Her father used to say: "Harley, spiteful words can hurt your feelings, but silence breaks your heart."

It was a line that she kept repeating over and over again in her head when she stepped through the nearly empty halls of Arkham Asylum. The walls were once sloppily painted a muted taupe color, and the only thing that seemed to stand out was the screaming. It wasn't constant, but once in every so often a loud, piercing sound of anguish would move throughout the halls. It was enough to make you think that the place was haunted by souls that clung to life. It was enough to make Dr. Harleen Quinzel question what living really was. She knew this wasn't it.

She had just come away from a morning session with a patient; a non-violent sexual offender who had been diagnosed delusional paranoid. He believed that his victims had been following him because they were attracted to him. He thought Harley was attracted to him. She wasn't.

He had said to her "I think you're more than you seem, Dr. Quinzel," and she gave him the blank, unenthusiastic stare that she would give any patient who assumed he knew more about her than he actually did. "I think you're a wild cat underneath that librarian get-up of yours." Although she had done absolutely nothing to suggest anything wilder then her current personality, she had noticed in his file that the powers that be were in the process of deciding whether or not chemical castration was an option for this patient. When Harley had finally stepped out of his cell, she was beginning to wonder if maybe it was a good idea.

Now she was floating through harshly lit hallways, seemingly endless aisles of door after door, their occupants bound, tied down, a danger to themselves, each other, and her. And yet somehow in the center of her chest she felt pity for them; some misplaced sense of sympathy where she believed that maybe not everyone could take responsibility for their actions - a mindset that was not shared by the majority of the elderly staff there are Arkham. Some of them were considered the very best in the country, but their practices were old school, and their ethics were tarnished to say the very least.

Harley knew that she was young, and had not yet become jaded by the world that she had suddenly become a part of.

"Commissioner Gordon is a friend of your family. Put in a good word for you," Dr. Jeremiah Arkham had said during her entrance interview. "Some members of the board found it to be a little disreputable by offering up a reference from someone that you know would have the respect of this facility." Harley had always heard that he was a bastard, but tried to keep her calm just the same. "But when we realized that James Gordon had offered up his reference of his own accord...well then!"

He clapped his hands together so loud that Harley had nearly jumped out of the Italian leather chair that she had been seated in. "Well then, we're in business. It's always nice to have someone powerful act as a little padding on your resume, isn't it?"

Bastard indeed, but Harley had smiled none-the-less and had found herself in the middle of a two year paid internship at the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. She was fresh-faced, sweet, well liked by the staff and patients alike. She maintained that everyone could be treated, and that everyone deserved to. It wasn't that kind of humanist mentality that got her through college, but it got her into Arkham, which was exactly where she wanted to be.

Except... well, except that she didn't think it would be this dismal.

Some of the nurses and orderlies had been working there since they graduated medical college in the seventies. They were too rough with the patients, lost most, if not all of their sympathy, and were used to treating people more like cattle than anything else. They sickened her, but she managed to put on a kind face and wave to them as she passed by.

"Smile and the world smiles back at you Harl. Cry, and you cry alone," her father always used to say to her. But as the days went on at Arkham, she realized that attitude wasn't everything.

After the first week people told her to stop smiling so much, or doctors were going to start to believe that she was the crazy one. After the first month people didn't notice whether she was smiling or not. She had begun blending into the walls. Maybe at first her ego was the one that convinced her that she was going to change things around here... but now she knew: you can't change a place like this. She knew Arkham was here before and would be here long after she was gone.

Something had begun to grind at her. It wasn't the jaded co-workers, the manipulative doctors, or the psychotics who had sometimes threatened to slice her up.

It was the silence.

Everywhere she walked in that place was filled with it. It seeped into the cracks in the aging concrete, filled the holes of patients mouths, while darkness filled their eyes. There wasn't anything in this place was wasn't touched by it. The few sounds that were made seemed only to accentuate the quiet. Things like footsteps coming down a hall, a ticking clock, or the ding of a distant elevator just made the silence that much deeper.

Over the first couple weeks Harley had come to appreciate the peace and quiet, but there was a sense of horror that filled her. Just as you had learned to take it for granted, the stillness of the place was shattered by a long, terrified, torturous scream. The first time she heard it she had been in her first week-end meeting with doctor Arkham. She had placed her hands to her ears and wished very much that she could crawl under the small desk hiding in the midst of her cramped office.

He had laughed at her lack of experience, she was white as a sheet. "My dear, my dear!" Arkham said in his patronizing tone. "You can't expect this place to be quiet all the time, can you?"

Except it was. Apart from the occasional scream, whispered exchanged between co-workers, or footsteps in the hallway there was never any sound. And it left Harley feeling as though she was falling into the same pit the rest of them found themselves at the bottom of. As much as she didn't want to turn into the old men that ran this place... she was beginning to understand why they had become the way they had become.

With the gentle ding of the elevator, Harley had slipped out of the sliding doors and down along the corridor on the main floor where her office was located. Regardless of its sinister reputation the building was quite old and beautiful. A large, wooden, handcarved staircase led up to the executive offices and meeting rooms that adorned the front entrance. The outside was dark gray stone with iron gates that matched the Gothic tone of some of Gotham's old architecture. There was reception, along with a nurses' station at the front, and Harley's broom closet of an office located just fifty meters away from the front door. She remembered thinking, if one of the psychos decides to burn down the joint, at least I'll be close to the door.

It was late at night, past midnight... maybe even past one. She had become renowned around the place for being the one who never seemed to go home. Indeed, there had been times when Harley had woken up in a start at her desk, a piece of her casework sticking to her face. She'd known how embarrassing it was to have to wear the same clothes to work the next day and not have a raunchy story to tell about the night before.

As Harley made her way down the hall and toward her office, she briefly passed a coworker who smiled and waved at her. She was young and fresh out of school like Harley, but had been taken on as an intern nurse. Sometimes they would eat lunch or dinner together (depending on the time of day) in the common area and talk about the thick-skinned doctors, or hopeful patients who looked like they were making a turn around. Her name was Molly, and sometimes her voice was the only voice she heard all day.

They exchanged a friendly hello in the hallway before Harley slipped into her office and closed the door behind her. She leaned back against the door, at once inhaling deeply and gazing disappointedly. Her makeshift office had once been a storage room for case-files of sociopathic murderers who had come to their untimely deaths in the halls of Arkham. The orderlies had offered to clean it out for her and move everything down to the basement, but she had been reading them in her free time, and was learning a lot from the plethora of notes left in the wake of the patients.

In the middle of a sea of paper was a small desk along with a large chair fashioned out of old golden flannel. It sat upon a very squeaky axis that was often the sound to wake her up whenever she fell asleep. There were a couple of folding chairs across the desk, meant for guests, but which had only ever been used by Dr. Arkham. She wouldn't have invited guests in here to save her life. She was sure that instead of a therapist she'd look more like some sort of a social worker: underpaid and overworked. Which wasn't too far from the truth...

Taking another look at the clock she had moved her lab coat over her shoulder to slip it off and hang it on the back of the door, but then...

The sound made her freeze. The clamor of doors crashing open, scuffling, and a woman screaming. Hurriedly sliding her arms back into her coat, she opened the door, which caused the hem to buffet in the sudden rush of cool air as people rushed in from outside.

"Restrain him!" came Arkham's voice, booming at the top of his lungs as he made his way down the beautiful woodgrain stairs.

Harley's shocked face turned down the hall to see what was the matter. "Dr. Arkham?" she called out to him. Immediately he turned to wave her back into her office, but said nothing.

Everything after this appeared to move slowly, like the instant before a car crash. The situation seemed hopelessly real, and yet simultaneously part of some wild and crazy dream. Everything was cloudy, surreal, absolute.

From the front doors and around the corner, past the nurse's station a group of five SWAT officers were grappling to restrain one man. From the time he entered into the wide hallway he seemed to have enchanted everyone with his presence. Maybe it was because they couldn't believe what they were seeing, maybe it was because he seemed to fill the room with his terrifying, maniacal laughter, but for Harley, it wasn't fear, or shock, or awe that encapsulated her - it was the sheer noise that drew her like a moth to flame.

She had seen the newspapers, the tabloids, and the articles written to paint the man as a true monster, a full-blown psychopath. He was taller than she expected, larger in the shoulders. Although there had been whispers... no one was ever really sure if he would ever be caught, let alone brought to Arkham.

The Joker had arrived, and was making his presence known to all who cluttered the halls at 1:33 that morning.

"Heya Doc!" He excitedly addressed Dr Arkham as he was pulled further within the building by the SWAT team. "Heard so much about you. Say, can you do a guy a favor, I got a couple of 'scrips that need refilling," he said, laughing. Harley immediately noticed that he was covered in blood, but it appeared to be his own.

"I'm sure you do," Arkham had remarked quietly. Internally Harley scoffed at his need to have the final word in every argument.

The group of men was walking down the hallway toward her when one of the members of the SWAT team told her, "Ma'am, please get back to your office."

She knew that the worst thing he could have done was to acknowledge her. She knew this because as soon as the SWAT officer was finished speaking, her eyes shot over to the Joker who was already looking at her. As they approached she could see his gaze follow her. She didn't break eye contact for a second.

When she was young, Harley's father had caught a Missasauga rattlesnake in their backyard. One bite could have killed the five-year-old version of herself twice over, and yet when her father held it up for her to inspect, she could remember that her heart didn't miss a beat.

But now, with those black eyes looking back at her, she swore she forgot to take a breath.

Although most of the war-paint had been smeared and smudged away, he couldn't have looked more sinister; except for when he squinted his eyes and turned his grin into an alarming full smile of yellow teeth. "Well helllllo nurse," he cooed at her and chuckled. "And what's your name?"

Arkham, who was closely picking up the rear, cut in, "You will address all the Doctors in this facility as Sir or Ma'am. Do you understand?"

Harley gasped for breath after the group strode past her door, thinking that maybe it was over, but before she had even finished exhaling the Joker sharply pulled to the right and freed himself from one of the SWAT members, twisting to look at her once again. "Oh ho! A doctor, huh? You must be pretty smart. I'm pretty smart too. Maybe we could have a deep intellectual conversation over a cup of coffee?" Although she couldn't see them, through the black paint she could tell he raised his brows, because the dark space around his eyes grew drastically larger.

"Settle down!" Harley was shocked by Arkham's strength as he immediately grabbed the large man and turned him back around. "The only conversing you're going to do is over a stainless steel table in a windowless room."

"Are you coming on to me, Doc?" his sinister voice cackled as the group continued down the hall and toward the freight elevator. Nurses and orderlies rushed breathlessly after them, but Harley stood by her door, watching the commotion and hearing that continuous, high pitched, uproarious laughter.

Suddenly the spaces hollowed out by the silence here were filled with life again. There was a shift in Harley's heart from dismal to something less empty, less finite. The noise seemed to fill in the spaces where there had been doubt about her role in Arkham Asylum. That laughter soothed her soul.

And before she could take it back, before she could force it to disappear, she could feel herself smile.