"What can I take?" she called as she sifted through her things. They'd never had much time to pack before.
"No more than you can carry," her father called back.
"Plus Nibbles, right?"
The Joker's lips flattened and he shook his head in amusement as he rummaged through their cabinets and extracted a few crucial items. "This child can do twenty pull-ups but still wants me to carry her rabbit. Lazy, lazy, lazy," he muttered to himself, and pocketed a leather box, before raising his voice. "Pack a clean change of clothing."
She folded up her catsuit carefully and scoured her room for evidence she was anything other than a normal teenager. Knives? Oops, there was a smoke bomb rolled under her bed. She put them in a box to hide them somewhere else; if someone raided the house, they'd not learn anything incriminating about her. She leafed through her comics, quickly, to find a few favorites. Would the PlayStation fit? That wouldn't give her much room for anything else...
She leaned out of the door. "Do we have to go through a metal detector?"
"Hmm." He seemed to contemplate whether he'd be bribing anyone. "Why don't you limit yourself to a switchblade," he answered. "You can practice getting it past."
A challenge! She gave him a big 'Okay!' sign with her fingers.
Her father paused at the sidewalk, to wait for her to catch up. She pulled up her hood against the evening mist and hurried up beside him. He was still so much taller than her, and she had to take two steps to one of his. They walked together in companionable silence, with Nibbles fast asleep in his pet carrier and much too old and desensitized to worry about things like moving from place to place.
They disappeared into the maze of buildings and alleys as the city grew dark in places and stayed bright with nightlife in others. They paused at a point to critique some nice street art.
"Any friends you'll miss?" her father prompted after a bit.
"I don't think I strongly identify with other kids my age anymore," his daughter assessed with an eloquence that suggested she'd been googling herself into a WebMD psychology degree.
"No?"
"Everything they talk about is stale, and the more they irritate me, the less I feel like I belong." She sighed at the dilemma. " It doesn't help that half my teachers are nice-ish, but the other half are deadbeats. Gym is bad; the girls stand around gossiping, and the teacher keeps telling me to 'take it down a notch.' I told him to shove it where the sun don't shine. He gave me a lunchtime detention and then held me after class to tell me no one would ever recruit me with an attitude like that, as if I cared."
"Ouch. You'd think he'd recognize a competitive spirit."
"Maybe he power trips. Our girls' volleyball team is obscenely bad for how large the student body is, and it's not like many people have an ace out of the school system aside from sports."
"Well, good-riddance. But sounds like you've been experiencing symptoms associated with a classically hot temper, eh?"
"Dad, girls my age are stupid boring and stupid touchy. I used to not say things I thought would make them upset. Now I'm just in such disbelief of their reactions, I want to see them firsthand instead of just in the future 'cause I just can't believe they're real." She paused. He raised a brow. "And then I laugh at them, in the face. I think that makes me mean."
"Snerk. That definitely makes you 'mean.' Hehe...!"
"If this is a result of puberty," she complained, "I don't understand why it won't make me taller."
"Patience, patience...!" He switched the carrier from one hand to another, and ruffled her hair. "These things take time!"
"Maybe Anastasia Hamilton should be a red-head," she speculated. "That might be truth in advertising.
He started laughing for real this time.
The bought the cheapest train tickets, hard seats instead of a compartment bench or sleeper. His daughter turned around and got up on her knees to watch the world fly past as the train started moving. She'd past her metal detector test, passing the switchblade from one hand and into her hood with a fluff of her hair and the grace of a master.
"Which stop are we getting off at?"
"Jersey City," he said as he unfolded his newspaper.
"We're going back to New York?" They'd lived there once, for a significant chunk of her life, but she didn't really remember any of it.
"Not New York. Jersey."
"What's the difference? They're both on the Hudson."
"Aside from the fact that they are separated by a river, require toll bridges and tunnels to cross between, and have different names? Hmm." He turned a page of his paper. "Jersey's roads look like a drunk toddler was in the City Planning office with red crayon the night before the plans were proposed, and everyone was too busy being a suck-up the next day to admit the result was decidedly unhinged. Whoever was in charge of posting road signs then just gave up and retired, and the next-in-line is either inattentive and lazy or else has a wicked sense of humor."
His daughter turned about and sat back down normally beside them, which greatly relieved the pump woman sitting beside them. "Where are we staying tonight?"
"Hotel. Waiting for payment to clear on the house."
"House? House? We're going to have a normal house?!" She'd never been privy to why they'd always lived in unconventional housing, but she suspected it had something to do with peace, quiet, and the ability to set off explosives in the middle of the floor without alarming any neighbors.
"Well, thought we'd do something new for a change. If you don't like it, I have an abandoned building in mind."
"I love it and I haven't even seen it yet!"
He was filling in the Crossword puzzle of the newspaper. After some practice they grew rather trivial and there were only so many clues one didn't recognize, but this one was comic book themed and he was being forced to exercise some intense powers of interpolation to suppose at how various heroes and villains had been transformed (sometimes quite hilariously) by the authors' and artists' imaginations.
"Hey dad?" his daughter asked sleepily into his shoulder. Cabin lights were dim and most everyone was attempting to nod off despite the discomfort of their seats. The plump woman on their right had sagged down into a pudding of herself and was clearly unconscious.
"Yeah squirt?"
"You know how you were asking me to be more up-front about my life with you?" she asked. "I... I do sorta have one friend. But she's not from school. I found her while I was exploring abandoned buildings at the Narrows. Can I tell you about her?"
He looked to the crown of her head, and raised his brows. Then he glanced around to make sure no one was listening to them. Which direction was this going? It sounded interesting. "What's her name?"
"Willow. She's not like me. She's not allowed to leave home, ever. She's not even allowed to go out with her mom. It's like she's Rapunzel, only without the hair. She doesn't go to school, or get to play outside, or to go anywhere; she's just stuck there. I sneak her fantasy novels through a sewer grate. She's a really big Harry Potter fan. She cries all the time, at the slightest thing, but I feel bad for her because I know it's not her fault. She's so lonely."
"They live underground?"
"Well. I haven't asked her about her mom. But seeing that she lives in a giant underground garden, and her name is Weeping Willow, I thought the implications were pretty obvious."
He straightened. "You found... Ivy...?"
"No, I found Weeping Willow. We laughed that her name was almost as bad as 'Moaning Myrtle.' She says she's scared what her mom would do if she ever learned about me, so I don't go often. Sometimes I don't even get to see her, I just leave the books and maybe a letter under a clump of leaves and skedaddle."
Her father was quiet.
"Is... is something wrong?"
"I'm... just awed to learn Ivy's still around, much less that she managed to tolerate the male gender for long enough to successfully reproduce. Unless this was some kind of mother nature themed parthenogenesis... Which would actually make a form of sense."
His child giggled and relaxed a little. "If, hypothetically speaking, Willow's mom ever caught me... what should I do? Should I mention you?"
The Joker bilnked at her. "Not even under duress. Tell her you know Harley."
"Harley?" His daughter looked up at him in surprise but kept her voice low. "Harley Quinn?
"She's calling herself Fruit Bat now. Assuming there was never any kind of fallout, Harley's name is the only one which could get Ivy to bat an eyelash before tearing you in half or turning you into a vegetable. They were best friends. Get Ivy to hand you over to Harley, and drop enough teasers to get Harley to take you. Because while I'd be the last person to vouch for clown-girl's character to you, your odds of survival will improve dramatically with the change of hands."
"I am restructuring my worldview of what the word 'safe' means," she reported after a moment. "Does this mean you trust Harley?"
"Not by a long-shot and definitely not with you. And if you ever meet her, try not to make her jealous; She's an odd cookie that way."
"Oh. Do you trust Batman?"
The Joker tilted his head to the side, because this question was bizarre and unexpected and interesting. He looked about at ceiling and floor, thoughtfully. "Well, never come straight home after talking to him," he advised. "And you don't want him interested in you, because he's a control freak. But the one and only 'hero' you can trust in this whole gritty world is most probably Batman. And he's had the acid test to prove that." He winked.
His daughter yawned and bundled back into his shoulder. "I think you like him," she sprung on him.
"What?"
"Batman. You're both lifelong bachelors, aren't you? Very suspicious."
"Ayaiai..." He sighed exasperatedly and went back to his crossword puzzle with a grin. There were certain advantages to being nocturnal on long trips. "Stop trying to set me up with people, squirt."
She grinned and pulled her hood low over her face. "You're just lucky my OTP is already TMNT's Leo x Karai, or this would get really funny in a big hurry."
"I don't even know what that means."
She snickered.