Chapter 1

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Huge thanks to Ripley10 who is taking the time to go over this and edit it. :)

A/N: Okay, so the usual disclaimer – I own nothing here, lay claim to nothing but Jane and will not and never have made any money through this.

This story can also be found in my fanfiction account, under my penname RubyWaters.

Right... so now that's done. I'm gonna just say a few things about this story. It's obviously J/OC and while I know there are loads of these stories out there and probably better than mine, I had to add my two pence worth, cause as of yet, I haven't really read a Joker I like. They are all too nasty for me. I've read the novel and watched the film and saw nothing in there that would convince me he would be sexually abusive. I've not read a lot of the comics so have no idea what his relationship with Harley is like. So this is the Joker my way, although I will try to keep him in character to the film. If you don't like the sound of it, hit the back button, cause I'm too old to care about flames, although construct crit, is always welcome. Forgive typos please, not checked other than by mine own eyes and they're old and rusty these days.

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Jane Kimble's job was always the same and she was used to it. She cleaned at Arkham Asylum. She was part of a five strong team that marched through the dank, depressing corridors and tried to bring a little light relief to the otherwise abysmal cells that held the inmates.

Jane mopped over the floor of the cells and offices that were on her level and while she was doing this, inside her head, she wrote her stories. Jane Kimble held a dream; she wanted to be a writer. Not just any old writer, Jane Kimble wanted to be a romance novelist. The paperback kind. She had no aspirations for hardback New York Times Bestseller list. No, she just wanted to write stories that would make ordinary women like her feel warm and fuzzy inside. Her dream was to write books where knights on white chargers (or in suits, and riding in taxis to their law firms, she wasn't fussy that way) still existed, and women were meant for one man, and one man only.

It was a load of bull, she knew that. Love like that just wasn't real, wasn't practical. But she saw no reason to make the dark, dreary world everyone lived in even worse by reading dark and dreary novels. So she made up heroines and heroes in her head while she worked and then when she went home to her one room apartment she tapped on her typewriter until well into the witching hour, and she felt okay with life.

She had two finished novels that were on the top shelf of her closet, boxed up and ready to go, but she had yet to find the nerve to send them for publishing. That would be like baring her soul; she would do it one day. Just not yet. For now she was as happy as she could be.

And then he entered her world. Or really, to be completely accurate, he entered a cell on her level for cleaning. She knew who he was even before she saw his 'name' on the nameplate outside his cell. It didn't bother her. One inmate was very much the same as the next. She was used to the way the inmates would react to her presence. Some wouldn't even notice her. Others would talk to her as if she was their mother. Each one was different and Jane ignored them all. She spoke to none of them, never made eye contact as she mopped their cells, aware of the guard in the door, usually reading a newspaper, while he waited for her to finish and move to the next cell.

Some of the guards she was fine with; some of them she hated. But her face remained perfectly blank as she worked. Her mind whipped up her tales. Her eyes didn't see the dirt that just couldn't be removed. Instead, her mind's eye saw her dark haired, long, and lean (usually Texan) heroes as they overcome whatever obstacle was in their way to the path of true love with the heroine (whose appearance was always rather vague to Jane, and so was never out rightly mentioned in her text).

So Jane was quite happy ambling along in life as she was. No real aspirations in her career; there wasn't much further she could go with a mop and bucket anyway, except the next floor up. She was content in creating fictional happy-ever-afters between perfectly perfect people who could never exist outside of the paper she wrote on.

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