Title: Me and a Gun
Summary: And a man on my back… One-shot for the Scarey-Quinn challenge over at tumblr.
Warning: Mention of abuse and dub-con, odd pairing as this was for a challenge that manifested in both the comic and movie form. This has references in spirit to both TDK/Batman Begins and the comics. Oh, and Tori Amos lyrics for the intro. Whoo-hoo.
Disclaimer: I own not the franchise or the characters and make no money off of this.
-:-
Yes, I wore a slinky red thing.
Does that mean I should spread?
-Tori Amos.
A car alarm. An ugly racket that doesn't help or really compliment the sound of the wooden bedframe smashing against the paper-thin wall (there will be dents to add onto the ones already there, but that meant little as the place was just somewhere to squat until someone came looking for the worthless landlord that Joker had stuffed under a floorboard three doors down) in tandem with every burning thrust. Usually after five minutes of such noise, Jack would get off of here and leave to go and blow the car up, but the fact that she couldn't scream anymore made it so he was so close to finishing than he had in months. There were words that he kept muttering in her ear that were not meant for her but for him (nonsense of the most depraved; broken glass, houses and fire, skeleton bones in a freezer, hissing like steam from a sewer grate) to mull over while boiling over inside himself and out into her.
He slipped out of her with a sneering cackle, "That's nice. That's a great idea, yeah…" and lifted his pants back up from around his ankles to amble out the door of the bedroom and to that coat hanging on the rack so he could go out. She doubted that she would see him until the next day.
A broken lamp light. When the door shut out in the hall and his heavy footfalls diminished into nothing less than a heartbeat and a hum, Harley lifted herself (oh, she slipped back on her stomach a couple of times, but her arms stood against her own weight eventually) from her spread position and tried to turn onto her back. The deep abrasions that his grimy fingernails had left were raw and hurt, but being on her stomach (stitches were still woven over and into her abdomen and those five inches around her lowest ribs that would dissolve with time, but only if she didn't strain) hurt much worse.
It was stupid and spur of the moment (a building event brought on because of proceedings beyond her limited control Joker allowed her with his plans and his choices of where to go and where to be; except when it came to making sure everything to keep him going was in order—food, drink, rest, cleaning, weapons collected from easy dealers, drugs when needed) but she found herself first pulling out the ruffled pigtails her hair was in—fingers weaving through the two bundled croppings so they shuffled into just hanging like greasy curtains on her shoulders and back—before picking up the lamp that had been knocked on its side when he'd held her down on the entrance. She removed the lightbulb from the socket and took it with her to put in the little satchel she had taken to carrying about when she walked the town and civvies and shopped for him.
She set about looking for inconspicuous clothes to wear (she didn't own a bra because Joker didn't like tearing them off and she got tired of having to buy new ones, but she had the presence of mind to slip on the deep green low-rise thong from her nightstand) that felt comfortable and didn't hug her body. She'd make the best out of the black wrap-top and denim pants with frayed endings and holes for the back of her knees (Misah J had put them there himself; thought it was good to see a little skin) that she'd put in the hamper to wash later and wouldn't get to. In her gut, perhaps she knew this might be a mistake in the long run, but she didn't feel a pull to just go about the general things she did after he'd had his way with her—the laundry, sew the holes in his favorite trench coat, buy the milk and eggs she'd asked him to get two days ago when he knocked over a mini-mart for spare cash—when she remembered to get some of the hundreds in cash he'd put in the freezer and stepped out the door after pulling on heavy duty brown boots that could carry her (according to the designer logo she recalled when she'd bought them before breaking Joker out of Arkham years ago) from one end of America to the other without giving in and still have plenty tread left over.
A revolver. The gun isn't very pretty and is (according to the idiot that sold Mistah J the shipment full cargo case of them before mouthing off and earning himself a joke that lead to him floating in Gotham River) very old fashioned, but if someone bothered to hassle her on the street, she could at least get rid of them with minimal problem. She wasn't looking to get in a fight when everything hurt so much.
She tucked the hardware into her bra and an impression of the scent (silver and copper and something reedy like leather and spoons that crack addicts use before tossing it away with the needle they can no longer use; rubber that reminded her of the gloves she kept in her first apartment garage and only wore during the rainy season of the autumn days that required her to rake leafs from the trees and her lawn into the street for those large suction trucks that picked up the tattered remains of the tree coverings for the city) curved through her brainstem and memory as the cold of the metal pressed to her warm skin; her feet tapping the cement as she left the building and started looking for somewhere else to stay.
A red Seville. It would have been quite a problem for herself if she took the car that Joker kept in the garage and out of sight for nights on the town when he wanted the Bat to notice them and come and play (with her, without her; it didn't matter at all so long as he showed up), because then he would know for sure that she wasn't coming back this time if she could possibly help it. He would know and he would be angry and suddenly she would turn up in the ER with a broken jaw again, or turn in among the gutter trash in dark water that settled in potholes along the alleys of Gotham.
A red coat. There was something in her that warned that she was being followed after the first twenty blocks of the city she wandered through, but she paid little mind to it until she found an umbrella (when had it started raining? She was so numbed up that she didn't even notice; so out of her own head and dizzy with contaminated thoughts that she didn't notice her clothing sagging to her skin—the gun, pressing harder—or her bangs clinging to her forehead) floating above her head as she stood in front of a bus stop, considering if she should risk public transport to a city that was more clean and less draining on the soul.
The umbrella wasn't particularly pretty thing (it screamed Victorian and wasn't plastic and the water soaked trough on the very rim of where the metal pulled taught into being), but she looked over the little hole that was trying to make itself bigger along one area (the hole was little against the shroud black color of the umbrella and smaller than the nail on her pinky) before her eyes and head tilted to the hand holding the umbrella, along to the wrist that seemed almost cut and gaunt by the Bogart Rouge peacoat that covered the rest of the arm that lead up to the shoulder. When she came to the neck she knew who it was before she found the face (sort of like Audrey Hepburn; swanlike, fine and white and too skinny to have been healthy when he was little) of Jonathan Crane looking at her over the rims of his glasses.
He looked as unimpressed by her as the day he had met her (the classroom had been large compared to the ones she had been in before she switched to Gotham; even compared to the ones in New York. He had seemed even skinnier than she thought he was all the way from her seat in the back; barking out psycho babble and text language to people that looked—she emphasized, looked—barely younger than himself) as he spoke quietly, "Looking to get yourself noticed, Harleen?"
A broken wrist and swelling jaw. She would have smiled at him if she thought that it wouldn't kill her to raise the tail ends of her lips, but she settled for waving over her face (there wasn't any greasepaint left from being rubbed away against bedsheets and washed away by tears; black mascara remained in a similar fashion to silt at the bottom of swimming pools) and shrugged her tiny shoulders, "Not much to notice here, Jonny."
His hand that didn't hold the umbrella brought itself from the inside of his coat pocket to bring a faded white handkerchief to the bursting red and darker colored bruises along her jaw, swiping as well along the few small cuts of her lower lip (it scrabbled up blood that soaked along the thread).
"I don't quite agree with you there."
Harley accepted the handkerchief gladly, if not a little clumsy, with her left hand while the right remained inside her own pocket as she could feel that the shock of the injury (Joker had slammed her into a wall and the bone had smacked in a loud, cracking manner against the wood of the bedframe before he'd pulled her clothing off and away and started in on her for the first time since they'd broken out of Arkham weeks before) was wearing thin and starting to feel. Jonathan noticed.
A fresh bed. Perhaps it was not the smartest idea to bring the gangly (beautiful; she was beautiful under all those injuries and broken dreams, though Jonathan would rather throw himself before the Batman before ever saying so—or even admit to it) woman from the bus stop (the bus had been pulling in and headed for Star City; he wouldn't have had to even think about her if she'd stepped onto the bus and escaped as she so obviously was trying to) to his newly bought hide-out across the river from the Narrows where he could see the bridge and count the lights. But—and Scarecrow cackled at the thought, 'Ho-ho! Are we getting soft Jonny?'—maybe she could be useful.
An entire building to themselves (brown and red brick with tarnish all over the outside that made it look awful for a normal person to even dream of purchasing unless they were a Slum Lord) and he ended up giving her his own room with the sheets freshly pressed and made and warm with the heating on full-blast. He requested only that she remove her drenched shoes and socks before she chaffed mud and dead leaves onto the comforter.
She happily took off her shoes and socks (her wrap-top, her frayed jeans also taken off, much to his surprise when he got a look at her bra-less back drenched in rain water drops; her bag dropping on top of the rest of the clothes like the end brush stroke to a masterpiece) and then slithered under the covers from the foot-end to where the pillows sat in wait to be used.
"Thanks…Jonathan," happened to be the last thing she uttered in those twenty-four hours plus she'd been awake, before she drifted off.
She failed to notice that he gingerly picked up the revolver she'd brought along with her and, frowning, had put it inside the dresser adjacent to the bed—right next to some of the CD's that had been left by the building's previous owner (Tori Amos, Jewel, Alanis Morissette—he had a theory that perhaps an added reason that the landlord hadn't been able to sell the place was because the inane, pathetic human being that had rented the particular room they were in had perhaps committed suicide. There was an awful smelling stain that he'd had to flat out cut out of the floor in the far corner near the window where there was a perfect view of both the harbor and the stars that backed up that theory as well), before he closed the drawer and hopped over the pile of clothing.
He didn't shut the door, leaving the light from his living area to poor in. The dark yellow light reflected on her hair and the drops of water clinging to the rest of her.
A changed direction. He would let her stay on with him as long as she cleaned up the apartment for him when he was too busy (he wasn't a lazy man by nature, so there was little to clean-up at all unless Scarecrow was in control with more ideas than he could write down and test on rats he collected from the gutters), cooked on occasion what little she could (that little wasn't so little and often had nothing to do with fish—he couldn't tell if she was allergic and didn't ask; he simply didn't buy any and was happy enough with the meat and dairy she provided un-burnt and edible), and didn't make a nuisance of herself.
They co-existed well enough, and he was surprised when she every so often tried to give him milk and coffee at a reasonable hour (mornings, always mornings and always hot so it wouldn't turn into ice while he was busy with himself and forgot about it). He frequently accepted a part of himself that was Crane himself and not Scarecrow that remained on the image of her faint smile when he did accept.
Both Jonathan and Scarecrow, however, were still curious at how a light socket in his room used for his more complicated experiments had been filled with a fresh bulb that was both environmentally friendly and decorative in the way that it was designed with the colors of church windows (red, green, white, blue, wings of angels and forked devils' tongues). Harley usually avoided any inquiries about it by saying she would run to the store for more milk and coffee grounds.