Outside the Joker's latest lair, two dead bodies lay in identical pools of gore--just as they had several months before, when Harley Quinn had slain two similar henchmen--but this time, it wasn't the Joker who stepped over the corpses, but a grimly determined Columbine. Unlike her paramour, there was no spring in her step--indeed, she seemed almost hesitant, yet strangely resolute as well. Her eyes were cold--almost to the point of being glassy--as she entered the lair.

Her furrowed brow relaxed, the creases disappearing as her eyes locked on the bright pillar of purple leaning over a drawing table laden with blueprints, scribbling madly on what was sure to be a fresh plan for the downfall of Batman.

Slipping into a cool attitude that was purely superficial, Columbine slunk up behind the Joker and laid one hand on his shoulder affectionately and the other slithered around his waist.

Not surprisingly, he shook her off just as he would have Harley Quinn, going so far as to reach behind himself and shove her back a few feet. "Not now. I'm exceedingly--"

The Joker barely registered the glint off the tip of the hypodermic needle; and by the time he did, it was already buried in his back.

Columbine pressed the plunger on the needle, filling his bloodstream with the strongest tranquilizer she'd been able to find that wouldn't kill him and smirked as his limp form hit the floor with a thud.

Now the games could begin…

---

The Joker came to three hours later and was quite put out to find himself hog-tied on the floor, lying on his side and facing Columbine. She sat on the make-shift drawing table, sifting through his plans, not paying him any mind whatsoever.

Well, he couldn't have that

"You bitch!"

She didn't start; she didn't jump. Columbine simply turned disinterested eyes on her captive as though just remembering he was lying there.

"Oh. You're awake." She hopped down from her perch and dropped onto her knees next to him. Columbine brushed his green curls out of his eyes in a mockery of a caring gesture and smiled at him. "I was worried I might have given you too much."

He glared at her, pouring such heat into his gaze she should have been turned to ash before his eyes and spat, "You'll pay for this, Columbine."

"I doubt it. You won't live long enough to see me pay for anything." She bared her teeth in a grin that wasn't anywhere near disturbing as his own but still unsettling in its own right. "Do you have any idea how long I've waited for this moment? To see you prone before me like a lamb with its head on the chopping block."

His voice trembled with cold fury. "I'll kill you, you know. I'll slit you open and dance in your entrails."

"How romantic." She ran her fingers over his cheek as she spoke. "But we don't have time for anything quite so elaborate, dearest. I mean, I've already wasted so much time waiting for you to wake up so I could see your face when I kill you…it's definitely down to crunch time."

He snapped his teeth at her like a hungry piranha and she yanked her hand back.

"Tsk, if you're going to be like that, I'll just slit your throat and have done with it."

"You've gone to too much trouble to keep me alive to do that, Collie," he replied with maddeningly clear logic. "Why?"

"Why…why am I bent on killing you? Why am I bothering to converse with you beforehand? You'll have to be more specific."

"I've been good to you, Collie, better than you deserve!"

She shrugged. "That may be true, but I have a job to do."

"Someone hired you."

A deep, sharp bark of laughter was his answer. "You still don't understand, do you? Oh you poor foolish man. You poor, poor uninformed foolish man! Nobody hired me…not directly, anyway. I'm doing this on behalf of Harley Quinn. She really wants this, you know."

"Harley would never--"

"Wouldn't she?" Columbine leveled her eyes at him. "Maybe you don't know us both as well as you think you do."

"You're in cahoots!"

"What an interesting way to put it! Tell me, when's the last time you brushed up on your Mother Goose, beloved? Because there's one rhyme in particular--rather rare to find it in its entirety printed anywhere these days--but it mentions two things that are very important to your current situation. Famed Harlequin and Sweet Columbine...and what's more, the rhyme's core message is the art of transformation." Columbine gestured grandly. "That's the joke. You're the Joker and you didn't understand the joke. It's the ultimate punch line, really. I am Harley Quinn and I am Columbine."

He looked at her with growing comprehension, yet still in shock at the theory surfacing in his mind.

She smirked at him. "Split personalities are such fun, don't you agree?"

The Joker shook himself out of his shocked stupor forcefully. "But you said you'd met her! Fought her!"

"Oh, I have!" Columbine tapped her forehead. "In here. You'll be proud to know she's been fighting me tooth and nail every step of the way, but I am the stronger of us. She's gotten out a few times and taken the body off on jolly little jaunts about town...disoriented, of course; but I ultimately regained control. For the most part, now we just wage war inside...it's almost sad, the way she thinks she's watching things unfold through her own eyes when really she's seeing the world through mine.

"Haven't you ever noticed any similarities between us, Joker? Oh, our attitudes, appearances and voices are different, to be sure...but our--my fighting style remained exactly the same as Harley's--if a bit more disciplined. I share her height, weight, body type...even with my name I threw you a hint and you still didn't get it. It should have been blindingly obvious, even to someone as obsessively self absorbed as you."

"How? HOW?! How could you be…be…her?!"

"I'm not her. We may share the same body but we are very different entities. Down to my mental marrow I am everything that Harley isn't. That's how I was designed."

She drew a switchblade and flicked it open.

"The first time you hit her and shredded that little layer of lies that she kept bound about herself like armor, something inside her cracked. Splintered off. A little piece of Harley that was kept separate from the rest of her. That little piece of herself was where she stuffed all the negative emotions and feelings of rejection that you continually subjected her to with your abuse...and when you dropped her off the Ellinstad, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. That piece was finally substantial enough to become something more than scar tissue. It wasn't Harley Quinn who awoke in that hospital room, it was me. She couldn't handle waking to a world where her rose tinted vision of you proved to be nothing more than illusion and sleight of hand...she needed me to take over. I'm her coping mechanism, now...and I have you to thank for my emergence from the deepest part of her psyche."

Columbine reached out and forced the Joker onto his back.

"How many times do you think she looked at herself in the mirror without her greasepaint and saw the ugly purple bruises that were left as a testament of your love? Do you think any woman can look at that kind of damage and not have some piece of herself that hates the man who did it? The deepest, darkest part that she won't acknowledge--the part that wants nothing more than to see her abuser dead?" Columbine laughed, eyes glistening with unshed tears of mirth. "I am that part! You made me.

"I love irony...and that's what this whole sordid affair is: pure, unadulterated irony. Just as the Batman unintentionally created you, you created me...and just as you've sworn to be his downfall, I have promised myself that I will be yours. But unlike you...I'll succeed."

Inexplicably, the Joker started to cackle. Columbine was stunned into silence, the speech she'd prepared for months forgotten in the space of an instant.

"Oh, you didn't really think I didn't know, did you?" he hooted, laughing like it was the greatest joke he'd ever heard. "Oh, Columbine, how stupid do you think I am?"

"You knew?" she asked, dumbfounded.

"Of course I knew, pookie." His gaze went cold, hard and mirthless--completely mismatched with his maniacal grin. "I was just playing along."

"You couldn't have been! I…I was so--"

"Predictable!" he exclaimed musically. "So terribly, terribly predictable!"

"But--"

"But nothing." His smile took on a coldblooded quality. "Oh, ho, so Harley pulled a Harvey Dent and grew another personality--she's a little more screwdle in the noodle than she was to begin with and it's all my fault. Am I supposed to be surprised?"

Columbine looked absolutely dismayed.

"It's Gotham, sweetums," he said chillingly, "I was just rolling with the punches."

"You…you couldn't have known. Not really. You wouldn't have let me get close enough to--"

"I just wanted to see how your little game played out," he replied carelessly. "So, here we are. A bit pedestrian, doll. I was expecting something a little more creative than drugging me and tying me up. I'm disappointed in you, I must say, but now that you've had your fun--la dee dah, we're all terribly impressed--I suggest you be a good little girl and untie daddy."

"No." She fixed him with a steely glare. "No, I have a job to do, even if you suspected, that doesn't change anything. I still have to--"

"Untie me!" he roared. "If I'm feeling charitable, I might let you limp away from this."

"I'm going to kill you, Joker," she said with finality.

Anger gave way to smugness and he smirked at her. "And what will you do when I'm gone, hm? Harley can't live without me!"

"You forget, dear heart." Columbine slammed the blade into the Joker's chest, wiping the smirk away. "I'm not Harley."