Chapter Text
At 4:55 AM exactly, Harleen was rudely awoken by the blaring of her factory-standard alarm clock.
She scrubbed sleep out of her eyes – she had been having a rather nice, soft dream – and felt around until she found the shut-off button. She smashed it with the side of her thumb, then sat up and shoved her glasses on with a half-hearted scowl before she could drift off again.
Only one thing mattered: It was Thursday.
She had work.
Harleen shuffled to the bathroom and turned the shower on, squeezing out toothpaste and scrubbing her teeth dispassionately while the water did its best to warm up. The shower itself was a rushed, noncommittal affair, and when she was done she sponged herself dry and hurriedly pulled her work uniform on – a pressed button-down, faded nylons, a pristine white coat with a shiny plastic badge on it that read HOSPITAL STAFF - HARLEEN QUINZEL. The hospital in question was, of course, Arkham. In the wake of its reopening so many years ago, it had ditched the accusatory title Asylum and fully embraced its fresh new status as a medical facility.
Harleen was proud to be a part of an establishment like Arkham Hospital. It was a relatively fascinating job, it made her good money, she had enough stories built up to get her through three times as many parties as she was ever invited to – and as far as stability went, she always knew one thing: she wouldn’t be running out of work any time soon.
She blinked at the bright pink sticky-note on the bathroom mirror that read, in her own neat cursive, ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY!’ and underneath that, ‘‘DON’T FORGET YOUR PILLS’, and after a moment came to her senses and pried the cabinet open. She pulled out a sensible array of plastic vials: lamotrigine, zoloft, estrogen, vitamins. the whole laundry list.
Harleen regarded the pills rather disdainfully as she doled them out. Half this stuff was the kind of thing she prescribed her own patients. Meanwhile here she was in a clean apartment on the other side of the wall, a smart, pleasant, acceptably social med school graduate, normal in all regards. Still swallowing the same handful.
She consoled herself of those thoughts with a singular chewable calcium tablet. It tasted like orange sidewalk chalk.
“Another great day on the job, Dr. Quinzel!” said Harleen out loud in the mirror, just to get herself into the spirit of things. The words rang uncomfortably in her small bathroom, and the smile she put up looked more like a gash across her face. She put it away, dissatisfied, and left to start up some coffee.
Harleen left her apartment around 5:20. She kept one hand on the wheel of her thirteen-year-old Nissan Sentra. It was drab and gray, but it kept the repair bills low enough to be forgiven. Her other hand held the sandwich she had snatched from the fridge on her way out, helped along by another bright pink sticky-note (The mustard was the uncontested highlight of the morning). She chewed on it thoughtfully while she drove to work, pausing only once, in a lapse of judgment, to yell obscenities at a man who cut her off at a left-turn light. The state of Gotham’s roads always reminded Harleen of something or other she’d heard on a late-night comedy show years prior: “Gotham is the only city I’ve lived in where drivers are nice to me on the road and I start getting suspicious. I mean, like, is this guy buttering me up for something? Like one of his buddies is gonna be right behind me in a big-ass F-150 revving the engine!”
Harleen had always been a discreet fan of trashy comedies. It was like shooting the shit with someone, without any of the embarrassing repercussions when she got it wrong or took it too far or whatever on Earth people used to get onto her for in high school. She hadn’t been very well-liked back then.
Thank god for adulthood! Thought Harleen, and shoved the last bite of the sandwich in her mouth. It was entirely crust.
Miraculously, she pulled into the Arkham parking lot without incident. It was early enough that the mid-July heat hadn’t kicked in yet, and the walk from her car to the front doors was at least tolerable. She waved the front desk hello and whistled an aimless tune as she punched in her ID card and took the winding stairway to her tiny personal cubicle – a perk of being among the number of legally qualified psychiatrists within the hospital’s walls.
She’d been there for a few minutes when Annie poked her head over the partition. “Hey, Harleen. How’s it going?”
“It’s going alright,” said Harleen gamely. “How’s it with you?”
“Oh, I’m good. Just wanted to check that they gave you the update of Zsasz’s file, since he’s in with you today.”
“He is?” frowned Harleen, and looked at her computer. “Oh, geez, he is. I swear that wasn’t there yesterday.”
“Yeah, they had to move some stuff around between us. New patient. They’re giving it to Strange, so you got moved up.”
“Oh, God. Why's he getting the new one right off the bat?” said Harleen. She was uncomfortably aware of the fact that Strange was not supposed to have the ability to reserve patients for his own examination, and also aware of the fact that she had been working at Arkham for approximately six months, and did not have nearly the kind of professional pull required to challenge him on it (and frankly, even if she did, he’d probably just keep doing it anyway – Strange was stubborn like a mule).
Annie shifted uncomfortably, hesitating.
Harleen frowned. “It’s not that one guy he kept talking about, is it? What’s his name – with the crazy hallucinogens?”
“Oh, no, no, not him,” said Annie trepidatiously. “It’s, uh… It’s – someone new. Or someone old, I guess. He hasn’t been in since you’ve worked here. They can’t really… keep him.”
So it was a he. “What, you mean, like, legally?”
“Physically,” said Annie bluntly. “He, uh, gets out.”
“Well, that doesn’t really narrow it down,” said Harleen slowly. Arkham had problems with that kind of thing – problems that brought the public reputation of the place under scrutiny. It had gotten a bit exhausting to answer the well-meaning questions: No, I’m not with security. I don’t know. It’s not my job. Strange has the say on what goes into place. Yes, that Strange. No, I don’t know him personally. He’s my boss. No, I’ve never met him outside of work. No, we don’t let them out on purpose, Jesus Christ, Ma! and that kind of thing.
“Look, I’m not really supposed to be telling you about it,” said Annie, snapping Harleen out of her thoughts. “Strange is kind of weird about this guy. Like, weirder than usual. He doesn’t want everyone making a big thing about it. I just wanted to make sure you’re, like, you know, prepared. Since you’re… new…er.”
Ominous, but, “I appreciate it, Annie,” said Harleen genuinely. “I’ll keep my head down. Y’know me.”
That got a small smile out of the other woman. “Sure you will, Harleen. I’ll catch you later.”
Harleen waved her off and went back to the files. “Zsasz,” she muttered to herself.
Zsasz, huh? Victor Zsasz.
Birth name unknown, fingerprints burnt off, nothing from dental records. He was a legal ghost – and might as well have been a literal one, if his reputation was anything to go by. If the tally marks scarred onto his body told the truth, his body count to date was in the low three-hundreds, which Harleen privately thought couldn’t have possibly been true. He looked to be well into his thirties, but how many murders could one guy possibly get away with? He didn’t exactly seem like the large-scale type, either. The scarification habit seemed to entail it was more personal than that; he liked to feel his kills – so he was either lying, or very, very efficient.
Harleen found herself dwelling on that again an hour later, when she was sitting across from the man in a one-on-one therapy session. Of course, the one on her end was actually several, given the large inconspicuous mirror set into one wall of their room, the blinking cameras in the ceiling corners, and the boarded table that Zsasz was cuffed down to.
In the hospital’s defense, the security was warranted – he had a very violent history, both in and out of Arkham, and nobody wanted to be the next name on his tallied list. The line between confidentiality and paranoia, however, was admittedly thin.
Victor Zsasz’s face was perhaps the most striking feature out of an overwhelmingly striking figure. Not a single hair grew out of his sallow white head, and the smooth skin was cleaved by huge swaths of inky black, shaping what was already a skeletal face to begin with into the true mirror of a grinning skull. A dark gaze poked out from the sunken depths of his eye-sockets, regarding Harleen with silent, stony apathy.
“Look, we’ve both been down this track before, so I’ll skip the introductory stuff for you,” offered Harleen generously. She somewhat resented Arkham for putting her onto these sessions. She shouldn’t have been seeing him unless she was prescribing, but they were shorthanded. Or maybe Strange just liked to see her suffer.
“Thank you,” came Zsasz’s quiet whisper. He exhaled when he spoke, pushing his voice like a dandelion tuft through the air, mild and papery. It contrasted deeply and unsettlingly with the rest of him.
“Is there anything in particular you want to touch on today?”
“I heard the clown’s back,” murmured Zsasz. One of his shoulders twitched.
Harleen blinked, and made a brief note on her clipboard. “Well, you know that I’m not allowed to talk to you about confidential matters, Mr. Zsasz. But I’m not entirely sure what you… mean.”
Zsasz rarely smiled, if ever, but past the flatness of his face Harleen saw a telltale glint pick up in the depths of his black eyes, and a tiny chill skittered down her spine. Zsasz’s displeasure she could deal with – Zsasz’s entertainment made her feel vaguely like a dancing jester in a glass box.
“The clown,” Zsasz insisted, leaning forward the barest amount. The pale green patient scrubs he wore reflected against his white skin and black ink, washing his whole frame in mint-flavored sickness. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of him.”
At her look, the corners of his mouth almost, almost turned. “Oh, you haven’t. Poor Dr. Quinzel, they left you out to dry. He likes the new ones something awful. Especially the clever ones.”
“I don’t think this is an appropriate topic for a therapy session,” said Harleen calmly.
Zsasz simply leaned back and shrugged, crossing his knees under the table. “Then I’ll entertain you. What part of my psyche are we dissecting today?”
“I…” Harleen collected herself. “I wanted to talk about your… history with violence.”
“That’s an awfully personal topic, Doctor,” said Zsasz. “And a very broad one. I have a long… history.” There was a mocking lilt to his tone.
“Killing means something important to you,” said Harleen. “You keep records of it on your skin. Can you tell me about that?”
Zsasz regarded her, unimpressed. “I’d hardly expect you to understand, Doctor.”
“Try me.”
A sigh, and, at length: “Have you ever been on a farm? You don’t seem like the type. I was born on a farm, Doctor. Raised up on a farm.” He paused. “I was raised on a farm. On lambs and sheep. The meat. The organs. I was clothed in the skin of them. Doctor, you have to understand me, it was a burden then… And it’s a burden now… All those poor animals, eating and breeding… and killing each other. Out in the fields. I did my duty. I made good money, Doctor. Money for the farm. It’s not easy. There’s no justice in it. Just the veins… and the knives. The skin and the meat. Selling and eating and killing. Using the animal. All of the animal.” He leaned in. “See, there’s that look, Doctor. You understand now, don’t you?”
Harleen blinked in the wake of his quiet, droning monologue, half unsettled and frankly unmoved. She wrote the farm part down on her clipboard — she had no idea if it was true or not.
“You think of people as sheep,” She asked belatedly, though it was really more of a statement.
(Privately, she thought that Zsasz sounded rather like a goth fourteen-year-old’s personal diary, but she was far too professional and too self-preserving to voice that thought.)
“Hm,” said Zsasz. “No. But… animals, all the same, Doctor. We’re all animals, even me. I can’t ever escape the things this body has done. One day I’ll have my time, Doctor. I am not a saint. I’m not a saint. I’m just a man trying to do the best he can with the… time he’s been given.”
Harleen wrote that down on her clipboard, too, even though she knew the entire conversation was being recorded for posterity. “Can you tell me about who raised you, Mr. Zsasz?
But Zsasz was listing, done already. “Look at you, Doctor. You’re so…clean. You’re so professional. You don’t want my life story. You want something that I can’t give you.” He shrugged placidly. “Or, well, maybe I was abused. Maybe I killed mom and pop. Nails in the kitchen sink, rat poison in their toothpaste. Maybe I’m just a narcissistic, sociopathic, murderous freak. Skullfucked from the very beginning. That’s the opinion all the others seem to have of me.”
Something about his voice had changed. Grown stronger now, less hushed. Smoother. In Zsasz’s file there were some grainy photos of him from where he’d been found and dragged in: with heavy foundation, an expensive blonde wig, and an open buttonup, he’d been lounging on a beach somewhere, claiming to be off duty. Antithetical to his entire existence. His file noted that he was ‘dangerously skilled at deception’ and ‘could change his entire personality almost instantly’. So which one was real, then, the overdone Hannibal Lecter killer, or the sanguine tourist of a hitman? One of them had to be. But Harleen didn’t know which.
“My opinion of you,” said Harleen, “Is that you should try writing a novel, Zsasz. You certainly have the creative vocabulary for it.”
A strange throaty wheezing began to work its way out of Zsasz’s throat. Harleen’s hackles prickled and raised – she was almost beginning to consider ringing the small ‘medical distress’ button built into her nametag when she realized that the noise was the stifled beginning of a laugh.
A discreet knock sounded at the door, and Harleen started, then blinked. God, had it really been an hour? They’d barely started speaking.
She stood up, brushing off her jacket. Her hand trembled almost unnoticeably. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Maybe you can come up with something new.”
Zsasz had not stopped laughing. His handcuffs rattled with the force of his mirth. His high scratchy laughter followed her out of the therapy room and down the whole length of the white tiled hall.
—
Harleen mechanically submitted her session notes into the system along with a visit summary and his pre-session vitals — perfect as always, but it was procedure — and walked herself all the way to the staff break room before realizing she had forgotten to pack lunch that morning.
Sighing, she checked the clock across the room. She could afford the detour, probably, though she didn’t want to. Arkham had an open cafeteria, which meant that the low-risk patient population took lunch there too. This didn’t particularly disturb Harleen – most of the Arkham patients were completely benign people, and it certainly wasn’t like she was prejudiced enough to mistrust them just for being mentally ill – she was a doctor, for Christ’s sake.
But she just felt slightly awkward being in there among such a large and varied crowd. Anything could happen.
The cafeteria appeared peaceful that day, teeming with idle chatter and plastic clinking. Harley quietly sidled around the edge until she reached the hot food counter.
“Look who it is. The good doctor,” grinned Dallas the lunch server, a kind wide-set person who was among the more personable of Arkham’s staff. “Hey, Harleen. Haven’t seen you around here much.”
Harleen cracked a smile. “Oh, you - you know me, just been busy. Uh, what’cha got?”
“Well,” said Dallas, “I got orange slop, or slightly less orange slop. Maybe some green slop, if you’ve been good lately.” They held up a serving spoon demonstratively. The orange slop vaguely resembled mac n’ cheese – The green slop was better off left undescribed.
“I’ll think I’ll stick with the orange,” said Harleen, mildly disturbed. “Thanks, Dallas.”
She grabbed a banana and a plastic water bottle to bolster her chances of eating something, in case the orange slop turned out to be the bad kind of orange. Tray in hand, she walked back out of the cafeteria, pausing only for the Hatter – who, seeing her pass by, cried jovially, “Oh, Doctor Quinzel! Do have a merry day, won’t you, dear?”
Harleen offered him a cringing smile and a nod as she passed. He was in the middle of a chess game against a patient Harleen didn’t recognize, and half the pieces were squirming on the board like little black worms.
The closer she got to the doors, the quicker Harleen’s footsteps raced. She shouldered the swinging door open so hard she almost lost her balance, gasping in shock as she struggled to right her precarious lunch tray. Her heart shook traitorously in her chest.
A guard interjected politely, “Ma’am,” and Harleen jumped so hard she actually squeaked a little.
Before she could collect herself, he shook his head placidly and gestured to the staircase she had been about to attempt (it was the healthy option), saying, “Fourth floor, right? Use the elevator. Sorry. Clown’s bein’ moved around upstairs.”
“...Huh,” said Harleen, bewildered, “Uh, sure, thanks,” and turned around and walked a few winding hallways to the elevator, a vague sense of unease creeping up her back. It was true that many of their patients had rather fantastical public personas attached to their names, but she wracked her brain for news about a clown and came up with nothing. And the way people had been talking about it that day – about him –
It just bothered her, that was all. Call it a psychiatrist's instinct.
Harleen stepped through the elevator’s shiny metal doors. She had been through med school, for heaven’s sake – she knew how to analyze human behavior, and this was… weird. Strange. Abnormal. Bizarre, even. Even Zsasz had been weirder than usual, and he was Zsasz. His weirdness was the layman’s burp – it happened often and unremarkably.
Harleen chewed on her lip as the elevator went up, tapping her foot absently, heel click-click-click-ing against the glossy tile.
The elevator dinged open, and she got off on the fourth floor, where most of the staff offices were, including hers. The few that were on lower levels mostly belonged to security, heads of locational departments, or Strange himself – perks of running the place, Harleen guessed. Three seconds less in an elevator. As far as Arkham went, it was a pretty tight deal.
In her cubicle, she poked her thus-called orange slop around on her plate, watching the unnerving jelly-like consistency as it formed around her plastic spork. It smelled vaguely of cheese and might’ve had something like pasta in it.
Just as she worked herself up to a spoonful, Annie decided to poke her head up over the wall again, saving Harleen from her mac-and-cheese-adjacent fate. “Hey, Harleen,” she said, “How’s lunch?”
Harleen silently held up an orange forkful in response.
Annie had the good graces to wince. “Yeahhh. Don’t know why I asked. Hey, Laura and I are gonna hang out tomorrow down at the Dock Plaza, and I was wondering if you wanted to join us?”
“Ain’t it a workday?” asked Harleen, bewildered.
“We’re off tomorrow, remember? Staff Appreciation Day or something. And it’s her last week, anyway.”
“Huh,” said Harleen, realizing something abruptly. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. ‘Cuz it’s my birthday today.”
She realized her mistake a millisecond too late. “It’s your birthday?” demanded Annie loudly, and Harleen cringed.
“I mean, ha, that is,” she stammered, “I don’t like to make a big deal out of- of-“
“Oh my god, why didn’t you tell me?” Annie continued. “You gotta come with us tomorrow! I’ll take you out somewhere, my treat!”
“I… I, yeah, I guess I could make that work,” Harleen gave in quickly, feeling herself wilt under Annie’s expecting look. The other woman grinned, promising to text her a time and location.
Harleen didn’t particularly care for her own birthday, was the thing – it was just another glaring reminder of how goddamn old she was getting. Twenty-nine, and she didn’t have a spouse or a house or prospects or… anything. And, well, the damning part: it wasn’t that she couldn’t get them. Her job didn’t pay badly, and she had some decent savings built up – she was pretty enough, once you got past the poor bleach job and the carefully concealed dark circles – she loved dogs, didn’t mind kids either, and though she was a god-awful cook she would’ve had to be the breadwinner anyway. For all intents and purposes, Harleen Quinzel was the perfect spouse. A shining display of her generation.
Except. Well. She was twenty-nine now. Well into her prime. Skirting dangerously close to passing it by. And she could get whatever she wanted, if she wanted it. Her mother called her every Saturday to ask if she had it yet; the answer was always the same. What was she supposed to say?
God knew Harleen wasn’t perfect. But it was either keep pretending she was or off herself, and offing herself would make her mother very disappointed in her, and her meds should have stopped her thinking that kind of thing anyway, so she stopped. She took a drink of bottled water and got up to bring her untouched tray back to the cafeteria.
The staff elevator, like all of Arkham, smelled distinctly of antiseptic. It mixed unpleasantly with the orange glop remaining on her plastic plate. She hit the floor button for ONE.
Chunk!
The elevator stopped abruptly at THREE. Harleen swore loudly in surprise, and then blushed even though nobody had heard.
Collecting herself, she stepped out of the opening doors into an empty hallway. One of the white, buzzing ceiling lights winked at her neurotically. A distant feeling of cold prickled at the back of her neck.
A dark shape appeared in the corner of her vision, and Harleen almost dropped the tray. But it was just one of the security guys, rushing past her in a hurry. His eyes slid over her like she was a blemish in the tile.
“Hey,” called Harleen after him, disgruntled. “Is somethin’ going on up here?”
The guard turned and started, as if he actually hadn’t seen her standing there. “You should probably move, if you like your skin,” he said, “Clown’s coming through here in a minute.”
“Who?” called Harleen after him, frustrated, but he was already around the corner.
She watched as he turned the corner, and then she stood and thought, lips pressed tight.
She could leave. There was plenty of time. She could go downstairs and put her tray in the bin and go shopping tomorrow for her birthday, like a normal girl, and never see this clown in her entire life.
She looked down at the tray in her hands. The same slop every day. A bruised banana. Artificial coloring.
You want something that I can’t give you.
Fuck me, thought Harleen distinctly, and stood silent and still in the hallway by herself, sweating lightly, until she heard stern voices turn the corner.
“Left! A left up here!”
“Shut it! Don’t give this freak any directions.”
“Hey, cut the chatter. Let’s just get – “
And then, very abruptly, they all came around the corner.
There were two gray-coated security guards in front armed with tasers and batons. Harley blinked in shock. Two identical figures brought in the back, and between them were four more, in eggshell-white radiation suits – pale anywhere else, it might as well have been an inkstain on the pristine bleached walls of Arkham.
And between them was…
Harleen identified the figure immediately as the clown, which deep in her heart she knew she would have done without a lick of context, without hearing the name first, from a hundred yards out, so distinctly clown-like it was in its composition — yet as she stared unblinking, as the bizarre parade moved closer to her frozen form, it became clear that the thing hardly resembled a clown at all.
Most of its form was taken up by a grotesquely, obscenely, blindingly purple coat, so purple that it left a ghostly yellow imprint in her eyes every time they drifted an inch away from it. The coat was banded at the joints and collar with equally terrible stripes of yellow and magenta — the forearms were wrapped in a nausea-inducing lime green and its hands were encased in dull steel cuffs behind its back. Its skeletal legs were clothed in a comparatively dull fabric that she couldn’t quite parse the color of; holes were cut in what might have originally been tights or stockings to reveal its heels, toes, and kneecaps; a painful motley of pinkish-grayish scars.
It must have been close to seven feet tall, towering a full head over the guards as it shuffled along in small clumsy steps, and Harleen finally looked up at where its face should have been.
They had attached some kind of – of apparatus to its head: it reminded Harleen unkindly of a Saw movie, the way it was clamped on, plain sheet metal over the front and bolts at the sides. If she had seen it on anyone else, anything else, she would have been sickened at the mistreatment – and a little part of her was sickened really, a part of her that shrieked he's not doing anything wrong and take that thing off his face, you monsters! – but the clown was such a starkly imposing figure in her vision, tall and twitching and lurching, that it mostly just invoked a deep thrilling fear of what might have been lurking underneath the layers of bolts and hinges.
It couldn’t see; or, at least, it wasn’t moving like it could see. As the entourage came closer down the hall Harley spotted the barest hints of a shape, a head: short, damp tufts of hair, flashes of white and red, shining – sweat? makeup? blood? – and from out the back of it there was a long, snaking oil-slick of a ponytail, every color of the rainbow diffusing down its dark surface.
A tiny, irrational part of Harley was suddenly grateful for her long white doctor’s coat, as if it would somehow disguise her, turn her into a part of the tile to protect her.
There was a slight widening in the hallway to accommodate the elevator entrance, and Harleen pressed herself flat to the far wall as the group of faceless hazmat suits slowly crept up to passing by her. Her plastic lunch tray shook in her hands – the thought that she had just been picking it up not thirty minutes ago seemed alien to her, as if the sheer sight of the thing in the hallway had altered her trajectory somehow. She knew on some intrinsic level several things: that the thing was despite all odds a human or had been a human previously; that it knew she was there; and that it was looking at her.
Harleen blinked.
The entourage of guards had stopped, speaking quickly to each other, trying to get the clown to start moving again. Its feet had scraped to a standstill on the tiles, and its boxed-in head was turned towards her, like it could see straight through the metal, see through her skin and bones and into the coronary arteries of her heart, pumping quick and hot with fear. She was an animal in the corner, dumb and pink in front of him.
The clown doubled over and laughed.
It was a whining, screeching burst of static, one that peaked at the tips and dipped into atonal fuzz at the gasping valleys, and it made Harleen’s ears feel like someone had pumped molten glue into them and then thrown her twenty feet deep in a swimming pool. The laugh went on for longer than any laugh possibly could, and Harley didn’t realize it had stopped until a good five seconds later, when the ringing in her head clued her in that it was silent.
“Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to play with your food, Dr. Quinzel?” it crowed mirthfully, in a sing-song voice like nothing Harleen had ever encountered. It was like a cauterizing spray of isopropyl, the voice, a bitter agent; pure and stinging. It woke her up.
One of the guards had snapped back from the cacophony. “Keep it to yourself, clown!” she snarled at the laughing thing, and to Harleen, she said, “Hey, get outta here, Doctor.”
“Sure thing,” squeaked Harleen, who was at a complete and utter loss. She numbly turned and got right back into the elevator she had come from, and pressed the button for floor ONE, which it mercifully accepted.
It was only halfway down, still dumbfounded, that she glanced absently at her reflection in the mirrored elevator walls and realized that at some point she had tipped the lunch tray too far towards herself, and some of the might’ve-been-mac-n-cheese had spilled in an embarrassing orange blotch onto her clean buttoned shirt.
Play with your food.
The clown hadn’t been paying attention to her. It had just been making fun of her.
Harleen, for reasons she wholly did not comprehend, felt herself beginning to blush a luminescent burning red.
Stupid! she thought, viciously. It was stupid. Who was she to care if some random freak in a hallway saw a stain on her shirt! She’d forget about it in a week. She was respectable. She was normal. She was doing just fucking fine.
But even as the thoughts passed through her mind, her blush redoubled with embarrassed shame for calling him a freak. He was just a patient, no matter what he looked like, and she knew nothing about him. And all he had done upon seeing her was crack a joke.
It was hardly a crime. She might have even done the same thing in his position.
Once Harleen had dumped her food tray in the appropriate dishbin she went to the women’s room and scrubbed the stain off as much as she could in a restless fervor, nearly shredding wet paper towels in her hand, hardly bearing to look at it. A useless little bit of humiliation stung at her like someone had just slapped her hard in the face. It was an unfixable blemish.
She buttoned up her white coat over it and threw the orange-tinted paper towel into the trash can. The path up to her office was mercifully empty, though she felt her heart pick up irrationally as the glowing number of the elevator flashed THREE – but it continued on without even a hitch.
She sat at her desk and sighed quietly, still frazzled. Two more reports, a review from the previous day, and she had to show one of the newer therapists how to use the filing system – then she could go home and sleep. Or cry. Or something.
The following hours flowed over Harleen like a tide of molasses, dragging and uncomfortable. She slogged through the day’s paperwork, went over the session with Zsasz from earlier – he showed textbook antisocial tendencies, a pervading self-absorption complex, severe and complicated pathways of compulsions that might have spoken to something like OCD, if Harleen’s instincts were correct, and they usually were – she almost flinched at the mention of the clown in her session notes – she suspected extended physical and emotional abuse or isolation played a factor in Zsasz’s upbringing, and she wrote as such – and by the time she had gotten to the point of meeting her new coworker, she had upturned Zsasz’s ghoulish head so thoroughly that she felt vaguely undead herself.
Sometimes, Harleen thought, as she carefully painted on a face of cheer to speak to Arkham’s newest hire, having a job consisting of eternally dissecting the minds of violent criminals was not all it was cracked up to be.
But it paid well, and besides – with six months under her belt she was staunchly determined to beat the turnover rate of the hospital, and it would make her mother disappointed to hear she had quit after so soon – after she had worked so hard to make the job, so determined to get a real gig in the big city after her residency, after interviewing in crackshot therapist’s offices on Gotham’s scattered outskirts – she was finally making use of her degree, use of the thousands and thousands of dollars that went into it, and she did love it when her family crowed about how well she was doing with her life, how she was the first Quinzel in ten years to finish college, how pretty she was now, not like the ugly duckling she’d been in school, how proud she was making them – she loved it so much that she spent half of most holiday parties retching over the perfumed toilet bowl, trying to keep a crawling metronome of horror from chewing her up and spitting her out in a mangled pile.
The buzzing in Harleen’s head came to an abrupt halt, and she realized she was alone in her office, and her shift was over in five minutes. Somewhere in the distance a medical machine was beeping faintly and rhythmically.
She started to pack up her bag. There wasn’t much in it – some papers she had to look over during the weekend, the empty lunch cooler-bag she had forgotten to fill that morning; lip gloss, wallet, mascara, keys, concealer. A couple of receipts abandoned at the bottom.
She shut off her office computer and, realizing the room would be empty until the night shift came, turned off the overhead light. Her heels clacked down the deserted length of the hallway, amidst hummed fragments of a pop song she’d heard on the radio a week ago.
“Going somewhere?” said a sing-song voice.
Harleen’s chest froze. Her frightened scream caught halfway out of her throat in a strangled gasp, her arms flinching up pointlessly.
The clown was leaning along the entrance to a dark side-hall, his lanky arms crossed over his chest – his hands were unbound, she noticed with an ugly spurt of fear, and his long fingers were stained a sickly white.
She looked up and saw – like a pale circle imprinted in the fabric of the air itself – his uncovered face.
It was, obviously and shockingly, a cheap plastic carnival mask. Green eyes ringed with lurid pink, triangular slashes underneath them, a curved grin of yellow needles and a bright red nose – the moniker clown made more sense at the sight of it, though the rest of him hadn’t exactly deterred her from understanding.
But it was his face: this she knew instinctively, just as she had recognized the danger he presented on sight. It did not make sense for it to be anything else. She couldn’t conceptualize it as a mask if she tried. And as she stared his feline grin widened, though the plastic itself didn’t move at all.
He said: “Cat got your tongue?”
“I- I- I-“ Forget cats – Harleen’s tongue was in knots. “Are you go-going to hurt me?”
A peal of laughter escaped the clown, loud and sudden. “Hurt you? Now, that wouldn’t be very funny, would it?”
Harleen, reeling, said: “I- No, it wouldn’t! Look, you’re not supposed to be here on your own, S - ” she cut herself off from Sir. It somehow seemed wildly inappropriate.
“Well,” said the clown. His smile was lurid and magnetizing. Harleen couldn’t tear her eyes away. “Are you going to tattle on me, Dr. Quinzel? This could be our little
secret.”
“I…”
Yes, said her hindbrain vehemently. But.
She hadn’t seen him hurt anyone. For all she knew, they’d locked him up for the simple crime of being different. God knew they’d done the same for others. The thought lodged in her chest, tiny and lethal, like an infected cut – He was no Zsasz. He had no kill count. He didn’t even have a record at all.
Arkham was a hospital. The clown was a patient, said one side: he had been chained, demanded the other! Blackgate wasn’t outfitted. That’s why Zsasz was here. But the Clown – surely not. He made no sense. He was… something else. Like nothing she’d ever seen before.
He was…
He was.
Harleen had been quiet too long. “I’ll get in trouble,” she said.
The clown guffawed again, pushing off the wall. It was a discordant, imperfect noise. “Oh, with that attitude, you will! Come on, Doctor. I’ll owe you a favor!”
“And - and what would that be?” asked Harley helplessly. A bead of sweat ran down her hairline, itching horribly. Half of her wanted to scream and run away like a child. The other half wanted… something. She didn’t know what yet.
“Hmmm…” The clown brought a knuckle to his chin, considering. “You know, Doctor, you seem like a gal who needs a little fun in her life. Wouldn’t you agree?”
The clown danced like a star-spot in her vision. Harleen was incapable of lying to him, pulled by a scouring string running up her throat. “I guess we all do.”
The clown laughed derisively. “Oh, sure, you do. But not me, darling! I have all the fun I need right here!” He made a delighted sweeping gesture, and she startled as he slid his long form smoothly down onto one knee in front of her, holding a hand out in invitation. “The Clown Prince of Crime, at your service,” he grinned, “but my good friends call me the Joker. I don’t bite, I promise.”
Harley was frozen in front of him, mind whirling like a carousel, trying to process the absurdity of what was happening. It was the most basic ironed-in sense of etiquette that made her reach out a hand and shake – his flesh was cold and soft, overwhelmingly and terribly normal. She wondered distantly why the guards earlier had been wearing hazmat suits.
“Harleen,” she said, figuring dumbly that it wouldn’t hurt. “People call me Harley.”
It was a lie. Nobody ever called her Harley. Her mother had said once that it was the name of either a five-year-old or a stripper, and she’d never been brave enough to find out if her friends thought the same thing.
But the Joker wasn’t her friend, and he wasn’t a person, either.
It didn’t count.
"Harley," he repeated after her, slow and melodic. "Harley Quinzel." He grinned at her and smoothly slid to his feet. Her mouth dried up at the stark reminder of the solid foot and a half he had on her.
“You’ll see me again,” he said, whirled where he stood, and started to walk away down the hall. “Some sunny day…!”
He paused and turned back. “Oh, and before I forget, Harley – Happy Birthday.”
The moment he disappeared around the corner, Harley’s critical thinking core snapped back into place, hard, like a rubber band. She screeched “Wait!” after him, almost slipping on the tile as she scrambled to follow him –
But the hallway he’d just turned into was empty. The bleached walls of the hospital held nothing but diffused shadows. And the Joker was gone.
Harley leaned her shoulder against the wall, head spinning, inexplicably short of breath.
Oh, fuck, she thought. She couldn’t possibly tell her superiors about this, could she? Let alone Strange. She would get fired for letting him just walk away like that. She would probably get fired for even talking to him – let alone shaking his hand! What the fuck had she just been doing? Oh, god, her life was going to be ruined. She put her hands on her face and inhaled shakily.
I’ll get in trouble.
With that attitude, you will!
A moment of helpless mental acrobatics, followed by an unpleasant one-eighty, jumping the queue: Harley admitted to herself that he had been right. Either she could wail about her misfortune, or she could buck up and… accept it?
…Okay, no. Never mind. Even Harleen Quinzel was not that strong-willed.
But, she supposed to herself, and straightened up and looked around –
No cameras.
Harley bit her lip. She wiped the sweat off of her forehead. She fixed her glasses on her nose and took a step. And another step. And another. And she walked to the elevator, because her legs were too shaky for the stairs. And she pressed the button and waited alone until it reached the ground floor. And she walked past the front desk and out of the building and into the parking lot, and she got in her car.
As she pulled her car out of Arkham’s lot onto the road, she heard the faintest blaring of a security siren in the labyrinthian depths of the hospital. The Joker had gotten out of his room.
She swallowed and kept driving.
On the way home she stopped in a cheap fast-food place to make up for her missing lunch, lab coat left in the car, not having the energy to care about the stain on her shirt. The greasy, unhealthy burger was the best thing she’d eaten in months. Her mother would have told her off for it.
Her mother wasn’t there.
Harley, inexplicably, felt fine.