Harley's grin laced up her cheeks, the dried blood taut across her skin. The laugh burbled from her lips, and she did ill to suppress it. Her voice echoed through the empty room as she looked at the treasure between her fingers. The texture was something akin to parchment – dried, leathery. Her mouth opened wider, as if mirroring the numerous times she had seen him contort his features the same way.
"I got you, Mista' J. And I ain't neva lettin' you go!" She squawked, her chortles growing to a deafening pitch. Her fingers became a vise around the mask of flesh, and her eyes bore holes into the tattered skin that once belonged to her crude lover. Her mind reeled as she glanced down at this item, the one that caused her to elude the Suicide Squad, the one that led her to incite the riot at the prison. She was alarmingly aware that Deadshot would be the first to get her, and she took some wicked delight that she would have her two lovers together at last.
"Oh, Mista' J. Do you remember? How we met? Ya made me blush. They all thought I was crazy for takin' your case… But… you were just such a charmer…" She allowed herself a lovesick sigh. The tempest of emotions that battered her back and forth made her head spin. She was sickened by her bouts of love and waves of loathing for the visage between her tapered fingers.
"You made me like this, yanno. I would still be little Harleen if it weren't for ya." She sneered, her nose scrunched acutely as she contemplated still existing as the meek young psychiatrist who came through the gates of Arkham trembling. No more was she Harleen – in fact, all that had been somewhat of a distant memory to her. She could only faintly recall, as much as it alarmed her, the days which she had been the timid blonde, and the days when she was still shiny-faced from her college graduation. She yearned, sometimes, when shadows crept across her room, for the days when she was eager to face life, still optimistic, still wise and yet so naïve. Now she was Harley. A villain. A sidekick. Tossed to the side and forgotten. Recruited by the Suicide Squad because she was expendable.
But looking down unto the skin of the one who gave her world a slap in the cheek, turning her from the Harleen Quinzel of the past into the Harley Quinn she knew herself to be today, she felt a flame blossom within her that she knew could not be quelled. It was anger, sadness, confusion.
"Whyd'ya go and do that, Mista' J?" She choked, her eyes falling to the ivory face that covered her palm, each wrinkle another road in some map to a lost place. "You made me like this, but then ya left me. Ya couldn't've at least stuck it out with me?" She forced out a bitter laugh. The sound in the empty room frightened her, the reverberations were shadows, spirits, specters of the person she had left behind outside of Arkham's looming gates, and they leered eerily. She was helpless at the sight of the Joker's visage, although the blank space where his gawping grin would be, like a cage of yellowed teeth between his lips, gave her a distant shiver.
It was only then she had heard it – the subtle change in the room. The sound of him. Deadshot. And as the same smile swirled up her cheeks, making her tears stretch tightly across her ivory skin, her eyes fell to the flesh clamped between her fists.
"Let's have a chat, huh, Mista' J?" She chirped, turning meaningfully on her heel.