I awake with a start, the taste of blood and a strange word in my mouth. "Punch." It is a second or two before I remember the shock that had awakened me, the phantom crunch of a mace in my skull. Warmth drips down my chin, blood. A coldness grows inside me for an irrational moment and I scan the shadows for the strings of a marionette. There is nothing, of course, and upon prodding a little, I find a small, shallow cut on the inside of my lip. I must have bitten myself in my sleep. Wiping the blood from my chin with the back of my hand, I arise from the pile of torn sheets and straw that serves as my sleeping place and out of the haunted house, my corner of the fairgrounds we haunt. I am still considering the significance of my latest strain of night terrors when I glance up and realise that my steps have taken me to his doorstep, the funhouse. I smile with a sore, reddish mouth, having expected as much. One does not learn to analyse as much as I must do without analysing oneself, and I hasn't escaped my own attention that I come here whenever my sleep is troubled. I never have the strength, however, to go in.

I go in. The first room is the hall of mirrors. Joker, having blocked up the back door, finds it amusing to force me to traverse this place whenever I need to tell him anything. I've done it enough to almost know the way, but it's harder to do in the pitch-black of midnight, and so I have to stop to get my bearings. I feel vaguely uncomfortable to be surrounded so by my own reflection. I am pale, gaunt, tall, and my bare chest is heaving as hard as if I had just run a marathon. The terror of my dreams still weighs heavy on me. My eyes are wide behind my glasses, barely a sliver of blue visible around the dilated pupils. My mouth is red, a shock against the pale skin shot with a shard of moonlight. It curves into an involuntary smile. I look like I'm wearing lipstick, something I've only done once, when I was young and my parents were going to be out of the house for hours. I'd only left it on a moment, hadn't really liked the way it felt or looked. I hadn't then had the affinity for red lipstick that I have now. Angry at myself for being so easily led astray, I smear the blood with the backs of my hands until my mouth is mine again, clean, if pink from abuse.

The hall of mirrors ends, of course, and after ascending a riveted metal staircase as quietly as possible, I am on the second floor of the funhouse. A row of a different kind of mirror greets me now, mirrors to stretch and crush, to distort the features and confuse the mind. I breeze past them, head held high, eyes glued to the door at the end of the hall. One of the mirrors is also a door, leading to the room where I imagine he likely lies even now, asleep. Joker rarely sleeps before five in the morning, and then past noon, but we've had a busy day. I have to wrench the splintered wood of the door to the balcony away from its loving, warped frame. The noise is not too loud; I continue on.

At last, I reach my goal. The balcony was once backlit by flashing bulbs and neon paint, a place to stand and find your friends among the brightly coloured tents and gaudy rides. The fairpark is silent now, save for the sound of crows, and the tents are long since gone or tattered beyond repair. The lightbulbs behind me are mostly shattered, a constant irritation I've snagged my elbow on more times than I care to count. I've often suggested to Joker that he remove them, but no, he says he prefers them the way they are. He says someday they might work. I admire his optimism. Magenta paint flakes off the rusty metal as I grip the railing and lean out over the balcony's edge. The railing groans a protest, but I know it's sturdy enough to bear my slight weight. The fact that it continues to creak and jitter brings me to realise that I'm trembling a little bit, though I'd like to say it's from the autumn chill in the air. One would think a monster such as I am would no longer fear his own nightmares. This could not be further from the truth. My nightmares have become more fearsome, as I have an excellent imagination. Freud would have a field day.

I glance behind with a gasp as something warm and smooth slides onto the back of my neck and smile at the irony of being relieved to find Joker standing behind me, grinning. His is not a presence many would find to be a comfort. I'm not sure what I had expected to find. At the base of my skull, his fingers find a curl and tug lightly. I shudder helplessly and hope he can't feel it as he takes a step closer and slides his arm around my shoulders. I find this casual camaraderie to be less unsettling, at least, than the touch of his unnatural skin. His grating voice startles a few crows and me, and I have to twist to see his face.

"Come for a kiss goodnight, Scarecrow?" Is it too much to ask for? To my credit, I don't say this aloud.

"I couldn't sleep," I tell him truthfully.

"So you came to join me? I'm honoured, Scarecrow, but you know I don't think of you that way." He's only mocking me, I think, but my heart still clenches and goes cold for a moment. I know.

"No." Why did I come here? I'm still not sure. "I like standing up here." There's a sense of loss tugging at my heartstrings as he pulls away and leans back against the protesting railing,

staring at me.

"Why?" It's a simple question, but one I can't find an answer to.

"The view, I suppose," I answer lamely, and am not reassured when he laughs at me.

"Why couldn't you sleep?"

"Oh." Not for the first time, I'm glad I don't blush. "I... had a nightmare." I steel myself for more mocking laughter, but nothing comes. I risk a glance at him out of the corner of my eye, and he is staring at me and nodding, hardly smiling at all.

"What did you dream about?"

"Punch and Judy." Another sidelong glance, and he is grinning at me, not unsympathetically.

"Pretty creepy," he agrees, his grin widening, "which one were you? Mr. Punch? The Devil?" My throat goes dry, and my attempt to swallow turns into a nervous cough.

"Judy," I croak. Memories, as clear as a photograph, of our beautiful sexless baby, its brains scattered like confetti over the floor of our one-room home. This never happened, of course. I still have to fight back a wave of fear and nausea. "It was real, though. Not puppets. God, it was real."

"Tell me, Scarecrow, does this mean you're officially out of your mind now?" I think he's trying to lighten the mood, but just thinking about it makes me sick. The club is still clotted and dripping with our baby's blood and its brains as he raises it slowly over his head. He tells me he loves me through a jagged grin as the club comes down, and then- thwack.

I must have blacked out for a second because he's dragging me away from the railing, looking for some surface without treacherous glass shards to lean me against. Supported in Joker's arms, I struggle to my feet and lean back against his chest. My heart refuses to settle down.

"Don't fall off the balcony," he warns me, and I can't help but laugh wearily. I'm comfortable in his arms, against my will. He waits a minute or two, bless his black heart, before he asks me, "what happened?"

"The same thing that happens in every Punch and Judy show." Trying to remain somewhat aloof, I pull out of his all too welcome embrace and lean against the door to the hall of twisted mirrors. Damn him, he's still smirking at me.

"Enlighten me. Let's pretend I've never seen a Punch and Judy before. Tell me a story." It always amazes me that Joker grinning the same grin can seem at once to be so childish and so frightening.

"Punch and Judy lived together with their baby and their dog. They fought often." If I were someone else psychoanalysing me, I would say the dream represented my desire for a loving, serious relationship with him, and also my seemingly contradictory terror of him. I'd never realised what an asshole I could be until I was the one on the other side of the tiny notebook. "Punch and Judy fought a lot. Sometimes Punch hit Judy. Sometimes Judy hit Punch. Usually, Punch hit Judy." My words are deliberately sing-song, as though I am speaking to a child. In many ways, I think I am. Mostly, I'm speaking this way to keep my voice from cracking. A dream has never unsettled me this much. "One day Judy came home and found their dog Toby with his neck broken. Just went to find Punch to ask him what he had done and found Punch over our child with its little head all smashed in with a club that I gave you for Christmas." I'm at least coherent enough to recognise when I'm getting more than a little bit hysterical. "Then you turned around with that horrible grin and knocked my head in, too." I have to stop and catch my breath, scrubbing at the rivulets running down my cheek. I'm a wreck, and all over a dream.

"Then why would you come here after that?" Joker sounds awed and I try an incredulous laugh, ending up with a raw gag.

"Because you said you loved me, right at the end, and I loved you for giving me death." The laughter comes more easily to me, now that I notice I sound like some goddamn fruity vampire. Maybe goddamn, certainly fruity under many definitions, archaic as wel as contemporary, but I will not be a vampire. I compose myself as best I can. I will not be unsettled by a dream.

"They say if you tell someone else what you dream, the dream won't come back." Perhaps it's only me, but his grin does seem more than a little sympathetic. I hadn't noticed when he moved closer, but he's standing close to me now, looking up at me across the scantest of inches that separate our heights. Uncomfortably warm, I'm close enough to smell his breath, and it isn't quite what one would call pleasant. I wonder if Joker's mouth is slicked with lipstick as it looks.

It isn't. That's the first thing that surprises me when his lips slide over mine, that there's nothing colouring them. The second thing is that I don't mind kissing someone who has clearly not brushed his teeth in, at least, the lengthy amount of time that I have known him. I think this slow burn in the pit of my stomach is a feeling I could get used to. It takes the loss of his warmth to make me wake up and realise he's been speaking to me, and an entirely unnecessary shaking of my shoulders to make me remember what he said.

"Scarecrow, I have to admit something to you." He's waiting for a response, but he's going to be waiting a long time if he expects anything coherent out of me.

I nod.

"I've gotta say, what I said earlier, that was an outright lie." Another pause, another nod. Out with it, already. "I think I have given you a goodnight kiss, and I think you ought to join me." Not surprisingly, he grins, and I brace myself for the inevitable punchline that must follow. "Whaddaya say we make some new nightmares?"

Oh heavens, yes.