Title: Do Not Want
Summary: Two years. Two years of being divorced (if not on paper, than in spirit) from a monster and still, there is the unsure feeling of ever hooking up again. Well, she has her health and she has a life, of course, but it's not the same. The sequel to Hating This; hinted Creeper/Harley.
Warning: I haven't decided if this is to stand on its own or if it is to continue yet. I'll have to wait and see. Also, this is only in Batman TAS because there is no section for general DC Animated and it didn't feel right just to drop it in the comic section where it would rot.
Disclaimer: I don't own the franchise and therefore make no money off of this.
Dedication: Let's see… Hebi R, Herotales, angelvan105, RMMB, Kirra kills; basically anyone who gave a damn about the last fic. And this is also my second in a string of anti-cyber bullying fics.
-:-
Life is a game, play it. Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
-Mother Theresa.
She didn't like to be touched anymore.
That is not to say that she rejects touch altogether—not at all—but it has to be initiated by her own hand or not in the least.
There are certain times, of course, where someone might inadvertently brush up against her (an elbow in her side while out drinking cocktails because Leland thinks it's good to celebrate a good day at work in a more friendly environment—with karaoke and no smoking allowed—than a suspicious place down by the docks or near Crime Alley where it was considered lucky if the pint glasses were clean; a hand on the shoulder that turns out to be Selina or Bruce Wayne that spotted her across the duck pond in Robinson Park and they just had to say hello; a prod of a sneakered toe against her ankle when her downstairs neighbor—Jason Todd—passes her on the stairwell to ask her if she has any spare cigarettes or some change he could borrow) and get away with it. But mostly, these occasions are still met with annoyed looks are derision and sneering.
Creeper found that, still, if he was to pursue Dr. Harley Quinzel, it would have to be entirely without making any move that could be deemed unsafe on her own person. She'd tossed him over her shoulder that one time he'd snuck up on her outside her apartment and landed a light peck on her cheek, after all. Those flowers he was to give her had been ruined, to boot.
As Jack Ryder, he had to satisfy his curiosity of her by setting up situations where he could just appear next to her in a bar on her days off, or in the Laundromat she occasionally went to when the laundry machines in her apartment building were out of commission; he'd just sit or stand next to her with his own drink or his own laundry and talk to her without making her annoyed in some way.
("I don't hate him, you know," she confided in Creeper one night when she had almost gotten mugged and he had swooped down to help her out; an unnecessary thing, seeing as she just lifted her leg and kicked the thief in the stomach so hard Creeper and Jack—both personalities in their own ways—could tell she had broken a few of the man's ribs.
This had become a sort of go-between of the two of them. He asked her questions until she told him to fuck off and then when he saw her again in his big feathered boa and his speedo, it was with the answers he had asked.
He looked at her with his half-crazed, half-sane eyes—such a giant step up from Joker himself—and made a sound for her to continue. Jack liked for her to delve into the details of her life while Creeper just liked to hear her talk (it was better than hearing a mermaid sing, Creeper crooned to Jack when the reporter was in control) and talk.
She continued to walk the back alleys while he stooped and capered beside or above or behind her; dainty hands with the chipped fingernails stuffed in her black coat's pockets, "You and Bats and the rest always seem to be under the impression that I hate Joker now, but I don't. He doesn't hate me either."
"Kinda hard to believe when you and he always try and kill each other these days, beautiful," Creeper smirked, his hands tightening on the edge of the roof he was bounding on above her like a squirrel after it's seen another squirrel that doesn't belong; his anger wasn't palpable, exactly, but it showed in how his fingers and tendons made his gloves crunch against stone.
She shrugged as she turned into another alley that that he knew would lead to that refrigerated building where she would say hello to detective Renee Montoya's little brother, tease the young man for a little while with how scary he still thought she was, and then buy some weird meat products for her hyenas and herself; and he knew she would pay extra. It was a force of habit Jack believed she had developed out of guilt while Creeper just thought it was her way of apologizing for making Benny Montoya sweat in her presence.
"We do want to kill each other, but not out of hate. More like…if we don't try and win one over each other, we'll stop being able to function and have a breakdown. Jack's too vain to be able to deal with that, and more than one massive breakdown a decade is too much for me to handle. So when he escapes and tries to screw with me, we fight. Plain and simple.")
There was blood all over the hallway Joan had been stuck in with Joker for the better part of five agonizingly terrifying moments and walking down it again on her way to meet Commissioner Gordon and that new detective in the MCU (Anna…Ramstein? Ramone? Ramirez?) to take her statement of how Joker had gotten out this time was not something she wanted to be doing. Stepping over some spatters of blood while her hands were tucked in her whitecoat to prevent anyone from seeing how she was shaking made her feel more queasy than she already was.
The two police individuals stood at the end of the hall looking a bit too calm for her liking, but she greeted the white haired Gordon with a nod and just lightly looked over the young Latina female detective that, up close, did appear to be showing a bit too much of the whites of her eyes. Ramirez didn't want to be there and Joan knew that Gordon had brought her because these situations happened all the time and the woman detective would need to get used to it sooner rather than later. Like trying to get used to taking care of feral dogs that, even though they had been collared and vaccinated, still always managed to piss on a wall inside the house or claw their way out from under a fence and into the freedom of the city.
"Commissioner Gordon, Detective Ramirez, it's good that you got here so quickly."
"Not as fast as we would have liked," Gordon muttered to Joan lowly, eyeing his new detective as Joan starting leading them down the halls with blood caking them and towards the room at the front of the asylum that was kept to house all the camera monitors. They needed to have the footage of Joker getting out and the sound footage incase he'd said anything, while cornering Joan and after being confronted by Harley, that could tell them what his next move might be once he got into Gotham City instead of the suburb of Summerset that Arkham sat upon (basically the same place, but Summerset was a district full of half natural plants and didn't suffer from as much pollution, what with being on a hill just overlooking the ocean) in its own dreariness and misery.
"It's basically straight forward in the way he got out," Joan explained as they made the way down the halls, her hands shaking just a little less as the adrenaline in her veins was thinning out and the tips of her fingers touched at the spare change in her pockets (three pennies, all disgustingly dark with age and sweat stains from human fingers; one quarter that was less than a year old and still clean, which was a miracle in Gotham and a couple of Canadian coins she never seemed to remember to get rid of) to make herself calm down further—not looking at the blood again, "He somehow got someone to smuggle in the metal holder of a pen and he used it to pick the lock to his sell like he did six months ago."
"I'm guessing he swallowed it in his lunch?" Gordon asked, hand steering Ramirez away from the wall so she didn't brush against the concrete that was cracked from a weight smashing against it and blooming outward.
"Of course," Joan nodded, punching in her personal number across the digits of the access panel to the camera room, fingernail making the keys tap hard like bird beaks snapping against glass, "And we're having reconstruction on the floor he ambushed me in, so he got his hands on one of the power tools that the workers neglected to lock up on their way to their three hour lunch. You'll want to speak with them."
They all entered the room, one of the screens showcasing the hall of the most infamous patients as they whispered to each other about the hour's earlier events (the Riddler was close to his newest parole hearing and was being quiet, but looked like his face would turn purple if Ivy spoke another ill word about the power equipment and the tussle Joker had with his ex-wife trying to defend Leland from going through some agonizing surgery,) with a few screens recording the lunch room, the shower room, the grounds outside the asylum.
The one Joan looked away from and that Gordon glared at while Ramirez looked sick to her stomach showed the recording of the events just before Joker broke out of a window and left Joan and Harley in the hallway with one of them clutching the right side of her face and her right shoulder. Blood smears on the floor made the three nickel plated, two inch long nails scattered about look like shards of glass in a '50s noir film.
"Personally, I think you could pull off the one-eyed pirate look."
There was very little emotion Jack Ryder could feel around Jason Todd except for discomfort and astonishment. The kid couldn't be older than eighteen and he smoked like chimney, swore like a sailor, and wore clothes around his apartment (hell, around the apartment building) only because Harley and their neighbor Stephanie Brown yelled at him to do so each morning. And yet, he was more comfortable around Harley-saying whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted and didn't care if he made anyone else uncomfortable when he was in her apartment in nothing but his boxers and a Japanese see-through kimono (he wore it like rock and roll royalty and Creeper chirped friendly remarks about whenever they saw each other from the apartment windows)—than anyone than maybe Creeper and Batman had the right to be.
Especially when she was cutting open a frozen deer carcass in her living room, nothing on her but grey Hipster panty-shorts and a black sports bra and (Jack felt sorry about it and Creeper just kept making jokes about depth perception) thick white gauze taped over her right shoulder, her collarbone and fore side of her face just above her teeth. Doctor Thompkins had taped up her face as best she could, but head wounds caused by two nails in Harley's cheekbone, one just in the crook of her eye near the bridge of her nose and two more just above her eyebrows were absolutely certain to bleed for a good long time.
Jack had chosen to sit in between Harley's hyenas, because the entire apartment had the windows open and the heat was turned off in the middle of dead winter to cool down the fever she had gotten from a slight infection along her shoulder from one of the nails that had been pulled out and been discovered to be covered in mold, and he couldn't have been happier to have made that choice as the glare Harley directed at Jason seemed to drop the temperature further to well below zero.
Jason didn't even flinch and the goosebumps along his shown skin didn't multiply.
"I can also pull off looking like the villain in 'Hellraiser,' but we both know how uncomfortable that was to look at while I was in the hospital, Mister Todd," Harley snarked calmly, leveling her meat hatchet from the kitchen into the shoulder of the deer hanging from the ceiling; the dead animal's tongue a strawberry red and touching the floor as if it were still breathing and trying to taste fresh bark in a maple forest.