Harley Quinn lets out a soft sigh as she pulls off her black suede poulaines. It was the end of a long hard season, the kind of season that makes even the most ardent of clowns tear. Send in the clowns they say, where are the clowns? Why? Harley doesn't know. She only knows she's feeling sick to her stomach and Pammy isn't around.
She's just fresh in from finishing some business for Mista J, business which turned out messier than expected but as Harley warily remarks to herself as she strips down to her underwear - there is no business like funny business. She figures it all started 6 months ago when Mista J walked in with this kid. He was some pug nose brat the boss plucked off the streets one night for reasons known only to the clown prince of crime. A stupid long haired runaway who didn't have the cow sense to turn tail and run when the Joker comes sliding up to you grinning like he just fucked the Batman up his arse - but that didn't mean he deserved what he got.
The sad thing is she actually liked the kid once. Sure he was one cocky bastard, always stepping on someone's toes or pissing them off with some childish prank or other but she swears - Honest to God - that underneath that entire macho bullshit swagger he was just scared and lonely like she was once upon a long time ago. She thinks him misunderstood and that with the benefit of her friendship she can help him, but he was too far gone for her to make a difference. She realizes this sad fact when Mista J tells her today out of the God Dammed blue to give the kid her gun and when she does, he takes it from her and with that stupid smirk still on his face calmly shoots her with it.
As Harley starts scrapping the white war paint off her face - she feels light headed, detached like she's high on helium gas floating on air - she makes a mental note to drop by Arkham on visitor's day next week. She wonders whether the good professor likes pineapple upside down cake. She knows he likes cake and they don't get it much on the inside. The nutritionist at Arkham was a right tight bitch when it came to baked goods.
Crane got hauled in last month for an ingenious plot to poison Gotham City with fear toxin (again) through a seemingly reputable chain of stores offering inexpensive pool cleaning services. Their board rates were so attractive that it came as a huge disappointment to many when the Batman uncovered the scheme and shut it and him down. Bats is a perpetual spoilsport in her books.
The professor unlike some people is a great pal of hers and she thinks well he can't help it if he's murderously insane. It's the God Dammed weather. And She - Harley Quinn - of all people should know. It was so hot in Gotham nowadays with all them skyscrapers sucking up the clouds that even the white gob on her face was melting and running down her neck into her red black check play suit turning everything to marshmallow. If they were going crazy in the streets, it was all the microwaves in the air frying their brain cells.
Bats on the other hand went round everywhere in that petrol guzzler of his with the air conditioning turned up high. She's sat in his "Bat Mobile" more than once to appreciate that people who drove around safe from microwaves in lead shielded tanks with black leather seats and fancy on-board entertainment systems didn't see things eye to eye with the have-nots of the world.
Harley sighs as she carefully examines the rash running down her chin. She really has to go easy on the gob; it was starting to give her spots. Looking critically into the dressing room mirror lit up with bulbs along its edges, Harley sees a tired looking blonde with bad skin dressed in a stained pair of cotton underwear sans bra looking back at her. What happened to that fresh face girl that used to greet her each morning? Good Morning Harley-out-there, and what are you going to do today? Why Harley–in-the-mirror, Puddin and I are going to liberate Ben Franklin from the Gotham National Bank - To arms! To arms! The British are coming - Oh scratch they are already here LOL.
Haley giggles to herself as she recalls how excited Mista J was at the prospect of blowing up the gas lines that ran under the city's financial district in order to bust the underground vaults belonging to Gotham National – It's raining men Hallelujah, its raining men Amen - Puddin loves starting things off with a BANG. It was the showman in him, make a statement, and make it funny.
All in all, Harley mused, he couldn't really complain, could he? Puddin got a good solid run this season with Bats; he chalked up a midnight roof top chase, a stuffed cow and a threat to vaporize Gotham City Hall into silly putty in addition to the usual oddball crime here and there complete with wacky henchmen and an airship thrown in for good measure. Puddin took crime to a definite level of performance art in Gotham only with a higher body count.
It was just like the artiste in him to make her do it - she was closest to the kid, she was the only one who would laugh at his anal jokes and he was always making funny faces at her - and that sick white faced bastard knew it. He knew the kid was her friend.
"Make it funny, Harley dear," was what he said "Make it funny like cheese on toast" as she literally flayed the kid (her friend) alive with her trusty rusty cheese grater. But then that stupid punk should have known better than to try to waste her with her own gun. What's wrong with kids these days? She puts it down to all the artificial sweeteners they keep putting in the food. At least sugar only rotted your teeth not your brain.
But now that everything's said and done and I'll strive to please you every day, Harley just wants to curl up tight into a little ball and disappear into the dirt floor. She's sick to her stomach and she doesn't need to turn round to know Pammy's back from God-Knows-Where doing God-Knows-What with God-Knows-Whom. She can feel those eyes staring daggers into her back.
"Bad day Harl?" Pammy asks her voice low and husky "Or did you stop by the meat packers on your way back to roll in cow guts?" Her tone is sardonic and amused, but Harley detects the murky undercurrents of tension that swirl between them.
The kid she grated was one of Pammy's best boys before the streets and Mista J got to him, and that was why Harley chucked what was left under a thicket of trees in Robinson Park. She wanted to return him to her in some way. He was her beautiful blue-eyed boy once upon a long time ago.
"Something came up, Red" she replies not looking into the mirror. She doesn't want to meet those eyes; she doesn't want to have to explain the blood and the dirt on her clothes.
"Something always comes up, Harl"
Harley watches Pammy from the corner of her eyes as she busies herself picking up the soiled clothes off the floor and bundles them neatly aside. Harley knows from her matter-of-fact demure that she already knows what happened, and possibly also the how and why. It was next to impossible to hid things from her. She always knew, it was like she could smell it off you - the fear, the regrets, the dreams, and the denials - take one good sniff out of the Green and know your heart.
Turning round with a violent sob, Harley desperately latches onto Pammy's back and buries her face into that soft red cornsilk, arms wound tight against her slim taut torso. "I'm sorry………" is all she manages to croak before her throat constricts with the bitter taste of bile.
Pammy gently holds Harley steady as Harley bows over and painfully pukes her guts out at her feet. Later like a mother dealing with a recalcitrant child, she sits Harley on her bed (their bed) and carefully wipes that sulky mouth with a warm damp cloth. In the background, her vines move silently of their own accord, they will recycle the psychedelic mess of vomit on the floor into the earth as compost; waste not, and want not is her decree.
She notices the rash along Harley's cheek and with a smile and a slight tut tut shake of her head; she takes Harley's face gently into her hands and tilts it back. A gasp of pleasure escapes from Harley's lips as Pammy slowly runs her rough tongue over the red sensitized skin cleaning it with her hot hungry mouth as only a mother would care to do. Pammy thinks Harley uses too much paint on her face.
She tries to get Harley to lie down to rest but the harlequin is disturbed and wild and Pammy soon finds herself on her back fending off the other women's increasingly aggressive advances. But Harley is too strong and too fast, and eventually Pammy finds her resolve fading - victim to the desires of her treacherous body. I don't want to feel this way; she thinks as she lets Harley strip her and push her down hard - and she is falling.
They are together a long time on the floor, wrapped in a skin of fur. Harley holds her tight and close, whimpering as she grinds her slippery wetness desperately into her, their bodies quivering and straining for release. They are rutting but there is not a beast with two backs like them. They touch often, her mouth on Harley's breasts, Harley's hands tight in her hair as they ride to the brick of madness.
She is beautiful; Harley thinks - beautiful and naked and stretched out under me. Their bodies touch and as Harley tastes Pammy's exquisite mouth they move slowly, gently against each other. But Harley knows that this tenderness she feels is fleeting; her sensibilities will soon be overwhelmed by a damming need to possess her lover? Her mother? Her sister? Or her friend? Like so many times before she finds herself mounting Pammy without gentleness and brutally thrusting that part of herself into her.
Harley tells herself when she is alone with the voices in her head that she cannot help herself. Pammy excites her like no man or woman before. The voices laugh back telling her that is nothing but a lie why she does things to Pammy that would make any other person blush. I fuck her like this Harley thinks because I have no words to bridge the gulf of space that threatens to separate us. What is she to me? I have no words to give meaning or form to what I feel for her, this burning desire that borders on the incestuous. Is incestuous because of what I am to her.
Harley's body tenses and falls limb. She is spent but release has come too soon for Pammy, She has not had her full of Harley. She pulls her back down onto herself but Harley resists. She is not ready to feed Pammy again but Pammy is hungry still for the smell of her skin, and the feel of her sex. Pammy feels her increasing frustration give way to the first stirrings of fury as she pushes Harley to the floor and straddles her. She sees her own anger reflected in those curious blue eyes. Pammy thinks I will kill her one day with my insatiable hunger but I know she needs me to want her as much as she wants me to need her. She is my lover, my daughter, my sister and my friend.
She knows Harley has no stomach for killing, she knows that he knows that too, and that from somewhere under the rock where he belongs he is laughing his head off. She knows this fine killing joke to pit one of her best boys against her blue-eyed girl in a grudge match of sibling rivalry, is nothing more than his childish way of striking back at her because he cannot accept that children naturally preferred their mothers over their fathers.
Did he think that she would not find out? She is the star of his twisted plot; her choice is Harley – it would always be Harley - and so Tommy has to die.
The poison is already eating away inside him when he picks up Harley's gun. It makes him reckless and sluggish; perfect cannon fodder for a strong fast opponent. He's dead only he doesn't know it yet.
She had one of the others pass him a message from her asking to meet at the old glass factory. She knows he will not say no. He loves her with a passion but not like how other men love their mothers. He is Oedipus and his poison is unrequited.
When he comes, she doesn't recognize him at first, he looks so grown up in his good suit and leather boots with his hair all slick up with grease. As she caresses his cheek she remembers him for the fair haired doe eyed boy he was; but she knows that the man the boy has become will think nothing of tearing her heart out for the satisfaction of making her suffer like he suffers. He was always jealous of her Harley, even as a child.
"What do you want?" he asks, his eyes shifting from side to side, unwilling to meet hers. She can smell the drugs he got high on for lunch, the alcohol he ingested for breakfast, and the whores he used and discarded last night for dinner. She takes in the abuse that he heaps on himself and the world around him, all she notes ironically in the name of love. He knows she thinks, he knows what the green haired devil will ask him to do and he will do it – kill what I love – because he needs to prove to himself that he is bigger than me, that he doesn't need me. It was so easy for her then to lie, to tell him she misses him and to kiss him good bye, and the fool that he is, he lets her.
Harley's mouth is a furnace as she pushes herself between Pammy's legs and penetrates her with her tongue. Despite Pammy's reluctance her breathing grows heavy. She does not wish to be like this. These feelings overwhelm and confuse her. She makes to kick Harley off but Harley is strong. She holds Pammy under her like a cat holds a bird in its mouth, firm tinged with the possibility of sharpness and soon to Pammy's shame her anger ebbs as waves upon waves of pleasure rack her pitiful body.
Pammy thinks of the many times she has lain with Harley and still Harley tells her she cannot have enough of her. Pammy likes that Harley is selfish in love, if you can call this madness love. What she resents is that what Harley wants from her is often more than she can bear, yet she cannot deny that what Harley craves from her is that which makes Pammy love and hate her in turns.
What is real? Harley thinks? Her life is an endless party of blood and guts; she cavorts across a ballroom with a cadaver at one, discuss grave topics of alchemy with a frighten crying hostage at another, and thrill at games of chance and skullduggery with her brother rouges at a third. She drinks poisons of wondrous hues - gold, mahogany, and deep red - from crystal goblets, and she twirls and she dances on pin points of glass . But nothing she sees, does, or hears is real, like Pammy is real and warm as she wraps herself tight around her, their fingers intertwined and Pammy laughs as she tastes the bitterness of herself on Harley's lips.
The poor kid never knew what hit him. He didn't think she could rig the gun to explode once the trigger was squeezed. That was his problem, he never did think and it cost him an arm and most of his face. So whose a pretty boy now? Huh?
Harley has a habit of keeping her friends close and her enemies closer. Did he think she was stupid? Did he think that she did not recognize that he was a ringer brought in by Mista J to improve the quality of the breeding stock for new and improved henchmen?
She was there when Mista J skipped up the curb to the blond haired blue eyed adonis with a wad of cash and an offer of a steak dinner. She was there when he wolfed down two tenderloins, a banana split and three burgers and chased it all down with a magnum of champagne to Mista J's delight. She could tell that Puddin was fond of Pammy's boy from the way he was always staring and running his long chicken bone fingers over the kid's hairless chest and legs. Harley understands that Puddin has issues.
She was watching that afternoon when he drove out in his fancy hot rod to the old glass factory. She watched as Pammy put her arms around him and told him she missed him. Watched as he kissed her full in the mouth. Watched as he ran his filthy hands all over her Pammy. Did he think she was going to let him just waltz in, shoot her, and take away the sunshine from her life?
He was unhappily conscious and crying when she cut his balls off, but she didn't feed them to him. It was the least she could do for a surrogate brother, especially one as close to Pammy as he was. After all, happy families were all the same it was the dysfunctional ones that were interesting.
I am tired Harley thinks, so tired I cannot sit up much less stand, my limbs have become leaded weights bearing me down. Pammy wraps her in fur and cradles her close like a child, her face pressed up against Pammy's soft chest Harley lets out a happy coo. She is safe and she is home. In response Pammy tenderly strokes Harley's sweaty head and leaning over indulgently feeds her, her naked breast. Harley's mouth takes the comfort of the offered nipple and in the quiet she is content to suckle and dream, drowning in the sea that is her.
FINS