"Don't come near me," Harleen Quinzel said, snatching up a paperweight and pointing it at Daniel with more defiance than confidence.
Daniel's lips curved slightly."Interesting," he said softly. "Your body's on edge, but your face… that's something else entirely."
He had to admit, she was drawn to dangerous, unstable minds—someone like Harleen Quinzel wouldn't choose Arkham Asylum unless part of her was fascinated by what lurked inside it.
A doctor of her caliber had options, safer paths, cleaner environments, yet she had stepped willingly into a place where madness wasn't studied from a distance but lived, breathed, and pushed back.
That kind of choice wasn't made out of necessity; it came from curiosity, from a need to understand something most people instinctively avoided—and perhaps from a part of her that didn't fear the darkness as much as it should.
"I'm smiling?" Harleen asked, the words slipping out before she could stop them.
"You are," Daniel replied, stepping closer as if her warning held no weight. A mirror appeared beside her, hovering at eye level without support. "See for yourself."
Her gaze shifted despite herself, drawn to the reflection.
The expression staring back wasn't fear—not entirely.
Her lips were curved, her eyes alight with something sharper, something disturbingly close to fascination.
And for a moment, she couldn't deny it.
"Why am I smiling?" Harleen Quinzel muttered, unsettled by the contradiction, because in a situation like this she should have been panicking—she was facing a stranger no one else could see.
"Maybe because you find this more fascinating than anything," Daniel said, and the papers scattered across the floor lifted, sliding smoothly back into his hand. One turned as it rose.
The Joker's file.
Harleen's eyes locked onto it. "How did you do that?"
Daniel vanished—and the chair behind her shifted as he appeared in it, already spinning once, relaxed.
"Don't bother with small things. An imaginary friend can do many things," he said.
"First of all, you're not my imagination. I'm too old to have one," Harleen replied, her voice steadier now. Since he wasn't harming her, her fear had already begun to shift into curiosity. She needed to understand what he was. Most people would have run. She didn't.
"Is there any rule saying grown-ups can't have imaginary friends?" Daniel asked casually.
Harleen opened her mouth to respond, ready to dismantle the logic—then paused.
What kind of argument was that?
No one studied imaginary friends. They were just products of a child's imagination—so what did that make this? Was she imagining him right now?
"So, Harleen Quinzel," Daniel said as he vanished from the chair and reappeared walking along the ceiling upside down, as if gravity didn't apply to him, "is there a reason you chose to work in such an insane place when you had the option to work in normal hospitals?"
Harleen didn't answer right away. Her gaze followed him across the ceiling, but no longer shaken. The fear had settled into something else—analysis.
"Because they're patients," Harleen Quinzel said, her tone firm, almost defensive. "Not monsters, not lost causes—people. Broken, yes, but still people."
She straightened slightly, slipping back into the confidence of a psychiatrist used to being in control of the room. "Places like Arkham exist for a reason. You don't just throw someone away because they don't fit into society. You try to fix what's wrong."
Her eyes flicked upward again, narrowing faintly as she studied him. "That's the difference between treatment and punishment."
There was conviction there—real, practiced, something she had told herself and others many times.
And underneath it, something quieter.
The kind of curiosity that had brought her here in the first place.
"Yeah, but shouldn't you treat yourself first? From where I'm standing, you're the strange one. A normal person would've run away a long time ago instead of standing here having a conversation," Daniel said.
Then he appeared right in front of her, his face barely an inch away, his gaze locking onto hers without hesitation.
"Maybe," Daniel said quietly, his face inches from hers, "there's a part of you that's attracted to dangerous things."
Harleen Quinzel didn't pull away.
For a brief moment she just looked at him—then a small smile formed, not forced, not hidden.
"Maybe," she said.
"You're really strange," Daniel said as he stepped back, giving her space before extending his hand. "Daniel Haken."
Harleen Quinzel glanced at his hand, then back at his face, the faint smile still there.
"I thought imaginary friends had names like Sparkle or Chubbu or something," she said, tone light, almost teasing.
Daniel raised an eyebrow. "Is that so?" he replied. "Then whoever came up with those names had no sense at all. Sounds more like what people name their dogs."
Harleen let out a short breath that almost turned into a laugh, the tension easing just enough to feel noticeable.
"Wow… I'm definitely losing my mind," Harleen Quinzel said, half under her breath, though the faint smile didn't leave her face.
Daniel shook his head slightly. "No," he said. "But you are getting close to the point where your normal world starts falling apart."
*****
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