I swallowed one more shot of whiskey and shoved the needle into my hand again, feeling the almost soothing sting as I tugged the skin together.

Normal.

Fucking Normal.

It's kinda funny how you can stray so far from the path without realising you've even left. Like Little Red Riding Hood I didn't listen, I took a shortcut, and when I arrived at that toothy grin I thought, "This must be grandma." Crazy, right? It's not till that blackness swallows you whole, till you're somewhere between dead and alive, deranged and normal, broken and salvageable that you know you're too far gone; that it would be more painful to turn around and go back now.

So you stay crazy.

Then again it's only kinda funny in the world where I live. Where sitting with my bare back pressed against a concrete wall, stitching up the gash on my hand given to me by an only slightly annoyed lover is normal.

I guess you wouldn't appreciate the humor in it? Too bad, if you'd let your sanity slip for a moment you'd realise it's a real riot.

I gasped and then sighed, letting the thread hang loose, twisting down my arm like a tiny leash to the life I lead. The blood had at least stopped flowing, now only kinda pushing at the edges of my torn skin. Was it crazy to even stitch the wounds any more?

It was so hard for me to tell what was crazy, and what was normal...

How did you get here Harley?

How does one go from normal to bat-shit crazy without even knowing it?

"You need a doctor," came the deep voice of that dark man behind me.

I laughed with my eyes closed, pretending I couldn't hear the worry in his voice. He really did have a soft spot for hurt little girls, some call it valiant, I call it dangerous. His eyes looked at the cut on my hand as if i had just fallen off a bike, and for a moment we both forgot my blood wasn't the only blood that had touched these hands. For a moment my soft laughter and his heavy breathing became all that existed in a brief second of childish intensity.

"When was the last time you had a tetanus shot?"

My silence seemed to annoy him because he swept forward and grabbed my shoulders, and for a moment we were a contrast of perfect proportions, my bare form, with nothing to hide in a world that shouldn't be told of, his cloaked body, with nothing to tell in a world that shouldn't have been hidden.

"You can still get out Harley, there are ways."

I spit in his face and laughed as he barely winced, a bloodcurdling scream of pure and utter joy. Ways to freedom! Ways to happiness!

Now that was a joke.

"She's too drunk to understand you," Ray said from the doorway, pity mingled with fear as he watched the bat with cautious eyes, deciding no doubt whether he'd rather face an angry Joker or a thwarted Bat.

"Fucking coward!" I screamed, taking another gulp from the bottle and tearing the thread in my hand with my teeth. The smell of whiskey on my own breath was disgusting, unsettling, and utterly necessary to numb the pain. My mind got a little fuzzy when I asked which pain, the dull, throbbing loneliness of being crazy, or the sharp stab of new rejection by my fickle lover. Or maybe just the pain of stitches in my hand.

There was a tense silence as the bat and I stared into matching sets of wounded eyes, communicating all the other needed to know, silent thoughts traveling faster then words, a hidden conversation Ray would never hear.

Let me help you, please.

You can't help me, you can't even try.

I'm not going to give up, I can't give up on you.

Why? Cause I'm a girl? Cause I'm fragile? Cause I'm pretty?

Cause you're human.

You can't save me.

I'll never stop trying.

All of this within seconds and then he broke eye contact, and was gone like that. Just gone, like a magic trick.

What he didn't understand was there weren't ways out for me, not easy ones.

His way out involved a long legal process, rehabilitation, witness protection program, constent doubt, instability and insecurity.

My way out involved a razor and a bottle of pills.

I guess the truly scary part about crazy is how scary it really is.

No one tells that to normal people.

I used to be normal.

I think.

Fucking normal.