Chapter Text
—+—
Harley’s POV
Harley first saw the kid through a window on the second floor of Arkham Asylum she happened to pass while being dragged to solitary. She watched him pile out of a van, already in the standard white uniform, fighting with the orderlies and screaming curse words. Harley grinned at the sight.
Oh, this’ll be a riot.
^—^
“Hey, Ives, you seen the new kid?” Harley asked Ivy a few days later. She’d only just been brought back to her cell, and was happy to be able to speak to her girlfriend again.
There was a moment of silence. “New kid?”
“Yeah, new kid! Black hair, violent–”
“I’m right here,” Eddie called. His cell was directly across from Harley’s, and he was peering through the glass into her room, looking mildly judgemental.
“Not you ,” Harley said with a snort. “The kid .”
Ivy hummed. “I knew I felt something different,” she muttered, voice just barely audible.
^—^
It was another day before Harley saw the kid again. He was sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, reading a book. For a moment, Harley wondered if he was another Mad Hatter, another man obsessed with a fictional story, but quickly decided he probably wouldn’t be sent to Arkham for believing he was a part of Pride and Prejudice.
“Stalking the kid?” Ivy asked. Most of the rogues had taken to calling him ‘the kid,’ even though he was technically listed in Arkham’s files as a John Doe.
“Nah. Just curious.” Harley hadn’t seen a new face in Arkham in a while. It was mostly the same guys over and over. “What’s his name?” Harley asked, still staring at the kid.
“Red Hood,” Harv answered, and Harley flinched before forcibly reminding herself he wasn’t there, Joker wasn’t there, and this kid maybe-probably-definitely didn’t work for him.
“Uh-huh,” she said when she regained the ability to speak. “Know what he did?”
“You could ask him,” Ivy suggested.
The kid finally noticed her staring. He glanced up at her, waved, and looked back down at his book.
Harley grinned. “Great idea, Ivs.” She stood, marching over to the kid’s table. He looked up at her fully, marking his page and setting the book down, not looking away from her for a second.
“Hiya!” Harley said cheerfully. The kid continued to stare blankly at her. Harley took it as an invitation to sit down. “So,” she cooed, smiling at him. “Heard a rumor you got pinched by Batsy.” It was a decent guess. After all, this was Arkham. Roughly half the patients had been brought in by Batman.
The kid’s eyes seemed to glow at her words, and his expression turned downright murderous in a way Harley found adorable.
“So,” she said, “what’d you do?”
The kid looked right at her and said, “I tried to get Batman to kill the Joker.”
And just like that, Harley had a new favorite patient. Well, after Ivy, of course.
^—^
Arkham patients had exactly one visiting day a month. Harley normally didn’t have many visitors, but on that month’s visiting day, a reporter was waiting for her on the other side of the glass.
She listened to him drone on for a while, something about a fall from grace and exclusive interview. He seemed to be under the impression that she would be fine using her trauma for clickbait.
Her eyes wandered the room. Clayface was meeting with his agent. Ivy was speaking to her plant sitter, and seemed totally absorbed in her description of the proper way to feed a Man-Eating Venus Flytrap.
The door to the prisoner’s side of the visiting hall opened. Harley glanced up, and watched a guard lead the kid into the hall. He was late, but the broken nose and beginnings of a black eye made the reason for his tardiness obvious. Poor guy, Harley thought.
The guard practically dragged him to a free booth, shoving him into the glass before walking to the corner to join his coworkers.
The kid’s visitor was a blue eyed man with blond hair too shiny to not be a wig, with black sunglasses that entirely hid his eyes. Even in his disguise, Harley knew who he was. What was Bruce Wayne doing, visiting Arkham’s newest patient?
The kid stared at Bruce for a moment, jaw clenched as he glared down at him. Bruce just looked up at him with hope. After a moment, the kid unfroze and sat down, putting the receiver to his ear.
“Fuck you,” he said immediately. Harley thoroughly tuned out the reporter and zeroed in on this conversation. Even through the ongoing discussions around her, she heard damn near every word the kid said.
Bruce seemed to try to say something, but the kid continued, “no, fuck you, you goddamn coward. You don’t get to throw me in here and let that pasty clown motherfucker still walk free and then come here for a visit like nothing fucking happened. ”
Bruce was speaking again. His face was mournful. The kid’s knuckles were going white around the receiver.
“You are that fucking naïve,” the kid muttered, “you actually thought–”
Bruce tried to talk again, motioning with his hands like he was trying to calm a wild animal. The kid’s eyes flashed bright green, and he slammed the receiver into the glass hard enough to crack it.
“Fuck you!” he roared. The guards were running for him, but he managed to hit it twice more before he was dragged away, still screaming obscenities.
^—^
Late that night, Harley woke up to the noises of a conversation, words bouncing off the walls and across the otherwise silent wing.
“I’m just saying,” Nightwing was saying, “you could have been nicer.”
The kid snorted loudly. “Fuck off.”
A terrible, drawn out sigh. “Are you okay in here?” Nightwing asked softly. “You’re not in danger?”
The kid scoffed. “Do you even care?”
“Of course I do.” Nightwing sounded genuinely hurt. “How can you say that?”
The kid laughed. In sharp contrast to the Joker’s, his was brutal, guttural, and furious. “You didn’t care when you sent me here,” the kid growled. “You didn’t care when you locked me in with a bunch of your fucking villains.”
“It’s for your own good,” Nightwing said, but he sounded entirely unsure. The kid didn’t respond. “I’ll try to visit again soon,” Nightwing said. “I’m not giving up on you, Jaybird.” He took a few steps down the hallway, then stopped. “It’s for your own good.”
“Eat shit,” the kid said sleepily. Harley heard his snores within seconds.
^—^
The crack of Harley’s fist connecting with the guard’s face was one of the most satisfying sounds she had heard in a while. He dropped to the floor immediately, groaning wildly. Harley knelt down and hit him again before pulling him close.
“You’re not allowed to touch the kid,” she hissed, spitting into his face. “Not again. He’s under my protection, you hear?”
There were more guards now, swarming around her. Two grabbed her arm and yanked her back.
“Do you hear me?” Harley shouted rabidly. She kicked another guard in the head. “None of you fuckers touch him!”
Someone whacked her across the face with a baton, and she woke up in solitary. Good. All the better to send a message.
^—^
“You didn’t have to do that,” Ivy said when Harley was returned to her cell nearly a month later.
“I know,” Harley said. “But I wanted to.”
While she had been in solitary, the bruises on the kid’s face healed and faded. Harley watched carefully, but no more appeared. The kid said nothing, but he started sitting closer to her in the cafeteria, maybe to stay closer to his protector, maybe to keep an eye on her. Every time, Harley waved him over. Every time, he pretended not to see.
^—^
“I think we should break out,” Harley said. She was pacing her cell, stretching her muscles in a mockery of tai chi.
“Oh?” Ivy said.
“But we should take the others with us.” Harley bounced around. “It could be like a big group adventure! Plus, we’d have a better chance of gettin’ out.”
Ivy hummed. “It could be nice,” she mused.
“I’m in,” Eddie called. “I’ve got a few new riddles I wanna try out.”
“Alright,” Ivy said. “So us three–”
“And me,” Harv interrupted.
“Us four,” Ivy corrected. “Who else?”
“Jonathan,” Harley said immediately. She started listing names, counting them off her fingers. “Bane, too, if we can get to him.”
The other rogues murmured their agreements, and a satisfied silence filled the wing, almost immediately interrupted by Ivy’s question, “what about your friend?”
“Friend?” Harley repeated, but it occurred to her almost immediately. The kid.
“You can’t exactly protect him if you’re not here,” Ivy pointed out.
Goddammit, she was right. “Well, we could break him out,” Harley reasoned. “I mean, if we’re already breaking out half of Arkham, what’s one more guy?”
Another bout of silence, this one much more uneasy than the first.
“I mean, I guess ,” Eddie said anxiously.
“What do we know about this guy?” Harv asked.
“He’s eighteen-maybe-nineteen, he’s got some sorta glowin’ eye thing, he likes Jane Austen, an’ he tried to get Batman to kill the Joker.”
Ivy sighed. “I want to meet him before we decide anything.”
^—^
Lunch was rice, beans, and mystery meat. Harley poked at it suspiciously as she and Ivy marched over to the kid’s table.
He had a new book this time. He set it down when they sat across from him, eying the both of them. “What’s this?”
“This is Ivy.” Harley gestured loosely to her girlfriend. “Ivy, this is the kid.”
“Red Hood,” the kid corrected.
“Nope!” Harley said cheerfully.
“ Anyway ,” Ivy cut in. “Harley tells me you tried to kill the Joker?”
The kid took a bite of his mystery meat. “Fucker had it coming.”
“I don’t disagree.” Ivy’s shoulders were relaxing somewhat, and her expression was slightly friendlier. “What made you do it?”
The kid snorted. “You sound like my shrink.”
“Just curious.” Her voice was mild, but had a slight edge to this.
Just fucking tell her, Harley thought furiously.
The kid pushed at his food with his fork. “He killed me.”
Harley’s head snapped up and she stared at him, trying to discern if he was kidding. He was decidedly not.
It was believable enough. In a world protected by alien gods and billionaires dressed as bat-demons, someone coming back from the grave wasn’t completely crazy. Not to mention that a decent number of the rogues had died and come back. And with the sheer number of people Joker had killed, it stood to reason at least one of them would come back.
“Oh,” Ivy said. She sounded surprised. “Sorry.”
The kid waved a hand. “Don’t be. I’m fine now.” He took a sip of his water. “Did you want something, or…?”
“Yes, actually,” Ivy said. “We’re planning a breakout, and we were wondering if you wanted to come along.”
The kid chuckled, voice hollow. “Wow,” he said. “Arkham really is a revolving door.”
“What did you expect?” Ivy asked. “The chief of security is going around wearing Armani suits and rolexes. Meanwhile, most of the guards make minimum wage, and the security system is decades out of date.”
“Yeah,” Harley said. “Like, a while ago, Bruce Wayne donated a shit ton of money to the asylum–around the time you showed up, actually,” she said pointedly. The kid didn’t respond, and she continued. “The next day, the asylum director rolled up in a fuckin’ lamborghini.”
“Goddammit,” the kid muttered. He shook his head. “I fucking told him.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” the kid said loudly. He huffed and stabbed his fork into the mystery meat. “And yeah, I want in. When’s this happening?”
The lunch went by without much trouble. Harley and Ivy laid out the plan, the timeline; one week, therapy room 2B, bring whatever you need.
^—^
Only they didn’t make it a week. Three days after the talk at lunch, another van pulled up outside of Arkham. Laughter echoed through the halls. Everyone who heard it knew.
Arkham was about to explode.