She’s happy.
She tells herself this, and it isn’t untrue.
She revels in the powdery taste of makeup on her tongue now that she can lick across the Joker’s cheek to gnaw at the sharp angle of his jaw when, bored in bed, she crawls atop of him. Sometimes he’s indulgent, tracing his smooth hands over her back, his cock twitching when she nuzzles her pretty blonde head against his thigh or takes one of his fingers into her mouth and bites. If he’s feeling particularly playful and generous, he makes her come from electric shocks or the vibrations of the tattoo gun. Once, he let her hang silk rope from the ceiling and she had tangled their two bodies together with all the artistry of a trapeze performer. The bindings had kept her thighs open wide and her muscles tight. Every thrust from his narrow hips had sent her slipping and tightening within the silk till she was whining in her long throat and scratching at the tattoos on his chest.
Happiness is the razor sharpness of a knife against her nipple, laughter in her ear and metal teeth on her collarbone. It’s an orgasm so painful that it crests into pleasure and leaves her breathless.
But …
But the Enchantress had shown Harley a glimpse of the future, even if it was a fraudulent one, and Harley can’t help but still think of it even after her prison break. She’d had kids and a husband who wore a suit of charcoal rather than a faux-alligator coat, as purple as the jam she used to suck from her fingers as a child. He smiled more, in the wish her secret heart of hearts had produced, and there was nothing insane or terrifying about it. But her mind, the ravaged organ that the Joker had created, knew better – that was not them. That was rot. Was cavities. Was sickness.
That was a lie, and the Joker didn’t like it when she lied.
So he promises her a chaotic life, a romance, and a tragedy, all wrapped up in a bow as red as cherries. He takes her by her pigtails and bites those promises into her neck, her shoulders, her breasts, her thighs.
It’s enough.
It’s enough for a mad love.
She wants a home. A place to nest. He finds them an abandoned factory in the center of Gotham’s crime life. He has his men refurbish most of it, but they keep the rusting iron railings and a few of the broken glass windows for authenticity’s sake. There’s three levels, all hers to decorate, but the two of them gravitate lower and lower – floor by floor – until they’re down in the belly of the beast, the closest to the devil. They’re both used to basements anyway (they like the windowless space, the way the darkness encroaches on the corners of the room, and the murky cement smell).
She turns the room red, like so many bloody, pumping hearts, and doesn’t mind when he organizes his knives and guns on a rack that takes up the entire left wall. The boys lug in a mattress larger than a king. There’s an electrician sporting a bloody nose and a bruised carpenter that work for an entire day to customize a lifted frame with lights that never stop burning. She has matching fur chairs in the corner. A closet full of high heels. Her mallet and baseball bat mounted on the wall for easy access. There’s even room for her vanity, her powders and creams and long-stemmed brushes haphazardly spread across the top, and his bar - crystal decanters full of acid-colored liquors and half-chipped glasses stacked in offering for greedy hands.
When he comes home from a hard day’s work, he throws his jacket over one of the chairs and accepts the drink Harley inevitable pushes into his hand.
To her credit, this routine lasts for a week before she puts her pouting, wet lips on his ear and tells him she’s bored.
“Boredom, Harley-girl,” he tells her, tapping her nose with one ringed finger, “brings disaffection.” He seems to taste the final word, half-hissing it. “And we can’t have that, can we?”
It takes a few minutes of rustling through some very old boxes, but the Joker comes back triumphant. He holds out a clean lab coat, pristine in its whiteness, and a pair of dark, professional glasses in one hand and twirls a syringe full of milky medicine in the other.
He leers, a little mad with the proposition of reliving their old days, and Harley laughs with excitement.
Part of the solution to appeasing Harley’s insatiable curiosity comes in the Joker’s limitless generosity. He has never, not once, truly denied her anything. He has taken only that which she never needed to begin with and withholds only so that she might learn the joy of savoring. Maybe occasionally her muscles ache and burn or threaten to snap, her mouth splits or her eyes purple with bruises, but then he’ll rub his hard fingers into her skin and drag his mouth over her curves and work away the pain. Open her up and let her see the dark, monstrous, beautiful thing he’s created.
Harley knows. Harley understands. He only hurts her because he sees that she can take it, because in her surrender there is a declaration of loyalty and love, a willingness to please and prove.
But there are things that trigger him, and some of them are trivial to Harley, like the arrival of a new, unwelcomed guest to their family.
As far as he sees it, the squirming, crying, wiggling mass of fur tearing apart the bedsheets is an unsanctioned destructive addition.
The Joker leans like a sharp, gleaming knife in the doorway, watching, and runs his tongue over his glinting teeth. "Harley-Pie," he growls, grabbing and turning the lithe blonde in mid-embrace, the rumble and shape of her name reverberating from his pale chest into her shoulder-blades. "What have I told you about surprises?"
Harley leans back into the dismal warmth of the Joker's hold. She can feel his fingers in her hair, scratch scratch scratching against her scalp, tangling in, rooting for a hold. “You like ‘em?”
He tsks, chides, and something inside of her begins to panic. A low-boil flutter in her stomach. Her fingers curl at her sides and she pushes further into him, her round ass flush with his sweatpants-clad cock, his free hand coming to rest on her left hip, fingers tapping. “No, no, no, no.” Each negative lands a warning shot from those tapping fingers, and she can feel it in her bones. “I love it when the surprise is mine …” He snaps the last word possessively, his jaw clenching, his teeth biting the air by her ear.
She giggles and feels the panic dissolve into something else, something warm and bubbling with toxicity. She feels like an animal, yes, caged by his arms and his hold, but it’s a welcome and wanted captivity. Harley purrs and turns her cheek into his, feeling his breath on her face. “Aw, puddin’, c’mon, ain’t he cute though? You two could cuddle.”
As if on cue, the pup has rolled from the bed, dragging bits of sheet with him to their feet. It has dark feral eyes and a spotted coat, little tufts of hair foreshadowing a small mane down its spine. It’s bristly and mangy and makes a noise like a baby’s cackle when it tries to tear into the Joker’s ankle.
The Joker raises a hairless eyebrow and his mouth splits into a grin. “Why, he sounds like me.” His manic drawl lilts upward.
With mild reluctance, he lets go of Harley’s hair and pats her ass dismissively, bending and picking the pup up by the scruff of its neck. It wiggles, whining in the air, trying to gnaw at his hand.
Harley giggles again, biting her thumb. “I was thinking Lou. He looks like a Lou, don’tcha think, puddin’?
“A Lou for a loon, why not?” He barks his signature laugh. “As long as I get to teach him to kill.”
She smiles wide, showing her teeth, laughing too.
She would never admit it to him out loud, but Harley knows that some triggers are also opportunities and while this isn’t the same as having a son, she figures it’s a start.
Not all of the neighborhood is excited at their domestic bliss. There is some trouble. There are still self-righteous cops who refuse to be on the Joker’s payroll, the Commissioner, and then, of course, there’s the Batman. Gotham’s personal rabid dog, ruining all of the city’s fun.
Harley thinks of his brooding eyes and hard mouth. He had smelled like honor and pain and river water the night he’d taken her in. She remembers his fist the most – the blinding white before the soothing pain and the cloudy darkness.
But the Bats has too many rules and restrictions; he’s easy to avoid, if need be, and even easier to slip from now that their army has grown. Which does not mean that they still don’t have the occasional run-in. Usually it’s because the Joker is itching for a taunt or has sent some present that has ruffled the Dark Knight’s perpetually stiff feathers and lured him out into the moonlight. Harley thinks he’s a bit of a bore, so stern and serious, with no color about him, but she follows her clown king out into the rainy streets and finds the fight.
Mr. J, he doesn’t want to win, not really. He just wants a little chaos. He crashes a car into an upscale restaurant, mostly by accident, after negotiations with a new alliance goes sour. Harley had left the meeting with a bag of diamonds and a bloody bat, so it’s a fine start to the evening; she doesn’t’ mind the thought of more butchery.
The havoc is too loud, too noticeable, and they aren’t surprised when the Bats arrives. It’s what they wanted. The Joker has another car by this time, as though they’re littered on the streets, ready for his taking, and he’s opening the passenger side door for her from the inside when she does a sudden, graceful pirouette to avoid a sharp batarang. She giggles when the Joker slams his fist on the horn in three rapid honks, like a welcoming, and wiggles her fingers at the gloomy, hulking figure in the back of the adjacent alley.
“Howdy, Bats! Didja miss me?” She winks, pops her gum, and puts a hand back on the open car door.
“He’ll only hurt you, Harley Quinn.” The Bats laments in the rain, like a prodigal wise-man.
“You ain’t ever been in love, have you?” She calls back sweetly before ducking into the car.
Later, when his foot is pressing the pedal to the floor and their hands are clasped over the stick shift, she tells the Joker that she feels sorry for the Batman. He must be lonely, she explains, and feels a pout twisting her mouth.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have what they have.
And that’s it, really. She doesn’t need some magical witch-bitch to take what she has and mangle it into a new, more societally-correct picture. The truth of it is simple: the Joker knows her, inside and out, and everyway in-between. He molded her, but she allowed it, wanted it.
He freed her, ripped her from life’s constraints, and she had swan-dived into a chemical vat to embrace it. It was not death the Joker provided but rebirth.
An awakening into a world of beautiful, crazed laughter.
What other domesticity could she desire?
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