Gotham v. Joker, 1894 (Chapter Fifteen)

Recap (SPOILER ALERT): An alternate universe take on The Killing Joke. Joker escapes out of Arkham Asylum and kills Barbara Gordon. Batman and Catwoman face-off against Joker in Amusement Mile during the midpoint of the story. Joker is apprehended and permanently damaged in some ways. Just as Bruce returns home, thinking that the case is closed, he is visited by Harleen Quinzel. Harleen confesses to breaking Joker out of Arkham. She struggles to reconcile her feeling for Jack (Joker) and her job as a doctor. In the end, she makes a choice. Now, we are inside Blackgate Penitentiary where Joker is being held.

The moment Harleen closes the metal door behind her, her hands begin to shake. Jack is right in front of her, head drooping and hands tied to his body by a straitjacket. She orders her hands to reach for the revolver in her bag but they don’t move. Her body has staged a coup against her mind it seems. She closes her eyes. “What have I become?” a voice echoes through the black space inside her head. “This isn’t me. This isn’t me. I can’t just… I can’t just kill someone. It’s all wrong. How did I end up here? Why am I doing this to myself? This isn’t happening…” But it is, isn’t it? It’s all happening. She made a decision. The hardest one she has ever made. She must go through with it because there is no going back. By writing a letter to Bruce Wayne she made sure of it. “Why did I do that? I didn’t have to do that to myself.”

“Harley?” Jack’s voice pierces through the void in her head like a bright, ethereal hand and pulls her back to reality, away from her own internal voice. “It’s good to see you.”

She opens her eyes and looks at his silhouette. Maybe it’s because of the light coming in from the gratings behind him but he looks angelic. Jack lifts his head and says, “You’re not going to say anything?”

Harleen sees his injuries, gasps and covers her mouth with her trembling hands, dropping her bag in the process.

“Sorry,” Jack says, looking down again, hiding his wounded face. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

They’ve been torturing Jack, very typical of Blackgate. She expected it, of course. But it’s tearing her heart apart to actually see him like this. Half his face is distorted from bruises that are black as berries. His right cheek has a visible and sharp cut, like someone tried to draw a smile on it. “My god, Jack…” she manages to mutter.

Jack takes the deepest breath, filling his lungs almost past its capacity and then lets it out. “This is going to be the most difficult thing you will ever do,” he says, slowly raising his head.

“What?” Harleen frowns. How does he know?

Jack stares at the floor near her feet, lifting his eyebrows and chin, as if to answer her unspoken question. Harleen looks down. The upper portion of her revolver—the metallic barrel and the hammer—is peeking out of her bag. “You weren’t supposed to know,” Harleen says. “Yes, that does make it difficult.”

“Then don’t do it,” he says. “Don’t go down this path.”

Harleen pulls a chair, sits down and smiles. “You sound like Batman. That’s something he would say if he was here.”

“I know. He is the wisest man I’ve ever known.” Jack shakes his head. “Now that’s something I never thought I’d say about an aristocrat.”

Her mouth gapes. “You know that he is Bruce Wayne?”

Jack grins. “Well, now I do.”

Realizing what just happened, Harleen reaches behind her glasses and rubs her eyes with two fingers.

“I can’t thank you enough,” says Jack. His eyebrows flatten.

“Why?” she asks, bitterly.

“For confirming my guess. It’d have sucked to die not knowing.”

Harleen rolls her eyes. “Of course,” she begins. “What else would you possibly have to thank me for? It’s not like I made you into my sole patient for two years, dedicated all my energy to your therapy, comforted you when you couldn’t trust your cognition, ordered the staff to be extra nice to you despite the risk of seeming suspicious, risked flushing my career down the drain by sending you love letters because you said they’d make you feel less lonely on weekends and holidays when I’d be away. Definitely not the last part, right? Let’s see what else--”

“I’m sorry, Harley.” He looks down again.

“It’s a bit too late for apologies, don’t you think?”

Silence.

Harleen picks up the gun from the floor and stares at the trigger. It’s truly a marvelous weapon. One pull and you can take someone’s life. Just like that. You don’t have to be near the person you want to kill and risk splattering blood on your clothes. Maybe you will have some remnants of gunpowder on your wrist and a ringing in your ear that will last for fifteen seconds, but that’s about it—a sanitization of murder. She understands Batman’s code now. No person with honor and integrity will ever use a weapon like this, she wonders. But how much honor and integrity are you left with anyway when you decide to take a life? Not much, she argues in her mind. And so, the method should not matter. In any case, if a person lacking any quantity of honor and integrity is what she needs to be in order to do kill Jack, then that’s what she will be. She will sacrifice herself to the greater good. Now that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

“You’re contemplating,” says Jack.

Harleen cocks the hammer. “Not anymore.”

“You don’t have to do this,” he says, continuing to be persistent. “You’re a good person, Harley. Too good to be able to live with murder. You can still walk away.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“Because it’s the truth,” he says and pauses. “I haven’t told anyone that you were involved. The only person who could possibly figure out the identity of the Man in Black is Batman, because... well, he has one of your letters. It’s completely my fault, I’ll admit. Even then, Batman is an enemy of the GCPD now. So any evidence he has or anything he has to say is worthless … See? You can walk away!”

Is he telling the truth? Did he really keep her involvement in his break-out a secret? It’s probably true as Commissioner Gordon didn’t recognize her name … Or maybe this is a trap. Maybe Jack made a deal with the commissioner and gave her away. The man was probably acting! Are Jack’s wounds even real or just make-up? That’d be typical of the manipulative bastard! He is probably just stalling. “Stalling what?” a voice inside her head asks in defiance. Of course, if this was a trap, she would’ve been arrested the moment she set foot beyond the gates. Harleen jumps off the chair, sweating profusely. This is bad. She can’t let paranoia take over her thoughts. Not now.

Jack frowns at the sight. “You don’t have to do this to yourself.”

“Batman knows about me,” she blurts. “About us.”

Jack stays mum.

“Because I told him myself. In fact, he knows that I’m here right now. I’m sure he’ll intervene, one way or another. He might be on his way to this room as we speak.”

“So you don’t have a lot of time,” Jack says with a smile.

“Why would you be happy about that?” Harleen suddenly screams. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Oh I wonder!” He cackles. It takes Harleen by surprise.

“I heard you couldn’t--”

“You heard right. Laughing still feels wrong to me,” he says, “But if you think about it, it’s not the worst case scenario. Imagine if my facial muscles went numb, if I couldn’t even fake laughter. Now that’s a nightmare! At this point, I’ll honestly take what I can get.” He then ponders, briefly. “I mean, people fake things all the time, don’t they? They fake happiness. They fake love. What’s laughter in comparison? Maybe if I do it enough times, I won’t be able to tell the difference! … If only I had the time.”

Harleen points the gun at Jack’s heart.

“No.” Jack stands up. “Go for my head. I promise I won’t duck!” He laughs out and then immediately becomes serious. “No, seriously, it’d probably be less painful.”

She begins to cry. All her mental energy is being spent up on trying to hold on to the revolver, keeping it from slipping through her shaky fingers. “As you wish,” she mutters and lifts the gun. Suddenly, a laugh erupts out of her chest, creating a contrast against the tear trails. “You know what the messed up thing about all this is?”

“What?” Jack wants to know.

“I’m not doing this to punish you. Not at all. I’m going to kill you because I love you.”

Jack laughs out hard, lifting his shoulders and looking down. “I’m not sure what you mean but yeah. That is pretty messed up.”

“Why, all I mean is that it’s better to die than to live your days out as an instrument.”

“Is that how you felt when I used you to escape from Arkham?”

“That’s exactly how I felt,” says Harleen, rubbing off tears from her eyes and cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Then I--”.

There’s a loud bang at the door. “Dr. Quinzel! Open the door at once!” says a voice muffled by the metal.

“I…” Jack hesitates.

“You may as well say it, whatever it is. We’re out of time.”

“Nah, it’s… it’s too late for that.”

Harleen says nothing. She still doesn’t pull the trigger. From the other side, the guards continue to scream and bang at the door.

“What’re you waiting for?” Jack asks.

“Dr. Quinzel!” Commissioner Gordon bellows. It seems he too has joined the effort to break the hinges now.

Harleen can feel her index finger throbbing uncontrollably on the steel trigger. She only has two bullets, so she wouldn’t want to miss a shot. Closing her left eye first, she aligns the iron-sight with the tip of Jack’s nose and then takes a deep breath.

Farewel--

She is blinded by a bright sparkle in front of her and then stunned by a thunderous clap. Immediately afterwards, Harleen smells smoke, bitter and sharp. She feels something hot settling down on the side of her wrist. She hears another thud but compared to the blast it sounds like an apple falling into the ground from a tree. As her sight returns and she recovers from her daze, she finds that Jack isn’t standing in front of her anymore. He has vanished. She stands there, perplexed, that is, until she looks down and notices Jack’s body. It lays idly, on its left side, beyond the white table. Only the top half of the corpse is visible, poking out to the right. She finally realizes what happened: she pulled the trigger. She did it and now Jack is dead. She has successfully thwarted the commissioner’s plans and saved the lives of countless inmates at present and future.

The guards start ramming at the door harder now.

Harleen lies down on the floor, parallel to Jack and parted by the table, for a better look. It seems that the bastard died smiling. It’s fake, she knows. But in death what’s the difference? His right eye is bleeding, rather generously.

Not bad for your first lethal shot, she imagines Jack say.

“If you say so,” she replies to the phantom voice.

Blood sprinkles and drips. Crimson trails branch and dribble beyond his glabella, his left eye and then land, hastily, into the dirty floor. She can smell the dust, the residues of blood, piss and vomit, now that she is close to the ground. Thank god Jack is dead.

“I saved you,” she says, clutching the single-bulleted revolver close to her violently beating heart. “Saved you from smelling like stink.”

“Quinzel!” the commissioner bellows outside, once more.

She takes one last long look at Jack's bony face. Then, deciding to make things easier for Gordon, she gets up and simply opens the door from her side.

Gordon barges in, runs right past her and—first things first—checks Jack’s pulse. “Oh my god… Oh my god…” he repeats.

Before she knows it, her hands are folded behind her and then handcuffed. Her gun has already been confiscated. She doesn’t struggle. There is no point. She just lets the process play out, like pictures in a kinetoscope, pretending she’s not there and none of it is happening. She isn’t even Harleen Quinzel. She is someone else, watching a tragic motion picture that is so immersive that for a moment she thought that the events were real and that she was one of the characters. “That’s so silly of me,” she whispers and laughs. The guards look at her like she is crazy and maybe she is. She tries to wake up or stand up from her seat and walk off the theatre but her body doesn’t comply, staying static like it is powerless, like its coup against her psyche failed and because of that it has been executed by the voices in her head.

“That makes no sense,” she whispers. “It makes no sense …”

THE END