'...There was a pawn,
who followed along,
and watched it fall.
He cast a stone,
he felt secure...'
–Freedom of Choice, A Perfect Circle
The courtroom is full today. Newly discovered cops and others Bane wants rid of are lining the back wall, while groups of regular onlookers jeer and bet on who will beg first to be exiled instead of killed.
Jonathan Crane doesn't have much of a job – death, or exile – but he didn't accept it for the career opportunities. With Gotham crumbling and chaotic, he just wanted to be a part of the new infrastructure, and, now, he is.
He sits atop the mountainous pile of desks and books gathered from the law offices, gazing down at the people that come before him like they used to, for prognosis, when he was a doctor.
Those days are so old to him now, so very distant, and yet, he can remember every patient, every twist and turn their minds took him, through those dark neural pathways. He is a vessel, full to the brim with secrets and longing to be important once again, to be recognised.
When he'd been pulled by the GPD on his latest streak of thievery – some very fine paintings and a particularly good case of Bordeaux – he'd thought he'd rot in their cells or be sent back to Arkham before seeing the light of day again, if ever.
And then, bam, Bane.
He'd torn the city up and laid down new foundations, and his men had freed Jonathan, along with the others in the cells with him. They had offered him a choice: live in the city, scrounging, pulling punches just for a place to sleep, or become a part of their ideal, help make Gotham better.
Choices. Choices. Choices.
Life is so much better with choices, and one that had struck so close to home, to what he wants? He couldn't refuse.
So he gives his diagnosis to every man, woman, and child that comes before him in the kangaroo court – death, or exile? – and he watches them all choose exile without a thought. They don't seem to know it's the same thing in Gotham's harsh winter, with all the bridges, save one, cut in two and the ice that merely coats the freezing water surrounding the city.
One of Bane's men breaks him from his thoughts. "You're up, Crow."
He glances down at the muscular, olive-skinned man from over the battered wooden desk he sits at and nods, inwardly contemplating his new persona. The straw-filled doctor, the studious scarecrow, he had been scattered, picked over, and Jonathan had decided from then on to always be the bird instead of the broken ragdoll. He had started anew.
His eyes are drawn to the sentencing chair, soft and gilded, it offers false hope, sanctuary in a place that will give them none. In it sits a boy, no older than fourteen, his chin defiantly raised as Jonathan peers at him.
"Death, or exile?" He offers easily.
He doesn't care why the boy was chosen, he doesn't need to know, and even if he did, the child will die with or without Jonathan's interference.
He's just a kid, but it's obvious that this one is a spanner in the works for Bane. The boy grips the arms of the chair, raises an eyebrow, and spits on the floor in front of him.
"Fuck you. My dad's a cop and he's going to cream all of you!"
The onlookers laugh and jeer, shouting about they're sure his dad likes cream, and other crude comments, before Jonathan strikes his gavel harshly for silence. The echoing bangs achieve his desired affect, and all eyes turn to him.
There's a momentary hush as his blood is chased through his veins by the eyes of the people waiting on his word, like they don't know the answer already, like they don't know it will always be the same outcome...
"Exile."
There are bloodthirsty smiles and laughs as the blonde boy's confidence fades from his youth-flushed face and he is presented with the final, ugly truth. He knows what exile means, unlike the others before him, and he knows he will die.
His hands shake and his lip trembles.
Jonathan waves his hand at the men standing by. "Next."
The boy, all wet cheeks and rumpled clothing, is hauled bodily from the chair and pushed out of a side-door to wait until there are enough of them to take down to the waterfront.
Jonathan watches him go. When he turns back to the chair below him, he sees someone entirely more familiar waiting to be sentenced.
The teeth she flashes at him are white and even, and the memory this drags up from the watery depths of his mind is of those very teeth against his flesh, pressing hard, trying to mark him like he had marked her.
She sits in the chair as if she's not about to shuffle from this mortal coil, like she owns it, and a very deeply shrouded part of Jonathan aches to kill her himself, hide her, anything.
Because this is the only woman he has ever truly felt something for. This is the only woman he has come across in his life that took the misguided love he had for his abusive parents and shredded it. She took everything he had and made it her own, and she did it with a fucking smile.
She's hardly manipulative, especially when she wears her intentions tattooed in black script on her breastbone – aut viam inveniam aut faciam...
"I will either find a way or make one," he recites under his breath, remembering long dark nights holed away in his plush apartment, talking about schizophrenia and Sartre, drinking wine as red as her lush mouth.
It was a lifetime ago, one where he didn't wear the black feathers on his shoulders of the birds, where he was a man made of straw watching the inner workings of the mind and the world unfold before him. Before she was institutionalised by his co-worker after a bust gone bad, when she had only been visiting a friend. Before he had to say goodbye to the heavy comingling of hot breaths under his bed sheets and the early morning wake-up of flushed skin and fresh coffee.
Her hair is as bright and blonde as he remembers, the very ends as red as the colour of her lips, and her eyes, stark blue, framed in black. Her skin is different now, though – paler – and he thinks of how he used to sometimes find her on his old balcony, eyes closed to the rising sun, taking in its rays.
She's grown for years in the dark, as untreated and uncared for as a weed, and it makes his bones burn to think of the treatments she would have been subjected to when she was just as sane as any man or woman that walked the earth.
More so, in fact. She saw things no one else did. She saw pain and suffering, she saw the indifference of the wealthy, she saw the corruption of the poor, she saw the strain of Gotham on the collective mind, and she saw him.
He had been with women before her – pretty ones, intellectual ones, clever ones – but he had never felt anything for them beyond lust, because they were all too...oblivious. Oblivious of the real issues, the real things in life – not money or power or family, but that intrinsic devotion.
He had devotion – to medicine, to science, to the mind – and she had shown him that he could still be devoted to his life's work and have something all of his own at the same time. She had given him her devotion, working with him some nights on nothing more than theories and thoughts, and he, in turn, had thought the sun rose and set with her.
A few women had approached him after she was declared insane – insane, like they couldn't see that their insanity was her genius – and he had not turned them down. But, after a while, he had found them lacking – they were attractive, articulate, but completely uninspiring. He did not look at them, talk to them, and think he could see the world spinning around him, turning endlessly on its axis.
She loses her smile when Senge, the only man of Bane's with actual power over the court sessions, shoves her shoulder and tells her to stop smiling like a clown.
The rage that passes over her face is something he has seen many times, like when she had whispered to him about her bloody past or when he had woken to find her lifting weights in the middle of the night after a particularly bad dream. But this rage...this rage is wild and untamed, a rage he can only guess is not meant for one particular person but the entire world.
"A clown?" She hisses, fingernails digging into the arms of the chair. "You want to see a clown?"
She's wearing black jeans and a sweater, but she moves as if she's naked, like there are no restrictions her body has to adhere to. She is simply not of this earth. She grips Senge's head between her thick soled shoes and breaks his neck in one twist, before throwing the bottom half of her body back into the chair and kicking his collapsed form off of her.
She slumps, her fringe guarding her eyes, but her lips convey a beguiling smile. Jonathan's hardly surprised by how hard he suddenly is – she always did know how to capture his attention, every speck of it.
Bane's men step forward, cocking guns and cracking knuckles, all of them steady footed but obviously unsure how to proceed with their outright commander forever breathless and broken on the parquet floor in front of them.
Jonathan and the crowds are silent. Only Bane's group talk.
"What is she here for?"
"She resisted, tried to flee the city when she was released from solitary in the asylum."
She's watching them with interest, as is the rest of the court.
"You know the kind that's brought here."
"We thought she counted."
"She's obviously crazy."
"Obviously," Jonathan drawls, adding his two cents and drawing glances from some of the men, but his real target tilts her head and looks up at him fully, blowing her hair out of her eyes. "Completely insane."
Her lips curl.
"He won't care about her. We should leave her."
"It won't matter anyway."
They all seem to agree on the last point and back off a step, lowering their weapons and their fists.
"Good choice," Jonathan barely hears her mutter.
All eyes are now on him.
"Cleared," he dismisses her, sounding the gavel, and it's a first in their court.
The baying audience look displeased but unable to voice it as she's standing from her seat and walking back through the courtroom, snapping her teeth at them and grinning.
The next to be sentenced is brought before Jonathan, but he only spares a glance at the quivering man before watching his woman leave the court unscathed, smiling over her shoulder at him as she disappears out of the door.
The day drags by endlessly, man after woman and woman after man brought before him for sentencing, and all Jonathan can think as he offers them their choices is whether she will disappear on him, flee the city, and never look back.
When it's obvious there are no more to be sentenced, he throws down the gavel and pushes himself from his chair to climb down the ladder behind him. On terra firma again, his stride is quick and determined as he pushes through the dissipating crowds exiting onto the cold, moonlit street.
His first instinct is to look around him for a place she might have waited, for him, but the two alleyways on the street, he can see, are completely empty. The street corners likewise.
But he knows he's being stupid, because why would she wait for hours in the icy, semi-snowy, freezing cold street? She would find somewhere sheltered, somewhere warm – if she was waiting for him.
Jonathan turns on the sidewalk to face the DOJ building, looking straight up at the windows lining the uppermost floor. Beyond the panes of glass are rooms for Bane's men and their lackeys to stay in – lackeys like Jonathan.
His eyes find his own apartment windows, at the very far end of the building, and he sees her, smiling down at him.
Jonathan doesn't waste a moment, taking the steps back inside two at a time, and ignoring any of the unluckier men and women who sleep in the foyer, offering him food and services if he lets them sleep in his bed tonight.
The elevator has been broken since the day Bane took over, and so Jonathan's chest becomes heavy, stuttering his breath, as he scales the staircases that he has only casually taken before tonight. He ignores the questioning stares of the people who watch him go by, his eyes fixed at the top of the stairs.
"Crow, I sent up a girl to your place. She was asking for you."
Jonathan ignores Aldo, the thug who says this, as well.
When he reaches the top floor, standing outside his half-open door, near-panting, he steadies himself and his sweaty palms. Deep breaths through his nose calm his erratic heartbeat, as well as his burning lungs, but he doesn't have the patience to fix anything else.
He pushes open the door and steps inside.
The lights are off, all except one lamp in the corner. There isn't much space in his home, originally an office, but he's managed to bring in a mattress to sleep on and the chairs that were already here are comfortably placed by the two wide windows overlooking the street.
He has food, water, and access to a bathroom, and, really, it's all he needs. What he wants is a different matter.
What he wants is a who, and that who turns to glance over her slim shoulder at him. She's kicked her shoes off, digging her toes into the thick, cream carpet, and Jonathan suddenly remembers that winter night they spent naked by his fire, his fingertips digging into the carpet as she cried out beneath him.
"Do you remember," she says quietly, "when we talked about ghosts in the brain, random patterns of reoccurring thought in patients that couldn't be explained or quantified?"
He closes the door behind him with a soft snap and leans against it, unwilling to touch her until he knows she won't run, and that she forgives him.
"Yes."
She looks out of the window again. "I have them now, thoughts that aren't mine, shared through science. You didn't know – how could you? You had your own project, and you couldn't go near the women in Arkham, only the men. Dr Young, she had her own agenda."
"Penelope?" He can't believe the only woman on staff while he was still in residence, meek and mild Dr Young, wasn't as spineless as she'd made herself out to be.
She lets out a harsh laugh. "Fucking Penelope, Jonathan. You know all the girls thought she'd help us, save us – even me! But she was working for the government, trying to create a mental link between people that could be undetected when used in warfare. She turned me into this. You remember Rosenhan."
"Being sane in insane places," he mutters. "What did she do?"
She spins around, eyes wide with a wild look. "That's just it! I don't know. I can't reverse it. Young's dead – killed when they broke everyone out of Arkham – and when I tried to get into her office to find her notes, they took me and brought me here. It's all rubble now." She clutches the sleeves of her sweater. "I was put with Poison Ivy and that Johnson woman that murdered her six children – I have them in my head!"
"Harleen..." Jonathan takes a step forward at her distress.
"Don't!" She growls at him. "Don't call me that. He called me that."
"Who?"
Her eyes close tightly as if she's trying to ward off a bad memory. "You know they let patients interact – men and women. The security was so shitty, Jonathan. They didn't care... He told me things, tried to groom me, and I had to listen."
"Who?" He asks again, but this time the threat in his voice is far darker.
"The clown," she tells him. "The...Joker. He took my head and he filled it up with shit while I was on the drugs they gave me. Him, and Dr Young...they turned me crazy."
"You're not insane," Jonathan murmurs, stepping in closer, drawn to her. "Harley."
She closes her eyes again, biting her lip. "That was your name for me."
"Is," he corrects her, so close now he can smell the scent of her skin.
A noise escapes her. "I thought you left me, but...you couldn't save me."
He wraps a hand around her arm, stepping up behind her. "When you told me about your father, do you remember what I said to you?"
"The past is only in my head, and I can escape it if I try," she replies easily.
"You did. You have. You can do it again."
Her hand grips his, warm and secure. "Why are you here? Why are you with these people?"
His fingers travel her body without his permission, remapping the curves and plains of Harley that had long been etched into his memory. He can feel her navel piercing beneath her sweater, and the lack of underwear beneath her jeans.
Jonathan presses his words into her silky hair, ignoring her question. "Where did you get these clothes from?"
"The doctors' showers at Arkham. I hid when those men broke everyone loose, and I got clean and changed. They found me after that, outside Dr Young's. How long has this been going on?"
He presses his fingers beneath the hem of the sweater, savouring the rush he feels touching her soft, flat stomach. She is more than a drug, more than a toxin – she is his own antidote.
"Bane has the city cut off. There's a bomb somewhere in the city that will blow all of Gotham if a citizen crosses the last bridge left standing. Cops, lawmen, troublemakers, they're all being processed and sentenced, and he's giving the city back to the people. Arkham patients were considered...too difficult, and were left – obviously that has been rescinded."
Harley stills against him, tilting her head until they can see each other's eyes. She frowns at him.
"How is it giving Gotham back to the people if this Bane plans on blowing it up?"
"The bomb is a threat to the government not to step in."
She turns in his arms. "To blow Gotham from the face of the earth would require nuclear power. Do you know how large a bomb like that would have to be, how powerful? The radiation would be devastating, even if it didn't detonate."
"Then, why–"
Harley steps in closer to him, pulling their bodies flush together with her arms around his waist, inside his suit jacket, with her hands pressed to the small of his back.
She looks up at him, only an inch or two shorter even barefoot, and whispers, "Everyone has ulterior motives, Jonathan. Everyone but you and me."
"I want to have everything the way it was," he admits, thinking of his successful drug trials and great leaps in his work as well as going home to her.
"It was beautiful." She brings her lips closer to his. "But it can't be the same."
Her kiss is just as powerful as he remembers, just as fierce, and his body becomes this electrified mass with only the want to feel more of her, to be a vessel for her to empty and fill as she will.
When her soft lips part from his, her thumbs tracing his high cheekbones while his fingers play along her finely-cut jaw, he knows she doesn't mean that they can't have everything again. She means they can't have it here.
"We can't leave," he tells her in a hushed tone. "It's impossible."
He's surprised when she leaves his grasp, pushing at his shoulders and tugging at his judicial, feathered coat.
"I don't like it," she tells him, obviously noting his expression. "You're not one of them. You're not a vulture."
"They're crow fea–"
"Vulture," she hisses, pushing him back and tearing the coat from him.
Jonathan stumbles and catches his ankle on the thick, white mattress tucked into the corner. He lands with a muffled thud among the thin sheets and flat pillows. He looks up in time to see Harley opening the window and pushing the coat out, shutting the lock behind its trailing black feathers.
He raises an eyebrow. She strips off her sweater.
Beneath it is only her skin and the tattoo he had thought of earlier, the Latin trailing lazily between the gentle slopes of her pale breasts. She throws the sweater aside, coming to stand in front of him, her jewelled navel glinting in the soft light.
"They let me keep it," she replies to his curious gaze. "I wasn't a suicide risk. Fuck knows what I could do with a belly-bar if I was."
"Precautions," he tells her, and she smiles above him, undoing the buttons on the fly of her denims.
"How thoughtful," she says sarcastically, though the moment is lost between her skin and his heated gaze.
She drops the pants, stepping out of them, and Jonathan is arrested by the sight of her body, as he thought he never would be again. She's like a letter, half-written, scrawled in places, but entirely meant for him to read.
She's not special in her biology necessarily, but the way she thinks is entirely unique, and she is his, now more than ever.
Harley crawls over his body, red highlights brushing his chest, and she begins to disrobe him. His hands attempt to facilitate the removal of his suddenly constricting clothes, but they hinder more than help and so she pins them against her thighs, urging him to touch her.
She uncovers his body swiftly, dispatching his jacket and shirt without him losing too much precious time touching her skin. His tie is unknotted and discarded, as are his shoes and his belt. His pants are gone before he can even note their disappearance, and his underwear is quickly undone and removed. She leaves his glasses. His socks are the last thing to go.
Harley smiles up at him as she pulls them away. "I've always loved your feet."
His lip quirks and he wants to make a remark about hidden fetishes, but Harley grins at him as if she already knows what he's thinking, and, perhaps, she does. She knows him as well as he knows her.
"You look after yourself," she tells him softly, pressing her words against his slightly stubbly jaw. "Always clean, and smooth. Always so...touchable." Her hands map his biceps. "Lean, and powerful. Sleek." She kisses his stomach, his hip, his thigh, his cock. "Beautiful."
He's breathing through his nose, trying to calm his thundering heart, and as Harley's blue eyes meet his, he feels a calm settle through him, blanketing them from the harsh winter beyond the room.
She's the only woman to ever compliment him, to pick up the bottle of cologne on his dresser and ask to dab it on him herself, to sit on the counter and watch him shave with a type of wondrous fascination – all liberties no other woman could take, but also ones which no other had ever cared to.
She sinks down over him, her hands on his shoulders and his pressed to her spine, and takes him inside of her slowly. He increases his grip on her, his fingertips digging, at the feel of her cunt, slick and tight around him.
Their breaths mingle as she presses her cheek to his, closing her eyes, before kissing him, biting his lip and making him groan. His glasses fog with her breath and she laughs.
She strokes his sides, thumbs following the ridges of his ribcage, and the teasing becomes too much.
Jonathan pulls her closer and turns her over, so she lies beneath him, her left thigh pulled high on his hip by his hand, which strokes the soft skin. The position allows him to push further, deeper, and soon she is writhing, meeting the flexing of his hips with the rolling of her own, creating tangible friction between their two bodies.
He bites her earlobe, his words breathy as he does so. "We'll find a way."
"Mmm." She sighs beneath him, languorous and smiling. "Find another city, ah...start again."
He kisses her, finding her tongue with his and tasting nothing on her breath.
He pulls away. "When did you eat last?"
"A few days ago," she murmurs, stroking his neck and sighing against him. "They stopped feeding us."
Jonathan mutters to himself as he pays attention to that little spot just below her ear that he knows will drive her over the edge. He pushes away that horrible shadow inside of him that has never disappeared – created and strengthened by Scarecrow, imprinted by that taste of his own toxin from the Batman – which wants him to seek revenge rather than care for her.
Harley pitches over that invisible edge with a familiar and welcome lustful keen, and Jonathan follows soon after, a shattered moan falling from his lips to her soft breast.
His skin feels fused to hers, hot and damp, and as he shivers from coming apart inside of her, her body against his gives him those few extra precious seconds of blinding friction that make his orgasm last.
But, eventually, it has to pass. His body shaking, the adrenaline and dopamine stop flowing and allow something else to pass in its wake: the amphetamine phenylethylamine hollows out his body until he is once more empty, aching, and he knows that he can't stay in Gotham, not if he wants more of this with her.
They stare at each other for a moment, before Harley smiles.
She tugs on the dress he found her, the dirtied lavender silk clinging to her curves in a way that injects ridiculous jealousy into his body.
He ignores the temptation of taking her back down on the mattress that they've made their home for the past two weeks and dresses himself instead. He leaves behind his feathers for a fine, scuffed suit he managed to get his hands on from one of the men he'd sentenced.
The battle rages on outside.
"How much longer, do you think?" Harley asks.
"Not long."
Gotham's police force had been rescued from their underground prison an hour or two ago, and the Batman had been sighted in the city. Guns sound on the streets below, and Jonathan doesn't spare a thought for who is winning between the cops and Bane's men.
It doesn't rest on them. It rests on the bomb.
"As much as I don't want to admit it, Batman gets the job done."
He does. Jonathan's seen it first-hand. The man has no limits and that is...dangerous, especially with such a disciplined mind. If he can stop the detonation, then Jonathan and Harley are away, dressed as rich evacuees in distress just in case they need the disguise.
"They won't open up the bridge with the bomb still active," she tells him. "I scouted it out a couple of days ago. The cops have orders to shoot on sight – doesn't matter if the perp's naked or wearing combat gear."
He nods, slipping his stolen Glock into the back of his pants and smoothing his jacket over it. Harley's ready too, a bag slung over her shoulder full of all the money, canned food, clothes, and other necessities that they could salvage.
They take the stairs down to the foyer, eyes on the tempestuous street beyond the open doors as they make their way out of the building via the back exit. A bullet grazes Harley's shoulder but she keeps moving, cursing under her breath.
As soon as they're out on the cold streets, their breaths fogging the air, they take the loneliest back-alleys towards the last standing bridge. Harley keeps her pace beside him, even as she wipes away the blood colouring her pale skin. She presses her bloody hand to her face, her neck, her ankles, before smearing some across his jaw.
"I like to play the part," she tells him, wiping her hand on her dress. "But let's hope we don't need to turn to the dramatics."
No one challenges them as they make their way past boarded-up houses and wrecked cars, eyes firmly fixed now on their goal. He can see the uppermost arches of the bridge, and the swinging silhouettes of the bodies hanging there.
"Shit."
He hums his agreement.
A school bus sits, engine rumbling, on the bridge, just in front of the police barricade that the officials on the other side of the bridge erected. Shabby-dressed kids with woollen hats and gloves are standing around, warming their hands with their breath and waiting as a dark-haired solitary figure walks, hands raised, towards the manned barricade. Shots are fired.
The kids are moving, milling about, pushing back onto the bus, and Jonathan's about to suggest some kind of desperate, acrobatic, underside traversal of the bridge – Harley, he knows, could do this with her eyes closed, she's such a successful risk-taking, urban gymnast – when dull and distant thrumming sounds from the buildings behind them, explosions following.
There's a shout from the cops on the barricade and the bridge suddenly bounces under their feet. A cloud of debris flies up in the face of the man urging the police to pull back the roadblocks, and Jonathan hears the splash of their lifeline hitting the freezing water below. The man ahead of them is screaming, shouting obscenities, and Harley unexpectedly laces her fingers with Jonathan's and pulls him forward.
They manage to get to the bus unseen, ducking to one side and avoiding the wide-eyed stares of the boys all being shepherded back on, someone saying something about protection from the bomb.
"Trying to give them hope," Harley says. "Better than nothing."
The both of them peer past the damaged chain-link fence and down at the yawning void between the two sides of the bridge. Jonathan is the first to speak.
"They probably haven't manned the lower half. Access was cut off."
Harley nods. "We just need a way down. Hang on."
She's gone for a second, sprinting back to the end of the bridge and out of sight. Jonathan crouches, head resting against the side of the bus, wondering if this is going to be the thing that breaks them. If they can't leave, then they'll either die in crossfire or, if the government wins, be incarcerated once more – it's sobering. He knows that it's now or never.
Harley reappears before he knows it, slumping against him, breathing heavily and clutching a coil of synthetic rope to her chest.
He raises an eyebrow. She grins breathlessly.
"I saw it in that totalled truck we ran by."
He kisses her temple and breathes in the scent of his shampoo that they both washed with this morning. She's warm and comforting against his side, and he never wants to lose this intimacy.
"Let's go," Jonathan barely murmurs.
She unfolds the rope and makes a quick loop, knotting it like a noose.
"Non-slip loop knot," she tells him. "Learnt it off one of the girls when she tried to hang herself."
He wonders if she'll ever be the same.
The kids are all on the bus, the two men are hashing something out on the other side, and the cops are all fretting behind their roadblocks, talking to each other, trying to figure out if they did the right thing.
The explosions and rumbling from behind the closest buildings of the city seem to be pitching towards a crescendo, and Jonathan doesn't want to be around when that happens.
He pushes Harley forward first, before throwing himself after her, through the gate in the fence. They slow to a skidding halt at the crumbling edge of the gap, and Jonathan keeps a look out as Harley ties the rope around a twisted girder blown into an awkward angle. She loops it through itself and ties it off just as the cops begin to take up their positions again, all looking much surer of the action they've taken.
Harley has already rappelled down by the time they spot Jonathan clumsily climbing down after her. A shot is fired, but he doesn't know if it's hit him or not because his blood is pounding so fiercely in his ears and the adrenaline in his body has made him numb.
They now stand one deck lower on the two-road bridge, looking across the gap. Harley tugs on the rope, keeping it taut. The girder's position above them gives them enough room to swing across.
"Okay." Her knuckles turn white. "Here I go."
Jonathan reaches out and pushes her as she swings across, giving her the momentum to cross the void and hit the road with steady feet. She swings it back to him.
"Pull back, run, and jump," she urges him, eyes fierce. "Don't fuck this up. I'm not doing this without you."
He thinks she means life, and he feels exactly the same way.
His heart stops as he propels himself forward, and it seems like everything slows and nothing does at the same time as a gunshot rings out, the rope slackens, and he falls.
"Oof."
He's winded, breathless, scrabbling as he barely holds on to the very edge of the crumbling road surface. Black grease covers his palms as he tries to claw himself up and he slips ever closer to the icy, green water beneath him.
Hands grip his, tugging at the wrist, and Harley crouches over him, eyes flaming and teeth gritted. She grunts, hauling him forward, slipping on the grease herself, but she soldiers on, pulling until she has a good grip on a crack in the road and wrenching him forward.
Jonathan lies there for a moment, his body feeling light, grease marking his cheek, and feels the breeze off of the water making his pants leg flap at the ankle. He's still alive.
Harley pulls him up. "Come on. We have to go."
He can dimly hear shouting and heavy footfalls, but he follows Harley's lead, leaning against her as he dazedly stumbles towards the walkway access to the left of the bridge. The wind through the fencing caging the path blows their hair about their faces, but it doesn't obscure the fact that the walkway has been left clear.
Harley sighs in his ear, and the sound is full of relief. "Okay. Good."
The cops stampede past them down the roadway, all of the trained gunmen missing Jonathan and Harley make their way towards the end of the bridge.
Screaming erupts from somewhere far behind them, shouting following, and soon after there's a mighty rumbling. It's the same thrumming noise from earlier, and they barely glance back, so eager to escape, that they nearly miss the strange, black, angular aircraft that breaks above the apartment and business buildings on the edge of Gotham, lifting higher and shooting forwards, something in tow.
Jonathan knows it belongs to the Batman. Only he could have such technology on-hand.
A shining sphere swings on a line behind the plane as it passes the bridge and crosses the water, heading for open sea.
"The bomb?" He voices, and Harley's fingers find his other hand as she pulls him along the walkway of the bridge, her arm around him.
"Definitely."
Jonathan manages to walk faster as he pushes through the wall of shock his body had put him behind with his deathly close fall. Harley's muttering something about passing off their disguises when the bridge is suddenly rocked with great force, and a resounding explosion vibrates Jonathan's eardrums.
The bomb has detonated. He can't really see where, and he hopes it's far enough away that they have enough time to get across the bridge and out. The end is in sight, the battered gate at the end of the walkway freely open, just ahead of them.
Jonathan reaches for the cool metal, gripping it in a fist.
They made it.
Harley has less enthusiasm, eyes on a point above their heads. "Soldiers. Quick."
She tugs him from the gate and forces him up the pedestrian slope off of the bridge, urging him into a run. They break out behind a couple of crates, and Jonathan realises that the end of the bridge has become a camping ground for the soldiers, until they can cross over into Gotham. There are trucks and supplies everywhere, and even more armed personnel.
But luck is on his and Harley's side. Every eye is on the giant mushroom cloud across the open water, out on the horizon.
He stares for a moment, the dirty orange cloud against the bright blue of the sky a chilling reminder that they could have been killed in that very blast, if there was no Batman.
This time, Jonathan thinks, is the only time he will ever be grateful for the Bat's existence.
The soldiers begin to disperse and Jonathan pulls Harley through the amassed trucks and away before they're seen. They break out into town, where city and suburb merge, and where there seems to have been an evacuation, cars standing idly by with their doors open and possessions strewn across the street.
"Radiation," Harley says in explanation. "They would have moved everyone out, just in case."
He glances inside the first car facing in the right direction he sees and finds the key in the ignition. Harley gets in without a word. They find blankets and water in the backseat.
He turns the key and savours the feel of the rumbling engine – it means a fresh start.
Jonathan glances at Harley before he peels away from the curb. She settles into the passenger seat, eyes closed.
"We found a way," she sighs. "Now, we can find a new city."
His teeth flash in a smile.
Author's note: Loved TDKR and thought Crane deserved a bit of a tribute considering he was in all three Nolan films. Not to mention, Cillian Murphy is a god. Harley is my Nolanverse characterisation of Harleen Quinzel, not really an OFC, and I had to write her into this fic because I loved Crane/Harley so much in my M/C 'Chicken Bones'. Thanks for reviewing!