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The Park; Saturday Afternoon

Sometimes a girl and her hyena just needed to get out of the house, so that was what Harley and Bruce were doing right now!

In more specific terms as to where exactly 'out of the house' they were, they were in the park, by the pond. And as for what they were actually doing, Bruce was stalking some of the flamingos, and Harley was watching him do so while taking noisy sips through the big straw in her absolutely monstrous drink concoction from the Perk. Unless it was from J,GoB? Actually, maybe J,GoB. The big cup wasn't even see-through and yet the thing was still managing to look like it was tooth-rottingly sweet.

Anyway, Harley was also calling out encouraging things to Bruce, like "Ya gotta find more cover if you don't want them to run like that!" and "Watch out for that wing, baby!" and "Did you know these pink freaks could get so goddamn loud?!"

Okay, maybe that last one was just a flat out question rather than encouragement, whatever, don't box her in!

(But seriously, did you?)

(open for all your park needs!)

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Pam had come here to...

... well, it didn't matter what she had come to the park for, did it? At least, it stopped mattering the second she turned the corner, and stepped onto the path, and saw a hyena and a blonde-- a very particular blond, a very particular hyena.

A very particular desire to let her feet carry her there, offended, suddenly, by the sheer distance between them-- and a familiar terror, something that rooted her to the ground (did she get my letters? did she come to find me? did she--) in equal measure, and.

She was still too far away.

"Harley?!"

She sounded hoarse.

A detail Harley didn't quite notice, as she and her giant drink whirred in place towards the direction the voice had come from, to see --

A redhead she couldn't immediately place.

"Huh?" she called, cheerful as ever, big grin, eyebrows up. "Who's askin'?"

Oh, like you'd recognize a college girlfriend right off the bat from however many paces this was, after however many years it had been.

Tell us if you've heard this one before: a woman walks into a park and sees the love of her life playing with a hyena.

'It's you!' she yells, and the love of her life replies-- 'Who's askin'?'

No one had ever told her that a heart skipping a beat could be so painful. It was Harley. It had to be Harley. Everything about her - beyond the faint shades of tattoos she didn't recognize-- screamed Harley, even at this distance.

Pam's hand, already up and extended, wavered. Sank down a little. "I-- it's me."

(But Harley would know, wouldn't she?)

"Yeah, I can see that," Harley replied, with a good natured snort that seemed to involve both her head and her shoulders, too, "but that's not really helping me right now!"

Although...

Her head was now tilting quizzically, with a thought that was trying to surface, a distant memory --

Was it possible for a heart to sink so far? Because Pam could feel it sliding down her chest, pushing past her liver, into her pelvis-- along her thighs, her knees, her ankles, and into the soil below.

Her hand fell to her hip. "I. I'm sorry. I must've mistaken you for someone else."

Except everything in her body told her this was Harley.

Real awkward that that was the moment it all clicked together in Harley's head, huh? The voice, the hair, flowers, Seattle, heartbreak --

Harley's mouth fell open.

"Pammy?!"

The particular loud squeak of her voice immediately drew Bruce's attention away from the birds and onto her.

... and sure, throw that sunken heart straight into utter confusion.

Pamela didn't believe there was a place where her Harley wouldn't know who she was. (Would she pretend not to know? She didn't think Harley Quinn capable of that kind of cruelty, but--) It didn't make sense. It just didn't make sense.

If she'd heard that call thirty seconds ago, she would've-- (run over there. hugged her. kissed the living daylights out of her) done something. Instead of standing here like a fool, grasping for something to make sense of it all, and winding up with little more than--

"... Yes."

"What?!" Harley squawked.

And then she was moving to cross the distance, Bruce hot at her heels.

"How? Why? When?"

The absolutely perplexed look on her clown-white face was unfortunately not promising kisses or hugs.

"I-- I escaped here from Seattle this week."

It was. Well. Answering that question was at least a start that didn't involve Pamela Isley standing there poleaxed and useless.

"I thought-- you were in Gotham."

Edited 2024-09-28 18:50 (UTC)

"Well yeah, I was," Harley replied as if that much should have been obvious. She was clearly about to barge on ahead on that topic, but something else caught her attention instead. The change in tracks was pretty openly obvious, too. "Wait, you escaped from Seattle? From what?"

By now, she'd come to a stop a bare few feet away from Pam and was still kind of gaping at her, even if it did come with a big frown now.

Something from her conversation with Yelena yesterday kept bouncing around the analytical parts of Pam's mind; she cast a quick gaze at the hyena, and that same, dispassionate part of her noted: that's neither Bud nor Lou.

The rest of her, though, was too thrown to listen. "A-- I don't know what it was. A fungal creature, I think. They've been following me."

(She wanted to touch Harley. She couldn't.)

"A creature? That's a fungus? Like a mushroom?"

And now Harley's eyebrows were getting to be almost higher than some might expect them to be able to go.

"Jesus, I never knew botany went so hard. Guess someone must've really fucked up in the lab, huh?"

"I--"

And that was that analytical mind, knocking on the door of her all too sensitive heart.

"You have no idea," Pam said slowly. (Helpfully, a little trail of fungus curled up from her collar and settled around her neck.) "Yelena, she said-- people she knew of from her reality but weren't from her reality."

And Harley's ever-shifting face was back to a confused frown. "Who's Yelena? And what's that?"

That thing about not touching? Yeah, Harley didn't work like that. So she attempted to poke Pam in the neck.

... In the fungus?

Look, whichever - point was, if Pam didn't do anything to stop it, she was getting prodded.

The poke was-- very befuddlingly, hilariously, hopelessly Harley. And because it was befuddlingly, hilariously, hopelessly Harley, Pam let it happen, swatting her hand away only gently afterward.

"Ophiocordyceps lamia," she said. "I can only control it to a certain point, so please don't touch it."

There was that, at least. Nice, precise, scientific information.

"Yelena is someone who lives here," she added. (Also nice, precise, scientific information.) "She-- you're not the Harley I know, are you?"

It would probably help to be more precise, she realized a moment too late.

"Well yeah," Harley replied, "not anymore, people change!"

She was gesturing at herself in an all-encompassing sort of way. The visible tattoos, the hair, the clothes, her actual skin - all things that had drastically changed since she'd seen Pam last.

She was still a step behind in putting together this was not that Pam.

"Especially since university."

"No, I mean you're not the Harley I know," Pam repeated. Slowly. Putting it all together. The tattoos-- well, the tattoos hadn't been the clearest signal, but they didn't hurt.

"The island is a multiversal nexus," she said. Still slow. Processing. "A lot of different mes. A lot of different yous."

It didn't stop her heart from hurting, but at least for a moment, that wasn't the loudest voice.

"If you were my you, you would've recognized me instantly."

Edited 2024-09-28 19:38 (UTC)

"I haven't been your anything for a very long time, Pammy," Harley replied without missing a beat, "so ya got that right."

The need to say that while processing what Pam was actually saying was coming from a very old place of hurt.

"I'm sorry a me hurt you."

(Can't we talk about it? I don't understand why you're so angry. We were trying to save your life--)

"But whatever me you think I am, I'm not."

(Please come back to bed. I can explain. I swear it's not like that. I would never do anything to hurt you.)

"I think we're from similar worlds," Pam said. "But not the same."

(My you tried to save me. I punished her for it. I'm so sorry. I deserve this pain.)

Harley made a face. "Whatever it is, I don't like it," she decided. "I don't like this."

She hadn't noticed how close to her hip Bruce had gotten.

"Different worlds or not, this feels like bullshit."

"On that, we can agree." Was that a sigh? It felt more like a release of months worth of-- something. A feeble one, that wasn't nearly enough. "I haven't seen my you in months," Pam added, studying that face. (The closest to her Harley's face she'd probably see in-- some time.)

And, because maybe she couldn't help herself, and maybe she was selfish, "I miss her."

"Tough titties!" Harley exclaimed, throwing her hands up. "'Cause I'm the one that's here. This is my home."

... Wait, what?

Huh.

Yes, she did briefly look like she was experiencing some sort of a revelation about that. But it got swiftly shoved aside to be dealt with later. Much like, apparently, all indications presented here about how there was a whole alternate life path some other version of her somewhere else had taken.

"And I haven't seen P-- m-- my you in years!"

Exhale. Right. So much for sentimentality. (She ignored that gnarled, stinging branch of emotion that curled around her; Queen Ivy would've been proud.)

"Like I said," Pam said. Carefully. (Clinically.) "I'm sorry she hurt you."

"I don't care! That wasn't my point!"

There was another one of those big, flaily gestures. Bruce watched it like -- well, a hyena. But metaphorically like a hawk!

"Ya might wanna go back to Seattle. Or Gotham. Whichever, I don't care!"

She'd already said that, hadn't she.

"Right."

The benefit of her voice - of that always-low, sensuous drawl - was that Pam could cover up any number of emotions with it. Make it sound careless, callous, even, no matter what she was actually feeling.

"I'm just passing through," she said, in that very same voice (god, her Harley would've called her on it. She didn't know if she wanted to be called on it). "I'll be out of your hair soon enough."

Everything hurt.

(Good, she thought grimly. Good.)

Edited 2024-09-28 20:36 (UTC)

This Harley remembered a very different Pam, a pre-Seattle Pam, and through a very different Harley, to boot. She caught nothing behind the voice. If anything, it matched that very old feeling of getting cast aside, getting left behind.

That pre-Arkham Harley feeling.

"Good," she said. Sniffed, for some reason, as she turned to gesture for the hyena that still had his eyes trained on Pam. "Come on, Brucey, we're leavin'."

Brucey? As in Bruce Wayne? Cute.

The words almost fell out of her mouth, like a discordant note in an already terrible composition, or a dandelion poking through concrete. Pam wrangled them back just in time, terrible as they were.

She thought about storming away. (But this wasn't anger, was it?)

And so instead what came out was a single, helpless, "I'm sorry."

Harley's attention snapped back to her. "Yeah, that's what ya -- what she said back then, too," she said, fumbling over her words in her rush to get them out. "And I didn't believe her either!"

She was going to feel a little sorry about this later. Right now, though, the surprise of it all felt raw.

"If it helps, I didn't meet you back then," Pam said, surprised by the evenness of her tone. "But I remember being very young."

And stupid.

(Naive.)

Driven, too. It was a far more awful combination than it had any right to be.

"It doesn't help," Harley replied, not even the least bit surprised by Pam's evenness or the lack of it in her own voice. She sounded agitated, tight. Almost frantic. "Y-- she left me and broke my heart! And you showin' up lookin' older and hotter doesn't do anything to that!"

Except make it hurt again, apparently.

(She left you and broke your heart and walked right into the arms of a narcissistic blowhard who nearly destroyed her. Would it help, if you knew that? Probably not.)

(It's probably why you haven't heard from her.)

Pam's fingers slid up to rub at the fungus on her neck. And then down, briefly, to touch the little red-and-black pendant that laid between her collarbones.

"I get that," she said. And oh, look: there was the break she'd expected minutes ago. A little upwards twist in her voice. "But I haven't-- it's not--"

"You left too!" Harley exclaimed, stabbing a finger at her. "For months! You said!"

"Because something-- terrible happened to me," and that was another voice crack; Pam couldn't even fathom how to begin to explain how Harley-- her Harley-- had clipped her wings out of love and--

"And I needed to work through it," she said, steadying herself, her hand dropping to her side. "But I write you-- her. I write to her every day."

It probably wouldn't have helped to explain it right now, anyway: this Harley was barely able to process what was being said to her anyway.

"Good for you." See? And her hand was reaching out for Bruce's collar. "Just fantastic! I'm sure that makes ya feel better about yourself!"

And, yeah, yeah, yeah, she could hear the cracking and hated how it still got to her a little. She was ignoring that, thank you!

"It... doesn't," Pam said slowly.

She felt defeated, if she was entirely honest with herself.

"I just miss you." No, not you. "Her." But that didn't help, did it? "But like I said, I'll... get out of your hair."

"Good," Harley said, unable to decide whether she actually meant that or not, and unwilling to think on it.

(I just miss you was such an unfair thing to say. To any Harley.)

She managed to actually tug Bruce into moving with her this time, though. Progress! On this dramatic flouncing she was attempting.

... Goddammit, she couldn't even think of a good quip.

And it probably did not help that Pam couldn't get herself to move just yet. That she just stood there, watching Harley attempt to flounce, and thought: a Harley in any universe.

At least she didn't say anything to interrupt it, this time.

And that - and likely that alone - gave Harley a fighting chance to actually exit the situation, her face screwed up into a tight frown as she turned and stomped away.

Thankfully the way her face (throat, chest, lungs) screwed up into something else only happened several stomps later.

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The Park; Saturday Afternoon

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