Bad Jokes (JokerxHarley Quinn)

i don't fear the dark anymore

Seven times I went down
six times I walked back.
And I don't fear the dark anymore
'cause I'm become all that.
-Deb Talan, Rocks and Water

I drove for a long time, not really sure where I was going, and as I drove, I thought. I thought about the man I had just killed and I couldn't resist comparing it to the first kill. There were factors in common—the lack of sickness, for instance, a strange absence of remorse, but I was well aware that this one had been much different.

The first kill had been an accident. I saw someone making a move that might have put the Joker in harm's way and I acted to intervene. It was all a blur; I barely saw the man's face, let alone had any real contact with him, and the little breakdown afterwards was a result of fearsickness. I'd always heard that after you killed a human being, you were supposed to experience physical illness and crippling guilt, and the fact that I felt neither confused and frightened me.

The difference between that kill and this one was astounding, though I supposed I shouldn't have been surprised—I'd been under the Joker's tutelage for a month, after all, and the sight of a dead body no longer inspired much of a reaction from me aside from vague revulsion. The scars and the turmoil and the things the Joker whispered to me in the middle of the night—they had twisted me, slowly, gradually, until my former self seemed like little more than a shadow to me, and I hadn't even realized it.

I realized it now, though. I just didn't care. This time, I'd gotten up close and personal. This time, I'd planned it, and this time, I had felt his blood on my hands, looked into his face as he died. Remembering that face, I realized that instead of feeling sick with guilt like I would have only weeks ago, instead of imagining his family and the pain his death would cause others, I felt a burn in my heart, a fierce sense of validation. He had intended to make a victim out of me. He had almost certainly done so to others—victimization of the powerless by the powerful was not made up of isolated instances; it was a pattern of repeated instances that would just go on and on and on until somebody stopped it, until somebody punished the wicked.

Who better to punish the wicked than its own bastard child?

I knew my motivations as a killer were different from the Joker's—he never pretended to be a humanitarian and thought justice was a myth. However, even if his motives were not altruistic, the end result damn well would be. From the beginning, he saw those people, people like that cop,people who probably went home to their families every night and worked so very hard on ignoring their own vice and who hadn't felt guilt for so long that they were now immune to its sting—he saw these decent people and he sought to tear off their masks, to cut them open and expose the rot inside of them to their horrified eyes. He did this because it pleased him, not out of some desire to serve the greater good, but it was the result of this work that mattered, not the intentions fueling it.

The bottom line was that he was exposing the poison in the wound. It was up to the people of Gotham to decide what to do with it. If they chose to draw it out, to cut out the corruption, sweep out the filth, and make it impossible for us to operate, that was their choice. If they chose to ignore it... well, when they were writhing in pain and gasping for breath, they could only blame themselves. The Joker was an utterly indifferent harbinger, and I now fully embraced my role as his agent.

I drove aimlessly, succumbing to highway hypnosis as I thought—it wasn't as if I had anywhere to go right now anyway—but as dusk fell, I snapped out of it. A quick look around proved that I was in Cathedral Square, almost all the way across Gotham from my former apartment outside of the Narrows and the Joker's place in Crime Alley. I wasn't sure how I'd ended up here.