Jonathan hasn't been happy with the changes she and the Joker have initiated. In fact, she'd nearly go so far as to say that he'd been angry with her. But that has passed – he is now simply silent.

She takes his arm, not bothering to tug up the sleeve of her long grey raincoat, and twists their hands together. He seems to relax a fraction as they head towards the building they will soon be calling home.

The red-brick block is a fortress, set in Old Gotham with close packed stone buildings surrounding it. The Joker had taken his time making it secure, once their deal was made and Harley had handpicked some guys to work security for them.

She'd also seen to her gym, Bud and Lou's kennels, and their bedroom on her and Jonathan's floor of the building without him. The Joker's place is two floors below.

Bud and Lou don't need leashes, they pad along beside Harley and Jonathan like normal domesticated dogs, except they're not domesticated – only when she's around – and if any of the new henchmen try to pet or feed them they'll find that out for themselves.

The doors open for them as they approach, and inside is Spider, one of the techies she'd handpicked.

He's nervous-looking and a bit sweaty from the heat inside, and the thick red spider tattoo on his neck is twisted as he looks up at her through his sandy fringe while he kneels at the door.

"Fixing the eye-scanner," he tells her. "Only way to get in once you guys are inside."

She smiles and lets Bud lick her hand. "Good."

She turns to see Jonathan levelling out a stare across the dark tiled foyer to the top of a back set of stairs that she knows lead down to the basement levels. At the top are five lackeys with guns in their pants and cigarettes between their lips.

She pulls Jonathan back, towards the elevator, before he can cause trouble for himself. The lackeys say nothing – they know who she is, and who he is, and, if they're lucky, they'll know what would happen if they even considered going toe-to-toe with Jonathan.

The elevator doors close them in a box in a soft swish of sheet-steel and then they're riding up to the top floor, Bud and Lou panting with excitement at the trip they're on.

"I don't like the way they were looking at you," Jonathan says quietly.

Harley rubs a knuckle of his with the side of her thumb, but says nothing. He hasn't had to compete with another guy being around her before and she knows he finds it tough to distinguish those who are looking and those who are interested.

They arrive at their floor with a hollow ringing noise, before the doors open and Joker stands before them.

He's relaxed-looking, leaning back on the burgundy-painted corridor wall with an air of nonchalance, but his eyes tell a different story. She knows he's been waiting to see who her 'partner' is, and the way his black pupils turn to pin-pricks, even in the slight gloom, she knows he's surprised.

His fingers tighten in his pale mauve shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, as he rocks forward on the balls of his feet.

He bites the inside of his cheek. "This him?"

Harley glances at Jonathan – he's pale, paler than usual, but he's looking at Joker as if he's finally found some solid competition in the building.

"Never thought I'd hear from you again, Crane," Jonathan flinches at the name from the Joker's red and scarred lips, "But, hey – who am I to judge, right? I come back from the dead all the time."

Harley steps in, Bud and Lou at her heels with their teeth bared at the Joker. He doesn't look fazed.

"Your mutts seem friendly, bunny. And by friendly I mean rabid."

Harley smiles sweetly. "They're extremely friendly."

His grin is wide.

Jonathan's hands clench and unclench. She can hear his teeth grinding.

"Why are you here?" He spits out.

Joker looks like he's been waiting for the question. "Just seeing how my new partner is, and who her boyfriend happens to be." Joker's dark eyes flick to her. "Wouldn't've pegged him as your type, bunny."

Harley knows that's enough. She clicks her tongue and Bud and Lou heel, and with another click they skitter away down the hall to the open door of her and Jonathan's apartment.

"Sweetness," she murmurs to Jonathan, her eyes bringing his to her face. "Would you look after my boys? You know what to do."

She leans in to kiss the corner of his mouth, her breath fanning across his cheek, and he gives her a nod, turning away from the Joker and going after the two hyenas.

Once he's gone, Joker unfolds his arm and waves a hand at the door.

"Where'd you find him, huh? The scrapheap? Did Scarecrow pull a Grundy on Gotham?"

Harley smiles at him, stepping so they each have a wall to lean back on in the thin stretch of corridor.

"I'm not telling," she says. "But I will say that it wasn't pretty, and I've put a lot of work into him. I'd hate for that all to go to waste."

The Joker's eyes crinkle at the corners slightly. "Oh, sweetheart, I think you might've wasted your time already. He looks like he's about to drop dead."

"And if he does," Harley tells him, "I will kill you. His lifespan is directly linked to yours for the rest of our…acquaintance."

She can't really read his new expression. "I best keep an eye on him then. Don't want to wake up with you over me, waiting to slit my throat. Although…" His smirk is feral. "I wouldn't mind finding you between my sheets for an entirely different reason."

She laughs, long and loud and terrifying to most people. "You'll never find me wanting to fuck you." She steps up close, so close they're almost nose-to-nose. "I'm taken, baby, and even if I weren't, I don't mix business with pleasure. And you are most definitely business."

Harley doesn't see his face when she walks away and shuts the door on him, but she feels his ice-cold eyes pierce her back like a shank. He wants her.


There's always a calm, he thinks, in fucking someone. It's not all blazing and quick like most people think it is. There's more than one moment where he can see everything about the girl – her fear, her greed – and sometimes, just for a jolly, he thinks he can even hear the sound of the cash register trilling when he comes.

It's like that with the girl beneath him now, who is a poor substitute for the one a few flights upstairs practicing backbends and flying leaps.

She calls herself Julia – not a typical whore's name, but still the way she said it when he asked made it one – and he wonders if he disgusts her.

She's very nearly a professional, all business, with all her own teeth, but one hell of a habit. He'll be feeding that habit, providing she makes him come in under ten minutes. She's trying hard, writhing and moaning, wriggling like the well-seasoned woman she is, but she's not winning.

He'd thought he would enjoy it – a little fun, a little release, and a game she couldn't possibly win, not with his ultimate control – but he isn't.

She's boring. She's blonde and boring. She's slender, blonde, and boring. She's short and slender and blonde and boring.

She's pretty enough for a Gotham street-rat, and she has a funny-shaped birthmark beneath her left tit that he thinks looks like a grim smile, but there's that flash in her eyes that he's called tasty in others' before her.

She's not a professional, because professional whores in Gotham are the ones that are old, tired, run-down and just let the guy get on with it, smoking while he does. They're the ones that no one wants to go near.

Julia here, she's the type he usually seeks out, just for that flash. He likes that he scares her, and he likes that she hates his face. He likes that when she looks up at him, her eyes dart down to his big red smile and the reading points in her face erupt in loathing and horror.

But, at the moment, with the memory of his rogue standing in front of him, so dispassionate about fucking him, but without that flash, that tell-tale glimpse of what's going on inside, all that he usually likes…he hates.

He fucks Julia into the mattress, making the headboard of the bed thud out a staccato on the plain wall. He snarls and he goes at her for the sake of it, because she's scared of him and he wants her to be even more scared.

Julia screams, and it's like the cash register's disappeared from beneath him, because now she's terrified, and now she understands that while he might've picked her up and charmingly promised her money and dope, it doesn't mean he's going to keep that promise.

She screams louder and he hopes the bitch upstairs can hear.


She and Jonathan are sitting on the couch in quiet contemplation when they hear it: the banging.

"Someone's having fun," Harley murmurs, stroking back Jonathan's overgrown fringe as he rests his head on her lap.

"Joker," she barely hears him say.

Harley lets out a breath through her nose. "You can't keep doing what you were doing earlier, you know."

Jonathan lifts his eyes to hers, and they are dark. "Fuck you."

She doesn't flinch, doesn't say a word, just removes her hands from his face and stands, heading for his lab. She finds the long-forgotten case of glass vials filled with blue and takes one, going back to Jonathan and uncapping it.

She holds it out to him.

He's sitting up now, pupils blown, teeth bared, skin shiny with sweat. His fingers are curled into the plush couch cushions like talons. She can see his pulse beating furiously in his neck.

She'll put him down if she has to.

Harley remembers the earliest days, when the darkness would consume him and turn him into someone completely different – this snarling thing – and she created the blue shot to keep him calm as he worked through it. This rage is new and different, and she can't help but think that if he doesn't revert soon then she'll have to admit to herself that he's de-evolving with too much stress and change.

He lunges at her, and she twists out of his way, curling her arm around his neck until his struggling stops. He passes out after a few seconds of gasping, falling heavy into her arms.

Harley lays him on the couch, the re-capped blue vial resting on his chest for when he wakes up. She leaves the lights on so he won't be scared, and changes into something more casual for dinner with the Joker.


She waits with her hands pressed to the stainless steel counter she's sitting on. It's shiny but covered in fresh scrub marks, making her reflection is distorted.

Harley wonders who cleaned, thinking it was probably Judd, just a lackey nobody who was hired to get all the little jobs done, who sits in the corner on a metal stool. He's waiting for the Joker to arrive, just like her, and, she thinks, he wants praise for the meal he's made.

Harley knows it came out of a can, but the broth's hot and thick and there's buttered bread with it. She's hungry, and Joker's keeping her that way.

The kitchen's vast, all gleaming metal and white tiles, except for the table in the centre on which the white china dinner bowls sit. It's dark battered wood, chipped and marked from years of use, and she wonders where it came from. It looks the kind to have gum stuck underneath. The chairs match.

Harley hears him before he opens the door. His footsteps are heavy. He's relaxed.

The white kitchen door swings open to admit the Joker in a dark blue suit. Harley raises her eyebrow at it.

Joker ignores her. "Judd, get us some refreshments."

The small dark man's eager to please as he scurries off through the door the Joker's just come through.

He finally notes her expression. "The suit? Just something that was hanging around my closet. Nice to see you made such an effort."

Harley doesn't glance down like an idiot. She knows what she's wearing: skin-tight denims and a sweater.

"I didn't know we were having a tea-party," she tells him, slipping off of the counter and taking her seat at the dinner table.

Joker takes the chair at the other end, half-smile in place. "You'll know all about those, won't you, Alice?"

Harley ignores him and dips some bread. Judd returning breaks the silence.

"B-Boss?"

She glances up to see the Joker taking a wine bottle out of Judd's hands as well as two glasses. The guy splits with one look from the painted criminal.

The soft glug-glug of wine being poured is loud in the large room. She's never felt small, not since she was in her old room, but the place is so white, so sterile, that it's making her dizzy. The soup keeps her grounded. She rubs a thumb over her wrist as she passes the bread from hand-to-hand.

Secrets keep her safe.

"So." Joker talks and chews. "Bane, huh?"

Harley rolls a shoulder. "He's necessary."

"You gonna fuck him, too?"

She smirks at him. "Who says I haven't already?"

She sees his fist clench. For a master criminal and psychopath, he sure is easy to wind-up.

"Why do we need him for a bank job?" Joker asks, lids narrowed.

"Have you got three billion on you right now?"

He just looks at her.

"Didn't think so," Harley mutters, turning the spoon over and over in the soup. "He wants his price for his help up front, and he wants it untraceable. He doesn't trust anyone. If we break him into a bank and he takes what he wants, then we have a deal."

Joker sits back in his chair, the wood creaking. "And the deal is?"

She finishes the bread. "We give him his goods, and he gives me the recipe for something I've been after for a long time."

He says nothing, before tearing into his bread as she finishes her soup. He pushes a wine glass towards her as he eats.

Harley can smell nothing on it but the sharpness of the grapes it was made from. Joker watches her lick the rim of the glass.

"Poison wouldn't suit my needs, sweetheart," he tells her.

Harley pushes away her empty bowl, downs the wine, and shifts so she can sit cross-legged in her chair, a far more comfortable position than the conventional way. She leans forward, a smile on her wine-darkened lips.

"Oh, yeah? What needs are those?"

Joker just tuts. "I don't know about your motives. What makes you think you can ask about mine?"

Harley feels her hair settle around her face. She can very nearly see his pupils dilate, but his eyes are too dark to really tell from a distance.

"You want me," she says. "You like my style, you've got a thing for mischievous blondes, and I'm far more bloodthirsty than any other woman you've met. These are facts, baby."

His fingers drum silently against the table. His hands aren't gloved, they're bare, and they are large and long-fingered. He has good hands, as evidenced by the faces he's so skilfully carved in likeness of his own. He cracks his neck.

"I already know your motives," Harley tells him. "What I don't know is your plan."

Joker's lips curl. "Oh, you wanna ask me about my plan, huh? If you're so clever, then shouldn't you already know? You say I want you. How does a guy get a broad?"

"You mean, a broad like me."

A bigger smile. "A broad like you, is right. You're off the fucking scale. I'm tempted not to even call you a woman, but I've seen you naked and I can tell a fake rack from a real set."

"Charmer," she accuses.

"You don't get to where I am without knowing how to work a girl, bunny."

She smiles. "Like the one you were breaking the headboard with earlier?"

He sits back, eyelids half-lowered and a curious expression on his face. "You heard that, huh?"

Harley cocks her head. "I'd be surprised if all the guys in the building weren't banging one out to it."

"And what about you?" Joker asks, though it looks like he's forcing himself to. "Did it get you in the mood to take that dry old Scarecrow for a spin?"

She wonders if Jonathan's awake, and, if he is, whether he's trying to hurt himself for going for her.

"It didn't," she tells him. "But I'll be sure to remedy that later."

Joker's jaw works silently. He looks like he wants to say something else, and, after a long while, he does.

He stands. "Let's just say, bunny, that one day, and soon, you won't think being mine is so beneath you." He circles the table. "You think it's funny to show me up, and I like that spirit, but don't misunderstand me when I say that when you're weak, I'll get you."

One fingertip slides down her cheek, before tracing her jaw, and she glances up his lean body to see him smiling. There's a part of her that hates him, that hates men, but there's another part, an equally feminine part and something that's just so her, that likes the way his black eyes glint at her.

She brushes past him on her way up and out of the room. He was already hard, and she can't help but grin.