Hand for Hire: A DC Harem x Reader Story

Hand for Hire: Harley Quinn

Y/N did not sleep that night. How could he? In his mind's eye, he had always perceived himself as a person with values, as someone not to stoop so low as those criminals he had always heard of. He thought he was better than this. And here he was now, he was just hours from becoming one of them. He knew that his past self would loathe him, and in part, he despises himself for what he was forced to do. But he knew his landlord was not a force to be reckoned with.

His fears of the threat he had made towards him were not unfounded, not entirely. One of his neighbors, a kind lady by the name of Jill, was 2 months late with her rent. She always claimed it was because she was robbed weeks prior to paying, and that seemed like a reasonable excuse. Criminals lurk at every street these days in Gotham. But the landlord wasn't too keen on her living for free for two months straight, so one day, her apartment was broken into. If there were any signs of breaking and entering at all, they were not found by any authorities, so that began the rumor across tenants that this was the landlord's doing.

To know whether that was true or not wasn't in Y/N's best interests.

He was staring at the buzzing screen of the computer and the unremitting sounds of its fan. Only one thing was discernible on that cubical screen, which to him meant a point of no return between his normal life and that of a low-life, the notification that only 10 minutes remained to receive further instructions. He was already fully dressed for the occasion. Not that he had to change anyhow, he already had the only thing that looked on him. For a brief moment, he looked at his hands. 

Were these really the hands of a criminal? Of someone who harmed people just for the sake of it? Or were these the hands of a desperate soul, a man whose life hadn't been smiling back at him for years and years? And even then, would that justify the dirty deeds he was about to do? No price was worth his soul, yet no alternative was around but death. To do this, it would be the same as dying; for the good man he once was had died alongside his debt... right? His moment of reflection was thwarted by the sudden noise of an alarm coming from the speakers connected to the archaic device he called a computer.

"NEW USER DETECTED.

PLEASE MEET AT:

135 W 50th Street NOW

FOR PROPER RECRUITMENT.

THANK YOU."

Of course, this repulsive line of work wasn't going to make things any easier on him, huh? Y/N didn't even know how a website so bare-bones and primitive could even detect that he was a new user, but that didn't matter now. What mattered is that he needed to get going, fast. He stood up from his couch and quickly made his way to the front door, opening every single lock like his life depended on it, and to be fair, it actually did. He blitzed through the unmaintained hallway of his floor and ran down the the rotten and ancient set of stairs in just a matter of seconds. The sheer volume of his footsteps could fool anyone into thinking this was the doing of someone falling down the stairs.

And, before he could blink, he was out of there. Y/N wanted to run to the address he was given, but was quick to realize that this just wouldn't do so he opted to take a cab instead. His mind lingered on the address, just from reading it once he had memorized it completely and didn't quite know why. The inner workings of his pulsating sleep deprived brain had attempted to rationalize that it was the adrenaline caused by the whole ordeal enhancing the part of his brain that stored memory somehow, or maybe it was some metahuman quirk he didn't even know he had until now. Either way, he knew it. 

It was a Sunday at 5:30 A.M., so getting a cab wasn't as hard as it would be on any other day of the week, which doesn't precisely mean it was easy. Still, he managed to find one. It looked a little too shitty, even for Gotham's standards: its yellow paint was close to falling off, with some spots actually being off, revealing an ancient cream paint job under it. From his knowledge, that paint wasn't used in cabs for decades before he was born. Knowing this, he wouldn't be surprised if there was mold growing under it... Whatever, Y/N just hoped the interior of the car wasn't as nasty as the outside.