Satisfied, Part 20
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~~~
The next day, she walked through the bad part of town (was there really a bad part of town in a place like this?). With the horse miraculous the whole ‘walking’ thing wasn’t quite necessary, but she was waiting for something.
She checked her reflection in a mirror and made sure that her earpiece was completely invisible and continued on.
People avoided her like the plague. If you were wearing a costume you were either a rogue or a vigilante. In this part of town they were both equally bad. The best option was to avoid them and hope you don’t find out.
So, when she saw people approaching her, her brain shorted out a little bit. They were all obviously affiliated with each other. They were wearing the same suits, even had the same general build. Did their boss get mad at them? At her? Did they have some sort of grudge?
Then she saw the needle in the closest’s hand.
She made a squeaking noise in the back of her throat and turned on her heel. To her horror, she saw more people in those same suits. Great. Brilliant, even. They’d surrounded her and were blocking her only two exits.
She could use a portal, sure, but she didn’t want everyone to know her powers. The less people knew about her new persona the better.
“Feeellas,” she said awkwardly as they neared her, hands up in surrender. “Listen, listen, you rea -- eeee!”
She had been cut off when one lunged for her. She backed up as quickly as she could, eyes locked on the needle in his hand, only to feel a hand clamp around her shoulder.
Her head whipped around and the man gave an apologetic smile as he held up a syringe.
“Ah, bon,” she hissed.
She didn’t register a gradual drop of consciousness, didn’t even feel the needle puncture her skin. One second she was struggling to get out of the man’s grip, the next she was tied in a chair, a bag over her head.
She could hear people screaming in her ear but it all came out as fuzz.
“Quoi?” She murmured to herself.
The bag was whipped off her head at the sound and she blinked a few times as she tried her hardest to understand what was going on through all the fog.
She was in a warehouse of some sort, that much was obvious from the high ceilings and boxes. For some reason, though, only one light was on; the one right above her shone brightly, making it hard to see more than a few feet in front of her.
Her brain cleared when she felt the cold barrel of a gun touch the back of her head. Her pupils dilated in fear. Even if it wouldn’t kill her, a shot to the head would definitely leave her incapacitated for the next few days.
A person stepped into her vision.
She looked up at the face of Harley Quinn and gave a weak smile. “Hey, miss, if you wanted to thank me this wasn’t at all necessary.”
She gave a soft laugh. “Thanks for your help, darlin’, but that’s not what you’re here for.”
“Then why?” She asked, trying to subtly tip her head back and see who had a gun to her head.
She heard the safety click and froze. She slowly trained her gaze back on the woman in front of her, but she never heard the safety turn back on.
The intention was clear: one more chance.
The smile that stretched across the woman’s face was so calculated and cold that she felt a shiver run through her. “I just have a few questions for you.”
She looked up at the woman in front of her and knew instantly that lying would be a fatal mistake. While she definitely gave off the impression of someone who had a few screws loose, her eyes were far too sharp for that to be completely true. At the very least, she’d been a very smart person before she had gone off the deep end. There was nothing saying that she didn’t keep those smarts when she’d changed.
So, no lies. This should be fun.
She swallowed thickly. “Of course.”
“One: why did you help me?”
“I was in the area, I saw you fighting Robin, I wanted to help you out.”
“Okay, that’s how, but why?”
Marinette bit the inside of her cheek. “You’re pretty high up in the crime world, I thought it would be a good idea to get on your good side.”
Harley raised her eyebrows. She must not have detected a lie, because in all technicality there wasn’t one, so she moved on: “Two: how do you know Robin?”
She blinked a few times.
“He went easy on you at first, it’s not normal for him.”
She gave a small shrug. “We’d met before. Didn’t go great on either of our ends but definitely not for me.”
Harley nodded. “Three: why can’t I take off your mask?”
Oh, thank kwami. Something she could answer having to think of a lie. “Miraculi don’t let you take them off without a fight. Especially this one, because it doubles as a mask.”
“Miraculi?” The woman’s cold smile dropped slightly in her confusion.
Great. She’d been wrong. Apparently they weren’t all that well-known in America. She could have hidden that information by just saying it was a part of her powers. Still, she couldn’t start lying now, so she just said: “It’s a France thing, apparently. It just grants me my powers.”
“And how do those powers work?”
She gave a small shrug. “I can open portals anywhere I can see or visualize perfectly. Like, I can make a portal across the room and send another to my house, but I can’t make one ‘just outside’ because I don’t know where I am.”
Harley nodded slowly. “Last question: why are you on this side?”
The girl closed her eyes to think, then looked up at the woman. “Necessity,” she said simply.
She looked at the person behind Marinette and tipped her head to the side. “She wasn’t lying.”
“She’s still hiding things,” said a man’s voice.
“She’d be stupid not to.”
There was a long silence and Marinette’s forehead beaded with sweat.
The safety clicked and the gun left her skin. She breathed a sigh of relief and slumped in her chair as much as her restraints allowed.
Harley smiled. “Have you already had your debut? You said you had already fought Robin once before...”
Marinette bit the inside of her cheek. “I’ve not really done anything outside of fight him while like this. I kind of wanted to do some sort of major thing to debut.”
“Weeeell,” she began.
The man behind her sighed. “Harley. Don’t.”
“Whaaat? I like her,” she pouted.
The man groaned.
The woman grinned and leaned down to be at eye level. “Listen, darlin’, we’re planning to crash the Wayne Gala. You want in?”
Marinette’s eyes widened. The Wayne Gala? She cursed in French. She was lucky she hadn’t yet made prototypes for the outfits, because she was going to have to rework them to make running easier.
“Um... don’t speak French, darlin’.”
“Oh. I was just saying that sounds fun! Can’t wait!” (It was true, the context had just been much different.)
The woman walked around her. “Great! Let me just untie you...”
“No need.” She winked and opened a portal under herself and went crashing to the ground a few feet away. The chair broke under her from the force and she grinned as she pushed the splinters away from herself.
“Are you okay?” Came Batman’s voice in her ear, and Harley unknowingly echoed him.
“Yeah, these suits are pretty durable,” she answered both, then looked up at her captors. Whoever the guy was, he wasn’t the Joker. Still, he had the very distinct look of a villain. She frowned slightly as she tried to place his face, then shrugged to herself. She’d describe him to the bats later.
She stood and picked up the rope holding her, then pouted at the pair. “You used my own weapon to tie me?”
“Sorry, darlin’,” said Harley, not sounding at all sorry. “It was what we had on hand.”
She reattached her lasso to her waist. “Alright. I’m gonna head out. Next time, if you want to contact me, could you just send a guy to tell me so?”
Harley grinned. “No promises.”
She sighed and shook her head slightly, then opened a portal back to the grocers rooftop. She sent a tiny wink before slipping through.
~~~
You know I got five plants at the beginning of this and named each of them after a different Wayne, then I said ‘hey, whichever one(s) is/are dead by the end of three weeks will die in the fic’ and all of them are still alive. The plants have spoken
~
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