A/N: I've never written an Ivy/Harley story before, but I certainly like the pairing enough to post this one. Feedback would be much appreciated, and hopefully the girls aren't too out of character. Also, Mr. J is a sick freak, but gosh if he isn't fun to write.
Disclaimer: Don't own.
Dog Problems
She might as well be blind, deaf, and dumb for all the harassment she lets the Joker inflict upon her. Circular cigarette burns and stupid expressions on her painted face make him annoyed, and her touching makes him angry, and her kisses make him want to cut her throat like a big, wide grin. (It's tit for tat with him. An action, then his reciprocal reaction.) For all of his aloof, twisted confidence, Harley Quinn gets under his skin.
Once, he almost convinced her to take poison as a joke (a one-time-only joke) and report back on her findings. Was it still funny in death? Funnier in heaven, or hell? Probably hell, he laughs. Certainly hell.
Today it isn't poison, or a big hammer, or some degenerate psycho he's locked in a room with her. (He laughed so hard every time Harley's head rocked backwards.) This time it's an unloaded rifle he stole.
The Joker likes to take things that don't matter to him. He likes to take things that matter to other people, to the civil war enthusiast that is too dead to mourn the loss of his prize artifact.
He's playing with the bayonet, testing out its range by using the harlequin as a target. At first she is laughing with him. Mr. J, she sings out, It's so old! And when he hears her, he flips the gun deftly in his hand and strikes her across the face with the heavy, wooden butt of it. She reels back, too dizzy to laugh, and the Joker smashes it down on her arm, cutting through her costume and bicep. He draws a crooked smiley face on her stomach with the point of the bayonet.
(He's laughing again, twirling his new toy.)
Age before beauty! He yells behind him.
Ivy won't touch her when she's all bruised up. Negative reinforcement, she calls it. No love when he hits you, not from anyone. You can come to me when you're whole, Harley Quinn, because I don't enjoy pitying you.
This new rule separates them, physically and mentally, and neither of them particularly likes it. (They have sex when Harley comes over. No matter what. It's a tradition or habit or something like that.) Red? asks Harley, brushing her cheek, but the woman does not respond.
The gauze is wrapped up tightly, staining red like her smeared lipstick, and Ivy makes her stay on the sofa. She locks her bedroom door at night, and now Harley knows how her babies feel when they sleep outside.
(Ivy doesn't sleep well. She's so guilty.)
The blood loss knocks Harley out like a rookie boxer, and in the morning Ivy forces a gallon of water down her throat in recompense. She sputters and chokes and a rogue fern slides over to suck up her spilled water, but Harley says "thank you" even though Ivy is being harsh and mean, and squeezes in a hug before the end.
Twitching her poisonous mouth, Ivy returns to her greenhouse as Harley leaves. She doesn't need to watch her walk away. The shears clip off a dying branch with a sharp snipping noise, and Ivy laments the little brown leaf.
It's so hard to be a part of her life.
When she goes back to the hideout, the dusty basement of a Gotham warehouse for now, Harley finds that she is alone. She asks, Where'd everybody go? Not even the mangy rats have an answer.
Her babies are gone.
The henchmen are gone.
All of their stuff, weapons and televisions and blueprints and the lopsided table, are all gone without a trace. In the dim light, she sees a small square in the middle of the concrete floor. (It's placed exactly where her favorite green chair used to be.)
The note says, "THE JOKE'S ON YOU," in big, blocky, uppercase letters.
It's not the Joker's messy scrawl, and the most painful thing about being alone in a villain's abandoned lair is that he didn't even take the time to write her a cruel goodbye note. Someone else did it.
(It's hours later and he's still laughing about it.)
Harley sits down where her chair should be, crumpling the note in her hand, and thinks that it's pretty lucky that she didn't have her make-up kit when she went to Ivy's.
She's just a sad clown in the middle of nowhere, but at least she doesn't look the part.
The show must go on, says Harleen Quinzel, shining through for a moment before Harley sniffs her away again. The bandaged woman takes a final look around the basement, for some sign- any sign- of her missing boss and obsession, but only grey walls appear.
She returns to the bright, blue skies of the surface. (Uncharacteristic of Gotham, these singing birds.) The day is beautiful and Harley's mood only worsens when she thinks of it.
It seems that even Mother Nature is mocking her. Ivy would appreciate that.
The reporter on TV is a young woman not even thirty, and Ivy thinks she would look quite nice if the mask of terror on her face hadn't been pulling her poor features into a grimace.
She is cooking dinner in her tiny kitchen, watching the news from the corner of an emerald eye. The spoon clinks angrily against the metal pot when the reporter begins speaking.
"Three hyenas run amuck in the Lower Canal Market, apparently released from the Joker as a distraction for the authorities," the reporter says, white knuckling her microphone. "Commissioner Gordon advises staying indoors and remaining calm until-"
Foolish, thinks Ivy, no longer listening.
In less than a minute of watching the footage of the hyenas, she could have pointed out three things to the great bastard Commissioner Gordon. (Not that she would.) First, the babies didn't have their collars.
They were shock collars at that, and it was the only way the Joker could keep them from tearing up his furniture. (He had the remote, but Harley had the power.) This meant that the Joker had just let them go. He didn't want them anymore, but why not ruin someone's day by letting them loose in a boutique or café?
Second, they were rooting through trash and forsaken restaurant plates because they were hungry. Any half-assed dogcatcher could have stopped them with a sausage link and pat on the back. (For a stupid second, Ivy considered getting them herself, but she shook her head. Harley would probably appear on screen with a big smile, maybe even a wave for the folks at home, and catch all her puppies without a problem.)
Third, the hyenas looked horribly abused. By humans, not each other. Patches of missing fur seemed magnified by the tiny, bright rectangle of her old television. Animals aren't that cruel.
One was missing a stub of his tail, and another had a bloody leg to match his limp. (Even though Ivy liked plants the most, she still had a soft spot for animals.) It angered her that the Joker and his band of morons had beaten the hell out of Harley's dogs.
She is salting the stew, pretending that she doesn't feel slightly concerned for the babies, when her doorbell rings.
"Shit," she says. Only two people come to visit her in the evening. Batman and Harley Quinn, and a certain Dark Knight never bothers to ring. It is always interrogations or playing doctor with them, but at least Harley makes it fun.
With a toss of her hand-towel, Ivy crosses the linoleum floor to open her door. She doesn't bother checking through the peephole (it can only be one person) and her assumptions are correct when a melancholy blonde stands before her.
"They're all gone," she says, furrowed brow revealing her confusion. "It's a joke. He left me a note and took all my stuff, and the babies aren't there either."
(The calm surprises Ivy. She isn't overreacting and clinging to her friend, screaming for her pets. Harley is being an adult.)
Ivy doesn't hesitate, "They're at the Lower Canal Market. The Joker let them go."
(She expects for a moment to see a comical puff of smoke as Harley tears down the street, but the blue-eyed woman is still standing right in front of her.)
"How many were there?"
"All three," says Ivy, smiling when Harley breathes a sigh of relief.
She looks at the doormat, lower lip pouting out slightly. "Oh, Red," she says. "I thought he killed 'em." (Three things broken now. A collarbone, a heart, and a resolve.) A tear slides down her pale cheek, but Harley wipes it away harshly.
"Let me turn the stove off before we go," says Ivy. "I don't feel like burning down my apartment."
Harley gives a timid smile and says, "You don't have to go, Red. I know they annoy you." (She means it, thinks Ivy. She's handing out a free pass.)
"And where will you keep your babies once you get them?"
"I… uhm. The zoo?"
Ivy rolls her eyes. "They don't take strays at the zoo, Harley." She pulls her inside by the wrist of her uninjured arm, and says, "Come on. I'll hide them in the garage, but they don't get to sleep inside."
Harley throws her arms around Ivy's neck, unable to keep control under the no-touching rule, and she says "thank you" and means it more than she ever has. (Not in that high-pitched, stand-up-comedy-routine voice, but in a lower tone that hits closer to Ivy's heart.)
Ivy hugs her back gently, afraid to reopen an old wound.
It ended up being a different kind of mutt that gave the girls the most trouble. The boys in blue refused to let Harley and Ivy just take the hyenas, happy as they were to see them wearing civilian clothes instead of their costumes in the streets of Gotham.
One younger officer even threatened to put them both under arrest, ignoring the warning glances of his colleagues (these women are celebrities!) and the explicit caveat not to approach them. Ivy vine-slapped him quite silly before they all piled into her convertible and sped away, ignoring every speed limit on the way home.
She loves the way Harley closes her wide eyes when she kisses her. Her mouth opens greedily and Ivy gives her what she wants, even though the whole exchange leaves her feeling weak-kneed. (This is strange, since she is the one on the kitchen counter and Harley is the one standing.)
Her hands glide up the pastel green legs and Ivy drags her nails from Harley's neck to navel, pausing when she elicits a gasp of pain.
"Did I hurt your neck?" She asks in fear. Her broken bone is weeks old now, but pressure still irritates it. Ivy's lips kiss the collarbone like a feather on snow and Harley manages to tilt her head back.
"No, no, no, no, you're fine," says Harley. "You just keep doing what you're doing." She purrs out a soft, "Oh, Red," after she gulps, and Ivy doubles her efforts.
(They're fully clothed, and still more turned on then when they'd had actual sex with other people. Not that they do anymore. They're both too bizarrely faithful and wickedly jealous for that.)
The flower queen slides off the counter, still controlling the motion of Harley's tongue even though she stands about three inches shorter than the harlequin. She pulls back for a second, planting soft little kisses over Harley's face, thinking about every faded bruise and healed gash that's ever been there.
"I'm really glad you gave me that antidote, Ivy," says Harley, interrupting her gloomy thoughts. "Your lips would've killed me a thousand times by now, not that that's a bad way to go."
Before Ivy can respond, they move to the sofa, the midpoint to the bedroom, and the blonde lays down her lover very smoothly. "You always fix me up, Red. Always, always." The blue eyes are full of candor and gratitude.
Ivy holds her pigtailed head with her vine-like fingers. She says, "I would put glue on my lips to kiss you back together again, Harley Quinn. Always, always."
(Tears well up. Ivy kisses her eyes closed instead. No more tears.)
They make it to the bedroom eventually, just to keep with their tradition.
The Joker is grinning like the devil in a whorehouse, and Harley knows exactly what he's thinking. She can see the reflection of his unspoken words on Ivy's furious face. (I have her. She's mine.)
Harley stands between them with slumped shoulders, unmasked and uncostumed, and she looks at her, then at him, and it seems that she's watching a particularly exciting tennis match.
"Why are you here, you piece of shit?" shouts Ivy. Her white teeth look like fangs, like a life-size Venus Fly Trap.
"Now, now, my little petunia! Are you upset that I've come to take your favorite sapling?" He motions with a curled finger to Harley. (Come back to me, little clown, he says. You're mine again.) She whimpers, "You left me, Mister J."
He leans toward her, puckering his chapped lips, "Whatsamatter, Harl? Can't take a joke?"
She turns her back on him in response, saying only four words to answer his question.
In a way she has never seen before, his face falls into a bottomless pit, jaw digging straight through China and out the other side. The Joker's nostrils flare in rage, so offended that he can't even move—can't even chase her down and throttle her.
And even though it was dangerous, some would say suicidal, to say what she said, Harley does not regret it. Ivy is laughing at the top of her lungs, and it's much more rewarding than the Joker's maniacal cackle.
"Your joke's not funny."
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