Chapter 1: Boredom
Cities never really slept, she knew that but there was always something different about cities during the day compared to when night fell. Gotham was certainly no exception to this, if anything the city was the beacon of the idea. Still, during the day there always seemed to be a lull that came over everything, almost as if Gotham functioned like any other place, people went to work, attended their meetings, ate lunch, maybe treated themselves to some shopping or a trip to a park. As a whole, the day was as normal as it could get, it was the night that brought out Gotham's energy. Every night crackling with fear and excitement, as some nobodies, average day citizens in this town became swooped up and caught in the middle of the latest scheme, plan, or joke to lure the symbol of Gotham from the night into the glow of Gotham's insomnia.
Harleen hadn't experienced it yet though, moving from Brooklyn to Gotham so many years ago, hoping the city would bring some new whirlwind of fun into her life. It never seemed to come though, and Harleen was left to try and find her kicks where she could. That had always been her life, Harleen the gymnast until the boredom set in and the thrill of something new as she grew towards womanhood. The thrill of boys, social life, mental stimulation took her down another path. It led to Harleen the psychiatry student. At first, it had been fun sure, but the reading, and the studying and the writing...it all grew tedious after a time too, especially after her thrill-seeking drew out the consequences of her actions. Harleen would sometimes let her mind drift back to those days, thinking of him, of Guy. The way his eyes would crinkle when he teased her, the jingle in his voice as he told her about his work with chaotic elements. It always turned sour though, the drop in the corner of his lips at the end, the smooth features of his face as it went slack, the smell of blood and the heat of a gun. It didn't take long after that for her to call it quits, tempted to go back to Brooklyn, to her mom and brother, and see what she could find. Psychiatry may not have been her path, but she knew Gotham was or at least she thought so. The years had gone by and Gotham now stood to eat her up, boredom ebbing her to sleep as the weight of reality crushed her. Work, eat, sleep, struggle, repeat. That's where she found herself now, at a dead end on a barstool at the bar of the only decent job she had in a hot minute, and it was ending…
Harleen threw her head down against the top of the bar, cradling her head with her arms, finally allowing herself to stop her reflecting and live in the now. "Hey, don't be smudgin' up my nice clean bar, this may be the last days but I take pride in my work." The voice stirred out the tiniest of chuckles from her, eyes peeking out to playfully glare at Deegan, the bartender of the joint. "Aren't you supposed to listen to my woes, barman? Ain't that how ya getcha nice big tips?" Harleen lifted herself away from the tabletop, sitting upright, and pointed at him, "How come you ain't wallowing with…" Harleen glanced at her drink quickly before continuing, "your root beer float, huh?" Deegan smirked, over the time Harleen had worked here they had grown to be work buddies, never meeting up outside work or knowing about the others' personal lives but here they could rib each other and commiserate the reality they both dealt with, here at least. Deegan had dark hair, black like his name would infer, and was pretty average on all accounts. He was probably a decade older than her, facial lines more prominent than the faint ones that had started to appear on Harleen's thirty-year-old face. Time had been kind enough, the lines seemed to linger around his eyes and the outside of his mouth, lines from smiling and laughing.
"Leave the comedy to the performers, Harls" he retorted with his smirk becoming smug as he got back to work, leaving her question unanswered. 'It was rhetorical anyways' huffing to herself. She wondered if he was dealing with the same worries she was. She didn't know his life at all, but didn't everyone have the same woes when you were bout to be laid off? She groaned internally, watching the number rise on the debt of her school loans and the notice of eviction pinned outside her door that would be sure to follow in the coming weeks.
Harls turned around, her root beer float forgotten while looking towards the unlit stage that loomed in the back of the big room. The Variety had been her workplace for the last two years, a comedy club settled in the middling class social hub in a town that didn't always take nicely to humor. The Narrows, Crime Alley, and what have you over time seemed to grow out, crossing the waterways and infecting certain parts of Gotham, and it was beginning to bleed into the area The Variety sat. It was never a place where the wealthy of Gotham would come to get their kicks, but it could pack a house and some great comedians came through. At the Variety, she was a hostess, an assistant, a server, basically filling any role that she could to help out, always kinda hoping to gather the courage to get on stage but never actually taking the risk. The work was never exciting, sure, but it did offer something not many workplaces could, a good laugh. At least that had been a constant in her life, though excitement never stuck around, she found that humor always came from every corner of the boring world. Her dad, before being locked up, had been a silly fella. She remembered being a little thing and laughing wildly as he taught her how to blow bubbles out of her drink with a straw and make a mess on the table. Her brother making crude jokes as the years went on and the family trying to deal with her father being cut out of the picture, and despite her mom's glare, it would all end up fading into a room of laughter. Though both scenarios Harley wondered if it was always blooming from her mom's exasperation. Her gymnastic practices as she would perform Buster Keaton Esque routines to deal with the pain and growing boredom, feeling her own giggles burst out as her teammates would chortle at her antics. How Guy would tickle her until she couldn't breathe from laughing, letting her only a second to take in a gulp of oxygen before starting again. Even afterward, after she was alone and Guy was in the ground, watching a tv flash with the news about The Joker only to break down laughing as the commercial break pushed a new and improved toothpaste for a brighter smile. The humor was always there, or at least a laugh or two, surely something about this scenario could be funny, right?
A sigh left her lips, it was done with, she was going to have to find something else again. The want ads in Gotham left little to be desired, never enough pay, and repetitive work for long hours. The blues were beginning to settle in on her, thirty and not getting any younger with no idea what to do. Honestly, it all had been dropped on her so suddenly, despite the seemingly decent business the bossman announced that he was closing the doors at the end of the week. She was never too fond of her boss, his sense of humor being the kind that old perverts seemed to get their kicks from, but luckily he was rarely around to tell those kinda jokes too much. He was a handsy but thankfully hands-off kinda business owner, instead having shift managers who took the opportunity to push their comedy careers control the ship. Harleen guessed it was why Tony hadn't soured her on the work, as long as she could avoid him, everything was pretty much peaches and cream. It had been the next day after seeing him after a long time that the news broke about the club closing its door. Bunching up her brow, she thought back to the encounter…
Tony had always been kinda a sweaty guy, but that evening he had been drenched, his hands had shaken as he gulped down a glass of some golden brown liquor. It wasn't long after a man came to him and said something, close enough that the laughs of the crowds obscured any chance of hearing it. Tony peered up at the man, shook his head rapidly, and lead the way to his rarely used office. That night curiosity had gotten the better of her, she followed a few seconds behind, with her own glass to try and listen in. Seeing the door shut, she leaned against one of the outer walls of his office, one that wasn't close too the door in case someone popped out so she could act stupid if caught. Gently placing the rim of the glass to the wall and her ear to the bottom of the glass she tried to make out what was being discussed. She was unsure if this trick would work, but she saw it in a movie once and seeing Tony so shook up she had to know what was going on. At first, only two voices could be heard Tony, stammering in fear and the second starkly calm compared to the first. "Tony, my boss is tired of waiting on you to get your act together, this isn't part of a comedy routine." Silence but then a stammer, "I k-know, Frost, I know, I j-j-just wanna get him the money and be on my way but I d-d-don't got it, all I got to my name right now is this c-club" Harleen's eyebrows shot up, had Tony gotten involved with the mob? She knew that the mob was everywhere in Gotham, but she had almost forgotten about them compared to the glamour of superheroes and supervillains that seemed to prowl the streets daily. Heck, half the time the mob were the ones strung up to dry by the villains to take the money and goons the mob desperately tried to keep. She almost brought herself to laugh, knowing that The Rogues had done more to dismantle the underbelly that Gotham had been built upon compared to the cops and their shiny badges and shiny guns. Then again, Cops and Mobsters seemed to be almost the same here, just swap a police uniform for a suit and there you go. "That's why I'm here Tony, no more time to wait, Boss wants his payment after everything he's done for you, getting the mob off your back, letting the goons who are soooo very close to your block know to leave this Club alone, to make sure that all your customers and employees got home safe to tuck themselves snuggly into bed." So it wasn't the mob, it couldn't be a rogue, what would any villain in the area want to do with a mildly successful comedy club? She was interrupted in her thoughts when she heard this man, Frost, clear his throat and continue. "I'm only here to handle the transition, make sure everything goes smoothly. Boss wants to talk but has more pressing engagements but I'm here to mediate while you discuss it…" Tony began to question, "I d-don't u-understand…" Silence again, Frost must have motioned to be quiet. Harleen's heart began to pound, nervously wondering if she had somehow been caught but through the quiet she could hear a phone, on speaker, ringing as it waited for the person on the other side to answer. Soon enough, "Boss, I'm here with Tony, ready to get everything squared away." That's when the new voice pierced through the wall straight into her ear. It was sharp and maniacal, almost like a song tittering through the air. "Ah yes, Tony, T-ony, Tone-eee. I've decided that, uh, this money issue just won't cut it, not at all, not one teeny, tiny, tony bit. So, I'm collecting my fees in another way, decided to expand my ventures and wouldn't you just know it, you, yes you Tony have exactly what a guy like me wants, a Comedy Club." The voice was nearly giddy, popping syllables at random points. "My boy Frost here will handle all the boring bits, but I expect this club to be in good shape and in my name by the end of the week, easy peasy am I right Tony?"
Tony was quick to give a yes sir before the mystery voice on the other side continued. "Great! Wasn't that fast and so less nasty than anything else that could have happened?" She could hear the snickering from the phone, maybe it was full-on laughter, muffled by the wall in between. "Frost, get it done, and get back here, this is getting boring." His tone had changed, threatening in a whole different way, a growl beneath the lower pitch but quickly evolved into a laugh, shrill and insane. It shocked her a bit, the laugh, and she pulled away from the wall, deciding that was her cue slink away before she risked having anyone catch her eavesdropping.
Back in the present, she worried at her lip still unsure of what exactly she had heard. She knew it was why the club was closing and that her boss Tony was in deep shit but everything else remained a bit of a mystery. The voice on the phone had sounded familiar like she had heard it before on TV or the radio, and she began to wonder if it perhaps was a comedian who had a lot more pull than any of the ones who came to grace The Variety. Could that be it? She loved comedy as a whole, spending many nights dozing off to the laughs of invisible people on the screen of the tiny tv in her room. Harley was snapped out of her thoughts, this time with a hand gripping her shoulder. She grimaced, "Yeah, Scott?" Scott was one of the managers, mostly only interested in good talent and slipping his name in the ears of traveling comedians in hopes he would be able to tag along someday. His routine was much like Gotham's own Steinfield, observational comedy but steeped in some outdated ideas. "Hey, why the long face? You know the audience doesn't want to see pretty gals frowning during a comedy bit, right" Harleen shrugged off his hand and gave a demure smile, "Just in my thoughts, wondering what I'm gonna do after the next few days...I'll be okay though." She knew that Scott would take it at that, despite his observations, he tended to only pay attention to the ones that could benefit him. Almost as if on cue, "You'll be fine, Harley, we all will, I just got a gig in Metropolis for a few nights, after that I'm gonna be going down the east coast. You may not be a comedian but I'm sure there's some kind of gig easy enough for you to handle, right?" She bristled, a few layers of insults to rile her up. Harley was reserved for friends, a habit she picked up after a few years into adulthood to feel more professional but well before she came to work here. Easy enough? She knew his ego was big, and he made a lot of assumptions about her as a tiny dyed blonde gal standing in front of him, but she was not inept like the role he put her in. It didn't help that none of this was easy, cause reality was hard for gals like her. Trying to survive in a boring dull world with a bunch of good-for-nothing men poking and prodding, tugging, and pulling and mocking her from the sidelines. Harley kept her cool, growing her smile, "Wow, are you serious? That's great news, yeah really that's great, Scott, I'm so very excited to see you go…" His brows lowered for a fraction of a second, but recovered, they both have learned to roll with the punches in this line of work. Staring for a second at each other, tension and boredom of each other slicing between them, they both wanted to let their minds drift to something more interesting than the person across from them. Before either of them could awkwardly respond to get away the noise of people entering came from the front door. The entrance was down a hall so that security could check id's and ticket stubs, collect fees, that sort of thing without anyone slipping by. It was too early for security though, or anyone else for that matter. Harley pulled out her cellphone to check the time, it was 4:13 in the afternoon. No one except bare-bones staff showed up before 6. She glanced over at Scott, who seemed confused but unconcerned and he quickly made his way back to the hole in the wall all the managers shared as an office. Harley wondered if she should do the same, make herself busy and start wiping down the booths and preparing the tables for the floor but it was all canceled when she heard a laugh. It was the same one she had heard on the phone. Her heart began to pound, knowing from the conversation that she could be finding herself in a tricky scenario, probably dangerous. Scanning the showroom floor, she didn't see anyone. Even Deegan had left to go do something, so it was only her. 'Fuck, what do I do?' She could dip in the back, but she wanted to know what was going on. Hell, it wasn't like she had anything else interesting to do, the worse scenario was she would deal with deadly consequences but at this time that seemed like an okay option in the grand scheme of things. Deciding to make herself as invisible as possible, she slid into one of the booths with the high backs that were against the wall the hallway connected to. Though she didn't have her handy dandy drinking glass spy gear, it wasn't needed, she could hear them pretty clearly. Tonys' voice was small, it was hard to pick up but this other man was confident, his voice floating down the hall. "Tony, you were supposed to make this easy, why are you making it more complicated than it needs to be? I hate, haaate having to explain myself, but obviously you, uhh, didn't fit all the pieces together." Harleen heard Tony mumble something in reply but it wasn't clear. "Shush, shhh, no need to get yourself so worked up about it, but I must say I'm quite cross with you...I never said I wanted a closed comedy club, quite the opposite in fact. I'm a funny guy, I enjoy the arts like any other entrepreneur, who knows maybe this could be the start of my own steady gig doing standup, could get picked up for a tour. You think I got the potential, Tony?" A cackle broke out of his throat, clarifying the rhetorical nature of his question. Their steps were reaching the entrance of the venue floor. "So I know Deegan is here, but who else is now under my employ in this fine establishment?" Wait, Deegan? Harleen wished at this moment she knew more about her work buddy, the idea that he may be leading a much more adventurous life outside the comedy club walls than she did dawning on her. "Not a lot, two others-s-s." "Names? I don't want to be rude Tony, I mean new boss not even knowing names, what kinda fella do you take me for?" She crouched down into the booth, trying to shrink knowing that she was way more likely to be found out. "Scott, uh-h Bridgers and Ha-Ha-Harleen Quinzel-l" "Scott and Ha-Ha-Harleen, hmm?" The conversation was interrupted by shuffling near the bar, Deegan was back. "Ah, Deegan, good to see you, I knew your eye on this place would bring forth some hilarious results. Now, go get the others who are here, some paper, pen, all that jazz. It's time for an employee meeting. Gotta meet the new boss you know?" There was no response but she heard more movement and knew Deegan was getting to work on the demand. 'Pride in my work' Harley mocked internally, 'What do I do, should I peek, announce myself? Maybe I can act like I was asleep on the job, that's not an impossible scenario for me'. Her mind couldn't stop moving, but her body was frozen. It would take an outside force to compel her to action. "Tony, show me around, lead the way". She heard them turn left, heading her direction and she knew that it was over, she was gonna have to deal with whatever came from this new 'boss'. She was ready to pop out when she heard the sliding of shoes and a scared "Oof". Right beside her on the floor laid Tony, fine enough though drenched and trying to gather himself. "Oh Tony, watch where you're stepping, I got long legs ya know, and tripping over my shoes makes me feel real self-conscious you know. Better not have scuffed my oxfords" His giggling filled the room again, and in any other scenario, it may have been infectious. She would be lying if seeing Tony laid out by being tripped wouldn't have made her day any other time but at the moment, she couldn't breathe, all her air stuck in her lungs. Tony was looking straight at her from the floor. Looking too long before looking at the man still blocked from her view. The jig was up. A split second and her vision was filled with the man leaning forward almost at a right angle to peer at her. She definitely couldn't breathe, her heart may have stopped too. She knew her jaw grew slack as the realization hit her. This wasn't just some man, not at all. He was tall and lean and decked in a purple suit. His skin was white, paler than the teeth that almost shone in the overhead lights. His mouth was huge, red lines surrounding his smile in a shade most women would be jealous to have. His hair was a deep green, mostly slicked back and his eyes were almost toxic looking, like pools of acid. Somehow his smile grew larger, his eyes making direct contact with hers and seeming to find something amusing in them. "Well hello there, Ha-ha-Harleen". His tone was sweet but laced with mocking. Today had been so boring but now she was face to face with her constant reminder of all the chaos that existed in her tiny boring world since she quit college. No this wasn't any man, this was chaos-made flesh, this was the Joker. Her mind clicked, a bubble of laughter wanting to push forth but stuck in her chest with all the air in her lungs, 'I guess life really is funny.'
A/N: Hi everyone, just some general notes.
This is my first ever fanfic so please be patient with me when possible. I have always had a special interest in both Harley and Joker, and even roleplayed Harley online for years about a decade ago, after a few years I basically read and reread as much as I could find on the characters and finally got struck with some inspiration to post an AU that drifted in my head.
Also, I fully understand and advocate that at no point should Joker/Harley relationship dynamics be supported in real life and this is only intended for enjoyment in the fictional realm.