Chapter 1: Confession
Chapter Text
There’s a nest in the chokecherry tree. Harley stands underneath it, grinning.
“What kind of bird made this?” she calls to Ivy.
Ivy looks up from under her garden hat. “No idea. I do plants, not birds.”
Harley cranes her neck even further. “There’s a baby! I see a baby! No, three babies! Awww, they’re so cute! Come see!”
Ivy sighs, abandoning her jasmine plant to come and join Harley under the tree. “Where’s Mama Bird?”
“Hey, it could be Daddy Bird. Ya never know.” Harley points to the birdbath, where a brown bird is preening on the edge. “Over there.”
She loves this place they’re setting up together, her and Ivy. It’s the closest thing Gotham has to an English cottage, and there’s plenty of space for the garden Ivy is slowly coaxing out of the Gotham soil. There’s a synagogue ten minutes away, and she doesn’t really practice anymore but she goes once a month and feels a little better each time she does. Every Sunday morning Ivy makes breakfast and Harley washes up and they tend to the garden together until it gets too hot and then they sit on the porch and drink lemonade and talk until the sun goes down. And every other week they do something mildly illegal- beat up a jerk trying to rob someone and then rob him, or smash up a construction site to save some wildflowers, or find one of the Joker’s goons and pummel him, just for kicks.
It’s a good life. It’s the life Harley really wants , if she thinks about it, even though there’s still a black-and-red harlequin costume stuffed in the back of their closet. She can’t bring herself to get rid of it, not just yet. It’s only been three months since Harley escaped Mistah J’s twisted little paradise in the bowels of the old Arkham Asylum, after all. Baby steps. She’ll get there eventually. But for now, she’s happy where she is.
“Huh.” Ivy adjusts her glasses and peers at the bird. “Looks like a robin to me.”
“Awww, baby robins! Batsy would be jealous.” Harley giggles at the thought of Batman feeding earthworms to a trio of hungry baby birds wearing tiny capes and gold R’s on their chests.
One of the babies hops to the edge of the nest, fluttering its tiny wings. Harley watches it, wondering if this is its first flight.
The baby robin cheeps loudly, pitches forward- and falls, its wings flailing helplessly. Harley shrieks and dives for it.
“Don’t!” Ivy cries, one hand stretched out. Her vine scoops the baby bird out of the air, catching it in a flower. The vine wraps around the tree, putting the baby back in the nest safe and sound. The parent bird is watching from the birdbath, bright eyes staring at the two of them like it doesn’t know whether to trust them for saving its baby.
“Poor baby,” Harley murmurs. “Ain’t ready to be on its own.” She looks up at Ivy. “Why’d you stop me from rescuing it?”
“If you touch it, the mama bird might reject it,” Ivy explains. “They don’t like our scent. They see us as dangerous.”
“Great parenting, Daddy Bird,” Harley huffs. “If I was a bird I would never reject my baby just ‘cause somebody dangerous had touched it.” She sighs deeply, looking up into the tree as the parent bird flies over to make sure its babies are all right. “Little Robin Redbreast sat upon a tree,” she mumbles. “Up went the pussycat and down went he. Ivy, it must be really nice, bein’ a bird.”
Ivy kneels down by the jasmine again. “Well, don’t you start trying to lay an egg.”
Harley snorts with laughter, staring up into the tree as she continues the old poem. “Down came pussycat, away Robin ran, says little Robin Redbreast- catch me if you can.” She giggles. She’s standing in her own garden reciting nursery rhymes to a family of birds. And, as if on cue, the neighbors’ white cat is sitting on the wall, lashing its tail as it looks hungrily at the nest in the chokecherry tree. “You better run, Robin Redbreast,” Harley says. “Or learn to fly better.” She laughs as she remembers the way the baby bird tumbled. Now that the danger is over, it’s pretty funny.
And then, just as suddenly, she stops laughing. A sick feeling sweeps over her, leaves her gasping.
Baby birds. Falling out of the nest. Broken wings and broken birds. Little Robin Redbreast.
“No,” Harley whimpers. “Oh, no, no.” Her head spins like a merry-go-round, and colors are flashing in her eyes- white and purple and green…and red.
“Harley?” Ivy straightens up, looking at her with concern in her eyes. “Harley, are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“What day is it?” Harley manages to say through deep breaths.
“May…23, I think.”
Harley lets out a little cry of dismay. “May? ” That means it’s been nine months, nearly ten.
Ivy comes over at that, putting her hands on Harley’s shoulders. “Honey, what is it? Do you need to go inside?”
“Mm-hm.”
Ivy leads Harley inside and to the couch, sitting her down. She goes to the kitchen and gets a glass of water, pressing it into Harley’s hand. It’s cold, and Harley grips it hard.
“Drink that, then we’ll talk, okay?” Ivy says softly.
Harley nods and sips the water. Ivy sits next to her, rubbing circles on her back.
When the water is mostly gone, Ivy takes it from her and sets it on the coffee table. “Better?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to talk?”
Harley sighs. “No. But I have ta.”
Ivy wraps an arm around her shoulders, drawing her in close. “Whenever you’re ready, love,” she says softly. “I won’t push you.”
And it’s that, just that, which makes Harley decide to come out with it. She’s been holding in the secret long enough that she almost forgot about it, and now she can’t hold on to it anymore. Ivy won’t push her to talk, and she won’t push her away once she does talk.
They trust each other, and that’s something she never had with the Joker.
Harley takes a deep breath, preparing to tell Ivy everything.
Instead, she starts crying. The ugly kind of crying, with snot running everywhere and her face getting all blotchy and red like her old makeup when she didn’t bother to take it off. Ivy retrieves a box of tissues and hands one over, looking bewildered, and Harley blows into it with a clown-nose honk. It would be funny if everything wasn’t so awful.
“I’m a terrible person, Pam!” she wails.
“If this is about the things the Joker made you do, you’re not responsible for all of that,” Ivy says firmly.
But Harley shakes her head. “It’s not! It’s what I did! I- I hurt the baby Robin, and then I left him all alone in the dark because it was the only way I could get out and he’s been down there forever and he might even be dead and if he is dead then it’s all my fault!”
“…okay,” Ivy says, sounding very confused and very concerned. “Harley, if you mean the baby bird in the yard, it’s okay. You didn’t hurt it, and it’s not dead.”
Harley shakes her head. “Not that robin! Robin robin!”
“What robin?” Ivy asks helplessly.
“Batman’s Robin!”
Ivy’s eyebrows go up. “ Oh. Uh…didn’t we see him last night? He’s okay, Harley. He’s fine.”
Harley lets out a sob. “No, he’s not. I mean he is. But I mean the second one. The dead one.”
Ivy frowns. “Harley, what are you talking about?”
Harley sniffles into her tissue. “He ain’t dead. Or he wasn’t three months ago. But maybe he is now, and if he is then it’s my fault.” She looks pleadingly at Ivy. “It was the only way I could get out!”
“The second Robin is dead, Harley,” Ivy says gently. “Joker killed him in an explosion, remember?”
Harley shakes her head furiously. “No, he didn’t. He just made it look like he did. He’s got the baby Robin under Arkham Asylum, and he’s hurtin’ him. I know because- because I helped him do it. I was so awful, Ivy! I hurt him so bad! And then when I cut ties with Mistah J I just left him there! I-I knew Mistah J wouldn’t come lookin’ for me if he had the baby bird to play with. But now I can’t stop thinkin’ about him!”
Ivy’s mouth dropped open somewhere in the middle of Harley’s speech. “The Joker’s had Robin all this time? How long has it been? Why hasn’t Batman found him yet?”
“It’s been nine months,” Harley mumbles. “Batman thinks he’s dead, so he hasn’t been lookin’. And he has the shiny new one now.” She wipes her nose and looks back up. “It was six months when I escaped, Pam. I helped Mistah J hurt the baby bird for six months. And- and I was jealous that Mistah J liked the baby Robin better than he liked me, so I liked hurtin’ Robin! I- I didn’t even feel bad about it until I left, and then I forgot until just now!” Another sob shakes her. “I forgot about the Joker torturin’ a kid somewhere! I was just so happy bein’ here with you that I just…didn’t wanna remember, I guess.”
Ivy wordlessly reaches out and presses Harley’s head to her chest. “You still have me,” she says. “I promise. No matter what.”
Harley nods, curling into Ivy, and they sit there like that for a long time. Harley closes her eyes and lets everything go, letting herself just exist with Ivy.
This really is all I ever wanted.
Finally, Ivy sighs. “Harley?”
“Hmm?”
“Where does the Joker have Robin?”
Harley sits up. “Under Arkham Asylum. Waaaay under Arkham Asylum. Nobody goes down there anymore, and Mistah J knew Batsy would never look there. Mistah J likes it there, so Robin’s probably still there. If he ain’t dead yet. He was in pretty bad shape when I left.” She fights off another wave of guilt and tilts her head. “Why?”
“I know you’re not going to want to hear this, Harley, but we can’t just leave the kid there, if he’s still alive. And if we try to tell Batman about it, he’ll think we’re lying, and then we’ll be in Arkham Asylum.”
“So we’re gonna rescue Robin? Us two villains? ”
Ivy sighs, stands up, and goes to the bedroom. She comes back with her Poison Ivy outfit and Harley’s harlequin suit in hand. “Yeah. We’re gonna rescue Robin.” She tosses Harley’s suit to her.
Harley catches it in one hand, feeling a little bit sick at the thought of putting it on again. But if they get caught by Mistah J, she’ll need to act like her old self in order to get Ivy out.
She sighs. “Where’s my makeup?”
“Under the sink,” Ivy says, and then “You don’t have to come, Harl. I can do this by myself.”
In answer, Harley digs out the plastic bag containing her clown makeup. She strips off her shirt and jeans and steps into the legs of the harlequin suit. “Like heck you’re doin’ it by yourself. I gotta face up to it sometime.”
“Are you going to be all right if we run into the Joker?” Ivy asks, already in the tights and corset of her own costume. She reaches behind her and unfastens her ponytail, sending red waves cascading down her back. Harley sighs dreamily. I have the prettiest girlfriend. Then she shakes it off and gets back to business.
“Well, with any luck, we won’t. And just in case we get unlucky, I’m takin’ Beatrice. Mistah J won’t shmooze me back to his side with his teeth busted in.”
“Harley?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Harley adjusts the suit’s frilly collar around her shoulders. “Now get the Wildlife Sanctuary on the phone, cause we’re savin’ a baby bird.”
Chapter 2: Liberation
Notes:
Okay, for this chapter and the next one especially, please mind the tags. These two chapters are largely where the “implied/referenced” stuff happens- this one is the violence, the next chapter will have both. I want to clarify again that it will not be explicit or gratuitous, but it will be there. Please read at your own risk!
Chapter Text
“I never, ever, ever wanted to see this place again,” Harley whispers, staring down at the tunnel that leads to the old Arkham Asylum buried under the new one.
Ivy wraps her arms around her, planting a kiss on Harley’s cheek. “We’re not staying long, rosebud. Just long enough to get Robin and get out. With luck, you won’t even have to bash anyone’s face in.”
That hope lasts about five minutes. They’re stopped by a guard coming back up, who points his flashlight into their faces and demands to know what they’re doing there. He squints in Harley’s direction. “Quinn? Where have you been?”
“Uh…” Harley stalls, using an insane giggle to play for time. The guard seems familiar, somehow. There’s a scar through his eye, but she struggles to read his name tag. Boles, she finally makes out.
Oh, right. She remembers this one now- a sadistic good-for-nothing deep in Mistah J’s pockets. The Joker had always liked him. Harley never had.
“I brought back company,” she says, gesturing to Ivy. She lays her Brooklyn accent on thick, trying to convince him that she’s still the old Harley Quinn. “You gonna let us in?”
Boles shifts, blocking the entrance. “Why don’t you have your pretty friend there make it worth my while?”
“Mistah J wants me to-“
“He hasn’t even mentioned you since you left.” Boles smiles crookedly. “You ain’t second fiddle around here anymore. Things have changed.”
Harley wraps her fingers tighter around Beatrice’s handle. “You know the one thing that hasn’t changed, Frank?” she asks.
Crunch, goes Boles’ leg as Beatrice slams into it. “You’re still a pig,” Harley finishes.
Ivy steps delicately over the groaning man. She raises one hand and blows him a pink, sparkly, mind-controlling kiss. “Why don’t you take a nice walk into Gotham Harbor?” she suggests sweetly.
Boles’ eyes glaze over, and he staggers up on his very-much-broken leg and starts walking. Harley hefts her hammer over her shoulder and leads the way. “I always hated that guy.”
“He seems hateable,” Ivy agrees as they exit the tunnel. They’re in the abandoned wing of Arkham now, and it’s just like Harley remembers it- falling apart and forgotten, sealed off from the outside world.
“Do you have any idea where Robin is down here?” Ivy asks.
“Deeper in,” Harley replies. “It’ll be either the old examination room or one of the holding cells. If it’s the exam room, we better look out for Mistah J.”
The two of them fall silent as they go further into the abandoned wing. The only sounds are a drip, drip, drip from one of the pipes and the echo of their footsteps. It looks like nobody’s been down here in decades, but Harley knows very well how false that is.
“This way,” she says, and turns left. Ivy follows her, slipping her slender hand into Harley’s, and Harley gives her a grateful glance over her shoulder. Ivy knows- how could she not know? - what being back here means for Harley, how much she hates being anywhere near the Joker’s lair. There’s a very real possibility that they’ll run into him down here, and Harley doesn’t know if she’s ready for that but she’ll do it, she has to do it. She can’t leave Robin alone down here again.
If he’s even still alive.
Harley leads the way into the depths of the abandoned wing. The smell of blood and filth is much worse now, and Ivy plucks one of the roses from her hair and holds it to her nose. “There’s the exam room up ahead,” Harley whispers. “If Mistah J is down here, that’s where he’ll be with the baby bird.” Her heart is thudding with fear and anticipation and the weight of so, so much guilt. How could she leave a kid down here and take off?
“Do you want me to peek around the door?” Ivy whispers back, but Harley shakes her head.
“If he’s got Robin in there, we’ll…we’ll hear it.”
Ivy’s eyes are full of nothing but compassion for Harley. No judgment, no buried hatred. Just compassion. She twines her whole arm in Harley’s like a vine around a trellis, helping to hold her up and see her through this, and Harley has never been more grateful for Pamela Isley.
The exam room is dim and quiet, with no sign of the Joker. It’s a relief- as much as she’d like to beat him to a bloody pulp for what he’s done, she doesn’t know is she’s ready to face him yet. She steels herself and looks into the room, trying very hard not to focus on the reddish-brown stain in the center of the floor or the butcher’s hook suspended from the ceiling.
Thankfully, the hook swings free. Harley’s not really sure she could take it if it wasn’t. “Not here,” she breathes. “The holding cells then.”
“Do you know which one?” Ivy says.
“I think so.”
She counts under her breath as they turn down the hallway to the cells. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine…ten. “This one, Ives.”
“Positive?”
“No. But we don’t have time to try them all. I think this is it.” Harley bends down to pick the lock. Ivy stands lookout.
Okay. You can do this, Harley. Just get in, get the kid, get out. No Mistah J, no problem. You got this. You got this.
“I got this,” she breathes into the stale air, and turns the pick. Click, goes the lock.
Ivy pulls her close and plants a kiss- an actual kiss, not the pink sparkly hypnotic kind- on her forehead. “You’ve got this. We’ve got this. Ready?”
Harley inhales, deep and slow, and nods.
The cell door protests being opened with a loud creak. Harley steps in first, Ivy on her heels.
And she didn’t get it wrong, this is the right cell, but she wishes it wasn’t because she’s not in any way prepared for what she sees. Judging from Ivy’s soft gasp behind her, neither of them are.
The tiny cell is so dark and so cold that it puts Harley in mind of a medieval dungeon. The tiled walls and floor are filthy, splattered with blood and mold and other things Harley doesn’t want to think about. The little room is completely bare save for hundreds of photographs glued to the walls. Harley doesn’t need to look to know that they’re pictures of Batman and Robin. The third one, not the second.
The second Robin isn’t out patrolling with Batman, because Batman doesn’t even know he’s alive. The second Robin is right here, lying on the floor in a puddle of his own blood with the marks of the Joker’s torture all over him, and this is where he’s been for nine months. Because of me, Harley thinks, and crumples to her knees beside him.
If the kid is conscious, it’s just barely. His eyes are closed, but his breathing is shaky and ragged, so she doesn’t think he’s asleep. It picks up when Harley kneels by his side, although his eyes don’t open.
“I’m sorry,” Harley whispers. “I never shoulda left you with him.” He was in pretty bad shape when she escaped three months ago, and she somehow expected him to look the same.
How he looks now is so much worse . He’s lying mostly on his stomach, his face half-pressed into the floor, like somebody threw him into the room and he couldn’t get up so he just lay where he fell. There’s the tracks of tears trailing from the eye she can see, and another one slips down his cheek as she watches. Blood congeals in his tangled hair from a fresh cut on his temple; a streak just above his forehead has turned grayish, and there’s patches of hair that have either fallen out or been torn out. The rest of it has been roughly cut short, although it’s still long enough to hang into his eyes. What she can see of his battered face is pale from long months with no sunlight, stained with dark bruises from heavy blows. His nose looks like it’s been broken more than once. His lip is split, and a trickle of blood leaks onto his chin. There’s a couple of narrow cuts across his face, long since faded to pale scars.
Those were from the Batarangs, she thinks. Mistah J wanted to see how well they worked. She remembers that, remembers it so horribly well because one of the sharp little weapons was in her hand. One of those slashes on his bruised face is a gift from her.
He’s not wearing his black domino mask anymore. Harley wonders when the Joker took it off. It was still there when she left. It’s funny- or maybe it isn’t- what such a small thing can do. Without it, he doesn’t look like Robin. He just looks like a scared kid.
Then again, that’s exactly what he is. And it’s my fault.
He’s still, after all this time, wearing his Robin suit. What’s left of it, anyway- there’s more holes than there is fabric, and the once-bright red has turned more of a dull, dingy brown. The parts of the suit that once had armor have been either stripped of the protective layer or just torn off entirely, and it makes him look small in a way Harley hates. There’s only one sleeve still attached, and one of the legs has been ripped off at the knee, the other at the thigh. The cape is little more than a few bits of frayed cloth hanging from his shoulders, and the back of the suit looks like it’s been shredded. The front of the costume is the most intact, and even that is tattered and stained- mostly with blood. There’s blood everywhere.
Harley doesn’t want to keep looking, but she makes herself do it anyway. The kid’s hands have been shackled behind his back- twisted up to his shoulder blades and bound there, the cuffs cutting cruelly into his scarred wrists. Several fingernails are gone, and she’s had tears pricking her eyes this whole time but seeing that makes them fall, because she remembers standing in the room while Joker tore them off the first time. Standing in the room, and watching, and laughing.
What have I done?
His arms are scattered with bruises and cuts and on his left shoulder there’s something that looks like a patch of skin was shaved off and on his right there’s something that looks like an acid burn. His legs are sticky with dried blood and dirt and who-knows-what-else, and she can tell immediately that his right ankle is broken. That happened before, too, the first night Joker had him, so he must have broken it a second time. Or maybe this isn’t just the second time. Maybe it’s the third, or the tenth, or the twentieth. Harley wouldn’t know because she wasn’t there. Because she left. She got out and left Robin to the mercy of a madman who didn’t know the meaning of the word.
Ivy is crouching by his feet- which are bare, Harley remembers the Joker taking his boots away- her face stricken and her eyes wide with horror and revulsion. Harley doesn’t want to look, but she makes herself, and the tears flow even faster now. The soles of Robin’s feet have been burned, and the left foot has a series of blood-smeared cuts across the ball. There’s a rough circle punched through both his feet, all the way through, and it takes Harley a few moments to recognize the wounds a power drill makes on flesh and bone.
Robin is a lot thinner than he was when she left. His suit was perfectly fitted when he was captured, and only slightly loose when she escaped. Now, it hangs off his emaciated frame, his arms and legs sticking out like twigs, his ribs showing through the front of his suit. He’s been starved almost to death. All the muscle he once had is gone, and his face is drawn and hollow. Harley thinks about the pictures she’s seen in history books of people who have survived being prisoners of war. Robin looks like that.
But this isn’t war. This is just Mistah J, getting a laugh out of making a kid suffer. And she had a hand in it.
Isn’t that funny? His voice plays like a recording in Harley’s head, cackling madly in her ear.
“Not funny,” she says through her tears. “Not funny at all.”
Maybe it’s her voice, maybe it’s the phrase she uses, maybe it’s something else entirely, but whatever it is, Robin comes awake. Harley sees his eye open, and it’s sunken and bloodshot and the white part is more pink than actually white. He looks around, half-dazed, and his bleary gaze settles on her.
The sudden terror that flashes into his expression makes her want to scream. He cringes against the floor, tears cutting trails through the dirt on his face, his thin shoulders shaking with silent sobs. He’s crying. The defiant little Robin who spat blood and vitriol at the Joker is crying out of sheer fear, and he’s not even trying to hide it. Harley feels like she’s had somebody grab Beatrice from her and slam the hammer into her ribs. It’s hard to breathe past the ache of guilt in her chest. Her lungs hurt.
“It’s okay,” Harley says softly, and she has to swallow a couple times before the words come out audibly. “It’s okay, kiddo. I ain’t here ta hurt ya.”
If he understands her, he doesn’t believe her. He shifts as she reaches out, trying to get away from her. He’s too weak or injured or both to do much, but it doesn’t stop him from trying. He makes an attempt to push himself away, but his right ankle gives way the moment he tries to use it, and the ragged cry of pain that rips from his mouth breaks Harley’s heart. She exchanges a helpless glance with Ivy and then looks back down.
Harley chokes, bile and acid rising in her throat. Her heart slams against her chest like a bird trying to break out of her rib cage, and she doesn’t know if she’s sobbing out loud or screaming in her mind or both. All she knows is that she can’t believe what she’s seeing.
Somewhere in the struggle to get away from her, Robin turned his head. She can see his whole face now, the bruises, the cuts, the scars-
And the letter J, branded on his left cheek just beneath his eye. She can’t take her own eyes off it. It’s half-healed, still red and angry. The Joker burned his symbol into Robin’s skin. Into his face. It’s a sickening act of cruelty, one she didn’t think even Mistah J- she shakes the words away, she can’t call him that, not here, not with that letter seared into Robin’s cheek- one she didn’t even think the Joker was capable of. If I was here, could I have stopped him?
Ivy curses, lifting her head to the door. “Harley, we need to get him out of here fast before someone comes.”
Harley nods, shoving down the wild, horrified swirl of how could Joker do this how could anyone do this why wasn’t I here to stop this . She leans close to the kid again, and this time he doesn’t try to get away. Only his heaving breaths betray how terrified he is. “Hey, baby bird,” she says thickly. “It’s gonna be okay. I know you probably think I’m gonna hurt you, but that ain’t what I’m here for.”
The boy closes his eyes, his bruised face painted with the kind of numb, resigned fear that happens when you know what’s coming next and you also know that you can’t stop it. “Please, not yet,” he whispers in a tiny, terrified, broken voice. “Please, I can’t- please, sir-”
Harley staggers to her feet and stumbles to the other end of the cell, just in time to fall to her knees and be sick. Ivy is at her side in an instant, holding her as she throws up all over the stained concrete. From the discolored splatters on the floor it isn’t the first time something like this has happened in here, and realizing that makes her heave again.
This is Robin. This is the second Robin, the scrappy one that hits hard and fights dirty and fires insults at criminals in the accent of Gotham. The one nobody likes because he knows the streets as well as they do and they can’t slip away. The one who took a beating with a crowbar and still spat blood in the Joker’s face. The one who always had some fight left in him, even after hours of torture. The one who always managed to say something snappy even through a mouthful of his own blood.
This is that Robin, broken and beaten and branded on the face with the Joker’s initial, calling him “sir” like they’ve stepped back in time, pleading for mercy the Joker doesn’t give.
Harley retches, but there’s nothing left to come up. She’s thinking about history books again. She remembers reading about the Romans, that they branded their slaves’ faces if they tried to escape and got caught. Is that what happened to Robin? He tried to run, to follow in Harley’s footsteps, and this was his punishment?
How much of this is my fault?
“Harley. Harley!” Ivy is jostling her, gently. “We need to go, sweet pea. We can’t stay here.”
“Ivy, I did this,” Harley whimpers.
“Hey. Look at me.” Ivy takes her face in hand and gently steers her to look into Ivy’s green eyes. “You did not do this, okay? The Joker did. And we will deal with him later. But that man is not worth you torturing yourself for him, understand?”
Harley nods, trying with only partial success to dam the flow of tears.
“Okay.” Ivy takes her arm and guides her to her feet. “If you need to break down later, I’ll buy ice cream and we’ll sit on the couch and you can cry for as long as you want. But right now, we gotta focus, all right?” She glances down at Robin. “Pretty obvious that he can’t walk. Do you want me to take him while you deal with anyone who might get in our way, or do you want me to be the bodyguard while you carry him?”
Harley shakes her head. “I don’t wanna hurt him again.”
Ivy nods. “Okay. Help me get him up?”
Harley bends down again. Robin is trembling, and she grits her teeth and fights back the waves of guilt. “Hey, kid. We’re gonna get you outta here, ‘kay? Ivy’s gonna pick you up.”
Ivy gently slips her hands underneath the boy’s battered body. “On three. One, two-“
“Three,” Harley says.
The sound Robin makes when Ivy picks him up is horrible. It sounds like an animal caught in a trap. It sounds like he tried to scream and someone stepped on his throat. It sounds inhuman.
Harley feels nauseous again, but this time she forces herself to choke it down. She holds the door open for Ivy and follows her outside, leading the way back out of Arkham.
Ivy glances down at the boy in her arms. “I think he passed out,” she says quietly. “We need to get him home and try to fix him up.”
Back the clown bus up. “We’re not taking him to a hospital?”
Ivy sighs. “Harley, if the two of us walk into a hospital with a kid who’s just about been beaten to death, what do you think they’re going to do to us? We’ll be back at Arkham before you can say “petunia” and this time it’ll be with a fellow inmate who’s incredibly angry that his favorite toy is gone.” Harley flinches at the phrase, and Ivy softens her voice. “We’ll do what we can for him ourselves, and if we need to do anything else I have people I trust who will help.”
“What about Batman?”
“Batman doesn’t even know this kid’s alive. I think we’ll wait until Robin tells us to contact the Bat before we do it.”
That’s fine by Harley.
This time, nobody stops them as they make their way through the exit tunnel. Boles is gone, somewhere in the Gotham Harbor trying to figure out how to swim with a broken leg. Harley can’t find it in her to care very much if he doesn’t make it. I hope a big, nasty shark eats him.
They have a boat stowed away on the rocks, hidden from sight by Ivy’s vines- since they did still break into Arkham, even if the part they broke into was abandoned. Ivy gently sets the kid in the back and tucks her green trench coat over him both to shelter him from the spray and hide him from anyone who might catch a glimpse. He looks smaller still out here in the light, and it shows in terrible clarity the hundreds of wounds scattered over his frail body.
Ivy unwraps the vines and starts the boat, and Harley sits in the bow with Robin. He’s still unconscious, and he’s going to need some serious medical attention. But he’s out, he’s away from the Joker, he’s safe. Harley lets herself breathe, not bothering to look over her shoulder as they leave Arkham behind. She curls her hand over Robin’s under the coat.
Hang in there, Robin Redbreast. It’s going to be okay.
Chapter 3: Examination
Notes:
we’re getting emotional in this chili’s tonight
This is such a selfish, stupid reason to update a fic, and I swear I didn’t rush the chapter just to do this, I already had it mostly done. But my sister moved out today, and she’s the first of my siblings to leave. She’s also my twin, and while we have our differences, we’re very close. I’m very sad and very emotional, and this fic in particular tends to get a lot of comments, which is instant seratonin for me. So…yeah. Updating this and seeing y’all’s reactions to help me feel better.
A word about this chapter, also.
This is the one where the tags- specifically “Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-Con” come into play. It is not explicit, it is not gratuitous, but I do make it fairly clear what happened. I’m asexual and sex-repulsed, so I will never write onscreen sexual assault, but for this fic I felt like I needed to address the implications of the game and the Joker and everything. I like to think I did it carefully, but I don’t know. So just…read at your own risk, and if this chapter is too much for you please know that I will not be bringing this up very often, it is not the focus of the fic, it’s just something I have to bring in right now.
Bye! Enjoy the chapter!
Chapter Text
It’s after midnight when they get to the Gotham mainland. Harley and Ivy change out of their costumes when they switch from the boat to Ivy’s convertible - their neighbors probably have
some
idea who lives next to them, but as long as there’s no incidents in the neighborhood, they turn a blind eye. But the couple next door arriving home unmistakably dressed as Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, carrying something that looks very much like an unconscious teenager who’s been declared dead-
that
won’t be ignored. So they switch to normal clothes, and Ivy lays Robin down across the backseat and covers him with her coat again. He still hasn’t woken up.
Neither of them talk very much on the drive back through Gotham. Ivy’s hands grip the wheel a little too tightly, and she has what Harley likes to affectionately call her “murder face” on.
As for Harley herself?
She’s lost in memories. Memories of what she watched the Joker do to the kid in the backseat. Memories of what the Joker did to her. Memories of what she did to Robin, because she was jealous and spiteful and angry.
She’s still angry, somewhere deep down. Robin is…is it sixteen? Fifteen? It’s something close to that. He’s a kid. Even the Joker’s depraved insanity should never have gone that far.
Prison rules, Harley thinks . You don’t hurt women, and you don’t hurt kids. The Joker broke both. But then again, he never did play by the rules.
Well, I’m gonna make some new ones, Harley thinks in a moment of fierce fury. And the first one is that Ivy and I get to track down the Joker and hand him his ass.
But they have more important things to worry about first.
Ivy pulls the car into the driveway. “I’ll take him,” she says, stepping around to the back. “You get the door.” She scoops the kid up, keeping the coat wrapped around him.
Harley swings the front door open and following Ivy into the house. “The couch?” she suggests, flicking the lights on, and Ivy heads to the living room, gently setting Robin down and unwinding the coat from around his thin frame.
“Now what?” Harley asks.
“Now, we have to see if we can fix some of this,” Ivy says. Her voice is tense and tight, like a rubber band stretched to its limit. “Do we have a first aid kit?”
They do, in the bathroom under the sink. Harley goes to get it, glancing up at the mirror as she passes.
The garish makeup stares back at her, taunting. She remembers the fear in Robin’s eyes when he saw it, when he realized who she was.
When she comes back out to the living room, first aid kit in hand, her face is red, but scrubbed clean.
Ivy glances up at her, a flash of warm approval in her slight smile. Then she’s back to business. “I got the handcuffs off,” she says. “I think we need to get the suit off, too. But his ankle is in bad shape. I don’t want to make it worse trying to pull the suit off over it.”
“Should we just cut it off?” Harley suggests.
“We’re probably going to have to. We need to see how extensive the…damage is.”
They both know it’s bad. They just don’t know how bad it is.
Harley finds a pair of scissors in the kitchen and takes a knife for herself. There isn’t really any point in trying to keep the suit intact. Robin’s not going to be wearing it again. It’s not clothes anymore, just some shreds of bloody fabric. The faster they get it off him, the better. She goes back into the living room, passes the scissors to Ivy and bends over the boy, carefully slipping the blade of her knife underneath the remaining sleeve.
Working together, they manage to cut off the tattered shreds of the Robin suit. The fabric might have posed more of a challenge at the beginning, but it’s threadbare and worn now, and it doesn’t take much effort to cut through it. Ivy puts the scissors on the coffee table next to the first aid kit as she finishes cutting the seam. She peels the suit off, tossing it down on the floor by the couch.
Harley tries not to look, she really does. There’s only one person in this house that Harley wants to see in their underwear, and it isn’t the unconscious teenager on the couch.
But she sees more than she intended to, and the nausea comes back with a vengeance.
Lines have clearly been crossed. She doesn’t know if it was one of the Joker’s goons or one of the Arkham guards or the Joker himself. It doesn’t really matter, because it was somebody even if it wasn’t the Joker. There are bruises and cuts and scars where there shouldn’t be any marks at all, signs of cruel hands in places no hands should have touched, and her knees buckle because he’s just a kid, he’s just a freakin’ kid- “Pam,” she chokes out, and Ivy is behind her in an instant, pressing her into a sort of half-hug.
“Don’t think about it,” she commands. “Not now. Just focus on helping him.”
Harley nods, swallowing tears, and concentrates on the kid’s upper half. It’s not much better. The sickly gray pallor of his skin makes it that much easier to see the wounds scattered all over him. There’s not an inch of him left unscathed- from tiny red barbed wire punctures dotted in a constellation over his chest to a deep blue bruise that wraps around one whole side of his stomach. New injuries cross over old scars, blotchy patches meet precisely carved lines, and even the blood and filth do little to obscure the fact that Robin is hurt in a hundred ways.
It’s not that the injuries are severe, although some of them absolutely are. It’s that Robin is just so fragile. With the suit off, Harley can see just how painfully thin he really is. He’s almost skeletal, nothing but skin stretched over bone, all the muscle wasted away. She remembers all the times she felt him fight, whether it was when he was still in the shadow of the Bat or down in Arkham when he still resisted her and the Joker every chance he got. He was a strong, stubborn little devil, and he hit a lot harder than his predecessor did. She almost can’t believe that the frail creature lying on her and Ivy’s couch was once Batsy’s bratty fledgling. She doesn’t think he could fight back now if he tried.
Harley’s moving on autopilot, gently wiping as much of the blood and grime off his skin as she can. Ivy is working on the wounds themselves, cleaning them out and bandaging the ones still bleeding. They haven’t run into any cuts deep enough to need stitches yet, although Ivy’s worried about internal damage.
Harley’s worried about the fact that he still hasn’t woken up.
“There’s not much we can do for some of these,” Ivy says heavily. “We just have to hope they heal.” She secures an adhesive bandage over the burn on his cheek.
With the J brand covered, Harley feels a little better. It unsettles her, knowing that the Joker did something so terrible. Knowing that capability is in him. Obviously all bets were off when it came to hurting his captured Robin.
What else could he have done that we don’t know about?
Ivy, at last, sets down the little bottle of antiseptic, giving Robin a critical once-over. “Half done,” she announces. “Can you grab a pillow? I’m going to get him facedown so I can work on his back.”
Harley finds a throw pillow from the pile of couch stuff that they shoved onto the floor. Ivy picks Robin up again, and Harley sticks the pillow where his head is going to go. Then Ivy sets him down, gently turning him over and adjusting his head to make sure he can still breathe okay.
Ivy steps aside to grab the first-aid kit again, and Harley gets her first view of the kid’s other side.
She lets out a little wail of dismay before she can stop herself. As much damage as the front had, his back is ten times worse. There’s less bruising here and more outright cuts. Deep gashes, just starting to scab over, crisscross the kid’s shoulders and back in a way that looks like the pattern left on peanut butter cookies when you press a fork into them.
“What’d the Joker do, steal Selina’s bullwhip?” she whispers furiously.
Ivy’s face is grim. “Looks like it was something like that. I’m going to have to stitch those up- they’re too deep to heal by themselves.”
And that’s not the only type of injury. There’s the all-too-familiar little cuts and burns scattered throughout the pattern of gashes, polka-dot bruises decorating his back in shades from greenish-yellow to dark purple. It’s these smaller hurts that pay true testament to the Joker’s cruelty- it wasn’t deliberately planned-out torture, at least not all the time. Often, it seems, it was just meant to hurt.
There’s still more marks, lower down, that make Harley sick to her stomach to think about. Dark bruises, half-healed cuts, hot red welts- all in places the Joker should never have seen, let alone touched, let alone hurt. There’s a series of tiny lines sliced into Robin’s left thigh, small and shallow and still bright pink. She thinks it’s just random little slashes at first, but then she recognizes them for the letters that they are. HA HA HA , they say, carved too high up on his leg.
A blotch of color paints the right side of his back, starting at the small of it and slanting around his hip. It’s a bruise, a nasty one, purply-yellow and in the distinct shape of a handprint. And Harley knows those long, spindly fingers, dipping too deep down past Robin’s waist.
She knows those hands all too well. She knows how much they hurt. She knows how far the Joker’s sick mind is willing to go.
And she knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that Robin knows too.
Suddenly it’s too much. She can’t force the memories away anymore, she can’t stop feeling his cold, clammy hands on her, she can’t stop thinking about those same hands on a sixteen-year-old boy. She can’t stop thinking that she left him to endure that.
Because the Joker never did it when he had her there.
“I can’t do this,” Harley chokes out. Her stomach churns like she’s going to throw up again.
Ivy looks at her for a long moment. “Okay,” she says softly. “I’ll handle it.”
“Are you sure?”
Ivy nods. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
Harley goes into the bedroom, where she can’t see the kid anymore. It helps only a little bit.
“Outta sight, outta mind, huh?” she says to herself, plopping down on the bed and pulling her knees up to her chest. “Sometimes I think I really am outta my mind.”
The Joker has crossed every line in the book. No, not just crossed them. Scratched them out and pretended they didn’t exist. He’s hurt Robin in ways it kills Harley to even think about.
I shoulda stayed, she thinks, for the first time because she’s never, ever regretted it before. When the Joker hurt me, I liked it. I thought I did, anyway. I thought it meant he loved me. He pretended that’s what it meant, and I went along with it ‘cause I was stupid and brainwashed and thought I was in love.
There was no pretense of love with the baby bird. All the Joker wanted was to make him suffer because it would make Batman suffer.
Would it have been better if I stayed? she wonders. I was happy, even if it was fake and I was jealous and the Joker was controlling me. She knows it wasn’t real happy, not the happy she is with Ivy. But she could have stood…everything…better than the kid on the couch.
Harley stands up and rummages through the dresser drawers to find some clothes for the kid once Ivy’s done patching him up. She finds an oversized gray T-shirt that looks like it’ll work.
“Wow,” she says, suddenly realizing what they’ve gotten themselves into. “Ivy and I just acquired a kid.”
“Harley!” Ivy calls from the living room, right on cue.
The first aid kit, Harley notices with relief, is shut and on the coffee table, which must mean Ivy’s done.
Ivy is sitting by the couch, looking tired and still upset but also something…not happy, but relieved, in a sense. “I think I got everything patched up,” she said. “Those gashes on his back are stitched, everything is cleaned out and bandaged, and I set his ankle. That’s the only one I’m worried about, it was a really bad break and I’m not sure I did it right. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
She gets up and lifts the kid so Harley can get the shirt over his head and arms. He looks better once he’s dressed, less… well, less like we just busted him out of Arkham Asylum. He’s swimming in the gray shirt, but there’s not much they can do about it for now.
“He needs to wake up,” Harley says suddenly. “We need to get some food into him.” She drops to her knees by his head. “Robin. Hey, Robin. Wake up, baby bird.”
“Do you know his name? His real name?” Ivy asks quietly, sitting down at the other end of the couch. “That might get more of a response.”
“Yeah,” Harley admits. “Joker beat it outta him by the first month. Never could get him to say who Batman is, or Nightwing, or Batgirl. But he told us his own name.”
“What is it?”
Harley reaches out and runs gentle fingers through the kid’s hair. “His name’s Jason.”
Chapter 4: Miscommunication
Notes:
Thank you all so much for the kind words on the last chapter! I’m doing better now and I think I’ve gotten used to my sister being away.
As for this story, it’s still pretty dark and angsty for now. I promise we’ll get to some comfort eventually! Not too much to watch out for in this chapter besides the general dark tone, but there is some discussion of non-consensual drugging and the like, so be careful of that.
I also wanted to ask- would you guys be interested if I made a Tumblr? I want to be able to talk to you all outside the AO3 comments section!
Chapter Text
Harley would have stayed by the couch all night, but at some point Ivy helps her up and into bed. She’s asleep almost before her head hits the pillow, and if there are nightmares brought on by the stressful events of the past few hours, she’s sleeping too deeply to remember them.
She comes awake to Ivy shaking her gently. “Shh,” Ivy says, pressing a finger to her lips. “I think the kid’s waking up.”
Harley sits up and swings her legs over the side of the bed, following Ivy out to the living room.
The kid- Robin- Jason is lying on the couch where she left him, a blanket draped over him. Ivy puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Jason? Wake up, sweetheart.”
His eyelids flutter, and he opens his eyes. He looks around in half confusion, half fear. The moment he sees Ivy, he cringes away from her, trembling.
“It’s okay, honey,” Ivy says soothingly. “You’re not in Arkham Asylum anymore. Everything’s all right.”
Jason doesn’t seem to hear her. He turns his head, closing his eyes. So quietly Harley can barely hear him, he says, “Get it over with.”
“Get what over with, sweetheart?” Ivy asks, frowning.
Jason takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Please…please don’t make me guess.” He sounds like he’s about to cry.
“We ain’t gonna hurt ya,” Harley chimes in.
Jason’s eyes fly open at that, and he looks up at them with unrestrained terror. “Not again. Please, I can’t. Not yet. Please?” His voice catches on a sob, breaking into a pleading question at the end. The sheer hopelessness written across his face breaks Harley’s heart all over again.
“I’ve got some water here for you if you want it, Jason,” Ivy says gently.
Jason shakes his head almost frantically. “N-no. I don’t-“ the words dissolve, and he hides his face in the crook of his arm.
Ivy straightens up, gesturing for Harley to follow her. She goes into the bedroom and shuts the door behind him. “Okay, he’s panicking,” she says bluntly. “I need to know why. What does he think I’m going to do to him by giving him a drink?”
Harley chews her bottom lip, thinking. “I don’t know,” she admits finally. “I was gone for three months. Joker coulda done anything to- oh, no. Oh, no.”
“I take it you remembered.”
“Yeah. Joker had this disturbing hospital fantasy. Cause of Arkham and all. I was the nurse.” She rolls her eyes at the memory of that awful costume he had her wear. “I think he thinks you’re gonna drug him.”
“And he thinks that because…”
“Because I used ta make him take hallucinogens and the Joker laced his food with Joker venom.” Now it’s Harley’s turn to be blunt, because if she says it any other way she’s going to break down. She remembers, vividly, shoving pills down the kid’s throat and leaving him to face whatever nightmares his tortured mind conjured up. Most of all she remembers the vindictive pleasure she took in it, paying Robin back for stealing Mistah J’s attention away from her. How could I do something like that and think he deserved it?
“Oh,” is all Ivy says. Then, “That’s just great.”
Harley sighs, running her fingers through her hair. “Yeah. He’s gonna think everything we give him is drugged.”
“We may just have to make him take it a couple of times until he realizes that it’s not.”
“Joker used to force-feed him if he wouldn’t eat. We probably shouldn’t remind him of that.”
“What didn’t you two do to him?” Ivy’s eyes widen as soon as she says it. “I’m so sorry, Harl, I didn’t mean-“
“No, ya did. And I don’t blame ya. Yeah, I was brainwashed inta thinkin’ my “puddin’” was the love of my life. But it was still my hands that hurt him.”
Ivy pulls her close and plants a kiss on her forehead. “Well, now our hands are going to help him.”
They go back out to the living room, hand in hand. Jason is still huddled on the couch, running his fingers over the covered burn on his face. He looks confused, like he can’t understand why somebody bandaged his wounds.
The Joker was never big on medical attention for his caged baby bird. He did it sometimes, if it was part of a new game- see “disturbing hospital fantasy”- or if there was a risk of Robin dying from his injuries or suffering permanent damage that the Joker didn’t want. But aside from that, whatever they did to him had to heal on its own or not at all.
Another memory drifts tauntingly to the surface of Harley’s mind. Robin had tried once- only once- to tend the wounds himself. He’d crudely bandaged his own cuts with strips torn from his cape. Harley remembers the Joker laughing himself silly when he saw the pathetic attempt at first aid, and she remembers laughing right alongside him. The Joker tore the makeshift bandages off, not caring how much further damage it did, and then brutally punished the kid for trying to patch himself up. He’d broken first Robin’s right arm, then his wrist, and then every finger on his right hand, one by one. She still remembers Robin’s screams, echoing each snap of bone.
Harley had thought it was hilarious, and sensible at the time- if the baby bird hadn’t wanted to be even more hurt, he shouldn’t have messed with Mistah J’s artwork. But now all she feels is anger at how unfair it was. Not that anything that happened to him down there was fair. But he wasn’t even trying to escape or anything- he was just trying to protect himself. It couldn’t have been easy, trying to bandage up his own wounds. He was a hurt, scared kid who just wanted to make himself feel better any way he could. And we hurt him for it until he was too afraid to try again. Robin had just let himself bleed from then on, afraid of what would happen if he tried to stop it.
Harley hangs back as Ivy approaches the couch, picking up the abandoned glass of water along the way. Jason watches her fearfully, his eyes flicking between her and Harley.
He’s more afraid of me than he is of Pammy. And I don’t blame him one bit.
Ivy kneels down by the couch and shows him the cup. “It’s just water, I promise. Look.” She takes a sip herself, making her movements obvious. Jason watches her drink, and Harley can see in his eyes that he wants it desperately. They don’t know for sure how long it’s been since he’s had any water, or food for that matter. But he’s clearly dehydrated and malnourished, and they need to start fixing that sooner rather than later.
It’s just- he’s so scared. The kid’s been tortured for nine months straight. Harley doesn’t blame him for thinking that everything they do is meant to hurt him somehow. With the Joker, there’s always another shoe to drop.
Ivy holds out the cup. “Here. All yours.”
Jason’s fingers twitch as if he wants to reach for it, but he draws back, his eyes searching Ivy’s face for any evidence of a lie. “What do I-“ his voice breaks again, and he swallows hard. “What do I have to do?”
Oh, kid.
Ivy’s hand curls around the cup a little tighter. “Nothing,” she says, and Harley can tell it’s a struggle for her to keep her voice soft and gentle. “You don’t have to do anything.”
Harley can see just how much he wants it, wants to believe Ivy. But he’s too afraid, too used to being hurt. He looks hopelessly at the cup, longing to take it but too scared to try.
Ivy shoots Harley a glance and stands up. “We’re gonna do this a little differently,” she says, and moves to Jason’s side. “I am not going to hurt you,” she tells him, enunciating her words clearly. “I’m just going to help you drink.”
Jason goes statue-still, his eyes wide and terrified, his chest heaving with panicked breaths. Ivy presses on anyway- she puts her arm behind him, being careful not to touch him, and holds the cup to his lips.
It does the trick. Jason opens his mouth and drinks, a tiny sip at first. Then he’s gulping it down like he can’t get enough, so quickly that Ivy pulls it away before he can choke. Jason makes a small sound of distress. “Easy, easy,” Ivy soothes him. “I’m not taking it away. Just don’t go so fast.” She puts the cup back, and Jason drinks a little more slowly. But it’s still painfully obvious how desperate he is.
Ivy lets him finish the whole cup. She sets it down on the table, still exaggerating her movements and making sure she telegraphs everything she does. “You can have some more in a little while,” she tells him.
“Th-thank you,” Jason stammers. He looks overwhelmed, close to tears.
Over water.
Harley feels close to tears herself. The kid’s been deprived of even the most basic necessities for almost a year. Even something as simple as a cup of water might be more kindness than he’s gotten in nine months.
She wonders, suddenly, what the Joker made him endure for a little water.
Just as suddenly, she decides that she doesn’t want to know.
Okay, enough chickening out, Harley, she chides herself. Gotta face the music.
She goes out into the living room. This time she’s braced herself for the wave of fear at the sight of her.
She isn’t braced for a stranger reaction, and that’s what she gets. Jason still looks terrified when he sees her. But he starts stealing quick glances behind her, too.
What are you doing, kid? Harley wonders. She catches Ivy’s gaze and raises her eyebrows. Ivy shrugs, and Harley frowns.
And then all of a sudden, she knows.
He’s looking for the Joker.
It only makes sense. Back when she was at Arkham, her appearance usually meant the Joker wasn’t far behind. Her job was to soften Robin up, make him afraid, crack whatever defiance he’d managed to cling to so that Mistah J could break him. She remembers taunting him, gleefully describing what the Joker had planned for him that day, making sure to tell him how much it was going to hurt. I was the opening act. I was the meat tenderizer. I was the setup so that Mistah J could come in with the punchline.
“Hey, kiddo,” she manages to say through the lump in her throat. “Long time no see.” No what are you doing what are you saying shut up you stupid-
Jason’s legs shift under the blanket as he curls in on himself. Harley stops approaching, staying on the other side of the coffee table, a barrier between them. “I, uh, I ain’t with the Joker anymore.”
Jason looks incredibly doubtful of that, and it’s the kind of expression Robin would have had in the beginning and even though it hurts that he doesn’t believe her, it’s good to see something other than fear on his face. She laughs a little, hoarse and strained. “I wouldn’t believe me eith-“
And then she stops.
At the sound of her laughter, Jason has turned sheet-white. He throws himself to the floor, the blanket tangled in his legs, seemingly ignoring his injuries. He presses his back into the corner created where the couch meets the wall, tucking his knees against his chest and bringing his arms up to cover his head. He’s trembling, terrified, and-
And shielding himself from a blow.
Robin in the beginning would have gotten ready to fight back, maybe even tried to jump Harley before she could make her move. Even six months in he had still tried to fight back, with words if nothing else. Now, all Robin does is curl up small and wait for her to hit him. He tries to protect himself as best he can, but he doesn’t try to fight anymore.
Harley knows very well what happens when you try to fight back against the Joker.
You regret it.
“Kid, I’m not going to hurt ya,” she breathes, trying really hard to drop her Brooklyn accent or at least lighten it. “I swear I’m not!”
Jason doesn’t seem to hear her. He buries his face in his knees, whimpering softly to himself. Harley can make out a few disjointed phrases- she catches a “not again” and a “no, please” and something that sounds like “I’m sorry.”
Ivy is there somehow, taking Harley’s arm. “Let’s give him some space,” she says, gentle but firm.
Harley lets herself be led out of the living room, but she turns at the door. “I’m sorry,” she calls out, and Robin doesn’t react but she doesn’t care. “You hear me, baby bird? I’m sorry!”
Chapter 5: Fragmentation
Notes:
I’m so sorry, this one was really not meant to be so…dark and sad, it just turned out that way. I decided to do a chapter from Jason’s perspective, just for fun, and it kinda got away from me- once I started I couldn’t stop. This chapter is very dark- there’s some very violent memories, threats, etc., in here, as well as some *very* vague allusions to the implied/referenced stuff, so just read carefully!
Next chapter we’ll get back to Harley, but I regret to tell you all that that won’t be until November. I’ve started prepping for my October scary fic, and I’m going to be spending the month writing that, so this is the last update for a bit. But once October is over I’ll be back at this story full swing!
One more thing- I’m in the process of making a Tumblr! So once that’s done, if you want to come say hi, I’ll share my username!
Chapter Text
Jason doesn’t know where he is.
He knows that he’s not in Arkham Asylum anymore. But he doesn’t know where he is, or how he got here, or how long he’s been here.
He knows why he’s here, though. Or at least he has a guess- he never really knows anything for certain, anymore.
But even in a faded t-shirt and yoga pants, Jason recognizes Poison Ivy. The green-tinged skin is a giveaway, and the bright red ponytail only confirms it.
Oh, yes, he knows why he’s here. And most of him wishes she would just hurry up and get it over with.
Part of him, though, wishes she would keep dragging it out. He’s been given luxuries he almost forgot existed- he got to sleep on her couch last night instead of on the floor, and he got to actually sleep, all the way until he woke up by himself instead of being kicked or shocked awake. He woke up with what was left of his suit gone, which sent a dull stab of fear through him until he realized that he was wearing an oversized shirt instead. He won’t get to keep it, of course, but for now it’s a welcome relief from the tattered remnants of Robin.
Robin’s uniform, anyway.
Jason is still hurt, like always, but for some reason Ivy patched up his wounds. He can feel puckered ripples on his back where she stitched the cuts, and the burn on his cheek has been carefully bandaged. It’s going to hurt like hell when the bandages are ripped off later, but at least while it lasts he can pretend the brand isn’t there. He’ll know it is, but he can pretend.
Ivy even gave him some water, without making him earn it first. Jason knows that only means he’ll have to earn it later, but he was so thirsty that he didn’t care. He can’t even remember the last time he got a drink.
The water helped clear the fog in his head, and now the fear is back- it never left, not really, just faded away while he tried to make sense of his surroundings. It’s back now and worse than ever, because now Jason can remember Poison Ivy’s reputation among the Gotham rogues.
He doesn’t know for sure, of course. But he has a pretty good idea what form her revenge on him is going to take.
That’s what this is, of course. Joker likes to loan him to any criminal who asks, letting them do whatever they want to him for a couple days. It’s Jason’s punishment for being Batman’s sidekick- they can’t hurt the Bat himself, but they’ll settle for his little bird. Joker only has three rules about sharing his toy, and two of them are for the rogues- I want him back with everything still attached, and I want him back alive. They can’t maim him, and they can’t kill him.
They can do whatever else they want. Jason has already experienced the full brutality of almost the entire Gotham rogues’ gallery. Some of them have even borrowed him more than once. There’s a lot of things that stay within the Joker’s two parameters, and Jason has learned how creative they can be.
Poison Ivy is new, though. And so is this house. Usually he’s taken to a different place in Arkham, or the Joker just lets the rogue who wants him take over the abandoned wing for awhile. He’s never been taken out of Arkham before. And he’s never been given to Poison Ivy before.
He’s already made a mess of it.
He didn’t mean to. He tried. But he heard Harley Quinn’s laughter, and he knew she was there to take him back, back to Arkham and the Joker and whatever torture is waiting for him there because he messed up, he wasn’t good.
That’s the third rule. Not for the rogues, but for Jason. The Joker always reminds him of it when whatever criminal is borrowing him comes for him- have a nice time, bird boy! Be good! Jason has to behave, like the Joker taught him, trained him- obedience school, he called it. Jason has to be good. He has to scream and beg and cry just enough to make it fun but not so much that it seems like he’s actually trying to get them to stop hurting him. He has to do what he’s told when he’s told to do it, no matter what he’s being told to do. He has to suffer like a good little broken bird, enough to satisfy them but not so much that he’s more afraid of them than he is of the Joker (he’ll never fear anyone as much as he fears the Joker, but he isn’t allowed to say that, he isn’t allowed to talk back. There may be only one rule when he’s with the rogues, but the Joker has dozens, and Jason is always breaking them, because even after almost a year he still doesn’t know how to be good.)
It’s his own fault if he’s not good. When he’s brought back to the Joker, they’ll tell him all the ways Jason wasn’t good for them, and the Joker will click his tongue and shake his head and say something about kids these days, they just don’t have any manners and then he’ll punish Jason for not being good. And no matter what the rogues do to him, none of it ever compares with the Joker’s excruciating punishments.
Jason is not supposed to be cowering in the corner, trembling as Ivy approaches him. He’s supposed to be waiting for her to tell him what she wants him to do, or for her to just start hurting him without telling him anything.
But that laughter- Jason’s lost control of what he’s supposed to be doing.
So has Poison Ivy, apparently. She stops before she gets to him, reaching out a hand- but she doesn’t grab him, she doesn’t hit him. She just leaves it there, outstretched. “Hey, Jason,” she says quietly. “It’s going to be okay.”
The first part of that sentence is strange- the Joker doesn’t make a secret of his name, but most of the rogues still call him Robin. Calling him Jason while they hurt him seems too much like an innocent kid, or something like that. He’s not a kid they decided to hurt on a whim. He’s Robin.
Robin deserves this.
The second part of Ivy’s sentence is even stranger, strange enough that Jason almost laughs himself. It’s not going to be okay. It hasn’t been okay for…almost a year, if he’s got the time right, and he may not have it right, the Joker might be messing with his perception of it just for kicks. But he thinks it’s been almost a year.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ivy says, and Jason shrinks back further against the couch. He knows what that means, when they start telling him that they won’t hurt him, they’ll be nice and gentle with him- it’s not going to hurt, they promise, not a bit.
They’re lying. Every time, they’re lying.
Poison Ivy is lying now. Jason doesn’t look at her, keeping his eyes lowered- keep those baby blues down, boy toy, I’d hate to have to gouge them out.
Even when he’s not in Arkham anymore, Jason still hears the Joker in his head.
“Harley isn’t going to hurt you either,” Ivy says, more softly. “She isn’t with the Joker anymore, she’s with me. She’ll be back later; she went shopping. We’re out of everything.” She lowers her hand, sitting back on her heels. “When was the last time you ate?”
“I-I don’t remember,” Jason stammers out before he can think. Panic threatens to overwhelm him. He isn’t supposed to say things like I don’t know, I don’t remember, I can’t. It took him a long time to learn that lesson. Yes, sir. No, sir. I’m sorry, sir. Please don’t hurt me, sir. That’s pretty much the extent of what he’s allowed to say.
But the Joker never told him how to talk to the rogues, probably assuming that they would be more interested in hurting him than talking to him. Should he call her ma’am, plead for mercy for not remembering, stay silent? I don’t know what to do!
“It’s all right, Jason,” Ivy murmurs, which means she must have noticed his panic, which means that’s another thing he’ll be punished for. The Joker is going to tear him apart.
Jason shrinks further into his corner, pressing his hands to his face. He can’t hold back the tears, and he doesn’t try. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. Why won’t he just kill me? He’s held onto the faintest threads of hope for so long, only to have them ripped away one by one. There’s nothing left of hope, nothing left of him anymore. He can’t live like this. This isn’t a life at all. It’s just hurting.
Jason wants so badly to stop hurting.
“Kid?” comes Ivy’s soft voice. She’s still watching him, still making no move to touch him. She said she wasn’t going to hurt him, and she still hasn’t. And maybe she wasn’t lying after all, but it doesn’t matter whether she hurts him or not. The Joker will. He always will.
Jason’s hand moves almost on its own to the bandage on his face. That was what finally did it. That was when he stopped fighting back, gave up believing that Batman would come for him. The Joker branded him, claimed him for himself, marked him so that everyone who saw Jason would know who he belonged to, would know that he didn’t belong to the Bat anymore. Batman had thrown him away.
The Joker’s voice echoes in his head again. Whose are you, baby bird?
He hears himself answer in the memory, and his voice sounds defeated, lifeless, empty of everything but fear and pain. Yours, sir.
The all-too-familiar cackle pierces through his mind. Mine, the Joker crows gleefully. Mine, mine, mine. To do with as I wish.
The brand was the breaking point.
Jason was broken long before that.
Chapter 6: Consolation
Notes:
Hey all! I’m back!
Technically I haven’t finished the spooky vampire series yet, there’s still seven pieces to go. But I got *really* inspired for this story, and I wanted to update it one more time before the New Year, so I finished the next chapter! (Also if you like darker Batfam, spooky stuff, Bruce trying to parent, any of that- go check out my vampire series, it’s been a lot of fun so far!)
With regards to this story, I’m enjoying myself way too much writing it. It hurts but it’s amazingly fun to write, especially when I get to do chapters like this! This one is more Harley-focused, after the more Jason-centric one last time. This one’s also…a little bit lighter but still pretty angsty. Also the random shopping lady isn’t meant to be a specific character or anything, it’s just an interaction I wanted Harley to have.
Enjoy! Oh, and I have a Tumblr now! Link at the end of the chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Everything reminds her of jokes now. Harley passes by a bin piled high with bananas and thinks about slipping on a banana peel. She sees a custard pie in the bakery section, and her mind tells her Pie in the face. She sees chickens roasting on a spit and thinks Why did the chicken cross the road? and then she has to think very hard about how funny that is (it isn’t funny at all) before she starts thinking about dead birds on a butcher’s hook.
I thought I was getting better. Harley knows she’s not…all there, still. But she didn’t think she was crazy anymore. She knows now that the Joker never really loved her, and she hates him and she doesn’t even feel tempted to call him “puddin’” and she thought that meant that she was better. But her mind is a beautiful Chinese vase from the ancient Kung Pao dynasty or something, all busted to pieces on the floor, and just because Ivy’s swept up some of the shards doesn’t mean the vase isn’t still broke.
Ivy sent her out to get food- whatever she can think of that Jason will be able to keep down easily. So far, Harley’s gotten three things- crackers and yogurt and weird pasta shaped like tiny stars. And she’s been in the supermarket for an hour. She just keeps getting distracted- her thoughts won’t stay in her head, unless they’re the bad ones, and then they stay too long.
“I’m a mess,” she tells a can of chicken noodle soup, and then dumps it into her trolley along with three more. A carton of bone broth follows them. Harley’s mostly just been wandering around the store, getting the kind of things she remembers eating when she was sick as a kid.
The problem is that she can’t think about what to get without her stupid busted brain reminding her that she’s trying to think of things to feed a kid who’s so painfully thin that his ribs stick out through his shirt. And that he only looks like that because Harley’s ex-boyfriend kidnapped him and kept him locked up in Arkham for nine months and she helped torture him for six of those. And that when she left the house he was hiding in the corner because he’s terrified of her and he has good reason to be.
Harley finds a bag of white rice and drops it into her trolley. She remembers something from when she was in medical school about a certain diet to use when people can’t keep anything down, and she’s sure rice was part of it. What was everything else? While she thinks about it, she gets some instant mashed potatoes and a carton of eggs.
Harley doesn’t particularly like shopping. The stores are too…normal. She doesn’t fit in with the mothers checking the nutrition labels on the week’s groceries, or the fathers wandering from spot to spot after everyone’s favorite snacks, or the kids excited to help out by grabbing the wrong brand of cheese to take back to the trolley. Compared to all the normal people that inhabit grocery stores, Harley’s voice always seems too loud, her accent too strident and harsh. She always feels like people know who she is, even if they don’t say it, even if all they see is a little blonde with a Brooklyn accent and fading hair dye. They know.
But she needed to get out of the house. Jason needed her out of the house. She’s too much for him. He remembers too much about her.
She’s realizing that she doesn’t remember all that much about Arkham and underneath it. She remembers specific incidents, but she doesn’t remember the day-to-day, and often the small details escape her.
She has no doubt that Jason remembers better. He carries reminders, after all. Harley shudders at the memory of the network of wounds and scars covering Jason’s frail body, and tosses a loaf of bread into her trolley harder than necessary. The loaf is mildly squished, but unharmed.
She gets some chicken, and then decides that Jello is a good idea. It isn’t a good idea- there’s too many flavors. She stands in front of the rack for ten minutes, trying to pick one. She doesn’t let herself even consider any of the flavors that are colored red. Or green. Or purple.
In the end, Harley chooses orange. Orange doesn’t remind her of anything terrible, so it goes in the trolley. And now she remembers what the sick person diet is. It’s BRAT, or something, bananas-rice-apples-toast, and she already has rice and bread so now she has a direction. She goes back to the bananas, and then goes to find applesauce.
It’s weird, shopping for food herself. Ivy does it, usually. They don’t get much, since it’s only two of them, and they don’t need to get any produce since Ivy handles that in the garden. Ivy also does some kind of…pickup thing, so that she doesn’t even have to go into the store, but Harley doesn’t know how to set that up and Ivy had bigger things to worry about. So it’s normal, everyday trolley pushing for Harley.
She debates with herself for way too long about porridge. It’s easy to keep down, which is what they need. But it also feels…kind of prisoner-y. Or maybe she’s thinking of that line in that one really old book- please sir, may I have some more? And then she has to turn and leave the aisle- without the porridge- because thinking about that makes her remember the way Jason begged for mercy and called the Joker “sir” in his cell.
Harley flees to the detergent aisle, which is empty and relatively quiet, and pulls out her phone. She types in Ivy’s number, her hands shaking, but she can’t press the call button. Ivy’s busy with Jason, Harley can’t interrupt her, she can’t- she can’t take even more from the kid than she already has.
The store is blurred out in her vision, and every time she blinks it looks more like Arkham, and she knows it’s not but she can’t help thinking it is. And she can’t stop thinking about Jason, either.
She can’t stop thinking about how they fed him, back in the abandoned section of Arkham. They being the Joker and the dozen or so crooked guards he kept on his payroll. And herself, of course. She can’t deny her own part in this no matter how much she wants to pretend it didn’t happen.
There’s a reason why Robin is so thin, why his suit went from being perfectly fitted to three sizes too big. The Joker kept him on the edge of starvation, kept him too weak to fight back. Harley remembers him cracking a joke about how little he fed the kid- “barely enough to keep a bird alive!” He’d thought it was hilarious, a real knee-slapper.
I did too.
It hardly counted as food, what they’d given Robin. If it wasn’t half-rotten, it was laced with Joker venom or hallucinogens or whatever else the clown had decided to play with. He had so many twisted games.
He made a game out of picking out the most revolting bits of garbage to see if Robin was desperate enough to eat it, knowing he wouldn’t get anything else and knowing what would happen if he refused to eat.
He made a game out of letting Robin go hungry for days at a time and telling him it had only been a few hours, just to mess with his perception of time a little more.
He made a game out of starving the kid and then sending Harley or one of the guards in to put down an empty plate or bowl, just to savor the look on the boy’s face when he realized he wasn’t getting anything to eat after all. Once, he’d sent Harley in with an unopened can of beans- food, but no way for Robin to get to it. The Joker had laughed himself into fits over that cruel trick.
Robin had actually figured out that particular game, and he’d also figured out that he couldn’t win- but he could stop playing. He’d stopped reacting to the false hopes, ignoring them as soon as he knew what they were, offering no reaction to laugh at.
The Joker had been furious. Robin had ruined the game, spoiled the punchline. And the Joker punished him brutally for it- he’d given Robin such a severe beating that even brainwashed and crazy, Harley remembers thinking it was too much.
Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I stood by watching and laughing. Maybe I helped him do it, struck a few blows myself. She doesn’t know anymore. There were so many beatings, so many sadistic punishments, so much suffering- and so much of it caused by her.
Harley realizes, in a distant sort of way, that her face is wet, and wonders when she started crying. It’s ridiculous, really. She used to be feared as the Joker’s right hand, and now she’s sniffling in a store aisle surrounded by overpriced detergent. “I’m such a mess,” she croaks to the nearest bottle. It responds with nothing but a promise that it cleans twice as nice!
“Oh, don’t say that, you’re not a mess, honey,” says a warm voice behind her. Harley jumps (and maybe screams a little) and whirls around.
The woman immediately fishes out a Kleenex from her purse and hands it to her. “Oh, baby,” she says soothingly. “What’s wrong?”
And in the middle of a detergent aisle, in front of a complete stranger, Harley Quinn bursts into tears.
The woman abandons her own trolley, bringing over two more Kleenex. “Can I hug you, honey?” she asks softly.
Harley nods, feeling miserable, and the woman pulls her into a side hug. It’s…it’s really nice, so nice that Harley thinks I don’t deserve this.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
Harley sniffles and tries to think of what she can say that won’t make this very nice lady immediately call the police. I’ve got a traumatized teenager in my house that I tortured for six months but I feel really bad about it isn’t going to work. “I’ve got a sick kid at home,” she finally mumbles. Close enough.
“Oh, been there,” the woman replies, chuckling. Harley thinks her warm, rumbly chuckle is the best type of laughter she’s ever heard. “Getting overwhelmed?”
Harley nods. She’s crying again. “I can’t- I can’t do this,” she gasps.
“Come here, honey.” The woman reaches into Harley’s trolley and piles her weird assortment of groceries into the empty front of hers. “We’ll do it together, okay? Do you have a list of what you need?”
Harley shakes her head. “Just- just things he can keep down.”
“You’ve done a good job already. Smoothies? I always make smoothies when I’m sick. What kinds of fruit do you usually buy?”
“I don’t. My- my girlfriend grows it.”
“Good for her!” The woman smiles so warmly that Harley feels like she’s just been punched in the stomach. People don’t- this is Gotham. People aren’t this nice in Gotham. People don’t come up to someone having a mental breakdown and help them with their shopping in Gotham.
“Popsicles?”
“Huh?” Harley blinks.
“Popsicles. Got some?”
“No?”
“Next stop, freezer aisle.”
This woman, who Harley doesn’t even know, guides her through the rest of her shopping. She suggests food to get, and has Harley pick the brand so she’s not just dictating what to buy. She asks a few questions, but no questions that would make Harley reveal important information. And she has tissues at the ready when the thoughts and the emotions get to be too much and Harley breaks down again.
Either she’s from Metropolis or she’s an angel, Harley decides.
They pay for their stuff together and walk out of the store together and go to Ivy’s car that Harley borrowed together. The woman even helps her load up the bags- there’s three of them, all full of food and none of them plastic because Ivy won’t hurt the environment like that- into the boot of the car.
“Thanks,” Harley says, and she wants to say so much more- like Did it hurt when you fell from heaven and/or Metropolis? Do you help crying freaks in stores a lot? Do you know who I am and what I’ve done?- but she isn’t sure how to say it.
The woman smiles at her again. “Honey, I don’t know you and your story, and you don’t know me and mine. Chances are we’ll never see each other again. I just want you to know that you’re not a mess, and you’re not broken, and whoever made you feel that way is wrong and an asshole. And whatever you’re going through, it’ll get easier. Maybe not before it gets tougher, but it always gets easier. You just hang in there, baby. You keep smiling, okay?”
The stranger picks up her own shopping and goes off to her own car and her own life, and Harley gets in the front seat and pulls out of the parking lot and tries to make out the road signs through a blur of tears.
I’m messed up, but I’m not a mess. Regretting what she’s done in the past- it’s not going to fix any of it. She’s luckier than most, because she actually has a chance to fix it. Starting with getting these groceries home and giving Jason the first good meal he’s had in a very long time.
Keep smiling, okay? the stranger had said.
Harley may not be able to handle laughter anymore. But smiling…that, she thinks she can do.
Notes:
Chapter 7: Restoration
Notes:
Hello! I just wanna thank you guys for the wonderful response to the last chapter, I felt so loved☺️
While I’m very happy with this chapter, I’m *really* looking forward to the next two. Some exciting stuff is in the works!
Chapter Text
Ivy meets Harley on the porch. “You look…better,” she says, sounding slightly confused.
“I met an angel,” Harley tells her, and pushes one of the shopping bags into her arms. “And I bought food. A lot of food. How’s the kid?”
Ivy holds the door open with her hip. “He’s okay. Still pretty spooked. He fell asleep again, but I couldn’t get him to get back on the couch so he’s still on the floor.” She glances down into the bags. “What did you buy?”
“Anything I could think of. And then anything the Metropolis lady told me. Should I start water for pasta, or do you think we should go with broth first?
“Broth. Harley, what Metropolis lady? What angel?”
So Harley explains everything while they put the food away, unable to keep the smile off her face. Ivy is smiling too by the end of it. “So you’re all right now?”
“I think I am,” Harley says. “That ain’t to say this is gonna be a piece of cake, but I think I’m not gonna be crying every time he looks at me now.” She glances over to the little bundle of blanket tucked beside the couch. “Doubt he’s okay, though.”
“Yeah. Let’s get him fed.” Ivy picks up the carton of bone broth and pulls a mug down from the cupboard. She lowers her voice, glancing to the living room. “How much should I give him? I don’t know if he’ll be able to eat very much for a while. He’s pretty malnourished.”
Harley frowns. Medical school, don’t fail me now. But medical school is being stubborn, and refuses to come up to the forefront of her memory. She’s strongly tempted to bang her head against the table to shake it loose, but she has a feeling that Ivy wouldn’t like that. “Maybe do half,” she says instead.
“We’re probably going to have to convince him it isn’t drugged again,” Ivy remarks as she sticks the mug in the microwave. “And actually, we probably need to think about giving him medicine. Something for his immune system; it’s probably shot after so long down there. Definitely a painkiller of some description.” She runs her fingers through the ends of her ponytail, her cheeks flushing darker green. “I keep thinking about him like he’s a plant.”
“Huh?”
“You know, if you have a sick plant that hasn’t gotten any nutrients in awhile. You have to give it a boost with some fertilizer. I think it’s probably the same with Jason, but I don’t know what to boost or how we would do that.”
“Magnesium, potassium, thiamine, and phosphate- the deficiencies associated with malnutrition,” Harley blurts out. And then blinks, because where did that come from? and you couldn’t have done that earlier?
Ivy gives her a half-smile. “Thanks, Doctor Quinzel.” She takes the mug of warm broth out of the microwave, yawning. “I think we can worry about all that tomorrow, though. For tonight, let’s just get him fed. And then all of us need sleep.”
Harley follows Ivy out to the living room, watching as she shakes Jason awake. Gently, barely jostling his shoulder. But Jason wakes up like he’s been kicked, flinching back from her with wide, fearful eyes. “It’s okay, Jason,” Ivy says softly. “You’re okay.”
Jason’s eyes flick from Ivy to Harley and back. He pushes himself up into an awkward sort of half-sitting position, braced against the couch and the wall. The blanket pools over his feet, and his fingers twitch on the edge of it like he wants to pull it up, wrap it around himself, protect himself. But he doesn’t dare.
Ivy holds out the mug. “We brought you something to eat,” she says. “I promise it isn’t drugged or-“
But she doesn’t have to finish. Jason doesn’t hesitate for a second before he’s gulping the broth so fast Harley’s surprised he doesn't choke on it. Ivy looks startled, after all the reassurances and coaxing they had to use when they gave him water. But she holds the mug still and lets Jason drink it down like he can’t get enough.
The kid drains every last drop in the space of thirty seconds. Ivy glances at Harley. “Good job, Jason,” she says. “Want some more?”
Jason squeezes his eyes shut. “N-no,” he answers like it hurts him to say.
Ivy nods. “Okay. No more right now.”
Jason’s quiet sob of relief wrenches Harley’s heart. She knows what he was thinking, what he was afraid of. She remembers the Joker crouching over Jason, pinning him to the floor. She remembers his spidery fingers forcing pieces of rotting food down the boy’s throat, his gleeful cackle as Jason gagged on them, trying to push his tormentor off of him with what little strength he had left. That was back when he had still been fighting.
After awhile, he hadn’t tried to fight anymore.
Harley puts the rest of the broth away and finds some leftovers to heat up for the two of them, while Ivy stays with Jason. She’s trying so hard, Harley can tell- keeping her voice gentle and soft, trying to coax him to let her get him on the couch so he doesn’t have to sleep on the floor. It’s really sweet.
And it’s not going to work.
Oh, it’ll work eventually. But it’ll take forever. And they can’t keep doing it with every little thing. Jason’s confused and overwhelmed and scared out of his mind, and he’s not used to kindness anymore. They can work on that later. For now, though-
Harley sets her jaw in that stubborn way the Joker absolutely hated. He liked her soft and pliable and empty headed so that he could fill her up with crazy. Too bad for you, Harley thinks, and fills up a cup with water. She adds in a painkiller and a sleeping pill that she digs out of the cupboard, stirring until they dissolve.
And then she marches out to the living room.
“Hey, baby bird,” she says firmly, and holds out the cup. Jason’s gaze snaps to hers, still keeping his eyes down, but focused on her nonetheless. Harley keeps going. If he’s afraid of her, then she can use that to their advantage until they manage to fix it. “This is water, and it’s got medicine in it to help you sleep. If you let Ivy get you onto the couch, you can have it, okay?”
She’s careful. She’s so careful not to phrase it as an order while still phrasing it as a deal, a game. Because that’s what Jason knows now. That’s familiar.
“Harley-“ Ivy says, sounding worried.
Harley shakes her head. “Trust me.”
Jason’s face has changed, gone from confusion and fear to something almost like relief. He knows what’s happening now, knows how to play the game. He nods his head, and Harley sees just a tiny spark of Robin’s determination still hiding behind his eyes.
She sets the cup on the table, making sure he can still see it, and steps out of the way so Ivy can pick him up. Ivy moves carefully and makes sure not to jostle his ankle, but Harley still sees the kid bite down on a scream. Ivy lowers him down on the couch as gently as possible, tucking the blanket back around him. “Good job, Jason,” she says softly.
Harley passes over the water, and this time Jason drinks it by himself. His hands are trembling, but he manages it. He spills some at the beginning, and freezes like they’re going to snatch it away. Harley pretends she doesn’t notice, and so does Ivy, and Jason relaxes and finishes the whole cup.
He’s already looking sleepy by the time the last drop is gone. It probably isn’t the medicine working just yet, but the events of the last- has it only been a day? A day and a half?- have probably exhausted the poor kid.
Ivy collects the empty dishes and deposits them in the sink, following Harley back to the table. They eat quickly and quietly, both keeping an ear out for anything that goes wrong in the living room.
“I’m sorry,” Harley says finally.
Ivy squints at her. “For what?”
“For dragging you into this. I was the one who screwed up, you shouldn’t have to be-“ the thoughts fade off into the fuzzy corners of Harley’s mind. “I never even asked you if you wanted kids, Ives.”
Ivy smothers a laugh. “You’re exhausted, huh, rosebud?”
Harley puts her head down on the table, narrowly missing her plate. “So tired.”
“Let’s talk about the- well, everything- in the morning,” Ivy suggests. “I’m gonna go turn the lights off in the living room. I think I’ll leave that little nightlight on, just in case.”
“Good idea,” Harley mumbles into the table.
She hears Ivy’s laugh as her girlfriend slips past her.
What if she hates me? Harley thinks. She didn’t sign up for me. Didn’t sign up for me liking hyenas, or being scared of octopuses, or naming my hammer Beatrice. And she didn’t sign up to take care of a baby bird, either. What if she decides she doesn’t like me anymore? The normal part of her knows that’s the exhaustion (and the part of her that still goes by Dr. Quinzel insists that it’s something to do with her mental state too, to which Harley thinks shut up) but she can’t help worrying herself about it. Ivy is the best thing to ever happen to her. What would I do if she-
And then Harley’s being scooped up from behind and cradled against Ivy’s chest, and she squeals as quietly as she can so she doesn’t wake Jason. “What are you doing?”
“Sweeping you off your feet,” comes Ivy’s voice above her head. Not her flirty voice or her sweet voice, but the voice she only uses with Harley, the one that Harley always thought sounded the most like Ivy. She wraps an arm around Ivy’s shoulder and looks back toward Jason as Ivy carries her through the darkened living room. He’s asleep, and only the bandage on his cheek sets him apart from any other sleeping teenager.
Ivy sets her down on their bed and throws a set of pajamas at her. Ivy wears floaty nightgowns and fancy silk wrapper things; Harley’s side of the pajama drawer is all old T-shirts and comfy shorts. They like to mess with each other- Harley buys increasingly ludicrous lacy lingerie and smuggles it into Ivy’s drawer. Ivy finds the most stupid, ridiculous T-shirts known to man and tricks Harley into wearing them.
Ivy’s won the battle tonight. Snickering, Harley holds up the shirt she tossed her- green, with two cartoon cacti on it. The cacti are high-fiving. There’s lettering over them that says “CactUS.”
“It’s a work of art,” Ivy says. She’s changed into one of her silk things, and she’s standing at the mirror braiding her hair. Harley watches her dreamily. How did I get with a woman this beautiful?
“It’s so stupid. I love it.” Harley pulls the shirt on and taps the left cactus, who’s got a toothy grin. “That one’s me. The one with the eyelashes is you.”
Ivy snorts, tying off her braid. She slides into bed next to Harley and flicks off the lamp. “You know, I’m proud of you,” she whispers in the darkness.
“Hmm, why?” Harley snuggles into the quilt. It’s handmade, patterned with roses and mushrooms and all kinds of little plants. Ivy had found it at a farmers’ market and her eyes turned into hearts. Harley bought it secretly, stowed it away in the backseat, and then draped it over her when she least expected it. It was the first time she’d seen her girlfriend cry.
“Harls, this is a lot. We broke into Arkham and brought out a kid who’s been through hell, courtesy of your abuser, and now we’re taking care of him with very little idea what we’re doing. It’s a lot for me and I don’t have the same trauma you do. You’re handling it really, really well.”
Harley finds her hand under the blanket and squeezes it. “You think he’s angry right now? His pet robin flew the coop.”
Ivy laughs. “I think he’s absolutely furious. Mad as a wet hen.”
That brings a smile to Harley’s face. She imagines the Joker, stamping up and down beneath Arkham Asylum, seething with rage and unable to do anything, anything, about it. For once, the helpless one.
Harley sighs and shuts her eyes, curling into Ivy. “Ivy?”
“Hmm?”
“What you said. About the Joker being mad that we stole Robin. We got the last laugh, didn’t we? You know what?” Harley’s lips turn up in a smile. “That’s funny.”
Chapter 8: Complication
Notes:
I’m back with a whopper of a chapter, double the length of the normal ones! I almost split it in half, but it was flowing so well I just let it happen.
Two things before you read:
- I’ve gotten a LOT of comments about my vampire series. That’s still going even though I haven’t updated it in awhile! The final chapter of Damian’s piece is nearly done. And this October I will be doing another spooky thing even though the vampire one isn’t finished. This new one will be much shorter and a very different vibe and I’m quite excited about it😄
- THIS CHAPTER IS PROBABLY THE HEAVIEST I’VE GOTTEN WITH THE IMPLIED/REFERENCED TAGS. Please, please, please be careful reading this one. Nothing is explicit, nothing is described, but there is vague nudity and it is made very clear what the source of trauma is. This is probably as clear-cut as I’ll ever get in this story, I won’t likely go any heavier than this, but it’s still pretty tough to read. It was hard to write. Please, read carefully and mind the tags!
Chapter Text
“Mmmm.” Harley stretches, luxuriously, like a cat in the sun. There is a sunbeam, falling deliciously across her ribs.
Harley lets her eyes drift open. She’s alone in the bed. The window’s been opened, and a ray of sunlight shines cheerfully through.
“Ivy?” Harley calls, sleepily. “Ivy, where’d you go?”
Distantly, she hears Ivy’s voice float back. “Kitchen, baby!”
Harley folds the covers aside and slides out of bed, yawning. Barefoot, she pads to the living room and stops short before she makes it all the way to the kitchen.
I completely forgot we had a kid.
Jason is curled on the couch in a smaller ball than she would have thought possible, even with a kid as underweight as he is. He’s wrapped the blanket around himself like a little cocoon, and despite the noise from Harley and Ivy, he’s still fast asleep. She doesn’t doubt that it’s because his body is trying to recover from the injuries, keeping him asleep while it starts to heal.
Jason looks almost peaceful asleep. She’d watched him sleep sometimes in Arkham- usually a few moments before waking him up in some unpleasant way on the Joker’s orders. She remembers dumping cold water on him at least once. The Joker liked to jab his shiny black shoes into the kid’s ribs or stomach. The henchmen favored using electricity to jolt Robin out of his sleep. Whatever the method, it was always a rude awakening.
It hasn’t escaped Harley’s notice that he’s still sleeping like he expects one. His knobby knees are pulled up to his chest- they stick out sharp under the tightly wrapped blanket- and his arm is upturned over his head, shielding his face. He’s braced to be hurt even in his sleep, the poor kid. For nine months his life has been nothing but hurting in different ways.
The blanket, too, shows just how accustomed he is to abuse. They keep the house pretty warm for Ivy’s collection of houseplants; even a frail little fledgling like Jason shouldn’t have been very cold. Harley’s about eighty-seven percent sure that he’s not snuggled into the blanket to ward off the chill. He’s wrapped himself completely in it, tucking all the extra fabric underneath himself so that it’ll be harder for someone to rip away. It's the same as the cup of water last night- Jason’s response to any kindness is to prepare for it to be taken away from him.
Harley turns away from the couch and heads into the kitchen. Ivy has the refrigerator door open, frowning at the contents. “What do we think for breakfast? I want to give him something with a little more substance to it, but I also want to make sure he’s ready first.”
“Eggs?” Harley suggests. “Maybe scrambled so they’re all soft and fluffy.”
Ivy flashes her a smile and pulls out a carton of eggs. They’re the good stuff- farmer’s market, locally sourced, free-range. Ivy loves farmer’s markets. She’s probably the only person in Gotham who knows her egg seller by name (Lafayette). And her cheese lady (Francesca.) And her milk person (Sky.) Even the ones she doesn’t buy from on the regular, she knows by name. All the farmers from here to Smallville seem to know Ivy.
“I’m gonna wake him up in a bit. Nice and gentle. Think he can walk?” Harley asks.
Ivy bites her lip as she stirs the eggs. “I don’t know. His feet weren’t too bad, but still pretty hurt. Why, do you want him to sit at the table?”
Harley nods. “I think it might help if he eats with us.
“I can carry him over,” Ivy replies. “But after breakfast, you’ve got the harder job.”
“Huh?”
“I’m going to go to the store,” Ivy says. “Get medicine and stuff.” She keeps talking, running the spatula through the eggs without really watching what she’s doing. Her green eyes are fixed on Harley in a way that means pay attention, I’m serious.
Unfortunately, it’s also really hot.
“Harley.” Ivy is frowning now, and Harley jerks herself back to reality before her eyes turn into hearts. “Are you listening?”
“Yeah. Promise.” Ivy raises an eyebrow, and Harley deflates. “No. But in my defense, you’re pretty.”
Ivy’s cheeks flush darker green. “Save the butter for toast, Harls.” She glances down at the eggs and gives them another stir. “I’m also going to get him some proper clothes, so he isn’t just sitting around in your old T-shirt. Can you get him cleaned up while I’m gone?”
“Yeah, sure,” Harley says, and then her brain catches up with her mouth. “Wait, what?”
“The kid isn’t exactly smelling like my roses, sweetpea. He-“
“Ivy! He will freak out!”
Ivy drops the spatula, turning to face Harley. “He’ll freak out more if it’s me,” she says, her voice heavy. “I’ve got a reputation, one that he’s definitely heard about. And knowing what's been done to him-“
“I’m the ex-girlfriend of the guy who did it!” Harley exclaims. "He's gonna panic and he'll be even more afraid of me than he already is and then-"
"Breathe, Harls. Breathe." Ivy's arms are around her in a moment. "I can't do it, baby. Not without full-blown terror, and we can't afford that. I need you to try, okay? If it doesn't go well, I'll think of something else."
"Ivy, why do you even...care?" Harley asks, and it sounds mean but she doesn't mean it like that. Ivy understands anyway.
"I like seeing things grow up tall and strong," Ivy says, running her fingers over the leaves of a spider plant on the counter. "And I hate the Joker. For what he did to you. He's down there under Arkham right now, and he's fuming. I only wish I could see his face."
Harley sighs. "Ivy...what if Jason thinks I'm going to..."
"You never did before," Ivy points out. "With any luck, he'll remember that. And if we get unlucky, you try your trick from last night."
"Making it seem like a game?"
"Exactly. And then we deal with the fallout."
Harley thinks about it over breakfast. It goes surprisingly smoothly, although they find out pretty quickly that Jason can't walk yet. He manages a single limping step before he falls, gasping with pain, and Ivy catches him. "Easy, easy," she tells him, scooping his legs up in her arms. Ivy's not a weightlifter, and Jason weighs barely anything, but carrying him makes the muscles in her arms stand out anyway and Harley feels her face flush, remembering the way Ivy did the same carry with her last night.
Ivy gets Jason situated in a seat and goes to finish off the eggs. Jason is shaking so hard he's close to falling off the chair, darting his eyes between her and Harley. He holds himself painfully still aside from the trembling, his hands stiff at his sides, and it takes Harley a second to realize that he's probably waiting for them to tie him to the chair. For the first month the Joker had kept him bound to a rusty old wheelchair they'd found in the abandoned wing. And he hadn't used rope or cuffs to do it- he'd used barbed wire.
Just don't act like tying him up even crossed your mind. Harley hums the first few notes of a song, slipping into the chair on Jason's left. "Ivy, how's breakfast coming? We're hungry over here!"
Ivy flashes her a grin, sensing what she's trying to do- acting casual to keep him calm, subtly telling him that he's sitting there because they're going to feed him, not hurt him. "Just about ready!" she replies. "How does orange juice sound?"
"Delicious!" Harley grins. "What about you, kiddo? You want some orange juice?"
She knows immediately that he's not ready for questions like that yet. Jason goes rigid, almost hyperventilating, staring at her until he realizes he's staring at her and drops his gaze to his lap. "I- I- I d-don't- I'm- n-not-" Even the words are shaking apart.
"Okay, it's okay, kid," she says gently. "We'll get you some, all right?" She's kicking herself inwardly. Of course Jason would panic when presented with something that sounds like a choice. Under Arkham, he ate what he was given or he had it shoved down his throat. He hasn't gotten to choose what he gets to eat in almost a year; he hasn't gotten to choose in almost a year.
Actually that's not quite true, Harley's brain pipes up, and cheerfully hands her a memory of when the Joker forced Jason to choose a weapon for the madman to use on him. Didn't he end up picking the crowbar? her brain asks.
Shut your face, Harley tells it. I know you don't have a face because you're my brain, but shut up anyway.
Ivy brings over two plates, setting Jason's down first, and then gets her own. Jason stares at the plate like he doesn't know what it is.
Harley cuts Ivy a glance across the table, picks up her fork, and stabs it into the eggs, shoving them into her mouth. "Go ahead and eat, kiddo," she says without bothering to swallow first. Ivy does the same thing with slightly more manners than Harley, both of them pretending that nothing is even out of the ordinary.
Slowly, Jason picks up his fork. He tries his best, the poor kid. But his hands are ruined, the fingers broken and crushed and skinned and healed up and destroyed again. They look like an old man's hands, not ones that belong to a sixteen-year-old boy. And they shake so badly that the fork slips out of them and clatters on the floor. Jason gasps in fear and braces himself like they're going to knock him out of the chair.
Harley can't stand it anymore, the way he keeps doing that. It's not his fault, of course it's not. But it makes her angry that he thinks every little thing will get him hit, or worse. It makes her angry that for nine months, every little thing did.
"Screw this," she mumbles, and tosses her own fork aside, digging into her eggs bare-handed. Ivy's eyebrows shoot up to her hairline, and out of the corner of her eye Harley sees Jason's mouth drop open before he snaps it shut again.
It takes a few minutes, but eventually the kid follows Harley's lead and starts to eat. And, just like before, once he gets going he goes at record speed. Ivy's only half done by the time Jason cleans his plate. Harley almost wants to offer him some more, but with what she has to do later...probably for the best if he doesn't have as much in his stomach.
Suddenly she isn't hungry anymore.
They steal a few minutes in the pantry when they're finished with breakfast. Ivy holds Harley close, and Harley lets her head press into Ivy's chest and just breathes. Ordinarily she'd be climbing Ivy like one of her trees, but with the knowledge of what she has to do as soon as Ivy leaves, she doesn't really feel like it right now. She just stands still until Ivy presses a kiss to the top of her head. "I need to go get that kid some clothes," she says. "Size small everything. And you need to get him ready to wear them, okay?"
"I'm gonna scare him," Harley mumbles into Ivy's shirt.
"Probably. But once it's over he'll know there was never anything to be scared of." Ivy gently disentangles herself from Harley, slipping her ponytail through the hole in the back of her favorite baseball cap. "I'll be back as soon as I can. If it's too much, call me, and I'll come back sooner."
Harley nods, biting her lip. It quivers dangerously as Ivy blows her a kiss and heads out the door, keys in hand. Stop, Harley chides herself. Kid first. Cry later.
They put Jason back to bed after breakfast; the kid was trying not to fall asleep at the table. He's so frail now. Even something as simple as eating breakfast brings his poor, battered body to the brink of exhaustion. He's sleeping again, curled in his protective little ball. Harley wonders briefly how much it really protected him.
She touches his shoulder gently. "Hey, kid, naptime's over for a bit." By now she knows to expect the flinch-y, scared reaction to being woken up, although it still hurts to watch. "I'm going to get you cleaned up," she tells him, trying to keep her voice steady. "If you're really good while I do it, I'll..." I'll what? Things like candy and ice cream that would entice a normal kid would be completely lost on him; he's used to getting nothing but the bare minimum.
She reverts back to the same thing she said last night. "If you're really good, I'll give you some more of that sleeping medicine tonight. That helped you sleep like a baby, yeah?"
Jason doesn't seem to be understanding her as well as yesterday, but he doesn't resist when Harley picks him up, so she counts it as a win. She's not as strong as Ivy, but he's so fragile that she can pick him up easy anyway. He kinda hurts to carry- his bones stick out all over the place.
They make it as far as the bathroom door before Jason falls apart. He shakes like a leaf in Harley's arms, tears filling his eyes and spilling down his hollow cheeks. Most telling of all, he's completely silent. No desperate pleas, no frightened whimpering, not so much as a sob. And the only reason Harley can think of for that is that he knows begging doesn't work. Or makes things worse.
There's some kind of weird psychiatrist term for that. Making yourself as uninteresting as possible in the hopes that you'll be overlooked. Harley doubts it worked very well underneath Arkham. "I'm not gonna hurt you, kiddo," she says as gently as she can. "I promise, I'm just gonna get you all nice and clean." Well, that sounded creepy.
She sets him down on the floor, on the green bath mat they'd picked out because it looked like moss and Ivy liked that, and because it was really fluffy and Harley wanted to feel her bare toes on it. Jason is shaking, still silently crying.
Harley has to get the shirt off him somehow. Is it gonna scare him more if he does it or I do? The thought of either option makes her feel sick again. She managed when they cut that suit off him, but he was unconscious for that, and they had needed to do it to see how bad he was hurt.
There's no way I'm tellin' a kid to take his clothes off, she decides. Gently, she takes hold of the oversized shirt.
Jason flinches so violently he almost doubles over. Raw fear paints his face. He presses himself back against the wall, trembling. "Not again," he whimpers. "Please don't do it again. Please?" His voice quivers and breaks under the weight of his terror. He hasn't stopped the silent crying.
Harley's almost crying herself. "Jason, I'm not gonna hurt you," she tells him. "I promise, I'm not. Just gonna get you cleaned up."
Jason sobs at that, then looks terrified at the noise and shields his head with his arm.
Harley gives up for the moment and steps around him to turn the shower on. She stands with her hand under the water, waiting for it to get warm, and thinks about Arkham and the boy cowering behind her. The only time he got something close to a bath, at least while she was there, was when they dumped cold water on him to wake him up. Or for other reasons- Harley remembers the kid, dripping wet, his head thrown back, teeth clenched around a scream as she jabbed an electric baton into his chest. She had done that. Not the Joker. Her.
But she'd never done what he thought she was going to do. It had never even crossed her mind.
Harley straightens up, an idea setting in. It's not gonna be fun for either of them. But it's going to work.
She leaves the water running- it's hot now, not too steamy but definitely hot- and stands in front of Jason, her hands on her hips. Pammy, you're gonna have to be good cop for awhile, she thinks, and then snaps "Look at me!"
Jason lifts his head up, his tearstained eyes focusing on her face.
"Do you know who I am?" she demands.
Jason nods hesitantly.
"Say it.”
"Y-you're H-harley Quinn," he whispers, and ducks his head again.
"No, look at me," she orders, and he jerks his head back up. "Do you remember me from Arkham?”
Another hesitant nod.
Harley takes a deep breath. "Okay. You know I hurt you, right?" She sees the way he goes rigid, gritting her teeth as she pushes past it. "I hurt you, kid. You remember. Didn't I?"
"Y-yes." Jason breathes the word out, too scared to say it any louder.
Harley steels herself, clenching her fists. "Did I ever touch you?"
Jason goes completely still, his eyes locked on her face.
"Did I ever, even once, touch ya the way you're scared of me doin' now?" She knows the Brooklyn is creeping back in, but she can't stop it right now. She has to focus.
Jason is almost doing the opposite of hyperventilating. He's barely breathing at all. Harley can see the storm of memories in his eyes- she's got to pull him out of it before she loses him.
She smacks her hand down on the edge of the sink- not hard, but enough to rattle the soap dish. "Answer me!" she barks.
"N-no," Jason gasps, curling further into the wall.
Harley crouches down, softening her voice. "That's right, I didn't. Never did, never will. It was the Joker that did that-" she ignores the hitch of the kid's breath as she says the hated name- "and he ain't here. Look around. You see him anywhere?"
Jason shakes his head.
Sorry, Pammy. "You see Ivy anywhere, either?"
Another shake of the head.
"Just you an' me, and you know I ain't gonna touch ya. I'm just gonna get you clean. That's it. Okay?"
It takes a few minutes. He's too scared and confused now to answer her verbally. But after a long silence, she sees a tiny bob of his head.
She can't stop the relieved grin that breaks out on her face. "Okay then. Let's get it done."
He doesn't flinch this time when she gently pulls the shirt off him. She can still feel him trembling, but that she can deal with. She folds the shirt up and sets it on the edge of the sink, and then gently takes him by the shoulders and turns him around. "You gotta get those underwear off yourself," she says. "I ain't gonna look, okay?"
Harley gives him about three minutes before she turns around. He's obeyed, which is good, but his shoulders hitch in a sob, and she knows she's probably lost him in a daze of traumatic memories again. "Stay with me, kid," she mumbles.
She doesn't want to look, but she can't help but see the marks on Jason's fragile body. The mocking H's and A's sliced into the base of his thigh. The handprint on his hip where the Joker held him down hard enough to bruise black. The half-healed welts and deep cuts that cross his whole back, shoulders to ankles. The burns and bruises and scars, hallmarks of every kind of torture the Joker and his minions could think of.
The worst wounds, she knows, aren't the ones on his body.
As gently as she can, she scoops Jason up and sets him on the floor of the shower. "I'm gonna wash your hair, and you're gonna do everything else, got it?" she asks. Jason gives her a jerky nod, and Harley stands up on her tiptoes to adjust the shower head until it's aimed at the kid's back. He shudders when it hits him- probably expecting it to be icy cold- and then glances up in surprise at the hot water.
Harley lets him sit there for a bit. The boy relaxes in the warm spray, more calm than she's ever seen him except when he's asleep. She props the shower door open, and rolls up her sleeves, resigning herself to getting thoroughly soaked. She wishes their little cottage had a bathtub.
"I'm gonna use Ivy's stuff, so you might end up smellin' like rose and gardenia or whatever, but it's gonna be better than smellin' like the asylum basement," she tells him. "Here, lean back a bit, there ya go."
The kid's hair is tangled and knotted, crusted with dried blood and dirt and other filth. It takes Harley fifteen minutes just to get a comb through the mess. She tries her best not to tug too hard on his hair, but even when she does hit a snarl, Jason has almost no reaction. Gettin' his hair pulled probably ain't bad compared to everythin' else he's been through. The Brooklyn is strong with her today, even in her mind. She’s learned that it comes out when she’s stressed or angry, and right now she’s both trying to not be either.
Harley works plenty of Ivy's shampoo into the kid's hair. The water underneath her knees turns a disgusting brown-red-gray as she scrubs at the grime. The boy sits stiffly, staring at the far wall.
Jason's hair turns out to be curly when she's finished washing it. The part at the front hangs over his forehead in dark S-curves, but the back- unevenly hacked off- is too short to curl, laying flat against the base of his neck. The streak of gray at his temple turns out to actually be a flash of white. Harley runs her fingers through it, wondering when it happened. What was so traumatic that it turned a lock of a teenage boy's hair as white as an old man's?
Her eyes drift to the bandage on his cheek, and she turns away, pouring some of Ivy's body wash into a cup- Ivy's because she only uses the good stuff with no chemicals, and Harley uses the cheap stuff from the corner store and she doesn't want anything weird getting into the still-healing wounds. "Okay, your turn. Use all of that, and scrub everything, got it? I'll be back in ten minutes."
Harley slips out of the bathroom and slumps against the hallway floor, her head in her hands, and lets the tears come.
That's where Ivy finds her a few minutes later. The paper bag of clothes thumps to the floor, and Harley lets Ivy pull her onto her feet and against her chest. "Hey, hey, sweetpea. It's all right. What happened?”
"That poor kid, Pam!" Harley wails into Ivy's shirt. "He's so scared- he's just a kid- an' the Joker- he's just a kid!"
She clings to Ivy, trying to keep her sobs quiet so that the boy on the other side of the wall doesn't hear. "It was my fault."
"How was it your fault?" Ivy asks, holding her tight.
"Cause he never did it when I was there," Harley mumbles. "He had me. So- so when I left-"
"No," Ivy says forcefully. "Not your fault. His. Got it?"
Harley sighs, shuddering. "Sorry.”
"Don't apologize. It's been a hard morning."
"Did you get him some clothes?"
Ivy nods, fishing a shirt, pants, and clean underwear out of the bag. "Is he about done in there?"
"Should be." Harley opens the door and turns the water off, keeping her eyes on the wall. "We got you some new clothes, kiddo. Knock when you've gotten yourself dressed, okay?" She leaves the clothes on the floor just inside the door and goes back out to the living room with Ivy.
It doesn't take very long before a soft knock sounds from the bathroom. Ivy goes to get Jason, coming back with the kid in her arms. He looks even better than before, in a muted green shirt and soft gray pants. His dark hair, half-dry, curls around his face. Ivy sets him on the makeshift bed on the couch, and Harley takes it as a good sign that he doesn't immediately curl into his terrified little ball. He perches on the couch with his knees drawn up to his chest, pretending not to watch them.
"I kinda yelled at him," Harley whispers in Ivy's ear, sitting down half in the armchair and half in her girlfriend's lap. "So he might be really scared for awhile."
Ivy hums, playing with Harley's hair. "I don't know, he almost looks better. Less jumpy."
It's still going to be a long road. Jason flinches badly at every sudden noise and movement, and he's still seriously hurt. There's trauma to be worked through, fears to soothe, likely nightmares once his body isn't too exhausted to dream. But they've taken the first few steps. The Joker isn't an easy man to recover from.
Both of us, hurt, Harley thinks. Both of us, doin' better.
She watches Jason's dark little head nod, lower and lower until he's asleep again. His sleep looks more natural this time, less tightly curled against a potential blow.
Sighing happily, Harley pulls Ivy into their bedroom for their own nap, curling up against Ivy's chest. All three of us, doin’ good.
Chapter 9: Question
Notes:
The next chapter after this will be another Jason POV! And, uh…hold on tight for it.
One thing I did want to address, because I got some comments about it: I update very slowly. I work a full-time day job, I moonlight as a dancer, and I act on the side. On top of that, I’m still in college. Doesn’t leave a whole lot of spare time for writing, *and* this is far from my only running fic. I’m also working on two novels, so even the writing time I do have can’t solely be devoted to fanfiction.
I’ve had to let stories go without updates for a year or more. I try not to do that with this one because it’s got such a following now, but it’s not uncommon for a few months to pass between chapters. It doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned the fic! I’ll always be back eventually. And while I love every comment I get, ones talking about how I must have abandoned the story and it’ll never be finished…those can be pretty dispiriting. I do my best to write when I can, but some patience is still going to help in between chapters. As much as I’d love to put out a new chapter every week, I just can’t feasibly do it. Bear with me, please? I promise I’ll always be back eventually!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The rest of the evening is a peaceful one. Harley and Ivy take a very long nap together that may not have consisted entirely of sleeping, but is at least quiet enough not to wake the boy on the couch. Jason still sleeps like a dead man right now, although Harley has no doubt that'll change as he heals up some.
For dinner, Harley makes the pasta that looks like little stars. It feels weird making pasta without drowning it in butter and olive oil and garlic and stuff until it's the unhealthiest meal on the planet. But that would definitely overload Jason's starved little stomach, and the last thing they need is to set the kid's recovery back any more. It's already going to take a long time.
Some of it will never heal. Harley knows that much. His hands are ruined- if he manages to regain half their former strength she'll be surprised. And that nasty break in his ankle- she's pretty sure that won't heal right, it's been broken too many times. He'll probably walk with a limp, when he's able to walk again.
They're focusing on what they can treat. The gashes in his back, for example. Those look better every time she checks on them. The cuts on his feet, too- they're all scabbed over, although the burns are being stubborn to heal so they've let the idea of walking go for now. Some of the bruises have even faded away already.
There's one wound that Harley can't bear to touch- the brand on Jason's cheek. Ivy has to tend that one. It makes Harley feel sick to her stomach just looking at it. Even with everything else the Joker hasn't hesitated to do, there's something so wrong about the thought of him burning his mark into a child's face. It's so deeply sadistic that she both can't believe he did it...and would hardly have expected him not to.
"You're staring at that pasta like it owes you money," Ivy comments. She's making pesto sauce for their portions, the tangy smell of basil and pine nuts filling their small kitchen.
"Just thinkin'."
"Penny for your thoughts?"
"Then you'd owe me money."
Ivy chuckles. "Well, I'll give you mine for free. I'm going to turn on a movie after dinner. Something lighthearted and fun."
"The Goonies," Harley suggests.
"Sure. What I'm hoping is to just...not ignore the kid, exactly. But I want him to see that we're not intending to hurt him. I think he thinks that we took him from the Joker for our own purposes. I'm trying to clue him in that it was just a rescue. No ulterior motive."
"Gonna take a long time for him to believe that," Harley mutters. "Took long enough for me, and I wasn't being tortured by the clown."
Ivy wraps an arm around her shoulder, kissing the top of her head. "Almost ready?"
Harley gives the pasta another stir. "Yep."
Dinner is...interesting. The pasta is great, of course, Harley would drink Ivy's pesto if she could. And they discover that Jason can manage a spoon slightly better than a fork. It's still pretty clumsy, but it'll do the job.
But he barely eats this time. He doesn't even touch it until Ivy tells him it's okay. After the way he bolted down the soup, it's surprising. Harley can see in his eyes how it torments him to leave food on his plate, and yet he does, for no reason she can guess. They don't force him to finish- that will do a lot more harm than good.
Ivy is true to her word, and after they've washed up she turns on The Goonies. She and Ivy curl up together on the armchair. Jason is back on the couch. He doesn't make it through five minutes of the movie before he's asleep, and it doesn't quite seem like he just dropped off naturally.
Harley nuzzles into Ivy's shoulder and speaks too softly for the kid to hear, just in case he isn't really asleep. "What is he doing?"
Ivy is frowning, chewing the end of her ponytail. "I don't know. Has he said a word since this afternoon?"
"Nope. Maybe I scared him too much. I really kinda snapped at him. I couldn't figure out any other way to get him to listen to me."
"That could be it," Ivy agrees.
They finish the movie without much more conversation, except for when Harley pauses it in the middle so Ivy can go make popcorn. She thinks she sees Jason stir slightly, maybe open one eye to watch her. But she isn't sure. Why is he being so weird?
Ivy wakes him up when the movie ends so they can give him another round of medicine. Jason takes it without a single flinch, or any reaction at all, really. He's...retreated, sort of, into himself. Harley knows that feeling. It feels like your body is a dollhouse and you're a doll looking out through the windows, unable to control what's going on outside. She did that during- things she'd rather not remember. It was safer, or she told herself it was.
But aside from her playing bad cop earlier, they haven't done anything to make him feel unsafe- have they? Granted, just about everything must be scary when you've been tortured by a mad clown for nine months straight. But why now? What's set him off?
It's Ivy who figures it out, all in a rush at breakfast the next morning- only their second full day with a kid in the house. Jason waits for permission to eat and then barely touches his breakfast, although Harley does make him take a few more bites when he stops just so that she's not worried about him being hungry. Ivy flicks her gaze from the boy to Harley, and her eyes widen in understanding. Under pretense of getting more milk, she pulls Harley into the pantry. "I've got it."
"Got what?"
"Why he's acting the way he is. He's- this is going to sound really strange so just go with it, okay?- he's trying not to exist."
Harley blinks. "That did sound really strange."
"I think he's specifically trying not to inconvenience us. Not watching the movie because he's not sure he's allowed. Barely eating so that he doesn't take too much of our food. Not talking or even really moving. He's trying to make himself invisible as best he can."
"Gray rock," Harley mumbles. "It's a psychological term for making yourself as uninteresting as you can in hopes that your abuser will leave you alone. But why is he doing it with us? Did I scare him too much?"
Ivy twirls the end of her braid around her finger. "I actually think it's the opposite. We haven't hurt him so far. He doesn't really know why we haven't. So he's hoping that we won't get angry and start hurting him. He doesn't know what will make us angry, so he's trying just...not doing anything in case it sets us off."
"Poor kid," Harley says softly. She keep remembering her own mental state after she'd escaped- a mental state which at best could be described as "entirely fu-“
"I don't really...know how to help," Ivy says, sending Harley's train of thought hurtling off a cliff. "If we keep on like this, he'll assume that we're not hurting him because he's not doing anything to set us off. I don't know how to convince him that we won't hurt him even if he does something wrong."
Harley sits on that for a second. "I think I have an idea," she says finally. "But it's a really terrible one."
"Terrible or not, at least it's an idea."
"We're bad at this, aren't we?"
"Which part?" Ivy replies, smirking. "Dealing with a traumatized kid, being reformed villains, handling complex psychological issues, or all three?"
Harley can't help but laugh. She also can't help but throw her arms around Ivy's neck and kiss her.
If they stay in the pantry a few minutes longer, well- no harm done.
They wait for that night to put their plan in motion. It's a peaceful day- Ivy spends it baby-talking her plants, Harley gets bored and reorganizes the entire kitchen by color, and Jason actually stays awake for a good few hours. He doesn't do much besides sit on the couch and look terrified, but at least he isn't getting exhausted by just eating anymore. He even manages a couple of steps after lunch, although it sets several of the cuts bleeding again and they have to rebandage them.
Neither Harley nor Ivy wants to really cook that night, so they use up the last of the leftover soup and doctor it with a couple of spices and some more chicken. Harley's pretty sure this time that Jason's reluctance to eat is at least partially because he isn't used to getting so much food in one day, and not solely because he's afraid of them hurting him for taking too much. Still, she makes sure he has at least a few bites before she gives Ivy the go-ahead.
Ivy stands up and collects her and Harley's empty dishes. "I'll go put these in the sink," she says slightly more loudly than necessary. Harley sees her stack the plates, add the spoons on top, then the glasses, and she moves out into the middle of the kitchen-
Crash! One of the glasses shatters on the floor. Ivy times it perfectly, waiting until she's far enough from the table that no shards might reach the area. Which is a good thing, too- at the sound of breaking glass, Jason is out of his chair and on the floor in a second. He throws himself to his knees and curls forward over them, wrapping his arms across his head like he's bracing for an earthquake. Or a beating.
Harley clenches her teeth and does not think about smashing Beatrice into particularly delicate sections of the Joker's anatomy. "Ivy, are you okay, sweetheart?" she asks, making sure there's absolutely nothing in her voice that might be mistaken for anger.
"I'm okay," Ivy replies. "Lot of broken glass, though. Sorry." She's pitching the words louder than normal, to make sure Jason hears.
"I'm not mad," Harley replies, deliberately. "Just a glass. No need to be angry about it."
She and Ivy sweep it up- carefully, the last thing they need is the kid getting glass stuck somewhere- and dispose of the broken pieces. Jason uncurls from his little huddle to watch them, although he doesn't come out from under the table.
It's possible that he might have misconstrued it. He might have taken it as some kind of warning that Ivy can get away with doing something he'd be punished for (it makes Harley sick to think like that, but she's trying to understand the kid's mind so they can help him.)
But Harley has more faith in him than that. He's a smart kid- he was a Robin, after all. Hopefully he'll understand that they aren't going to get angry with him, that they won't hurt him for anything, especially mistakes. He's watching, even if he's trying to pretend he isn't. She can almost see his mind working.
"Should we get him out?" Ivy asks, about an hour later. Jason has fallen asleep under the table, his head pillowed in the crook of his arm.
Harley nods- she doesn't want the kid to wake up stiff from sleeping on the floor. His cell didn't have any sort of bed in it. He's done too much sleeping on hard floors. Even if it's just their couch, she is going to make sure he's comfortable from now on. She crawls under the table herself. "Hey, kid," Harley says gently, jostling Jason's arm.
As usual, he comes awake flinching away from her, this time gasping out a shaky "I'm sorry!" before the confusion clears from his eyes.
"Time for bed, kiddo," Harley tells him. "Come on out."
Jason obediently pulls himself out from under the table, and Harley doesn't miss the small pained noises he makes when he does it. She scoops him up in her arms- he still weighs so little. "Hurt your feet again, hm? We'll get those fixed up." He's torn some of the cuts open again. She and Ivy take care of that, and then look over the rest of the healing wounds. Harley turns away when Ivy checks on the brand.
Through the whole process, Jason is still and silent and doesn't make a peep. But this time something's changed. He watches them now, his eyes tracking their every move instead of fixed on the floor. We've confused him. He's tryin' to figure us out. Which means he's stopped thinkin' we're the devil he knows in a new costume. Maybe soon enough he'll get it through his head that we're on the side of the angels, Pam and I.
Notes:
Chapter 10: Expectation
Notes:
I’m back!!!
This chapter took a lot more research than usual- Jason POVs tend to do that- but the good news is while I was writing this one, I planned out the next! So it shouldn’t be as long of a wait, but my life is still haywire plate-juggling so it won’t be a sometime-next-week update either. I also have some new fics in the works, so keep an eye out for those!
About this chapter…first off, it’s very long, almost 3000 words but I had to stop somewhere. It would have been longer if I hadn’t accidentally deleted a chunk while I was editing. Whoops. I think I rewrote it well enough, though. It’s also, um…yeah. Sorry in advance, we’re not quite at the stage where this fic gets all fluffy and happy.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jason's right ankle protests the sixth step by wrenching itself violently out from underneath him. He falls, biting off the cry of pain before it can fully escape his mouth.
Ivy catches him, her hands as steady on his shoulders as his feet on the floor aren't. "Good job, that was a good try!" she tells him. She hooks her elbow under his knees and swings him up into her arms almost effortlessly. "Those cuts are healing up really nice. You'll be on your feet again in no time."
Six steps. Six limping, shaky steps are the best he can manage. And she's praising him for it anyway.
Jason doesn't understand.
Ivy carries him to the little table in the kitchen and sets him down in one of the chairs, taking the place next to him. Jason risks looking up for Harley- she's standing at the counter, waving a pair of tongs around and half-singing, half-mumbling along to some cheerful-sounding song on the radio. Jason can't tell what she's singing, or what she's making.
It doesn't really matter. He'll get some of it anyway, probably. They haven't let him miss out on a meal even once since they took him from the asylum. It's strange. Harley and Ivy seem to be obsessed with feeding him. Jason can't figure out why- nothing they've given him has tasted like it's been drugged. They tell him whenever they're giving him medicine, and they always tell him exactly what it's going to do, whether it's a painkiller or something to help him sleep.
At least so far, they haven't been lying.
Harley practically skips to the table- she seems happier than ever, which sets Jason on edge. Whenever the Joker was happy, it usually meant that he had thought up something particularly cruel to do to Jason. He'd learned very quickly to fear the sound of laughter or the sight of a smile. Beneath Arkham Asylum, they never meant anything good.
In this house, it apparently means...toast.
That's what Harley sets down in front of him. There's a glass of milk too. They've got the same thing on their plates, Jason notices, daring to steal a glance at them.
He gets bread a lot underneath Arkham- the place runs like a prison first and an actual mental institution second, so the meals being healthy never crosses anyone's mind. Whatever the inmates get to eat filters down to Jason eventually, so there's often bread. Usually it's just the crust, or it's moldy, or it's a moldy crust. It doesn't really matter. He always eats it anyway. He has no choice.
But this isn't either of those things. It looks...normal. All of the food they've given him has been normal, and Jason doesn't understand why it's changed.
Why is he doing this to me?
It's the kind of thing that would be a punishment, but Jason can't remember anything he's done wrong. Whatever he did, he would rather take days of torture than this. Letting him have a taste of everything he's lost, only for it to be snatched away again whenever the Joker comes to take him back- it's the cruelest thing he's done to Jason so far. Even counting the brand.
He's trying so hard not to get used to it, so it doesn't hurt as much when it's all ripped away.
Ivy reaches over to tap the edge of his plate. "Know what that is, sweetheart?"
Jason stares helplessly, unsure what she's trying to ask.
Her smile doesn't dim. "On the toast. It's apple butter. I grow the apples myself!"
She seems like she wants him to say something. Jason glances at the pale yellow stuff spread across the toast. "Oh," he says. It's all he can manage to choke out. She wants him to talk, but she hasn't told him what she wants him to say.
He sees the glance she flicks to Harley, but he can't read it. Harley leans across the table- getting an eyebrow raise from Ivy- and offers Jason another smile. They smile so much. "Go ahead and eat, Jason," she tells him.
Jason obeys and finds out that he can pick up a piece of bread better than a fork or a spoon. His hands don't work right anymore, but he manages. He can't help but be a little nervous about Ivy's apple butter.
Fruit was never a good thing underneath Arkham. He never got it until it was rotten enough to make him sick, and it wasn't usually much more than the cast-off peels and cores someone else hadn't wanted.
There had been a whole apple once. He'd known it was probably less than fresh, but it had been whole, and he had been hungry, and it hadn't been so rotten it was almost pulp. He'd trusted it. He should have known better.
As soon as he'd bit into it he'd known. Worms. More of them than the actual fruit. Jason didn't know how the Joker had done it. It didn't matter, really. He'd been forced to eat most of it, and the only reason he hadn't been made to finish it all was because the Joker had laughed himself into such a fit watching that he'd had to leave the cell. The taste hadn't left Jason's mouth for days.
This...tastes good, when he finds the courage to take a bite. It's the best thing he's had in a long, long time. He's been trying to avoid getting used to eating so much, but it's so good that he can't stop. Jason gets through half the slice before he thinks to look up and make sure that it's all right.
Neither of them looks angry, when he risks a glance at them. Ivy looks delighted, and Harley is beaming. The knot of fear that always keeps itself tightly wound around his insides loosens, just a fraction.
Maybe this is real.
When Harley and Ivy notice him watching them, they pretend not to have seen anything. Jason wonders about that. He also wonders what they are to each other. If he didn't know better, he'd think they were together. But the Joker doesn't share his toys unless it's meant to be cruel, and Harley doesn't act like Ivy is hurting her. Jason can't figure them out.
He finishes most of the food- he can't quite get all of it down. As delicious as it is, it's too much. But he does better than he did the day before, and they both look pleased about it. Jason's not sure if that's genuine or not, but he doesn't question it.
"There's a change of clothes in the bathroom," Harley says, pushing back her chair and coming around. "I'm gonna pick you up, 'kay? Ivy, are you good with the washing up?"
Ivy's at the sink, filling up a watering can. She flashes a thumbs up over her shoulder.
Harley grins. "Up we go!"
She scoops him into her arms. Jason clings to her neck before he realizes what he's doing. But she didn't seem to mind.
He doesn't know why the bathroom makes him so nervous. He thinks it's because the floor and halfway up the walls is tiled, like most of the rooms he's been in underneath Arkham are. Or maybe because it's such a small space. He tries not to panic, but as Harley steps through the doorway and sets him down on the fluffy mat, Jason's breathing a little harder.
She crouches down on her heels in front of him. "Okay, blue or yellow?"
Jason stares at her. What?
"Shirt," she clarifies, and holds out two. "No right or wrong answer, honey, just pick whatever one you want."
It- is it a test? She said it wasn't. But it has to be. Jason doesn't get to choose things unless it's part of some game, some trick, some joke. This has to be one of them.
Unless it's not. Unless it's real. Unless they're not lying.
He can't manage words; when he tries they stick in his throat. So- quickly, before he can think about it too hard- he points to the yellow one, immediately cringing back and bringing his arm up over his head in case he made the wrong choice.
"I like yellow, too," Harley says cheerfully. "Here. And there's pants on the counter. Why don'tcha get dressed? Don't want to wear what you slept in all day, do ya?"
She isn't angry. Either he made the right choice...or there truly wasn't a wrong one.
Harley leaves him alone after that, but she told him to get dressed so that's what he does. Jason's hands are so clumsy now. He barely manages to get the shirt over his head, and when he tries to put on the pants his ankle refuses so painfully that he has to stop and wait until the lightning bolt throbbing recedes. But eventually, he manages it, and knocks on the door to let her know he's done.
It's...awkward, having them carry him from place to place, but it's better than being dragged. Jason doesn't remember exactly when he got too weak to walk, but he knows it was before he earned the burns and cuts on his feet. Those were just to drive the lesson home. He thinks about the six stumbling steps that were all he could manage this morning. They seemed so proud of him for that. If the Joker had told him to walk and that was all he could do, he'd be screaming by now.
Jason's just glad the clown hasn't thought of making him crawl yet.
Ivy is the one outside the bathroom door. "Harley's looking for something," she explains, setting him down on the couch. She tucks the blanket over him- they're still letting him keep it- and reaches out her hand. Jason cringes.
Ivy pauses, something dismayed in her face, and she doesn't hit him like he thought she was going to. All she does is ruffle his hair as she turns to leave.
Jason watches her pick up the watering can from before and head outside. He hasn't seen the outside yet- he knows he probably won't get the chance- but he thinks with how careful Ivy is when she's tending to the plants inside the house, the garden outside must be beautiful.
I wish I could see it. He hasn't seen sunlight in a long time.
"Hey, Jason!" Harley plops down beside the couch out of nowhere. Jason freezes, unsure what she's doing.
"Tracked this down for ya. I've got tons lying around, but I wanted to try this one for you."
That sounds bad, but she's grinning, and she holds out her hand and offers him...something. Jason takes it hesitantly, unsure what he's supposed to do with it. It's a little blue ball, slightly heavy in his palm.
"Tryin' to see if we can get some strength back in your hands," Harley explains. "Just squeeze it for now, like this. I'm gonna touch your hand, okay?"
She gently wraps his fingers around the ball. Jason's hand is shaking; he isn't sure whether it's from fear or the damage done to it.
"Can you try and squeeze it?" Harley asks.
Jason tightens his fingers around it, and it gives way under the pressure. He can't close his hand much more than that.
"Hold on," Harley says, smile suddenly gone. Jason's heartbeat slams into overdrive, and he drops the ball immediately. It tumbles to the floor with a little thump.
Did I do it wrong? Jason wonders.
Harley retrieves the ball. "You're good, honey," she tells him, noticing the terror that must be written all over his face. "You did good. But Jason, this is really important, so you gotta listen to me, all right? I want you to keep squeezin' this whenever you have a couple minutes. Try switching hands every so often. But- and here's the important part- if it starts hurting, stop." She sets the ball back in his lap. "Is it hurting now?"
I...I don't know. If she means any kind of hurt, then yes. But if she means the kind of hurt where he can't stand it, then there's a lot farther to go. He doesn't know how to answer, so he stays silent.
Harley is watching his face with an expression he can't identify. "Okay," she says. "That's okay. We'll stop for now, all right? I'm gonna put it right on the table here."
That...Jason's relieved, in some odd way. She gave him the little ball and she isn't taking it away, she's just setting it aside.
He gets to have things here. Like the ball. And the blanket. And clothes, and good food, and-
And I don't want to leave.
Jason has been wondering when the Joker will come back for him. Part of him has almost been wishing he would- everything is strange here and he doesn't understand what he's supposed to say or do or what they want from him. At least underneath Arkham he knows his place.
But underneath Arkham he sleeps on the bare floor of his tiny cell. He eats food picked out of the garbage, if he gets to eat at all. He gets hurt day after day after day, in a thousand different ways, and no one bandages the wounds or gives him medicine or cares about him at all. He's nothing but the little Robin that fell out of the nest and into the clutches of a predator.
And here...here it isn't like that, and Jason has tried so hard not to get attached to it because he knows it won't last, but he doesn't want to go back. This was probably the plan all along, to let him have just a taste of what he doesn't deserve and then snatch it all away again. And he tried not to play the game, tried not to listen to the joke, but he did it anyway and now he's the punchline and it'll hit him with a knock-knock at the door. And he'll have to leave and go back to the cold, dark hell that he's been living for over a year, except now he'll remember what he doesn't have and it'll be so much worse-
"Are you okay, sugar?" Harley asks quietly, and that's when Jason realizes that he's crying.
Harley reaches out for his hand again. She doesn't put something in it this time. She just holds it. "Overwhelmin', isn't it? I was the same way. Pammy had to hold me while I shook apart every night for a week when I first left. Went through a lotta ice cream." She brightens up. "Actually, Pam's gonna be outside talking to her plant babies for probably the next three hours. I'm gonna check if we have any ice cream. I know we had breakfast just a little bit ago, but I won't tell if you won't." She snorts- not a full laugh, but Jason flinches anyway- and hops up to go to the fridge.
Jason tucks himself deeper underneath the blanket. He gets tired easily; his body has been ravaged so deeply that it can't keep him going for very long anymore. In his cell he spends most of his time trying to sleep, because at least when he's asleep he can't feel the pain. He can hear the soft hiss of Ivy's garden hose outside, and Harley humming another song as she rummages through the freezer searching for ice cream. Jason keeps an eye on the kitchen as he lets himself relax, just in case he's not supposed to be asleep right now.
And then someone knocks on the door.
In an instant all the exhaustion is gone, replaced by a tsunami surge of terror. Jason can't move, can't speak, can't even breathe. It feels like he's been hit up with fear gas, except he's had that happen before and he knows what it's like and this is real.
"Coming!" Harley yells, her voice echoing where her head is still buried in the depths of their freezer.
Jason sits underneath the blanket, petrified. There's a hundred fragmented thoughts swirling around and around in his mind, but only one is still whole, and it's the one that terrifies him more than anything else in the world.
It's him. He's here to take me back.
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