V
I blinked. Kill me? Seems a bit extreme.
"Why kill her?" I asked conversationally, searching for the fear that had suddenly fled from me.
He rolled his shoulders back, half shrugging, half stretching. "Why wouldn't I? Deserters get shot. And Harley—oh, she'd be one hell of a deserter. Oh, I know how you feel about killing," he drawled indifferently. "If it makes you feel any better, she'd probably try to do the same to me."
Fear, where are you? Your boyfriend just said he'd kill you if you ever leave him. That's usually your cue to call the police and get a useless restraining order.
But no. No fear. Calm in its place—serenity, acceptance but not resignation. These were terms I found fully satisfactory. Why? Because I had no intention whatsoever of leaving him. Oh, for a few days, maybe, a few weeks, even, when I was absolutely sick of his brutal behavior—but never for good, and I thought he could tell the difference.
"She loves you," I asserted, nearly forgetting the little game I was playing.
He laughed then, shrill and high and ragged, teeth bared and eyes closing amidst a mass of gleeful creases. "What?" I asked, getting angry at the reaction. "She does." At that moment, I needed him to believe that. Hell, I tried to show him every single day. Maybe hearing it from Batman would change his mind. He did seem to revere the vigilante as almost a deity, albeit a deity that he wanted to torture and break and quite possibly eventually kill, if he ever decided to retire one day.
"Oh, love," he said cheerfully. "Ya know, I think it's chaos's greatest creation. Absolutely no sense to it, none at all, defies our most basic, er, programming. You ever loosen up enough to love someone, Bats?" Every time he said the word, it was fairly dripping with scorn—the idea inspired distaste in him, I got that. Didn't change facts.
I ignored the question. "If she doesn't love you, then why does she put up with it all?" I demanded.
"Ohh," he groaned, and with a quick, jerky series of moves, he threw himself onto the bed—finally—and laid his cuffed hand flat for the first time in hours, hissing and working the fingers as the blood rushed to the neglected area. "Well. That's an interesting question with a boring answer."
I waited for his response, aware that my hands were shaking slightly. Welcome back, fear.
He tightened his fingers into a fist. "Harley Quinn is a scared little girl, Bats. She's been a scared little girl… for her whole life. But she's got a spark in her—she's got a craving that she can't satisfy on her own. If you look around her, look at the company she kept before me… you'll see smart people. Forceful people, charismatic people—not a whole lot of Mr. and Mrs. Does. No, no no—Harley latches onto people she finds incredible. They whip that spark up into a nice, big ol' flame, and she needs that. Without them, she's just plainclothes, glasses-on Harleen, would-be gymnast, boring therapist—no blood, no guts, and definitely no glory."
A chill shot down my spine, lifting goosebumps to the surface of my skin. His words stung, in large part because—as much as I hated to admit it—they were true. Without the Jonathans, the Pams, the Js of the world, I tended to settle onto a nice little beaten-out path.
"And me," he continued, watching the ceiling with heavy eyes, "well. Kinda hard to be modest here, big guy. I'm the… uh, the cream of that specific crop. She's never gonna meet someone more than me." He left the 'more' undressed. He didn't have to qualify it; I knew exactly what he meant and knew the truth in the statement. "She's obsessed. Obsession isn't love, and it certainly has an expiration date."
"I disagree with that," I said quietly. To my astonishment, I found that I had to fight my throat to get the words out, and there were tears pooling in the corners of my eyes. Get a grip, I told myself forcefully.
"Oh, do you," he muttered, not asking a question. "Then let me put it in terms you might understand. You ever seen the girl?"
"Yes."
"Cute as… as a button. Perfect shiny hair, perfect shiny smile, big blue eyes, perfect size—hell, the girl's perfect down to her shiny little fingernails." I looked self-consciously at my nails, clipped a bit short so that I could do the work I was called on to do, but French manicured, glossy at the bases.
He sat up suddenly, making me jump slightly back, but he just loomed there, deadpan. "Now look at me."
As I realized where he was going with this, my heart hurt.
"I'm a freeeeaaaak." He'd never cared for the word and basically lost his shit when he heard it from others, but he drew it out emphatically now. There was absolutely no self-pity and no self-loathing in his tone; he wasn't agonizing about the drastic difference in our appearances. Rather, he was glorying in it. The stabbing pain in my heart receded slightly. It still hurt that he thought that looks had anything to do with it, but knowing that he didn't resent me for it…
Well, of course he doesn't resent you, I scolded myself sharply. He doesn't give a shit about that. He's just looking at the evidence. Cold, clinical evidence.
"Look," he commanded. "Scars and all. Paint. Matted green hair, and half the time I'm carrying nitroglycerine home to her on my hands. Now, really. Looking at us, would you really say we have a chance? Honest opinion here, Bats. Give it to me straight."
"I think she likes the way you look," I said emphatically. And I did. Yes, sometimes on a whim I'd try to imagine him pre-scars, pre-dye, pre-purple, just pre—but I always found that I preferred what I had to the stunning man my imagination would come up with. I saw glimpses of that man in J anyway—this way I had it all. "Maybe she's not as shallow as you think."
He drew a wincing breath in through his teeth. "Well, it's not really about her. World's rules, you know. Pretty li'l blonde thing like her doesn't belong anywhere near someone so bone ugly, and the rest of the world knows it. I dunno how it'll happen—uh, a pretty-boy hostage… a ruggedly handsome henchman, maybe—but the world will make her see. Aaaaaaand…" He clicked his tongue, indicating his certainty in the prediction.
Beneath the surface, I seethed. He is not ugly, I thought fiercely. He's not. He's not.I couldn't tell him that, though. Not right now.
I held it down and found another outlet. "Well, isn't your job to break the world's rules? Why not that one?"
"Er, that one, it… requires two people's cooperation, open dedication, et cetera, et cetera… and you know as well as I do, big guy—you gotta do every-thing yourself."
This declaration didn't hurt. I knew this full well already—me and the henchmen notwithstanding, J was a firm believer in the adage "You want something done right, do it yourself." His independence was a force to be reckoned with, and I'd learned not to trifle with it.
"Do you think you'll ever trust her to really help you?" The question was resigned. I sensed the answer already.
J, as always, surprised me. "I… I dunno, maybe," he said rapidly, dismissively. "Can't say. All unclear." He groaned, settling himself more comfortably on the bed. "Ooooh, wow. These drugs are—ooh, they're really kickin' in. How much time do you figure we've got left before I'm out?"
Weirdo, I thought, not without affection. There was absolutely nothing in that ibuprofen that would make him woozy; if he was feeling tired, it was all him—and it was hardly surprising, considering his attempt to marathon it these past few days. He needed all the rest he could get.
I couldn't resist one more question, though, try as I might—in truth, I didn't even want to ask it, knew that I didn't want to know the answer, know it for sure. Still, I couldn't prevent it from emerging from slightly shaking lips: "Do you love her?"
And that, it seemed, was the million-dollar question. J went stiff, opened hazy eyes and stared at the ceiling, dark irises rolling rapidly from one side to the other. He hissed, and quietly, he asked, "Why? Are you… jealous?"
"No," I said, keeping calm control of my tone. "Just curious."
That seemed to trigger him, though, and the boldness of the question combined with the exhaustion he was clearly feeling ensured that I was shit out of luck. He simply chuckled softly at one of his many private jokes and fell silent. When I got up to check on him again, he had fallen asleep. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought that the heat on his skin had receded just a bit.
I sighed, rearranged his arms so he wasn't cutting off his blood flow, and then retreated to the desk once more to collect my thoughts and decide how to feel about it all.
What the hell was that? I thought, slightly stunned by the amount of open information—about me, no less—that I had just received. It was unprecedented—J scorned the idea of talking about 'us.' Sure, he wasn't shy with his opinions about me, about the way we worked, but… the Joker talking to me about me was different than him talking to Batman about me. He played games with me, had motives—not that he didn't do the same with our droll Caped Crusader, but the Joker was unswervingly honest with Batman. I couldn't be sure of the same on my part.
I'd gotten way more than I'd hoped for, and that in itself confused me. A simple hallucination lasting that long? It made no sense, not with the Joker interacting calmly with me and carrying the belief that I was Batman despite lots and lots of physical evidence to the contrary. To the best of my imagination, it had been an extended fever dream of sorts, or maybe a materialization of the shadows always at the edges of his mind, his usual ability to distinguish between fiction and reality weakened due to the sickness.
Or maybe he was exactly a hundred percent aware of what was going on and was playing me. I could see that. Mind games were his forte, after all; I couldn't dismiss any realistic possibilities. Somehow, I doubted it. Logically, the only reason to pull that charade would be to express his concerns without looking like he was expressing his concerns, and that sort of sidestepping the issue would be completely against his character. He enjoyed plowing straight through territory that most people considered sensitive. Shying away here would make no sense.
Now, as for what he'd told actually me…
Operating under the assumption that he'd been telling the truth, there were both good and bad things to be extracted from the discourse I'd surreptitiously shared with him, of course—heaven forbid he ever be simple or easy.
Good first—he believed I was getting somewhere, really thought so, which was extremely encouraging. It meant I wasn't just deluding myself. Obviously I couldn't ever compare to him—he made villainy into a high art, an exquisite work that we humble humans couldn't ever dream of touching. I hadn't entered the game to compete with him, though, so this didn't disturb me. The fact that he thought I could be helpful was thrilling.
And now for the bad. The Joker thought—had convinced himself that he knew—that this was just a phase, an aberration, by its very nature something that I would move on from someday. Whoops, sorry J, I thought it would be okay but I'm really not/that's a little too much blood for me/I'm just gonna run away with this hunky clown you just recruited/kids die when you throw them out of moving buses? I didn't realize that; I'm out now.
Please.
I sighed. I was just realizing once again what I already knew deep-down—that there were no freebies with J, that I was going to have to prove myself over and over until I'd clawed my way up from the starting point. I didn't know how long I was going to have to work to prove to him that I had no intention of leaving him, not now and not ever. If I said I wasn't frustrated that I'd made so little progress in nearly six months, I'd be lying, but hell, I was used to playing by his rules by now. If his rules said he had to hold me at emotional arm's length for an undetermined amount of time due to his certainty that I'd leave, then I'd find some way to be okay with that.
I would be more discouraged if I didn't know how incredible it was that I'd already gotten this close. With or without his ultimate trust, I believed I was the nearest and dearest to the Joker, inasmuch as anyone could be near or dear to him. Almost everyone was expendable to him—hostages, henchmen, police, average everyday Gotham folks…
Not me—at least, not nearly as much as they were. He might not actively shield me from harm, but he'd been known to pull me out of its way every now and again. He let me in his private space, he often shared thoughts and plans, almost absent-mindedly, undercutting the significance of this activity—henchmen often didn't know what he was doing to the day of, and certainly weren't privy to the rough draft version.
In fact, the only one who I could really view as a rival for J's attention was, of course, Batman. Batman, who consumed the Joker's waking thoughts, who yielded such rich opportunity for torment and destruction. Of course J loved to torture and torment on his own, but with Batman… ohh, with Batman, he had a nemesis. He had someone entirely capable of fighting back, a pinpointed center of the city to target.
In a lot of ways, I think he trusted Batman to be what he was more than he trusted me to be what I was. And again, I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little stir of jealousy at that, but it was accompanied by a feeling of resignation. After all, Batman had been protecting this city for a couple of years now and he'd never showed as much as a chink in the armor. He'd risked his own life to avoid killing the Joker, I'd been told late one night as he shaved, talking carelessly around the straight razor, and for this reason I both appreciated Batman and loathed him. He was stoic, unchangeable, and for this reason he would fascinate the Joker till the end of time—or until he cracked, whichever came first.
Hey, though, I tried to bolster myself. If you didn't have any sort of rivalry, it would get boring, and you know how much you hate boredom.
I realized that I had crossed my arms over my chest, that my jaw was jutting out sullenly in response to my train of thought, and I quickly pulled the sulk back, even though J wasn't conscious to see it. Snap out of it, I told myself sternly. You've got too much to focus on to give undue credence to your insecurities.
I shoved the thoughts to the back of my mind and refocused my thoughts on the task at hand.
The Joker slept like a stone. He didn't even stir the two times I hauled his head up so that I could force some water down his throat, swallowing automatically without as much as a token resistance, and I took the opportunity to feed him some more ibuprofen. I worried for a while that when he finally awoke, he'd still be stuck in the midst of his delusions, but that fear slowly receded along with his fever—I checked every four hours or so and was pleased to note that as far as I could tell, it was slowly, slowly going down.
After the first twelve hours, I determined to release him the moment he was conscious again, but he continued to sleep. Before my very eyes, I saw evidence of the healing power of this rest, acting more quickly than I would have thought possible—the cold sweats disappeared completely and his breathing leveled out and came easier, free of the labored, wet sounds his lungs had been producing over the past few days. The deep illness-pained furrows smoothed out of his face, the rapid twitching of his eyes behind their lids watching fever dreams slowed and left him looking almost peaceful—almost. "Peace" and "the Joker" weren't exactly terms that went very well together.
Finally, after a full twenty-four hours of sleep, twenty-four hours which I spent alternatively keeping an eye on him, helping where I could, and taking hour naps here and there, he shifted.
I glanced up hopefully. His eyes didn't immediately open; he brought his free hand to his forehead and groaned loudly before the lids twitched and swept up. He stared at the ceiling for a moment, his eyes flicked back and forth, then he turned his head—right, then left, checking out his surroundings with the full appearance of calm and awareness. He rolled his eyes over to me, and, turning on his side lazily, making no move to sit up, he drawled, "Don't tell me ya got someone to help you move me up here."
I released a relieved breath that I hadn't been aware I was holding and got up from the desk chair. He doesn't remember. "No," I answered conversationally, reaching for the matchbox. I dumped all the contents on the desk and sifted through the pile of matches until I found the tiny silver key amidst them. "That you did yourself."
I spotted the brief light of mild surprise in his eye before it disappeared. He rested back on the bed, affecting disinterest as I rounded the desk and went over to him. "What's the date?"
"It's the twentieth. You slept for a full day," I said, approaching the bed.
He raised himself up on one elbow, turning his paint-mottled face up to me in response in response to my new proximity, a look of near-defiance on his face—I think I surprised him, coming close like that. The starting words of some sharp, well-aimed comment were on his lips, but I was in no mood to bandy words with him after the trying hours we'd just been through. I sank down on one knee on the mattress, gripped his face firmly between my hands, and kissed him.
I got the distinct impression, judging from his complete lack of reaction, that I had taken him by surprise. Likely he'd expected cringing apologies, thought that I'd just toss him the keys and then flee while he was busy securing his freedom. I didn't think so. Oh, I would ditch this place for a little while, of that I was sure (he was bound to have come up with numerous revenge plots during his unwilling confinement, and I wasn't exactly interested in sticking around to watch him enact them), but I figured his first priority would be getting back into the swing of things, so I had at least a few hours before I started to see his cruelty in full force. Before I left, I wanted to make sure he knew that I felt the same as always about him.
I took thorough advantage of his surprise, deepening and lengthening the kiss until his brain caught up to his body and he wound his fingers into my hair at the left, fisting his hand and pulling my face back from his.
"Hmmm," he rumbled thoughtfully and suspiciously, looking me in the eyes. "Trying to… butter me up?" He liberated one thumb from the handful of hair, reaching over and stroking the bruised and battered flesh at the side of my face, a bit too harshly for it to qualify as a caress. I winced at the roughness and the resulting twinges of pain but didn't try to pull away, instead glancing down at his imprisoned hand and fitting the key into the cuffs.
"Uh-uh," I said in denial. "I just wanted to do that before I did this." With a twist of the key, the cuff came loose, and I pulled it off of J's silver wrist an air of almost defiant finality. With his liberation complete, I looked into his eyes, silently asking for a reaction.
His grip on my hair loosened but didn't release. He glanced down at his suddenly-freed hand, flexed the fingers experimentally, then reached up with it and grasped my chin. Finger and thumb bit into my cheek below the bone, holding me steady, and I didn't attempt to avert my gaze as he studied my face curiously, looking for an ulterior motive to my apparently unexpected compliance.
"Hmm," he said again, this time with an air of slight bemusement, but shrugged it off for the time being, loosening both hands and withdrawing from me. He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back as he rose, on his feet for the first time in many hours but spitefully steady. "Don't go anywhere, Haaaaarley," he said over his shoulder, then disappeared into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.
Not likely, J, I thought wryly, sitting up straight again and staring at the bathroom door as the shower started running. I was definitely going to give him some time to catch up, seethe, and then get too distracted by Gotham's happenings to remember that he was particularly annoyed with me.
To Pam's, I thought, smirking as I got up to throw a few things into a bag. And doubtless she'll want to know why I smell so funky. Somehow, I didn't think my explanation of "I didn't want to take a shower because I was afraid my boyfriend would die while I was in the other room/one of his henchmen would come in and free him while I was busy" would go over too well; I made a mental note to come up with a slightly saner one.
I glanced at the bathroom door one last time before finally leaving the room. Yes, I'm leaving, I admitted to myself.
But I will definitely be back.
Final Notes - I feel like this ending may have been a disappointment to some of the readers who were expecting a great big physical blowup between the two, but a gigantic altercation was never the point, not in this story- that's what my longer bits are for. For short pieces like this, physicality is never the point, not with me. No, this- this was a study, a way to sort out some of the dynamics of the relationship and expose them briefly for our view.
That said, I think the discussion featured in the latter half of chapter four and the beginning half this chapter is my favorite part of the story. I'm fond of the idea that Harley sort of seeks out electric people in order to enhance her own life, to make her a greater person. Additionally, I wanted to talk about physical appearance. It's pretty obvious that Harley in canon conforms to the idea of a typical cute girl, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, basically the cheerleader fantasy with a darker twist, and while I don't think the Joker cares about looks, he's bound to have noticed the discrepancy between the two of them. I try to dwell on some of the Joker's more unappealing physical aspects (even from Harley's perspective, which is bound to be a bit more giving than the average Gothamite's), because I think we tend to forget, watching him safely from behind a screen, that he would certainly not be as appealing in real life as we like to make him seem. At the same time, Harley adores him, so she's looking from behind rose-tinted glasses, and she's our narrator, so...
I'm rambling now. I just enjoyed this opportunity to sort of take a break from the hectic lifestyle to which the Joker ascribes to take a look at what goes on in their quiet moments, which are few and far between. If you liked it too, you should tell me so that I know I'm not crazy. For that matter, if you disliked it, you should tell me and explain why. A good critic is an author's best friend. Either way, thanks for sticking around this far. There will be more work in this fandom around before much longer, hope to see you all then!
