You drive me crazy

Back to work

I got out of my car, ready to start another Monday full of signing and writing papers for Jeremiah.
I pressed the lock-button on my car key and put it down in my right pocket.
I went inside of the great building and headed towards my office.
On my way there, I stumbled across a few friendly faces which I stopped by for a couple minutes to talk to, it almost felt as though that one haunting session had never happened. I learned though, that after all of this with Guy - my dead fiancée - what I needed was not another nut case to fix nor was it to go around pretending I was okay.

Any other human being would have been completely broken down after an incident like what I'd been through. As a psychiatrist I should've realized that recovering from Guy's death would take a lot more than denying it. Maybe it was my turn to go to therapy?

I chuckled at the irony of my recent thought; I had a special talent - a superpower you might call it - of always being able to laugh about situations, even traumatizing ones.

Stepping into my office, I sat down to continue on the report of my short session with The Joker, which I hadn't gotten around to finish. I opened my computer and started writing, but an obnoxiously big amount of email notifications in the corner of my screen was bothering me, so I decided to deal with that first.

Arriving to my inbox, I found that I had gotten multiple emails from my boss, Jeremiah Arkham, as well as from a man named Hugo Strange; an older man who had just moved here from Metropolis who had his main expertise in hypnotherapy. I found it strange since I had't said more than casual "hello"s since he had started working here.

Filled with curiosity, I opened one of the emails from Dr. Strange. Attached to the mail was a video of something that I couldn't quite make out from it's "thumbnail" because of the low quality camera and the nightvision, which made it all green.

I looked around for some kind of text that would describe what I was about to watch, but none could be found. I begun to feel anxious; this was the opposite of the recovery I'd imagined just five minutes ago. I started the video and froze when I saw the face of my former patient 4479 lying down, his eyes glowing from the green light.

I heard Hugo's voice asking his patient to lie down;

"Tell me what you see"

"I see... I see a roof. I'm looking up. And I feel... like I'm floating"

I sat paralyzed through the rest of the video and reacing the end of it, I started panicking.

"How did he know these things?" I thought, "What does this mean? What does he know about me?" Then it hit me. The million dollar question, "What is this Joker capable of?"

I desperately looked through the rest of the messages sent to me from Jeremiah, and one that particularly caught my eye was about the transfer of patient 4479. Appearently, they had already had meetings and contacted the higher positioned people from Blackgate, Gotham City's very crammed jail. He had also taken the liberty to have these meetings immediately after Strange's hypnosis session, during which time I had not been present.

How come I hadn't gotten any information until after the decision had been made? He was... used to be, my patient after all. Sure, I had ended our sessions after 40 minutes, but so had Hugo, right? Why was he allowed to have a say in it and not me? He was my patient first, after all.

While walking over to my boss' office, I wondered what I was doing. What was I even going to say? Was I going to scold him about the fact that I wasn't a part of deciding whether or not The Joker should be transferred? Was I okay with the transfer? Why were even so upset over this? I hated my session with him. I had a nightmare about it for Christ's sake. Was this some kind of weird jealousy? I felt like, for being a psychiatrist, I had an awfully small idea of what was going on with my own mind.