This was especially short, but I had to have something out for Halloween that was at the very least creepy as hell. Happy Hollow's Eve!

-:-
On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kipper it is sealed; who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled.
-Tu B'Shvat, Melanie Rae Thon.

Coffee or Cotton Grow-:-

The disease of life that was the prize for fleeing madness and, by default, all of her friends, was something difficult to bare, but she was becoming accustomed to it, one visit to the doctor (her only two that could look at her without recoiling in horror and saying in almost one breath, "Dear God, how is she still alive?" aloud to themselves and to her in a sort of half-there way) at a time.

Ivy did not know this when she set out in the closing days of true fall, pumpkins cut from their stems and torn apart with knives to make misshapen teeth and eyes and all the while burning on the inside candles that spat wax through open maws, her walking quickly by them on the streets in as best a disguise she could scrounge up on short notice. She looked vaguely like some high powered attorney or their secretary, which was fine when lying to normal people, but for the person she was going to see, it would take more than that.

She wasn't going to hurt Harley; all of the redhead's anger at the girl-woman had been wiped clean over the last few months to be replaced with righteous indignation at being kept in the dark about things so important and worry at hearing around that affection was being freely given to the blonde by someone possibly just as dangerous as the leering bastard forever in solitary. She was going to look at where she was living, scout out the people who were calling themselves her friends (new and old—Eddie kind of counted since Leland let slip that Harley tended to take the man lunch when she felt like making sure he wasn't working himself to death just to keep his laughable little agency afloat; wheat bread with the crust cut off all of his sandwiches and all the meat she could stuff down his throat to up his protein levels, or whatever) and then maybe follow her around for a little before deciding what to do next.

But that plan got chucked out the window when she dropped in to the office of the mob doctor she used to take Harley to when they were raising hell together and she saw wispy blonde hair through an open window.

"Hands up above your head... that's right, clutch the bar tight as you can... Do you want the—okay, no rope, don't glare like that, you'll tear the stitches in your face..."

As long as Mob Doctor kept talking, Harley would always glare. He thought chatting her up when she had no choice but to come to him for treatment would make her less likely to punch him in the face afterward and walk out without paying, but he was only half right. She hadn't skipped out without handing over his cash in over two years, but whether or not she smacked him was up to how well he could stitch her without having to cut and cauterize old wounds while she held still in a most uncomfortable position on his stainless steel operating table, one of those poles meant for carrying saline bolted to the end of the table so she could position herself on her knees, balls of her feet pressed down to keep her steady. Naked entirely, she looked like one of those fucked up Greek statues, but only if it had a baseball bat taken to it so it was cracked and missing some of the smoothness and even parts that could be properly identified.

"I got hit by a truck and you're worried about my face?"

"No, but your boss will be if she sees blood oozing down your face when you go back to work, and I'm pretty sure you don't want that."

A sigh, "Fine. Just get on with the—wow, that is a big knife."

"Yep, special ordered so I don't break all of my other scalpels working on you."

"Me? Me, specifically? I am not so bad to warrant you buying a fucking whaling knife, you jerk."

"Your skin is black where that truck's grill hit you at seventy miles an hour through a construction site. We both know that's like cutting Italian leather—plus all the wire your Real Doctor uses for stitches. And the dirt and grit you rolled in that's scabbed over. I need all the help I can get, thank you. Exhale."

The tip of the knife that spanned roughly the length of six foot tall man's arm and was the width of a fat wrist, started digging into the skin just at the tip of Harley's right hip, pierced the skin so an inch of it spread up for the doctor to grab with two thick fingers, and then began to carve further up to where a little green line from a marker so it would stop. It would stop just between both of her shoulder blades, doing away with the black of oil, hazy red brick dust and brown scabbing from days ago that altogether looked like a pheasant's tail in flight before it gets shot by some dickhead hunter that doesn't even eat the meat.

Chef's did similar things to skin an eel before serving it. Though, that involved a tool that looked a little like a potato peeler in industrial size so the cook could make an incision around the eel's head, insert both hands and then pull the skin off on either side in equal lengths.

That would have been cleaner. Fish secrete fluid when cut up, but Harley bled blood that was hardly as red as it was when she was a healthy person. It looked darker from where Ivy was standing, peeking in and listening. Like strong wine that wasn't quite professionally made and retained some of the skin and coloring from the grapes the wine had been made from.

Ivy dazedly walked away when the doctor found the first hidden cache of stitch wire and might a triumphant nose in tune with some blood spurting free and splashing on the table.

"So, you finally decided to see Pamela again?"

Harley blinked up from where her head was settled atop her arms in her office, her legs dangling off the back of her chair and her appearance enough to send anyone in Arkham that wasn't supposed to be there screaming and running for the exit. She had gotten in late and apparently fell asleep the night before in a dumpster behind a Mediterranean restaurant and was presently taking a break from pulling bits and pieces of some kind of freakish food out of her hair. Joan resisted looking inside the garbage pail beside the desk.

There was a heartbeat in Harley's hand that was clutched beneath her fingers.

"Within reasonable belief that she won't throw me against a wall again," Harley answered smoothly, not even bothering to change position after she had just gotten comfy, "Plus, she wrote, like fifty letters to Jeremiah asking to see me. That's a lot of paper. I can't not think about her maybe having something important to talk about that she won't discuss with the other half-wits here."

"I thought we had a conversation about you insulting Bartholomew and Steven when it comes to their work."

"We agreed that I'd stop insulting them if they ever got better at their work. So far they haven't, so, nyah~" she concluded, sticking the very tip of her tongue out childishly. The bumps raised from when she swallowed scalding coffee earlier were irritated with the motion, but they were appeased when she slid the appendage back into her mouth.

The Robin—the small one, smaller than the others had been, except for the first, but that was a matter of being skinny rather than just short for however old he was at the time—found her eating a bacon cheeseburger an hour after she'd emptied her stomach from revulsion, but he didn't attack her right away. He actually seemed to be thinking the exact same thing she was, in that if she had just broken out of Arkham and injured fourteen guards, she should have been laying low and plotting somewhere particularly foreboding.

Harley must have been rubbing off on him, because he jumped up, perched on the back of the bench she was sitting on—they weren't in the park, not really, not the kind with trees, but where cement replaced healthy soil and metal was arranged for the little brats on their skateboards that Ivy occasionally watched just to remind herself why she was choosing not to abduct someone else that wouldn't be missed and use him to get her pregnant—and just continued to look at her. She, meanwhile, continued eating processed meat and cheese and a bun that didn't have sesame seeds all over it.

Robin gave her a dirty look when she got a little burger sauce all over her chin and didn't immediately wipe it away, but just scoffed and pulled a travel thermos of what smelled like rich Caramel coffee out of the confines of his cape, undoing the cap and swallowing deep.

"Should you really be drinking coffee at your age?"

The dirty look on Robin's face increased by a degree and even if he would end up kicking her ass for it later, it was worth it to see the split second of borderline indignity.