Bullets rattled out of the AK-47 like a flock of bats exploding from a cave. They rained down on the pavement below, and Harley could see the clouds of dust that erupted from the peppered pavement.

Maintaining the bullets' trajectory had been a little harder than she had expected - she'd come a little too close to hitting the Joker and his accomplices a couple of times. But the spectacle had done just what the Joker had hoped: it provided him adequate cover while taking SWAT attention off of him and training it on the roof. Truth was, Harley knew that this part of her adventure would be short-lived, so she gripped the gun the way one might wring out a damp rag, trying to squeeze all the fun she could out of it .

There was a reason they'd set her up with the AK instead of a sniper rifle. After the Joker left, Bosco had clipped her into a harness that allowed her to lean off the edges of the building, and it helped her clear a path from the Joker to where the fully loaded truck had been waiting all this time, a few hundred meters away. But instead of precision shooting, there was a hailstorm of bullets that rained down on the officers below. People scattered in all directions, and she knew that the Joker must have been loving every second of the chaos she was creating.

It gave her a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, too.

Harley laughed in amusement as she walked around the rooftop's edges, SWAT doing their best to storm inside the building once again. She knew that any minute now, a team of them would burst up to the roof in an attempt to take her out.

No worries - she was beginning to realize that this was all just a part of the plan.

"While you're up here, stay on the roof, you understand?" Bosco had asked her, as he clipped a carabiner from her back and into a nylon tether that would keep her secure on the roof. "A few of them are going to get up here pretty fast. When they do, take a few shots at them, and then jerk the rope twice, and hard."

Bosco had explained that pulling on the rope twice would free up some slack, and allow her to swing from the roof, down into the twenty-fourth floor. From the inside of his old windbreaker he'd pulled a closed midsized folding knife and held it out for her to take. "Once you're there cut the tether, run to the zip line we left on the top floor and get your ass into the truck."

As she slipped the knife into a small pocket along the red leather seam of her jumpsuit, Bosco held out a small strange switch in the palm of his hand. "Here, take this too..." Harley had immediately noticed the obvious red button on this small detonator switch. "When you're ready to jump from the zip line, press the button."

"Why?" she'd asked in relative confusion, wondering what, if anything, they planned on blowing up.

"Distraction."

The idea appealed to Harley's thirst for adventure. Moving along the very edge of the building made her heart beat in sync with the rattling of the automatic weapon that was slung over her shoulder. The Joker, kept safe behind her curtain of bullets, had already quickly made his way to the chain link fence with the rocket launcher wielding 'Bear' and Marky, firing back with a shotgun.

Although the thrill was running high, so was the stress – Harley had to keep an eye on the door as well. With all the clamor there would be no way for her to hear the sound of pounding footsteps rushing up the stairs, and so every few seconds, her eyes flashed back to the door in attempt to protect herself without remaining too preoccupied with the Joker.

Before he had left, Bosco put a worried hand on her shoulder and gave her a stern glance. "Listen, the Joker's gonna have Marky and the Bear with him... so if anything goes wrong, and they get up here faster than you expected, than you need to get yourself out of here."

"Than what's the point in having me up here in the first place?" she'd asked.

Bosco just smiled and chided her by sucking on his teeth in feigned exasperation. "C'mon... you know the Joker wants you up here. But he also wants you back alive. Don't forget to watch your own ass while you're watching his."

That was exactly what she did. Beneath the leather, she was sweating as watched the Joker rush through the entrance they had torn in the chain link fence. While the SWAT team lumbered behind, several muscular German Shepherds raced toward the gate, gnashing and barking so loudly that even Harley could hear them.

"Shit..." she muttered to herself and turned to give the rope a tug as she turned around. It wasn't a moment too soon. Just at that second, three heavily armored members of the SWAT team emerged from the roof entry.

"Stop right there!" one of them screamed, but with a smug grin, Harley gave a second hard tug of the rope -

- and gasped loudly as she fell from the edge of the building, watching the expression of shock on their faces at what had to seem like a suicide jump.

Within a fraction of a second, the rope went tight, and the momentum of her fall catapulted her through a blown out window on the twenty-fourth floor. Wielding the knife in her free hand, Harley cut the tether before she'd even had the chance to hit the ground. Rolling on the gritty floor, she quickly recollected herself, pushing herself up to her feet.

"In here! In here!" she heard someone call out from behind her. Twisting herself, the gun rattled as the the AK-47 showered the oncoming SWAT with bullets. She took a few cautious steps back toward the zip line that fed right into the back of the transport truck. This system had worked well enough to transport the explosives from the building, but she wondered to herself how fast she would fly down this thing, and right over the Joker's head. She could see in the distance that the truck's engine was already starting up, its eerie orange headlights flashing as the engine started.

Quickly, gun still aimed at the door, she watched as a few more SWAT officers plunged into the room from the stairwell. Harley swept the gun across them, the gun leaving a line of bullet holes along the concrete wall, burying themselves into the kevlar armor of several team members. With her other hand she took hold of the carabiner dangling from her chest, clipping it onto the zip line before glancing down.

It's never been the heights I'm afraid of... it's the fall.

Retrieving the red button detonator, Harley didn't have time to speculate about the outcome of an explosion before she pressed the trigger. There was a deafening bang, and a vibration under her feet. Three hundred feet below her, SWAT members and police officers alike scattered in all directions as the white van the Joker's henchmen had placed there exploded into a massive gasoline fire. Harley could feel the heat on her back as she took a mighty leap, pushing herself off the edge of the building and began moving at a tremendous speed toward the truck. The sound of rushing air filled her ears, and she watched as the Joker lifted himself up into the back of the truck trailer, along with the two other men who had been following him.

Firing off a few more shots, she laughed heartily as she flew over the faces of a few shocked police officers. Their gaping maws turned upward as they watched her fly over their heads, cackling like some wicked witch.

Even now, as she came in fast, she reflected back on the Joker's words about the longevity of adventure. '...lots of planning, and only a few minutes of sheer, unadulterated joy' he'd said, but if a lead up of a few boring days resulted in a rush like this, Harley was more than happy to put in her required hours at the office.

The wind whipped her blond fringe away from her face, offering her a perfect view of the transport trailer's open doors, but also, peeling through the darkness and closing in on them quickly, Harley thought she saw some kind of a squad car, but it had been too dark... a SWAT van maybe? But, it couldn't have been. It was virtually invisible whenever it passed through the shadows, but when it passed a street light, or an orange flood lamp from one of the nearby warehouses, Harley could see its silhouette.

Finally coming into earshot, she witnessed as the Joker and his two men jumped into the back of the truck. "Joker!" she called out to him to attract his attention.

Once he'd turned to her, she pointed emphatically to the racing tank. The identity of the vehicle must have been clear to the him because he pounded loudly on the side of the trailer wall, singling the driver to step on the gas. Harley heard the truck grind itself into gear, attempting to take off as quickly as it could. No sooner had it begun to pull out of park had Harley sped into the back of the trailer, the cable snapping as the truck began to move, sending her onto the floor. She managed to land bent over, legs spaced far apart, fingertips steadily pressed into the floor of the trailer.

The back doors slammed shut, casting the room into a dull orange glow of internal light. "Don't move..." she heard the Joker growl from behind her.

Harley remained still. As the seconds ticked by, she wondered what had captured the Joker's attention so much that he'd requested she stay in the world's most unflattering position. "Alright, you can stand up now," he croaked, a coy smile cracking across his twisted mouth as his two other men grunted in suggestive laughter.

Unamused, Harley's gaze turned to the side as she felt the truck lurch into a left turn. "Good to know that you have a sense of humor – especially now," she said, but the Joker paid her little comeback no mind until he'd made his way over to the slide panel of the trailer, sliding open the door to the world outside.

"You think we'd be able to get through this without laughing at someone's expense?" he asked her.

"Yeah, but did it have to be mine?" she asked, watching him closely as she stepped toward the door.

The Joker appeared darkly focused on the vehicle in the distance, as it came closer and closer toward the transport truck. "Not for much longer. Here comes the next punchline..." he purred, and watched as the black tank-like thing came toward them at incredible speed.

"This sure looks familiar, doesn't it boss?" she'd heard Marky croak from a few feet behind them, loading shells into a magazine.

The Joker scoffed at the idea and shook his head, looping his hand into a leather sling as he released a giant sigh. "It's all been done before. This isn't going to be any fun."

"Is that him?" Harley asked flatly, her eyes shooting back up to the Joker. He turned back to her just long enough to nod. "So what now?"

Sighing, the Joker turned around to motion for Marky to pass him his gun. "Well, I know his type."

"He must know how much explosive we have on board," Harley yelled over the sounds that seemed to fill the air. The explosives they had packed into the truck remained at the very front of the trailer, tucked securely up against the wall, and while they seemed safe and sound, everything else around them was a hurricane - sirens blaring, engines revving, tires squealing, and the whole world around them appeared to be falling apart.

Harley watched for a moment as the black-tank came closer to the side of the trailer, the Joker burning through an entire magazine of his Glock. Not more than a hundred meters behind, a few squad cars along with a SWAT van followed quickly behind, attempting to catch up as they made their way toward the highway. Dealing with the cops would have been child's play for the Joker, though; they couldn't do anything that would cause the truck to crash, for fear of the high-powered explosives on board.

Batman was a different story.

Harley realized this would be the first time she'd be pitted directly against the man. Sure, she'd spoken to him the one time he'd come to warn her about the Joker's motives, and yeah... there was that little altercation when he'd dragged the Joker across the lobby of Arkham Asylum. But beyond that, she knew only that he was a man who didn't operate on the same level the police did. He was trying to keep one step ahead of the Joker, while the Joker was trying to keep ahead of everyone. It must have been exhausting for him.

What kind of sidekick would she be if she couldn't remove him from the equation entirely?

In-between the Joker's bouts of firing at the Batman, Harley tapped him on the shoulder, which made made him jump. "Not now baby, Daddy's working..." he said through clenched teeth.

"If I handle this guy, can you get take care of the cops?" He hollered out over the sounds of the vehicles buzzing around them.

Before the Joker could say anything, the truck jerked suddenly to the right, causing Harley to reach out and hold onto him in order to maintain her balance. The expression on his face appeared concerned as he turned to speak to her. "What the hell are you talking about?" he asked, but she knew with the Batman quickly approaching that she would have no time to convince him.

Taking him by the collar to capture his full attention, he shot him a stern glare, "Just answer me! Can you get rid of the cops and get the truck outta here if I manage to get rid of the Bat?"

"Yeah... but how're you gonna do that?" Nonchalantly, he turned his back to her once more, the sound of massive tire treads vibrating through the earth as the Batman came ever closer.

Glancing down at the palms of her hands, her eyes scanned over the grip gloves that Bosco had provided her with earlier. Taking a deep breath, she watched as the massive dark tank pulled up alongside the truck trailer, its details clearer to her now. The top of the vehicle was wide, but would provide her with just the edging she'd need to support herself. She knew that if she did this now, there would be no coming back without triumph.

So, just as the Joker turned back to reach out for another gun, Harley had taken several steps backward, until the heels of her feet pressed against the opposite side of the truck. Flexing out her fingers in preparation, she rushed toward and then right past the Joker, who at this point regarded her with complete astonishment as she leapt like a cat from the relative safety of the truck trailer and onto the roof of the tumbler, her gloves easily adhering to the edge which hung over its bulletproof windows.

"Harley!" she heard the Joker call after her.

She didn't respond, too busy struggling to maintain her grip, the massive black vehicle swerving in response to her landing. Harley could only pay attention to the road in front of her as her feet scanned the back portion of the roof for anything to support some of her weight on. Finally her feet found the lip of the rear ventilation shafts, using them to steady herself as the Batman weaved left and right to free her grip.

The whole thing seemed so surreal, and at that very moment, it felt like everything that had happened in the last several months had led up to this moment. Where had that meek little librarian gone? Oh her? Yeah, she's jumping from a speeding truck riding topside on Batman's personal limousine service.

Just another day in the life.

"Take care of the cops and get outta here!" she hollered back to the Joker who still stood dumbstruck by such proactive behavior. "I'll find my way back!"

After she'd said it, it wasn't more than a few seconds before a defeated Batman must have realized that regardless of his maneuvering, the girl would not come loose. The tumbler geared forward, passed the truck, and sped along the highway toward the closest exit.

"Was that Harleyquinn riding on top of that thing?" came Bosco's crackling voice from over the handheld.

Snatching the walkie-talkie out of Marky's hands, the Joker held down the button to respond. "Next time I want to rip her fucking head off, remind me why I love that girl," he growled into the microphone – a response that his counterpart must have found particularly hilarious.

"Alright Jokerman, you got the SWAT team behind you. Have Bear throw open the back doors and take them out with the rocket launcher. After that you're going to have to close up and start moving the explosives all the way to the back if you want this to work."


Harley might have been having the time of her life surfing through the concrete waves of Gotham's inner city, had it not been for the fact that the rain had begun to fall. Droplets stung her eyes like a million bees and streaked her dark makeup out over her cheek bones like like dark shooting stars against an inverted white sky. But regardless of the weather, the tumbler was smooth against the wet pavement, and took corners particularly sharply, most likely in an attempt to throw her off.

Now that she was situated, Harley was able to maintain her grip without much hassle, but as the minutes dragged on, she couldn't help but open her stinging eyes to gather some kind of idea as to where he was taking her.

After living here long enough, the Gotham City landscape inevitably begins to bleed together. The skyscrapers of the downtown district all start to look the same, particularly when you're only getting brief glimpses of everything. Even so, she immediately recognized the smell of burning rubber and the vibration of tires as the passed up a small incline over cobblestone.

This was the bridge near her old apartment.

It just so happened to be only a few blocks away from the police station.

Alarmed at realizing his intention, she tried her best to antagonize him into confrontation. "C'mon you yellow-bellied worm!" she called out to him, gripping down hard with her right hand as she pounded on the top of the tumbler with the left. "Come out here you...you mammallian-winged monstrosity! Fight me like a man!"

She hollered in vain. This was not the kind of man who would be persuaded by words alone.

But then, there was a flash of epiphany that stung her - a thought of such genius that she didn't have much time to consider whether it was suicidal, or a revolutionary turn in their little game. Without giving the idea too much thought, she waited a few seconds until he slowed down into his next turn, and once he did, she took a deep breath, felt courage wash up her spine, and released the strength in her limbs, doing her best to push herself away from the tumbler as she rolled off the top. She landed hard on the pavement below, rolling side over side several times before she finally came to a stop.

Pain had squeezed the air from her lungs like a tube of hastily compressed toothpaste. Distantly, she heard the massive tires of the caped crusader's vehicle screech to a halt. For a second, she lay face down, feeling the rain pelting against her leather suit. It was softer now that speed had been removed from the equation, and slowly the few strands of hair that were free from the front of her headdress slid to stick against her forehead.

Against her better medical judgment, she pushed herself to her feet. This was the law of the jungle – the last one to stand was always dinner, and tonight she would not make herself into a meal for the Bat. Bruising, her left arm draped over her cracked ribcage, she waited as the ceiling of his formidable vehicle shifted and then lifted as he raised out of it like a locomotive.

"Are you out of your mind?" his dark, raspy voice called out to her and immediately, she broke into a bout of laughter that would have easily answered his question for him.

"You know..." she said, struggling to straighten herself when she addressed him, "you two really are more alike than either of you will admit. With you, I very rarely get what you ask for until I give up a bit of action. God knows that's the way it is with the Joker..."

He'd started walking toward her no more than twenty feet away, the two of them having to speak loudly over the loud hiss of the falling rain. "Harley!" he called out to her in what could have only been a plea for sanity.

Before he could take another step she exhaled a large sigh and produced her large revolver from the holster at the small of her back. "I thought I told you a while ago... don't ever call me that," she said savagely, gnashing her white teeth between a set of smeared red lips. The gun dangled at her side for a moment, waiting perhaps for another moment of provocation. "I'd hoped that at this point you would take every ounce of the girl you thought you knew and thrown it out the window... if you'd even known her in the first place."

"The person I knew was a doctor who wanted to help people," Batman growled, but it was just another joke to fuel her uproarious laughter.

"He's right, you really are too much, you know that?" she asked, slapping her knee enthusiastically. "I thought you, more than anyone else, would be able to understand the back avenues people take to help others. My job was to treat the Joker. What makes you think I ever stopped?"

The idea flooded his mind through a broken levee of misconception. As much as one could believe that the Joker had turned Harley's mind to madness, these were not the words of a lunatic. What she was suggesting to him now was that somehow, in a very roundabout way... she was attempting to treat the Joker still, from behind enemy lines. There wasn't much that Batman could say... but what else could he do? Harley's emotions had been throughly wrapped up in the Joker since the beginning. He'd seen it the night he'd walked the circumference of the Robinson Park fountain with her all those months ago. He'd seen it when she'd struck him hard in the jaw that night at Arkham. He was seeing it now, and it chilled him to the bone how someone like her could love a man like that.

"It's pretty rich to get the morality lecture from you... isn't it?" she shot at him venomously.

"You're too far gone for redemption," he admitted, and when he did, he could almost feel the muscles in her body contract as she lifted the gun she had held idly at her side.

With a confident, cracked smile and took a few forceful steps toward him, "Yeah, well... that makes the two of us."

He didn't require much warning other than her sinister smile. She punctuated the end of her sentence with the pull of a trigger. Harley's aim at such a close distance would have been dead on, but the street corner the two of them had found themselves on was cast in thick shadows that made it difficult make out his moving figure. Hearing the bullet ricochet, Harley immediately turned her attention toward the darkness, widening her eyes in hopes that they would further adjust to the lack of light. It did her little good, though she continued to scan the shadows with the barrel of her loaded gun.

There was a fluttering sound, the ripple of fabric moving across the drenched pavement as the rain slowly whispered to a stop. All was eerily quiet, and Harley sorely wished that she had her back pressed up against something.

The fear was justified, since just as she turned to gaze over her shoulder, her wrists were taken forcefully by his thickly gloved hands and crossed over her chest and behind her back in a straitjacket hold. He squeezed her right wrist hard, causing her to drop the gun. "What are you hoping for, a white-picket fence and a happy ending?" he hollered at her in his gruff tone as he pulled her tight against him to stop her from struggling. "Living this way is only going to get you killed!"

Gritting her teeth she resisted him for a moment, but stopped when she realized there was no way for her to overcome his sheer strength. The pressure he was putting on her obviously fractured ribs made her blood run cold, and made her severely reconsider her plan of action. After rolling her eyes out of his sight, she softened her features and pressed her head back against his chest, craning her neck back to glance up at him affectionately. "Killed?" she asked in a soft voice, as if there was a bottomless fear associated with it. "The Joker said he wouldn't let that happen."

His proximity to her had become an obvious cause for concern. She found it curious the way he had sharply tilted his head up to avoid direct eye-contact with her. "What makes you think he'd keep any promise he ever made you?"

Harley must have felt him relax in response to her feigned affection, and as a result, she scooped one of her ankles behind his and leaned back sharply to displace his weight from under him. She knew he wouldn't fall, but while he was off balance she balled both her hands together and brought them back over her head before swiftly swinging them down across his left cheek. This was just enough to send him to the ground, and now she'd placed him in a position that would make it impossible to avoid eye-contact.

Batman grunted as his back struck the pavement, but it wasn't more than a few seconds before Harley was standing over him, pressing almost the entire weight of her body on her heel as she stood on the inside of his thigh between two of his protective plates. He grunted again in pain, but it only caused her to grind her heel back and forth against the pressure point on his hip.

"You think I'm naïve... that hurts." Batman had grabbed at her ankle, but in the time that it took him to grab her she had swooped down to pick up her gun, and was now straddling his torso, having taken the pressure off his hip. She pulled the hammer back on the gun and pressed it right between his blue eyes. "Sugar, I know I'm goin' down. But if you know me at all... and by your relative casual use of the name 'Harley', I'm going to assume that you do – than you should know that the only way I'm going down is swingin'."

Batman didn't say a word, and didn't want to give her any emotional ammunition to pull the trigger. With her injuries slowing her reaction time, he might have been able to snatch it away, but he didn't want to underestimate her reflexes. The fact that she'd managed to get him into this position spoke well for her tenacity. Beyond the barrel of the gun, he was met with Harley's curious gaze. There was nothing much he could do besides let her inspect him.

After a moment, though, she slowly and cautiously lowered the hammer of the gun and stood to her feet. He didn't retaliate immediately; as a precautionary measure she'd placed her foot on his sternum, prepared to jump on it at a moment's notice.

"I think the only thing that would make the Joker more angry than not killing you would be to actually kill you. To be completely honest, I'm not up to dealing with his bullshit later on while I nurse a couple of broken ribs. I did what I needed to do...I got you out of the Joker's hair," she explained, but hovered over him a moment longer. Leaning over, she gazed hard at his eyes once more, hoping that something would be triggered by their specific shade of blue. "I don't know who you are... but I'm not looking for any kind of understanding or sympathy. If I was, you think I'd be living with the Joker? Heh..."

Stretching her arm she fired a shot that ricocheted on the pavement beside his thigh. "I'll be sure to keep you on your toes, Batsy," she started, feigning affection once more, "so long as you promise to keep me on mine."

She winked, and he lay there as he listened to her run off into the darkness of an alleyway.


Dawn on a cloudy day in Gotham City was a mesh of monochromatic hues. Brown, blue, and grey mingled with one another to create a dismal, sleepy landscape. Night owls prayed for days like today, where they could sleep in until the early afternoon and never see the difference in time. It was abysmal to morning birds and businessmen alike, who wished that the sun would come and wake them from a fatigue that endless cups of coffee could not stir them from.

Harley had spent a few hours of the wee morning crawling her way across the city. She'd started out in a brisk run, but when the sounds of the sirens had finally bled away, the humming electrical heartbeat of the city was all that surrounded her. Once the adrenaline rush had worn off, she'd slowed to a slumping crawl, making her way out of the dangerously prying eyes of downtown and into the relative ironic safety of Crime Alley. Once there it hadn't been long until she found Gambol's bar, her heart only dropping slightly when she found the place empty.

In the cover of the bar, she took stock of her injuries, which had been grossly underestimated. Her leather jumpsuit was pulled tight around her torso, but it was causing her a massive amount of pain. The area around her ribcage had begun to swell, the metallic taste of blood swimming in her mouth. She could have a collapsed lung, she could be bleeding internally - there could have been any number of problems caused by the fall from the speeding tumbler, and she was lucky to have made it here in the first place, let alone made it out of a fight with Batman. While she probably should have been headed somewhere for medical treatment, fatigue overcame her...

Pushing the door aside, the sound of her feet shuffling against the dusty floor rage through the silent place. Before long, she made her way over to one of the several booths that lined the wall adjacent to the bar and collapsed, her legs dangling over the edge of the seat as she blacked out into oblivion. Away from the pain, away from the heartache of not knowing whether they were alive or dead, away from searching those blue eyes for any signs of recognition.

The bar settled into the morning grey, and nothing moved other than the swept up dust as it settled against on the old wood floor.

The place stayed this way for several hours. Indeed, it wasn't until night had fallen that the place stirred once more. The door had been hastily opened, and in from the rain outside, Bosco was searching for something, and had been searching for several hours. Once the crew had made their hasty and well timed getaway aided by the slippery rain, the Joker demanded that they all immediately split up in an effort to find his missing girl.

"Chances are she fucked up and got herself killed," the Bear had chided after sucking his teeth loudly in disgust of the girls thoughtless action.

The Joker had just shook his head. "No, he wouldn't kill her... he might have turned her in, but he wouldn't kill her." If Harley had been captured or killed, they would have heard some kind of mention of it on the police scanners they had installed in the truck. Hell, the Gotham City News would have been all over it within a matter of minutes.

"What if it wasn't the Bat who got to her...what if it was these other guys?" Marky had asked, but his idea didn't do much to make the Joker feel any better.

And then fear gripped Bosco when he spotted her - both her lifeless legs hanging over the side of the booth. He hurried over to her, holding on to his belt to keep his rain soaked jeans from falling off as he ran.

"Harley..." he called to her gently, and upon placing his large, eerie eyes on her did he begin to panic. She laid there, limp, her face covered by the shadow of the table that sat between two leather benches. "Harley!" he hollered, placing his hand on the table to lean over her. "C'mon chicken! C'mon... Oh, shit." He cupped his hand around her chin and felt for a pulse, somewhat relieved to see that her skin was still warm.

Without another second of hesitation, he rushed back to the entrance and pushed open the door. "Boss! She's in here! She's hurt bad."

There was a impetuous shuffling, the sound of a car door opening and then slamming shut. The Joker's massive purple duster coat buffeted around his knees as he made his way to the booth where Harley's unconscious body was laying. He leaned over the bench just as Bosco had, his voice calm, almost delicate as he tried to speak to her.

"Harley...?" he whispered, taking off his glove to touch her tear-streaked face with his hands, angling it into whatever kind of dim light the bar could offer him. "Shit..." he muttered as he gazed at his fingertips stained with fresh blood as it had trickled out of the side of her mouth. "She's been coughing up blood..." he told Bosco, whose worried eyes scanned over her suddenly frail looking frame.

The Joker lifted himself up onto the tabletop, and motioned for Bosco to take her hand to lift her. Once they'd sat her up, the Joker slid into place behind her, scooping her into his arms. Sliding out of the booth, he stood to his feet, lifting the broken girl into a damsel carry, but once he had he shifted her weight in his arms to give her a good shake. "Harley!" he called out, hoping to rouse her into consciousness. It took him a few tries before her eyes began to stir. "Harley!"

Her eyes opened slowly to the Joker's constant jostling, and Bosco bent himself over, placing his hands on his knees as he heaved a sigh of relief. Albeit more silently, the Joker did the same. "C'mon Harl, we gotta wake up, we gotta go..." he whispered to her softly, as she slowly came to, her arm moving up to drape around his neck.

Her bloodshot eyes stared up at him in a moment of recognition before her heavy eyelids fell over them again. He jostled her once more. "No, no, no...c'mon toots, you gotta stay awake for me ok? Who did this to you?" he asked. "C'mon Harl... who did this to you babe?"

The arm that had not wrapped itself around his shoulder had been hanging heavily at her side. Slowly it came up and fell upon her chest. "Me... I did it..."

The Joker gave her a confused glance and sighed, holding onto her tightly. Turning back to look at Bosco, he motioned toward the door with a nod of his head, "Those bastards out there?" he asked, still using his arms and back to gently keep Harley in wakefulness.

"No... they lost us back on Gregory Street. Haven't seen them since. Who the hell are they?" There was a certain level of confusion in his voice as the Joker's gazed moved between Bosco and the now helpless girl in his arms.

He shook his head, a stern look scrawled on his face. "I've seen them before... but I don't know who they are. We're going to have to find out."

The two of them made off toward the door, Bosco holding it open as the Joker made his way through with Harley. "She gonna be OK?"

He jostled her once more as the two of them slipped into the back of the large black Tahoe. "Hey Harley..." he said rousing her again. She shuddered and blinked up at him again with large, hollow eyes. "You hear that? Bos' asked if you're gonna be ok," he teased her mildly in hopes of getting a rise out of her.

A tender, pained smile stretched its way across her bloodstained lips and she moved to place a gentle hand on his chest, curling up as he settled her down on his lap.

Once Bosco as lifted himself up into the driver's seat he adjusted the rearview mirror to offer himself a better look of the two. The Joker didn't notice that Bosco had seen the way he watched her, seen the way he stressed his painted black eyebrows together and leaned his head on hers as the Tahoe pulled away from the curb outside of Gambol's bar.