For one and a half days she nursed her depression, indulged and allowed herself to feel hopeless, useless, despairing, and she wept helplessly. She turned out the lights, pulled all the shades, and retreated into a cocoon of goosedown, Ben and Jerry's, and MSNBC. She flipped back and forth between the news channels, almost compulsively. She had no real idea of what she was looking for.
By Sunday morning, Pam had had enough.
At 7:15 am, Harleen Francis Quinzel found herself laying on the carpet of her bedroom floor, still wrapped helplessly in her bedcovers, a rare species of angry redhead snarling her in the face.
"You haven't answered your phone in days, your hair stinks, this place is a wreck, so you're gonna drag your sorry ass out of bed, take a shower, and you're gonna have breakfast with me."
Harley blinked for a few long seconds.
"I love you, too, Red,"
"Get up," was all she snapped in return, and stomped out of the room.
Once Harley actually managed to locate the direction in which her feet and legs occupied, she extricated herself from the knot of cotton, and stumbled into the bathroom.
Upon returning, admittedly she felt a little closer to human and, as she approached the kitchen, so did her stomach.
"Is that sausage?" she asked hopefully.
"Veggie sausage," Pam replied, flipping a fried egg.
"I should have known," she replied despairingly. "How can you love plants so much when you eat them at every meal? Isn't that like murder?"
She shrugged. "I'm like a black widow. I love you," she cooed to one of the lovely organic cherry tomatoes she had brought with her, before popping the whole thing in her mouth, jaws closing with a snap. "…aand now you're dead."
"That explains to me why you're still single."
She swallowed. "I thought it was just because guys are afraid of me?"
"Why do you think they're scared!?"
She threw the nearest object she could locate at her best friend, but as that first object was a dishtowel, it flew sluggishly through the air and flopped lamely to the ground, a few feet short.
Pam nodded, after a second, staring at the towel, before arching a thin eyebrow. "Now I see why you got your ass kicked. Speaking of, who's the newest name on my list of people to maim and kill when I finally take over the world?"
"I didn't get my ass kicked!" Harley growled. "It's perfectly respectable to lose the fight when the other guy is a hell of a lot stronger than you are!"
Pam stopped dead. "A guy hit you?"
"Yes, and he damn near broke my jaw, but if it makes you feel any better I cracked his head open… Made me feel a little bit better, up until he started laughing about it, and up until he hit me, cause that wasn't funny at all."
"Cracked his head open with what?" Her face was twisted in confusion.
"The butt of a handgun."
The redhead scoffed, removed the sausages from their pan, and threw down the spatula in frustration.
"Alright, I am just completely lost here. Who hit you, and why were you carrying a handgun?" So Harley explained, and it was a long story… She was horrified by that fact, considering the events in question had actually only taken about two and a half hours when she put them all together that way.
"I'm gonna kill him."
"Well, that's not going to help me. I can't analyze a corpse."
"So you're just going to keep seeing him?"
"What choice do I have, Pam? If I were really so scared about being attacked by a patient, I would have picked a different field. I specialize in treating mental illness in veterans, uncontrollable anger and an inability to resist violent urges is pretty much par for the course. They warn you about that in class. They've been trained to kill, but no one tells them how to turn it off. And... no one was permanently hurt. Flesh wounds all around, I mean, but no real damage. I've thought this over, and sometimes you have to take a step back in treatment to take a step forward. Perhaps this event will have a positive effect on his behavior, like… lancing a boil."
"So you're saying since he blew his top, maybe he'll be calmer from now on?" She looked skeptical, and Harley shrugged weakly. "I think you're trying a little too hard to be optimistic about this, Harley."
"Maybe," she sighed, after a long, reluctant pause. "I don't want to be. I just want so badly to save him, Pam. Everyone deserves a second chance."
"You never did anything wrong, Harls, you're still on your first chance." Pam said quietly, and gave her friend a feeble, sympathetic smile: the blonde looked small, and hurt. "And he's not your Dad, Harley. Sometimes people are just beyond saving."
"No, no," Harley was saying quickly, shaking her head as though she could erase the words from her ears with the motion. "I refuse to believe that. I've never met a man who deserved a chance at a normal life more than the Captain. After all he's been through, I can't abandon him now. I can't just let this go how it may, not when I can help."
"You know the biggest danger in trying to save a drowning man, Harley?"
"What?"
"They can't bear to let you go, either. And sometimes, they drag you down with them."
She winced as though from a physical blow.
"What I'm saying is this wasn't Hostel: The Middle Eastern Edition, okay, they didn't just pick him at random and decide to hack him up. Those were interrogation techniques that I saw in those photos. That guy was dealing with some heavy shit in his everyday work. You know what that means to me? To me, that says there's more going on here than you're thinking about. He knows something, something he's not told you, and whatever it is, it's important enough that somebody was willing to kill him and ten other people to get to it. They left him for dead, but he didn't die, Harley. Where's your guarantee somebody isn't gonna show up to finish the job?"
It was Harley's turn to scoff. "Do you honestly think someone would try to kill him in a military hospital? They'd never even make it into the building with a gun, or a knife."
"There are plenty of ways to kill people without metal. My point is you've got no idea what the big picture is, okay, you're focused very narrowly, all on him. You need to start thinking about yourself, and whether you're really safe knowing all his secrets."
"If I'm not going to run when he threatens me, what makes you think I'm going to run when someone threatens him?"
Pam growled. "You don't get it. This isn't about courage, or honor, or whatever the hell it is you're concerned with, there are some thing's you just don't get involved in, because they end up getting you killed. It could be dangerous to even be associated with this guy, never mind the fact that he himself is dangerous. And you're still mooning over him!"
"I am not!" she snapped. "This is a completely legitimate concern for my patient that I'm displaying. It's my job to help him."
"Why can't you pass the job on to someone else?"
"There is no one else. He's been through five doctors, four men and one woman who all together have more credentials than I can even name, and I'm the only one he has responded to. Four months ago I was still an intern, Pam! They threw me onto this case expecting me to fail. What if I could prove them wrong?"
The redhead practically flailed, giving a little shout in anger. "Did you hear me? Were you even listening? I just said this isn't about that! You are in total denial, Harley, you are in danger, and you are skipping along obliviously! You're staring at everything else except for the fucking knife coming at your gut, okay, you need to pay attention."
A pause. "Are you going to hyperventilate?"
The redhead eyed her angrily, hands curling into delicate fists. "You know, sometimes I just want grab you by your hair, and pound your head into the floor."
"You've got problems." Harley said, grinning, already balancing on her tiptoes. "Have you ever considered seeing a therapist?"
Pamela tackled her.
Five minutes later, as she was beginning to fail in her effort to prevent Pam from strangling her (mainly because she already couldn't breathe from laughing so hard) the smoke alarm began squealing.
"The eggs!"
The eggs were inedible ("That's fascinating," Harley murmured, transfixed. "Even I've never burnt an egg that bad…. Ow! You're so abusive.") and most of the other food had by now gone cold.
"Good one, Red."
"Shut up. Put it in the microwave."
"Testy, testy."
"You drive me crazy."
"Short drive." She sing-songed.
"And what in the hell? You almost made me forget about it. You said he gave you that box like a week ago and you haven't opened it?"
Harley shrugged, picking between her warm food and a bowl of fruit salad. "These waffles are really good, Pam."
"Consider yourself lucky, I usually have a salad for breakfast."
"You're a freak." Harley shook her head, amazed.
"And you're avoiding the question."
"I'm almost afraid to look inside."
Pam was already standing. "Well, it's not gonna eat you, and I don't hear it ticking."
Harley snorted. "Very funny."
"I wasn't joking. I bet you didn't even listen to it."
She made a sound of frustration as the redhead disappeared briefly into the hallway.
"You're paranoid, Pamela!" She called after her. She returned half a second later with the white box in question.
"It's fairly heavy."
"Yeah," Harley muttered, watching almost in pain as the redhead grabbed a clean knife and slit the tape holding the box shut. Upon opening it, she pulled out an envelope and immediately slit it open with the same knife, and pulled out the letter inside.
"You are so nosy!" Harley squeaked.
"He gave you the box, Harley, he wanted you to look at it." The redhead rolled her eyes. "Captain… blah blah blah… god this guy is boring… here it is… Contained herein are the personal effects that were found in your headquarters. My best wishes for your recovery, blah blah… This is everything he had in his room in Iraq, basically."
"They're not really rooms, more like bunkhouses, tents sometimes." Harley said, distractedly, finally plucking up the nerve to stand and look at exactly what the box contained.
"CD's," Pam said. She herself pulled out several magazines. "It's just miscellaneous stuff… that's it?"
"The box is heavy. It's not twenty pounds of junk, keep looking." She set aside notebooks and folders, paperbacks, a bag of toiletries, and even a snow globe.
"What's that?"
She gave it a shake, peering within it. "It's old. They used to dress Wayne Tower like this every year for Christmas, with these huge garlands, and bows, and lights… They haven't done it in years though, not since Thomas and Martha Wayne were murdered." Pam had stopped rummaging through the box, and was staring at her instead. Harley shrugged. "I did some research on the city… to better understand what kind of environment he came from."
She shrugged, too, and brought out another sheaf of what looked like old paper work, bound into a stack with twine. It seemed now there were only four objects left in the bottom of the box.
Pamela lifted one out, rubbing her hand across the patchwork leather cover.
"This was handmade." She said, glancing up to Harley before opening it. A familiar face stared back at her, but much smaller, infinitely younger and caught in a stunning, ear to ear grin, displaying the fact he was missing both front teeth. His hair fell onto his forehead, as pale and delicate as candy floss, and there was a livid, stitched-shut gash, almost y-shaped, on his lower lip.
Still, it was hard to believe he had once looked so innocent. There was an inscription below the picture, in a neat, feminine script which said "Jack, Age 4. The World's Most Beautiful Smile."
"Since you have far more interest in my past than I do… that's what he said." She blinked, looking back to her best friend's face, heart suddenly pounding with excitement. "These are his photo albums, Pam." Each hand-bound book was nearly six inches thick. Harley was utterly stunned by what those pages would contain.
His most gracious gift. He had given her his life.