Chapter Text
Arkham Asylum reeked with the smell of sweat, mold, piss, and the sterile scent of a hospital. Dr. Quinzel still had to fight off the odor with a hand over the lower half of her face despite having entered the building once before at her interview. Perhaps it was the sort of smell one could never acclimate to; it set loose a pang of compassion toward the patients. To live like this all the time. The building itself was up to Gotham’s loose health codes. She straightened her pencil skirt when Dr. Leland approached.
“Dr. Quinzel.” The older woman extended her hand to shake. “Good to see you again.”
“Harleen, please.” She obliged, taking her hand in hers. “Sorry, my hands sweat when I’m nervous.”
Leland wiped her hand on her lab coat and gestured with a sweep of her arm for Harleen to join her. “First day jitters, or fear of the inmates?”
“Even if they’re the worst of the worst, criminals and killers, I’m going to treat them as patients, not prisoners, or we’ll never get anywhere.”
“You aren’t the first person to go at it with that view point. You’ll soon see that that’s an admiral trait, but easily abused. You’ll get used to the way things work around here soon enough.”
Harleen chewed her cheek, offended that her resolve was up to questioning. “What will I be tasked with today?”
“It’s a little soon to shadow me right away. As discussed, you’re being primed to take over some of our most storied inmates.”
“So you can retire, correct?” Harleen kept her mind on annunciating her words in a clear, concise manner.
“Possibly. I might stay on at an administrative level.”
“Whatever your choice, it’s an honor to work under you.”
“You’re the first person to say that,” the older woman chuckled. “You come highly recommended from Gotham University, so you’ll find the files in your office are of our unsavory crowd. We give our interns a month-long trial period to be sure they’re up to snuff, so they can decide if they want to work here at all. It’s a job that affects the minds of not just the inmates, but the ones administering treatments and therapy.”
“I was under the impression that you all are desperate to keep people aboard.”
“We are. But we don’t want to hire just anyone to handle rehabilitation of these inmates. If you can’t hack it, we offer you lesser cases, or we allow you to part ways with a recommendation to other opportunities.”
“Oddly…benevolent, I guess.”
“You won’t be handling the more brutish lot – Waylon Jones, Victor Zsasz, et cetera – the ones who require physical restraint or full lockdown. They don’t tend to take to therapy much at all. We simply contain them and keep them as tranquilized as possible.”
“If they’re tranquilized, doesn’t that mean they’re not a threat?”
She ominously shook her head.
Harleen’s office was hardly a broom closet. Her desk was just over the size of the average college student’s, had a single window overlooking a dry patch of dirt without much else to look at, and two chairs. She’d learned during onboarding that eventually she would have one-on-one sessions in her office, a thought that intimidated her until she learned about what the patients wore as precaution. Part electric collar, part inhibitor with expensive Wayne Tech, it housed an embedded needle of a constant low dose tranquilizer.
Joker. Riddler. Poison Ivy. Two-Face. Scarecrow. Clock King. Mr. Freeze. Harleen’s lips twitched just the slightest bit upward, and she pulled out a weathered composition notebook, notes that she kept away from prying eyes. Inside were notes more detailed than the files in manila folders before her, worked on for years, waiting for the day she prayed would come. The day she’d worked toward the moment the accident happened, disqualifying her from graduating with an athletic scholarship. Most classmates in Gotham University worked hard so they wouldn’t end up in Arkham – Harleen was so determined to be assigned in the decrepit asylum that she’d slept with a professor with the sole purpose of assuring that goal.
Harleen did always have a thing for extreme personalities.
She smiled at the treasure trove of information, face positively aglow, and set in with ferocious determination to update her notes.
X
Something in addition to Harleen’s heart throbbed as she was escorted across the row of the peculiar, strange, tantalizing host of oddfellows. As one of the only women on staff in the building – and exceedingly the most attractive – she caught the eye of every patient she strode past, even the female ones.
“Don’t worry about them, doc. One wrong move and it’s the shocker.” One of the guards grunted, patting a hand over the taser-baton on his hip. He cast disgusted glances at the people he was tasked to simultaneously keep the staff safe, and consequently keep the inmates safe from one another. Harleen didn’t like that, but she swallowed back her indignance. “Strange that you want to familiarize yourself with the patients this way, doc.”
“I thought it would take away some of the intimidation of meeting them through sessions first. So I can see them as human,” the doctor partially lied.
It was like she was walking through a grocery store, picking at produce and examining each piece in the search of the perfect, juiciest apple. The problem simply was that most of them wouldn’t be a challenge to analyze, the patients assigned to her. Many would be willing to share all the details of their lives and purposes – Crane, Nygma, Cobblepot, especially Tockman – and there wasn’t much excitement in that. People were like chapters in a novel, and without enough cliffhangers it could keep the reader cold.
Freeze was her first choice. Though he wasn’t there, instead in a proprietary containment setup to keep his body at a certain temperature, he was her first choice. Though his motivations were obvious – the cryogenically suspended love of his life – that they became criminal at all astounded her. She was practically chomping at the bit to attempt deciphering his break from forlorn husband to the plunge into villainy.
This left the Joker and Poison Ivy. In truth, according to Harleen’s pros and cons list inside her composition notebook, they were neck-and-neck. They were similar, in their own ways. Uninhibited toward causing destruction, indiscriminately killing people without so much as batting an eye. No, that wasn’t true, the intern admitted with twitching fingers. There was a reaction to murder – the obvious satisfaction. And they each had distinct causes with similar desires.
She stood between their cells, opposite one another, separated only by solid doors with but one small window at the top and the hall between.
Joker had no purpose other than his own whims, his id well overtaken the driver’s seat from his ego. Killing and torturing were pastimes to him, and it seemed no amount of blood was enough.
Poison Ivy, Ms. Isley, was purely driven by purpose. Her superego sublimely honed and by far the most intense case Harleen had ever heard of, more so than even the Batman himself. Oh, what she wouldn’t give to have him at her mercy in a patient’s chair. He, too, had several pages in Dr. Quinzel’s little black book.
“Where’s Victor Fries’ containment?”
“Lower level. He’s in a separate area, though. He’s not as…wild as the others.” The guard finally had a crack of pity in his demeanor. “He’s probably the least psycho of all of them.”
“Don’t ever say that near me again,” Harleen snapped.
“What?” He was taken aback.
“ Psycho is a movie, not a way to describe a person. These people ain’t – aren’t – well.” Oh god, she almost slipped.
“Dr. Quinzel, they’re killers and nut jobs.” He insisted, indignant.
“I’m putting in a formal request for a new escort as soon as I’m back at Strange’s desk. Now, take me to him so I can wrap this day up. It’s dragging on like a lifetime, and you aren’t helping.”
Dr. Strange’s office was practically opulent compared to Harleen’s. There was no shortage of solid mahogany and gold-toned trinkets that littered the space. A metal globe the size of an end table sat beside his desk, a desk which had one of those stupid pendulum toys that only the pompous would busy themselves with if they had the choice. A golden brain-shaped trophy stood on a tall shelf of books behind him where he sat in his leather executive chair, positioned above his head in the way an angel might have perched its halo.
“Doctor Quinzel, hello again.” The balding man stood and offered his hand to shake. Harleen took it. “How is your first day faring?”
“I am poring over the dossiers provided to me with serious interest.” She sat in the chair opposite him when he gestured. “It’s incredible how much and how little your staff has been able to retrieve from these people.”
“Leland did her best to build a rapport with them, but few of them cracked open enough to bring anything meaningful to the table. A part of it, surely, is her age.”
“Wow,” Harleen raised a brow. “Never speak ill of a woman’s age, sir.”
“No, no. I mean you’re closer to these patients’ ages than she is. She’s tried the motherly approach many a time, but so far it’s only worked so much.”
“So I was hired on solely because I’m an attractive young woman.”
“Attractive?” Dr. Strange blushed furiously, as if appalled by the notion.
“It’s also a faux pas to speak ill of a woman’s looks.” Harleen smiled deviously, already pushing her boss off kilter. “I have a request, Doctor.”
“Hrm,” he straightened his tie, offended at the potential jab to his reputation. “What is it?”
“Move the Joker and Poison Ivy into rooms with a window.”
“A room with a – are you mad?!”
Dr. Quinzel stiffened, fighting back the trigger at the term. “It will help me level with them, make them feel like they’re being taken into consideration and an opportunity to make them feel grateful. A gesture like this would make them grateful and would plant in their mind the concept of ‘owing us one.’”
“You mean owing you one.”
“A victory for me is a victory for Arkham.” She pushed up her glasses, her eyes already beginning to strain from their magnification.
“And how does something so small as a window factor in?”
“As I explained, it would put them in a place –”
“Of gratitude, yes. But these people do not operate this way, Ms. Quinzel. You need only spend a little time with them to understand.”
These people. Ms. Quinzel . The disrespect was off the charts. Harleen was a goddamn doctor. Just because she hadn’t gotten a chance to cut her teeth on treating actual patients didn’t mean she wasn’t worth her salt.
“You wanted fresh eyes to make changes for this asylum.” She tried again. “My first suggestion is to make this place feel less like the maximum security prison it already half is, and more like a place for healing and mental wellness. Not every patient here is criminally inclined, just sick people from the tri-state area that need help. If the patients who are Rogue criminals feel as though the non-offenders are receiving luxury treatment by comparison, then giving them small amenities just might make them feel like people. Not an inconvenience.”
The doctor chewed his inner cheek, face deeply in thought, deepening the wrinkles beneath his white hair. “You’ll have three sessions to see if it feels as though it’s working. If your progress notes and recordings do not reflect a modicum of change, they’ll be back to their usual confinement.”
She stood and offered her hand to shake once more. “Thank you, sir.”
He shook it, expression still dubious, and a bit perturbed.
“One more thing, Dr. Strange.” She asked over her shoulder while she hung in the doorway, red-nailed hand on the frame.
“What is it?” He toyed with the pendulum on his desk, making Harleen bristle with annoyance at the pretention.
“I’d like a new guard. The one I’ve been assigned is hardly suitable. Someone a bit nicer, if you don’t mind?”
He grumbled something like a “yes, yes,” and shooed her off, forehead in his hand.
Harleen bounced out the door, a new spring in her step knowing that it was the last time she would see this guard. She thought of Strange’s obvious annoyance of Harleen getting her way, and smiled broadly at her victory, and his new headache. She had that effect on people.