The Last Laugh

It was Thursday, and Harleen sat anxiously in her room. One day a week, Jack would come to visit her, and that day was today. She was sitting on her bed calmly, starring at the wall with anticipation etched all across her face. She had grown very fond of Mr. Ryder, and found that she could tell him anything, and he would not judge her. That was one of the things she feared the most; that no one would ever trust her again. Not after what she had done.

The door opened and Harleen jumped up. Her usual, Hank, came in holding up her normal straight jacket.

“Hey there, Ms. Quinzel,” he asked her, as if they were old friends.

“Bonjour, Hank,” Harleen answered happily. “How’s the fam?”

“Francy’s good, but you know Paul,” he answered with a chuckle. The faculty at Arkham was not allowed to share any information about their private lives to patients, so Hank and Harleen were not talking about Hank’s actual family, but his friends who also worked at Arkham. Francis worked in the recreational room, while Paul was also a patient attendant, just as Hank was.

Harleen laughed along with him, and if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought the two were going out to lunch together, having a friendly chat about their lives, and not stuck inside an old asylum full of crazy people. It was not as if Hank was completely oblivious to what she had done; when he first met her, he was terrified out of his mind. Who wouldn’t be? But over the past month, the two had made a silent pact with each other. “You don’t hurt me, and I won’t hurt you.” And it slowly grew to a type of friendship. More like acquaintances, but you get the idea.

The door to the interrogating room opened, and Jack was sitting in his normal chair, his back to the woman and her escort. As soon as he heard her enter the room, he smiled to himself and stood up, like a proper gentlemen would, despite the fact that Harleen was a murdering psychopath.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Quinzel,” he greeted as they sat down, and she nodded her head.

“So what’s it today, Jacky?” she asked him, referring to today’s interview. “My childhood, his childhood, my favorite color?”

She still refused to say the Joker’s name.

“Your favorite color is red,” Jack told her, then his face turned red. She had never told him her favorite color. “Ahem, well, no. Hehe, the thing is, the story is complete.”

“Does that mean…” Harleen’s voice trailed off, but Jack knew exactly what she was thinking. Freedom.

“Not today, but soon,” he said, almost guiltily. He wanted her out of there just as much as she did. He, for his own reasons. “I have been meeting with Dr. Arkham for the past couple of days, and he is rather reluctant to let you back out, regardless of all of the progress you have made. He just does not think that the public would approve of letting you out after a month.”

“If he’s listening to the public,” she began, her eyes trailing to the ground. “Then he’ll never let me out. The public is so naïve, they actually think that BATMAN killed Dent. No, Batsy wouldn’t do that. Mr. J said that he-”

She put her hand up to her mouth, refraining herself from saying anything further.

“Mr. J?” Jack asked curiously. “Are you referring to, er, him[i/]?”

“I think we’re done for today,” Harleen said abruptly, standing up.

“But we haven’t even been here five minutes-”

“We’re done.”

Judging by the look on her face, Jack was not willing to argue with her.

********

Harleen sat on the green, mildew-smelling couch in the recreational room, mindlessly pulling at a strand of her blond hair. She was thinking about the past, before the whole Joker mess, and was starting to realize that she was never truly good to begin with. Having slept her way through college and depending on money from both her parents and her gymnastics career (which she had been neglecting for the past couple of months), she found she had never done anything that she was proud of.

“Hey blondie,” a woman called out as she entered the room.

Harleen turned around and smiled at her only female friend, Pamela Isley. She faced the TV again, and waited for the ‘smack,’ indicating that the guard had once again tried to grope Pam. She sat down next to Harleen, grumbling.

“He’ll never learn, will he, Red?” she giggled, shaking her head.

“Incompetent morons,” Pam mumbled angrily, her messy and unkempt red hair dangling in front of her face. “And every single one of my complaints to Dr. Bartholomew have gone unanswered. Stupid, sexist pigs!”

“I thought only ‘mistreatment to the Earth’s environment’ made you this angry,” Harleen grinned, putting up air quotes.

“Sometimes I think they’re one in the same,” Pam sighed.

Pamela was tall, slender, and beautiful, with bright orange hair. She adored the Earth and all of her natural beauties; which lead to the reason that she was thrown into Arkham. She had tried to stop a bulldozer from knocking down a protected rainforest and was sent to the hospital. The doctors believed that she was crazy, seeing that it wasn’t her only attempt to stop the destruction of the planet’s natural biomes, and landed in the nuthouse.

“So what’re we going to do today, Red?” Harleen asked, standing up and stretching. “Checkers? Charades? Tag-“

“PUT DOWN THAT PLANT!” Pam screamed out suddenly, pointing intensely at one of the patients who was attempting to eat one of the flowers from the pots that stood in the window.

The man immediately spit it out from his mouth and went on a tangent about how aliens were going to take over his dog.

Pam shivered and pulled herself back into the calm, collected woman that Harleen had known her to be.

“Ya know, outbursts like that are the reasons why they keep denying your parole,” Harleen pointed out, scratching her nose.

“Is that so?” Pam said sarcastically. “I thought it was because the men at this place are disgusting pigs. Well most men. There is one that seems to have caught your attention, Harleen.”

She turned her head playfully towards her friend, smirking.

“Not this again...” Harley mumbled, grabbing a pillow and pulling it to her face.

“I know you like him,” Pamela continued, lounging back onto the couch. “You never stop talking about him, and you truly believe that he has ‘cured’ you. You have a crush on Mr. Ryder.”

“Do not!” Harleen yelled playfully, her red cheeks giving her away. Knowing that she had blown her cover, she threw the pillow at Pam.

“Be careful,” Pam said, seriously. “You remember what happened last time.”

Right on cue, the TV flashed, and a breaking news story appeared on the screen, catching both of the girl’s attentions. One of the news reporters was on the screen, with the words “Joker Finally Captured” flashing at the bottom of the screen.

Harleen turned pale.

“I have fortunate news for the people of Gotham,” the newscaster informed his audience happily. “The notorious Joker has once again been captured and is going to be sent back to Arkham Asylum under the most intense security possible. It appears that Batman, known murderer of District Attorney Harvey Dent and numerous others, had left The Joker dangling off the side of a building, leading many curious officials to wonder why he had killed Dent, and not this mass-murdering psychopath that had attempted to reveal Batman’s true identity, and even turned Dr. Harleen Quinzel into a murderer as well. Full details will be released at the press conference-”

Pamela had shut the TV off and gazed down at her friend worriedly. Harleen stared at the wall blankly.

“Harleen?” Pam asked quietly, slowly edging closer to the girl on the couch. She didn’t respond. “Harley?”

Slowly, Harleen’s head turned towards her friend. And at first nothing happened; they continued to stare at each other while the other patients in the room continued doing their normal, well, normal for them, routines.

And then Harleen started screaming. Not a big freak out scream, nor a terrified scream, but a wild and disturbing one. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell onto the old, blue carpet on the ground, twisting and turning in fidgety messes. Pamela didn’t know what to do. The last thing she wanted to do was to call the guard over, the same guard who had groped her not five minutes ago. But Harleen was her friend, and Pamela only knew how to treat plants, not people. She swallowed her pride and pounded on the door, trying to gain the guard’s attention. He was sitting in the corner, reading some dirty magazine, when he looked up and finally saw her through the little window. He cursed under his breath and made his way over to the fiery redhead, hoping that it was something important. He knew it was as soon as he heard the painful, ear-splitting screams.

********

“What happened, Bartholomew?” Dr. Leland practically screamed at the older doctor, causing him to cringe slightly.

“Well, I, I uh, I am not entirely sure,” he began to mumble incoherently, flipping through his little manila folder as if the answer were in there.

Their white shoes squeaked on the newly cleaned floors.

“She was in the recreational room with Ms. Isley, the patient from room 206,” he began, reading the report the one guard had given him. “And she just started to have this panic attack. No one seems to know what had happened, and Ms. Isley is too paralyzed to tell us any more information.”

“I need to see her immediately,” Dr. Leland, growled at him and his lack of knowledge on the situation. She grabbed the manila folder out of his hand, causing a second one to cascade to the floor.

Dr. Bartholomew gasped as the two of them reached out to get it at the same time, but Leland, being the younger and much quicker of the two, managed to take the folder first.

“Here you go, doctor,” Leland began, handing the document to the old doctor, but stopped, for she spotted the name at the top. “The Joker. Damn it, Bartholomew!”

She cursed at him and flew down the hallway to her office with the old man trailing behind her.

“The Joker is returning to Arkham,” she yelled at him, turning on her computer and typing a way like a teenager with a texting phone. “Today.”

“Yes, he is,” Bartholomew began nervously, rubbing his bald spot self-consciously. He knew exactly where she was going with this.

“And is there not a television in the recreational room?” she half-asked half-barked at him, who responded with a small nod. “She saw that he was going to come back to Arkham, and so she had a panic attack.”

Dr. Leland quickly hit enter on the keyboard, and charged down the hallway again, this time in the opposite direction.

“We need to have her moved immediately-” she started to say, but was interrupted by loud, menacing and maniacal laughter coming from the lower floor. The two stopped and listened intently, following the brouhaha as it slowly moved towards the elevator, and up to the floor where they currently resided in. The same floor that Harleen Quinzel was currently located in.

********

Harleen was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, not a single emotion being shown because of how medicated she was. It was the only way that the doctors were able to calm her down.

In her mind, she was screaming angrily and, although she would never admit it, fearfully. She was afraid that he was coming back for her. A month had passed since Harleen had been locked up inside the dark, dingy walls of Arkham Asylum, and other than the flower she had received on her first night, she had not heard anything from the Joker. Sure, she had seen him on the television and in newspapers in the recreational room at the asylum, but they were mainly telling people to be on the lookout for him. Obviously, the Joker hadn’t made his move yet. Harley was unsure if he was going to make it anytime soon. If she knew the joker like she thought she did, he wouldn’t.

Even so, Harleen wasn’t ready to face him. Not yet.

Not after all the progress that she had made.

Not after she was finally returning to her “normal” life.

Not after she had finally found someone to replace the grinning menace.

Harleen began wondering what Jack was going to think about this, what he was going to say. Was he going to get her out sooner than expected?

She heard footsteps outside of her door, and she expected them to continue on their way down the hallway, but this time, they stopped. Stopped right in front of her room. Her heart began to pound faster in her chest, but she was unsure if this was because she was scared as hell, or because of all the medication the doctors had given her.

The minutes ticked away, and she heard another door open. Harleen assumed that it was the room across from hers, indicating that there was a new patient in the asylum; the room had been vacated only a week before. She slowly let her breath out, in relief. For a second, she truly believed that it was the Joker, coming to get her.

Harleen giggled for a second. It was a dead, slow giggle, with no real humor in it. The giggle grew louder until it turned into a full-fledge maniacal and creepy laughing fit.

This was soon followed by an evil laugh, much deeper, much darker, and much more familiar, than Harley’s.

Her eyes grew wide as the laugh began to echo throughout the walls of Arkham. Throughout her small, empty, white room.

Throughout Harleen’s swirling mind.

And Harleen began screaming once more, despite her heavy medication.

He was here. He was back. Whether for her or not, she didn’t care. She just knew she had to get out of there as soon as possible.