker hadn't stressed the author's name, Harley might have ended up with the wrong one. The first results that came up were for a novella from the 1920s and some book about a crazy samurai. And the one she was after, further down the list, came with its own problems. Apparently the Amok she was looking for was, first of all, originally written in Polish – and so were half the search results. And once she sifted out a few English results, she discovered that the book was about a serial killer – what else? she thought wryly, considering the source of the suggestion – and instead of finding an online version of the text or a used copy for cheap on eBay, what her search returned instead was a long list of news articles on the arrest of author Krystian Bala – for being a serial killer. He had been convicted just last year, Harley read, and he had been caught because he'd written too many details of his crimes into his book.

"What an idiot," Harley muttered to her computer screen. She wasn't exactly a criminal mastermind, but at least she had the good sense not to write a novel about something she wanted to keep secret. And now she understood – the librarian who'd said they no longer had the book, the other librarian who'd given her that weird glare, the conspicuous absence of the book in stores – once the author had been outed as a killer, and the text had been outed as being a little too real, shops and libraries had started making the book disappear. "Well, now what?" she asked over her laptop to the empty room. "You got any helpful suggestions, Charmander?" The plush Pokémon apparently had nothing to say, either helpful or snarky; it simply sat on top of Harley's shoebox of college souvenirs and stared at her with its little embroidered eyes until she closed up the computer and decided to go to bed.

---

In between patients on Friday morning rounds, Harley explained her findings to James, who sighed and nodded at the same time. "How much do you want to bet he picked this book on purpose, for this exact reason?"

"Because he doesn't want me to find it?" Harley grumbled. "That seems counterproductive." James shrugged, finishing his notes on the last east-wing patient.

"It is if the whole point is discussing a book. But if the point is to discuss something else, then maybe it's not counterproductive at all." Harley thought about that for a minute, and the Joker's words about her first dream – words that she had repeated back to him after the camera had gone off – came back to her.

Shouldn't? And who made that rule?

"He wants to talk about censorship, doesn't he?" she said aloud, and James waggled his clipboard.

"Censorship, taboos, how we decide what we collectively find appropriate, something like that. That's my guess, anyway. Seems to fit his M.O. from previous sessions. Anyway, he's next on rounds, so you can ask him yourself if you want."

Harley considered this as they crossed into the west wing, finally shaking her head. "No, I don't want to give him the satisfaction of that just yet. I'm going to try a few more things this weekend, see if I can't get my hands on a copy somehow. If I can't find one by Monday, I'll just come in and set up a session without the book, and that way I'll at least have the upper hand. But I'm not going to go into his turf and, as he would see it, ask him for help or guidance. I'm not quite that desperate."

And she wasn't that desperate – at least, not for the book. But as they buzzed themselves into the Joker's cell, a different kind of desperation rose up and slapped her square in the face. Harley had been diverted to other tasks every other morning that week, missing rounds in favor of helping with intakes or sitting in on experimental therapies, and this was the first time she had been in the same room with the Joker since their last session – and since the dream. She had been so knocked off course by the dream that she had nearly forgotten the request she had put in last Friday; and now she felt like she might have contributed to her own destruction. The Joker was stretched out on his cot reading a book, holding the pages open with his left hand and propping his head up at the correct angle with his right arm. On a different day, Harley might have been tempted to care about what he was reading. But today, still coming off a five-day dream hangover, she was helplessly fixated on the man himself. The arm that was bent back to prop up his head was at exactly the right angle to display his tattoo, along with the smooth angle of his bicep as it dipped down into the sleeve of his white cotton t-shirt. This was a fresh one – the collar hadn't been stretched out yet – but it was well-worn, thin and soft with age and repeated washing, and she could see the shadow of his chest hair through the white fabric, the faint suggestion of his belly button just below the open book. And below that – God help me, Harley muttered internally – soft gray sweatpants. They draped exactly how she'd been afraid they would drape, lying gently over his legs and hips and offering no helpful structure of their own, simply delineating what was beneath them and inviting observation. He wore them low on his hips, and the bottom hem of his shirt had wrinkled up in such a way that a little sliver of skin peeked out at his waist.

Did she really want to wait until Monday for a session? Harley began to have her doubts.

"Good morning, Joker," James was saying – normally, Harley marveled, completely normally, like nobody in the room was falling to pieces. "What are we reading today?" The Joker sat up a little, rolling his neck until it popped and stretching his shoulders.

"WE… aren't reading anything," he rumbled amiably, giving James a very pointed waggle of his eyebrows. "Not unless the two of you plan to cuddle in this bed with me and read over my shoul-der." He closed his book and dropped it on the mattress between his legs, cocking one knee up in the air and striking a seductive pose. He was cooking up some sort of remark, Harley could see it in his eyes, something sexual and designed to bait her and upset James – so she did the only thing she could do and headed him off.

"Catcher in the Rye?" she commented, nodding toward the book cover that she had only gotten a look at because she couldn't stop glancing at his thighs. The Joker smothered a grin before James could see it and gave the book a little nudge.

"The most successful CON-job in the history of high school literature classes," he quipped, eliciting a chuckle from James.

"You don't think Catcher is important?" he asked, glancing around the cell for any safety violations between moments of eye contact. The Joker tilted his head.

"Ah, just because something is important doesn't make it good. Yeah, it struck a blow against the censors, sure. But it's only a, ah… a CLASS-ic… because it irritated people. The actual writing is garbage. It's the same with most art forms these days; I mean, you can have a trash movie script with three coherent words in it, but as long as you throw in something reeeeally controversial, TA-DA! You win an Oscar. Now, ah… tell me… how exactly am I supposed to learn to be a Good Boy, when being Controversial and Irritating apparently wins the prizes, hmm?" He blinked up at them with mock innocence, and James let out a laugh that was almost a sigh.

"As soon as I find out, I'll let—"

WAAANNNHHH WAAANNNHHH

WAAANNNHHH WAAANNNHHH

James and Harley both jumped as the braying of sirens started up out in the hall. They whirled around to the cell door and saw emergency lights flashing at both ends of the corridor and two orderlies galloping down the west wing toward the shower rooms. They caught each other's eyes and turned back to the Joker, who was behaving as if nothing untoward was happening at all; he had pulled up his feet, criss-crossed his legs, and started reading his book again like the room wasn't echoing with the deafening screech of alarms.

"James?" Harley said quietly, suddenly remembering she was an intern and that whatever was happening at the end of the hall was probably way above her pay grade. James squeezed his clipboard nervously.

"They've got the emergency lights on, so whatever it is, it's big," he murmured, glancing sharply back and forth between Harley and the hallway. "I'll have to go help. Damn it…. I don't want to drag you into something that isn't safe, like if Waylon is on a rampage or something, but I also don't want to leave you here." His eyes flickered over to the Joker and back to Harley, clearly trying to decide which was more dangerous – the known or the unknown. Harley reached up and took the clipboard from him, taking his arm and turning him toward the door.

"Then let's compromise. Run down there and find out what's going on. If we both need to be there and it's safe for me, you can come back and get me. If they've got it handled without you, or you don't think I need to be there, then you can come back and escort me the other direction; we can keep ourselves out of everyone's way and resume rounds when the alarms turn off."

"What, and leave you in the Joker's cell while I find out? Hell, no!"

"James," Harley pressed, trying to be heard over the alarms without raising her voice, "You won't be gone long enough for it to be a problem. I've spent four sessions with him, two of those with nobody watching but a camera, and I'm alright. If I can survive an hour with him, I think I'll be okay for five minutes." They both looked back at the Joker, who was still reading and humming something in time with the rhythm of the alarm. James wavered, and Harley was almost sure he was going to refuse; finally, though, he sighed and took the clipboard back from her.

"Less than five minutes," he stressed. "I'll be back as quick as I can, and I'll take this with me just in case he decides clipboards are weapons." He made for the door, stopped with his hand on the card lock, and turned back. "Do NOT turn your back on him, do NOT engage him in conversation, and do NOT go any closer to him than this spot right beside the door. Okay?"

"Okay, just go," Harley shooed, and she gave his shoulder a little push as he left the cell. Once he was in the corridor, she heard him break into a run; and after the sound of his footsteps had dissipated, the only sound in the cell was the blaring of the alarm and the thud of Harley's pulse in her ears.

On his bed at the other end of the cell, the Joker began humming again; then his voice crackled into a song.

"I think we're alone now," he crooned softly, wavery and eerie but surprisingly on pitch. "There doesn't seem to be any-ONE a-ROU-ound. I think we're alone now…,"

"Joker, for the love of God, behave yourself, or we'll both be in deep shit. Okay?" Harley had said it quicker and snippier than she had intended, and the Joker raised an eyebrow at her.

"Me?" he said innocently, laying a hand on his chest in mock offense. "Me, misbehave? Ah, perish the thought." And he went back to his book, although Harley wasn't sure if he was really reading or simply watching her over the rim of the pages. The little gesture he had just made finally sunk into her brain, and she realized what she hadn't accounted for until now – he had gestured with his hand, because his hands weren't cuffed. Harley took a deep, shuddering breath and tried not to react with her face. They'd been alone in a room with just a camera before, sure. And they'd been truly alone, like this, for the moments just before and after the camera came on. But always on her turf – and always with his hands cuffed. Now she was alone in a room with him – truly, completely alone – with his hands unrestrained. With all of him unrestrained. That thought made her shiver. He was unrestrained, and there was no table between them – nothing at all between them, in fact, but a few long strides across an empty cell. He could cross that space in three steps and snap her neck before she had time to even get the door open. He could have his hand on her mouth quicker than she could call to a guard for help. He could….

Harley nearly stopped breathing as the dream came back to her so violently that she nearly lost her balance on her low heels. His whole body was unrestrained, and he could do anything he wanted with it.

Across the cell, the Joker stood up.

"Joker, please don't wreck everything," Harley began, but found she was barely audible over the constantly braying alarm. The Joker grinned softly.

"Oh, I don't plan to wreck anything. Not today, anyway."

"Then sit back down."

"You, ah… you sure about that?" He took one careful step toward her, and for the first time she got a good look at the way he moved in the new sweatpants that she had so HELPFULLY requested for him. She could have kicked herself in the head, if her legs had been long enough. "See," the Joker was saying, tucking a loose curl behind his ear, "I can… go back and sit down… if that's what you really want." There was a barely repressed grin playing around the corners of his mouth and eyes, and he took another step. One more stride would put him within arm's length. "Buuuut, think of the opportunity we'd be allowing to …slip away." He made a fluttering little gesture with his fingers, something Harley recognized from their sessions but wider and looser now that his hands were free to move independently of each other. She couldn't stop staring at his fingers, at how lean and powerful and precise his hands always managed to look, and she couldn't stop thinking about the dream – the way he had beckoned her closer from the inside.

She was so busy watching his fingers that she almost didn't notice him taking the third step toward her, and when she took a hasty jump backward, she found that she had nowhere to go – the wall and the door had already been only inches behind her, and now her back was against them, the card lock digging into her right shoulder. Pinned between the cool plaster of the wall and the immense heat from the Joker's body towering over her, Harley found herself so forcefully swept back into her dream that she had to bite her lip to remind herself she was awake. When she managed to look up into the Joker's face, he was staring at her frankly and without expression, and she realized a series of things all in the same moment. The first was that the small scar on his lower lip and chin divided his lip almost precisely in half, and that if it had been any more symmetrical, it would have been almost… pretty. The dark little furrow added dimension and fullness to the soft pink lip on either side of it, making it even more sensual than it had already been. On either side of his mouth, the larger scars for which he had become so famous looked superficially just as soft; but underneath, Harley could see now that she was so close that they seemed tight and rigid, and she suddenly wondered how wide he would be able to open his mouth without resistance, how many subtle facial expressions he might have lost once they had healed. Was that the reason for his odd, lilting speech, Harley wondered? Did he have to change the way he moved his mouth, change the way he shaped certain words, after it had happened? Harley thought it was likely. The scars seemed so stiff and unmoving. All except the one on his lip – the one she was fighting the desire to run her tongue across just to see how soft it was. And that, of course, led straight into her second realization: that he was quite simply the handsomest man she had ever seen in her life. It wasn't overreaction or hyperbole or the heat of the moment. The Joker was absolutely the most beautiful man she had ever laid eyes on, in person, in pictures, on television, anywhere. She couldn't find a single part of his face that didn't make her forget to breathe, that didn't make her begin to shake deep in her core with a desire that was almost terror. Harley had never been one to make blanket statements about things like that; but in that moment, she knew without even a hint of doubt that she could lay eyes on every single man on the planet, every single man who had ever lived or would ever live, and not one of them would even come close. She felt herself flush hotter than any fever she had ever had, felt her thighs weaken like the muscles were uncoupling themselves from the bones, felt a throbbing begin deep inside her where his fingers had beckoned in the dream days before. And it was that – her mind wandering back to his fingers – that led her to the third realization.

One of his fingers was touching her thigh.

Just as it had in her dream, the wall was the only thing keeping her standing. He wasn't holding her still or blocking her exit; if she'd wanted to, she could have ducked off to the side and gotten out from between him and the wall. But she was rooted to the spot by a blinding mixture of fear and arousal and the electricity sparking from the Joker's eyes. He still hadn't changed his expression, regarding her with a frank but inscrutable face in which only the eyes seemed to move, quivering and sparkling with anticipation. The hand with which he was touching her wasn't moving, and his finger wasn't even pressing hard enough to create a dimple in her leg. He simply stood there with the very tip of his middle finger resting on her upper thigh, just below where her pocket would end if her slacks had pockets, touching her so lightly that she could only barely feel the sensation through the gray twill fabric.

"I think we're alone now," he sang softly, in a voice unlike any she had heard him use before; and as he hummed the rest of the chorus, he began gently sliding his fingertip upward, so lightly that she might have thought she was imagining it if she wasn't actively watching him do it. His finger moved gracefully in and out of the shallow dip where her thigh met her pelvis, and then –

Then he stopped, his finger coming to rest an inch away from the zipper of her slacks. She breathed for the first time since she had backed against the wall; it came out in a quavering series of near-sobs, and when she looked up at his face, his eyes were burning.

"You shouldn't do that," she whispered, not sure where she found the gumption to say it. The Joker wrinkled the tip of his nose, and the corners of his scars twitched into a smile.

"Well, I'm, ah… I'm known… for doing things I shouldn't do." He paused, just long enough to bring his lips to her ear. "Would you like to be one of them?"

Before she could react, he pressed his finger into her flesh with precisely the amount of force her body had been screaming for, and Harley had to slap her hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. It took all of her willpower to resist the urge to shove herself away from the wall and into his open hand, but she managed it, calming herself just in time to hear the footsteps running back up the hall toward the cell door.

The Joker melted away from her like fog, and by the time James had gotten the cell door open, he was back on his cot with his legs propped up in front of him, one arm wrapped around his knees and the book in his other hand, looking for all the world like he hadn't even moved. James glanced around the room just long enough to note that the Joker was on his bed, that Harley was where he had left her beside the door, and that she was neither dead nor maimed; this seemed to be good enough for him, and he grabbed Harley's wrist.

"It's bad, Harley," he panted, waving his clipboard nervously. "They need all hands on deck, and Leland said you should probably come observe."

"What, what's bad?" Harley managed to ask, extracting her arm from his grip. Her whole body tingled with pent up energy, and even the small act of James touching her wrist made her feel like screaming. "What is it, what happened?"

"It's Rhonda," James said flatly, which explained half of the story already. "She's been quiet all week, we should have known something was coming."

"What did she do?"

"She got loose from the orderlies on her way into the shower, and then she stabbed her nurse before going on a naked running tour of the therapy rooms."

"She stabbed her nurse?" Harley gasped, finally being brought back down to earth by the shock. "Who? And with what?"

"April Simms, and we don't know yet because we haven't found it," said James, finally getting his breathing back to normal. "Come on, rounds are over for today."

"Is she—" Harley began, and James shook his head.

"No, she's alive, but she's bled enough that the shower room looks like the hallway from The Shining, and they're taking her to Saint Mary's. Rhonda's being sedated, and Leland wants you to see the emergency procedures and incident reporting. Joker?" James finally looked over at their patient, who had been calmly pretending to read the whole time.

"Mm-hmmm?" the Joker acknowledged vaguely, fluttering his eyelashes as though James had roused him from a deep concentration. James gave him a brief nod.

"Congratulations on not being the most problematic patient on the roster today, and please don't take that as a challenge."

"Well, if I were problematic every day, then think of how boring that would be." It was as close as he would come to saying You're welcome to their implied gratitude, and James pulled Harley out of the cell and led her down the hall before anything else could happen to change their luck. And somewhere in the hurrying, drug-administering, and incident-reporting chaos of the rest of the morning, Harley managed to shove what had happened in the cell into the back of her mind where it would stay until she was home that evening, when there was nobody around that she'd have to worry about seeing the look on her face.

---

Harley didn't look for the Joker's banned book at all on Friday evening. The thought of searching through any more card catalogs or waiting for anyone else to check their stock room or clicking on one more broken website, all while still trying to get the Joker's words

(I'm known for doing things I shouldn't do. Would you like to be one of them?)

out of her head just seemed a little ludicrous and unmanageable. But as she wrapped herself in a blanket burrito and tried to drown out her own brain with Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs, she kept coming back to one irrepressible thought: she was not going to be able to make it a whole other week without a session with him. With or without that book, she was going to have to schedule their next session for the beginning of next week. And the thought of going in without the book… well, that was certainly what the Joker wanted, but it made Harley feel a little like driving without a steering wheel. Without the book between them, physically and metaphorically, what would she have to keep her grounded? She'd have no control over the conversation at all, and the Joker could steer it wherever he wanted, because she'd have no way of predicting what he was going to talk about next. Having a topic gave her a framework she could grab onto when the Joker tried to veer somewhere dangerous. Going in without the book seemed almost suicidal. But if she didn't find it soon, she'd have to; her desire to get into a room with him again was just too strong.

On Saturday morning, feeling the tendrils of desperation creeping in, Harley did the one thing she hadn't yet tried. She had given herself a hard talk over her morning coffee and decided that if anyone in Gotham had a copy of Amok, or knew how to get her one, it would be a place that dealt in rare books – and specifically, rare books that were rare because of their dark content. Harley knew of one shop that fit that bill exactly, a little place in Red Hook called "Spynes." But there were two problems with that particular solution: one, she hated going to Red Hook as a general rule; and two, the shop was owned by her ex-boyfriend Terry and his new girlfriend. It had been floating around in the back of her mind since she'd first realized the book was going to be difficult to get, but she'd been avoiding it as long as she could. The breakup hadn't exactly been amicable – one of her classmates had been forced to talk her down from running him over with his own van when she'd found out he'd been sleeping with that horse-faced girl Jodi from the art department – and Harley hadn't seen him or spoken to him since. But they were all adults, right? It wasn't like she still had feelings for him (unless irritated resignation counted as a feeling). And she had nothing against the new girlfriend Mackenzie – it's not like she was the one he'd cheated with. Surely, she could go to his stupid bookstore with its stupid name, say hello, hopefully make a purchase, and they could all be civil with each other. That was the definition of being an adult, right?

She had to drink three cups of coffee and put on a low-cut shirt before she could convince herself to make the trip.

---

Spynes Bookshop sat near the middle of Chambers Avenue in Red Hook, surrounded by a few other small businesses that had, against all odds, managed to survive the recession. The sign had been hand-painted (by Terry, Harley was sure) and showed the shop name surrounded by various esoteric-looking books, several of which were being pierced by the long, sharp spikes that seemed to be growing out of the name itself. Harley sighed; it looked like someone had taken a little too much inspiration from the Hellraiser movies, and Harley only needed one guess as to who that someone was. I will never date another film student, Harley muttered darkly to herself as she pushed open the door. Never again.

The inside of the shop looked pretty much how Harley had imagined it – like someone had put a cash register in the middle of an elderly book hoarder's attic – although there was at least some attempt at organization on the shelves closest to the entrance. She could see one section labeled "Occult/Spirituality," and another labeled "Political Ideologies," and there seemed to be a whole glass case near the front full of early editions of Lovecraft works. Harley took a deep breath. Yeah, if anyone could find Amok, it would be these people. Steeling herself for the awkwardness, she walked up to the antique cash register and rang the little bell beside it. A moment or two later, the beaded curtain behind the counter parted, and a woman came out to greet her.

"Welcome to Spynes; can I help you find something?" This would be the new girlfriend Mackenzie, Harley surmised. And it's a good thing I'm not here to fight her, because I absolutely could not take her, she thought, sizing her up. Mackenzie was tall, lithe, and gorgeous, with absolutely flawless dark brown skin showing through her various layers of black fishnet and velvet, and little skull-shaped beads dangling throughout her long, deep purple locs. Part of her height came from the massive Hot Topic boots that Harley could see through the bottom of the glass counter display, and she felt quite sure that with the right application of pressure, those boots could break someone's arm.

"Yeah…" she began tentatively, "I'm looking for a banned book, and this seems like a place that might actually have it." She found herself putting on a slightly brighter face than she'd come in with. Terry really must be ready to settle down now, she thought wryly. Because if he ever cheated on this woman, she'd just break him in half.

Harley told Mackenzie about Amok, and about traipsing over most of Gotham trying to get her hands on it with no luck. Mackenzie took the Post-It note Harley had written the title and author on and stared at it, looking pensive. "Hmmm," she mused. "Name doesn't ring a bell, but let me check the inventory. I'm not as savvy with the crime books; that's my boyfriend's wheelhouse." Putting down the sticky note, she took a few steps down the counter and pulled a laptop out of a hidden cubby. She clicked and typed and clicked some more, finally coming back to Harley and shaking her head. "It's not in our current inventory, but we've got some books in back that we don't have out on shelves yet, and sometimes we can order things if we need to. Gimme a minute." Stepping back from the counter, she poked her head through the bead curtain into the back room. "Terry? Come out here a minute, babe, we got a book you might have to go digging for." There were some noises of shuffling and the scrape of a chair from the back, and then Terry came through the curtain.

"Harley?" he said abruptly, stopping short like he'd been slapped. Then he muttered "Fuck," under his breath. Harley breathed a sigh of relief – seeing him didn't dredge up any feelings she'd thought she was rid of – and decided to let him off the hook.

"Truce," she reassured him, sticking her Post-It note to a pen she pulled from her purse and waving it like a tiny white flag. "I actually am here for a book, not to poison you or set your store on fire." Terry laughed nervously, like he had been expecting exactly those things, and Mackenzie eyed both of them suspiciously.

"You two know each other?"

Terry opened and closed his mouth a couple of times like a turtle but said nothing, so Harley figured she'd better rescue him. "We, um… we dated in college." Mackenzie scrutinized her, black nails tapping on the glass counter, and then she tilted her head.

"Ooohhhh, I get it. You're the one who almost stole his van."

"Um… no, no," Harley chuckled. "Not stole. I fully intended to give it back to him after I had killed him with it." Mackenzie almost grinned at this; then she turned and glared at Terry.

"What did you do?"

"Um…," Terry started, stopped again, and then finally just shoved his hands in his pockets. "Long story. SO, Harley… you're looking for a book?"

Harley took pity on him, exchanged a brief look of female solidarity with Mackenzie, and began explaining about Amok all over again. Terry seemed grateful for the subject change, and after only a little explanation, he held up a hand to stop her.

"Oh, yeah, I know that book," he nodded. To Mackenzie, he said, "It's the one written by that Polish murderer who got caught because the book basically dramatized his own murders."

"Oh, right," Mackenzie nodded slowly. "I remember you talking about it now."

"We actually had – I think – three copies, back when it came out," Terry went on, "and we sold all three of them within a couple of months of his trial."

"Dammit," Harley spat, stomping her foot a little. Terry held up a finger.

"I can try one thing for you, though. Hold on a second." He took a few steps down the counter and started clicking around on the laptop Mackenzie had been using. "Sometimes we do deals or trades with other rare book shops. Let me see if anybody in our network has a copy they're willing to part with." He hunched his shoulders and got down to business, pulling up various pages and scrolling, clicking, and typing until Harley lost track of what he was doing. Mackenzie stood behind him with her arms crossed, occasionally pointing to something or suggesting another business associate to try. As they searched, Harley studied Terry, wondering what exactly she'd been worried about. Lingering attraction, she supposed; but now that she was here, she was relieved to discover that that was all out of her system. He had grown his hair out since college, put on a little healthy weight now that he wasn't chain smoking and living on ramen noodles cooked in a coffee pot, and he'd traded the soul patch for a cultivated stubble. All in all, he actually looked better now than he had when they'd been dating. And yet Harley felt no remnants of desire trying to stir themselves up in her brain and make trouble.

Well, of course not, her inner monologue piped up. He looks too healthy now. You prefer men who look like stray dogs that need you to rescue them.

Not now. This is neither the time nor the place for that train of thought. Okay? She stomped her mental foot down on her mental voice and held it there. She had not been interested in Terry just because he'd looked like a struggling artist who paid for his lunch by dealing weed and selling English Comp papers to freshmen (although he had done exactly that). Mostly she had been into him for his eyes – leafy green with little flecks of brown, like taking a hike through woods with bright sun filtering through a thick tree canopy. They were absolutely his best feature, and they were also absolutely why Harley had let him get away with so much. They were why she'd consented to spend so much of her time in a weed-smelling van listening to Duran Duran and Pink Floyd instead of her own musical preferences, and why she had slept with him a lot sooner than she'd really been ready to. And while Terry had been great in bed (when he wasn't stoned), that first time had been awkward and painful, and the only thing that made the memory really worth hanging onto was the mental snapshot of his eyes looking down at her in the dim yellow light in the back of the van. He was flicking those eyes toward her now, snapping occasional sheepish glances at her over the laptop like he thought he might like to apologize if he could find the guts, and Harley suddenly felt like laughing at the absurdity of it all. She'd spent the last few years resenting him, and for what? Because he'd been the first guy she'd ever slept with and then he'd had the audacity to turn out to be not as great as she'd thought he was? Well, they were both basically different people now, and besides –

Besides, now you're way more interested in someone else.

Harley clenched her toes in her shoes and pretended to look out at the street so they wouldn't see her face. The thought had rolled down her back like she'd had a bucket of water dumped on her, catching her so off-guard that it barely seemed like her own thought, and she made a valiant effort to claw her way back into her memories where it seemed safer (an absurd concept, in itself). But now when she tried to summon up the image of her college-self on the rug in Terry's van, it wasn't Terry's face hovering over her.

I'm known for doing things I shouldn't do. Would you like to be one of them?

With no warning and no way of stopping herself, Harley suddenly found herself back in the Joker's cell, screaming alarms muffled by the thumping of her own pulse in her ears and her body caught in a miserable but exquisite tension between desire and terror. That horrifically beautiful face, staring down at her with a completely unreadable expression. His finger, sliding up the fabric of her slacks and stopping (too soon) just in time. Harley felt the beginnings of a nervous sweat beginning to prickle under her arms and in the fingertips she had been resting on the glass counter, and she shoved her hands in her pockets. Again, she felt the absurd urge to laugh. She'd been worried that seeing Terry again might reignite unwanted feelings for him; it had never occurred to her that seeing him could stir up her feelings about someone else. Was this just her life now? she wondered absently. Was she going to keep walking into this wall of weird feelings every time she looked at any half-decent-looking man, bonking her head on it over and over again until she was incapable of thinking about any man except the Joker? Oh, and he would love that, wouldn't he? Harley sighed. Yes, of course he would. So she would just have to stop letting it happen. Inside her pockets, she dug her fingernails into her thighs until she felt her focus coming back, until she could look back at Terry and see nothing except a guy looking at a computer, until he just looked like himself again.

"Bingo," Terry said abruptly, and Harley jumped in spite of herself. Relax, she hissed internally. It's fine. It's just Terry. Everything's normal. But as Terry straightened back up and began to turn the laptop around, the shifting light glanced over his face – and for just a moment, his eyes looked deep and dark and eerily familiar.

Harley shuddered.

"Okay, I've got good news and bad news," Terry was saying, and with a monumental effort, Harley managed to start paying attention. "Good news is, I found a copy of your book. One of our book dealers in the UK has one, and he's actually selling it."

"And the bad news?" Harley grimaced, suspecting what he was going to say.

"The bad news is that, if you're making what I think you're making at that hospital, then you'd have to spend the next three months living on government cheese and pocket lint in order to afford it."

"How much?" Harley winced, and Terry turned the laptop all the way around and showed her. Harley put her head down on the counter and groaned. "No book is worth that," she mumbled into the glass. Mackenzie snorted.

"Especially not one with so many bad reviews. I think if you're gonna be controversial, you should at least be good."

"Do you really need it that badly?" Terry asked as Harley dragged herself upright. "I mean, the wildest thing I remember you reading back in the day was Stephen King. This seems like a major change of genre for you." Harley sighed.

"I… well, I can't go into detail, but a patient of mine brought it up," she said carefully. "I hoped that if I could read it myself, I'd get a better look at what the patient was thinking." Terry chuckled.

"Well, I applaud this whole 'going-above-and-beyond-for-the-patient' thing, but if you want to go that far beyond, they're either going to have to give you a raise or charge the book to the hospital expense account."

"Ha!" Harley sneered, trying to imagine the look on Arkham's frog-face if she asked him to buy her a new stapler, much less a book the price of a small country.

"That's what I figured," Terry nodded. "How the hell did your patient get their hands on a copy in the first place?" Harley opened her mouth to answer him and then stopped short, her head tilting as a brand new thought began dancing around in her brain.

"You know what?" she said, a little hazily. "That is a really good question. I don't know how they got a copy. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't even know if they did."

"You mean, your patient might have just been pretending to have read it?" Terry asked. "Why would they do that?"

"To seem edgy and impressive," Mackenzie chuckled, putting the laptop away. "College boys do it all the time." And she gave Terry a knowing look that made Harley suspect he had done exactly that when he and Mackenzie had first met. Harley wasn't surprised; well, not about Terry, anyway. But did it make sense for the Joker to pull something like that? To pretend to have read something that he hadn't, just to make himself seem darker and more mysterious than he already was? No, at least not for that reason, Harley finally decided. He would know that he didn't need to do anything like that – he was already dark and mysterious enough without it. But would he let her think he'd read something just so he could send her on a wild goose chase looking for her own copy? Harley thought he might. And to be fair, he'd never actually said he'd read it – he'd just told her to.

"Well, I guess I'll find out one way or another on Monday," she said finally, folding her Post-It note sharply and sticking it in her pocket. Terry grinned at her knowingly.

"You're gonna call your patient's bluff?"

"Yeah," Harley grinned back. "I think I'm gonna call their bluff."

---

It was nearly lunchtime on Monday before Harley could get into a session room with the Joker – in the wake of Rhonda's attack on Nurse Simms, the whole staff had to sit through a safety training about escorting procedures, approved restraint techniques, and bloodborne pathogens, all of which everyone in the room already knew and which probably should have been emailed to them in a PowerPoint instead. It lasted just long enough for Harley to start getting nervous about calling the Joker into a session without the book to back herself up. Suppose he really had read it after all, maybe gotten a copy right after it was published and before all the backlash made it hard to find. Suppose he used it as a springboard to jump into some topic that was going to get both of them in trouble. What then? She didn't think he would – at least, not too much trouble. He would want the sessions to keep going as much as she did. He was having too much fun to sabotage it now. And she was pretty sure he had assigned the book just so they could talk about not finding it. But she spent the whole morning training session pushing down the nagging fear that she might be wrong, and that he might sneak up on her.

Just like he had snuck up on her dreams the night before.

It had started out frustrating enough without the Joker even being involved; seeing Terry again hadn't gone badly, and they'd parted politely, and she'd had no issues with any feelings for him resurfacing… until Sunday night, when she'd dreamed about being back in his van, parked by the abandoned house ruins off campus. It had been a rehash of their first time, down to the last detail – Paula Abdul on the radio, the Jovan Musk smell of Terry's sweater pillowed under her head, the dog tags clinking against the shark tooth on the chain around his neck. His eyes had been beautiful, even enhanced in that way that dreams often are, more green than she should have been able to see in the dim light. Staring into them, it was hard to see anything else around them. Then the clothes had begun to come off, and she had looked away just long enough to take in his body. In real life, that had been when she'd gotten scared, but in the dream everything was copacetic. She was warm and getting warmer, enveloped in the scent of cologne and lust, and she traced his collarbone with her finger before looking back up into those forest-pool green eyes.

Except they hadn't been green. They'd been dark brown.

The Joker had been looking down at her from where Terry's face had been, and the scent around her changed to the familiar aroma of hospital shampoo and the smell of the Joker's own skin, and the dream had ended in a slow dissolve of erotic terror that had left Harley wide-awake and jittery in the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning. Add onto all that the nervousness she'd worked up wondering whether he'd actually read Amok or not, and by the time the safety training ended, Harley had to excuse herself to her office just to calm down. She'd stayed there until she was sure she could keep a straight face, until the mere thought of the Joker didn't send her brain whizzing back into the dream, and it was 11:00 before she made the call to have him brought to the therapy room.

---

It was going to be a short session. She could tell that already, even as she turned on the camera and read off the required session tags; something in the way he sat, the restless energy in his movements and his eyes. He looked like someone with other places to be, other things to be doing. Like the conversation they were about to have was the last thing on his mind.

It probably is the last thing on his mind, she told herself as she finished speaking to the camera. He's not here to talk about the book. Whether he really read it or not, that's not the point. This whole session really isn't the point.

Then what is?

Harley didn't answer her internal voice, but she had the sneaky suspicion that the point was just getting in the room with her.

"Well?" she said, after a moment of silence. The Joker raised one eyebrow.

"Well what?"

"You know what," Harley replied, and the Joker let her see the edge of a grin before he smothered it. "I couldn't find the book."

"Why not?" he asked, sounding like a teacher trying to elicit a specific train of thought. Harley started to consider how she should answer, and then she stopped; if the book wasn't the point, if the conversation wasn't the point, then did it matter how she answered? She tried to read his expression and realized that it didn't matter – at least, not to him. The conversation was for the camera. The real point was the unspoken conversation they were having, with the tension between them instead of with their voices, with their eyes instead of their words.

"Because once everyone found out it was a real killer writing about real murder victims, nobody wanted to read it anymore," she said matter-of-factly.

"Ah, shouldn't that make it easier to get a copy?" the Joker said glibly. "All those… unwanted copies lying around unbought, unborrowed?"

"They stopped selling them," Harley answered. "Libraries pulled them from circulation. The only stores selling them now are rare book shops. But you knew that, of course." She fixed him with a look that was stern but amused, and he reached up to clutch imaginary pearls.

"Those gosh-darned censors," he frowned dramatically. "What ever happened to freedom of speech, hmm?"

"The free market," Harley countered. "You can write whatever you want, but the stores don't have to sell it if they don't want to. The libraries, well, that's a little more debatable. I guess they thought it wasn't appropriate, especially since it falsely advertised itself as fiction." The Joker snorted at this.

"You mean… if he'd written it from prison after getting arrested, and everyone KNEW it was a killer's book about killing, it'd be okay?"

"Seemed to work for O.J. Simpson," Harley shrugged, and for the first time, the Joker actually laughed – a real laugh that seemed to come out of him before he could catch it or make it into a desired shape. His shoulders even hitched a little, the chain on his handcuffs tinkling against the table as he tensed back up to regain control. By the end of the laugh he had managed to pull it up into a theatrical little giggle, but it was too late – for him and for Harley. The soft baritone at the beginning of the laugh had already lit her on fire again.

"So, ah…," the Joker began, clearing his throat and tucking hair behind his ear as he collected himself, "so I suppose that's why libraries still have Mein Kampf on the shelf, but not Amok? Because Mein Kampf does what it says on the label?"

"Maybe," Harley said, crossing her arms in an attempt to press down the rising heat his laughter had set off in her chest. "I mean, there are some libraries who don't shelve Mein Kampf either. But I think most of them do because we can't get around the fact that people need to know what started all of that shit. It's historically significant. And… well… Amok isn't." That helped cool her down a little – nothing like bringing up genocide to stomp out your arousal, she thought absurdly – and across the table, the Joker was back to his old self.

"And… who decides what's …historically sigNIficant, hmm?" he grinned. "Who decides the difference between an important document and a thought crime?"

"The preponderance of public opinion, I guess," Harley shrugged, and the Joker snorted again. She put up a hand to stop him launching into his next rant. "Hey, for once I actually agree with you. Censorship sucks. It's a dangerously slippery slope. The ability to decide what's okay to read and what isn't is more power than anybody should have over anybody else. But if it has to happen, then I can live with this particular book getting tossed."

"Why's that?" the Joker rumbled, leaning in a little for the first time that day. Harley took a moment before answering, wanting to be sure she explained herself in the right words.

"Well… because Amok isn't informative, and it's not enjoyable. It doesn't help anyone prevent more murders, it doesn't teach us anything, and all it does is help the author get off while hurting the families of his victims."

"You don't think books should hurt?" the Joker pressed, and that dark intelligence was in his eyes again. He was actually interested in the conversation now, something Harley suspected he hadn't really planned for.

"Oh, they absolutely should," Harley nodded, "if they hurt because they're causing change in the person reading them. If they're aiding in personal growth. A really excellent book can do that, if it's in the hands of the right reader at the right time. Personal growth hurts, sometimes. Actually, most of the time. Because you're – how is it you said it in our last session? – you're shucking off a version of yourself, and what's underneath is gonna be sore. Right? So really good books probably will hurt. It's necessary. But this book doesn't cause that kind of growth, not from what I could find out about it. So the only kind of pain it would cause is the unnecessary kind. And I think maybe that's a good enough reason to bury it."

"So, ah, we've come back around to that whole pain makes you real idea, hmm?" the Joker smirked, and Harley realized he was repeating what she had said to him in their last session, just like she'd used his own words a moment before. Tit for tat, a perfect exchange. His smirk deepened into a slow grin. "Thought you were tired of that song and dance, Doc."

Harley clenched her toes inside her shoes at the way his voice had suddenly dropped – not menacingly, but gently. Almost seductively, she realized with a lurch of her stomach. It was still the Joker's voice in its pronunciation and cadence, but the tone was soft and maddeningly normal, and his eyes were still and serious.

It was the voice he usually reserved for the moments when the cameras were off, and all her hard work at smothering her earlier arousal was instantly erased.

"I guess I'm warming up to the concept," she said finally, and the Joker smiled – softly, with only half his mouth. Harley knew she was in trouble before he even spoke.

"And what else are you warming up to?"

Harley felt the blood drain from her head into her feet like an elevator dropping to the bottom of a shaft. What the hell was he doing? Abandoning all subtlety like that and just throwing a line at her like the Forbidden Love Interest in a trashy romance novel? And not even in the safety of his cell, but in a session room with a camera? God, was he crazier than she thought? Was he going to sabotage everything, after all their hard work?

She had been panicking for a solid fifteen seconds before she realized how quietly he had said it – and that it had probably been just soft enough for the camera to miss it. Damn him, but he was good.

"Why don't you ask me a real question this time?" he whispered, before she could come up with anything else to say. He was leaning in, intentionally keeping his voice below the threshold of the camera's microphone, and Harley knew there would be hell to pay with Leland later.

"A real question?" she repeated, only slightly louder than he had spoken. He nodded a tiny little nod that was only just visible, but which sent a wave of that shampoo-scent floating over to her.

"A real question. Something you actually want the answer to, not about how I'm sleeping or where I got my tattoo. Something dangerous. Something that might hurt."

"You mean something I'm not supposed to ask," she murmured. "A …censored question."

"Bingo, Doc," the Joker smiled. "Something They don't want you to ask. Something important."

Harley took a deep breath and thought about how she was going to get out of this one. Leland already didn't like it when they lowered their voices in session. She wanted to be able to debrief every word of the transcript. But the Joker didn't like it when Harley evaded his questions. The way she saw it, there were only three options here. Either she chickened out and didn't ask him anything probative, which would upset him and might jeopardize their rapport; or she asked him something quietly, so the camera couldn't hear, and tried to fake her way out of it later, giving Leland some made-up version of what had been said and hoping she wasn't upset by the quiet; or she took a chance and asked him something dangerous out loud – and hoped Leland would buy the explanation of the session was all about censorship and freedom of speech, Doctor Leland, and look how much we learned! She wasn't sure any of the options were good ones. But number one was out of the question. She couldn't mess up what she had going with the Joker, not after everything she'd put into it. She'd just have to take a chance with Leland, and show the Joker she could take a risk. Show him she was okay with dangerous.

"Ask you a question that might hurt?" she repeated, this time just loudly enough for the camera to catch it. One of the Joker's eyebrows twitched, the only indication of his surprise, and then he nodded. Harley cast around for what to ask. She knew he had meant something that might hurt her to ask it. Something that put her in danger of getting reprimanded. But hurt could go both ways. After all, he'd said to ask a real question, and he was the one always saying it was pain that made you real. What would he do, she wondered, if she asked something that hit one of his sore spots? What would he do if she invaded his mental space – the way he'd been invading hers over the past week?

The way he'd invaded her dream the night before?

Oh, it was so dangerous. Leland would be apoplectic. And the Joker might shut down… or snap. But now that she'd thought about her dream again, it was an urge she couldn't shake. He'd told her to ask something dangerous, and now she had no other choice.

"Alright, Joker," she began, managing to keep her voice from shaking. "A real question, then. Tell me about your first sexual experience."

For a moment, the Joker didn't do anything but blink at her slowly. Harley tensed, waiting irrationally for the sound of Leland launching herself down the hall and into the session room to cut them off; when that didn't happen, she let out the breath she'd been holding and studied the Joker's face. It was completely still, more still than she had ever seen it. He barely seemed to be breathing. Then, so quickly she almost didn't catch it, there was a little twitch below his left eye. His nostrils flared. His jaw tightened, so subtly that someone unfamiliar with his face wouldn't have noticed. Shit, Harley thought, the panic returning. He's not going to answer. He's mad, and he's not going to answer, and I'll be lucky if I get out of this room, much less get to keep the sessions up. I've upset Leland for nothing. Shit. Shit.

Then the Joker tilted his head, the curls he had tucked behind his ear falling loose, and he narrowed his eyes at her.

"You're making an aw-ful-ly big assumption, Doc," he rumbled. To the casual listener, he sounded like his normal self; but Harley could hear the irritation below the surface. "How do you know I have an answer for that? I might be a virgin."

Not fucking likely, Harley's inner monologue snapped reflexively. The images of his intake photos flashed through her brain unsolicited. She thought about that face, how close he'd been to her in his cell, the way she knew he must have looked before the scars. She thought about the way he had touched her leg, what he'd been able to do to her with the tip of one finger.

"I doubt it," she said aloud, and dropped her eyes to his left hand, where the soft change in skin tone at the base of the ring finger was clearly visible in the fluorescent light. The Joker pulled his arms back from the table and crossed them as best he could over the cuffs, tucking his fingers in where she could no longer see them – like if she couldn't see the ring mark anymore, she'd forget about it. He sucked his lips in against his teeth in irritation before responding.

"You, ah… you wanna hear about how my… Uncle Carl… was a per-vert who took me behind the garage and …deRAILed my sexual development?"

"Only if that's what really happened," Harley shrugged, mimicking his crossed arms. "Was it?"

"No," he said flatly. "But isn't that what people always want to hear about criminals?"

"If their pathology is sexual, I guess. It makes their crimes make some sense. But your pathology isn't sexual. And what I want to hear is the truth."

"Truth," the Joker muttered darkly, glaring down at the table, and Harley didn't think he was playing anymore. In fact, he looked like he was sulking. When he finally looked up, he unexpectedly reached across the table with both cuffed hands and took Harley's notebook again – and this time she wasn't nearly as confident that he didn't want to use the pen as a weapon.

"Joker—"

"What, you want a… a dirty play-by-play?" he sneered, whipping the notebook open to a blank page. "You want me to draw pictures for you?" He clicked the pen aggressively, and Harley held her breath. He was still just irritated at the moment, but he was right on the border of angry, and that was somewhere she didn't want him to be while they were still in the same room.

"No, just um… just the W's, if that's okay," she said softly. The Joker made a face, mouthing if that's okay back at her mockingly before starting to write something in her notebook.

"Just the W's…," he grumbled, taking his time over each letter he was writing, going back over them, digging the pen into the paper. "The, ah… the who, what, when, where, and why. How very ef-FI-cient of you." He fell silent again as he doubled back over another word he'd just written, and Harley was afraid he might not ever answer the question; then he sucked his lips against his teeth again and stabbed an aggressive period at the end of his sentence. "Fine. You can have your W's." He underlined something. Wrote something else below it. "I was sixteen, at a party in my best friend's basement." Another underline, this one harder. "She was a friend of his older brother from college, and no, it wasn't legal." Another word, another underline. "And, ah… as for the why, well, you'll have to ask Jack Daniels about that." He drew a final underline, and Harley could hear the paper tear slightly from the force of the pen.

He's telling the truth, she thought incredulously. He's doing it against his will, and he's absolutely not telling me everything, but I think what he just said was true. He's too irritated for it to not be.

"Thank you for answering," she said gently. The Joker lifted his eyes to her, glaring through his thick lashes; then he clipped the pen onto the notebook and shoved it across the tabletop toward her.

"Well, a deal's a deal," he growled, and Harley got the impression that he was currently regretting making the deal in the first place. She wasn't quite sure if he was upset because he was omitting some memory that was much worse than drunk sex at a party, or simply because she'd dragged something true out of him at all; what she was sure of was that she'd pressed her luck enough for one day, and it was time for a tactical retreat.

"Thank you for keeping up your end," she said, and she brought the camera clicker up where he could see it. The Joker cracked his neck, adjusted his position in the seat, stretched his legs; and when he became still again, his face was so remarkably blank, so empty of emotion, that if Harley hadn't been in the room for the session, she would have thought it hadn't even taken place. Letting out a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding, Harley retrieved her notebook, said her end-of-session script, and turned off the camera. When she got up and went to the door, the Joker stayed still and silent. He didn't stop her with a well-timed comment this time, or take advantage of the moments without the camera.

Somehow, Harley found that almost more unnerving.

Leaving him sitting at the table, Harley sighed and buzzed herself out of the door.

"Done already?"

Harley swallowed a curse as she nearly walked into James, who was standing in the hallway only a foot from the therapy room door. "God, do you have to keep doing that?" she hissed, nodding distractedly to Officer Cash as he made his way into the room behind her to retrieve his prisoner.

"Doing what?" James said brightly, knowing exactly what. Harley glared at him.

"Popping up right outside doors that I'm coming through, that's what. I'm tense enough being in a room with the Joker, you're gonna give me a heart attack."

"Sorry," James grinned, not sounding sorry at all. "Just thought I'd bring these back now that I'm done with them." He held out a stack of papers, which after a moment of blank incomprehension, Harley recognized as some of the Burton files James had offered to help her rewrite.

"Oh. Right. Thank you, I almost forgot about these." She took the stack from him, attempted to shove them all into her portfolio in one go, and failed. One of the paper-clipped bundles went in crooked, almost losing its clip, and another jumped ship completely and landed in the floor. Harley sighed. Were her nerves so shot that she couldn't even put papers in a folder? Groaning, she bent to pick up the packet.

Two cuffed hands beat her to it.

Harley recoiled so quickly she almost lost her balance, but the Joker stood up slowly, coming the rest of the way out of the therapy room so Officer Cash could shut the door behind them. He held out the papers to her, his face a picture of blank innocence.

"Careful, Doc," he said blandly. "Littering is a crime, y'know." Harley took the papers from him, muttering a thank-you and hoping her face wasn't giving away as much as his. The sulkiness was still lingering in his eyes, but underneath it Harley saw that the heat had returned. It was that same look he'd given her all those sessions ago when she'd asked him about his tattoo – like he wasn't quite sure whether he'd rather stick his tongue in her mouth or a knife in her throat. For a minute they just stood there looking at each other; Harley knew she should break eye contact, turn back around to James, open her portfolio and put the papers with the others, anything to keep James and Cash from noticing what was passing between them. But she simply didn't have the strength. When he looked at her like that, it was like one of those spaceships getting sucked in by another spaceship in a sci-fi movie – or like getting yanked underwater by a current nobody else could see.

"Come on, now, let's be moving along. You've got a headcount to be in before lunch." It was Officer Cash coming to the rescue; he tugged on the Joker's handcuff chain, remarkably politely for someone who could probably kill with just his bodyweight, and it broke the spell long enough for Harley to busy herself getting all the papers back into her folder. When she let herself look up again, the Joker was being led away down the corridor and she was safe.

For now, anyway.

"Is it just me, or was he almost… helpful?" James asked, apparently oblivious to the undertow of sexual tension Harley had just barely escaped.

"Well, he did pick up my papers for me," Harley said, trying to sound normal, "but I'm not sure we can call it a major behavioral breakthrough, since he probably has an ulterior motive."

Yeah, like engineering yet another opportunity to flip all your switches.

Harley sincerely wished internal voices were something a person could have surgically removed.

"Quinzel? McKnight? Good, you're both in one place. I didn't want to have to do any hunting." Dr. Leland had stomped up behind them without them noticing, and she laid a heavy hand on each of their shoulders before either of them had a chance to be startled. Harley was taken aback; Leland's eyes had the wild, shiny glaze of someone who had just dodged a speeding car.

"Is everything okay, Doctor Leland?" Harley managed to say, suddenly remembering what a risk she'd taken in the session. If Leland had started watching the tape as soon as the recording had stopped…. "I know my session was a little …different than usual today, and—"

"Shortest one you've done so far, and God, am I glad for that. Come to my office, both of you." And she was halfway down the hall and nearly to the security doors before either Harley or James had the sense to start moving themselves.

"Dammit," Harley spat, power-walking in Leland's wake. James puffed along beside her, looking confused.

"What, what did we do? Did we do something?"

"You probably didn't. You're just coming along to witness my execution."

"Oh. Well, what did you do?" James asked, almost getting stuck at the metal detector because he forgot to put his badge clip in the basket. Harley grimaced.

"I… I might have run with a line of questioning that she's not happy about."

"No way she's already watched the tape, though. Right?"

"If she started watching it the minute I clicked stop—"

"You mean you got to the dangerous questions within the first five minutes of the session? I'm impressed."

Harley stopped short outside Leland's office door and blocked James with her arm. "Not a word about it, okay? Not until we find out exactly what she's keyed up about. We let her do all the talking. No sense in incriminating myself until I know whether that's actually what she wants to talk about."

"Right to remain silent. Got it," James nodded, and Harley pushed open the door into Leland's office.

Dr. Leland was standing over her conference table, looking down not at her notebook or at the session tape but instead glaring at a cardboard box. When she heard the door open, her head snapped toward them like a predatory bird, and Harley gulped.

"Doctor Leland—"

"Quinzel, you are the luckiest damn woman on the face of the planet right now, and you don't even have the faintest idea." Her voice was tense and full of adrenaline, but there was no anger in it, and Harley was confused.

"I… what?"

"Just out of curiosity, how come the session was so short today?" Her hand closed around the lip of the cardboard box, mauve fingernails digging into the corrugated surface, and Harley gulped again.

"I… well, he was more interested in talking about censorship than the book itself – which is a good thing, because I never found the book. If you want to watch the tape—"

"Oh, I would love to watch the tape. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to watch the tape. But I can't watch the tape. And do you want to know why?" Harley and James just stared at her, unsure of how to safely answer. Not seeming to actually need their reply, Leland plowed on. "We finally found out what Rhonda was doing during her little excursion on Friday, when she wasn't stabbing nurses."

"What was she doing?" James asked slowly. In answer, Leland tipped the cardboard box, spilling its contents across the surface of her conference table. Harley heard herself suck in a sharp breath.

The box was full of what appeared to be the guts of several recording devices, none of which Harley had a name for but most of which looked vaguely familiar. Belts and spinny things, electronic components, a VCR door flap broken completely off its hinges. There were some DVD recorder trays in the wreckage too, snapped in half, along with what looked like bits of circuit boards and broken disks. Wires of various colors had been ripped near their connectors and, in some cases, tied in knots. And throughout and beneath all of this lay piles of twisted, shiny black tape, the innards of a dozen or so VHS tapes, mangled beyond fixing.

"Holy Moses," James muttered, sitting down in one of the conference chairs. Harley put down her portfolio and stared.

"What is all that?"

"That, Quinzel," Leland announced, still sounding high on adrenaline, "is what is left of the recording setup behind the wall of your therapy room. Apparently some time between stabbing Simms and getting tackled, while all the orderlies were looking for her, Rhonda was happily destroying the entire wall of gadgets."

"Oh," Harley breathed, and Leland nodded sharply.

"Yes. Oh is the correct response. See, I went to get your tape when I heard you buzz out the door today. Opened the panel that hides the electronics. Found this."

"We didn't know about this on Friday when it happened?" James asked dully. Leland sneered.

"Nobody checked that therapy room for damage. There was no blood on the doorknob, we didn't know she'd made it that far."

"And nobody caught it over the weekend?" Harley probed.

"Nope," Leland growled. "Nobody but you uses that therapy room. We thought it was less of a security risk if you two were the only people in or out. And we loaded the new tape automatically at the end of your last session when we took the old tape out, so nobody touched the electronics from then until today."

"Nobody except Rhonda," James muttered helpfully, and Leland fixed him with a withering glare.

"So there is no tape of today," Harley said, finally comprehending.

"Correct, Quinzel," sighed Leland. "No tape. You just spent a session alone in a room with the Joker unobserved and unrecorded and came out unscathed, and if that doesn't make you the luckiest doctor in this building, I don't know what would."

"Oh, my God," Harley breathed, and she plopped down in the chair beside James, her face blank and distant. James and Leland were saying things, patting her shoulder, probably commiserating with what they assumed was the shock of a near-death experience, but Harley didn't process any of it. Her brain was a broken record, stuck on the same phrase in an endless loop.

He knew.

He knew he knew he KNEW.

There could be no other explanation. His restless energy, his disregard for theatrics, using his off-camera voice even after Harley had clicked the camera on, goading her into asking dangerous questions, the bold way he had spoken—

what else are you warming up to?

—like nobody else would ever hear him but her. It was the only thing that made the session make sense. Somehow, in some terrifyingly inexplicable way, he had known that the camera wasn't working. She had no idea how he could have found out before Leland, but it had to be true. He never would have pushed her into such a risky question if he hadn't known already that it was safe. Had he spoken to Rhonda and found out from her? No, Harley answered herself as soon as she thought of the question. He couldn't have – Rhonda had been sedated and carted off to Solitary as soon as she'd been apprehended. None of the other prisoners would have had contact with her all weekend. And if Rhonda was the only person who had known what she'd done—

Harley stiffened in her chair.

If the Joker couldn't possibly have found out about the camera after it had been broken, then he had to have known about it before it had happened. And nobody could predict what Rhonda would do during her episodes; even guessing, the Joker could never have been certain about his guess. And that meant only one thing: the Joker hadn't known because he had predicted it.

He had known because he had planned it.

Harley thought she might be sick.

"…going to tell him. Right?" Leland had been speaking for a few sentences before Harley registered her voice, and she shook her head blankly, reorienting herself in the conversation.

"What?" she muttered, and Leland eyed her with some concern before pulling a bottle of water from her mini-fridge and handing it to her.

"I said, what we're really damn lucky about is that the Joker has no idea the camera wasn't recording. No telling what he would have done if he'd realized he had you in there all to himself."

Harley's legs tightened and then turned to jelly. Had me all to himself? Please, God, don't let her say that out loud again.

"And if we can help it," Leland was continuing, "he's not going to find out, and neither is anybody else that doesn't have to know. You're certainly not going to tell him. Right? And neither are we. We're just going to play it off like it was a normal session, get the recorders fixed, and you can have your next session once they're back up and running. Take your time with whatever your next assignment is, give us time to let the tech people put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

Harley nodded, more in shock now than she had been at the start. They had no idea. They were breathing sighs of relief and congratulating themselves at escaping with a near miss, and the whole time, the Joker not only knew about the camera but had probably engineered it in the first place.

And if you were a good, responsible doctor, you'd tell them that. You'd let them know that actually, the Joker did know because he'd made it happen, and they'd take the appropriate action. But you're not a good, responsible doctor, are you?

Harley bit her lip and silently screamed at the internal voice to pipe down, already.

"Did he give you a new assignment?" James asked, and Harley stared down at her portfolio for a second before realizing that she hadn't even read what he had written.

"I… um… he wrote something down as we were finishing, but I didn't read it at the time because I was too focused on what we were talking about." She fumbled the portfolio open, searching for the notebook among the bundles of Burton files she'd unceremoniously shoved in; one of them had lost its paperclip, and she had to gather the pages back up before handing them off to Leland along with all the neater stacks. "Here it is," she said finally, pulling out the notebook and flipping to the last-used page. She laid it open on the table instead of holding it up, so neither of them would see any shaking in her hands.

"Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," James read, and Harley groaned reflexively. She'd tried that one in school once and had failed to get past the first chapter.

"The Bonner version," Leland read on, indicating the words written under the title. "What does he mean by that?"

"Well, the original book was written in French," James offered, "so my guess is that's a particular translation he wants you to read. There are actually probably about ten different English versions by now, and I'm sure some are better than others. Bonner must be the one he prefers."

"Well, there you go, Doctor Leland," Harley sighed. "You should have plenty of time to get the cameras fixed – that book is a monster that'll take me way too long to read, not even counting how long it'll take to find exactly the right translation."

Too long, she murmured internally. It'll be another long gap between sessions, and I don't know if I can handle another long wait. And that's probably exactly what he wants.

Leland was nodding as she swept VCR debris out of her way, opening her own notebook and settling more comfortably in her chair. "Well, that's just fine with me. After this scare today, I don't want to rush back into anything. Now. Let's go over today's session as close as we can."

"W… without a tape?" Harley gulped, and Leland shrugged.

"It's not ideal, but I can't let today go without a debrief of some kind. Now, I know you're not gonna remember every single thing you both said verbatim, but just try to walk me through it in as much detail as you can. Not just what you talked about, but his behavior, too. Oh, and whatever bonus question you asked him after your book-talk."

"Well, I…."

"And don't rush through because it's lunch time. I sent an orderly out to get us some pizza, and we'll just sit in here through lunch and talk it over. Gotta make a record of some kind, even if it is just notes."

Harley shifted uneasily in her seat, glancing over at James as he got up to poke around in the mini-fridge. He looked back at her over Leland's bent head and raised one cautionary eyebrow. Right to remain silent? he seemed to be saying snarkily, and Harley sighed.

He wouldn't be so snarky if he knew what had actually been said in the therapy room.

"Okay, well…," Harley began, "we, um… we started by talking about why I wasn't able to find the book." Leland nodded, scribbled in her notebook, looked up for Harley to continue. Harley took a deep breath; then she launched into a retelling of the whole session, as well as she could remember it, anyway. And if she maybe forgot one or two sentences along the way

(what else are you warming up to?)

she was sure Leland would forgive her. After all, nobody could remember every word of a conversation. A few omissions were natural.

And by the time the subject of her end-of-session question came up, Harley was calm enough to tell her all about how she'd asked the Joker to tell her something about a childhood friend, and how he'd responded with a very vague but possibly honest story of playing in his best friend's basement, under the watchful eye of the friend's older brother. The best lies, she knew, always contained specks of the truth. Leland nodded and scribbled notes and occasionally asked for clarification, and if she'd been looking more at Harley's face and less at her notebook, she might have noticed something was amiss. Thankfully, she didn't.

But the one time Harley glanced over at James during the telling, she saw his usually large blue eyes narrowed in something like reproachful suspicion.

Right to remain silent, she tried to say to him with her eyes. The look he gave her in return said that he might buy what she was selling – for now – but that he wanted a receipt just in case.