Inspired by the song In The Cold Light of Morning by Placebo.
The morning after any major event is always a surreal moment. The cold light of morning shone bright in the sky and made its way through the cracks of wood that replaced a broken window in the Steel Mill, causing Harley to squint through her swollen eyelids. She had stopped crying an hour ago and barely moved from her spot next to the crib where her future would have slept.
Her love was dead. He had been allowed to die the night before and to top things off, through her tears and suffering she had felt that something was wrong within her. She didn't know much about pregnancy or impending motherhood but she knew that severe physical trauma could play a serious factor with her hormones and with her fetus's life. She had decided to take another pregnancy test to make sure that she was still pregnant only to be devastated once again.
It came back negative.
The beautiful life she and Mister J should have created was non-existent. Not only had she lost the only man that had ever made her feel loved and cherished, despite all the abuse, but she had also lost the only reason she had to continue living after he had been taken away.
Now all she had left was an empty cradle that would never hold life and all the proof of that strewn about the floor and inside the cradle.
If only she had stopped Joker from using TITAN…
If only she tried harder to defeat Batman herself or at least swayed Joker to annihilate the Bat in a different way…
Harley felt fresh tears follow down the path the previous tears had left on her face. She held her legs tighter against her chest and rested her forehead on her knees, hiding her pain from the persistent light that did nothing to alleviate her from the horrible reality that lay before her.
Sobs tore through her small frame and all the emotions she had tried to suppress poured forth anew, tearing her soul open from the inside.
She knew that she was a monster for all the things she had done alongside Mister J, but for life to punish her that way was beyond any cruelty she had ever done.
Everything she did was in the name of love. She would have quit and gone to the ends of the earth in order to see Mister J hold their child in his arms.
It would be days of countless of sleepless, pain-filled nights for Harley to feel anything other than sorrow. Revenge would eventually cross her mind and she would do what Joker hadn't done. She would kill the Batman.
I know this is the second story I've written about Harley's thoughts about Joker's demise but I can't help it. I'm still mourning his death so I just have to keep writing about it.