Bad Jokes (JokerxHarley Quinn)

you're the same kind of bad as me

They told me you were no good
I know you'll take care of all my needs
You're the same kind of bad as me
-Tom Waits, Bad as Me

As time passed and I grew more confident in my skills, I also felt more confident about my role within the Joker's crew. I started getting to know the boys, and quickly realized that he hadn't been exaggerating when he said that most of them were batshit insane. I was sure he had plenty of perfectly sane recruits living in their own homes, on call whenever he needed them, but I rarely saw them, definitely not enough to get to know them. There were a lot of guys, though, who just didn't seem to have anywhere else to go, and these were the ones I had the time to study. Of these, all of them had problems, and some were much worse than others.

Timmy and/or Tommy walked with a limp and had a dissociative identity disorder. Two personalities lived inside of the head of the beat-up kid—Tommy was the brave one, the one who would actually talk to you, while Timmy was the wounded, cowardly animal that would show up protectively when Tommy got picked on, the one who would snarl fearfully and spit poison at others until left alone. Dissociative identity disorders were extremely rare, and the therapist in me was utterly fascinated, though I managed to avoid staring most of the time.

Jake had mild obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested largely in the way his gun was handled. He wouldn't use other guns, he was constantly cleaning and re-cleaning his, and no one else was allowed to touch it or he'd go into panicked rages.

Javier, the henchman who'd spoken out for me on the day of the Stephen incident, suffered from bipolar disorder (and was decidedly not open to drugs). Chaz was a paranoid schizophrenic who heard voices constantly, except for when J was around. Frank was bulimic and dealt with frequent panic attacks when we weren't out on jobs (which, ironically, was when he was at his steadiest). I believed Roger was autistic, though I couldn't really pin it down—I suspected a form of Aspergers, since he showed very little interest in anything but bombs and wouldn't talk to anyone but our charismatic leader.

At first, these men were wary of me. They were reluctant to be seen talking to me—the Joker hadn't been exaggerating when he said he was a jealous man, and if he caught a guy so much as looking at me, that guy was risking his temper, depending on his mood at the time. So, I started working on them when he was gone.

It took a while, but considering the fact that I was still "in training" and therefore rarely included in their jobs, I had time on my hands. It helped, I think, that I had somewhat reluctantly shouldered a domestic role—believe me, I was aware that this put me directly in danger of being dismissed as "the little woman," kept around to cook and make up beds and wash dishes, but after being confronted with what felt like the dozenth hissing roach in a day and seeing that these guys' idea of cooking dinner was either to opt for McDonalds or to throw a hunk of ground beef in a pot and hope for the best, I decided to clean first and tackle gender bias later. However, I wasn't going to do it alone.

After asking the Joker's permission (he was busy scribbling furiously on a train schedule and just grunted in response, which I took as an affirmative), I raided one of the many nooks in the apartment that contained a wad of cash and took several of the guys on a shopping excursion—J still didn't like me to leave the place on my own. I got a boatload of cleaning materials and a lot of food and brought it all back home. I bullied them into helping me carry everything upstairs, and then I bullied them into helping me clean. For a while, the air was thick with roach poison, lemon pledge, and relentless bitching from the guys who apparently liked living in six inches of filth, but when the dust cleared (quite literally)... well, it was still a condemned apartment, but at least it was cleaner, and at least I didn't feel like I was going to get salmonella just from stepping into the kitchen.