IV

We were left in relative peace after that—Ace was the only one immediately dumb enough to barge into the room and interfere, and he doubtless would have told the other guys that I'd lost it. I managed to catch a quick nap in my chair, resting for an hour or two before I woke up with the sense that all was not right.

I looked immediately to the floor where J rested. He had rolled over halfway under the bed, his imprisoned arm twisted over his chest and pointing up at a strange angle, the other trapped beneath him. His back was to me now, and I could hear him shivering from all the way from my place across the room. Hesitantly, I rose to my feet and took a few steps towards him, then paused.

It's probably another trick.

It could be. Then again, this time he knew that I wasn't carrying the key on me, and he'd already beaten my face up pretty badly. What was he going to do this time, catch me and beat on me until I agreed to go get the key? He'd see the folly of that plan; as soon as he let me go to retrieve the key for him, I'd be safely out of his range.

I'd done a pretty shitty job of taking care of him thus far due to the fact that I was scared to go too close to him. These symptoms, though, were consistent with what I expected of the midpoint of a bad illness, the hardest part, and he was going to need some help if he was going to get through it quickly.

To hell with it, I thought. I'll go see if he's faking. If he's just looking for another fight, it's not like I'm in pristine condition—what are a few more bruises in addition to the ones I already have?

I'd talked myself into it, and it didn't take long for me to reach him and stoop down to him. I touched his shoulder to no reaction, and it took some effort to pull him over—he definitely was committed to the huddle he was in.

I rolled him onto his back, and immediately, he began wheezing. His eyelids rolled open, then drooped shut again, flew back open long enough for me to see his hazy and unseeing eyes, then closed.

"Damn it," I growled. I dragged his torso up, leaning it against the bedframe again, and once he'd been pulled upright, he started breathing a little easier. I leaped to my feet and darted into the bathroom. He needed fluids. I grabbed one of the numerous discarded coffee mugs sitting around on the counter, rinsed it rapidly, and filled it up with water before returning to his side, crouching beside him and smoothing his bedraggled hair out of his face and pressing the rim to his mouth.

Really, I think he was still unconscious at first, yielding to the cup and parting his lips in some subconscious need for hydration, but the act of drinking must have awoken him. His eyelids twitched, slowly swept open, and I saw the recognition in them but was a little too committed to trying to tend him to stress out about it. Let him hit me, I thought savagely, determined to get as much water in him as possible before he reacted.

By that point, he'd had half the cup, and so I was resigned when his hand groped at my wrist and then batted the mug out of my hand with a powerful swat, sending it careening across the room until it shattered against the wall. I launched myself backwards, aware that my presence was definitely no longer required, but with an impressive display of reflexes, his free hand darted out and caught my ankle, and with a powerful pull, he hauled me towards him.

"J, don't," I protested, even as I resigned myself to whatever fate he had in store for me. I was off-balance and there was nothing to grab on to, and he was having another bout of that twisted, potent strength amidst his illness. He had me within seconds.

I was fully prepared to put up a fight, and I lurched up, fist colliding ineffectually with his jaw and knocking his head back with an audible snap. He was undeterred and had me pinned to his chest in another split second.

I was struggling to free myself when I belatedly realized that, aside from holding me tightly to him, he was making no effort to fight me. Slowly, my thrashing died away, and as he shifted beneath me, I stopped moving entirely, my curiosity calling to find out what was going on.

With a grunt of effort, he pulled me fully into his lap and drew up his knees so that I was effectively locked in. His elbow was crooked around my waist and his forearm rose up along the line of my torso, hand splayed along my uninjured cheek and pressing my head hard into his thin, painfully heaving chest. His shoulders were bent, hunched over me, and, trying not to provoke him by jerking my head around, I rolled my eyes up to look at his face.

His eyes were open but glazed over, and beads of sweat were forming rapidly on his forehead. His mouth was shut, and he was breathing rapidly and laboriously in and out through his nose, his gaze darting from one corner of the room to the other hastily as he rocked slightly back and forth over me.

He's hallucinating, I realized, and a hideous knot of cold fear settled firmly in my guts. This was bad. Little chest colds, mild fevers didn't result in this.

He kept cradling me as a child would a cherished doll—another second and his fingers came down over my eyes, trying to keep me from catching a glimpse of what he thought he saw. Whatever he was seeing, he was blocking me from it, and this in itself worried me immensely. The Joker was anything but the protective type, generally taking the lenient view that whatever didn't kill me made me stronger, and hey, if it did kill me, I probably deserved it for getting myself into that mess to begin with.

This illness had him acting out of character, displaying traits that, were he in his right mind, he would cheerfully die rather than adopt permanently. If he were in his right mind—well, what served for his right mind—then he'd be up and fighting, not crouching in the corner and hanging on to me.

I shifted a bit in his tight grip, moving my head an inch or two until it was nestled more over the left side of his chest, and I listened. His heart was thudding a mile a minute in my ear, loud and fast, and I knew I needed to do something quickly.

First things first. He was expending too much energy hanging onto me like he was, energy needed to fight this thing off, and goodness knows his heart didn't need the extra strain. I worked my arm up and laid my hand alongside his neck, feeling his pulse thudding away against the heel of my palm.

"Shhh," I murmured softly. I had no idea if I could calm him down at all, but I could at least try. "Shh… shh, it's okay. J, it's all right. Calm down. Settle down, you're all right. You're just… you're just seeing things. We're okay."

No discernable change. I stroked the side of his neck gently, my cold hand sapping some of the heat from his skin temporarily as I kept shushing him and nestled closer to him, hoping that my proximity would stir some memories, bring him back to what usually functioned as his normal self.

After another moment or two of this, either my voice penetrated the thick haze coating his mind or he ran out of the energy necessary to keep it up. Either way, his grip loosened, and when I looked up I found him staring down at me, looking vaguely bewildered. I took the opportunity to wriggle free, and he made no attempt to catch me and bring me back. Once I'd managed to fully liberate myself, his eyes shut, his head dropped and he sagged over, completely drained.

I struggled to my feet and ran for the bathroom. I needed to get rid of that fever before it started addling his brain. Sure, he probably had some mental damage already, but the mind was delicate—too much more stress and it could break completely. The thought of J as a vegetable was suddenly very real and very scary.

I found another cloth, soaked it in the coldest water the tap would yield, and ran back to his side. Stooping next to him, I applied the cloth to his forehead, cleaning off the sweat and smudging the paint in the process. I pressed my palm to the cloth, flattening it to his head, and he remained lax and unresisting.

"J," I said, trying hard to keep the panic out of my voice. "J, talk to me, will you? Do you know where you are?"

He opened his eyes with difficulty. That frightening bleariness was still there, and he stared at me for a moment—seeing but unseeing all at once. The brief recognition of earlier was gone, and it scared me, knowing that he didn't know who I was and still wasn't fighting off my ministrations. He licked his lips once, twice, then smacked them painfully.

I fled back to the bathroom, where I soaked the compress again and filled another cup with water. I stopped at the desk, grabbed some ibuprofen from the discarded pile, and went back to him. "Take these," I said, pressing the pills into his cuffed hand and putting the cup into his other. "Drink this."

For a second, I thought I was going to have to force-feed him. After a moment, though, he chuckled throatily. "Suuuuuure," he drawled languidly, head lolling to the side. "After all… it's not like you'd try ta… poison me, wouldjya?"

"What? No," I said, frowning and pressing the compress to his head again.

"No," he repeated, blurry eyes rolling around in his skull. "No. Just… drug me and send me back to that boring little place."

My frown deepened. "What are you talking about?" It was fairly obvious at this point that although he was finally talking to me, he wasn't talking to me. The question remained, then: who was he talking to? Who does he think I am?

His fist tightened over the medicine, and for a moment I thought he was going to fling it as far from him as he could. After a split second of clutching it, though, he flattened his palm against his mouth, then chased the medicine with the entire mug of water, which he then dropped carelessly on the ground.

Relief flooded me. We still were far from through, but that was progress—figures, I thought bitterly, dabbing at his face with the cool rag. He's out of his mind with fever before he'll take basic, over-the-counter medicine for it. And fifty bucks says he doesn't even realize what it's for.

More paint was coming away. He tolerated my care for a second longer before reaching out and putting a flat palm against my shoulder, shoving me hard away from him. I landed back on my butt but didn't attempt to get up and try again. Instead, I pulled my ankles in, sitting Indian-style and leaning slightly towards him, searching his face for some clue that would help me understand the latest ramblings.

He leaned back against the headboard and adopted an expression of casual, cool resignation, twiddling his thumbs awkwardly as a result of the cuff. He licked his lips again and looked calmly at me. "So, when does this stuff kick in? If I'm gonna be takin' a trip to Arkham… well, you understand if I want this to go as quick as possible," he said, screwing up his eyes in mock earnestness. "Gotta plan a breakout and all."

I felt my eyebrows climbing. Oh. So that's it. "Hey. Who am I?" No harm in double-checking.

He laughed, a surprised, delighted keening, its usual strength weakened by his bout with the sickness. "Wow," he chuckled, drawing out the opening 'w.' "Hey, uh—I'm—I'm flattered that you're coming to me with this little… existential crisis, Bats, I really am… but I gotta be honest with you; I'm not the best person to ask in this case."

Oh, shit, he actually thinks I'm Batman, I thought, and edged backwards from him a bit, suddenly wanting to be well out of range. This situation had just gotten a little more dangerous.

Okay, a lot more dangerous.

Plus, this was a pretty huge hallucination. He wasn't just seeing threatening shadows at the edge of his vision; this was a full-onbreak from reality. He'd convinced himself that Batman had shown up to drug him and incarcerate him again. Not good.

"J? Come back home, okay? It's me," I said softly, trying to gently draw him back in, back to here and now. "It's Harley."

"Harley?" he said, tilting his head and squinting at me. "What do… why do you wanna talk about her?"

"No, I—"

And inspiration belatedly struck. That beast of curiosity arose again with a roar, this time demanding its way. Be careful what you wish for, I reminded myself ferociously, but it was too late for that. I'd been handed an opportunity on a silver platter, and I was neither strong nor weak enough to resist it.

Carefully, I rearranged my thoughts and assumed the persona he'd assigned to me—admittedly with some difficulty, I was a far cry from the demented six-foot rodent that plagued the Joker so elegantly. "You two… seem pretty close these days. Should I worry about her?"

"Should you worry about her?" J sucked on his teeth placidly, eyes twitching left and right as his mind churned. "Ya know," he said suddenly after a moment, "if you'd asked me that a few months ago, I'd… hoo, I'd have said no. Not a threat, push her to the side, go about your business." He lifted a hand, shaking it dismissively. "But… hmm." He turned the hand around, examined the slightly overgrown nails hazily as I waited, my breath suspended in my throat. "She gets meaner every day."

"To you?"

"Mm," he said noncommittally. "Public, usually. She, ah—she…" He licked his lips pensively, tapped his fingertips as if counting, and then his face split into a grin. "So we were out shopping a couple'a weeks ago. Nothing fancy—get in, grab some basic supplies, then get out." He snapped his fingers emphatically. "Simple. But, uh, you see… there was this girl there. And, ah… she was just blatant. I'm sure you've noticed—you being the big, ah, gloomy testosterone factory that you are—Harley's rigged herself a little getup. Not as dramatic as yours, sure, not as swanky as mine. More cute than anythin' else. Cut her some slack, though, wouldjya, she's new to the game. She's getting there.

"So anyway," he continued, tilting his weary head back to rest flat on the mattress, wincing and shifting to accommodate the new position, "she's, ah… this girl's got on a copy of Harley's outfit. Pale imitation, really," he said, wrinkling his nose in scorn. "You know the diamonds I gave her?"

I smiled to myself, realizing for the first time how drastically different the meaning of that question would be coming from any other man in Gotham. "The scars, yes."

"Yeah. This girl had 'em painted on. Talk about lack of commitment. So there she was, bold as brass—well. Less so when we showed up. I really doubt she thought she was gonna come face to face with the real Harley Quinn. So Harley sees her, and… she just goes ballistic. Jumps on the girl, starts whaling on her, just merciless. None of us takes too kindly to copycats, you know, but we all have different ways of dealing with 'em. Me, I like to play with my food. You prefer to wait around till I deal with your imitators, obviously. And Harley. Harley seems to prefer the down n' dirty approach. You shoulda heard some of the things she was saying to this kid—I didn't know she was so creative with her language; it was enough to make me raise an eyebrow.

"She cut up the girl's face before I pulled her off—nasty knife, too, had an edge to it. Spat on her, told her to think twice before messin' with scary people. And in that moment—" His eyes rolled into the back of his head as if he were lost in the bliss of the memory—"Oh, she was scary. I was so proud."

I ducked my head, reminding myself that I was supposed to be Batman and that grinning like a fool wasn't likely to keep him talking. On the bright side, it might snap him out of it. That would be a nice return to normalcy. This new, unreserved flow of information was intoxicating, though—it was almost enough to expel my worry about its source. To think he would brag about me to Batman—it was almost unbelievable, except here it was, playing out in front of me.

I chose my next question carefully and with a quickening heart. "So then… do you think you'll stick with her?"

He lifted his head slowly from the mattress, and from the sharpening look in his eye, I feared I'd asked the wrong question, that he'd snapped back into reality and was suddenly privy to the knowledge of my nosiness. He narrowed his eyes, though, the way he would look at someone who he suspected of knowing more than what was said. "Ah, but that… isn't the question… is it?"

I raised my eyebrows in bewilderment. If that wasn't the question, then I sure as hell didn't know what is.

"The question," he continued clearly, rolling his head back on his neck again, back to the mattress as he addressed the ceiling, "is whether I think she'll stick with me."

"Oh," I said intelligently. It seemed the only real response.

"Yeah. Oh," he said moodily, licking his lips.

"What, do you think she won't?"

He lifted one shoulder noncommittally. "You've seen her. She's enthralled. She… ohhh, she's having a good time these days. Doesn't mind getting… battered and bruised, cause you know, she's free. Free from Daddy, free from those terrific upstanding folks at the Asylum… but ya know, sooner or later, she's gonna realize at least one of two things."

I had stopped breathing. Fear was boiling up now, different from the cold fright that I'd felt just moments ago. I forced myself to speak. "What?"

He extended two fingers from his left hand, not bothering to lift his head. "One," he said, ticking the index finger. "That she isn't free. Not really. She's just traded one kind of servitude for another. She's as chained to me as she was chained to her father—" the word was dropped with scorn—"or to her job. She made a conscious decision to commit herself to this enslavement, suuuuure, but, you know, dependence is dependence."

Hmm. That's not so bad, I thought. I know that I'm locked to him pretty tightly, but I'm cool with that. I'm serving someone or something one way or another, might as well be someone I love.

"What's the other thing?" I asked, feeling slightly calmer now.

"Two," he hissed, ticking the second finger. "One of these days, somethin' will happen. I kill a bus of orphans, or we get in a li'l tussle and her armbreaks, or… her favorite henchman gets heavy-handed with the C4 and gets blown up. Somethin' like that. Then…"

He trailed off. He was silent for a decent span and his eyes drifted shut; I was afraid he'd gone to sleep after twenty seconds or so passed, and demanded "What?" He had to finish the thought. I wanted to know what he thought about me, about my dedication to him and to this cause.

He picked up the sentence as if he'd never left it. "Then, little Harleen will re-emerge. The good girl she was—and still is, way deep down. That good girl, the doctor, the sane one, will snap. She won't be able to logic it away anymore. She'll get scared. She'll run."

My chest was rising and falling rapidly, reflecting my sudden wrath at this declaration. How could he think that? How? I forced myself to exhale through my nose, to keep it cool, play like nothing was wrong.

He opened his eyes, and very simply, he told the ceiling, "And on that day, that second she runs scared… I'll kill her."


A/N - To be continued and concluded shortly. My apologies, this is a day late due to sleep deprivation and not nearly enough time spent near a computer. There's just the one chapter left- I told you it was a short little thing! In the meantime, drop me a line, let me know what you think, especially about the latest turn of events. All my love, and I'll see you all shortly!