No, he didn't want her dead all the time. Sometimes it was even as though he liked her. Occasionally he could have been persuaded that they belonged together. Once or twice the thought occurred to him that he might have glancingly loved her from time to time. But to expect him to form a coherent opinion on the subject was really far beyond tall order! That was "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" territory! Batsy knew that. Why couldn't the rest of these morons read the cue card that was being held up before their earnest little faces?

"When you try to kill Harley, what does she represent to you?"

Oy vey. "Look, Dr Top-Of-Your-Class-In-Medschool, I'd love to be the loony that sets you up for life, but you're making me miss my soap and I really must dash…"

Belying that statement, the Joker stayed firmly put; he had little choice in the matter, being not only strait-jacketed but belted into his chair while the young up-and-comer rattled through the neat questions on his university stationery, questions that were soul-destroyingly similar to batteries of others the Clown Prince had heard over the years.

Perhaps stirred by the possibility of the financial windfall referenced to him, the Doctor cleared his throat and tried again.

"What is it that you feel you need to destroy? Does she remind you of your conscience?"

At this, the Joker tipped his head back, so fast that a less experienced maniac would have incurred injury, and laughed so that the fabric of space around the young professional seemed to be slashed into strips, like a flimsy garment.

Tears sprang into the man's eyes, from a mixture of shock and terror; the tapes had not prepared him for this. He saw Death, Death white and grinning, standing over his maimed body, and because their gravity insisted, he met the Joker's eyes as his chin descended once more. Those eyes were teary too, but with hopeless glee. Glee that had very little indeed to do with sunny days and puppies. Glee that didn't need rationality. Glee that thought nothing of even the most advanced restraints, according to Arkham lore.

And because he was a trained professional who had studied countless homicides with a straight face and spoken to many alleged socio- and psychopaths with a level voice, his mind secure in itself and quavering for no man, he first underlined his last note meticulously, replaced the pen and pad in his coat pocket and said a civil Good Afternoon before getting his unbroken limbs and unbled arteries out the door of the consultation room, with a decisiveness the like of which he had never felt before and would never feel again.