The first stage of Harley's plan is complete. The second is nearly through. The third is on the horizon.
After spilling a few of her guts to the Joker in the back of his car, she went straight back to work, only stopping to feed Bud and Lou and then work out for a bit.
She didn't bother sleeping, knowing that the next day was only so many hours away and that there was plenty more to do in preparation for her Grand Finale, and now, as she stands in front of the cream-coloured Gotham News desk, she doesn't regret that decision to not waste time sleeping.
She thinks about the information she has, the weight on her shoulders that will soon be lifted, and palms Penguin's remote hacking device. His machine's all wired up to the Gotham News signal, so all she has to do is tune in at the right moment, the moment where all of Gotham will be sitting down to eat their dinner and flip on the news.
Anchors Tom Harrison and Grace Wilkins sit quietly in the corner, under guard, like the rest of the news crew that had been captured when Harley and the Joker burst in this afternoon. She wonders what the Joker will do to them – she doesn't care and he likes to make a splash. It's a bad combination for their hostages.
Instead of wasting the time remaining, she takes a walk across the warm, brightly lit studio and jogs up the steps to the monitor room. Spider's bright eyes catch hers through his fringe as he swivels back and forth on one of the crew's chair.
"The disc ready?"
He nods.
"How about the passwords? They work alright?"
He nods again. "Just like Croc said. The G-O-V's systems are out of commission indefinitely, as soon as you give me the signal."
"Good." She touches her nose ring, straightens her high ponytail–
"You look hot," he tells her, as if she was looking for reassurance.
"I like you," Harley tells him straight. "Your work's good. Don't make me regret choosing you."
He turns away and looks back at the screens, waiting for her show. She's satisfied with the glint of fear in his eye as he studiously ignores her.
Harley suddenly feels a hand at her back.
"You're on in five," the Joker's distinctive drawl sounds, somewhere near her left ear.
She looks over her shoulder at him. "Good. Make sure there aren't any fuck-ups."
His eyes slide to Spider, who looks like he's suddenly sweating in the bright glare of the numerous TV screens.
"There won't be."
His hand leaves her as he goes to lean against the back bank of computers in the small booth. His eyes momentarily leave Spider to find her.
"Go on, then, bunny."
She strides down the stairs, across the open floor covered in black cables and electrical tape, and twirls her index finger at a couple of their boys to get the cameras rolling. The digital clock across the room reads 5:58 in bright red. The sign next to it lights up as she takes her seat on top of the news desk, the show's theme sounding in the studio – ON AIR.
"Good evening, Gotham."
Rebecca Adler's been sick all day, only managing some thin chicken broth her sister brought over yesterday and put in the icebox for her. She's currently curled up with some aspirin and a glass of water, staring at the bad drama on the TV.
Her boss had been real angry she couldn't make it in on two such busy days, but, hey, what was she supposed to do about it? It wasn't like she caught the thing off of her sister's kids on purpose, was it? Well, he seemed to think so, which is why he'd told her her job won't be waiting for her when she goes back.
She loves her job, being a secretary is just right for her, and it puts food on the table, but sometimes...sometimes it would just be easier if she didn't work for Jeff King. That is, if she did still work for him at all anymore.
Seeing it's nearly six from the clock across her dimly lit lounge, she channel-hops until she finds the news.
The face that appears surprises her. She's young, the woman on the screen, and she's pretty, but she looks sorta punk, what with the ring in her nose and the heavy, black mascara lining her lashes. Her clothes are odd too, all tight, and red and black. She looks like that kid the building across that likes to turn his music up until the whole block's jumping.
Rebecca sniffles under her duvet. "Weird."
The blonde girl's smile is almost alarming. "Good evening, Gotham. Tom and Grace have stepped away tonight so I can give you a special report, you know, one of those insider ones."
Rebecca's ears instantly prick, even though she was already riveted. Gossip is a bit of a luxury for her.
"I know it's usually about gangs or politics, but mine is something different. You know those crazy people that say our government conspires behind our backs? Well, I'm one of those crazy people."
Rebecca sighs, instantly losing interest, and turns over so her back faces the TV and she can fall asleep more comfortably on her couch.
The girl's words still reach her ears.
"What would you do, Gotham, if you found out that the government of this country sanctioned the creation of a programme that took unwanted children and forcefully trained them to become cold-blooded killers?" There's a soft laugh. "You'd say 'prove it or go fuck yourself,' right? I am the proof, Gotham. I lived and breathed patriotism and murder for as long as I could remember until I escaped, and now, it's time for revenge."
Rebecca turns back to the TV, eyes wide, to see the girl clutching a prescription bottle.
"These drugs open up a person's mind. They subdue, and they let some clumsy-fingered fucker to go in and pick at the things they don't like and put in the things they do."
The blonde pops the lid and empties them out onto her palm – they're pink and round, and the camera does a close-up of her palm holding them. A chill runs up Rebecca's spine, and it has nothing to do with her being ill.
"These pills have never been discontinued, never stopped being prescribed to those who didn't make it out of the underground facility beneath Arkham, and there are some of you, watching this at this precise moment, who have these in your possession."
Rebecca throws off the duvet, scrabbling towards the darkened doorway of her bathroom, clutching the sink with one hand as she pulls at the door of the medicine cabinet with the other. Her heart comes to a crashing halt as the girl's voice rings out from the other room, and Rebecca's eyes become glued to the half-empty bottle of pink pills she takes for hypertension.
She grabs them and rushes back to the TV, falling to her knees in front of it. She turns the sound right up, until the girl's voice is all she can hear.
"You are the unlucky ones," the blonde tells her. "Your instincts have been moulded to suit the needs of those individuals, and now they are being repressed with the same drugs that helped to create them, until the moment they are needed to protect this great country from the enemy. Do you know what I say to that? I say, lose them. I say, stop taking the drugs, see where it leads you, create your own revenge on those people that destroyed your childhood and treated your brain like a fucking toy."
Something picks at Rebecca's mind, some distant memory of white walls and no baby photos of her in her parents' photo album.
A knock suddenly sounds at her front door.
The pills are still clutched tightly in her hand as she dazedly makes her way to answer the door. Her sister appears in her apartment hallway, looking rushed, and looks up as Rebecca pulls back the rusting safety chain.
Karen's dark eyes – eyes that she'd so often thought were so very like her own – flicker to the pill bottle and then back to Rebecca's face. Karen's expression changes, twisting into something so cold and unfeeling that a terrified prickle sweeps across Rebecca's heated skin.
The unfamiliar click of a gun cocking meets her ears before something else entirely drowns out the noise.
The girl is talking again. "If those names I just released have spurred the officials and agents working in this programme to cover up their secrets already, then I have an ace up my sleeve for all those victims facing a gun at this very moment from someone you thought you loved and trusted. This is how they work, people, to control you, and you can stop them by saying three easy words – I am Nemesis." A laugh. "Warning: This product is unsuitable for children and can cause mild bouts of murder and insanity. But at least you'll be free, right? At least you'll be you. I am the spirit of divine retribution, and I'm here to ruin everybody's fucking day."
The long, low beeep of the lack of a signal sounds from the TV and Rebecca's eyes meet the stranger's, the woman wearing her sister's skin.
"On your knees, hands on your head," Karen tells her, pressing the gun to Rebecca's forehead. "Don't move a fucking inch."
The words roll off of her tongue before she can stop them.
"I am Nemesis."
She doesn't know how she does it, but within seconds she has unarmed her 'sister' and blown her brains out. She sees flashes of light down the blood-spattered hallway, pieces of forgotten memories, and she suddenly knows just how powerful she is.
She has no directive, no commands to follow, she just has instinct, and it tells her to do what she wants to do.
She wants to be the spirit of divine retribution too, and she clutches the gun in her hand tightly as she makes her way down to the lobby in the elevator, still wearing her fuzzy, blood-stained, duck pyjamas.
Jeff King's day is about to get a whole lot uglier.
"Systems are down," Spider says over the studio's PA. "The GCPD's going nuts on the radio. People are getting shot, stabbed. Reporters are trying to air their own segments on different signals. There's some chatter about sending in troops, but the G-O-V's lines of between-department communication are down."
Harley still doesn't know why Spider won't say 'government' instead of his hushed 'G-O-V', but she thinks it has something to do with all that time spent in that facility after he was flagged as a possible threat and/or terrorist. Truth is the guy just has itchy fingers and a mind made for creating trouble.
"They won't bring the army boys in," Joker says as he strolls towards her, where she is still perched atop the desk. "That'll be like declaring their guilt. Nah, they'll lie low, try to cover up, and let Gotham go to hell on a fast train saying something like it's just hysteria gone apeshit."
Harley feels a grin pull at her lips. "Yeah, well, there's no hiding from the faxes and copies of some incriminating documents I found and sent this morning to every news station I could think of. Lists of patients, names of high-ranking officials involved, treatments given – you name it, the press has it."
"And, uh..." The Joker comes to stand in front of her, black lids lowered. "What d'you think the Bat's gonna think of all this?"
"I hope he'll sit back and enjoy it, because there's no fucking way he can clean it all up. This city will tear itself apart, and the country will follow suit."
He taps his fingers rhythmically on the desk beside her, looking every inch a criminal satisfied with a job well done. "Twenty bucks says he'll come after you before the day is out."
"Done."
It feels a little strange to know her Grand Finale's gone off without a hitch. She's exposed a decommissioned, government-approved, assassin training ground, and she's brought the city that sanctioned it to its knees in only one day with a few bits of tech and some carefully-chosen words.
She sits on their building's rooftop, thinking of those words she had found on a plain piece of paper in Stanovich's desk. She hadn't known there was a single trigger – she'd thought it was going to be specific to each sleeper – and it was sloppy of them, because now look at what it's done. Three words over one broadcast and every man and woman conditioned to kill is doing so until the city crumbles into dust.
Harley knows he is behind her.
"Those words," she mutters, "I felt them. They made me cold."
"I am Nemesis?" Joker asks, shoes scuffing the gravelled rooftop behind her.
The tiny stones dig into her bare, crossed legs as she shivers, gripping the low wall at the edge of the roof just that bit tighter, resting her arms across the rough surface as it comes up to chest height.
He sits on it, next to her crossed arms, obviously not bothered by the sheer drop at his back, and says nothing.
The city is sparkling in hues of yellow and blue tonight, the black sky littered with stars. It is marred by the constant wailing of sirens in the distance, but up here, away from the freshly-released media and re-runs of her 'special report', it seems the same as it always has, like the city's not rotting itself away from the inside.
Harley rests her head on her arms, turning as she does so she can look up at the Joker. He's stripped down to a plain shirt and pants, lazily buttoned, and his forearms are bare once more. She sees the drag marks.
"Does it itch?"
He doesn't look at her. "Sometimes."
"I have something for that," she tells him. "Something to numb the craving. It's what took me off of the pills."
He doesn't reply and she just leaves it. Some people don't want help, and Harley doesn't offer it twice.
He doesn't state the obvious, about how she must be cold in just a tank and shorts or how it feels coming down from something as big as she's just pulled off, he just sits with her for a while, looking out at the city one way while she looks out the other.
Eventually, she glances at her numberless watch, and a smile crawls across her face.
"Pay up."
He glances down at her for the first time, black eyes glinting and a hint of a grin on his scarred face. "Past midnight, huh? What was it? Ten bucks? Five?"
"Five gets you nothing. Ten gets you something. Twenty gets you one thing of your choice."
His hand's in his pocket faster than a whore's in her client's. He passes her two rumpled and folded twenties.
Her eyebrow hitches at his misuse of her unusual charity. She'd given him an inch and forgotten that the Joker always takes fifty miles. She fists the notes anyway.
"So, what'll it be, baby?" She asks, knowing full well one of them will be something like sucking him off or getting in his bed, which she'll make sure he knows is off of the menu by pushing him off of the building.
He surprises her by pulling up one of her arms and pressing a fingertip to the pulse in her wrist, running his nail along her indecipherable tattoo.
"I want to know what these mean," Joker tells her, eyes on his finger touching the black marks.
She frowns. "They're...fuck... They're secrets, to keep me safe, and grounded."
His face is blank. "More."
She restrains a growl, pulling her arm out of his grip. "They remind me of everything I lost and everything I'm living to do."
"Like today?"
"Yes," Harley grits out. "They tell me things I forget sometimes, and then I remember why I'm so fucking pissed all the time, because she took it all away from me."
His lip curls, and he runs a hand through his hair. "'Kay. Good enough. Now, for the other one–"
Harley leaps up and takes up a steady stance, ready to break his nose, glaring at him. "Just fucking say it."
He looks amused as he sits there, elbows resting on his long, bent legs, his face twisted in a never-ending smile beneath smeared and smudged greasepaint.
"I want to know your name."
The first thing that bursts from her is a high laugh. "Didn't you hear? I'm fucking Nemesis!"
He just waits, silent and still on the rooftop edge, until she stops laughing and stares down at him, realising that he actually wants to know. Her mother is dead, what's left of the rest of her family doesn't even know she exists, so what does she care?
He helped her make all this come to fruition, and, sure, he's an asshole, but there's nothing he can hold over her by knowing her name. Still...
"Harley," she tells him, slowly. "Harley Quinn."
The Joker shakes his head. "Harlequin? No, more."
She restrains the clenching her jaw wants to make in frustration at his ability to read people – including her, on occasion – like a fucking cheap, trashy paperback. It infuriates her that he challenges her when she's so obviously even farther ahead of the curve than he is, but she hasn't ever been challenged like this before.
She decides to let him have this one.
"Harleen...Quinzel."
It's like a sucker-punch to say that second name, the one inherited from her mother, but she breathes through it and watches the Joker's face transform.
His body loosens and his face relaxes strangely, his lips bearing a smile. "Harleen."
And, instantly, at the sound of the huskiness in his voice wrapping around the syllables of her given name, she knows she's made the wrong choice.
Fuck.