I'm not sure about one of these, so...
Title: A Beginning and Middle
Author: Pokadotvelvet
Disclaimer: Don’t own them. Don’t sue.
Claim: Harley & Ivy
Characters: Ivy, Harley
Prompt: 45. Missing
Word Count: 529
Summary: One day that knock on your door didn’t come.
Every so often she’d come knocking at your door sporting a couple of black eyes, a busted lip and a bloody nose. You never turned her away. Even long after you’d given up hope that she might she sense, you still let her into your home.
You bathed her eyes, cleaned her cuts, all the while muttering words of comfort that had lost their meaning long ago. You don’t know why you continued to allow her into your home long after your concern turned into sheer annoyance.
Perhaps it just became part of a never-ending ritual, just another plant that needed replanting; a rose bush that needed pruning. You don’t know if you actually saw her as a plant. You can’t really say; self-analysis was never your strongest suit.
And then one day that knock on your door didn’t come when it should have.
You responded, as you always knew you would, all that frustration and exasperation transformed into a ball of rage and grief in the pit of your stomach.
You tore up Gotham looking for him, and when you found him, the parasite denied killing her. Denied killing Harley. Batman believed him though, just as you always dimly suspected he would.
He even produced evidence that proved Joker’s innocence. He even had the audacity to help you look for her.
You didn’t find her. He didn’t find her.
As time passed and your investigation came to a dead end, you, like everyone else around you, could only conclude that somewhere between Joker’s lair and yours, Harley Quinn simply vanished into thin air. She just fell off the face of the earth.
And somehow that was worse than coming across a bloodied corpse.
There was no finality. No closure. The last pages of Harley’s biography had been ripped out - and that was grated the most. From that moment on, there would only be wondering and idle speculation
It’s only on birthdays and holidays that you allow yourself to think of her, allow yourself to wonder what happened to her.
Sometimes you imagine her as a corpse, rotting in some cranny in Gotham you neglected to check. You don’t like that idea, though, it makes you ill to think of it, and so the image never lingers long.
You prefer to see her walking along some road in another county - Australia, maybe. Completely oblivious to all the pain and suffering she’s caused. Your pain and suffering. The backpack she’s carrying is comically large and she’s wearing a silly cork hat to go along with her dopey grin.
And it’s that idea that’s allowed you to change the sheets in the spare bedroom every week for the past three years. The small hope that one day there will be a knock on your door and it’ll be her back from her wanderings. You’ll scream and shout at her; claw and kick at her; maybe tell her she hurt you more than Woodrue ever did.
She’ll look at you like a kicked puppy. And you’ll forgive her on the spot.
You’ll tell her you missed her. And that you love her.
And it won’t be an ending. It’ll be a new beginning.
Title: Ivy II
Author: Pokadotvelvet
Disclaimer: Don’t own them. Don’t sue.
Rating: R
Word Count: 642
Claim: Harley & Ivy
Characters: Harley, Ivy
Prompt: 9. Insanity.
Author’s Note: Set before OYL, during Batman’s absence for Gotham. Probably helps a little if you’ve read #823 of ‘Tec
Summary: If you didn’t know any better you’d think that maybe Ivy didn’t come back from the dead at all
The stranger upstairs isn’t Ivy. She looks like her, she sounds like her - but it isn’t her. Ivy would never do this kind of stuff…. she isn’t capable of it.
If you didn’t know any better you’d think that maybe Ivy didn’t come back from the dead at all. But you do know better, you know that Ivy did come back from the dead and that she’s sick. Sick. Sicker than the Brady Bunch and the Jetsons combined.
If they gave you your glasses and notepad back, then maybe you could do something about it. Something to help. You could hem and haw; mutter something about post traumatic stress disorder, maybe begin treating the patient using EMDR; prescribe some paroxetine - maybe some risperidone too.
But they won’t give you your glasses back. They won’t give you your notepad back. So you can’t do anything at all. There’s nothing you can do for her. You don’t think she wants to listen to a friend - you don’t even think she considers you a friend anymore.
So you sit here, your finger on the volume, trying to drown out the screams coming from the room above, trying not to think too much about long this has been going on…it isn’t working.
She dreamed it up yesterday, chaining a person widespread in the centre of the room, surrounding them with lots of little flytraps…it’s sick and messed up. It makes you sick and messed up too.
There are other plants in room upstairs too. You don’t recognise them. You don’t want to recognise them or know how they feed, the screams are easier to deal with if you don’t, so you won’t.
You didn’t ask what the camera was for when she proudly showed you the room.
Sure, there had been times in the past when she fed people to her plants, but back then you could justify it. A CEO here, a security guard there; it didn’t really matter since it was always incidental to whatever she was planning at the time and it was always over so quickly. It wasn’t this…it was nothing like this.
They didn’t cry for their mommy - or their daddy for that matter. There wasn’t time.
You didn’t feel sick to your stomach either. You didn’t feel like you had to rush up those stairs and put a bullet in the poor bastard’s brain. You didn’t feel as if you wanted to claw out of your skin, just to get the hell away. There was a time when you felt safe with her.
And you don’t. You don’t feel safe with her anymore. You look at her and a shark stares back. There’s no warmth there, just this mask of cold callousness, and every time she speaks to you your skin crawls. Her smile is like poison crackling over ice.
You don’t know why she opened the door to you in the first place. Actually you do, it’s obvious what’s coming - you’re not stupid, despite what others think. The gotcha moment is heading right your way, probably sooner than you think.
So you do the only thing you can: leave.
Slowly, nonchalantly, you switch off the TV; careful not to attract the attention of the plants, you lethargically walk out of the door, out of the garden, out of Ivy’s life. You ignore the bile at the back of your throat as you do so.
You head for home. The Joker. Mistah J.
Because at home, all the begging, pleading, wailing and moaning doesn’t matter. It can’t matter, so it doesn’t matter.
And as you wander through the streets you try not to think of Ivy. You try not to remember a time when she looked at you and not through you. You try not to remember a time when she looked at kids and saw kids - not veal.
So you don’t.
Title: Undoing the Past
Author: Pokadotvelvet
Disclaimer: Don’t own them. Don’t sue
Rating: PG
Claim: Harley & Ivy
Prompt: 43. Regret
Characters: Harley, Ivy
Word count: 130
Summary: Poison Ivy had few regrets in her life.
Poison Ivy had few regrets in her life. She didn’t really believe in them. In her mind at least, mistakes were part and parcel of life and they should be looked on as learning experiences. It was pointless brooding what could and couldn’t be changed, what should and shouldn’t have been done.
The past couldn’t be undone, regretting that fact was a pointless exercise in futility as far as Ivy was concerned.
However, even though Ivy felt this way, she couldn’t help having a couple regrets concerning certain matters.
Certainly, if she got to do it all over again, then she wouldn’t have broken into that music shop - violins made from rare wood or not
And she sure as hell wouldn’t have allowed Harley to take that goddamned banjo either.