Written for my friend, who wanted genderbent Harley and Joker both. I hope it suits you! It's pretty heavily pulled from the 90's cartoon.
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With her feet kicked up on the dash of the stolen mustang, Joker paused in the middle of running a comb through her wind-blown hair. "This is the place?" she said, one arched eyebrow ticking up.
Harley tightened his hands on the steering wheel, reflexively—it always made his head spin to be on the receiving end of one of those looks, and not necessarily in the good way. "Sure thing Miz J," he said, "it's one of the Penguin's buildings."
What it actually was, strictly speaking, was a department store from the seventies that hadn't been in a good enough location to be worth demolishing after the neighborhood had gone bad. Decades of broken glass were scattered across the sidewalk underneath its windows, piles of cardboard from the hoovervilles of yesteryear. And of course, just faintly visible inside, the huge curling tendrils of one of Poison Ivy's monster plants.
"You've been outta town for a while, Miz J," Harley said, "but don't worry! I've been keeping up."
Joker sniffed, unimpressed, and then buttoned up her suit jacket. "It hasn't got the style," she complained. "Where's the panache? The je ne sais quoi?"
"They can't all be subterranean caverns," Harley pointed out, as he turned off the engine. He climbed out of the sleek little car and circled around to open the Joker's door for her, ducking to avoid the stiletto points of her heels as she swung her feet down off the dash.
"No," she mused, fixing the position of her pillbox hat, "or I suppose we'd all go batty, wouldn't we!"
Harley smiled his most supportive, good-joke-there-Miz-J smile, and tries not to wince at the mention of anything bat related. A guy could never tell when the boss was about to swing manic at the mention of certain flying rodents. Back when he'd been her shrink—strange, faintly warped memories those, all scattered around in his head now—he had spent months trying to purge even the faint echo of flapping from their conversations. Back then it had seemed so obvious that the Bat was the anchor drawing Joker down into her madness. If he could just cut the Bat out of the equation, he'd find the brilliant sweet woman underneath the mania.
Harley trailed after his boss, across the ruined pavement of the parking lot, and thought, Harel Quinzell, you didn't know the first thing.
The side doors of the building swung open as easy as a whisper, revealing the cacophony of the Gotham Rogues Co-op. One of Cobblepot's goons was on the register today, and he gave Harley a harried little wave as the Clown Queen of Crime and her loyal henchman sauntered into the building. Joker snagged a basket from beside the door and tossed it over her shoulder, already moving on as Harley rushed to catch it.
The co-op was the only place in Gotham that the eccentricities of its many villains wouldn't by necessity put a halt to the mundane business of maintaining a life. The part of Harley with a doctorate, the part always running quietly in the back of his head, listed: severe megalomania, histrionic personality disorder, disfigurement, delusions—
He trotted to catch up with Joker, who was surveying the selection of cereals this week. In Gotham, even in the nicer places, you couldn't get much except the Coca-Cola and the local generic—the big companies wouldn't deliver across the bay anymore. This week it looked like what had fallen off the back of the truck was Frosted Health Lumps and Circle O's.
"Pitiful," Joker remarked, pursing her lips at the box in her hand.
"Ah don't worry!" Harley said, plucking the box out of Joker's grip and dropping it into the basket, "when it's your turn to muster up some loot, we can hit up a Kellogg's truck in Metropolis."
"My turn?" Joker sniffed, squaring her shoulders. "I don't think so. I've got better things to do than waste my time chasing after cereal trucks. Unless there's something funny in it, but what's funny about breakfast?"
"Boss," Harley said, "it's a co-op. You gotta."
Joker gave him a murderous look. At 5'6 she was nearly a head shorter than Harley, even in her wing-tipped heels, and when she glared like that it was a wonder that animals didn't run for cover. Harley took a step back, basket against his chest like a plastic barricade.
And then Joker smiled. "Well," she said, flipping a hand carelessly, "civic duty is civic duty, right? If we all went around ignoring law and order like that, why, we'd have chaos!"
She left Harley in the breakfast isle, trying to get his heart rate under control. For a second there he was really sure the boss was about to unload one right between his eyes. He grinned, a little dazed from the hairpin turn of events. Jeeze. He'd really missed her while she was away.
While the Joker was digging through a bin full of old movies, her heels practically in the air as she excavated her way to the bottom of it, Harley wandered over to Ivy's booth. The booth itself was almost invisible underneath the wild tangle of foliage, broad leaves and blooming buds obscuring their tables and trays alike. Ivy blossomed like a strange and striking flower in the middle of it all, in her Birkenstocks and sarong, elbow deep in potting soil. When she looked up from her work, her smile made Harley's ears go hot.
"Hey Red," he said, scooting between the errant branches of some fruit bearing bush. "How's business?"
"Oh, you know," Ivy said, gesturing vaguely with her clippers. "Typical. Boring. Pays the bills. The offer's still open if you want to come help me here at the shop—between the two of us I'm sure we'd get through the weeding in time to perpetrate something really nefarious."
"Ah," Harley said, shifting the basket from one arm to the other, "thanks Red, but—Miz J's back in town so—"
Ivy wrinkled her nose. "Oh," she said.
"It's nice to have a lady around the place again," he said, forcing brightness into his voice. "You know I keep the guys in line best as I can, but it don't really feel like home without the Boss around."
Ivy jammed her arms down to the bottom of one pot and lifted the entire mound of soil free in one decisive jerk. "Maybe you should consider getting a new home," she remarked. She didn't look up. "One that doesn't revolve around the presence of a twisted sociopath."
Harley blinked at her. "Those exist?"
From down the aisle, there was a triumphant cackle, and then Joker called, "Pack it in, Harls, I got the goods!"
Harley winced at Ivy's pointed glance. Ivy was a better friend than you'd think to look at her, and a real good one to have in your corner when the chips were down and your boss was in the clink, but she could never seem to understand what it meant to be in love. To be totally gaga, over the moon, devoted to someone, when you didn't want anything more in life than to follow them into a firefight and come out the other side laughing. Ivy was an independent lady. He couldn't fault her for that, but it made things complicated when they tried to talk like this.
"You had better go," Ivy said. She snipped the bloom off an orchid, where it fluttered down to the knot of vines covering the table.
"Right," Harley said. He took a step backwards and stumbled over a taproot that hadn't been there before. "Look—you know where to find me if you need me, right, Red?"
Ivy didn't look up from her pruning, but her expression softened at the edges. "Of course," she said.
Harley made his way back to where his boss was, with her elbow around a stack of old black and white films. She'd pressed herself up against the display of ziplock boxes, and as Harley came down the aisle she reached out and dragged him back against the display as well.
"Boss?" Harley said, wincing at the metal shelf that had just embedded itself in his spine.
"Killer Moth is around the corner," Joker said, out the side of her mouth.
"Killer Moth?" Harley echoed. "What's he gonna do, chew your scarf?"
Joker shot him a withering look. "If that was all I'd let the old boy have at it. Those rubes at Blackgate crammed me in a cell with him while they were rebuilding my wing of Arkham, and if I have to listen to one more of his pathetic little speeches I think I'm going to go sane."
"Huh. Let's go the other way then."
Joker pursed her lips and jerked a finger at the other end of the aisle, where the Mad Hatter was loudly bemoaning the lack of decent teas in Gotham—something about stems per leaf or something, it was hard to tell with him when he got worked up like that. Harley usually just tuned him out whenever they were in the same building together.
"Harley, my dear," Joker said, "my angel, my prince—"
Harley felt himself go kind of fuzzy and dizzy as she took his hand in her soft kidskin gloves.
"I need you to go out there and distract the winged wannabe while Miss J goes and snags the last of the wax lips, alright Cupcake?"
Harley blinked a couple of times, not quite caught up with the conversation. "Uh," he said. "Sure?"
"Spendiferous," Joker said, grabbing Harley by the arm. She swung him bodily out into the path of Killer Moth, and he staggered to a halt at the edge of the frozen dairy case, nose almost bumping the villain's basket.
Killer Moth, full wings and antennae and all, tilted his head.
"H-hi," Harley said. He attempted his best one-of-the-guys smile, the one he used when Miz J dragged him along to one of her team-up schemes. It was tricky being someone else's henchman, especially with the B list villains who always seemed to have a chip on their shoulder. And sometimes when they really didn't like that a lady was an A lister while they were still stuck pilfering rubies from little old widows, they got it into their heads that Harley was responsible for the problem.
"Oh," Killer Moth said, "Hi. You're one of Joker's boys, right?"
"Ye-ess," Harley said, slowly. There was a no-shooting policy in the co-op, but that didn't mean he didn't have something in his boot just in case.
"Oh! We had a great time in Blackgate last month," Killer Moth said, brightening up immediately. "I was telling him about my new breeding program for the monstrous luna—it's a subset of the Actias Luna, a personal project of mine, see the jaw capabilities of moths are so—"
Ten minutes later, Harley emerged from the conversation with more anatomical knowledge of flying insects than he had ever wanted to have. If he never heard the word "mating habits" again, it would still be too soon. Maybe if he hit himself a couple times with the mallet in the car he could liquidate the moth-carrying brain cells and forget some of that.
He caught up to Joker where she was in line for the check out, tapping the patent leather toe of her shoe. "About time," she said, shoving the basket back into Harley's arms. "I've been lugging this thing around for minutes."
Harley flipped through the selection of obscure candies, ropes, bear traps, and bargain bin films. He was going to have to come back for some actual food, later this week.
They made it all the way up to the cashier, before Joker paused, tapped herself on the head and said, "The bags, of course. Forget my own head if I hadn't sewn it down. Harley, be a mensch and run out to the car for me?"
Harley glanced back at the line of goons behind them, all grinding their teeth at him. There was a low sound like a growl somewhere in the queue. He took a step towards the door with a nervous chuckle, sliding his boots across the floor, and then made a dash for the parking lot.
The shopping bags—reusable, with the Rogues Co-op logo printed down the side—were in the trunk, and Harley hastily shoved the Joker's oversized papier-mâché set of teeth out of the way to paw through the leaflets and detritus for them. Miz J could handle a queue full of irritated henchmen no problem, but Harley himself wasn't sure he could deal with the aftermath if the Penguin got word of it.
As Harley was jogging back across the parking lot, movement in the window of a semi truck caught his eye like a beacon. He slipped a hand into his boot on automatic and fished free the bowie knife sheathed there. He'd rather have a bazooka, honestly, but you don't get to be the number two in an outfit like the Joker's and live long without learning a thing or two about the sharp and pointy end of self defense. There were a lot of people out there who thought a guy working for a villainess must be some kind of a push over. And maybe Harley had been, coming almost straight outta academics and into the criminal lifestyle, but he'd always been a fast learner when he put his heart into it.
Harley hopped up on the runner and pressed his nose to the window, and then let out a bright little laugh of surprise. Inside was Scarecrow, tapping away on a cell phone, slumped in the passenger seat with his mask pulled down over his face.
"Doctah Crane!" Harley called, tapping on the window with the butt end of the knife.
Scarecrow glanced up. It was hard to tell with that bag over his head, but he seemed surprised. He cracked the window.
"Hello, my dear boy," he said. "Is this a hold up?"
"Nahhh," Harley said, resheathing the weapon. "How come you're holed up in the car, Doc? Near to gave me a heart attack, I thought you were the Bat or something."
Scarecrow gestured vaguely with his cellphone. "I'm beginning to wonder the same thing. These buffoons can't do a thing for themselves." The machine buzzed, again, and he let out an irritated noise. "Circle O's or Sugar Lumps, Harley my dear?"
"Circle O's. Those lumps'll rot your teeth, Doc."
Scarecrow reached out absently and patted Harley's broad shoulder. "Right you are," he said, his thumbs skating over the screen.
Harley left him to it. The doctor probably didn't want to be seen pushing a cart around like a regular old villain. Probably it'd ruin the mystique.
As Harley pushed his way through the doors into the co-op, instead of rioting henchmen shooting their ray guns into random support structures, he found an absolute ghost town. The crickets practically chirped in the rafters. Harley stood there, stunned, watching the conveyer at the cashier's slowly carry a lone box of toothpaste towards an unmanned register. What in the world…? He set down the shopping bags on the end of the conveyer and wandered into the store. Nobody in the canned food aisle. Nobody in the acids and ammonias aisle. Some boxes scattered across the floor in the wire and crafts aisle… and one lone figure examining the wrenches in the hardware aisle. Harley lifted a hand to wave, about to jog over, when the figure looked up from his selection and fixed Harley with a stare that was as terrifying as it was invisible.
The blank red helmet of the Red Hood glinted in the fluorescent light.
Harley threw himself back, out of the aisle, handspringing over a display of chainsaws to land in the relative safety behind it. He clutched at the spandex over his heart. He knew that one, that was the one Miz J beat to death a year or two before Harley joined the team. Oh, jeeze, they were in trouble.
"Nice of you to join us," said a derisive voice beside him.
Harley turned to stare at the Joker, who was idly picking bits of floor lint from her white gloves. Not a hair out of place, shopping basket at her hip, she didn't look at all bothered by recent developments.
"That's Red Hood out there," Harley whispered, ducking in closer. "The bird boy you whacked. We gotta get you outta here."
"Are you implying," Joker said, "that I can't handle one of Batsy's little whelps?"
Harley grimaced. "No, Miz J, of course not. It's just—he's unstable, everybody knows it."
From the breast of her jacket, Joker drew out an old fashioned revolver much too big to have fit there. She spun the chamber, the silver metal of the gun reflecting the sickly greenish glint of her pearls. "He's a bad sport," she said, clicking her tongue like a disappointed mother. "He needs to learn how to take a joke."
"Please, boss," Harley said, clasping his hands together, "let's just hit the road, okay? This isn't the place for it."
"Ah, Harley my dear," Joker said, patting his cheek with one small hand, "this is why I'm the brain of the outfit, and you're the one who orders takeout."
Joker shifted, as if she was about to push herself to her feet, and then paused at the sound of Red Hood's voice, somewhere above and beyond them.
"Hey," he called, in that oddly echoing voice, "clown boy, I know you're back there. Get over here."
Harley and Joker exchanged a look. Joker lifted an eyebrow. What that meant, Harley assumed, was that from here things could go one of two ways: her way (with a lot of shooting), or Red Hood's way (probably also with a lot of shooting, but none of it directed at Joker). There was apparently no room in this equation for Harley's way, which would be making a break for the back door before Miz J could say anything to get Hood any madder.
Harley sighed. Obviously he wasn't going to let anything happen to Joker, even if that required taking a bullet for the team. In a possibly very literal way. He stood.
Red Hood was waiting on the other side of the display, tapping some complicated mechanical tool against his open palm.
"Uh, hiya," Harley said. "Nice weather we're having…"
"Stow it," Hood said, but he sounded more bored than enraged. "You run the registers here sometimes, don't you?"
Harley frowned. "Sure, when it's our turn."
Hood turned on his heel. "C'mon. You can ring me up."
Harley hesitated for a second, and then raced after him. Harley was a good bit bigger than him, but he moved like he had places to be and physics were a thing that happened to other people.
"How'd you know that?" Harley asked, as he keyed his code into the register.
Red Hood said nothing, just sliding his purchase across the counter. It was a monstrous wrench, with holes and divots for shaping who knew what all sorts of things—Harley had never been very mechanical, coming from a city where people mostly walked where they needed to go.
"Come on," he wheedled, leaning over the counter. "How'd you know? Even Bats doesn't know where we keep the co-op. At least, I don't think he does. I'm sure he'd have something to say about it if he did," Harley added sourly.
Hood stared him down for a minute, eyeless mask doing a pretty solid job of it, and then sighed, shrugging. "I used to be a villain?" he said, the accompanying "duh" implied thickly in his voice. "I still have the card."
He whipped the co-op membership card from the pocket of his jacket. Harley took it gingerly and flipped it over, counting the stamps. Definitely the real thing.
"So how come you ain't busted us yet?" Harley asked, going ahead and stamping the next box on the card.
Hood tapped the frankenstein's wrench. "These were discontinued back in the nineties," he said. "Frankly I don't know how you guys are still getting them."
"Yeah," Harley said, "the sources can be mysterious like that. It'll be fifteen fifty please."
"Oh," Hood said, "I'm not paying. You know, I heard your boss was back in town, clown boy."
Harley smiled uneasily, backing up against the register. "You really oughta pay—folks don't like it when their merch gets lifted."
Red Hood reached across the counter and dragged Harley down to his eye level, hands fisted tightly in red spandex. "You tell your boss something for me, when you see her," he said, in a poisonously quiet voice.
A seam in Harley's collar popped.
"You tell that loony grinning bitch," Hood said, "if I catch so much as a whiff of her perfume in this town, I'm going to burn it to the ground."
"Um," Harley said. "You know, lotsa folks wear Clinique Happy, it's really a—" another seam popped, "—a popular brand—"
"To the ground," Hood said. "And then I'll make her eat the ashes."
"Ashes, got it."
Red Hood let go. He adjusted Harley's suspenders, snapping them back into place where they belonged with a sharp twang, and then picked up his purchase. At the door, he glanced back over his shoulder.
"You should find new work," he said.
And then he was in the parking lot, throwing a leg over his sleek motorcycle and disappearing silently into the night. Harley watched him for a moment, frowning at the falling evening outside the glass doors. What a nosey little punk. What was with people today and telling Harley his business?
"You guys can come out now," he called, crossing his arms against the register.
Slowly, rogues of various kinds begin trickling out from underneath the nooks and crannies of the store. Joker reappeared, shoving her revolver back into her suit as she strode across the floor.
"I believe I'm going to have to speak to his father about this," she sighed, "it's simply not acceptable behavior for good little boys, shoplifting and threatening employees and such. Why, if I was his mother, I certainly wouldn't stand for it."
Harley had been around for long enough to know what the beginning of a scheme sounded like.
"You wanna get Bats involved too?" he asked. "Puddin', maybe we oughta start smaller?"
"Nonsense," Joker said, already taking off towards the blocked off exit with a rapid click-click of heels on linoleum. "It's about time we had a heart to heart about the boy, Batsy and me. Speed it up, Harls, I don't want to pay for this stuff if I don't gotta."
Harley could practically feel Poison Ivy's eyes on the back of his neck, the weight of the unspoken advice. Maybe it was time for Harley to pull back a little bit—not forever, just long enough for this ugly business with the kid to pass over. After all, it had started before Harley joined the clown queen's gang. Back when Hood died, he'd still been Harel Quinzell, rookie headshrink looking for his first big break. Joker could spare him for a week, a month tops…
There was a deafening bang as Joker shot the lock off the exit, kicking the door wide open. "What're you waiting for," she called, blowing smoke off the barrel of her gun, "a police escort?"
Harley was off before he could think twice about it, pounding across the linoleum after her. His chest buzzed with warm fuzzies, like bunny rabbits on fire, like sugar and spice and everything nice.
What a woman, he thought.