Chapter Text
It had been the coldest February anyone could remember. Winter had wrapped her loving claws around Gotham, and with every sunrise, she incrementally relaxed her cruel grip.
On the outskirts of the narrows some of the tougher ice had melted around Arkham Asylum, coating the tiled floors of D block with a glossy sheen of stagnant water. Dr Lucy Sharpe was doing her best to make her way through it without looking like a fawn on a frozen pond. Heels skidding on the slimy floor, she used one hand to drag along the filthy, mold ridden wallpaper for balance, and the other to keep a white knuckle grip on a small plastic shopping bag.
She was a small, thin, unremarkable woman, with nothing to recommend herself apart from her ambition, and her willingness to break ethical codes. For the last 6 months she had been shadowing one Dr James Kurt, a true visionary, and rising star in the field of personality psychology. Dr Kurt thought the way she did, that ethics should never be a barrier to progress- though he was a little braver in his application of that sentiment than she would have been without his guidance.
She shivered a little, pulling her stained lab coat tighter around her small frame. The pit of anticipation began to bloom in her stomach as it always did when she visited D wing. You see, most of the costumed, famous rogues were in C wing, where the treatment was awful, but at least it was masquerading as a place giving actual psychiatric care. D wing though? It technically didn’t exist. It was the Wild West of psychiatry, with no board approvals, no ethics, and only one patient bad enough to deserve it.
Surrendering her pitiful morality to that thought she reached her destination: a modern looking door, with a biometric fingerprint lock. It was state of the art, and in stark contrast to its damp and dismal surroundings.
The door slid open to reveal a small boxy room that was the viewing gallery side of a two-way mirror. A short, older man with pronounced eye bags was leaning up against the wall, his fingers drumming out an impatient tattoo.
Dr Kurt sighed and straitened up. “Finally.” He gestured at his watch for emphasis,
“Where the hell have you been, it’s almost midnight?”
She decided to bite her tongue, refraining from asking him how easy he thought it was to buy black hair dye and a fresh bottle of spray tan within the hour at 11pm on a Sunday night.
She did however, pass him the bag with the 2 items inside. He brusquely looked them over, complaining a little that the brand of tan was different but relented. Pushing himself fully off the wall, he hovered his white pass over the receiver on the door, waiting for it to glow a steady green that meant he had been admitted to the other side of the mirror.
The other side was something they were actually both very proud of. Floor to ceiling mirrors lined every surface that was not the soft padded floor they now stood on. Specifically designed so that you were never able to ignore your own reflection, every wall whispered your own image back to you, in an unsettling and never-ending parade of forced vanity.
And there he was. Even after 6 months of working on him, her pulse still fluttered with heated panic every time the potent smell of formaldehyde and burnt sugar wafted over her.
He was curled up like a cat in a sunbeam in the left-hand corner of the room, limp strands of black hair hanging over his eyes. An unfortunate side effect of the less than legal actions of his doctors meant that the old Arkham barber was never able to visit him. They knew his type- a bleeding heart that would go running straight to the police, or God forbid, Batman. So, since Dr Sharpe nor Dr Kurt were brave enough to bring scissors into the room an unruly mess of matted black curls tumbled to his shoulders.
He was clearly fighting the copious amount sedatives they’d put in his evening meal. It was a valiant, and maybe even medically impossible effort, given the dose, but at least it was having some effect. His usually razor-sharp eyes were now glazed, struggling to hold focus on her, which allowed her to haul him up and into a seated position.
It never really got old seeing him like this, all pliant and sleepy. A man so feared and reviled that any self-respecting Gotham Catholic bruised their knees nightly, begging God to cleanse the world of such a blight. But now he was like putty in her hands, a warm rag-doll for her to paint and play with. His eyelids fluttered softly, making him look so pathetic and vulnerable she often forgot who he really was under all their tinkering.
She may as well start with the hair dye. Pulling on a pair of blue surgical gloves from the pocket of her lab coat, she brought her hands up to the top of his head, pushing them into his thick hair. It could do with a clean, she noted, observing the layers of box dye that were never washed out, congealing together with dander and grease. But that’s what 6 months without a shower will get you. She indulged herself a little, running her hands through the greasy curls and smiling a little, secretly hoping for some reaction from him, but there was nothing. His head had slumped against his chest when she first put her hands in his hair, and it hasn’t moved since. Feeling a little hurt she tried again stroking the limp strands out of his face and gently running cold fingers over the burn sites on his tan forehead. She felt a little bad about it honestly- but it wasn’t her fault. She’d never had to prepare anyone for electro-shock therapy before and had no idea his skin was quite that sensitive.
“He’s not a pet, Lucy, get on with it” Dr Kurt interrupted, and it was a shame really, that he had to be here for this. She’d always rather preferred when it was just the two of them and she could really take her time with it.
Chastened, she parted his hair at the roots, honing in what she was looking for- the thin line of green that was growing out from his parting. There was something faintly unnatural about it, like a barrel of toxic waste that will still be malignant long after the world has ended. She ran a self-indulgent finger across the line of hair, eliciting a barely perceptible twitch from the man beneath her. This made her frown slightly, as much as she loved making him squirm that actually wasn’t a good sign. For the sake of the experiment, it was important that he woke up every morning with no evidence of his previous appearance, and it’s a little hard to keep up the facade if you’re mentally present when a woman in her mid 30s is rubbing spray tan into your arms once a week.
It was Dr Kurt’s masterpiece. Most of the Arkham doctors saw the failed experiment with the Barry Dancer show as something horrifically embarrassing. Something to heckle each other in the break room about over cold coffee. They’d managed to make the Joker a drooling idiot for about a week, before it was quickly capitalised on and reversed by the media- ostensibly a failure.
But Dr Kurt saw something nobody else was seeing- that it worked. Those doctors in their cruelty had ultimately succeeded in suppressing the Joker personality, and it was only undone when those useless talk show people actively helped him to regress to the way he was before, ‘for the ratings’.
In his eyes the first set of doctors had made only one mistake: they hadn’t replaced the missing personality with anything. It made him want to tear his hair out in frustration, all that work gone to waste. If you wipe the software on a faulty computer, you need to replace it with something, and the same principle should have been applied here.
Except, he could load that awful computer with something better, something more constructive. With that eureka moment, he saw the book deals flash before his eyes, the documentaries, hell even the medal of freedom. By the end of his initial brainstorming he could practically feel the comforting weight of the Nobel peace prize in his hands.
So, Dr Kurt devised his strategy: he would lock Patient #0801 in a 10x8ft room for as long as it took. He would dye that unseemly green hair black, put brown contact lenses in his eyes and tan his skin until he had erased all traces of the clown persona. He would have no visitors or contact with the outside world, unless it was limited sessions with himself or Dr Sharpe. He would refer to him as John Doe, never Joker, and would have floor to ceiling mirrors put up to reinforce their therapy, serving as a constant reminder that the Joker was not there, only John Doe. A personal hell for the discerning narcissist.
At first it was a complete disaster. On day one he managed to break 3 walls worth of shatterproof mirrors and remove his contacts. All of which were swiftly replaced when he was sedated with his evening meal.
He had laughed himself sick, pounding on the double sided mirror and snarling,
“You can’t trap a clown in a hall of mirrors Doc, I’ve heard this one before!”
By day 4 they had a new problem. Joker had stopped touching his meals, wising up to the strong sedatives they were almost always laced with. Dr Sharpe had been deeply concerned by this, asking Dr Kurt what they would do if he starved himself to death purely out of spite.
“That’s not going to happen Lucy” he smirked, speaking slowly as if to a child. “You think he’d let himself die at the hands of 2 nobody doctors in a side ward in Arkham?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Exactly. The Clown Prince expects to go down in battle with the Dark Knight, and nothing less.”
With a defiant posture, Joker threw the apple and roll they had spiked with sedative against the two-way mirror. After a few minutes, with a weak laugh that spoke to deep exhaustion and hunger he succumbed to a forced sleep anyway. Dr Kurt had had the foresight to spike his drink too, a thin strawberry milkshake to disguise the taste of the sedatives, that Joker had frantically gulped down in a moment of weakness.
Upon waking the next day he had used his elbows and knees to smash the reinforced mirrors, which was no mean feat. Despite being shatterproof, they weren’t perfect and some sharp edges bloomed in the cracks, ripe for what the Joker had planned.
All the doctors could do was watch in mild horror as Joker slit his palms on the jagged glass of the walls. Expression blank, he dug his long and untrimmed nails into the cut, twisting and brutalising it until he had 2 small wells of blood at his disposal. Dipping a shaky tan finger into the bloody mess he slowly dragged it across his lips, repeating the action until his mouth was a saturated gash of reddish brown.
It was making Dr Sharpe feel a little sick. Safe behind the mirror, she made a few short notes about how this behaviour could be indicative of self-harm as a form of regulation in the absence of more complex stimuli. Until he started painting his signature smile. Then she crossed out the previous line with a frustrated sigh before conceding they still had a long way to go.
After that incident, he had been kept regularly sedated, receiving most of his nutrition through IV’s, which was getting increasingly difficult due to frequent vein collapses. He had also been kept in a straight jacket semi-permanently, with them seeing no benefit in full freedom of movement until he displayed significant improvement, (and it was becoming too expensive to keep replacing the mirrors).
With a shake of her head, Dr Sharpe returned to her present task. She hooked a finger under Joker’s tan chin, raising it until the back of his head hit the cold surface of the mirror with a soft thud. His eyes being open when they had first entered the room was impressive enough, but he really should’ve been long gone by now. That twitch had unsettled her far more than she would’ve liked to admit.
“John Doe?” she asked softly, “can you hear me?”
Nothing.
She brushed his hair out of his face, gently tucking it behind his ears.
He looked peaceful, serene, and there was no emotion on his face, so clearly the Propofol was doing something.
“Is something wrong?” The voice of Dr Kurt probed from somewhere above her head.
Maybe it was involuntary, she mused. No need to look incompetent in front of James.
“No” she squeaked, rushing in to reassure him, “I think he might be gaining a tolerance to the anaesthetic though, I swear I gave him a concentrated dose earlier, but it’s like he takes longer to go out every day.”
“Fine” he conceded, “we can work something out with the lab.”
He raked a hand roughly over his ashen face, rubbing at his eyes with a groan.
“Do you think you can finish up alone tonight Lu?, I think my caffeine patch ran out.”
Yes, Finally, having James loom over her was clearly throwing her off, so after saying her goodbyes, he handed her plastic shopping bag back to her and left the way he came.
Giving her patient a quick once over she noticed some patchiness on his neck, a ghostly white emanating through the false layer of bronze. It distracted her enough that she forgot all about fixing his hair and moved straight to the main course.
Putting her hand on his padded shoulders she rolled the limp man forward until he gently slumped onto her, his head rolling into the crook of her neck.
The warmth and weight of his body was like a balm to her frazzled humdrum existence after a long day. Something about a force of primordial chaos placidly breathing into her neck sent pleasant shivers down her spine. It felt electric, but safe, like holding a gun with no bullets up to your temple.
Allowing herself to fully relax, she nuzzled into him, forcing straight mousy brown hair to tangle into his matted black locks. His head lolled to the right, away from her advances, and a pang of hurt radiated through her, even if logically she knew he was unconscious and it was only the work of gravity.
With a sigh she slid her arms around him, and craned her neck over his shoulder to undo the straps of the straight jacket that was swamping his thin frame.
After a brief struggle due to their slightly awkward position the straps were all free. Disentangling herself she pulled it all the way off over his head, and he softly slumped back against the mirror.
Gently humming to herself she turned and dropped the jacket onto the padded floor with a clunk and moved to pick up the brand new bottle of tan.
There was a small sound behind her, a kind of muffled crinkle. She had all but seconds for confusion to metamorphose into full on terror, her mouth opening into a scream that never came to fruition as the carrier bag enveloped her head and was pulled taught around her neck.
She couldn’t speak. All she could hear was the deafening roar of her own blood pounding in her ears, her terror taking her to a place of frantic, bestial survival.
She desperately tried to claw at the bag, her painted talons trying to rip through the plastic that was cutting off her air.
Before she so much as touched the bag though an arm as inflexible as wrought iron wrapped around her middle, trapping both her arms, doomed to uselessly writhe at her sides.
The tan arm also brought her into contact with her assailant, who was leveraging her body against his in order to pull both the bag and his own arm tighter. What had felt warm and pliant only moments ago was now a solid wall of ice, glacial and unfeeling but disturbingly alive.
She began to cry, painful tears smearing up the plastic of the bag making it foggy with evidence of her agonising realisation.
She was going to die.
Frantically her brain threw out a final solution, just as the lack of oxygen was beginning to create hazy black spots in her limited vision.
She buckled her legs, causing her body to become a dead weight. Not expecting the sudden imbalance, her attacker’s grip slipped, the bag momentarily choking her even tighter for a second as the distance between them widened, before it slid out of his cruel hand with a snap.
Cool oxygen flooded her deprived brain, and she gasped, clutching at her abused throat. Not even looking behind her, she scrambled to the door, her vision tunnelling on her only hope of survival.
She didn’t make it very far.
An unseen hand locked around her ankle like a vice, effortlessly reeling her in like a minnow on a line.
Images of her life passed before her eyes. Her graduation. Her first kiss. When her father taught her how to skate on that frozen lake near her cousins house in Alaska. She would probably never see her father again, a voice in her head reminded her. Her agonising wails only became louder, her pretty face now a mess of ruined mascara and fresh tears. It just wasn’t fair, she was a good doctor, all she’d ever done was try to help this wretched creature and this is how he repaid her.
The grip on her ankle vanished suddenly, but the pressure returned almost instantly when a brutal hand violently twisted its way into her hair, roughly pulling her up to her knees.
Her scalp was on fire, pulsing in waves of prickly agony. She did her best to claw at the hand holding her, in a last ditch attempt to free herself.
The lack of oxygen combined with the pain had made her hysterical, her cracked sobs clawing their way out of her throat with every breath.
“Quiet” a voice slurred out from behind her, rough from lack of use.
It was the first vocalisation she’d heard from him for at least a month, and hearing him communicate encouraged her panicked mind to test how much real progress they had made these last 6 months.
“John Doe, I need you to let go of me now” she rasped with a veneer of professionalism, still frantically pulling at his wrist.
“John?” a small voice quieried, but crucially, the grip on her hair slackened a touch.
“Yes!” She gasped, blatant relief colouring her ruined voice. “It’s Lucy, you know me, I’ve been helping you!”
The grip on her hair loosened entirely and she dropped back onto all fours, her sweaty palms pressing into the rough fabric of the padded floor. She loosed a stuttering breath, and used the sleeve of her lab coat to blot some of the sweat from her face, staining it orange with her makeup.
After recovering for a second she turned to face him. He was sitting cross legged, head against the mirror, looking deeply distressed. His eyes were wide open, but blank, absent, almost staring through her.
Her heart ached. He was still her John Doe then. Shuffling over to him she placed a shaky hand on his face, softly brushing some of his thick hair out out of his eyes.
“It’s ok baby” she whispered fondly, tentatively stroking a thumb across his hollow cheek.
She wasn’t quite sure what went wrong in those next few moments.
In a split second his eyes almost illuminated, flashing back to life with a malice and intelligence she hadn’t seen in months. An aura of hatred glowed around him like a halo, and his presence seemed to suck all the air out of the room.
With a speed she couldn’t have matched even on her best day his hand knotted back into her thin hair, and the last thing she would ever hear was the sickening crack of her own skull fracturing against the cool glass of the mirror.
***
He lost track of time a bit, a small part of his shattered psyche finding the motion repetitive enough to be soothing.
However many times he slammed the disintigrating flesh into the mirror it wasn’t enough. It was only when the clump of hair he was holding was no longer identifiable as brown, so coated was it in sticky redness and completely detached from the white shine of her skull that he let it flop onto the padded floor.
There was red everywhere. That tangy smell of iron wrapped around him like a warm blanket, reminding him of better times that teasingly slipped through his fingers whenever he tried to draw them into his mind.
He was really shaking now, the vibrations of it rattling up his spine as his vision locked onto the macabre scene before him.
The thing on the floor was barely identifiable as a person. What had once served as a head now looked like a pumpkin that had been run over by a truck leaking ketchup.
Ketchup.
When was the last time he had a burger and fries? Feels like forever. He trawled his mind, briefly recalling the greasy deliciousness that was Marco’s Pizzeria. He remembered laughing himself sick over the total nonsense that was a pizzeria that did awful pizza but great burgers.
He dipped a tentative finger into the smashed pumpkin, scooping out a blob of the ketchup and depositing it on his parched tongue. His face crumpled a bit on instinct, the ketchup tasted weirdly like iron and was way too thin, what kinda criminal waters down ketchup? He should probably just go to Marco’s instead.
Seemingly on autopilot, he could see his hands moving. He reached into the sodden lab coat and fished out the pass card, the ketchup on his hands sliding wetly against the shiny white plastic.
The adrenaline that had been pumping through his collapsed veins was fading fast, and standing took an inhuman amount of effort, his shaky legs barely supporting his weight.
After one final pathetic kick to the lumpy red bundle on the floor he began to shuffle slowly to the door.
With the card, the first door proved no great challenge, although he did have to hobble back to collect a finger from the thing on the floor to get through the second door.
The rest of it was muscle memory. He didn’t know why exactly but in his bones he just knew the way out of this strange place, the twisting corridors lovingly guiding him out, sliding and changing to accommodate their prince.
With one final shove from a bony shoulder the exit door of a disused maintenance hallway gave out. He was free. The chilled smoky air whipped around him, luring him back into the adoring embrace of the city.
His consciousness felt muted and blurry, like he was right back in the old amniotic fluid . A kaleidoscope of blurry lights passed across his vision, yellows, reds, the occasional green, and it was like he was watching it all through the curved glass of an old diving suit.
Thinking felt like wading through strawberry gum, all syrupy, sweet and sticky, choking the life out of any panic or reason. He just couldn’t think, why couldn’t he think?
He snaked a hand into his thick hair, tugging roughly at the oily, matted strands, trying to pull the thoughts out manually, or at least unstick some of the gum. He tightened his grip until tears nipped at his eyes, but the pain didn’t even ground him, it just added to the ever-increasing cloud of dense fog.
Pointless. He went to remove his hands from his hair, bringing a clump of black hairs with them, and instinctively thought to appraise his own hands on their way back down. Big mistake- he felt ill just to look at them. He could see the healthy-looking tan, the ketchup, the short, unpainted nails, and cracked dry skin, and felt nothing but nausea and a desperate need to get away from those hands.
So, he tried. He walked for hours, but wherever he walked, the man walked with him. Those beige hands stalked his every move, and the man with the brown eyes and black beard stared at him with those terrifying brown eyes every time he caught his reflection in the windows of a passing store.
It was unbearable, but the man couldn’t follow him forever, if he just kept walking, he was certain he would lose him eventually.
He paced around for what felt like hours, frantically ducking into side streets and scrambling over wire fences to avoid places he felt would have too many people.
He’d tried to blinker his vision after the first few agonising sightings of the man, but doing that required his hands. So the best he could do was to just stare straight ahead, and keep moving forward.
With a cold slap, he realised he’d walked right into a freezing puddle, and absentmindedly wondered where the hell his slippers were, he was sure he’d been wearing some when he left wherever he was before.
He shifted a tan foot, stirring up the silt and filth in the puddle. His orange pants were soaking up the foul water, forming 2 dark rings around his ankles, which would no doubt make his walk even more uncomfortable in the hours to come. In a way he felt a bit of kinship with the small disgusting bit of sewage, it was so muddy he couldn’t see the man with the beard in it, which meant it was the only reflective surface in the narrows that hadn’t betrayed him.
Even so, he wanted it gone, it took him away from the nice fuzzy place. Dragging his feet apart he took a rather ambitious jump into the air, and pounded both feet back into the small brown pool with a loud slap. The impact splattered the foul liquid up his legs and across the sidewalk, but it wasn’t enough. He jumped again, and again, little grunts of exertion eventually filling the air, harmonizing with the wet thwack of his numb feet.
After a while he had that tingly feeling on the back of his neck, that innate 6th sense that he was being watched, and he was right. A strikingly tall, thin man in a long beige trench coat was watching him very intently, his pale eyes bulging out of his skull at the spectacle.
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell him that staring was rude, but the words never reached his throat. They stayed right at the back of his head, fluttering just out of reach like a spectral moth, leaving holes in the delicate fabric of his mind.
Holey his mind may be, but some part of him was supplying him information. For instance, no Gothamite would have seen the infamous orange glow of an Arkham jumpsuit and done anything other than mind their own business or subtly call the cops. So, this guy must be from out of town, and a small voice purred from the back of his mind, telling him that was just perfect.
His id-like mind gave the signal and his body reacted. With a speed and strength the man was not anticipating, he snatched his wrist with an iron grip, and pulled him into the nearby alley, like two teenagers sneaking off to canoodle.
The man made no real attempt to struggle, short of a very token resistance in his opinion, and a note of disappointment crept up his back.
He swung the man against the wall in a satisfying arc, only letting go of his wrist at the last moment, so he thudded against the wall with the accuracy of a thrown shotput.
The sweet terror in the man’s pale eyes sang to his very soul. A glow of sadistic satisfaction lit up his synapses in the anticipation of what came next.
“I like your coat, mister” he heard himself say in a raspy hiss.
He slinked over to the man, pushing him back against the wall and holding him there, before thumbing the sandy lapel- nice fabric, expensive.
“Then take it, whatever you want.” The man replied, frantically sliding the coat off his lanky frame with no attention paid to the biting cold.
The man hurriedly held it out, gesturing for him to take it. He slowly wrapped it around himself, only just managing to coordinate his unruly arms into the sleeves. He hadn’t realised how cold it was until he felt the residual warmth from the coat warm the surface of his skin, and he luxuriated in the feeling for a second, his eyes fluttering shut.
“Is that blood?”
His momentary peace was shattered by the man’s panicked whisper, and he whipped his head around, looking around in genuine confusion.
“Where?”
The man looked at him with acute concern, “on your hands?…and everywhere?” He asked, with all the patience of a concerned adult speaking down to a child.
“No, that’s ketchup” he said slowly and with a degree of certainty. There really were some weird people you could meet on the streets, this guy was crazy.
“Blood” he snickered to himself, that’s just nuts.
Before long the snickering had disintegrated into a cackle and then a laugh so loud and raucous it startled all the pigeons in a 5 mile radius, and another creature, patiently waiting in the dark. The signature laugh of Gotham’s apex predator bounced around the twisting alleyways, as it always had.
He was finding it a little hard to breathe, but the laughter wouldn’t leave him. Even as the tears streamed down his face, and his knees buckled, all he could do was laugh and laugh.
Eventually the lack of oxygen reached his head, and with the gravel biting into the soft, stinging flesh of his palms, he slumped onto all fours and began to wretch, a kind of feverish desperation clawing at his throat.
Nothing came up save a few tepid strands of pink spit, his stomach so thoroughly empty.
He was really hungry.
Sighing, he pushed himself back up onto his haunches, pulling the coat tighter around himself.
“Do you know where Marco’s pizzeria is?”
The tall man was still cowering against the wall, frozen in a state of terror at the strange outburst and even stranger recovery he had just witnessed.
“I’m not from around here, I have no idea.” He whispered, words partially lost to the wind.
But it didn’t matter. At that moment the world seemed to shift a little, the wind changing direction as a powerful entity stepped into the rancid alleyway.
“Batman.” he heard himself whine, a sense of embarrassingly bone deep relief overtaking him. Batman would fix this.
The Bat seemed taken aback for a moment, those milky white eyes narrowing in confusion at the strange sight before him.
“Joker?” He rumbled, wasting no time in stalking forward and fisting a hand in the front of his orange jumpsuit, before effortlessly raising him back onto his feet.
“Joker? I hardly know her” he wheezed breathlessly, the presence of the Bat bringing the smallest bit of equilibrium to his injured mind.
The gauntlet never leaving his jumpsuit, he was held firmly in place while the Bat directed his searchlight gaze onto the guy who had no coat on. They were speaking quickly, the man’s panicked whisper bumping up against the Bat’s steady rumble, and he could make out none of it.
He was sure at some point the Bat had begun to ask him something, even going as far as to roughly shake him to punctuate whatever question was being posed. But he couldn’t answer even if he wanted to, he was beginning to fade. The bone deep relief was translating into a slow loss of consciousness, the wind suddenly feeling so much less cold than it had a moment ago.
So, with a final weak giggle, he closed his eyes and for the first time in months, he succumbed willingly to the darkness.