Three whole days and she hasn't left her room, not even once.
All right, he probably went just a tiny bit overboard, but with his newest idea coming out a failure, all thanks to Schwarzy there, you can't really blame him. Not really. She's been screwing up since day one and it finally came back to bite her. Hard.
Some people say that they hear her crying inside her room, which Joker kind of expects, really. He remembers, in one way or another, when he got his, and they hurt. Or maybe she's crying because he's ruined her pretty face? Schwarzwald was kind of a vain little thing, so she might be taking it very, very hard.
Not that he really cares. It's just something to consider.
Harley's been walking on eggshells ever since the night in the rain. It's kind of annoying, actually; he's been in a relatively good mood for most of these three days, and nobody wants to talk with him anymore. Not many people did in the first place, but he's gotten used to dealing with the attention of having two jealous women fighting over him and now that it's gone, it's kind of odd.
The fourth day passes and he decides to go look at Schwarzwald himself. It can't be so bad that she'd rather starve to death in that little room, can it?
When he opens the door and gets a quick look at her shocked expression before she turns her head and hides her face in her hands, it apparently is that bad. Her hair is blond in spots, blackish grey in others, horribly ratted and tangled, her makeup is gone in most places and only there in small white spots on her forehead, her costume is filthy. But it's her face that he wants to see again.
"Let me see." He says, walking over to her in her corner, as she keeps her hands, her filthy, bloody gloves, over her face, shaking her head rapidly. He grabs her wrists and pries them away, as she turns her head away as far as she can, and the side he can see is hidden behind a veil of ratted hair.
"No! Get away from me!" Schwarzwald screams, her voice hoarse and desperate and so damn pitiful, full of terror. Joker tsks, before trapping both her wrists in one hand and using his free hand to forcefully grasp her chin and force her face back towards him. He admires his work, as she tries to kick at him, fight, and he ignores her feeble attempts to get away.
Her false smile is lovely. It's also sort of jagged, since when he did it to her he was enraged, it was dark, it was raining, and she was covered in mud and thrashing, but that's okay; his are too. He can't tell, though, if he's relieved or unhappy that he's not the only one with the smile that is not happy in Gotham anymore. Instead of either choice, he decides that he's satisfied with Schwarzwald's scars, and knows that she's never going to go against him ever again. He didn't really have a choice in what he took from her, anyway, so she shouldn't be so angry with him.
She really didn't have anything left but her beauty. So he took it away.
"They're not half bad," Joker says, running his thumb very gingerly over the gash twisting up from the left side of her mouth. He can see the very hasty sewing job and knows that when they actually scar over, they're going to be absolutely horrible. "I think I did well, considering the environs we were in."
Schwarzwald, as soon as he touches her face, jerks away suddenly and tears out of his grip, hands over her face.
"I'm ugly!!" She wails, in complete and total despair. "You made me ugly!!" She screams the words, muffled though they are by her hands, as she sits with her back towards him, sobbing. Joker tsks again, rolling his eyes a bit at her theatrics, before grabbing her shoulders and forcing her to turn back around. She resists, until he gives a harder jerk to tell her that he's not playing around, and she turns, though keeping her hands over her face.
"If I wanted to make you ugly, I could have cut out an eye, or sliced out your tongue, or knocked out your teeth," He informs her, quite pleasantly for the situation they're in, and sees the glint of green from in between her fingers as she watches him for movement. "I didn't want to make you ugly. I just wanted to give you the message, loud and clear."
Schwarzwald keeps her hands covering her mouth, but parts her fingers slightly to show that she's interested. "Message?"
"Times are gone, Schwarzy, for the good little children." Joker states, still crouching down right in front of her. "What happens to the good ones? They get kidnapped. They get held hostage. They get beaten, they get mugged, they get raped, they get knifed and left to bleed out in cold alleyways. It'd do you a world of good, it really would, to stop pretending you're one of the 'good guys', because you're not. You know it, I know it, Gotham knows it."
"What did you get for helping the poor girl strapped to the bomb? You got your pretty face fixed, and no big 'thank you' from the city. They still think you're a freak. And now, they've got another reason to. I told you before, Schwarzy; they're ruthless dogs, and they don't want you. They want to have a villain." He pries her hands off of her face again, so that he can see that she's got cottonballs in her mouth, probably from under the sink. They're soaked with blood, of course, and he notices the bottles of peroxide laying near the bed. She's been trying to fix it, adorable, pitiful little thing.
"They want to hate you. You'd better learn that quick." Joker smiles again, and Schwarzwald feels inwardly sick when she knows that if she survives long enough for them to scar, she's going to have a smile like that someday. He lets go of her, and she pulls herself into a sort of ball and watches him turn and leave, leaving the door cracked.
"Don't stay in here the rest of the day, or I'll have somebody help you out." He says, before she hears his footsteps fade away down the hall, and wraps her arms around her legs as she pulls them against her chest, hiding her head. Schwarzwald doesn't believe when he says that she's not ugly. She's hideous. Disgusting. No one will ever want her now. She had only her beauty to pride herself in, and now that's gone too; there's literally nothing left that anyone can take from her that doesn't involve mangling her. It's not like there's anything left of her sanity but confetti, anyway.
It's now that she wonders what would've happened if she had followed Crane instead. There's no telling what might've happened to her there; she knows that Crane is probably a sadistic bastard on his own terms, but then again, so is the Joker. She wonders if Crane would have hurt her too, and then decides that he probably wouldn't have done anything to her physically. Probably would've absolutely destroyed her mentally, but that's different, and by now she doesn't even care.
She makes her way back to the bathroom, pushing aside the bloody needle and thread that have been there for a few days, and looks in the big mirror at herself for the first time. The small mirror that Joker gave her lies on the floor near the opposite wall in the main room, shattered, where she threw it in rage and disgust at seeing herself.
Schwarzwald looks in the mirror at her full profile, and it makes her want to cry again, makes her want to learn how to tie a noose with a bed sheet. Her hair is tangled and oily and disgusting, her makeup is blotched, her eyes are red and bloodshot from all the crying, and the gashes on the sides of her mouth are bright red, irritated, twisted. They're horrible and disgusting and they ruin her pretty face. They're horrible things that will never, ever go away. She doesn't ever have a chance at a normal life now, and nobody will ever, ever want her because she's so ugly.
Schwarzwald lets out a loud, strangled scream, and then drops her head to the sink, sobbing.
Joker raises his eyebrows as Schwarzwald stands in the open doorway, arms crossed over her chest, watching him sit in his chair with one leg crossed over the other, using it as a sort of support on which to hold a knife he's been sharpening out of boredom.
"Leaving?" He asks, and she gives a curt nod, as he notices that she's wearing normal clothing; that disgusting black jacket that's been laying in the room for months, now soiled with only god knows what. She's got on her black sweater under it, and wearing those dirty brownish slacks; she's trying, so hard, to dress and look normal, though her cheeks are enough to prove that she's not. He knows what she's trying. She's threatening to leave because she wants him to say, 'No, don't leave, I need you here, I can't stand to have you go'. If she didn't care what he thought, then she wouldn't come tell him in person that she was going.
Unfortunately enough for Schwarzy here, he doesn't play those games. The only games he plays are his own.
"Fine," He says, returning to staring at his reflection in the knife blade, but he can see her expression tighten and her shoulders droop in unhappiness, and it makes him want to smile. "Go then."
It's not that he doesn't want her around. It's just that he's not going to beg for her to stay. And where else will she go? Gotham? They'll laugh her out of town, they'll mock her for her new face and they both know it. He's not her father; she wants him to care, and he's just not capable to play babysitter to the girl with daddy issues. For Christ's sake, she's thirty five, and still acts like a teenager sometimes. He knows she wants him to be nicer to her, to act like they're friends, maybe even family, but that's not his job. She's his worker and he's her boss, and that's all the relationship they have. Schwarzy dear just can't get that through her skull.
"I will." She says, and her voice quakes as she tries to sound strong.
"I'm not stopping you." He states back, in dread monotone, and she turns, hesitantly. He ignores her as she turns her back and then looks over her shoulder at him, hopefully almost as he looks up at her again.
"You'll have to walk. We're keeping the cars."
Once he says that, and her heart breaks, he returns to his knife and pretends she doesn't exist, and he knows it hurts her so badly. It does. Schwarzwald wants to cry again right when she sees how superfluous he finds her. He just thinks of her as a tool, as a grunt, and that's really all she is. But she thinks of him as something much more nowadays; that disorder, that mental disease where she makes attachments that to her are so strong that they might as well be family, and are to them as dirt. Schwarzwald, stupid girl that she is, considered the Joker a mentor, a friend, maybe even a sort of father figure. And so when he betrays her trust, her adoration, like this, it destroys her from the inside. When he carved her face, it made her fear him again, like she should have the entire time. And when he lets her just walk out like this, without a single care, she realizes that what she felt never meant anything at all.
It's so stupid, now that she really thinks about it. Why was she so stupid?
You don't need him, she thinks she hears something whisper in her mind, low and angry and dark, but it's gone the moment she hears it and she fancies it a fluttering thought that she had no control over.
"Fine." Schwarzwald says, her voice gruff to try and hide the hurt in it, the softly quaking tone, as she walks out the door, her hair a freshly washed blond and her face clean of makeup. The walk to Gotham is going to be long and hard, but she'll make it, because there's nowhere else to go.
The Joker thinks that Schwarzwald's got nowhere to go, but he's wrong. She's going to go hunt down a mad scientist that fancies himself a doctor.