"Well," says Bella. "Then if I ever find myself on your world, prepared to make you my problem, you'd better convince me you're harmless, or be dead before I finish putting the turf down on a pretty little space rock."

"Sweetie." He shivers. "You are cold."

"When my problems include sources of death? Yes. Who wept for the malarial parasites?"

"'Course, if that's what you're after, why not just kill me yourself? Or do you not like me like that?"

"But you don't know that," Bella says.

"I don't know that," he agrees. "But if it takes long enough to show up, I might not care. And I really don't wanna die all alone on an asteroid in the middle'a nowhere, either way."

"Once you were safely stranded on the asteroid," Bella says, "perhaps I could wait a couple days and see what you say about the presence or absence of Milliways when you wake up. I don't anticipate being in a hurry on that time scale."

"I actually don't know if I have the stomach to kill someone when there's another option," she says conversationally. "I'm quite sure I could do it if there wasn't, by the way, so cornering me won't yield any interesting facts... But I could check. And even if I didn't I could arrange for you not to be alone."

"I'd like that," he murmurs.

Bella nods.

With the same bizarrely innocent curiosity from before: "Would you care?"

"Some."

"Aww."

"You could've been like my Alice," she says softly.

"What's the difference, to you?"

"Alice has never killed anyone," she says, "for one thing. And he's about whimsy - not mayhem - and he's mine."

"The hell he is," the Joker says amicably.

"He's not my slave or my appendage or my trained ferret, but he's mine."

"How d'you figure?"

"In what sense of the word do you object? You weren't complaining when I called him my boyfriend."