It was difficult to concentrate inside Arkham Asylum's recreation room. Normally, the Riddler was able to block out the sounds, sights (and, unfortunately, smells) of the other inmates that milled about in the little room. Today, though, something was breaking through his concentration.
Was it the television? No, he was used to cartoons at this hour. He could ignore them. Was it the irregular metallic squealing from the construction workers' equipment out on the lawn, repairing the latest hole in the fence? No, he'd dealt with that noise often enough as well...
It couldn't be thoughts about his henchgirls. Ex-henchgirls. That would be ridiculous, and a waste of time. Henchgirls came and went, he knew that. In fact, he'd been the driving force behind most of their departures, whether that had meant simply leaving them for the Batman or officially kicking them out. The fact that his newest pair had decided to seek greener pastures with the Mad Hatter (of all people, the Mad Hatter!) wasn't upsetting him even slightly. Really. It wasn't. He was perfectly capable of doing his crossword without thoughts of those two ingrates bothering him.
He shifted irritably on the couch. Instead of the normal creak of wood or rustle of fabric, the couch let loose with the distinctive snapping and grinding noises made by medication under pressure. He rolled his eyes and slipped a hand beneath the cushions, extracting a jumble of brightly colored pills. Blue-and-white Geodon nestled cozily next to baby-pink lithium, surrounded by a loose ring of orange Thorazine tablets.
"Heya, Eddie!" The Riddler glanced up to see Harley Quinn perching on the arm of the sofa next to him. "They've got ya on those?" she said disbelievingly as she poked at a trio of little white Tegretol.
"Denture smog," he muttered. Harley regarded him with the patient blank stare that she reserved for the occasions in which she needed a riddle-to-English translation. "They're not mine," Eddie explained, tossing them gently in his cupped palm. "I found them in the couch."
"It's amazin' what people leave there, isn't it?" Harley chirped. "I remember once, the first time I went home with Mistah J? I dropped my makeup down the couch an' when I went to pull it out, it felt all squidgy. Turns out I grabbed some poor jerk's hand instead!"
"Where was the rest of him?"
"Who knows?" Harley shrugged. "Puddin' said he couldn't take a joke." Ah, yes. Seriousness - the number one killer among Joker henchmen. Harley shifted uneasily on the arm of the sofa and plucked a pill out of his hand, examining it with her full attention as if she was trying to work up the courage to ask him something. But that was ridiculous! What would she ever want from him? She was holding the sky-blue Klonopin between thumb and forefinger, examining him through the tiny K-shaped hole that had been stamped through the center. Then, with a tiny pink sliver of tongue protruding, she rolled the pill into position and fired it off like a small, airborne marble. It bounced off the lens of the nearest security camera with an audible plink and came to rest in the middle of the chessboard, where Jonathan Crane sat idly planning chess moves. He absently brushed the thing onto the floor with the back of his hand, as if flying medication was a phenomenon as common as violence on the evening news.
"Two points!" Harley crowed. "Anyway, Eddie, I had a favor to ask ya."
He'd been right! (Well, of course he'd been right. Would he ever be wrong?) "What?" he asked suspiciously.
"Nothin' much," Harley said casually, examining the toe of one laceless shoe. "You still stealin' paper from arts-n-crafts?"
"Why would I steal paper?" Eddie said dismissively, trying to hide the twinge of shock that twitched up his back. He'd thought no one had been paying attention...
"I dunno. But I saw ya doin' it last Wednesday. Remember? Origami day?" She grinned devilishly at him. "An' there's a bit stickin' out of yer sleeve from this mornin'."
Eddie hurriedly jammed the sky-blue corner of paper back into his shirt. "For your information, they keep taking my notebooks," he scowled, "and I have to have something to write on."
"Don't they find the paper when they toss yer cell?"
"I hide it in the mattress," he informed her loftily. There was certainly enough room in there...over the years, he'd popped spring after spring out to use as lockpicks, and now there was more paper than bedspring keeping him supported at night.
"Can I have some?"
"Of my mattress?"
She playfully shoved him. "No, silly. The paper!"
"Why?"
"For Sorrow."
Eddie frowned. The last he'd heard, Sorrow had gone fully off the deep end and was paddling around in a flood of psychosis. "I repeat: Why?" he asked.
Harley blew a sigh upward, dislodging stray hairs that lay across her forehead. "I've got a plan. Oooh!" She brightened. "You could help!" She laid out Stage One of her plan for him, complete with expressive hand gestures and an occasional bounce of excitement.
Eddie eventually agreed to go along with it. It was something to fill the time, after all, and...well, Sorrow had been looking at him once, hadn't she? Maybe he could bypass the bother of hiring more fickle henchgirls and forge an alliance with her. Having someone with powers around was nearly always worth it...and at least another rogue wouldn't abandon him for the Mad Hatter.
Harley's current goals were rather simple. Through the asylum grapevine, she'd heard that the Joker would be stuck in solitary for the foreseeable future. Much as she hated to admit it, it would be impossible for her to persuade the doctors to let him out sooner. For some reason, they just didn't understand that she knew what was best for him! In the meantime, she had to fill her time with something.
Ivy had managed to get a new plant, and Harley had sat through hours of prattle about it. Red was like a mom with a new baby, only without the snapshots. Thank God there were no snapshots. It was bad enough to hear endless soliloquies about the specific curves and lines of one stem, let alone be forced to nod and smile over endless repetitive pictures of them. Harley, never one to appreciate plants, was sick of hearing about the stupid thing.
That left her with one possible companion: Sorrow. Everyone else was too wrapped up in their own dignity to giggle over silly things with her. Well, at the moment, Sorrow wasn't exactly cheerful either, but Harley was determined to fix that. It would be like a game - and she could prove that she was still a better therapist than anyone here!
Of course, that meant that the doctors would have to be prodded into letting her try. "I'd only like to go see her," she pleaded at her next therapy session. It had been the same for two weeks - ask, and plead, and beg...well, this time would be different.
Dr. Jackson regarded her from under bushy black eyebrows. "No," he snapped. "You heard about what happened last time."
"Yeah, but doc, I'm not poisonous," Harley pointed out. "An' I only wanna help her!"
"Yes, right out of the asylum," he snorted. "No deal."
"Please?"
"No."
"Pleeeeeeease?"
"No." He tapped his pen emphatically on his notepad. "We've got ten minutes left. What else would you like to talk about?"
Harley sighed. Well, if asking nicely hadn't worked..."Oh, we could talk about a lotta things," she said cheerfully. "We could talk about that new car you got last month!" The pen started slowing down. "Or we could talk about that new house ya got last year!" The pen tapped slower and slower.
Harley leaned forward, looking the doctor square in the eyes. "We could talk about that bank account you've got down on Berry Island," she added pleasantly. "The one that Dr. Carlson doesn't know about?"
Dr. Jackson stared at her. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said flatly.
"Sure ya do," she chirped. "It's under the name Lyle Rupert, yer sons' names...cute, Doc, no one ever woulda guessed that..."
"You can see her next week," Dr. Jackson grunted. "Provided that you forget all about that account, which doesn't exist," he added pointedly.
"What account?" Harley said brightly.
History is full of people who have done impulsively stupid things when the opportunity arose. Grabbing an electric fence to see what it feels like, reaching out to pet that friendly-looking bear at the zoo, leaning out to catch a not-quite-foul ball at a baseball game...Impulsive stupidity seems to be hard-wired into the human brain, as much an instinct as breathing in and out.
It had been a bad decision for Sorrow to bite Poison Ivy. Never mind the fact that making a rogue bleed was probably one of the few ways to skyrocket straight to the top of their Revenge List. No, the stupidity had lay mostly in the fact that she'd done it inside Arkham.
Of course they'd had an antidote to Ivy's particular brand of toxins. Ivy had, after all, been a major force in Gotham's underworld for years now, with a large portion of that time spent inside these very walls. Of course they'd have developed something to counteract her poisonous blood. Otherwise, the guards would have probably been wearing full bio-hazard suits around her at all times.
The only comfort that Sorrow could draw out of the whole situation was that she hadn't consciously made the decision to gnaw on Ivy's neck. Some primitive function in her brain had connected the relevant information - I need to die, and she's lethal - and she was tasting blood before she knew what was happening.
Well, she wouldn't get a chance to try that again, or anything like it. She also wasn't going to get a chance to yank her IV needle out or wriggle out of her restraints as she had previously. The gurney they'd gotten to replace the one she'd destroyed was short, squat, and made of such heavy and sturdy materials that tipping it over would be almost impossible. To top it off, they'd stuck the IV needle in her foot and run the tubing like a strand of Christmas lights up and away from her. It was maddening, particularly since they'd strapped her legs down and secured the needle with almost half a roll of tape.
She glared impotently at the wretched mess of plastic dangling over the gurney. Disgusting white liquid dripped quietly through the tubes as it made its way toward her bloodstream. If she'd known that they could feed people intravenously, she would have found a quicker way to kill herself...somehow...Then again, if she'd known covered a lot of nasty territory. If she'd known what would happen to her, she probably wouldn't have pulled that last bank job, for starters...
A tear, hot with self-pity, leaked out of her eye. She hastily scraped her face against her shoulder, blotting it out before anyone saw. Crying wasn't the answer. Crying never helped.
But...what else was there to do? She was trapped, and soon Dr. Teng would show up with his needles and his chemicals and start the whole thing over again. More tears joined the first, running in tiny rivulets down her face and into the collar of her scratchy asylum uniform.
As if the world were privy to her thoughts, there was a familiar clicking as the door lock opened. Sorrow stiffened, expecting the worst, and hurriedly dried her eyes on her other shoulder.
The heavy metal door swung open. "Hey, kiddo!" Harley Quinn stood framed in the doorway, holding a patchworked tube of paper. "Long time no see!"
"Harley?" Sorrow asked disbelievingly. It couldn't be her. The doctors would never let her come visit, not after Ivy...
Harley grinned cheerfully at Sorrow. She looked better than she'd expected. Maybe Phase Five would need a little adjustment or two.
"I brought'cha a lil' present, Sorrow, from me an' Eddie." In point of fact, the picture - Phase One - was supposed to be from Harley and Ivy, but that idea hadn't gone down too well. Ivy had pitched a major fit about the very idea of taking mutilated and dyed bits of her babies and desecrating the remains to make a stupid picture. Harley looked around the room, examining the wallspace, then glanced over at Sorrow.
"Huh. I got it!" Harley clambered up onto the bed and balanced on tiptoe by Sorrow's bound wrists. With a few pieces of tape liberated from the roll around her own wrist, she secured the picture to the ceiling. "There ya go, S-girl!" she chirped, bouncing down to the floor.
Sorrow's eyes widened, darting toward each section of the picture in turn. Harley smiled proudly at the look of surprise on her face. It had been tricky to make, particularly since they weren't allowed scissors or glue, but they'd managed to tear and tape enough paper together to make an approximate rendition of Gotham's docks at night. A gum-wrapper moon shone down on a crinkly cellophane sea, while dingy grey pamphlet buildings adorned with pale med-schedule gargoyles thrust themselves into the scribbly black nighttime sky.
"It's…it's beautiful, Harley," Sorrow murmured.
"Yeah, see, I knew what it looked like cuz Mistah J. had a place down there once, so I spent a lotta time outside, ya know? An' Eddie got all the paper, and then we made it for ya in the rec room one day." Sorrow continued to examine the picture. Harley beamed triumphantly. Phase One had obviously been a success.
If Harley Quinn had one talent, it was reading people. It had gotten her through college, it had gotten her a staff position at Arkham, and it had kept her alive longer than any other Joker associate on record. Sorrow may have been saying that the picture was beautiful, but what she really meant was that she was surprised and somewhat grateful that someone seemed to care about her - which was just the reaction that Harley had intended to elicit.
"So how're things?" Harley asked conversationally, flopping down on the bed.
Sorrow shrugged. "Fine."
"Fibber," Harley teased, flicking her gently on the nose. "I heard you haven't been eating. Can't blame ya, the food here's not much," she added lightly. "It's gotta be better than that, though." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the array of IV racks and tubing leading into Sorrow's bare foot.
"I'm not hungry," Sorrow muttered mutinously.
"Maybe not for the slop they give ya. What you need is..." Harley paused, eyes twinkling, "a sammich."
"A sandwich?" Sorrow shook her head. "No, thanks."
"Not a sandwich," Harley corrected. "A sammich. Sammiches are better!"
Sorrow, lips tightened, shook her head again. "I made you that picture," Harley pointed out. "The least you could do is eat a sammich for me." Sorrow's lip slowly started sneaking between her teeth. Indecision! Harley pressed her point. "C'mon, promise Harley yer gonna at least eat one lil' sammich," she wheedled. "Puh-leeeeeeeeeeze? I'll sing ya a song!"
Sorrow ducked her head. Whether she'd meant to look away or agree, Harley didn't know, and she wasn't about to ask. "All right! We have a deal! One sammich for one song!"
"I didn't say that-" Sorrow sputtered to a halt as Harley pressed a finger over her protesting lips.
"C'mon, you'll wanna see this!" Without further ado, she launched into a somewhat squeaky rendition of "Say That We're Sweethearts Again", posing theatrically in place so that Sorrow could see. "You like? It's from a movie er a musical er somethin'," Harley said, tilting her head and making her pigtails bounce.
Sorrow nodded slowly and actually cracked a smile! "Yeah. It was really… appropriate."
"So it was worth a sammich?" Harley demanded, grinning.
"Yeah, it was worth a sandwich," Sorrow admitted.
"Hey, hot stuff! Get this girl a sammich!" Harley ordered one of the orderlies in their cluster by the door. He scowled at her and left, nametag bouncing as he stomped indignant feet into the floor.
"You mean…eat it now?"
"Yeah! HEY HOT STUFF, GET ME ONE TOO!" she bellowed through the open door. "We can have a little afternoon snack." She glanced over her shoulder. The orderlies weren't watching too closely. In fact, they were elbowing one another in the ribs and chuckling over their associate's rapid departure. Harley shot a wink at Sorrow and quickly unbuckled her wrist. "Can't eat without an arm!" she whispered conspiratorially.
The orderly was back with the sandwiches on two paper plates. Harley snatched them from his hands. "Thanks, hot stuff!" she said merrily. "Dismissed."
The orderly glared at her and stamped out, hissing epithets under his breath. He may have turned down a direct order from Sorrow, or from any of the other lower-level rogues, but he was smart enough to know that the day he turned down an order from Harley would probably end in his untimely death. Sorrow was flexing her fingers, stretching her arm, and totally ignoring the sandwich that lay on her chest. She opened her mouth to say something.
Her mouth was promptly filled with sandwich. "Mmmf!" she grunted, raising her free hand to pull the unwanted food out. She paused when she realized that Harley's hand was still there, holding it firmly to her face.
"Bite," Harley ordered. "I hear you're good at that."
Sorrow swallowed indignantly. "I didn't mean to bite - mmmf!"
"Keep goin'," Harley said happily, taking a bite of her own snack. "You owe me a whole sammich, remember."
Sorrow, with her mouth full, obviously knew that arguing would get her nowhere. "Why do you call him that? Hot stuff?" she asked, not swallowing, obviously hoping that would keep Harley from stuffing her face again.
"Mmmf…his first day here, his badge read H. Stufington…H. Stuff. Hot Stuff!" exclaimed Harley, spraying breadcrumbs everywhere. "Reads Horace S. now, so none of the new guys tease him about it."
"How…mmf!"
Phases One and Two had gone surprisingly well. If this kept up, Harley mused happily, she might have Sorrow back to her normal self in just a few weeks! With that in mind, she mentally flipped through her plan until she found a likely tactic to try next.
Plans were important. In fact, being a rogue meant spending most of your free time planning. Which theme-related event would have the most cash, or the best opportunity to humiliate the Batman? How many henchmen would be needed to secure the building? And just how were they going to get the eight-foot-tall iron-plated zucchini with optional rocket launchers up twelve flights of stairs? Even if there wasn't a specific target, rogues spent a lot of time in contemplation of the Perfect Heist...or the Perfect Revenge.
Everyone in the gallery had gotten revenge at some point, sometimes even on each other. Whoever said that the best revenge is living well had obviously never considered the possibilities offered by an intricate scheme designed to utterly ruin the target of their righteous anger - or, failing that, a handy tire iron and a henchman built like Andre the Giant.
Even Harley had looked for vengeance - most memorably on the Joker, only a few weeks after she'd first put on a costume for him. She was almost embarrassed to think about it now. Oh, certianly he'd done his share to anger her - he hadn't exactly fired her halfway across town in a rocket with the intent to give her the warm fuzzies - and after she'd dragged herself out of the wreckage she'd sworn to get even. (Well, technically, she'd also tried killing herself first, until Red had kindly reminded her about the joys of revenge.) She'd gotten her revenge...mostly. At the very least, her Puddin' had said that he was sorry, and so everything could be forgiven. (She counted that as a very serious victory indeed. Who else on earth had managed to get the Joker to apologize?)
Teng probably wasn't going to apologize. That left Sorrow with one option - delicious, glorious vengeance with no strings attached. She probably just needed a nudge in the right direction to get started. "So, I was thinkin'," Harley said nonchalantly, just quiet enough so that the orderlies outside couldn't hear, "if you wanted to get some of yer own back, I could prob'ly getcha some of Puddin's Smilex. It might be a little hard to get it to him...you know guards, too nosy for their own good," she said, raising her voice enough for the orderlies to hear and develop slight frowns of disapproval. "But maybe prison guards don't care as much."
Sorrow slowly stopped chewing and looked at Harley as if she were a particularly obscure Riddler puzzle. "What?"
"The guards at the prison," Harley repeated. "He's in Blackgate, remember?"
"WHAT?" Sorrow yelped. The forgotten sandwich tumbled apart as she snatched Harley by the front of the shirt. "Say that again," she demanded. The swarm of orderlies outside, noticing her liberated hand, began shoving one another pointedly toward the door of the cell.
"He's in...they didn't tell ya they arrested him?" Harley turned to the orderly who was gingerly attempting to pull her to her feet. "Nice going, jerks," she sniffed.
Sorrow, shoulders jerking as orderlies wrestled her back into position, fought to reach her other wrist. "I'm going to get better and get out of here," she vowed. "And then I'm gonna rip his lungs out!"
"Atta girl!" Harley called encouragingly as she was hustled away.
Edward and Ivy were waiting impatiently in the rec room. Rather, Eddie was impatient - he'd never done anything like this before, and he was curious about the results - and Ivy was merely eager for Harley's return so she could stop feigning interest in the halfhearted game of poker.
The doors flew open and Harley bounded in. Laceless shoes kicked toward the ceiling as she ducked into a handspring, turned a somersault in midair over the couch, and landed to absolutely no applause in front of Ivy and Edward. "Well if that's how yer gonna be," she sniffed, "I'll take my talents elsewhere." She sniffed haughtily and made to strut away.
Two hands hauled her backward by her collar and she landed on her rear on the table amid a deck of scattered cards. "How'd it go today, Harls?" asked Ivy.
Harley grinned. "I fixed her!"
"That quickly?" Eddie said disbelievingly.
"I'm simply that good," Harley assured him with a superior air and a look of disdain, as if she was Queen of the Universe. With a tilt of her head and an impish grin, she lost all hint of royalty. "Anyway, turns out she was only freaked out 'cuz she thought Teng was gonna come get her again. It took Doc Harley's intervention to make it all betta!" Harley leaned back on her hands, kicking her feet like a little girl. "Maybe I should try gettin' my license back, go back to the therapy gig," she mused.
"I think to keep the license, you'd have to give up the Joker," commented Ivy, watching with amusement.
"Give up Mistah J.? Forget it!"
Teng was in prison.
Teng was in prison! She couldn't believe it. She'd laid there waiting for him to come back, waiting for the final torture to begin while she was weak and basically helpless...and he'd been in prison the whole time! She'd been safe from the very day that she'd been admitted. She'd thrown herself out the window, almost killed herself three times, and spent days in cringing anticipation of his arrival...and he was in jail.
Sorrow, not for the first time, felt like a complete and total idiot. There had been no reason for any of it! If only she'd watched the news when she was still in her hideout...if only she'd bothered to go outside and pick up the newspaper from the front steps...if only someone had told her!
Her blushing, burning feeling of ineptitude started to leak away. No one had told her that she was safe. No one had bothered to let her know that he'd been locked away - and her building anger was almost wiped away by a surge of fierce joy as she imagined Teng in a starchy orange jumpsuit, locked in a cell with nothing but a 300-pound muscly roommate to keep him company. Oh, yes, that was a beautiful image.
A lone orderly waited patiently outside, watching Sorrow as she glared back at him. "Go get me some food," she snapped.
"Gotta wait for the doctor," he said calmly.
"Well, can you at least get this stupid needle out of my foot?"
"Gotta wait for the doctor," he repeated.
Sorrow sighed explosively. "Can you breathe in and out? Gotta wait for the doctor," she mocked, yanking irritably at the restraint around her left wrist. The wide leather strap was beginning to rub through the layer of latex that coated the outside of her horrible steel-mesh gloves. On the other hand, the handcuff that secured the glove in place was doing its bit to wear away the edges of the leather, giving it a wonderful peely fringe. Maybe if she kept rubbing them together, she could wear through the strap in another six years or so...
Dr. Lily Soehnlean was not a particularly strong person. The mysteries of the human mind required time and thought to piece together, and generally she spent her time just sitting and thinking rather than on strenuous physical activities. She was slender and girlish - and coupled with her generally passive personality, one might wonder where she fit in as a doctor to the violently insane.
What most people didn't realize was that weakness could be a weapon. If an inmate didn't have to prove his or her superiority - if they knew, right from the start, that they could take Lily apart in a matter of seconds, and if they knew she knew it too - then they could bypass a lot of the threats and boundary testing that so many of her coworkers had to endure with new patients. People who didn't feel threatened often let their secrets slip. (Of course, doctors who felt constantly threatened often had nervous breakdowns, but that was just one of the many wonderful benefits of working at Arkham.)
Lily generally dealt with henchgirls. Ever since the Batman had first flapped his cape over the city, it seemed that her life had been nothing but a stream of abandoned henchgirls. She'd grown tired of constantly easing them toward sanity only to find that they'd latched on to a different rogue and turned themselves into a new person overnight. If only once they'd latch on to a doctor...
But doctors were trouble, all on their own. When Lily had finally acquired a real rogue as a patient, the others had done almost nothing but pester her about the girl. Dr. Tanaka had persuaded her into letting Poison Ivy visit - and that had been a catastrophe, start to finish - and just yesterday Dr. Jackson had browbeaten her into letting Harley Quinn do the same!
No more, she vowed, tucking a pen into her clipboard as she strode toward Sorrow's cell. No more visits, no more advice, no more helpful tips. From now on, it's just me and her. An orderly was waiting for her outside the wide plexiglass window. He smiled a relieved little smile and hastened to unlock the door for her.
Something had changed. Instead of laying there, limp and steadfastly looking at the wall, Sorrow was glaring directly at her with a look of pure rage on her face. "Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded as Lily stepped inside.
"Tell you?" Lily asked, baffled.
Sorrow twisted toward Lily, wrenching her left arm backward as the restraint pulled on her wrist. "Why didn't you tell me Teng was in jail?" she growled. If looks could burn, Lily would have been ashes in a fraction of an instant.
"You...you didn't know?" Lily asked tentatively.
"No, I wanted to kill myself for fun. All the cool kids are doing it," Sorrow snapped.
Lily fumbled with her clipboard. "But...but you hadn't been admitted when he was arrested! It was all over the news...we thought you knew," she trailed off.
"Well, now I know, so you can take these stupid straps off."
"I'm afraid I can't do that," Lily said automatically.
Cold blue eyes sparked with rage. "Why not?"
"Well, you...that is...you might hurt yourself," Lily said lamely.
"Like hell I will. I'm through with that."
"Why don't we just wait a bit and see?" Lily said consolingly. "I'm sure that maybe in a little while-"
"In a little while, blah blah, whatever," Sorrow sighed. "Can you at least get that thing out of my foot?"
"You know why you need that," Lily said sternly. "If you're not going to eat - "
"I ate a sandwich three hours ago!" Sorrow protested.
"Really," Lily said flatly.
"Check the crumbs, lady," Sorrow said, gesturing with a jerk of her chin to the spray of breadcrumbs on her blanket. "Better yet, ask your little monkey out in the hallway. He saw it."
Dr. Lily turned to the orderly. "Well?"
"She ate it, all right," he agreed. "Well, after we tied her down again, we hadda feed the rest to her, but she definitely ate it."
Lily nodded and strode to the foot of the gurney. No one told her anything, not even about her own patient! Well, she'd deal with that later. "You know that if you stop eating, the IV goes back in?"
"I know, I know," Sorrow said with the air of a teenager taking last-minute instructions before a date.
Tape parted with skin in one loud, sticky riiiip. The orderly handed Lily a cotton ball and a Band-Aid from his belt pouch as she made ready to remove the IV. "Leave this on for a few hours," she instructed as she eased the little plastic tube out of Sorrow's vein, "and then you can take it off."
"Oh, yeah, I'll just bend down there and peel it off with my teeth." Sorrow pointedly rattled her restraints. "Any chance of getting these off sometime in the next millennium?"
Lily balanced on a knife-edge of indecision. If she let her go, and she hurt herself, there went any chance of moving on to rogues and leaving the Land of Whiny Henchgirls behind. On the other hand, if she let her go and she didn't hurt herself...wouldn't that prove her methods had worked? Wouldn't that give her the credit for turning a suicidal person into one that had plans for the future? (The fact that they probably involved hunting down ex-Dr. Teng like a rat in a trap was secondary. Plans meant that she wasn't going to kill herself.) Lily leaned down, looking Sorrow directly in the eyes. "You promise not to hurt yourself?"
"I already did."
"And you promise not to hurt anyone else?"
"Not here," Sorrow said.
"Not anywhere in this building?"
"Nope."
"I'll trust you to stick to your word." Lily bent over Sorrow's lifeless feet and quickly unbuckled the restraints. "Remember, I'm trusting you to do the right thing," she reminded as she reached for Sorrow's right wrist.
Sorrow grinned. "Would I lie to you?" she said innocently.
There have been many people through the years that have worked their way back from paralysis to full health. There have been tear-soaked, grinning moments when the new walker collapses triumphantly at the end of her five-yard marathon. There have been stoic, determined women with really horrid toes in the back of trucks, commanding their feet to move by the sheer force of their iron will. There have even been occasional miraculous instant cures, when girls who have never walked suddenly leap from their chairs and sprint away from danger.
This particular numb-legged person wasn't really paying attention to her legs. They dangled uselessly over the edge of the bed as she focused intently on her gloves. Would she walk again? Probably. The more she twitched her feet, the more of her legs she was able to feel. If it was only a matter of time, she had better things to worry about.
If she could scrape enough of the latex away enough from the steel mesh, she reasoned, she might be able to touch someone through the gloves. Maybe they'd let her out if she had a hostage. Maybe she could get away with just threatening someone until they got her out...the orderly that Harley had renamed Hot Stuff seemed pretty willing to go along with rogues' demands.
Her nose tingled with a vicious itch. Instinctively, she blew upward, trying to ease it. "What am I doing?" she chuckled, reaching up a newly-freed hand to scratch it. Bliss! Just for good measure, she rubbed over the rest of her face, and the back of her neck as well. Oh, she needed that.
Industriously, she dug the corner of her handcuff back into the center of her other palm. The outer layer of latex obligingly flaked away, exposing a thick, pebbled layer of latex crammed beneath the steel mesh. She glared at it. If she only had a needle, or something else thin, she could poke through it...but armed only with the sawn-apart cuffs, she'd never get through that bottom layer of latex. Well, so much for that plan...
"Hey." An orderly rapped on her window. "You want dinner in here or the cafeteria?"
"Cafeteria," she said instantly. Who cared that she hadn't had a proper shower in weeks? (Bed-baths, she felt, didn't count.) Who cared that she looked like she'd last been used to clean out drains? She'd be getting out of this horrible little room!
The orderly sighed the sigh of those who don't want to bother with doing their job. "Be right back," he muttered. Sorrow took a minute to attempt to flatten the tangled mess that her hair had woven itself into. The orderly came back, pushing a wheelchair in front of him. Instead of his earlier, bored expression, he wore a new look of interest.
Sorrow had no way of knowing it, but this particular orderly was new at Arkham. He'd gone through the traditional training process halfheartedly, not really interested in the minutia of taking care of an endless parade of the warped and weird. No, what he was really interested in was the money.
Orderlies didn't get paid much - by Arkham, that is. A clever orderly could do a favor here, fudge a record there, and make himself a handsome profit for doing very little work. In the few minutes it had taken to fetch the wheelchair (and to sneak a little look at Sorrow's charts), he'd found that she'd been visited by no less than two of Arkham's elite - and two that traditionally were very generous, when it came to favors. Talk about a quick ticket to the top!
So Sorrow was rather surprised when he tossed her a hairbrush and offered to take her to the showers before dinner. Not ordered, offered - with an air about him that suggested he was a puppy looking for praise.
"No, thanks," she said carefully, wincing as the hairbrush lodged firmly in a tangle. "Just give me a minute to - ow - to finish this, okay?"
"Whatever you want," he grinned. Oooo-kay, she thought, confused. Something was probably up, but since that something apparently involved catering to her every whim, she was willing and ready to let it happen.
When her hair was finally detangled, the orderly retrieved the brush and lifted her gently into the chair, fussing over her as if she was made of spun glass. I could get used to this, she thought cheerfully as he wheeled her carefully out into the hallway. Part of her was still on the alert for a trap - she knew she wasn't that safe, after all - but it was nice to not have to worry about things for a few minutes. Mr. Conscientious back there would take care of any trouble.
Her bubble of security lasted just until they entered the lunchroom, where it dissolved instantaneously as the orderly aimed her right toward the center of the room. "Uh, guy?" she asked. "Why are you - not there!" she snapped, locking her gloved hands around the wheels as she realized where they were headed.
"Huh?" the orderly asked, obligingly stopping. "I thought you liked Quinn."
Sorrow craned around to glare at him over her shoulder. "I like Harley," she informed him icily. "Not, and I want to make this crystal-clear to you...not her boyfriend."
Sure enough, next to Harley, dominating his section of the table, sat the Joker, merrily illustrating some jape or another with a forceful wave of his soup-bowl. A spray of watery tomato soup splashed those nearest to him. No one dared to complain, particularly not Harley, who was now wearing a tomato-soup mask over adoring blue eyes. Apparently his two months in various versions of solitary confinement had done nothing to squelch his sense of humor.
The orderly shrugged and obediently wheeled her down to the far end of the table, where Poison Ivy sat alone, moodily letting a spoonful of soup drizzle down into her bowl. The days of wine and roses - or, more realistically, the days of Harley thinking for herself - were obviously over for now, and Ivy obviously wasn't happy about it.
"Hey," Sorrow said uneasily. "Mind if I join you?" The orderly locked the wheels in place from the back and scurried off to fetch her dinner.
Ivy, without raising her head, flicked suspicious eyes up to regard her through her eyelashes. "Provided you aren't going to attack me again," she said frostily, "you can sit wherever you please."
"I'm sorry about that," Sorrow murmured. "Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?"
"Not at the moment," Ivy muttered.
Another tidal wave of soup crashed down the table. "How about this," Sorrow suggested in a conspiring whisper. "You distract the guards, and I'll go drown him in his soup."
"You can't drown someone with soup they don't have," Ivy pointed out, raising her head a little.
"Your soup, then. Or Harley's -" Splash. "Or not."
"I like the way you think," Ivy smiled.
At the other end of the table, the Joker had finished his story. Harley, laughing and applauding enthusiastically, failed to notice as he palmed a slimy piece of bacon out of the green beans. With his other hand, he lightly tossed a large chunk of lettuce from his salad on top of Harley's pigtail. "My little BLT," he smirked.
Lettuce...tomatoes...she frowned. "But Puddin', where's the bacon?"
Splat!
She giggled delightedly, totally uncaring that she looked like a victim of an earthquake in a supermarket.
"Say, have you ever..." Bright green eyes tracked an unexpected orderly across the lunchroom, heading toward his table. But the man wasn't going near him - no, he was heading for...
The Joker sucked in a breath of astonished, evil delight. Mmmmmm...the thought of pending vengeance was better than Christmas, even that Christmas where he'd played Bouncing Pedestrians in that SUV with Robin tied up in the passenger seat. She was still here!
"Puddin?" Harley asked, noticing the Joker's distraction, and peered across the room to where Ivy and Sorrow sat. "Whatcha thinkin' about?" she asked hesitantly.
"It's that girl," he chuckled quietly. "I'm going to give her the laugh of a lifetime."
Harley, unseen, felt a little shudder of dread quiver her shoulders.
(to be continued)
Author's Note: This one goes out to my real-life Harley, sammiches and all. Nothing quite says 'you're my pal' like a mouthful of food forcibly shoved into your face!
Harley's flirtation with suicide took place in Batman: Harley Quinn. Shocking. Likewise, the walking scenes were lifted from a random Lifetime movie, Kill Bill, and Redwall (hey, Brian Jacques - legs do not work that way!)
'Bouncing Pedestrians', of course, is from Detective Comics #826. Now there's a holly, jolly Christmas!
