* J *

Part Twenty-Four: Chapter 177: Solo

Jason's POV

When I told J that I'd do this thing, I honestly didn't know what was in store for me. I knew I'd have to look like him and act like him, but I didn't know how thorough J would be with this. J is the most meticulous person on the planet. There simply isn't a single detail that manages to escape him. He literally thinks of everything.

However, I never signed up for shock therapy. Yet, I got quite a lot of it. J wasn't gonna stop giving it to me until I became forgetful. Which I have become. I've lost little details, nothing major. I've also found that shock therapy makes it a bit difficult to concentrate sometimes. It comes in handy in the sack, but beyond that, it wasn't very useful.

You know, when J told me about Strange's machine I thought it was bullshit. Who can make a machine that can take you into another persons mind? It sounded science fiction. But when I went into J's mind for the first time, I saw it wasn't all a joke. J's mind...it's so broken. All the pain he had endured...it's no wonder that he is the way he is.

I had become addicted to going inside J's mind. I knew things that J's forgotten. Things like his first wife's name, his birthday, and events in his childhood. I offered to share them with him, but he didn't want to know. He'd rather not remember. I know I'd want to know those things. I guess to him it just didn't matter. J didn't spend much time worrying about the past. He didn't see a point in it since you can't go back to the past and change or redo anything.

He's not doing very well. It's starting to show that his health is declining. That thing in his brain is causing a lot of motor reflex problems. He falls. He drops things. He loses the sight in his left eye from time to time, due to the optic nerve being pressed against. He keeps losing weight. But the strangest thing is that he's becoming rather passive. Well, passive for the Joker anyway.

Despite how sick he is, he still tries to maintain as much composure as possible around people. I don't even know the extent of how sick he is. I doubt any of us know. J certainly isn't one to talk about how he's feeling. J's the only one who knows how bad things really are. I can tell he's trying to be brave for all of us. I think he can see how much we all worry, some more than others.

J couldn't go on many missions with us anymore. He knew that in a tight spot he would only be a liability. He couldn't run anymore, and you never knew if running would be involved or not. His aim wasn't always a hundred percent. He suffers from weakness in his arms and hands. I could tell he really missed the excitement. Cocaine couldn't touch the adrenaline high of breaking the law and actually getting away with it.

In a strange kind of way I felt like Frankenstein's monster. J made me and Harley in his image. He was our creator. The world thought we were freaks, clowns. We were looked at as less than human. But J saw us as more than that. The acid in our blood had it's advantages. Because of the acid we healed three times faster than normal. Our blood was the key ingredient to J's Joker Venom. If we were ever in a tight spot with no weapons, all it took was a little blood, because it acted like an acid to regular people.

I stand outside of J's office and place my ear flat on the door. He wasn't in there talking to himself today. A lot of the time he talked to the voice in his head. Other times, he held conversations with his hallucinations. So when it's quiet, he's functioning within safe perimeters, and it's ok to think about knocking. Notice I said 'think about'. He could still be in there stewing on a topic that's passing him off, in which it's usually best to stay a mile away from him. Or he could be in there napping. J never minds his sleep being disturbed, because he would rather be awake. But all of us know how little he actually sleeps, therefore we hate bothering him. And of course, you couldn't completely rule out death, because there was a chance he could be in there dead.