Work Text:
Arkham Island has been cordoned off since the riots; it's quiet here, eerie, melancholy, now that everyone has left or been made to leave. Ivy's touch still lingers on the place, untamed and corrosive, though her Titan-hybrids are withering. The ground is dry and brown and crackles beneath her feet.
The perfect backdrop for a moment of grief.
Harley visits the old cemetery, it's becoming her new haunt, although there's nothing for her but dust and bones. She tells herself the remains of whoever rests here will appreciate her company – who better to mourn a former patient than someone who's been both caretaker and inmate herself? It's not like she has anywhere else to go. The only way to her puddin's body is through the GCPD, and B-man is likely waiting for her at the morgue. She wouldn't give him that satisfaction. Not yet.
She lights a candle for every day spent without Mr. J. The wind rips through them, and they gutter like agonized souls. She shelters them behind a gravestone.
The night is cold and not as quiet as she's used to. The leaves are louder, the shadows longer. She's not alone.
"What do ya want?" she asks the rustling bushes. One of them might answer.
One of them does.
"Just to talk," comes the reply. The voice is rustier than she remembers, like unoiled hinges. It suggests a lack of use these days, below the level of a scream anyway. "You don't mind talking, do you?"
"If it's a therapy session you're looking for, schedule one with my secretary. I'm kinda in the middle of something here."
"Anything I could help you with?" The figure shuffles closer, hunched and haggard, pants torn below the knees and mud-encrusted. His feet are bare, his shins spotless. She can't decide if the beggar-look is intentional. He's always been so meticulous about—maybe not his clothes, but his experiments, this might as well be another outfit calculated for effect. Which is small, sad, and certainly not scary.
"Go away, Crane."
"The doctor's out," he cackles. His favorite saying. "It's Scarecrow now. You do recognize me, don't you?"
"You're both creeps, man or mask. It doesn't matter who's wearing who." Something cold and crooked digs into her back, makes her shudder. Without noticing, she's recoiled against the metal bars fencing around the graves.
"Does that mean I frighten you, Harleen?"
She sneers. "You wish."
"Indeed I do." Crane is tall, taller than her, or would be if he straightened his spine. He's close enough to touch, but instead of towering, he's curled like a question mark and twists his head up to look at her. At least she thinks he's looking at her, it's hard to tell in the candlelight, what with the hood and all that burlap shadowing his eyes—wait, have they always been this pale?
"Geez Louise, what happened to your face?" she asks, more curious than alarmed, and her inquisitive fingers pad over (what appears to be) shredded skin before she can hold them back. The texture is rough and uneven, layers of gauze where flesh should be. Gas mask filters protrude from the sides of his jaw as if attached to them. She traces the edge of his cowl, as if she intends to yank it down, but his clammy hand around her wrist prevents her.
"Nothing spectacular," he says, unperturbed. Clouds of mist spill from his nose and mouth, both uncovered, both a little less than she remembers. He must be high on painkillers. "I had a little run-in with our friend Waylon. He seemed not to like my face much, and decided it was time for a makeover."
"God, you're so weird," she says, then berates herself: better weird than gullible. For all she knows he may have drugged her already, sprayed the area with his fear toxins before she even arrived, and now she's seeing ghastly versions of his mask, while he's likely standing a few feet away, dressed in a lab coat and sensible clothes, taking notes on a clipboard and smiling to himself.
"Am I? Tell me, Harleen, is mourning for a dead lover who did nothing but mistreat you any less weird?"
"Mr. J was kind when he wanted to be. But you wouldn't understand. You've never been in love, have you?"
"So in your opinion, abusive behavior is all right as long as you're in love?"
"What do you know about Mr. J, anyway?" she hisses, prepared to shove him away, because quite frankly, his insolence is starting to piss her off, but his grip is strong and wouldn't budge. Perhaps she's let herself be deluded by his choice of clothes: she's understimated him, seen him as weak.
"I know that you were not afraid of him."
He leans closer, crowding her against the grates. This topic excites him, the pervert. Harley's face twists. He reeks of mold, of old straw, of dank prison cells and shivers in the night.
"Everyone was afraid of him in some way, but not you. You were only ever afraid for him. That's why you're so fascinating, Harleen."
"Compliments won't get you anywhere, Crane."
"I've read up on your history a little. You were at Blackgate the night they brought in the Joker the first time."
She remembers the riots, the excitement, and her pity for him that transformed into a spark of something deep, something meaningful, like connecting with your soulmate. It may not have been love at first sight, but it was the next thing to it.
She has the creeping suspicion that this is not what Crane wants to talk about.
"So?" she prompts.
"Quite the event, wasn't it? You were taken hostage, threatened, nearly killed..."
Oh, that part of the story. Boring. "Thanks for the history lesson, Doc. I was there."
"Does this make you uncomfortable?"
"If by 'this' you mean being pressed against cold bars that dig into my back at odd angles – by a guy who dresses like a scarecrow, no less – then yeah, it's making me uncomfortable." She tugs at the noose he's wearing like a tie. His fashion sense is sort of amusing. "What do you say we postpone our little chat to, like, never?"
A dissatisfied sound escapes him, a sigh perhaps. He's irritated, she's acting like a child. "Since you insist on being so difficult, I think I'm going to return something that belonged to your old flame." There's a click and a flash of steel, before she feels the cold tip of a switchblade pressed against her jugular. Good doctor. Knows his anatomy even by candlelight. "I'm considering using it."
"Hands-on violence?" she bubbles with suppressed laughter. "I thought that wasn't really your style."
He's moved so close, he could lay his head on her shoulder and sway her in some imagined tune, it's what Mr. J would have done, threaten and sweet-talk her, a bit of cha-cha, and then off you go, Harley, I have a plan for you. Crane plays a different game. His thumb rests on her pulse point, but she remains calm, defiant. He's not gonna cut her, it's too messy.
"I'm well aware that this is lacking in finesse." he waves the blade in front of her nose like a wand. She finds herself going cross-eyed. "Then again, subtlety was never your boyfriend's strong suit." He presses the edge against her cheek, and Harley hopes she doesn't have to sneeze anytime soon. "This doesn't bother you, does it?"
"What bothers me is you not telling me what you're on about." That and the business of not letting her go. He's free to jabber at her all he likes when she's somewhere more cozy. Right now, her patience is wearing thin.
"I'm trying to establish if this brings back memories." He drags the blade down the track her running mascara has left, grazing the skin just shy of drawing blood, and inhales deeply, as though he can smell the memories on her. Who knows? Perhaps he can.
"What memories are you looking for? All the times Mr. J knocked me unconscious or made sweet love to me? Or perhaps you're more interested in when I lost my first tooth? When I broke my collarbone in second grade? Something like that?"
Crane chuckles. It starts as a ripple in his throat and takes over his whole body. "I can see why the Joker was so fond of you. You really are amusing."
A thrill shoots through Harley at hearing those words. Her puddin' was fond of her. Others had noticed. Take that, B-man – her puddin' wasn't the cold-hearted monster you think he was. At least not to her. He really did love her, as she's always known. Warmth blooms in her chest, encompassing the hurt and the anger, and she could have kissed Crane for that revelation, except, with the filters and the threads in the way, she doesn't want to bother with logistics.
"I know you're not afraid of me, the pain I could cause, the mental scars I could leave," he says. "But I wonder what would happen if I were to do this."
Slowly, lightly, he drags the blade down her chest, as though traveling through wax. He's not cutting off her clothes, he's not interested in that. It's the psychological threat that gives him power, not the physical one. The blade comes to rest above her waistline, she can feel the prick beneath her navel. She stiffens.
Both her hands grip his wrist, ready to break his arm if he does anything funny. "Try it and I'll kill ya."
"You see," he continues, breath misting against the side of her face like wet cloth. "I've observed you during your time at Arkham. A pretty thing like you, in a den of the criminally insane – murderers, rapists, psychopaths – none of whom seemed to frighten you, that's why you caught my interest. Did you value your life so little or did you trust the security at Arkham so much that you never regarded anyone as a threat? And if you weren't afraid of the patients, what could you have been afraid of? Everyone is afraid of something, and you, you only ever seemed afraid of losing the Joker."
"Sounds like you spent an awful lotta time wondering about little old me. Did you ever get any work done at all?"
"Now that he's gone, I find myself wondering: what could you be afraid of now?" he muses as though he didn't know the answer already and was expecting her to enlighten him. Despite her death grip on his arm, he manages to wedge the tip harder against her skin.
"I swear, if you don't take the knife away right now, I will tear off your arm and make what Croc did to you look like child's play."
"Interesting choice of words," he says and drops the knife. "Tell me, Harleen, what do your pregnancy tests say? How many of them have tested negative?"
"I'm not interested in your mind games, Crane. It doesn't matter what they say. They're wrong."
Crane chuckles. "So much anguish. Is it really a good idea to let the child growing inside you feel all that?"
"What do you care?"
"You want to carry on his legacy, don't you? But what makes you so sure it's even his?"
Harley sneers. "It can't be anyone else's. I'm not that kinda girl, if that's what you're implying."
"But are you certain? Our dear Basil is quite the actor. Fooled Batman till the end."
"Yeah, well, he didn't fool me. I knew my puddin' more intimately than B-man did. He showed me sides he wouldn't let anyone else see."
"Oh, I'm not contesting that. But out of curiosity: what if it's not his, what if you lose it? What will you do? You can't just try again."
"I am not going to lose it. No matter what happens."
Harley hates him for getting under her skin – hates everyone: Fries for keeping the antidote to himself; Cobblepot for stuffing her babies and displaying them in the Museum; even Strange and his TYGER guards for being a nuisance. But most of all she hates Batman for letting her puddin' die.
"Don't you want to make Batman pay for the pain he caused you?" Crane asks, as though he's been following her train of thought.
Despite herself, despite the anger and the memories, Harley laughs, a mad howl she can barely contain. "So this is what this has been about," she says between gasps for breath. "You're afraid of the old batbrain and need a bodyguard who is not."
She's close to tears she thought she couldn't cry anymore and rests her head against his pointy shoulder, her own shaking with bitter mirth.
"Just as a diversion, really," he rasps, almost soothingly, and pats her back in a gesture likely meant to be comforting. "I have plans, and Batman is the only factor standing in the way of completing them."
Harley looks up once she can trust herself enough to speak. "What's in it for me?"
"Won't a chance at revenge be enough for you?
"A chance is not good enough. I want certainty. I want to bash in the brains of everyone he loves, so he'll know what it's like to be all alone, and then I want him to die with my hands around his neck."
"I'm sure we can arrange that. If the others agree, that is. They'll all want a piece of him."
"What others?"
"I'll need someone to help with the distribution of my fear gas and to procure both sufficient arms and the men to carry them. I doubt even Nigma crawled around Gotham all by himself to place all his riddles."
"I wouldn't put it past him, though. He can be quite obsessed. But let me guess: you've asked Penguin and Two-Face."
Crane nods. "I'm going to, anyway. You were the easiest to track, so I came here first."
Harley's fists clench and she tries hard to swallow her rage. "Sorry, Crane, but I still have a score to settle with that fat bastard Cobblepot for what he did to my babies. When I see him, I'm going to stub out his cigar on his good eye and stuff his sorry hide with feathers."
"A charming idea, but may I trouble you for some patience? You can do whatever you like to him once the operation has succeeded. Until then, we need his resources."
Mouth set, Harley glares and chews this over. She could satisfy her immediate need for brutality and jeopardize his plans, or she could wait, feeding her anger, and kill two freaks with one scarecrow.
"So, do you accept?" He takes a step back, inclines his head and offers his hand as though asking her for a dance.
Harley takes it, and just for fun – just because he doesn't expect it – spins them in a circle. "Tell me a joke, and I'll think about it."