She came out bruised–she was sure, almost immediately, right at the decisive point of impact, that she was bruised and that the bruise would hold for no less than about two weeks.
Dragging her body forward–not with pain, but with a low feeling in her gut–towards the long, sequential alignment of pilings near the edge of the wharf, Harley Quinn, feeling soft and broken and deprecatory, began to unload a fresh, bountiful fusillade of tears onto her palms, and tried her best not to fall crumbling down to the ground on her shaking knees. But the loosely supported, deconstructing pier on which she stood shifted violently and threw her down anyway. Swish.
Broken and humiliated, she continued crying like this until, finally, those tears tapered off into faint, bottomless sobs and sniffles (like they always do, without fail) and then she turned, stood, and hissed at herself; curses spilling out of her mouth in that thick Brooklyn accent, chockfull of venom, self-loathing, and the not-too-far-off linguistic vestiges of New York's Hudson Valley.
She steadied herself against the prickly, wooden pilings and thought about those words, his words, that were spoken to her just a moment before, seconds after everything was great, and her Mr. J was proud of her (loved her, needed her) and the damn groceries were in the damn fridge and they were going to go to bed happy and satiated and without strife . . . . and then she breathed in and sighed and cried all over again.
And you wanna know why?
Because she could've done something, dammit.
It was her fault. It must be. And the worst part–the part that always somehow found a way into her subconsciousness and pounded her into a vaguely sentient puddle of self-awarness and disenchantment–was the simple fact that she could have worked around this. She could have prevented this feeling, this strain, this palpable, sickening sense of tension and bitterness and hate that now bridged their relationship; no matter for how ephemeral and delicate that bridge really was.
She still could have fixed this.
If she only knew the signs.
But then something wonderful happened. Then the wind (the same wind that weighed heavy with the cling of sour, green liquid and decaying tuna and dirty sewer stench) suddenly felt refreshing and brushed against her skin with a kind of indescribable, uncanny comfort. And Harley, with a muffled but undeniably angry voice of reason barking away in her brain, seized her railing–the veins in her hand hardening with loathing–and realized something.
She realized that there were no signs for which she should have read. Not with him. Sure, this time, he was already pissed off and waiting for an excuse to hit something (and she was always the excuse, wasn't she?), but there were also times, times bursting unwelcome but plentifully into her head at this moment, where he would just break, unprovoked. Times where he was actually happy, content, satisfied(!), and just needed an outlet for that happiness. As strange as it was, sometimes . . . he would just do it for fun and nothing else.
And that made Harley even angrier.
She breathed in again, her lungs heaving carefully up and down inside her body, her thoughts seeming to have cleared and brightened, like a pimple or wart or wrinkle that simply ceased to exist over a smooth, healthy dot of flesh underneath.
But . . . sadly, this wouldn't last. It was just another stage in the required process of her coping: Harley would, at first, feel low and casted out, like she wasn't worthy or up to his measure–like a failure, to be truthfully and prosaically blunt–and then, after the self-shaming, she would become consumed with rage and righteousness. She would feel under-appreciated and entitled and above the situation. She would feel her own person, no longer preoccupied in thoughts elected to her by him and him alone, but instead . . . with thoughts of her own ordination; thoughts that allowed her to see the light at the end of tunnel and take steps towards it.
And then she would revert right back.
Then she would run and crawl right back to his feet, whether he offered them or not. But not out of weakness per se, but out of fear. Yes, it obviously was a matter of love and loneliness and a looming rejection from the outside world (fear of whatever she would become without his warming, accepting presence; something worse, she feared; something bloody and confused and monstrous), but also out of . . . of the fear that, if she followed that light at the end of the tunnel and escaped the darkness somehow, he would find her.
He would find her and make sure she could never get away again.
Yes, she would always think about this, consider this, and it would always mock her silently, as if she was just another punchline to some cruel joke. It would always gnaw at her and, oddly enough, remind her of religion. Something necessary, something vital, something that anchors you down, and something that's also born out of the two most primitive, timeless concepts: love and fear. Or maybe it was just one of those. At any rate, she would still always love-
Before Harley could finish that part of her process, she turned and saw Fudge walk up to her.
She grimaced.
"What are you looking at?"
Fudge started back. "N-nothing, I swear!"
"What is it?" Harley probed harshly, throwing her sunlight-colored hair to the wind with a cursory fling. She snuffled and patted her eyes and then advanced him, getting in his space, pointing an erected, angry finger to his gaping face. "You think I'm some flop now, huh?" she asked starchily, "Some doormat?"
"N-no!" Fudge exclaimed, made a wide warding-off gesture as if he were caught in a pair of dual headlights, and backed up some more.
Harley glared, unfazed. "Yeah? Well, I'll ya mistah," she continued, her voice stiff and steady, if not a bit cracked and teary from before. "You better get moving if that's what you think. Cause I'm really, really not in the mood to stand here and listen to the hired help start making accusations about me. . . . Or start thinking he's better than me because he never gets tossed around by the boss."
Fudge's eyes bulged. He gulped, nodded. "I . . . I don't. Honest! I was just coming to tell you about the boa-"
"Ya know what?" she said and cocked her head to the side, gauging the sweaty, heavy heap of a man in front of her. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't just shoot you right here, right in the noggin'?"
Fudge got really nervous now. He straightened, gulped again, groped for the obvious answer that was unfortunately somewhere lodged down his swollen throat that stood frozen with intimidation, and before he could reply and warn her about that motor-boat that was speedily breaking water, approaching their hide-out more each second, a hot, silent splash of crimson shot across Harley's face.
Looking down the hole that darted through Fudge's right temple–and, like as not, out his left–as his body lay lifeless and prostrate on the swaying wharf before her, Harley reared back, eyes alive with surprise and shock, and pondered if she was indeed magic or not. After all, she had thought about it . . . and then it had happened. That meant something, right?
She wiped the spray of blood off her chin and around her eyes with her rim of her sleeve, studied the hole with another quick, cautious glance, and then deduced that the more likely conclusion, the one that really made sense, within the confines of reality, was that she has actually God incarnate all along.
And as she marveled dramatically at her hands, half expecting to be levitated upwards by way of some inarticulate, ethereal beam of holy light, Jervis climbed unto the wharf, adjusted his bow-tie, promptly tucked the 9mm into his waistband, and smiled.
He walked closer, with a card rolling about his knuckles.
"Greetings, my friend," he said.
