Chapter Text
A choice had been strictly laid out to the young woman, somewhere along the line, as choices come for all of God's children beneath His sun - be that sun clear and bright or obscured by clouds, as it most often was in Gotham - if she should become a psychiatrist or a reporter. Though she could no longer remember the fork in the road that had led her to go down the latter path, Harleen Quinzel could remember that she have been given the option at some time in the past and given it some decent thought as well.
Ultimately, becoming a reporter had thrown down the option of becoming a psychiatrist and kicked the ever-loving shit out of it.
Maybe it was that it would take so much longer for her to see her name in printing, if she had waited the time needed to write the book she had planned to, and that gradually had become less appealing in a city like Gotham, especially after she had started to see how sick and dangerous it was to everyone foolish enough to live there. Quinzel too had discovered that the sickness had crawled its way inside of her, so much so that by the time she had become an adult, she was still there, gradually worsening for it. The life expectancy remained low in Gotham City, however, should she have decided to leave or to stay; Her choosing either had been nothing too great to effect that.
She took the stairs up the lonely and filthy apartment building one at a time, occasionally looking out the windows and unable to tell if it was darker outside them, with its blackness of night, or inside, with the lightbulb broken and the grime covering the walls. She was a fool, she knew it, to continue to climb the stairs with the shards of broken glass from the bulbs greeting her on the landing, but there she was, still ascending with her hand on the small pistol she had hidden inside of her blazer. Bringing a purse had been unthinkable, too much of a temptation to thieves, even if her body was something she could not so easily leave behind, so the rapists were still being taunted, as they would probably claim if they made any move that would take them to trial.
What made her continue the climb then, with the shadows around her and the squeaking of rats a comfort for they were not the breaths of human beings, be they men or women?
It was the story of a lifetime, she remembered.
That was what she had been promised.
And nothing else could have made her drag herself up several flights of stairs to a room number at the very height of the building, risking her bodily safety and the welfare of her mind in the act of trying to reach it.
The elevator had been an option. However, elevators weren't surrounded by doors, not that any would open if they heard her screams. If working at the Gotham Times had taught her anything, it was that doors stayed tightly shut at the sound of tragedy, and the only hope you had in the world was from a man dressed up in the costume of a bat and his little helper in his costume looking like he'd just gotten out of the circus. Still, elevators were too close to coffins and the shafts always felt like expressways straight to hell in Gotham City, the places the real smart criminals dropped their victims, so Satan could help them hide their crime by taking care of the body if the soul was never his to claim.
Not that Quinzel had much hope anymore that any Gotham citizen would find their way to Heaven. For all she could tell, the city was either hell itself or a purgatory and that last was only divine red tape when Saint Peter knew that those souls sent this way were destined to fail, every single one of them.
How many flights had she climbed now? How many steps? When her heel slipped for a second and she was forced to use muscles once adapted to gymnastics, but now weakened from sitting behind a desk all day, Harleen looked down to see she'd stepped into a small collected pile of used condoms, like someone had been making a sacrificial mound of them, and she finally had to ask herself if that prissy bitch Vicki Vale would ever find herself walking up a flight of stairs in a verging on condemned apartment husk for the sake of a whispered first rate story?
She doubted it. Vicki Vale got where she was by pretending she didn't give it away. Quinzel now regretted she had been too open with the fact that she was willing to do anything for the sake of good grades or employment. Maybe then they would throw a decent massacre or act of God her way.
She could let her foot slip altogether, and end the misery of her life, by accident and not by violence, something rare in Gotham. But her curiosity had been aroused, and now, after making it this close, she was desperately in need of satisfying her desire to find out what she had been so cursably foolish for, even if it was only a ruse or a joke.
Finally on the floor that had been neatly written on the piece of paper sent to her desk a few days ago, Harleen wondered how long it would take to rush all the way back down the stairs again. Probably far faster than the climb. It was almost an analogy for the choice between evil and good, the fight against gravity. The struggle to reach Heaven took so much out of you, whereas the surrender to the fall took so very little effort at all. It didn't make you sweat so much, only the punishment when you were caught.
She decided against it, once again, only due to her curiosity and her own lack of humor. She'd come this far and, though it might be funny to abandon it, she was too weary now and cranky to find the thought amusing. So, she turned around with very little thought and headed to the door, looking at the number on the sheet of paper, just to ensure she knocked on the right one.
Once finding the numeral that matched, she shoved the paper into a pocket, straightened her skirt and put the gun in the holster she hoped was disguised well enough. Then fixing hair freshly bleached again only yesterday, and which by now was probably covered in its own level of grime from the long trip up, she opened the door, without knocking first, just as she had been instructed to. What kind of fool would willingly leave their door unlocked in this city was a question she should be asking herself, for if they were not a fool, then they could be nothing else but a madman, one whom cared for no one else's safety, not even his own, or the helpless sort of person whom believed they could never be harmed, but were impervious to the blade and impenetrable to any bullet, no matter what caliber.
A smell invaded her nostrils, as she too invaded the sanctity of the apartment, which was dark and seemed lightened by only a solitary source of light: a 40 watt lightbulb in a dark shaded lamp on a nightstand. It was dank, but over that dampness was the dryness of a cigarette, but none she had ever smelled before, though she had been a smoker since she had given up gymnastics out of college. She liked the smell. There was something in the smoke that she had never encounteted before. It didn't mean it was drugs, or a new sort, but it was something thrilling all the same that scent for it was something new in a city where everything seemed old even the newborns crying out in the cribs at Gotham Mercy General.
The first thing she saw was that it was one of those deals where everything was cramped into one room, except for a solitary door which would lead to the bathroom. The main feature of the whole thing, besides a table and two chairs, was a bed that reminded her of how exhausted she felt after her ascension up the stairway and how tired the whole city was in general, not just physically but mentally, of everything. They were tired of struggling to make ends meet, tired of being afraid every day and sometimes just tired of being alive to suffer the weariness over everything else.
Looking at the bed, she realized once more what a bad choice this had been. It looked well worn, and with how old both it and the building seemed, she wondered what transgressions had taken place on a mattress where springs and batten alike now tried to escape from the threat of any more bring heaped upon it. It was the type of bed you could die on and not be discovered for weeks on end and the landlord would probably just pour a bucket of disinfectant on it, when you were, and consider his job done.
"You came," a voice said in the shadows, like it was a shadow itself or maybe, like the sheets on the bed, itself, threadbare and barely there anymore from overuse or time. The man's voice was average, nothing really special about it, other than how damned tired it sounded, like his words were a slowly dying wind crossing from the back of his throat over his teeth and to his lips.
Not in the best of mood, and still a little too confident of the gun she was carrying, Harleen stayed, looking toward the grimy window now and seeing the silhouette of a man she now knew was staring out of the window. She then made a joke, probably a stupid one that did her no favors considering the situation she had recklessly, and without anybody else knowing, crawled into. "That's more than any of your lovers can claim."
His head turned slightly, just a small glance over his shoulder, the moonlight making his face appear very white to her, and drained of all blood, in that micro second, before he looked out the window again. "Lovers? It's been a long time since I had one of those. What is one again?""
"Your choice of meeting places might also help explain that," she quipped.
A sound came from him then. It was as full of energy and life as the man himself seemed deprived of it, and what surprised her was the sudden conviction that he had only intended to make his laughter a short thing, but how it suddenly grew and became unwieldy like the sail on a boat during a hurricane before the boat and everyone on it was set to drown.
He turned to face her then, and Quinzel gasped for she knew that he hadn't been laughing with her but at her lack of common sense instead. He was laughing at her. Laughing at her because she had actually adhered to his note.
It was a pretty good joke too.
She could hardly fault him for his sense of humor.
Afterall, he was the Joker, the single most feared man in all of Gotham City, and she was as good as being shat out by one of the fishes in the polluted waters of its very own Gotham River. It would have been better should she have thrown herself down the flights of stairs, afterall, she realized and taken her chances with the broken neck.
Now she tried the attempt to at least to do that, to at least make it out the door where she could scream for help, and even if the doors all stayed shut, she could hope that the Batman might hear her and swoop down to make one of those timely rescues she was always reading about under the bylines of journalists whom were never her.
She'd willingly become fodder for one of their stories now and relinquish her envy.
Her hand was on the door knob, it was already half turned, when she heard him say behind her, "Please, no, don't go. It would be a pity to waste the effort already spent. Might as well see what you used it all for. I'll make it worth your time."
His voice made her stay because it was so different than what she had expected. It was tender almost, refined and certainly defeated. More than that it was sane, a word she never had heard while describing anything about the Joker before in any article she had ever devoured.
She turned around to have a better look at him now that he had stepped out from the dark corner by the window and was equally taken off guard.
He didn't exactly look like they said, nor did he carry himself in the same manner. This man. He was thin, that much was true, and his face was painted the garish colors of a clown, his lips pulled back into a horrific grin, which did actually look to be the farthest thing she had ever associated with sanity, and yet his eyes...His eyes held none of that madness. They were calm and sad, if anything, not exactly desperate now even, for she had always associated desperation as bordering on being insane, but still pleading, no, more hoping that she would adhere to his request.
The eyes made her stop - the red of his lips - even if his hair, such a bright shade of green would give her the signal to go.
"Yes. Thank you. That is better," the Joker said, straightening out his suit and her eyes drifted over it, from the collar to the tips of his white and black spatz and she realized it wasn't the purple suit of royalty that had partly won him the moniker of the Clown Prince of Crime that he was wearing, but more the tailored suit that an accountant might wear on his day of counting beans for the government or common man. Where was the suit now, she wondered, her eyes going around the apartment room? Neatly folded into a drawer? Perhaps in a closet? No, there were none of those around, unless she had been mistaken about the John and the building had one for everyone to use, which in itself was a horrible thought.
"Sit at the table," the man, if he could be called such a thing when he resembled a freak, offered, and Quinzel watched him walk over to it, motioning towards the chair at the end of the beaten piece of furniture, as he stood beside its counterpart, grasping the back of the thing like the world's elderly would hold on to their walkers. "I have gifted you with some security at that end, if my reputation bothers you so much."
Seeing several items lying there, Harleen took tentative steps towards them, holding back a gasp as she saw what they were: a knife, a gun and what looked like a grenade, the old fashioned sort.
"For your safety," the Joker stated.
Curious now, if this wasn't just more of a prank, she picked up the knife, expecting it to be rubber, but finding that it cut into the table top as she quickly plunged it into it.
The Joker looked genuinely amused, but in a reserved way, contrary to his appearance. "You'd find the bullets in the revolver are not dummies either, would you care to shoot. Although, I think you had the good sense to come armed, if I needed to wager."
Harleen Quinzel blushed, feeling guilty now when faced with his deduction of her decision. She turned to the last item on the table and nodded to it with her chin. "What's that for?"
Now the Joker looked partially mollified, turning away from both her and the grenade. "I'm afraid my reputation is not pleasant, as I already mentioned. You might find a quick death preferable to what your peers say I have a liking for."
The confession was chilling and instantly returned a few articles to mind of things that she frankly didn't want to think about now. The grenade was something that couldn't be checked for legitimacy either, one pull of the pin proving it was real. Best to take it on faith then doubt it and wind up in a million pieces.
"You're welcome to frisk me," he offered, his hands rising, but when he saw her expression, they instantly fell. "I thought not."
Harleen sat down, her eyes drifting to the grenade, but then flitting again swiftly to her host as he joined her at the table, his hands folding together in front of him like he was getting ready to say grace, even though the only things on the table were on her side and a weapon every one of them. Now Harleen added something new to the mixture, although something still as inedible, by pulling out a tape recorder from her pocket and hitting its button, far safer than the grenade's pin.
The Joker's eyes watched her the whole time and his breath sounded strained, like the recorder was what he dreaded now more than any of the other deadlier objects he had gifted her to turn on him, should the opportunity be needed and taken. But he equally looked like he welcomed the recorder as well, which was strange.
"Why did you call me here?" Harleen Quinzel asked with a certain calmness, for she felt surprisingly safe sitting before him than she had on the flight of stairs. "What did you want everybody to know?"
That was what it came down to, wasn't it? You told a friend or a lover a secret. A journalist was whom you turned to when you were tired of those and wanted your truth spread across the city and world like the cure for rumor and gossip. Or maybe if you merely liked the sound of your own thoughts and wanted those to take over the minds of others, as well, if only for as long as it took them to spend some of their attention on you.
"Where to begin..." the Joker asked himself more than her. "I suppose I should start by saying it's my choice to tell you all this...I've realized that our choices are the only things we really have that nobody can rip away from you. Even if they take away your consent, you still can decide what you do with it...how you allow yourself to feel and deal, so to speak. And so this is my choice, even if it will get me finally killed...just like he has always wanted. Maybe it's time to let him win. Perhaps it would have been better for the whole cursed city, myself included, if he had..."
Harleen watched as his hand began shaking, uncontrollably, like it too had just been a choice to pretend it was steady for all this time - for the duration of his torment of Gotham City - and now, he was slipping back to a point in his memories long before the decision had been made to seem strong, and where he could quickly let it become weak again...