Queens of Crime 3/3 (Joker x Reader x Harley)
Pairings: Joker x Reader x Harley
You make it back to Gotham in record time after the crash.
The apartment is eerily quiet as you slowly wander from room to room. Nothing has physically been altered, but you can feel the emotional shift weigh down on you. Everywhere you look there’s a piece of one of them – Joker’s knife, a baby-grow Harley had cherished.
It’s all too much to think about but means too much to hide it all away.
If the Bat broke in right now, you wouldn’t stop him. Arkham would be better than a world without the King and Queen and as you gaze at your tattered reflection, your fingers graze the tattoo that adorns the left side of your face.
The tattoo is very like Harley’s, but reads; † TAINTED †
Damn right you’re tainted.
Aged seventeen, you walked the streets of Gotham regularly at night. You had a home, if you could call it that; a Catholic Boarding School for people who had nowhere else to go. Mostly rejects whose parents shoved them out or dropped dead.
Your own parents were far too busy being socialites to watch you, so the good Church was given the pleasure.
The sisters generally didn’t care what you did during the day, as long as you stayed in Gotham, went to (most of) your lessons and came home before one in the morning.
It’s currently half twelve, but you’ve no real intention of going back. It’s not the first time they’ll find you asleep on the doorstep.
You aren’t far off the Iceberg Lounge when the car came to a screeching halt next to you. It was a frosted dark magenta, the inside bright with white light and beautiful leather seats. But he practically radiated, blue eyes shining like two sapphires.
He sat there, staring at you, and you gazed back.
“Well…are you going to get in, or will I chit chat some more?” He slurred, and something about him mesmerised you. His eyes finally locked with your E/C, and you never wanted to look away.
That night was the most exhilarating you ever had experienced. Driving around Gotham at breakneck speed as he just talked – every word gospel, every sentence your bible.
He returned at the same time for weeks on end and you’d joyride, talk, repeat. That was until you hit eighteen. By then, you had fallen in love with him. Or whatever love you were capable of.
Your acid bath was the next step in this game he played. Before your rebirth he had taken your face in his hands, and kissed you. Poison flowed to your mind. From then on, you were tainted. Tainted with his madness; tainted with your own brand of chaos and violence.
Every second you spent with him you grew filthier and filthier, until your hands and soul were black as night.
But you never looked away.
Now, in the mirror, tainted seems to sear against your skin. It taunts you, knowing that no longer you’ll have someone to battle your demons with.
You turn on the bath’s tap.
“Flame!” You roar, and the henchman falls into the room from the adjoining apartment next door. When he sees you, he’s genuinely in shock. You were the one that would deal with the henchmen, the bogeyman haunting their dreams.
Now, you look like a lost child.
“Boss…?” He gently questions as he treads carefully over to the bath, which is full with water and still rising. You sit there, legs drawn to your chest and mascara blackening your cheeks.
“They’re gone, Flame, they’re gone,” you cry as he sinks down to his knees. You clutch his arms and he tries to calm you feebly. “J and Harls are gone!” You shriek as the henchman wraps a large green towel around your trembling frame and awkwardly pats your back.
“Boss, of course they ain’t gone. We’ve been listening in on the radios for hours; they haven’t found any bodies except the pilot and Frost. My guess is they’re already on their way back here, Y/N.” He soothingly tells you. He hears your breathing calm as you try to rationalise what he’s saying in your fuzzy mind.
“I knew they wouldn’t leave me.” You mumble, eyes drooping tiredly. Flame sighs, throwing you over his shoulder like a rag doll. By the time he puts you to bed, you’re out of it.
When your eyes flutter open, you’re lying in the back of a van. On both sides sit guards dressed head to toe in black, none of them move when you wake up. Adrenaline courses through your veins as your heart pounds.
You begin to panic and yank a baton off the guard closest. He jerks forward with surprise, and then screams when you bring the butt of the weapon back into his nose. Hazily, you struggle to your feet as the van rocks. Someone wraps their arms around your waist as you thrash and kick.
“Get off of me! I’ll kill you; I ain’t going to no prison!” You roar as battle against his grip – but your capture doesn’t let go, but instead rips away his goggles. He holds you tightly as you flail however useless it is.
“What’s up, buttercup?” He slurs, grinning. Your heart flutters as you go still, utterly at a loss for words. Tears spring in your eyes as you twist around to hold his face in your hands. Those blue eyes – the precise ones you fell in love with – gaze back.
“I knew it. Flame…Flame was right. I knew you couldn’t die,” You whisper as you wrap your arms around him. The driver in the front calls out, telling J you’ve made it to Belle Reve.
Harley’s here. Harley’s safe. You’re all safe.
“Welcome home, hon.” You murmur in his ear as the doors open and Flame offers an exchange: the baton for a machine gun.
Sitting in her cell, Harley happily waits for her espresso machine to chime when the wall next to her explodes.
She ducks down into the corner of her cell as streams of impostor guard’s file in, guns blazing. The door of her cell is ripped open as two of the soldiers enter. They stand there, silent.
Harley glares at them suspiciously, until the smaller of the two starts to giggle.
“…Y/N?” She whispers, and the same guard rips their helmet off reveal wave of purple hair. You laugh at her expression as you open your arms – she practically jumps into them, and pulls the second guard’s helmet off to reveal her King.
“Oh, my puddins’…” She laughs, drawing Joker into her embrace as the three of you stand there, reunited at last.
Finally, the King and Queens of Crime, ruling monarchy of Gotham City, reborn.
