She'd known.
Damn it, Quinn. Damn Robin for being such a cocksure fool. Bruce had warned him.
The Joker now had Harley pinned on the floor, sitting on top of her with one of her arms wrenched under a heavy piece of furniture. The handle of a long knife jut out of her thigh. He'd both hands around her throat, thumbs depressing the trachea, and Harley's erratic twitching suggested little time remained to act. Still, Batman gauged the distance carefully, knowing that the situation left no room for error. The Joker had uncannily fast reflexes, access to numerous weapons, and good leverage for snapping her neck; If he detected Batman's arrival an instant too early, there was little doubt he'd have enough time to kill her.
Now-
"DAD-DY!" pierced shrill through the warehouse, echoing off of every surface. It was a lot louder in sound than she or anyone else realized it could be. She saw her father react instantaneously to her sound: his whole body jerked violently, and he turned head and shoulders to stare at her. Acid eyes gleamed, flamed, from dark and sunken caves in dead white skin. A mouth of blood smiled eternally.
Veronica stood there with her face and eyes all hot, heavy, and sticky with tears. Her nose was running and she was trying to stop it on her sleeve. She was helpless. There was nothing she could do. There wasn't even anything to think. She was a tiny lump of stress and tears and misery, and she needed help.
The Joker remained coiled over top his suffocating victim, posture feral, fingers buried in the flesh of her neck, calculating eyes misted in predatory blood lust. He still felt the cathartic pleasure of struggles growing more irregular, more frantic under his pin, but the spectacle of the moment was no longer this Fruit Bat. Instead, a red-faced baby sniffled and hiccuped, standing there in little Spider-Man tennis shoes and a Mulan T-shirt, and raised little arms up towards him as if he weren't some complete and ineffable stranger. Small children didn't do that in an effort to solicit hugs; They did that to signal they wanted to be picked up. Carried. Reassured.
The Clown slowly raised a brow; He blinked slowly at her, curious, interested. Then he felt Harley pawing vainly at him, in a plea for him to release her. He turned his gaze back down to her, to see her face was losing its coloration and her eyes were starting to gloss over. The look she was giving him was almost forlorn, daring to suggest that he ought to feel anything. He did: a wave of delighted loathing washed over him. His fingers tightened and his upper lip curled in a sneer to match against the smile on his cheeks.
"D-daaddd-dd-dy!" The Joker jumped slightly, attention once more stolen by a child who tottered closer to him and warbled incoherently. Scary didn't matter; Paint didn't matter; Evil didn't matter. He was Daddy: the one and only human being in the world imbued with the mystic powers necessary to make the world okay again.
The Clown cocked his head to the experienced a moment of intense, peculiar, loyal fondness; and then entertained the idea that killing a woman in front of his tear-streaked daughter was probably bad parenting. A retaliatory wave of violent need crested through him, and he released Harley's throat involuntarily as pangs of anguish and delight fluttered through his stomach. The throttled woman sucked in a hard, wet, bruised breath of air, sputtering coughs. His hands curled of their own accord in front of him, but it was no longer Harleen Quinzel they wanted to strangle.
Hhhaaa. Hahaha... H-hello. Hello my little buttercup. A wide grin split in his face. He beheld his daughter's wide-eyed stare for a moment, and then quickly turned, wrenched the knife out of Harley's leg, and wiped the blunt end down across the gasping woman's temple. His child jumped at the violence of the impact. Harley crumpled. Without a second glance backwards, the Joker got off his prey and hurried over to his daughter. He knelt into her outstretched arms and gathered her up, and placed a hand on the back of her head so he could tuck her face into his shoulder instead of letting her look over it to see his handiwork. He stood with her in arm, and pressed a wide, red kiss into her. Mine. Hah.
The little girl could scarcely breathe she was crying so much; and perhaps he was hugging her a little too tightly to boot. She stammered a question into his shirt, a muddled eddy of syllables containing at least one 'daddy' and perhaps concern for the life of 'Nurse Quinn.' That was cute. That was fine. Good parents did not murder people in front of their children anyway, even if that was never something ever specified in parenting handbooks (and it ought to have been).
"She's just sleeping," the Joker crooned in a giggling promise. "Hush-hush, nnh?" He nuzzled his face into his daughter's hair and temple, drawing in everything—every lovely, mundane detail—of the thing to which he had arbitrarily committed the wholeness of his life. He had the urge to gut her, to smell the metallic heat of her spilled entrails, to watch horror and betrayal and desperate fear fill up her eyes. He had the simultaneous urge to kiss her and play airplane with her, and laughingly twirl her about. The future was filled with images of gore and intestinal drippage and death; the line between reality, imagination, and reflection blurred and he could barely tell which world he was currently standing in.
His daughter smelled of peaches. That must have been because he'd bought her a shampoo that smelled of peaches, no? Yes, that sounded familiar. He'd given her a bath the night before, and could recall the crisp, clean aroma of soap as he'd sponged her clean. She'd splashed half a tub of water at him. Hadn't he painted her fingernails afterwards? He had. The Clown looked about and found his daughter's little fingertips where they clenched tightly against his dirty shirt. Each nail was coated in a fine layer of pink. Sparkly pink, of course. He wondered at them, at their simplicity, at their small size, at their delicate appearance. He had not realized his shoulders were tense until he felt the lines of them slowly collapse. He sighed and rested his cheek against the top of her head.
"It's okay," he murmured, voice once more low and level. "Someone will come for her soon. We need to go."
His child nodded miserably into him. Veronica Peterson did not protest the way she had as Marcy Adams. "Daddy..." she mumbled to herself, to him. "Daddy..."
"I'm sorry," he whispered truthfully, bundling her to him before taking his first slow steps towards the exit. "I'm sorry. It will be okay."
Her fingertips touched his face, pressing firmly against his skin almost as if to anchor her tiny self in him. Aw. Her fingers came away white. The Joker paused, staring at the greasepaint caked around her nails.
"Honey," he whimpered suddenly, remembering a Halloween one year past. His daughter had asked to dress up as Poison Ivy. Was it possible that she now would know the truth? Did she know what the makeup meant? The colors? Had she ever seen a picture of... Shit.
Something moved behind him. The Joker spun around and drew three knives between the fingers of his unoccupied hand, all without needing to think. At first, it appeared he'd been mistaken and that there was no one new in the warehouse. Ah, but the lighting was currently poor, and the Joker knew better. He watched the space directly above Harley's collapsed form. A moment later, the pregnant darkness suddenly unfolded, and a black silhouette dropped quietly down beside her.
Hello Bats.
Perhaps it was the stillness that kept Joker from acting. Batman stood defensively in front of his fallen 'Fruit Bat.' Frozen silence passed between the two men, each apparently poised to attack if only the other should take hostile action first. When no violence occurred, the Bat slowly took a knee and reached behind him to feel for Harley's pulse. The Joker took the opportunity to back slowly away, and Batman did not immediately pursue. Bats waited a moment to ensure the pulse he felt was strong and stable, and then stood again.
"You are very close to home for a dead man on the run," he said to the Clown.
Joker said nothing, considering his best route of retreat. Veronica, who until that moment had been oblivious to the appearance of a newcomer, nearly jumped out of her skin. She blinked sleepily and twisted about in her father's hold, trying to get a look at the speaker. When she did, her jaw dropped a little and her eyes widened.
"Are you alright, kid?" Batman asked her.
Hey! The Joker stiffened and bared teeth in a hateful smile; but, before he could actually throw anything, his daughter spun back towards him and hugged him. Oops. Furious energy rebounded and coagulating into something more complex, more verbal: "Not yer business, Bats. Now take Sleeping Beauty here and skedaddle!" (His daughter looked quickly up, startled by the lilting whine of his voice.)
The dark knight's eyes narrowed as if he found this absurd. "I'm pretty sure whatever Arkham's Joker does is my business."
"Daddy?" Veronica pleaded. Acid green eyes flashed to her and rounded out some. When he looked back at the Batman, his voice had dropped back into its low baritone octave:
"You think so? I think I deserve at least a little credit for my good behavior," Joker growled with slight joviality. "I've been playin' it nice, Bats, but I don't wanna be found. Be grateful I didn't kill Harley and go. I'll slink back into a hole and you won't hear a peep from me." Batman studied him silently for a long moment, body language obscured by a black cloak and a stick up the ass. Then he said the worst thing possible:
"That is not your daughter."
The Joker slowly gaped, eyes shuttering. He stared so utterly that he did not so much as twitch or smile. Then he straightened, and blinked with a rapid flutter to clear his head. "Well." He steadied himself with a deep breath, and then turned to the side and slowly set Veronica down. "Hey sweet pea," he reassured, "ya mind just staying right here for a second? Daddy needs to have a 'chat' with an old friend," he said. The little girl looked up at him with round eyes, looking staggered by all the horrible things that could maybe go wrong in her absence. His mouth twisted slightly at the side and he nearly found himself promising to behave himself (sorta) when she abruptly shook her head and mumbled that of course she'd stay. "'Atta girl, and cover your ears, kay?" he praised, ruffling her hair before turning away and sauntering back towards the Batman.
Veronica obediently put her hands over her ears and peered wondrously after him.
"Hey," Joker hissed, walking up slightly tangent to the bat till he was within easy speaking distance, and then beckoning. "You. Come here."
Perplexed, but wary of trickery, Batman did not move. He watched the Joker suspiciously.
The latter man sneered and then took an aggressive step closer and gestured backwards towards his child. "The fuck is the matter with you?" he growled in an angry whisper. "You can't just walk around telling kids they're adopted!"