"You'd get all nostalgic for the murder and for your bat-clad crush," says Bella, with sympathy that is not entirely mocking.

"Mostly for her," he says. "Don't tell me you fell for that one too; I don't like murder all by itself."

"You don't? Not even a little?"

"Mm, well, that's the thing," he says, tipping his chair back on two legs and glancing up into the rafters, gesturing expressively with one hand. "It's fun, sometimes; I'm not saying it's not. And it's fun-ny. But it's not an end in itself, like... oh... sex."

"You just do it to see how people react, is that it? And nothing else guarantees such a very strong reaction, or you'd content yourself with property damage and white-collar crime and provocative graffiti and dumping trucksful of jellybeans onto the freeway."

"Oh, you do know my favourite book."

"It's the same as Alice's," Bella says, leaning back.

"Is she fully informed?" Bella asks.

"She's my officcial headshrinker at Arkham Asylum," he says. "So yeah, pretty well."

Bella snorts helplessly. "Your shrink has a crush on you. Oh lord."

"I never said she had a crush. She doesn't wanna fuck me, or we woulda already," he says with an easy shrug. "But she likes me. I like her, too."

"Maybe she has some residual sense of professional ethics," Bella suggests.

"Mm, could be. Could be she's put off by what happened to my first shrink, too."

"Which was what?"

"Well, he decided he did want to fuck me," the Joker says matter-of-factly. "I put up with it for a while because he was funny, and then I killed him."

Bella's not particularly fazed by lethal responses to things that fall under the umbrella of "rape". "Yes. I'd imagine that would remind people of their professional ethics, if that were an event in recent memory."

"She should know better, though, she's known me for long enough." He shrugs. "But maybe you're right. Maybe it'll be different when I get out."

"I'm pretty sure her professional ethics are supposed to last even after you are no longer her patient, although she might not be technically at risk of losing her license at that point," Bella says.

"But why is it against professional ethics to fuck your patients?"

"Issues of vulnerability and abuse potential," Bella says. "Of course the rules were designed because of that potential in one direction, but you know, I'm not so sure that there's not something sketchy about you having sex with someone who's spent any amount of time having it be her job to listen to you talk."

"Do tell," he says, giving her an unimpressed look.

She shrugs. "What else is there to tell?"

"Why."

"Because with a captive audience - mind you I say a captive audience, someone whose job is on the line if she just gets up and leaves, I'm not saying you're mistreating arbitrary people who can go as they please if you have sex with them - I think you could be unduly fascinating, at least to a certain kind of person who might be disproportionately likely to become a shrink. When the only winning move is not to play, anyone who has to play - loses."