Crash and Burn, ch. 2 (part one): First, do no harm
Title: Crash and Burn
Chapter Summary: The Joker gets a visit from the new director of Arkham Asylum, and Harley plots her revenge with a little help from an old mentor.
Disclaimer: Batman, Scarecrow, Joker and Harley Quinn are the property of DC Comics, and Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are the property of Warner Bros. Inc. I'm not making any money off of this story.
Warnings (this chapter): Mentions of masochism
Characters: Joker, Harley Quinn, Scarecrow, OC
It had been two days since he had taken a risk and made an unasked for leap in their relationship, two days of being sedated into a amorphous puddle of drool, and the Joker was beginning to worry that his lovely Harley-kins was just not going to call him back.
Just as those feelings of abandonment were really starting to get to him, he heard the door to his new padded high-security cell depressurize, and he lolled his head forward to see who was coming in, truly in too much of a stupor this time to make any grander gestures of welcome.
A balding man in his late fifties entered the room, his flint-sharp, calculating blue eyes fixing on the Joker as if he wanted to peel him open and study his insides. Joker wished he would. Then maybe he could find out where all these delightful visions were coming from.
He cackled with delight when dozens of purple bats followed his new visitor-Dr. Harold Wells, the new director of Arkham-into his cell. When they began to dive at his head, he swatted at them playfully and tried to snatch them out of the air, but he was always just too slow to catch them because his arms felt strangely heavy.
“Batsbatsbatsbatsbats,” he said gleefully.
Wells narrowed his eyes.
“You must be having an adverse reaction to the new sedative,” he said with a conspicuous lack of concern. He approached the Joker cautiously and put two fingers on his neck to feel his pulse, wrinkling his nose with distaste as if he was being forced to touch a pile of dung and not a person. After what the Joker judged to be about ten seconds, he took his hand away and wiped it on his white physician’s coat.
Leper, a voice in his head hissed, sounding all growly and low like Batman’s, and his eyes rolled back in pleasure, basking in the accusation. Yes, he was a leper, someone who made even doctors who worked with the criminally insane for a living writhe with carefully repressed fear. How, hmmm, delicious.
“Your heart-rate is normal, so you’re most likely safe from the more serious side-effects. Nonetheless, I’m going to have to put you under constant supervision until the Temazepam metabolizes out of your system (1). I don’t want anything to happen to you due to my negligence,” his expression darkened, “no matter how much you deserve to die.”
The doctor’s voice trembled slightly with rage, though he tried to hide it. The Joker grinned lazily.
“Who’d I kill, doc?”
“I don’t know what you’re-”
“Wife? Kids? D’ya miss tuckin’ ‘em in at night?”
Wells made a wordless, animal cry somewhere between a growl and a sob, and slammed him back in his cot. His shaking, sweaty hands closed like a vice around his throat, and Joker gave a wheezing laugh as his oxygen supply was cut off.
“You deserve to die in the most unremarkable, quiet way possible, and I know that would be the worst punishment for someone like you. To just fade away and be forgotten by the world,” he snarled, and Joker felt a moment of unease as he held the man’s knowing stare before reason returned to him. He wouldn’t ever be forgotten by his Batman, his city. He’d made too much of an explosive entrance into their lives, haha.
The doctor shuddered, and he let go of the Joker’s neck reluctantly, struggling to control himself even as tears of rage streamed down his face. Joker sighed. Self-control. How boring. Human nature seemed determined to keep disappointing him. “I…I can’t kill you. It’s not my right to kill you. Coming from me, vengeance would just be for my loss. It wouldn’t give your victims a chance to get back what you stole from them. The chance to grow up, get married, become a veterinarian or,” he laughed a little in fond remembrance, and it was obvious to the Joker that he was now imagining a specific person, “the first female president.”
Something in his mind clicked at the ‘first female president’ thing. That was what all little girls said they were going to be around the first grade, when their teachers liked to give them delusions of grandeur by telling even the stupidest kids that they could be anything. Hmm, so Wells blamed him for the death of a little tyke? Joker didn’t target children-they weren’t what you would really call challenging, as far as opponents went-but sometimes they did get caught in the crossfire, or on a ferry where they had to depend on their stupid parents to decide their fate. Anyway, in his humble opinion, people too spineless to kill a couple of convicts in order to save their children’s lives would have only had themselves to blame if they’d died.
“You, hahaha…tell yourself it’s about justice…‘cause you don’t have the balls to avenge your own daughter,” he laughed, sensing that Wells was just like the parents on the ferry, too held back by arbitrary ideas about justice to save their own families. He had accepted his inability to get revenge on his daughter’s murderer, not because he genuinely believed that vengeance was wrong, but because he couldn’t imagine himself becoming a proverbial Cain, an outcaste of society’s numbing hold. Coward. He would never know what it was like to feel truly alive.
Wells blanched and flushed at the same time-quite the feat, in the Joker’s humble opinion.
“I would take your words more to heart if I thought you actually understood anything about justice,” he said, his voice trembling, lifeless. “Although I don’t know if I can believe in justice as I thought it was, anymore. If there was any justice, my innocent six-year-old daughter wouldn’t have been gunned down by a madman who decided to shoot into the middle of a busy street! I doubt my wife will ever recover from losing Mara, but you-you’ll never understand what that feels like, will you?”
The Joker stayed silent, as this was obviously a rhetorical question. Besides, some people just wanted to give you all kinds of valuable information without any prodding, or, you know, torture, and who was he to discourage such helpful behavior?
“If I hadn’t spent thirty years of my life trying to help people like you, if it wasn’t physically ingrained in me to save people’s lives instead of take them, I would kill you this second. As it is, I just…can’t. But I’m not about to deny anyone who does want revenge, and I know at least one person who deserves it as much as I do. You do remember Dr. Quinzel, don’t you? The woman you tried to rape, when she was the only one here who actually wanted to help you.” Wells’ shoulders were slumped, his eyes full of the collapsing despair of a man who was slowly dying of grief, his convictions falling to pieces one by one. The Joker had seen this before, although Wells bore the change more quietly than Harvey Dent had. “She persuaded Dr. Cr-Scarecrow to give her the formula to his toxin for this little experiment. Evidently he wants to see its effects on you, too. They’re making it as we speak.”
It took a few seconds for Dr. Wells’ words to fully register with his drug-fogged mind, but when it did, he whooped with laughter. Oh, he’d been right; there was a little more to Dr. Harley than met the eye. He hadn’t pegged her as a fellow sadomasochist, but then, he did have a talent for bringing out the best in people.
“Oh, whenshecomin? Whenshe coming?! Always up…for a good…scream.”
The doctor’s lip curled with disgust.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure Dr. Quinzel will give you plenty to scream about, but not in the way you want. Fear toxin isn’t something even a masochist can enjoy.”