𝐑𝐄𝐃 𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐃

You told me, once, after cornering me by the printer and refusing to let me leave without at least listening, that you believed that the patients were not just broken minds in need of fixing. There was a new lanyard around your neck, and a new badge hanging from it. Doctor Quinzel, it read. A trophy that you had been parading around for the past few months.

You believed in evolution. Of the mind, that is. You believed that, much like a plant, they would only need a little nourishment and a little sunlight to fully flourish into what they were meant to be. I remember lifting my eyebrows, at the implication that the fracture was necessary, the passing of a torch, the checking of a box, in order for a person to become fully human.

"The sprout has to break through the shell," you told me, "for the flower to grow."

I thought this analogy was ridiculous, and I had told you as much.

I told you that you had been spending too much time with your new patient, after Isley's care had been transferred from me to you. I told you that you could not predict the way a mind such as these might flourish. I told you that you- you, specifically- could not tell the difference between a columbine and a corpse flower. That you might not even be able to discern if the seeds in your hands would grow into flowers at all. Perhaps they were crops. Perhaps they were trees. Perhaps they were dead.

You told me I was pessimistic.

I told you you were impeding my work.

You called me Jonny, and I hated you for it.

You asked to prove me wrong, and I indulged you.

I was surprised, then, when the paperwork came across the desk, and he was the one that you picked. It sat on my desk for a few long days, before you finally cornered me again and stood in my doorway as you watched me sign it.

You wanted to be right. You thought you were right.

I was intrigued, I'll admit, to see how awfully wrong you were.

And, for a while, it seemed that you were. And then I was wrong. And then I was incredibly, dreadfully right again. The Joker did not take kindly to him new therapist- I warned you that he never does. No matter how many psychiatrists we threw at him in the past, he would never find them interesting beyond whatever they could do to get him back on the rooftops with the Bat.

But you came to me, beaming brighter than the Metropolis sun, saying that you had made a break through. That he had told you secrets that he had never shared before. That he had cried for you. That he had thanked you. That he had smiled, softly this time, as you left.

I didn't believe him.

You did.

You cried in my office, on my couch, when the asylum's security got breached and the doors got locked for our protection. You were so worried for his safety. Worried that the intruder- that the Batman- would hurt him, and that there was nothing you could do about it.

This, you were right about. As I remember the rage that you flew into, upon seeing his bruised and bloodied face.

You didn't care for the reason of the Batman's visit. You didn't care about whatever scheme the vigilante had uncovered, or whatever information he had dragged from the clown's painted lips.

(Painted, of course, because you had allowed him his makeup again. To make him more comfortable. To bribe him into liking you. To get him to talk. No one had said anything, of course, when you started wearing the same shade of red.)

(Looking back, I wonder if you picked that shade so that no one would be able to tell the difference between the dabs you had applied yourself, and the smears that he had left. I always read over the transcripts that you provided at the ends of the session, and taken them for granted. But you have proven yourself to be quite the liar, and I wonder now if you were lying, even then.)

(You were, weren't you?)

You only cared that he was alive.

You went missing for two days, after promising your patient that you would fix everything.

There were search parties, you know. I'm sure you must have gathered that, from the ways that some of your own coworkers act around you now. I never went on any of them. After all, Gotham has this habit of swallowing its inhabitants whole, either spitting them back out wrong, or leaving them to digest forever. A habit that I am familiar enough with to no longer be shocked by, or moved to change.

Isley was furious when she heard the news. I like to think that some of the fury is because she knew that I would become her attending psychiatrist again. I know that it's not.

I've never asked who told her. But, as with almost anything that happens in this building, it was Nygma that I first heard the story through. He was so smug, when I asked him how he knew, and he had refused to answer beyond restating that he was the smartest man alive.

He told me through riddle, of course. After he had been probing me about your absence. I asked him eventually why he cared. He gave me the look that he gives the Batman- you know the one by now, I'm sure- when he knows something that the Dark Knight does not.

I can be cracked but never broken.

I can be pulled off but never put on.

I can be played but never paused.

What am I?

A joke.

The clown's cell was empty by the time I got to it. Even still, we don't know how you got him out without the guards being any the wiser.

I had dragged Nygma through the halls with me to get there, not trusting that he wouldn't have taken the opportunity to escape as well. He tells me now that the thought hadn't even crossed his mind-- as he would have wanted to see the look on my face when I got back.

He said something about how I should never try to be right about anything ever again, as that was his job. I finished our session in that room, and then locked him in quarantine for a week.

There were names for you, after the word finally got around. The Joker's girlfriend. The Joker's dog. Isley got sick of them, and threatened that if I did not let her out then and there, she would slit my throat when she escaped on her own. I indulged her, too. Later, I had told the others that she had simply coerced me into flipping the switch, with whatever new pheromone or poison she had concocted.

It was the first time that I lied for you, however fruitless that lie turned out to be. As you didn't return to the asylum, as a doctor or a patient, for several years after that.

What did you do, in that time, I wonder. Did you manage the henchmen around his hideouts? Did he humiliate you in front of them? Did any of them deem to pull you back together, as I've heard that you are the one that pulls them together, too.

Did you ever get your revenge, in whatever small and petty ways you could? Or were you only grateful that he saw you as important enough to punish rather than kill.

Because he does kill his girls.

I know this much.

Or is it that these thoughts did not cross your mind?

He made you feel special, as if you were the only one to crack through the shell to find the secrets he was hiding underneath. As if, out of everyone in the asylum, you understood him and he understood you. And what a terrible thing it is, to be understood like that.

At least, how terrible it is to think that you are being understood.

I remember there was one time, just before the end of it all, where you almost pulled yourself out of it. You almost admitted that you were wrong, you almost told me that you recognized this all from your textbooks, you almost knocked on the door. I wonder what stopped you, beyond the intoxicating and addicting nature of a love like that. I wonder what pushed you to almost realize it all.

I remember you lingering in the threshold of my office.

I remember you leaving and closing the door behind you, just as I was always reminding you to do.

I remember, just as vividly, the first day that we saw each other again. It was sometime in late February, just after all the heart-shaped balloons had been taken down and the wreckage caused by Mr. Day's last big stunt had just about been cleaned up.

The night was cold and dark, and I was walking home from a particularly late night at the office. I was never wary of the shadows, as I was always so sure of my ability to handle whatever might spring out of them. Until you did.

You, in your short shorts and your high heels, and a jacket that was inside-out and hastily pulled around yourself, appeared out of nowhere to yank me into an alleyway. For a moment, I had thought I was being robbed. But your face was tear-streaked, and your eyes searching for something familiar. We might not have ever been friends, per say, but I recognized you. I have never cared to ask, whether or not you found what you were looking for in that recognition.

You were afraid, you pulled me close as you whispered every fear into existence for me to witness. You said that you could still feel the burns and the bites. The pains that lasted lifetimes. The pains that rearranged your brain. The pains that were gentle. You told me all of this, as we walked through the foggy nights towards my apartment, which was only a few blocks away from the Narrows that you presumably sprung out of.

You said that, of everyone, I was the one that might understand what it means to be afraid like this.

I did.

I told you I didn't.

I let you inside.

You told me not to tell anyone else, as this was your shame to bear. And then, even more shamefully, you told me that you still loved him anyway. And I scoffed. And you cried harder.

And I told you that, of all the things you had done, the robberies, the murders, the lies-- expecting for him to love you back was the maddest of all.

"I don't," you had told me. "I never have."

And of course you didn't.

You're too smart for that.