There was a moment - a split second of sheer terror, while she walked in almost slow motion from Arkham's leather-scented office, past the slowly advancing blood stain that came out from under the receptionist's desk in the front lobby. There was a moment of moral hesitation.
Oh God, Harley... what have you done?
But really, what could she say? She had enjoyed it. She had been filled with a current of shivering electricity when Arkham's terrified and yet defiant red-headed receptionist had gushed blood. She had reveled in a moment of personal victory when the slug himself, Jeremiah Arkham, was no more. Harley had smiled when she saw his lifeless body slump in his leather chair, a man never again to read the weather report and dream about the feeling of the air on his skin. His evil dreams had ended.
Hers had just begun.
As she slowly made her way down the large ballroom staircase that led away from the offices and to the main floor below, Harleyquinn's arrival caused quite the scene. The hefty, donut-filled, rent-a-cop guards at the front entrance turned to make their way over toward where she stood, out of sheer curiosity. A couple of nurses in the station right by her former office lifted their heads just above the window ledges to peer at her with a mix of shock and bewilderment. Who is this strange creature? their faces appeared to ask..
And then they didn't need to ask anymore.
Without another moment's hesitation, and before the guards had a chance to utter a single word, Harleyquinn pulled her Magnum from the holster at the small of her back and fired off at them, striking both in the chest. Taking them out first had been more than mere convenience. Nurses at Arkham weren't armed, and so when they attempted to barricade the door with their body weight, it took only a single slam against it with her shoulder to keep the door from closing, holding the barrel of the gun firmly in place.
Hearing their screams and gasps of terror seemed to drive her to smash her side into the door again with astonishing strength. It snapped open on its hinges, sending two women in their pristine white uniforms to the floor, and leaving a third clutching the receiver in her hand and attempting to dial 911 as quickly as her shaking fingers would allow her.
Snickering to herself, Harley made quick work of aiming and pulling the trigger, one bullet for each of them. The woman on the phone was struck first in the chest, and she seemed to spring from her swivel chair, collapsing onto the floor in a twitching heap. The other two were awarded a quicker end, and Harleyquinn quivered with hilarity upon seeing the blood from behind their skulls explode into jagged halos on the stone tile floor.
There was something almost angelic about that.
She enjoyed it so much that she put another halo on the floor with a shot right between the eyes of the nurse who had desperately been trying to call the police. It would have been cruel to leave the poor thing there to bleed out in pain, after all.
Pressing her index finger down on the archaic receiver button on the telephone just to give herself some piece of mind, she inspected her handiwork, taking the few seconds of silence she had to place a speedloader in the cylinder of her revolver and then snapping it closed. Glancing up from her gun and back toward the door, she smiled brightly at the men who now stood there, two guards dumbstruck by the scene before them.
One little clown standing in a sea of dead bodies. Harleyquinn had to laugh... It must have really been something to see.
"Geez, I'm sorry boys!" she called out to them in an unrecognizable high-pitched tone. "You look a little shocked that I started without you!" she said excitedly, as if overly pleased to see them.
But while they must have expected her to raise her gun to send them running for cover, she sprang into a different action. She took a few long, bounding leaps toward them before jumping up to grab ahold of the door frame, swinging her body with mighty force. Each foot collided into the chest of the each of the pudgy guards, sending them careening into the floor much as the nurses had just a second ago.
The sound of more footsteps blazing down the hall ahead would usually have caused her to panic, but her reaction was eerily calm. She removed a billy club from one guard as she used her free hand to shoot him in the head, and without pause moved the arm which now held tightly onto the shaft of the billy club to bludgeon the other furiously against the side of the head. It didn't take more than a couple swings and the splatter of blood after them to tell her that he was injured enough to be included on her current count.
Nine...and that number was about to go up.
To give herself a tactical advantage, Harley took off into a stairwell, her flat, leather-bound feet clamoring up the stairs to the second, and then the third floor, all the while hearing those chasing feet coming up behind her. Pushing open the door to the third floor, she moved halfway up the cement steps to the fourth, and then lay in wait. It was a dynamic little plan. The men would come hurtling up the stairs and hear only the sound of the metal clasp opening. They would move through the doorway to pursue her, and... well...
Watching as two guards and an orderly came through the slowly closing door, believing that it was where Harleyquinn had made her escape, she sprang. Her gunfire struck two in the back, and one in the head just as he was turning in shock and terror to witness her nifty little ambush.
It wasn't as though they couldn't figure out exactly who she was...they had to know she wasn't as much of a raving lunatic as she might have seemed. After all... she was a lunatic with a doctorate. That education had to count for something.
Still clenching onto the billy club with one hand and lowering the shiny metal Magnum with the other, she exhaled almost casually and looked up the remaining stairs that would take her up to and beyond the fourth floor. The stairs meandered their way upwards toward the sky, or the seventh floor, whichever came to her first. They both felt like the same milestone. She took no time to appreciate her sudden, dark accomplishments, taking the stairs two by two, hoping that they wouldn't have the time to lock the stairwell doors on her; they had a penchant of doing so if an erratic patient had attempted an escape.
Rounding the stairs to the fifth floor, there was a feeling of panic that rang through her head as the alarm began to sound – a repetitive wailing that caused Harleyquinn to clamor up the stairs on all fours, and she managed to throw open the door to the sixth floor just as the heavy bolt of the lock came down to trap whatever evil that snaked skyward in a vertical prison until the authorities arrived. Without a doubt, they were already on their way.
She needed to act fast. That wouldn't be much of a problem at this point; Harley knew that this alarm would send the staff at Arkham promptly leaving the building, and usually by this time in the evening, most of the doctors were tucked safe and sound in their expensive beds. The ones that remained were usually a few night shift nurses, anywhere between ten to twelve guards (six of whom she'd already killed), and a few orderlies to assist in administering emergency medication. They remained until morning, and considering the wages at which they were paid, Harley knew damn well that it wasn't enough to put themselves in the line of fire.
The unfortunate souls that she had come across thus far had had probably been investigating, thinking that there was a patient loose. It was so much more than anything they could have imagined, and she was sure that once they had seen the mess she'd made in the front lobby, the call was placed in to put the asylum on lockdown, and to get the remaining employees to move their asses out of the building.
However, Harley had found herself a floor short of her destination. She'd managed to escape the lock mechanisms in the stairwell, but she was on the sixth floor, the Joker still lingering above her, probably impatiently pacing back and forth, waiting for whatever surprise Harleyquinn planned on springing on him. She found herself in much the same predicament as a caged bird. So little seemed to separate her from her freedom.
But then, if she couldn't get herself out of this mess, then she didn't deserve one ounce of that freedom.
Glancing around the the corridor and up above her head, Harleyquinn sought the answer to the question that floated predominantly through her mind – How the hell am I going to get out of here? She gazed down the hall before taking off around the corner. Maneuvering through Arkham was difficult when the place was on lockdown; no one could get in, though it was certainly easy to get out. As a safety precaution, and to assist the evacuation of any faculty, the old fire escapes on the side of the building usually remained open, though it was impossible to open them from the outside. The doors lacked outside handles, key holes, or any sort of way to grip the door to open in on its hinge.
Harley could escape through them, make her way down to the car that waited in Arkham's back alley, and leave without the Joker... but the thought was so nauseating that Harley fought back the urge to violently vomit.
The panic was beginning to get to her. With the alarm sounding, it wouldn't be more than just a few moments before the police were drumming their way up the stairs, coming to condemn her, and if they got her, they got the Joker...
And that was certainly not the way this was supposed to end.
After glancing down at the billy club she held in her hand, she did a double take as she noticed the woodgrain, which had captured some of the blood that had splashed on her. The black stain that had been placed over it gave one the impression that it was identical to that of a police officer's. Though, Arkham was so cheap that there was no way in hell he would pay full price if a cheaper alternative was available, even if it was incredibly below industry standard. Still... it gave her an idea.
As Harley ran down the corridor and toward the fire escape at the very end, she pushed open the handle and carefully listened for the sound of approaching sirens. Thankfully, there was nothing yet, only the rush of the night air as it swept between the buildings and wrapped around the asylum's tight brick corners. Stepping out into the rusted platform of the fire escape, she took a firm hold of the billy club, striking it hard against the frame of the open door.
Nothing.
Taking a deep breath to calm herself, she looked down at the baton, and then to the metal clasp on the door. Using her back to keep the door open, the club held up over her head, she brought it down in a large swing with such strength that her elbow ached afterward, but she accomplished her objective. The wooden billy club had splintered, leaving a fine edge like that of a crowbar.
Smiling down at the broken baton, she moved like lightning up the rickety stairs and to the seventh floor's fire escape, holding the splintered club in one hand and keeping the magnum at the ready in the other. It seemed too much to expect that there would not be someone, or a group of someones waiting for her behind this door. But when she managed to pry the wood into the tiny gap between the door and the frame to pop it open on its hinges, standing behind it was only the sound of the wailing alarm – and the sturdy legs of a former friend.
Molly stood before her, indignant. Her arms were crossed over her chest, only twenty or so feet away from the fire escape. "You didn't think I was just going to let you come up the elevator and whisk him away, now did you?" the young nurse asked.
Harleyquinn had to look at her twice. Was she out of her mind? She had to have been told that someone was coming up for the Joker, and before anyone else had assumed her identity underneath her leather headdress, Molly must have made the positive identification. She'd known it was her. Who else would risk life and limb for this man other than Harley? But still, regardless as to what Harley had done, Molly stood there, blatantly in her way, fearless in the face of fear itself. She'd taken the lives of so many tonight. Would she hesitate to take another?
That was a question she was having a hard time answering.
But there was a slow, boiling contempt for Molly brewing in the pit of her stomach. She'd come so far and accomplished so much, and this girl still thought that she had enough to stand up to her. Harley was so much more than what Molly's superficial tutelage would have eventually turned her into...some latte-swilling, designer-wearing, bad-date-getting social monstrosity. Molly lived in a world where ignorance was bliss... and that wasn't the world Harley was interested in anymore.
"Well..." Harley started, tossing away the broken baton and feigning a scrutinizing glance at her gloved fingernails, "I was kind of hoping you would, so I could mow you down. You might not be the brightest crayon in the box, but I'd hoped you'd be able to figure at least that out," Harleyquinn finished, in a tone that was significantly meaner and darker than Harley had ever been.
Molly didn't flinch. She just stood in her way, staring into her as if there was something more to the girl then her shallow existence. She tried to egg Harleyquinn on. "Killing guards and orderlies you don't know doesn't count. You really want to be a killer? Why don't you take a shot at me?"
Without another thought, Harley pointed the revolver directly at her head and pulled back the hammer. "You've just proven my point. If you'd been smart enough to look around before you ran up here to lock the doors on me, then you would have known that even though I had no problem getting the guards and nurses out of my way... nameless people with faceless bodies...there was great pomp and circumstance when I fired a bullet through the brain of Jeremiah Arkham."
Molly's face fell, and Harleyquinn released the most amazing, echoing laugh, which rippled through the bricks of the asylum like rattling keys on a piano. "You honestly think I'm going to have a problem killing you, Molly? You really think you mean more to me than him?" she asked, slapping her thigh at the girl's naivete. "Why the hell would you think that?"
"Harley," she called out, begging for the girl within to hear her pleas. "You've never been happier than when you stood there wearing that dress. You're never been more confident than when you and I took the day off to just be ourselves." She was trying so hard to reason with Harley emotionally, but Harley wasn't here right now...
You can leave a message at the beep.
Taking a few solid steps toward the girl, she was shocked when Molly didn't turn to run off in the opposite direction, standing her ground instead. "You think wearing a dress and drinking a glass of wine with you is the extent of who I am?" she asked through clenched teeth, coming up so close to the girl that now there was no other reaction she could have taken other than to back away in anxiety. "Wine and designer dresses. Does that encapsulate me? Is that everything that I am?" She tapped the barrel of the gun against the tawny dark skin of Molly's delicate temple.
"No, Harley, but..." she started, but Harley didn't care anymore.
"No, that's what you are. You're happy? Sure you are, why wouldn't you be? With your nightclubs, and your boyfriends, and your expensive clothes, and your pretty makeup, and your luxurious weave...every single bit of you is made out of plastics, and fabrics...you're like a real life Barbie doll..."
As Harley went on and on, she could see Molly beginning to succumb to the ridicule from the raving leather-clad woman who had been her friend. She was on a judgmental rampage, and knew that she was managing to hit all the right buttons. Suddenly, the life that seemed to give Molly all that candy-covered, saccharine confidence that she walked around with was the very thing Harleyquinn was using now to bring her down into a million tiny pieces.
"I found something beyond material possessions. I found myself in the midst of people like you, trying to push me toward some kind of eternal path to shallow, superficial emptiness..." she whispered, watching and following when Molly shuffled a few steps further down the hallway.
"And you know what I've done to those who've stood in the way of that, tonight?"
Silence hung in between them – Harleyquinn's dark features twisted into a scowl, while Molly stared back at her, wide eyes holding an innocent, intense shock that pierced through the leather, through the darkness, and into the girl she'd once known.
Inside herself, Harley could feel her heart soften into the soft, warm, waxy mass that it had been before, free of the jaded armor that it had been recently dipped into, coated and darkened like a candied apple. But Molly's look had everything in it... regret, sadness, surprise, and shock. She was everyone's collective argument, everyone from Jim Gordon, to Bruce Wayne, hell... maybe even to her mother or her father, begging her not to do what she was about to do.
Begging her to forget about the Joker... a lost man in a lost mind.
"Harley..." Molly's tiny voice called out to her, pleadingly, "don't do this..."
But the way the Joker had looked at her when he came to her apartment, with his face lit up in moonlight and the neon glow from the window, had asked him to come with her... that sense of adventure and intrigue that had nearly pushed her to disappear into the night with him... the way he had seemed sore to leave, hesitating before he went...
He wanted to give her his vision of the world. And really... what else had she asked for over the last six months, but the chance to see the world through his eyes?
She couldn't let that go.
And where in her heart there had been a battle between Harley's good intentions and the Joker's streak of painful truths, there now came a point where both aspects stood on the same side of the line she'd drawn through her heart. One side remained of sound mind, the other... remained with the Joker.
It was too late to turn back now.
And then the gun went off.
Molly was thrown back several feet, and she collided painfully with the floor, bouncing once before leaving a red streak where she slid to a stop. Harley had shot her in the shoulder. Not enough to kill her, but certainly enough to get her out of the way.
Lowering the gun, she watched as the woman squirmed in pain and shock for a moment before realizing what kind of exit wound the bullet must have left. Molly lay on the floor, bleeding at an alarming rate, a pool of dark red gathering around her shoulders. She groaned, and as her upper body writhed, a strange snow angel effect brushed across the dusty tile floor.
Moving to stand over her, Harley looked down at the injured girl, almost apologetically. Perhaps with a smaller caliber, Molly might have lived, but that didn't seem like a possibility now. It would have been too cold-hearted for even Harley to simply shoot her dead...try as she might, saying goodbye to the places she knew, throwing her keys and her phone into the river...nothing had been as hard as watching Molly die now. And nothing else might have been so disconnecting.
She coughed blood, and Harley knelt in the spreading pool beside her shoulder. There must have been a softness in her face, because when Molly's eyes opened into tired, twinkling slivers, she smiled as much as she could.
Finally, after a labored breath, she asked, "You love him, don't you?"
Harley had opened her mouth to rebuke her, but Molly just smiled a bloody smile, coughing laughter. "Oh well... not too much you can do about that..."
If there was one thing that Molly had never done, it was judge her... she'd stated concern, of course, but she'd never judged Harley. And now she'd never get the chance to.
"I tried understanding you... but everything about you...seemed so ass-backwards," she whispered quietly to Harley, still kneeling in her friend's blood, seeming to listen attentively to the dying young woman. "How someone as smart as you, could seem so... sad, so insecure."
Harley's big blue eyes burned as tears stung them, but her pride held them there.
"Maybe you will figure him out... maybe this is how you're going to do it. Ass-backwards, just like everything else..." Molly's voice faded, her eyes closed, and her body seemed to relax as the pool of blood Harley had been leaning in spread so large that it spanned the width of the hallway.
"Molly..." she called out, but Molly didn't answer.
Harley took a sharp, awakening breath of air and rose to her feet, leaving bloody footprints behind her. Slowly, she made her way to the Joker's cell. There was something melancholy in the atmosphere now. She had expected to burst into the room with all the splendor of a Roman Emperor, but now she only gazed down the hall to Molly's lifeless body, jarred by the painful reminder that there was no time to hesitate.
Swiping her still active cardkey over the lock to the Joker's cell, the door clicked, and came unlocked. Throwing the door open, it slammed upon its hinges. The blood still tracking in after her, she looked over to where he sat on the bed, clad in everything but his long violet frock coat. His elbows rested on his knees, and the fingers of his grease painted hands intertwined with one another as he waited.
Slowly, the Joker turned to glance up at her. Over the flat leather shoes, up her long, tightly-bound pleather calves, and over the black and red argyle pattern of the suit. He stood as his eyes traveled over the arches of the headdress before moving back to her face. He said nothing, but his eyes were as wide as they had been that night ten days ago, when she'd kicked him in his ass after he'd broken into her apartment.
She took her headdress by one of its arched points and pulled it up and off of her head, a thick cascade of blond hair spilling from out of it. Smiling, she winked at him. "You had said you thought I'd look better as a blond?" she asked, a mischievous air in her voice, and suddenly, Molly's corpse was a million miles behind her.
"Yeah...the hair color is not my biggest concern," he muttered, with a gaping maw and darkly-rimmed, tea saucer-shaped eyes.
Shaking her head, Harley reached out and took a firm hold of his wrist, as the sirens from outside finally came into earshot. "Yeah, it's not mine either." she said, grinning as she pulled him out of the room, both of them hurrying toward the fire escape.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
Ok guys! That was it. Part One is complete, and Part Two will commence on November 1st, at 7:30AM EST. I gotta say, considering all the great response I've received, I'm a little sad to have to take a break. Considering I've been writing nonstop for the last six months, I need to give my brain ample "recharge" time to come up with some super great material.
Part Two promises to be ever more dramatic, action packed, and romantic than part one, so get yourself ready, because in a month's time, I'll be back with all new explosive chapters.
Again, I can not tell you how much I appreciate the reviews, and now much all of my readers mean to me. If you've never believed that you could dedicate yourself to a project of this magnitude, I'm here to tell you that you CAN. I've had several people tell me that they respect me as a writer because I keep myself organized and maintain a consistent schedule. I find that the ONLY reason I'm able to is because all of you continue to read. Without you, my motivation, and essentially this story would not exist.
Thank you!
Please keep in mind that if you see any chapter updates over the next month, it's probably just me going in and tweaking things, but as for this weekend? I'm off to my family's cottage for a nice relaxing Autumn weekend.
I hope to talk to you all again soon.
Thank you some much for reading. You have my eternal gratitude.
-Shanghai.