AN: This piece is both terrible and special, because it's literally the second thing I ever wrote. It was born way back in about 2009, and it shows. But I couldn't let it languish in the dark corners of my laptop forever. It had to take a serious beating to be whipped into anything resembling readable condition - I was a baby fic writer when I made it! - but hopefully I've shaped it up to where it can stand up next to the likes of the other stories in this series and hold its own. And to any Jewish readers out there... please forgive if the Yiddish is awful. =P

Bruises

"She dreams in color, she dreams in red…"

- "Better Man," Pearl Jam

Harley watched the drain absently as the rivulets of hot water carried dribbles of red, black, and white silt out of the shower and down into the pipes. She felt like that particular coat of paint had been on her face for months. In reality, it was only a few days, but she had reapplied it a couple of times since the first coat, which meant all the sweat and dirt got painted in between the layers. She squeezed her eyes shut and stuck her face under the water, picking free a few wisps of hair that had gotten stuck in the makeup. The water was extra hot today, and she backed out of the spray quickly; it filled the whole shower with delicious clouds of steam that she stopped to breathe in. She always felt like steam opened her up – not just her sinuses, but also her mental pathways. The shower was her favorite place to clear her head, to sit and think, to organize her thoughts. Of course, the great majority of her thoughts for the past couple months could probably be neatly and efficiently organized into a single folder – a large purple one with a green label that read "J." That was what she had finally settled on calling him, just "J." Saying "Joker" all the time sounded so… unfamiliar, and at this point, they were a little too familiar for that. And the variety of pet names she had tried hadn't worked either. Sweetheart was a no-go, and while he let babe happen every now and then, it was just so generic. And Puddin' only pissed him off. So just J would have to do.

Relief loosened her face as she dug her fingers into the wad of dark blonde tangles clipped up on her head; she had worn it up under that old jester hat for so long it had started to stick like that, and she was glad she had gotten rid of that thing. But even now her hair threatened to stick in two distinctly pigtail-shaped bunches. The trickles of water seeping down through it to her scalp felt amazingly refreshing, and she backed up slowly until her whole head was under the stream. Glancing down to look for the shampoo, she caught a glimpse of her toenails, ten little dots of alternating purple and green smiling up at her from the floor of the shower. That put a satisfied smirk on her face; there were few things that could make a girl feel so inexplicably happy about herself as a set of perfectly painted toenails. They didn't match her costume, of course, but they were J's colors, a fact that totally superseded her matching instincts. The shampoo wasn't down there with them, however, and she looked back up and found it on the shelves. It was a new bottle, freshly shoplifted, and Harley used a good deal more of it than was necessary. The more suds, the better.

The magnetic latch of the shower door made a dull thunk as it opened behind her, and Harley started to turn, eyes squeezed shut against the bubbles sliding down her face. "DAN," she began to splutter, "if that's you, you'd BETTER F—" Then a pair of arms closed around her waist, and she let her protests trail off into a smile. She knew those arms.

"I be-lieve… someone earlier today mentioned some-thing about, ah… revving up my Harley," the Joker murmured, burrowing his chin into the curve of her neck. He held her that way for a moment, then pulled her closer, turning his head and kissing her shoulder lightly. "I, ah… I sent the clowns out to do something point-less and time-consuming, soooo – we have the place… all… to… our… selves…." He punctuated the spaces between each of the words with a series of kisses, moving closer and closer to her neck. Harley had to bite her lip to keep from making that eep sound he hated; her entire body was turning to mush, right down to her green-and-purple toenails, which were making a vain attempt to dig into the white tile floor.

The Joker tightened his hold on her waist and turned his attention to the other side of her neck; as he did, Harley folded her arms over his, her fingers gently tracing the contours of his hands and wrists, following the dark line made by the tattoo that ran along the outside curve of his right arm. She was in the process of deciding that his arms might be her favorite thing about him. They were absolutely perfect, like the arms of some sort of classical marble, an Apollo or a Hermes or something like that, like in a museum – perfectly shaped, smooth, contoured, lightly muscled but flexible – and here, with the hot water trickling over them, plastering the dark blonde hair to the taut skin, they looked like they were sculpted of polished brass. She stroked the back of his hand, suppressing a contented giggle, and he leaned his head forward and kissed her on the cheek.

"So, beautiful… the afternoon is… ours. What sort of, ah… dirty deeds should we perpetrate first?" There had been a hint of a mischievous chuckle underneath his words, and it made Harley blush in spite of herself. She turned her face so they were almost nose to nose.

"Whatever you say, J," she simpered, her bottom lip caught lightly between her teeth. The Joker did laugh this time, and he spun her the rest of the way around, his hands slipping down to trace the curve of her hips. Harley sighed. Never mind, she amended mentally. His arms weren't her favorite thing about him. Everything was her favorite thing about him. His shoulders, just the right breadth to be masculine without being bulky or disproportionate, smooth and solid and powerful; the curves of his biceps, tensing and flexing as he reached his arms further around her; the lean, sleek chest and the softly chiseled abdomen, subtle shadows delineating mountains and valleys of natural muscle, moving with each breath like a caged animal was wrapped up inside, struggling to break free. She slid her hands across his chest, up to his neck, reveling in the feel of the smooth, taut, hopelessly attractive skin; its warm, sun-kissed color contrasted sharply with the brilliant white smeared onto his face and made the streams of hot water cascading over his shoulders look like molten gold.

The Joker gripped her tighter, pulling her to him until she could feel every part of his body against hers, and she shivered in anticipation. His dark eyes stared at her with a flicker of amusement as he moved his hand up her back, dragging his fingers along her spine until her head was resting in his palm.

"Then, ah… let's not waste time, hmm?" he murmured, looking like he was about to break out in one of his characteristic cackles. He lowered his face to hers, stopping just short of her lips, teasing her, waiting for her to finish the gesture. Which she did. With relish.

Harley opened her eyes – and immediately stuck out her bottom lip in a huff. Instead of the Joker's face and clouds of shower steam, she was looking at the pills of fuzz on the end of her ripped pillowcase. Of course. She should have known; it was too romantic and fluffy around the edges to have been anything but a dream. Plus, the nail polish should have given it away. She hadn't had time to paint her toenails for weeks. Harley sighed, dislodging some of the fuzz and sending it floating away from the bed. It wasn't fair. It always ended just when the dream was getting good. Every time. Especially the shower dream, she never got to finish that one. And it was a damn shame, too, because that one always looked like it was shaping up into something fantastic. And it drove her crazy, dreams leaving her hanging like that… especially when the real thing was almost always quicker, more emotionless, and far less romantic than she preferred. She glanced over. The Joker was turned to the other side of the bed, actually asleep for the first time in days, but stretched out in a strange shape due to his bruised ribs. She resisted the urge to reach across the bed and touch him; it was incredibly tempting, but he needed all the sleep he could get, and it was hard enough just convincing him to sleep at all. If she woke him up, there'd be no getting him back under. But his skin was just so attractive…. To vent her frustration, she flipped over onto her stomach and plopped her face down in her rumpled pillow.

Then she let out a strangled sob.

A throbbing pain woke up from its own sleep and began to spread across her face, and she lay there unmoving, waiting as it took its sweet time to subside. As it ebbed, she was able to separate it into its component parts; she became aware of a dull ache above her eye, a soreness in her chin, a stiff jaw, and a stinging sensation in the corner of her mouth. She opened wide to explore it and then closed her mouth quickly, tasting blood. She sat up and put a hand over her lips, then winced as her palm brushed the sore spot on her chin. Harley sighed again, growling a little at the back of her throat. She had almost forgotten about falling and smacking her face the night before. Which meant that on top of all the bumps and scrapes from running around and evading cops and generally being a henchwoman, she now had a whole new crop of injuries.

She got up gingerly, rubbing experimentally at her also-sore shoulder, and tiptoed over to the window of the apartment, thinking of just how incongruous the stupid dream seemed now. The setting should have been another giveaway. No fancy white-tiled showers here; there was something large and grey in the next room that might have once passed for a tub, and a big ugly sink equipped with a faucet that intermittently spat dirty water from rusty pipes, but that was it. They had been forced to ditch the warehouse about a week after her sleepover with Pam – some businessman had purchased the property and they'd had to scram pretty quick to avoid the inspectors he'd sent in – and so for the past few days, they'd been holed up in a condemned apartment building just north of Chinatown. Billy, Peter, Dan, and Dionté were sprawled out in the few livable rooms on the floor below, while she and the Joker had taken the biggest suite, the one that probably used to serve the building's super. The "window" she was peeking through was empty of glass and crisscrossed with two-by-fours nailed to the wall. The spaces between the boards let in a few droopy shafts of light, tinged red and gold and a sickening peach color from nearby neon signs that turned the dark nighttime cityscape into an eerie, chilly twilight.

Harley shivered, but didn't bother to find any clothes to throw on; sitting around in her undies would make it easier to examine the new bruises, and it would reduce the risk of making any noise that would wake the Joker. He had been exhausted and fuming when he'd gotten in last night, and he needed to rest, even if he didn't think he did. A person could only go without sleep for so long. Harley walked over to the tarnished mirror on the ancient, crumbling vanity. The glass was leaning at a precarious angle, making it a little like a funhouse mirror – the Joker had loved that, and had cackled for a good five minutes on their first night there as Harley had made faces at herself. She felt a little color rise in her cheeks as she sat down on the old crate they used as a stool. It might be cheesy, but it was always a sort of accomplishment when she was able to get a laugh out of him – a real one, not part of the act – when she knew she was able to make it through the shell and say or do something funny enough to impress his somewhat elitist wit. Not many things did. Making it onto that list was a noteworthy achievement.

Speaking of smiling…. Harley squinted at herself in the splotchy glass of the mirror. Sure enough, there was a split in her corner of her mouth; the dried blood caked around it almost blended in with the red streaks of makeup that banded her face. She'd definitely have to reapply that later – after last night, it was a bit more than just smudged. And last night… she thought. Her whole body filled up with a warm, agreeable tension as she remembered how he'd felt last night – good enough to distract her from all her injuries – hot, powerful, intoxicating. She grinned. And then she winced. Right, split lip – back to business. She touched the scab hesitantly. Great, she scowled. The makeup would all have to come off if she wanted to clean that up and give it any chance of healing. Trying her best to be quiet, she slipped into the poor excuse for a bathroom and closed the door most of the way to mute the sound; then she turned on the water and let it run. It usually took a few minutes for the pipes to empty out enough and the stream to run clear instead of reddish brown.

There was a tiny radio perched on the rim of the thing-that-had-been-a-tub, and Harley went to inspect it while she waited on the clean water. The slightest noise in his immediate vicinity would wake the Joker up, but Harley had accidentally discovered that music was something he could sleep through. In fact, it tended to help. She wasn't even sure the thing would still work, but she turned it over and checked the battery compartment anyway. They were there, although they did look close to retirement age. She closed it up and placed it on the floor beside the sink, turning the volume dial almost off in anticipation of what might blare out of it. She flipped the switch; a voice came on in mid-sentence, proclaiming that his station played the BEST Hits From the '80's, '90's, And Now! Good, she thought, and not too loud. She grabbed a rag from the floor that looked like it might once have been part of a towel and stuck it under the faucet, soaked it in mostly-clean water, and started scraping off a week's worth of face paint. On the floor by her feet, the radio played some soft, wistful guitar notes that took her back to junior high; she hummed vaguely along with Eddie Vedder as he started crooning up at her from the floor, trying to remember when she'd heard that song for the first time. That was… what, '94? Yeah. 1994, sitting in Erin's basement eating Doritos. It was funny, the things you remembered. That—

"Ah broch!" she spat irritably, discovering another bruise as she wiped.

She was finding that she had to scrub harder as she went on; some of the makeup was really stuck on there, especially the black eye paint. It had become apparent to her out of frequent use that not all facepaints were created equal, and this particular brand had a bad habit of staining the skin if left on. Usually the red was worse, but this batch of black apparently had some very strong pigments in it. As she swiped at it repeatedly, she ran through the previous night's events in her mind, trying to account for exactly when she'd split her lip. Batman had all but disappeared from Gotham after the fiasco on Halloween, and last night was the first they'd seen of him since the beginning of November. He'd only shown up briefly, and then he'd flitted away again. GPD had shown up too, and that had ruined the whole excursion for everyone, Bats and Clowns alike. The Joker had come back to the apartment in a rage, his eyes dangerous, conversing with himself and nursing a set of bruised ribs marked with a shape suspiciously like that of a boot. Harley had been the most pissed about that; it irritated her that they always seemed to want to go for the kick-in-the-ribs to take him down. Eventually they were going to break one, and Harley didn't know if she had the wherewithal to take care of that without an actual doctor. That's what had put him in the infirmary at Arkham, a big Bat-boot to the ribs during his escape attempt. Harley grimaced into the mirror. The Bat might be trying to protect Gotham, but Harley was beginning to hate him a little. For one thing, he came across as a self-righteous cape-wearing nut job. Everyone talked about the Joker having psychological issues, but Harley knew issues when she saw them – she had a degree in them – and nobody flapped around a city at night in a costume and a bad fake voice without some kind of disorder. And for another thing, how was he supposed to be a symbol of… "order and justice" when he was out killing dirty cops and beating criminals within an inch of their lives? No. The Batman wasn't really much further above any of the criminals he fought. Which was what the Joker was always trying to tell people, of course.

In any case, as soon as he'd gotten back in the room, she had wanted to do something for him – hold him, try to reassure him that he'd get the stupid Bat where he wanted him eventually, that the cops couldn't get in the way every time…and she had definitely wanted a closer look at his ribs, at least. And then there was also her desperate and somewhat masochistic desire to be near him when he was angry. Granted, it wasn't exactly healthy, but there was something about the feeling of his skin, the tension and the taut muscles, and the dancing blackness in his eyes when he was in those moods that made the reward greater than the risk. At least by her calculations. Of course, she had never really been the best at math.

She had restrained herself for the first hour or so – even she knew there were limits. But after he had seemed to calm down a little, had put away his knives, and had half undressed, she had seen her opening. She had crawled across the bed to where he sat slumped, staring at the far wall, and had timidly tried to get him to lie back so she could look over his injuries. First he had ignored her; then he had flinched away. She had rolled her eyes; she'd just have to get him to go to sleep, then, and look at the bruises while he was unconscious. And there was really only one reliable way to get him to go to sleep. She had gotten back off the bed, dug into her clothes pile, and slipped into the little red negligee she had snatched from the mall. It was her secret weapon. Of course, in order for it to work, he had to look at it. Which he hadn't. Not even remotely interested. That had elicited a glare at his back. Of all the straight men in the world, she had to end up with the only one who could completely ignore a woman in a see-through nightie. But glaring at his back made her look at his back, and that had softened her up a little. The back had always been her favorite part of the male body, and his was particularly exquisite. In the end, she had resorted to sitting down behind him and running her hands across his shoulders, which he didn't respond to but also didn't attempt to stop. He had a couple of smaller bruises there too, but nothing like what she had seen on his ribs. She had tried again, this time stretching her legs out where he couldn't possibly miss them. It hadn't worked. Not even remotely.

"Hey…," she had whispered, trying to slip her hands around onto his chest; he had pushed them away. This time though, she had been a little more persistent, and she had slipped around beside him and wiggled her arms up under his again, nestling her chin onto his shoulder. He hadn't pushed her that time, but he also refused to make eye contact. She had sighed. "Oh, come on, J. Don't you wanna re—eeeep!"

The Joker had caught her off guard, put his hand over her whole face, and shoved her backward off the bed; she had landed squarely on her left hip and shoulder with a squeal. Then the Joker had just gotten up, stepped over her, and gone to the window. After waiting a minute for her head to stop spinning, she had followed him.

She had tried talking him into at least letting her see the bruise; it was difficult to remember exactly what had been said, but apparently it hadn't been what he had wanted to hear right then because he had slapped his hand over her mouth to shut her up; then he had taken her by the chin, holding it between two fingers for a good fifteen minutes as he had lectured her on the finer points of his pas de deux with the Batman. All the while, he hadn't mentioned his injuries a single time. Like he was pretending they didn't exist. It was after that when she had fallen and scraped herself up so badly; she remembered the Joker making some sort of unexpected gesture toward her, and she had backed up to get out of his way – and when she had, she had lost her balance, probably on that stupid loose floorboard by the window, and fallen. Her face had hit the side of the old chest of drawers, bounced a bit, and then her forehead had hit it as well. That would explain why she was so sore. Leave it to her to get beaten up by furniture. Way to go, Harl.

Strangely, though, that had seemed to change the whole mood and accomplish what she'd been trying for the whole time. She had pried herself off the floor and had been examining her face in the mirror when she'd realized there had been several minutes of silence. The Joker had been staring at her, an odd look on his face. And just like that, he had swung from dismissive to romantic (or, as romantic as the Joker ever got; Harley wasn't going to split hairs on that definition). He had gotten the negligee off her pretty quickly, in any case. The way he had kissed her after that, you'd think he hadn't just lost a fight with Batman, never even heard of a Batman, that he hadn't recently taken a dangerous blow to his ribs, that he wasn't breathing carefully around the pain. Actually, between her face and his ribs, neither of them had really been in any condition to be doing what they were doing. But the way he touched her, the heat of his hands on her skin, had a way of helping her tune out her pain. And he had made no effort to jerk away when her hands brushed his ribs, so she figured maybe she did the same for him.

From there, it had been business as usual – hot, explosive, and (very, very) quick. Sex with the Joker was pretty much like riding a roller coaster; a blinding tsunami of adrenaline, a dizzying high, lots of screaming, at least one moment in which you were convinced you were going to die, and a sudden stop way before you felt like you'd had enough. He had gotten her exactly to the most painfully enjoyable part of the high and then left her lying there, screaming inside but not daring to protest. She had thought about speaking up this time (just a little longer?!) but by the time she had caught her breath and looked over at him, he had already been sprawled out across the bed, mostly asleep. Well, that had been what she was going for, right? Unfortunately, he had fallen asleep with his arm conveniently covering the biggest area of bruising, and so Harley had simply given up and decided to sleep a while herself. And now it was hours later, she felt like a crash test dummy, and she still hadn't gotten a good look at his injuries.

Harley threw the rag down into the sink in frustration; she had been scrubbing carefully at the area under her left eye this whole time, and it was still dingy and dark. It was that stupid black face paint. She made a mental note to never leave it on that long again. Maybe if she washed her face every day, it wouldn't stain. She picked the rag back up, put more water on it, and tried a different scrubbing technique, her fingers picking up the soft rhythm of "Better Man" on the would come off. Eventually. If she washed it enough. That's how paint worked.

Except, what if it wasn't paint?

"Ot gaist du," Harley whispered at her own subconscious, jumping a little when she realized she had actually whispered out loud. It was that stupid voice in her head starting up again, the one she preferred to tune out because everything it said was snarky and unsettling. What if it's a bruise? the voice persisted. What if it's a big, fat black eye? What if your whole cheekbone is broken? Hurts enough to be, doesn't it?

"Of course, it could be a black eye," she replied under her breath. "I did fall and smack my face against the furniture, ya know." She scrubbed a little harder, then winced. Oh, I saw that, the voice smirked (as much as a voice could smirk, that is). I saw you smack your face. I didn't see anyone fall, though.

Harley shook her head irritably. She knew where the voice was headed with this. Same old argument. It always wanted to blame the Joker for everything. And… if he had slugged her in the eye, she might tend to agree. Or if he had pistol-whipped her again. Now that would be his fault. But he could hardly be blamed for her being clumsy and tripping over the floorboard, now could he? She scrubbed at the bruise again, then stopped. Her arm was sore. Whether that was from repeated scrubbing motions or from being shoved off the bed, she declined to think about. And the cut on her lip was starting to bleed again. Fine. Maybe he had clapped his hand over her mouth harder than she had remembered, and it had reopened the splits from the beating he'd given her on Halloween. She looked at her chin in the mirror. Was that a paint stain? A regular, run-of-the-mill bruise? Or were those the imprints of the fingers he had dug into her to hold her face still while he was discussing Bat-hunting?

The bathroom door was only open a tiny crack, and Harley resisted the urge to peek through it to look at the spot under the window; she was too afraid she'd see a smooth, flat floor with no hazardous boards to speak of.

"Ugh," she groaned, making a face at herself in the mirror. "I hate having to be rational."

Harley threw the cloth down again, this time getting up and slipping back into the bedroom, hoping she could leave the voice behind with the makeup in the sink. This was the part, she ruminated, where – if she was your average girl on the street – she'd start coming up with excuses. The perennial classics like 'But I bruise so easily,' or 'He was trying to catch me, not push me,' or the favorite, 'Sometimes he forgets how strong he is!' But unfortunately, she thought huffily, she was not the average girl. She had a degree in psychology and an annoyingly strong tendency toward metacognition. Which meant she couldn't allow herself the psychological escape hatch of explaining away the Joker's behavior. She acknowledged that he was rough with her, and that a hefty percentage of her injuries came from him. But she also knew that he was not technically an abuser – not in the way that word was normally used. It was like she had told Pam, when she had started with that spiel. He didn't hurt her to show dominance, or out of an emotional dependence, or any kind of misogynist ideology, and he didn't derive pleasure from hurting her. She wasn't a "battered woman." Not unless you wanted to count Billy and the other guys in that category too, because the Joker didn't just hit her, he hit everyone. That still didn't offer an excuse for his behavior, and she knew that. She just wanted to call it what it was. But she'd be damned if she was going to sit there in that bathroom and explain all that to her own brain. Again. Especially when her brain wasn't doing anything helpful, just making snide comments and trying to convince her to go to a women's shelter or something. She shook her head at the voice she couldn't see. No. There had been no more instances like the night in the Halloween maze, so it wasn't like she was in imminent danger of death. And the little injuries she ended up with in the interim… well, take her mouth, for example. She didn't even remember him pushing hard enough to split her lip. And if she hadn't felt it hurt, then it couldn't have been that bad. Nope, these were all livable injuries. She reached up and poked at her cheekbone – and after a wince – no, that wasn't so bad either, really.

Oh really, Harleen? This is what we tell ourself now?

The voice was cutting back in, this time sounding suspiciously like her grandmother. Are you a shlub, Harleen? Is that what you are? Harley rolled her eyes. Okay, so her argument was not exactly rock solid. He had beaten the shit out of her, and she was (sort of) defending him. And that was dumb. Obviously. But she could at least be comfortable in the knowledge that she wasn't in denial – she wasn't defending his behavior, just the psychological category under which his behavior fell. And the potential implications that category had for her. She wasn't saying she was completely fine, or that he didn't hurt her. Just that he didn't hurt her in a way that made it stupid for her to still love him. And besides, she hated hearing the concept of being a battered woman being thrown at her in the disembodied voice of her grandmother.

"Shkapeh," she hissed. Harley hadn't even spoken to her in three years, and yet she was still managing to insert herself where she didn't belong. "You aren't here, and you don't know."

I know things you could only dream of knowing, little maidel, the voice retorted. What do you know? Have you had two husbands that you had to take care of? No! Az a yor ahf mir. I've buried two husbands, and lived long enough to know what needs to be known about men. And what needs to be known about men is that they are all shmucks. All of them. And that we are better off without them, no matter what lies we speak to ourselves. They think that because they have this thing dangling between their legs, that they can wave it like a sword and conquer. But never forget, maideleh, that it was Chavah who made the decisions in the Garden, for better or worse. And she did not ask him to take that fruit. Got zol ophiten! No, she PUT that fruit in his hand, because she knew him, and she knew that his burden in life must be equal to her own. The voice came back to her over the years with unsettling clarity, and Harley instinctively put her hands over her ears to block it out. Listen, lamb; if you let the man make the choices, he will dominate you. If you let him dominate you, then he will hurt you. And if you let him hurt you, then you have lost the only thing we have left as women in this world – our power to create and sustain life.

But that's just it, Harley murmured internally. Whether it's him telling me what to do… or you, or Pam… what's the difference? I'm still being dominated either way. And besides….

Harley leaned against the bathroom door, gazing at the Joker's body draped across the bed, watching him sleep. Not quite as wet and glistening as in her dream, but just as sculpted, just as beautiful. His chest and stomach rose and fell gracefully, slowly, with each breath – every now and then, there was a twitch as he breathed too deeply and his injured ribs cried out in protest. Besides, she repeated to herself as she watched him. Don't the Mishlei teach us that the true pride of a woman is the strength of her capability and resolve, not without men but in spite of them? That a truly great woman is the driving force behind her man? Of course, you wouldn't know anything about that, would you, considering Zayde would have been a much greater man without you?

"Exactly, Bubbe, so just shut up." On that whispered pronouncement, Harley closed the door firmly on her grandmother's complaints and let her mind wander. Her eyes did the same, wandering up and down the Joker's sleeping form. Absently, she began prodding the sore at the corner of her mouth with the inquisitive tip of her tongue.

It wasn't even that he was dominating her, she thought as she watched him try to turn over in his sleep; he stopped in mid turn, ribs again saying no. She was here of her own volition. Everything she had done since the night she bought that jester costume had been her choice. It was her decision to get him out of Arkham, not his; it had been her decision to go in deep enough to get inside his head, her decision to participate in every theft, every attack; the lady in the kitten sweatshirt had been her decision too. If the decisions hadn't been hers, then he wouldn't have kept her around. Choice was the axis on which his universe rotated, and he wouldn't waste his time on a woman he had to force to be with him. And this wasn't a case of domestic violence, because his aggression was omnidirectional. He just got angry. And whoever was standing closest to him when the anger happened usually got it square in the face – like whoever walked across the bridge when the stress finally reached its threshold was the one who got toppled into the river. And sometimes… Harley tilted her head and looked at him again, pondering.

Sometimes it was more like he was angry with someone the rest of them couldn't see. She had said as much to Pam, although she probably didn't believe her; but Billy had seen it too, so she wasn't imagining anything. It was something in his eyes. In the times when his anger surged like boiling water looking for an escape route, there would always be a moment when his eyes would flicker over all of them, around them, behind them, like he was looking for a person who wasn't there. And she was willing to bet that person was a very specific woman. It was a classic case of projecting anger onto a surrogate. Can't get back at the person who hurt you, so you find a substitute, someone to be a punching bag in their place. Harley let her mind drift back to that day months before, in Arkham, when he had held her hand against his, studying it. And in the midst of all that philosophizing about hands and personalities and universal qualities, she had seen that telltale mark on his finger that had made her reevaluate everything she thought she knew about him. That he had once been married was really the closest she had ever gotten to a history on him, but that tiny clue was enough to make her suspect that – as she had unwisely told Pam – the mysterious long-gone wife was a large part of his problem – that maybe he was trying to lash out at her, and because she wasn't here, he hit everyone else instead. Or maybe that was too easy, too cliché, and she was trying to give him a tragic back-story that he didn't have.

Not that it mattered. The moral of the story didn't change. And the moral was that yes, she was going to take a heavy beating as the Joker's partner. That was a fact of her life now, no changing it. But like everything else in her new life, it would be her choice to stay or go. And she would stay because the pain was only one small part of the equation. The rest of it was made up of all those other variables, the love and fear and philosophy and quixotic purpose, all scribbled together with some parentheses and plusses and minuses in between. They all had to be considered in the final answer, not just the one.

She wasn't going to let herself complain about the injuries from here on out, she finally decided. Not unless they were serious. So he had given her a few battle scars. Big deal. After all, he lived with his battle scars every day. They had become a part of his character. He lived side-by-side with injury, with pain, with constant aches that she knew had to go way deeper than his physical body. If she was ever going to be able to help him, she would have to understand where he was coming from. And if he was ever going to allow himself to really love her, it would be because she offered herself to him with a willingness to hurt in all the same places. She would have some wounds of her own to match. And she could be okay with that.

Quietly, she snuck back across the room and slipped herself back into the bed, trying not to let the motion of the mattress wake him. When she was sure he was still asleep, she smiled at his sleeping form and snuggled up next to him as best she could, laying the uninjured side of her face against his chest. His skin smelled of sweat and gasoline, and it was warm and smooth against her cheek. He moved his arm sleepily, half embracing her, and she allowed herself a soft smile. So what if she had a few bumps and bruises? When it was all said and done, the benefits outweighed the risks. Maybe the equation didn't come out as an even number; maybe (probably) she'd never be able to get the pain to cancel out. But in the end, if the equation solved, did it matter? So what if there was a little remainder? The pain was a decimal, and she was more concerned with the whole numbers on the other side of the dot. She didn't need the solution to be a round number to be satisfied. But of course, she thought through a yawn, she never had been very good at math.

In the bathroom, the radio played on, the band repeating the chorus until it was time to fade into the next.