Four months in and Harley was starting to think this 'mother of a movement' thing was in competition with 'pregnancy' for award for most hyped with the least amount of impressive results. It sounded just lovely in theory, but more and more she was finding that with each passing day her restlessness and irritation grew and multiplied to the point that it became absolute loathing for anything that stepped within five feet of her.
Vincent...or Victor...or whatever the hell his name was--she just didn't care anymore--insisted it was just her hormones acting up.
She'd shown him hormones. Oh yes, she'd shown him good.
Served him right for leaving a sledge hammer lying around when he was asleep.
Bashing the bastard's skull in had taken the edge off, but two minutes later and she was crying and apologizing for what she'd done and two minutes after that she was beating on his motionless body, demanding he get up and help her and stop being such a slacker.
Either pregnancy was driving Harley around the bend even further, or she was just as unstable as everyone always said she was.
As for the 'mother of a movement' thing...well, that was going...
Not as well as she'd hoped.
Oh, there were a few genuine psychos in the ranks...those she trusted implicitly; but most of them were disgruntled teenagers trying to get in on the latest craze. They were useful meat shields, but nothing else, and as the weeks wore into months and Harley got bigger, angrier, surlier and closer to her due date, she started ordering them off into battle heartlessly just to get rid of them. They were stinkin' up the joint, in her opinion, and she ruled the troops as ruthlessly as the Joker would have if he'd still been around.
That was her one source of solace. The idea that he would have been damn proud of her efforts and thoughts of the fact that she was carrying her beloved Puddin's baby were sometimes the only things that kept her from sticking her head in the nearest oven.
By the time her second trimester dawned, Harley finally had the troops whipped into some sort of viable minion shape, through both fear and blackmail tactics, the Jokerz, as the news had acknowledged them (due to Harley encouraging them to start tagging buildings with the single word 'Jokerz' in purple, red and black) were taking Gotham by storm.
It was getting to the point that none of the other costumed villains could pull off a heist without one of her children managing to find a way into the equation.
As such, Harley had quite a few mounting enemies in the underworld, though the leader of the Jokerz was still incognito--merely spoken of as 'Mother'--and, for all intents and purposes, she was still dead.
Naturally, this made her feel very secure that no one would find out her true identity, track her down or intrude on her perfectly maintained lair...
Harley could say, with quite a bit of confidence, that she was completely untouchable.
But she was wrong.
---
While Harley Quinn was commanding her troops of 'Jokerz' down in the lesser used sewers of Gotham, the man known as Batman had been quietly, carefully gathering information; more carefully than he would have under ordinary circumstances so as to keep the reason he was so diligently searching for a dead woman under wraps. It was a delicate process, to search for someone without the people he was questioning knowing who he was searching for, but he had the methods mastered. So even though it was rather slow going, he was getting what he wanted.
And that's what counted, really.
Jim Gordon had been mildly upset with Batman for keeping such a huge secret from him, but after he'd had time to calm down and had everything explained to him (Though it was a heavily edited version of events, naturally. He didn't need to know how guilty Bruce felt over Harley.), he saw the logic of Batman's actions.
He wasn't happy about those actions, but he could understand why he'd done what he had. After all, in Arkham, Harley probably never would have been given the opportunity to become anything more than a permanent inpatient without any hope for escape or reintegration into society; outside of Arkham and without the Joker clouding her mind, she might've been able to recover and become normal again.
Being a compassionate man beneath all the layers of Hardboiled Police Commissioner, Gordon offered whatever assistance he could and made a point of keeping a critical, observant eye on the more unusual goings on in Gotham, hoping to help the dark knight in his quest to find the wayward woman.
And so it went, for close to three months, before they finally caught a break in the case.
Whoever had taken Harley from Binns' facilities had made a clean break and was very careful about covering their tracks, but when a body turned up at the morgue--beaten, bloody and bashed to bits--and the coroner confirmed the man had been bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer, there was no denying who was responsible. The method and the damage done to the body both screamed 'Harley Quinn'.
Unfortunately, it seemed that Batman and Commissioner Gordon weren't the only people on the lookout for clues in Harley's disappearance, which Batman found disturbing to no end. Gordon was the only person he'd confided in and when he started hearing that someone else was on the alert for anything Harley Quinn-esque, he felt a certain kind of dread trying to coil within him.
When the coroner turned up dead, via an ingested toxin, it was clear who had such an interest in Harley Quinn's whereabouts. It didn't take the world's greatest detective to figure out the crime had been committed by Gotham's own botanical terror and the only person in the universe who truly called Harley 'friend'.
Poison Ivy was on watch for Harley, that much was crystal clear.
It was almost enough to boggle Batman's mind; to think that she'd broken out of Arkham, only to search for Harley Quinn, rather than to start a crime spree the way she usually did wouldn't have seemed to fit Ivy's M.O. For anyone without an interest in psychology or a deep understanding of the criminal mind, it appeared to be lacking any logic.
Of course, Batman did understand the criminal mind, and what's more, he understood Ivy.
Poison Ivy was forced into complete isolation from other human beings. To have lost the only person who had broken down her barriers, the only person who cared about her, must have been a terrible blow to her psyche.
And if she'd found out that the friend she thought she lost was still alive and in hiding somewhere, Ivy would do anything she could to get her back, just to stave off the loneliness. In this, Batman and Ivy were very similar. The way she would search to the ends of the Earth for Harley, he would've searched for Tim or Barbara…even Dick.
Batman knew he couldn't completely understand the depths of Ivy's seclusion, because even though his little circle of family was small, he still had one. Before there had been a Robin, he had Alfred, after all, whereas Ivy was completely alone, without anyone to anchor her to the rest of the human race.
Once Batman grasped the fact that Ivy was also searching for Harley Quinn, he came to a rather unusual decision. Rather than searching for Ivy and catching her, thus leaving himself to do all the work alone, he would keep a close eye on her. After all, she was more likely to find out things from Gotham's underground than he was and she could probably find things out much easier than he could.
With this line of reasoning in mind, he let her run free in Gotham for three whole weeks, keeping tabs on her movements as best he could, before finally knowing that she'd found out wherever Harley was keeping herself hidden away.
It was on a mildly warm, early summer evening when he saw Ivy's eyes light up as she interrogated one of the Jokerz, and he heard the young man screech something about the sewers and 'mother'. A little more prodding and he revealed that 'mother' was called such not only because she was in charge of everything going on in the Jokerz ranks, but because she was heavy with child.
"Where?" Ivy screamed in the youth's face, one of her vines reaching around his throat and squeezing as it shook him back and forth. "Where in the sewers?!"
A Batarang shot out of nowhere, effectively giving away Batman's position concealed in the shadows as it sliced through the plant that was trying to throttle the life out of the teenage boy, dropping him gasping to the ground.
Poison Ivy spun on her heel, commanding some of her plants to lash out at the hero who'd been spying on her friendly little chat with the greasepaint covered teen.
"Don't you know it's rude to eavesdrop, Batman?" She hissed as he stepped out of the darkness and into her line of sight, valiantly fighting off the attempts of her flora to restrain him.
He didn't respond, opting instead to grab a canister from his utility belt and use the milky white contents--his own special brand of weed killer--on the vicious vegetation that was trying to spiral itself around him.
When the mixture hit the plant, it shrank back and Ivy let out an angry shriek, being able to feel the plant's pain through her link with it.
Yet ignoring her obvious agony, Batman continued to expose the plant life to the chemicals he held in his hand, until Ivy had slumped to the earth, unable to take the ache he was causing in one of her babies without collapsing.
The boy had attempted escape--no doubt to warn 'mother' of the events he'd seen occur--but Batman stopped him with a well placed kick to the head and a pair of handcuffs used to bind him to a dumpster in the alleyway.
Ivy was another matter entirely. She lay on the ground, chest heaving and eyes slightly glazed as Batman approached her fallen form and hauled her up with one hand, careful to restrain her with another pair of handcuffs as he did so.
She let out a devastating sob suddenly, startling the man in cape and cowl. "No! NO! I was so close!"
Ivy tried to turn to face him but Batman prevented her. "The only thing you're close to is another stay in Arkham, Ivy."
"Please! I have to see her! I've been searching for months!" Her voice was rough and pained as she continued to struggle to look her captor in the face. "I can't go back to Arkham now that I'm so close to finding her! You don't understand! It…it feels so empty without her. I have to see her! PLEASE!"
With a great deal of effort, Batman kept his demeanor neutral. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Liar!" She hissed. "You know who I'm talking about! You're the one who saved her! You're the one who put her in a hospital away from Arkham!" Ivy broke away enough to twist her torso so she could glimpse Batman's eyes. "Please, Batman, let me see her! I'll do anything you ask, I'll…I'll…anything!"
He grabbed her forearm, roughly turning her around to face him. "You know I can't do that. You're a criminal--"
"You bent the rules for her…I'm begging you, just this once, bend them for me," she said, a twinge of bitterness creeping into her tone. "I can't live without seeing her. Everything is so cold without her. I can't go back to that now that I know where she is! You're going to find her, I know you are, all I'm asking is that you take me with you. I'll go to Arkham quietly! I'll be a good little girl, I swear!" Another heart wrenching cry escaped from her throat. "Just let me see her!"
Batman found himself both puzzled and intrigued. Ivy was ordinarily a very strong individual, yet here she stood, shivering and shaking and begging to be allowed to see her friend, where Ivy would never, under normal circumstances, beg for anything. Not even the preservation of her own life would see her degrade herself to the level she currently was.
She looked so desperate, sounded so desperate, that for one agonizingly long moment, he entertained the idea of taking her with him.
Then his attitude righted itself and the hard vigilante mask was back in place, covering all signs that Bruce Wayne's messier emotions had tried to seep through their veneer. "No. You're going back to Arkham, Ivy. That's final."
Her shoulders sagged in defeat and if Batman hadn't known better, he could have sworn she was actually crying. Then she glanced up at him and there was a fire behind her eyes that told him he'd made a deadly mistake. He'd let his guard down for too long.
Batman barely had time to turn and register the movement of the plants that had miraculously revived themselves as their mistress distracted him before all went black.
As one of her plants fumbled about for the keys to her handcuffs, Ivy leaned over the fallen champion of Gotham to whisper, "You should have just said 'yes'."