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He takes her from Arkham. It’s far easier than it should be and he can’t help but think it’s no wonder all Bruce’s little pals keep escaping, if the security is so lax that it only takes him a half hour to break in, chloroform Harley Quinn and sneak her out in one of the huge laundry carts.
He has help, not that he really needs it. His new friends, the Drug Lords of Gotham, they all have some long-standing, fine-aged beef with the Joker and they are more than willing to hand over men, guns and whatever else Jason fancies if it means the Clown Prince ends up in a box. But it does mean he has three guys waiting to load her up into van and then secure her tight to this big, wooden chair that won’t break if she tries to throw herself and it to the ground. If she can even move it at all. She’s much smaller than he expected.
They drive to the Narrows, to an abandoned apartment block. There are other men waiting for them. A bunch of sweaty meat-heads that help carry the bound woman up to the sixth floor and into one of the apartments, the one Jason has chosen for no particular reason other than he likes the layout of it.
The dealers or the muscles, or whatever they are in their respective organisations, keep shooting Quinn glances like they think she’ll wake up and tear their throats out with her teeth any minute. Jason can understand their apprehension, but he doesn’t appreciate it. He’s rather glad when they all leave. They’ll probably run as soon as Joker turns up, and he will turn up, Jason found one of his other men and sent him away with the message of where to find his little girlfriend and a few dozen missing teeth, but he doesn’t care. He’d rather it was just he and Joker anyway.
After another twenty minutes or so, Jason on edge and prowling the apartment like a caged tiger, Harley Quinn stirs.
“Huh?” She says softly, but Jason hears her.
“Morning Quinn, nice nap?” He asks jovially and she doesn’t respond, her head still lolling forward. When she does look up, she remains silent.
The clown blinks up at him, dazed, before a spark of recognition lights up her blue eyes.
“You’re him, ain’tcha?” She slurs, an after effect of the chloroform, her eyes growing wider and wider the longer she stares at him. “You’re the Robin that -” She cuts herself off, tearing her gaze away and pointing at her lap.
“The Robin your precious Mister Jay murdered. Yeah. Nice guess.” Jason replies, resting a hand lazily on the holster at his hip. She swallows audibly but remains silent, and something ugly roils in Jason’s guts. “You like kid killers, huh? That your thing? That what gets you off?”
“Shut up!” She snaps, shaking her head and still not looking up at him. “Shut up!”
“Oh come on Harley, don’t you wanna hear how he did it? How he knocked me out and tied me up and beat me with a crowbar until I couldn’t breathe? Until I was coughing up blood? How he left me there, bleeding and broken-”
“Stop it!”
“Did he tell you how, if that bomb hadn’t killed me, then the internal bleeding certainly would have? Did he tell you that he blew me to hell, Doctor Quinzel? That the only reason there was a body left was because he wanted to torture Batman? Did he tell you any of that?”
“Shut up! Stop talking! You don’t know, Mistah J, he’s sick, he needs-”
“He needs what? Help?” He laughs then, but there’s not genuine humour in it. This poor, stupid woman. “He doesn’t need help, he needs a bullet to the head!”
“Stop it!” Harley screeches, thrashing and pulling against her bindings, but Jason knows it’s futile. She’s not getting loose til he says she is, and that means she’s never getting loose. Because once her precious puddin’ comes to rescue her, it’s going to be curtains for the pair of them. “He’ll kill ya for this! He’ll kill ya for taking me! And this time you’ll stay dead!”
The temptation to backhand her is almost overwhelming, but Jason’s quietly loathed to hurt her any more than he really has to. He’s read her files. GCPD’s and Arkham’s. He knows a victim when he sees one. He knows if he were to wipe away the thick white grease paint marring her pretty face that there will be bruises colouring her skin.
And he knows they’re not from Bruce.
That being said, he’s read her files. He knows she’s as awful as Joker. Like she’s been infected by him, turned into a rabid animal, just like him. Best to put them both down before they taint anyone else.
She’s still screeching, screaming and hollering as though he hasn’t already told Joker exactly where to find them. He watches her dispassionately for a few minutes, before wandering over to the chair at the opposite end of the room. He’s left a book on top of it, a collection of Emily Bronte’s poetry, and flicks it open, settling down into the chair as he does. He likes the Bronte sisters, always has, ever since the day he walked into Wayne Mansion’s extensive library and picked up an omnibus of their works when he was eleven. He lets the words wash over him and drown out her screamed threats, content in the knowledge that Joker will walk through the door soon enough and he’ll be no one’s problem any more.
-
The minutes tick into hours. There are no gun shots from down below, no sounds of his men being slaughtered. Only silence and the sounds of Harley Quinn’s laboured breathing as she struggles against her bindings, and even she quietens eventually.
When the fourth hour passes, Jason begins to get irked.
When the fifth comes and goes without change, he begins to get angry.
When the sixth hour enters the seventh and the sun is beginning to creep over the horizon, he stands with a sigh and walks over to the woman. When he gets within two feet of her, he notices the smudges in her grease paint, tracking down her cheeks, and feels his stomach drop.
“He’s not coming.” She whispers, sniffling. Her voice is thick with distress and long shed tears and her fingers quiver against the arms of the chair she’s tied to. She’s talking to her lap again, but Jason can hear her just fine. It’s hard not to with the complete absence of gunfire and Joker’s obnoxious laughter.
“Looks like it.” He agrees, trying to sound indifferent. He crouches down so he can peer up at her face. She spares him a glance and her long fingers clench into fists as she tries to wipe the hopeless look from her face.
“Well, so what! I’ll get outta here myself! Mistah J’ll be real proud if I bring him your head! He’ll think it’s real funny!” She snaps, but Jason gets the feeling she’s trying to convince herself more than him.
“OK.” He says with a shrug, and watches her blink. “If that’s what you think.”
“I…I do think that! I know it!” He nods and isn’t at all surprised to find her nodding along.
“OK. Great. You do that.” He stands and dusts some imaginary dirt from his hands. She’s staring up at him, her brows furrowed and her painted lips parted in outrage. Jason couldn’t care less. She willingly follows the Joker and she’s a useless lure. Who cares if she’s a little upset? Certainly not him. “See ya.”
He’s halfway out the room, ready to send some goon in to finish her off, because she’s certainly not worth his time any more, when she starts to cry. The soft little sobs of someone who is exhausted and terrified and alone. The cries of someone who knows their death is coming, but isn’t ready to accept it. Yes, Jason is well acquainted with these tears.
He pauses in the doorway, torn between leaving the clown to her fate and actually trying to make a difference. Her Arkham file had been…well, Jason had disregarded most of it. He’d thought it was drivel. That there was no way anyone who willingly associated with Joker could be rehabilitated or reintroduced to society. He’s still uncertain about it. But.
But.
He turns and watches her cry and is bombarded with memories of women he’s known, women he’s cared about, who have fallen under the influence of terrible people, of evil men. He remembers Caroline for the first time since he came back, a girl he’d run with back in the Narrows, her red hair glinting almost blonde in the rare days when the sun shone, who was only twelve when her eighteen year old boyfriend convinced her to run away with him.
He remembers hearing that they’d found her body in an abandoned warehouse two weeks later.
He remembers Marie, a girl who lived in his apartment block and his first real crush when he was nine. He remembers being entranced by her dark eyes and even darker skin, by the thickness of her pretty onyx black hair, by everything about her. She’d been fourteen. He can still feel the shock of seeing her being pressed up against a wall in the hallway by her step-father as he screamed in her face, telling her she would get in there and entertain his friends, and she would do what they told her, and she would like it, or she’d get the belt.
She and her little sister were taken away a few days later, by a lady in a pantsuit. Marie’s face had been swollen almost beyond recognition. Her body shook when he’d hugged her goodbye, and she whimpered like it hurt when he wrapped his arms around her back. She’d walked funny, limped. Bile rises in his throat like the realisation of what happened to her is brand new. It’s not. He worked it out, not long after Bruce took him in, when they met a girl that looked just as afraid as Marie had been, cornered in an alleyway by a group of six drunk college boys.
He remembers his mother, and the bruises shaped like fingers on her wrists and shoulders. He remembers the shiners and split lips and he remembers the time that one guy hit her so hard her tooth came flying out. He remembers the hand-shaped marks on her throat and swallows against the bile that sits in his own.
He thinks of all the women that he and Bruce dealt with over the years, they flash through his mind like a sickening slideshow, starting with the ones whose faces are bruised and grateful, to those ones who never had the chance to be grateful.
He looks at the woman in front of him. She loves the Joker. Jason hates her. He loathes her. The sight of her makes him recoil in disgust.
But he still knows a victim when he sees one.
He takes a deep breath and removes his helmet before he walks back into the room. She either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that he’s returned, as she carries on crying quietly, beginning to hiccup with the force of her sobs.
He crouches at the chairs side again and sighs.
“Stop crying.” The command is issued as softly as he can manage, but it just makes the harlequin sob louder. “C’mon, quit it.” He tries instead. It doesn’t work, so he sighs and says “Look, I’m seriously reconsidering killing you, but if you keep crying I’ll just stick to my original plan.”
That gets her to stop. Although, she’s built up some momentum, so she doesn’t stop instantly, just quietens to soft hiccoughing noises. She’s managed to cry off enough of her makeup that Jason can see the yellowing bruise on her left cheekbone. He’s fairly certain he didn’t cause it and he knows Bruce took her out easy last time, got her secured with a batarang when she wasn’t paying attention so it’s probably not from him either.
“You…You ain’t?” She whimpers, wet eyes going wide and hopeful. She looks almost painfully young, and Jason has to remind himself that she has a doctorate and is complicit in the deaths of at least a hundred people.
“No, I ain’t.” He mocks her accent, but she doesn’t seem all that bothered, staring up at him with a smile curling up her cheeks. “On a condition.” Her smile dies almost instantly.
“You’re gonna tell me to leave him.”
“Yeah, I am.” He rubs at his jaw and eyes her wearily. “And I don’t wanna hear none of this ‘but I love him’ crap. You were a doctor. A psychiatrist. Some part of you, even it’s way deep down, buried under eight layers of crazy, some part of you must know what he’s doing. How he’s manipulating you.” There’s a fire burning in her eyes when she answers him.
“Mistah J ain’t manipulating me! He loves me! And I love him, and when the Bat and his brood are outta the way-”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re gonna settle down and have a whole Brady Bunch load of kids and live happily ever after, cos he only hits you when he’s angry with Batman, right?” Even if he hadn’t read about that particular delusion in her file, Jason would’ve been able to guess it. Not like he hasn’t heard it before. The silence that follows is tense and uncertain, Harley’s lips pursing together as she nods. “And Batman’s the only thing standing in the way of that life, huh? Holy Hell, do you know how delusional you sound? C’mon Quinn, don’t they teach anything about Battered Person Syndrome at that fancy school you went to?”
“I…I’m not a battered person.” She replies, and Jason rolls his eyes.
“Sure you aren’t,” he drawls, “and I’m not dealing with PTSD and enormous trauma from that time Joker killed me.” Her teeth sink into her lower lip as her eyes flick over his face, and Jason is suddenly reminded that she never actually met him, not while he was Robin. There was a brief overlap of their time in Gotham, but she was still a respected psychiatrist then and Bruce never liked taking him into Arkham. “I was fifteen when I died, you know. Do you know a lot of fifteen year olds, Quinn?” He won’t call her by her first name, absolutely not. That would humanise her just a little bit too much for his liking. “I was still all chubby-cheeked. Couldn’t get rid of the puppy fat on my face. My brother and sister used to pinch me and call me Round-Robin.” He smiles faintly as Harley’s lips begin to shake. “I was worried about my math final. And asking this girl in my class to the summer dance.”
“Oh my God.” Harley angles her face down, her eyes scrunched closed as she shakes her head. “Stop it. Please. I don’t…I don’t wanna hear this.” He lets loose a humourless laugh.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t wanna die, but that’s what happened. Your ‘Mistah J’ killed me, to fuck with Batman, when I was fifteen years old! I was a child Harleen! He killed a child!” He knows from reading her GCPD file that she has never killed a child. In fact, Joker seems to have started avoiding children’s events since Harley came on the scene. Maybe he knows that’ll be the last straw for her. Maybe he knows that would be the low that would lose him his loyalist lackey.
Replacement Robin excluded of course. But even then, she doesn’t seem to try and kill him, not the way she does with Bruce or did with Babs at least.
"Why are you doing this to me?!" She snaps, glaring at him, her eyes full of fire and the desperate desire to disbelieve everything she's hearing. He pushes his face closer to hers, their noses just inches apart.
"Because," hisses Jason, "If I don't tell you how it is right now, you're gonna end up dead. Or worse, you're gonna end up killing a kid, just like he did." Her jaw tightens, her teeth clenched together so tightly that Jason half wonders if they'll crack.
"I would never-" She starts, her voice gaining volume with each word. He cuts her off viciously, standing up without warning, making her jump in her seat. The flinch makes him sick to his stomach. She makes him sick to his stomach, and yet...
"Yeah, you would never! So why are you with him, Harleen?!" The room goes completely silent for a moment as they stare at one another, barely even daring to breathe. When he speaks again, his voice is softer, because every muscle in Quinn's body seems tight and ready for an attack and her eyes are shining wetly and Jason can't deal with any more crying tonight. He just can't. "He doesn't care, Doc. He doesn't love you, he never did and he never will." He turns away for a moment, hands coming up to massage his temples. He's got a migraine coming, he can feel it building just behind his eyes. The worst part is, he has no idea what to do with her now. Even though he hates everything she is, the idea of killing Harley Quinn now leaves a sour taste in his mouth. He's not sure why.
Maybe it's because she's so afraid to die, whereas he knows the Joker wouldn't be. He'd face his death laughing, not sobbing and quivering. Maybe it's how outraged she was at the suggestion that she'll eventually kill kids, just like her puddin'. Maybe he's just spent too long associating her with the other women in his life, his mother, Marie, Caroline and all the rest.
Maybe, somewhere deep down, he actually believes she could recover. He wants to shake the thought away. That's the Bruce in his head talking. He always comes out with shit like that. About how one bad day can change your whole life and how it can be recovered from. As though Bruce has found some healthy coping method beyond 'dressing up like a bat and beating the crap out of people' to deal with his one bad day. As though Bruce is any authority on recovery.
"He made me feel special." Her voice is barely more than a whisper, shaking and fragile like a frightened child's and Jason's heart just about stops. He turns around slowly, something sad and curious sparking in his chest as he watches her stare past him, at the furthest wall, her face worryingly vacant. Her brows furrow and her teeth sink into her lower lip, smearing her thick dark lipstick across the white of her front teeth. "It's real funny, now that I think about it. I had this theory, 'bout him, and how he wasn't really crazy, that he was in full control of all his mental capacities and that he just enjoyed the destruction he caused. That he was just a run-of-the-mill sadist. And I wrote it all up and was gonna get it published and everything. I even left a hard copy with Doc Arkham, to see what he thought of it." Her brows come together, her mouth setting in a thin, miserable line. "And then everything changed. In our sessions, Mistah...The Joker, he became more open, more honest. He told me stuff I thought he'd never told nobody before. 'Bout his wife and her accident and his dad and how he used to hit 'im....He started actin' like...Like he really cared about what I had to say, like he cared about me."
She turns her eyes on him, her big, sad eyes, and Jason's stomach turns in a thousand ways and none of them are pleasant.
"I felt special." She tells him, so earnest that part of him actually hurts for her. Because...sad as it is...he gets it.
That desire, that need to be more for someone, to be loved and be told how extraordinary you are, that's what kept him at Wayne Manor. The desperate ache in his gut that roared warm like a fire whenever Bruce complimented his school work or his form during combat, it was like a drug. Being Robin was like a drug, addictive and exhilarating and costing him so much more than he realised. He thinks being Harley Quinn must be similar. And yeah, maybe the love they wanted was different, but ultimately Jason Todd and Harleen Quinzel have fallen victim to that same trap. A sharp, metallic taste dances across his tongue, bringing him out of this particularly disgusting bit of navel-gazing, and Jason realises he's been biting the inside of his cheek.
"I felt loved." She admits softly, before tears start streaking down her cheeks again. Closing his eyes for a moment, Jason debates what he should do with her. Killing her is off the table now, he simply can't stomach the idea of it any longer. He could release her, but that would end in her running straight back into the Joker's arms. Ditto for dumping her at Arkham. He could maybe hand her over to Poison Ivy, she escaped the other week and Jason knows she's lying low in the old Gotham Park, but he feels that would only result in the same thing. The best option he's got is smuggling her out of the city and sending her to an institution far away from Gotham and the Joker, somewhere that she might actually receive the help that she obviously needs. But that's pretty skeevey to be honest and Jason's not entirely sure he can manage it without access to Bruce's resources. Sure, Talia will help him out if he swallows his pride and asks, but he really doesn't want to be in debt to the al Ghuls.
It's still the best plan he’s got though.
"You must know this isn't right though? Don't you wanna get help?" He questions gently, ready to float this idea to her.
A crash from the far end of the room drags him out of his half-baked plans and he looks up to see vines breaking through the dirty windows.
"Shit!" He growls, reaching down to his left calf, where he stores a pretty sizeable Bowie knife, but it's as if the vines know what he's going for and move to stop him, quicker than any human ever could. They surround his wrists and ankles and grip them tightly, pulling him spread-eagle and in to the air. "Fuck!" He snaps, right before another vine lays itself across his mouth, working as a make-shift gag. Then, in through the broken window steps Poison Ivy to the surprise of no one.
"Oh, Pammy, you came!" Except Harley Quinn, apparently.
"Hey Harley." She says, exuding calmness. "I've been looking all over for you." She walks over to the other woman, looking way more like some ancient forest goddess than Jason remembers, and pays him no mind at all, which is either very good or very bad. "I would have found you quicker but certain clowns," She spits the word as she begins waving her hands about and a few more vines make their way over to Harley and wiggle in between her wrists and the cable ties binding her, "decided to be rather unhelpful."
"Hmph." Is all Harley says in response to that.
"Are you alright?" Ivy asks and seems genuinely concerned, her hand on Harley's chin, turning her face this way and that as she examines her.
"I'm OK. He didn't hurt me. He was gonna, but he changed his mind." Harley tells her friend as the cable ties snap and she becomes a free woman once again. Ivy turns towards Jason and he realises that his first impression was wrong. She is not exuding calmness, it is cold fury, colder than anything Mr Freeze could ever produce and he swallows against his gag. He begins to struggle, despite knowing that it's pointless, their grip is already too good.
"Hi Ivy," He mumbles through the vine, "Nice to see you again, you're looking well." Of course, none of this sounds like that when muffled, so whether she understands him or not is up in the air.
"Aw, don't hurt 'im Pammy." Harley whines from somewhere behind her, still beside the chair Jason thinks, but he daren’t look away from the furious woman before him. "I think he's my friend now."
"I'm not." He assures them, but is ignored.
"He can't be your friend Harley, he kidnapped you." Ivy tells the other woman, still glaring at Jason, her bright eyes narrowed so only slits of toxic green remain.
"Yeah, but only to get to Joker. And plus, he was trying to get me to leave him! He said I was smart and should know better, that I'm a battered person!" She says all this with an undertone of pride that makes Jason stop struggling and stare at her incredulously. "'Cos he cares!" Ivy pauses, looking between the pair of them before bringing one hand up to pinch at the bridge of her nose.
"I can't believe you managed to Lima Syndrome your captor. You were literally here for seven and a half hours." Harley waves the words away carelessly, grinning as she makes her way over to Jason.
"Aw, it ain't Lima Syndrome. It's just 'cos he's a good guy. He used to be a Robin, y'know." There is a moment of complete silence as Ivy stares up at him, digesting Harley's words. Then, she laughs.
"Well, who woulda thought." She says, taking a step closer. "Gotta say Baby Bird, death's a good look on you." She looks him up and down in a manner that makes Jason more than a little uncomfortable. Nodding, she smiles and it's not unkind. "Nice to see you again, kid. I'm glad you're back." She grabs the lapels of his leather jacket and pulls him forward so they are nose-to-nose. "If you ever touch Harley again, I'll kill you, and unlike the clown, I'll make sure it sticks. And you're a grown-up now, so I'll do it. Got it?" Jason rolls his eyes but nods as best he can. Poison Ivy gives him another once-over, before she releases his jacket and slips an arm around Harley's shoulder. "C'mon Harl, let's go."
"Bye Badger!" Harley grins, hugging him around the midsection before reaching up and flicking at his small section of white hair. "Don't worry about chloroformin' me or tyin' me to a chair or nothin', it's all forgiven. Mostly. I'll probably getcha back at some point!" And with that cheerfully ominous declaration, Harley allows Poison Ivy to steer her towards the window and out on to what Jason assumes is some kind of plant based platform. The clown waves at him as they begin to descend and Jason thinks he may have made a mistake in not killing her when he had the chance, because he just has this awful feeling she's going to turn up in his apartment and demand to sleep on his couch.
The vines leave as suddenly as they arrived, dropping him to the ground unceremoniously.
"Ow." He says to no one in particular, having landed on his face. It takes him about twenty minutes to force himself from the ground and on to his feet. Once he is up, he rubs at his nose (bruised, but not broken, thankfully) and stalks towards the door. As he walks past Harley's chair, he notices a small scrap of paper left on the seat. There's writing on it, quickly scribbled and barely legible, but there.
'I will if you will' it reads, and then there's a name Dr May Tanaka and a phone number underneath that. Jason reads it twice and then just stares at it for at least five minutes.
He'll rip it up, he decides finally. He doesn't take advice from nutjobs, certainly not clown-based nutjobs. Besides, it's probably a trick, a trap of some kind. Her file says she's smart and she did say she'd get even. He holds the scrap in both hands, tiny as it is and prepares to rip it to shreds.
And finds he can't. He finds that as much as he knows he ought to, there's some tiny, little part of him that wants to keep this number. Because if it's a real number, if it's not a trick, then that means...Jason doesn't even want to think about what that means. He sighs and reads it again.
'Just in case.' He thinks, slipping it in his pocket. 'Just in case.'