Later that day, Dick was working on the jet, when Harley came over and sat on her makeshift clothesline. She was wearing the torn remnants of her black and red jester suit with her mask and hood on. He had sealed all the holes and needed to get the water out of the jet. The more water and silt he removed from the aircraft, the lighter it got. By the end of the day, he reckoned he would have the jet floating atop the ocean's surface.

"Is that how we're gonna get out of here?" Harley asked.

Dick lifted his head. "No. I can have it floating, but I won't be able to fix the GPS, flaps, or the flight systems," he explained. Harley wondered why he was fighting so hard to fix it then. Dick told her that having the jet available meant effort-free transportation from one island to the next. "No need for paddles or oars. If she can float, we can use her to get to the other islands." He said it could also provide shelter from the rain, shade from the sun, and warmth from the cold.

"Do you need help?"

He looked down at her arm, still in a sling. "Don't worry about it."

"Don't say that. I wanna be useful," said Harley. Dick mulled it over.

"I could do with some company," he said. Harley leaned back on her makeshift folding frame. She said she was willing to sit and chat. Dick used a bucket he'd found in the jet's supply closet to toss gallons of water out of the partially submerged jet. Harley asked if he wanted to talk about space some more. "Maybe tonight…"

Dick asked Harley about her family. "I told you. It's just me and Mr J."

"You were half-asleep when you said that so I didn't know if you were being sincere or not."

"I'm always sincere, puddin'."

"I thought Mr J was your 'puddin''," Dick smirked.

Harley rolled her eyes. "Anyone can be my puddin'. Mr J is my romantic puddin', and you're my platonic puddin'." Dick asked if she had any parents. She shook her head, no. He asked about children. "Nope."

"Do you want children?"

"Mr J doesn't want children. He says it's a weakness because people can use children against you," Harley said.

Dick climbed to the top of the jet and dumped a bucketful of water into the ocean. "I didn't ask about Mr J, I asked whether you want children or not."

"You didn't ask about him, but it takes two to tango, and–"

"And we know how your dance partner feels about it. How do you feel?"

Harley plucked away at loose straws of wood as she sat on her folding frame. "I did want kids. Who wouldn't want kids? Having little versions of you running around, growing old with them, robbing banks and blowing stuff up together…" Dick rose out of the jet and cocked his brow. "Sorry. Force of habit."

"Mhm."

"What about you? Do you want kids?"

"Yep."

"How many?"

"I don't know… one?"

"One? But they'll get lonely?"

Dick shrugged. He hadn't put any thought into this topic until now. He had only recently turned nineteen, so he still felt like a kid himself. Dick didn't know what the ideal number of children was, so he just went along with whatever Harley thought was best. "Then three?"

"Three?! How will you give them all equal levels of attention? What if the second one suffers from middle child syndrome and they grow up feeling 'caught in the middle' like in that show with Frankie Muniz and Bryan Cranston? What was it called again?"

Dick dumped a bucket of water into the ocean. He shrugged. "I don't know… I don't watch much TV, but… I choose the right answer. The right number of kids."

"So two?"

"Yeah, two."

"I want two children too. Either two children or eight."

"Eight?" Dick lifted himself out of the jet. How were two people supposed to handle eight children? The two kids suggestion made more sense. He looked at it analytically: Two children, two parents. Each parent could give half their love and attention to each child, meaning one hundred percent of each parent's devotion was to their child. Thus, no child would feel left out or underappreciated.

Harley scolded him. She told him he was being too much of a nerd about it. "There's no mathematical equation for love. You have two children because one can be an older sibling and the other can be a younger sibling."

"And the eight children are for?"

"Once you've passed two, you might as well get crazy with it." And Harley was nothing if not crazy.

The jet began to rattle. Dick dumped another bucket of water into the ocean. The jet moaned as it started to shift. Harley told him to get out of there. Dick told her that it was fine. He jumped back down into the water and pulled another bucket out, and another, and another.

The jet finally crackled and let out one last bellow. It flipped onto its stomach and splashed Harley with a wave of water. She let out a yelp. "Are you okay?" Harley asked.

"Yeah, I'm good," Dick called out. The ship was floating and the water was sitting at ankle-height. He climbed out of the hole in the jet's left-side panel and took a swim to the right side to see how much damage had been done. The right wing had been ground off by the crash, so there was no way they were getting in the air.

Dick climbed back into the jet.

"Do you need my help?"

"I'm good."

Dick pulled open the control panel to see a bunch of wires, some torn, some just wet. Harley asked if everything was okay in the jet. Dick told her about the wet wires. She told him to be careful, but he told her that Batman's jets were made to survive lightning, fires, and superpowered energy blasts, so he wasn't as concerned about that as she was. "Maybe try putting them in rice? That usually works for me," Harley said. Dick rolled his eyes and chuckled. He followed some of the wires to see where they led, trying to salvage what could be salvaged. "Well, do you still wanna talk?" Harley asked.

"Sure. What do you want to talk about?"

"I don't know. Stuff. What's Batman usually like?"

Dick lay on his back, pulling at, disconnecting, and reconnecting wires. He wondered how much he wanted to tell her. "Uh, exactly how he acts with you, he acts with me."

"Well, he's usually punching me in the face, so I doubt he's doing the same to you."

"You'd be surprised."

"He hits you, too?"

"I was making a… no, no, he doesn't hit me. But he's a very tough teacher. He never stops being Batman."

"So, is he like a father to you? You said your parents were killed by Tony. Did he adopt you or something?"

Dick squinted. "No," he lied. "But he made sure to keep an eye on me while I was growing up. He said I had great potential and that if I could turn the anger in my heart into a lust for vengeance, I would be unstoppable."

"Hardcore."

"What about you and the Joker? How did you meet?"

"I forgot?"

"I thought we were being honest with each other," Dick said.

"I am! Everything before I became Harley Quinn is hazy. I just remember waking up in Arkham Asylum one day and it's been me and my puddin' ever since." Dick remained silent. She called out to him. Dick sat up and climbed out of the jet. He sat on the jet's opening. She told him he had oil and dust on his face.

"Your name was Harleen Quinzel."

"Harleen… Q–"

"Dr Harleen Quinzel to be exact. You were a psychologist and a brilliant mind. You were one of Arkham Asylum's best therapists, capable of rehabilitating even the most far-gone of criminals," Dick told her. "Until they assigned you to the Joker. No one knows what happened but your appointments with him became more frequent and much longer. Hindsight is 20/20, but now we know that he was manipulating you and somehow turned you from a young, smart doctor into what you are today."

"And what am I today?"

"Redeemable."

Harley froze. She looked around. "How do you know all that about me?"

"Batman knows a lot more about you then he lets on. Batman knows everything about everyone, and since I was once his sidekick, I had to know everything too."

"Everything?"

"Everything. I feel like a protagonist in a Lovecraftian horror. Cursed with a thousand lives of despair, and all I can do is babble incoherently about it." Dick told her that he would help her escape this cycle of evil if it was the last thing he did.

"Hm. It's getting late. We should probably get started with lunch… or dinner. Or, linner? Dunch?"

"I have something I want to show you," Dick said. He disappeared into the jet and reconnected the last few wires. The jet came to life, slowly but surely. The headlights came on and the soft hum of engines firing broke through the sounds of soft waves and rustling trees. The rudder and the energy-propulsion systems were still working, so Dick was able to steer the jet onto land. He deployed the front wheel – which was the only wheel still attached to the jet – and left it on the shore. He turned it off and jumped off.

Harley gave him a round of applause. "How much fuel do we have in this bad boy?" she asked.

"Well, since it has no wings, we don't have any jet fuel… but it's solar-powered, so we just need to leave it with its roof facing the sun and we'll be good for a few hours," Dick told her about how they could go between the numerous islands a bit faster now. Unfortunately, it was still slow and unstable, so they needed to avoid rough seas and stay within the island chain.

Dick hugged Harley. "Not that I'm complaining, but what was that for?"

"I don't know, I achieved something on my own, so I'm overcome by a lot of emotions right now," Dick said. "I just needed to… do something about those emotions."

"In that case, come here, kid." Harley pulled him in but told him to be careful of the arm.

Dick gave the ship a day to charge.

The next morning, he woke up and jumped into the jet. The tide had come up, meaning the ship was partially submerged already. He raised the wheel, like an anchor, and allowed the jet to drift backwards onto the water. Harley wanted to come along, so he told her to hop on. They slowly drifted towards the atoll.

"Is this as fast as it gets?" Harley asked.

"If you want to keep the jet in one piece, it is." Harley sat in the same seat she was on when the jet came down and let out a soft sigh. "Is there still a bomb inside you?" Dick asked. The whole point of them being on their own jet was because Harley couldn't be within a certain distance from Joker because of the bomb inside her. It had been six days since that night in Tokyo, he said, so surely Harley had pooped it out or something.

"Okay, you don't have to make it sound gross by saying I pooped it out, but yes, it left my system a while ago."

"You're supposed to be the adult here," Dick chuckled. "Being comfortable around each other includes acknowledging that we have to perform human bodily functions like pooping and peeing."

"Doesn't mean I can't call them out for how gross those bodily functions are."

Dick looked back at her. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Why did you let the Joker put a bomb inside you?"

"What do you mean?"

What else could he possibly mean, he asked. "That bomb could have killed you. Why did you let him put a bomb inside you?" She told him that it was meant to be a diversion of sorts. If they couldn't be placed in a plane together, then one of them could have escaped and rescued the other. "Did he have a bomb inside him?" Harley shook her head. She looked at him like he was crazy. He asked her if she saw anything wrong with that.

She justified it by saying that he would have had a better chance at saving her from Arkham, then she would have had at saving him, so it made sense for her to be the damsel in distress. "Plus, he's my man so I let him get a bye."

"What does being your man have to do with this? Relationships are meant to be a two-way street," he laughed.

"Yeah, but you know… he's a guy and it's just in his nature, so who am I to go against him?"

Dick stared at Harley through the dirty rear-view mirror. It's just in his nature, he thought. He remembered hearing her say that on the night he almost drowned her, but he wasn't entirely sure what that meant. At the end of the day, you're just a man. It's in your nature. The energy between them was good though, so he didn't want to open that can of worms right now. "Yeah… I guess."

The jet made it to the atoll – which was still fully submerged. The jet had turned an hour-long journey into a thirty-minute breeze. Dick told Harley to hold her steady while he stabbed at fish in the shallow rock pools. He pulled some fish from the atoll and dumped them into the ship.

He turned them back to the main island but decided to take a detour and head towards the island to the south. Harley asked him what he was doing. Dick told her that now was a better time than ever to explore the nearby islands. "And the fish?"

"We'll cook them on the island, I promise," he laughed.

Fixing the jet had given Dick a newfound level of confidence. He felt like an explorer for once – like Marco Polo navigating the Silk Road. The world was his oyster. Unfortunately, he let his hubris get the best of him. It took them two hours to get to the fourth island. By the time they arrived, the fish were starting to stink and they had to be thrown out. Harley chose not to say anything but he could feel her hangry gaze burning through the back of his neck.

On the bright side, the fourth island was perfect for building a shelter, Dick said, trying to shed some light on their misfortunes. Fish were temporary, he said. They could always get more fish. But, if they hadn't taken that detour they wouldn't have found this island. The island was large. Larger than the main island but smaller than the biggest island. It had mountains with cascading rivers of freshwater, a plethora of trees, lively birds that sang throughout the island, and a cove that they could dock in. It was perfect for a shelter. The only problem was that to build a proper shelter, they would need to chop down a lot of the trees that made this island so beautiful.

Harley shrugged. "What's wrong with that? The trees will grow back." Dick's biggest worry was about the birds. He didn't want to evict dozens of birds that had never encountered humans before and going from tree to tree checking to see which ones had birds and which didn't would have been too draining.

"I got it!" he said. "We'll head back to the main island. I'll chop those trees down because it's uninhabited, and we'll tie them to the back of the jet and use them to build a shelter."

"Honestly, I'm just pretty hungry, so whatever gets us back to the other island faster sounds good to me," she said, hopping back onto the jet.

Dick took them back to the main island, swinging by the atoll again to grab fresh fish.

After eating, he spent the rest of the day with an axe chopping away at trees. It was a long process that continued into the night. They had dinner, then he was back at it.

He fell asleep, woke up to day seven, and went back to chopping. Once he had enough, he tied them to the back of the jet and admired his work. The large black jet, with its sole wheel acting as an anchor, sat on the edge of the beach. Waves lapped at the dozens of logs attached to the jet's rear but they remained firm and secured. Dick stood in front of the masterpiece with his hands on his hips. He let out a deep sigh.

"You look happy with yourself," Harley said, emerging from the thick jungle.

"Because I did that all by myself," Dick said. It was beautiful. Most people would have capitulated under the pressure of being stuck on a desert island with their worst enemy, no food, and no water. But not Dick. Not Nightwing. He didn't need anyone to hold his hand. He didn't need Batman to teach him how to survive, how to hunt for fish, how to repair a ship. He just did it. "I did that."

Harley's clothesline flew across the beach. "My frame!" she screamed. It crashed into some rocks and exploded into numerous pieces. The wind was starting to pick up. Fast.

The clouds had gone from white and wispy to dark and towering in a matter of minutes. The sun disappeared behind an ominous gathering of cumulonimbus clouds as darkness descended upon the pair. "Get under the trees!" Dick told Harley.

They hurried back behind the treeline and tried to hide from the storm. The straw mesh Dick called a bed was quickly lifted into the air and tossed into the ocean. Dick told her they had to go deeper into the forest. "I thought we couldn't go any deeper," Harley said.

"We don't really have a choice!"

Rain came down. Buckets of it. It soaked Dick and it drenched Harley. It felt like hail on their exposed skin. The wind, the rain, and the sound of thunder. It was overwhelming. Dick made it to the point where dark sand turned to black rock and started to climb onto the volcanic rock.

He paused.

"The jet!" He turned and started back towards the beach.

"Where are you going?" Harley called.

"I need to stop the jet from getting carried away."

"Are you crazy? Look around you! The jet is the least of our worries!"

A massive branch clattered onto the earth between them. Harley grabbed onto a tree to hold herself firm. Dick couldn't see the forest for the trees, literally and figuratively. Harley told him that they needed to find somewhere to hide. Dick's mind was fixated on saving his jet. "That jet was my one and only accomplishment on this island. If it gets swept away then I have nothing left to live for," he said, before turning and running down a muddy hill. Harley chased after him, calling his name.

He slipped, hit the ground, and started bleeding, but he didn't care. He was like a machine. His current objective was to secure the jet before the storm consumed it.

"Richard! Oh– Nightwig! Dick!" Harley called for him.

"I need to–" An old tree was ripped from the ground. Dick slipped. He stared at the massive trunk as it came down. He closed his eyes.

Harley screamed.

The sound of the tree clattering into another tree broke through the sounds of thunder and rain. The tree hit a third tree and crashed at Dick's feet, blocking the way. Harley caught up to him.

"Are you crazy? You could've gotten yourself killed!"

Dick tried to get up but he'd twisted his ankle. He pointed at the muddy opening in the trees leading to the beach. "The beach is just beyond that opening. All I need to do is…"

"All you need to do is come with me," Harley said. Dick propped himself up. He used a tree to lift his body onto one foot. Harley stood between him and the beach. He could see logs floating out into the ocean. The ocean's surface rose and fell like a breathing chest. Its dark blue waters rose higher and stretched farther than he'd ever seen them before. The waves were kissing the edge of the beach. His shoulders sank. "You told me a while ago that no one was born evil, that everyone was redeemable, right? Well, this is your chance to be someone's Ba– someone's Nightwing. Look at the state of me, kid. I'm not making it a day without you. I need you here. I need you to be my knight in shining armour." She placed her head against his chest and told him that they could always come up with a new plan together, but if he went out there and got hurt – or worse – what was to become of her.

Dick clenched his jaw. He leaned forward and nestled his face in Harley's hair to stop himself from crying. It felt like everything he'd done up until now was worthless. All for nothing. He couldn't stand here and watch his life's work get dragged into the ocean.

"You're the one who's always being logical. If we find somewhere to hide, we'll lose the jet but still have each other. If you go out there, we'll lose the jet and each other. It's just not worth it, puddin'."

Dick wrapped his arms around Harley and breathed. "You're right…" He pulled away from her. They needed to find some shelter – be it a lean-to or a cave, anything. She helped him stand, and he told her where to go. They made it deeper and deeper into the forest, onto the volcanic rock, and into a cave.

The cave was perfect. It was deep, warm, and had a soft layer of moss lining the floor, so they could walk and lie down without worrying about scrapes and bruises. Dick lay on the floor and put his hands over his face.

It felt like the universe was taunting him. As though the world was telling him, "Batman would've secured the jet in advance," or, "Batman would have felt the shift in atmospheric pressure from miles away and moved both the jet and the logs behind the treeline long before the storm even appeared." You're not Batman, Dick told himself. He was Nightwing. A hero in the shadow of the Caped Crusader. A hero whose only claim to fame was that he'd trained with Batman, lived with Batman, and had access to some of Batman's fancy gadgets. "Who am I kidding?" Dick muttered to himself.

Harley landed on top of Dick and wrapped her arms around his neck. She interlocked her legs with his, pressed her breasts against his chest, before slowly lowering herself onto him for a kiss. Dick's mind went foggy. She held the kiss for a few moments before resting her head against his chest.

Nine times out of ten, Dick would've thrown her off of him – thrown her across the room even. Nine times out of ten, he would have gone into a rant about how they were fierce rivals and enemies, and that she was probably trying to get his guard down so that she could steal something. Nine times out of ten, Dick would have cast doubt upon Harley's sudden show of affection and warmth. But this was time number ten, Dick was in a vulnerable position and he desperately needed to feel the warmth of another human's touch.

"What was that for?" he asked.

"You looked like you needed it," Harley said, "Plus, I'm cold and wet." She looked him in the eyes. He did the same.

He grabbed her by the chin and pulled her in for another kiss. She didn't understand just how much he needed this. It felt like a week's worth of frustration had built up to the surface and exploded in Harley's mouth.

He was rough and aggressive.

She melted into his touch.

Their tongues danced in each other's mouths. They were passionate and hot. So hot that Harley started to remove her jester's hood, then her mask, and then her suit. Dick told her to stop. "I don't want to move too fast. We need to still be a bit logical about this," he said, feeling Harley's bra press against his chest.

He resisted the urge to look down. He had to avoid looking down. He had to because he knew that if he caught a glimpse of her soft, supple breasts, he would start to second guess himself. And the hunger would take over. The hunger and the lust of being without affection for weeks prior. So he looked into her deep blue eyes and asked if she would be okay if they just kissed a bit more and slept alongside each other.

"Anything for you, Dick."

Dick kissed Harley. "Thank you."