Familiar Faces
Fanfiction
Title: Familiar Faces (tentative title)
Author: Avelera
Universe: Nolanverse, post-film AU
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Harvey, Joker, Harvey/Rachel (more to come, don't want to spoil it)
Word Count: 2,019
Warnings: Spoilers for The Dark Knight
Summary: A woman claiming to be Rachel appears before Two-Face, sending him into a spiral of self-doubt. Has she really returned from the dead, or is this just another of the Joker's tricks? Then again, why can't it be both?
Author Note: Inspiration provided by Crossfade’s song “Colors.” I’m not really sure where this story came from, but I like it. I hope you all like it too, this is my first serious attempt at writing the Joker and I think I did passably well.
I’m trying to be a little experimental here, in an attempt to avoid my usual meandering descriptions that lead up to the action. Everything in this chapter is very “in medias res.” I’m worried that it makes the drama a little too clipped. I guess I’m looking for a beta, if anyone’s interested. I’d very much like to see this story turn into a multi-chapter fic, but I’m just not really sure where it’s going yet. I can only promise there will be no OCs ;)
----
Perhaps the fire had ruined the senses of the left side of his face, but even so, he could never understand how she had snuck up on him. Soundless. The whimpers of his gagged victim were the only noise that could have masked her approach.
“Harvey, what are you doing?” Rachel said, her voice trembling.
Two-Face whipped around his heart freezing dropping to his feet. He looked back at the bound prisoner, the petty mobster’s eyes lolling like a rabid animals. Looked down to the gun in his, the finger resting on the trigger. “Rachel?”
“Harvey, put the gun down,” she began to walk towards him, her palms open and held out before her. “You don’t want to do this.”
“I--” he looked down to the gun in his hand, feeling its solid heft, the cold reality of the steel barrel. Could this be a dream? But he could feel the metal against his hand, the subtle throbbing of the old burn scars on his face. Earlier he had smelt the acrid terror of piss and sweat on the scum behind him. That could only mean….
He extended his arm, leveling the nozzle of the gun straight at Rachel (no, not Rachel, impossible), “Whoever you are, I think you should back off.”
Her arms fell as her face went impossibly white, “Harvey, no,” she whispered.
His heart twisted and his finger tightened on the trigger. Her voice, the same cry she had uttered when he had last heard her voice, in that room so long ago where had had listened to her die.
“Lady, I think you have the wrong man. Harvey Dent is dead. And so,” he took a step forward, still holding the gun to her head, “is Rachel Dawes. It would be in your best interest to leave here and forget you saw anything.”
“Harvey…”
“STOP,” he roared, “saying that name!”
“But it’s me! Please, you have to believe m- look out!”
Two-Face turned just as stars exploded across his vision and agony seared the ruined side of his face. He collapsed to a knee, grasping at his head as his vision swam, the gun forgotten in his hand. As the world swam back into focus he had only a second to see the thug on his feet, chair held aloft like a club just as he brought it down again, plunging Two Face into darkness.
The gun went off. A scream rang out.
Then nothing.
---
He awoke to a throbbing head and the sound of cloth rustling. Opening his eyelids despite the jackhammer assault on his brain, he turned his head to see a familiar figure in a purple suit crouched beside a shapeless form that lay prone on the concrete.
“’Morning, Har-vey,” said the Joker, wiping the blade of knife clean against a piece of cloth that resolved itself into the torn and bloody shirt of Harvey’s victim, late victim rather. The Joker had cut his signature grin across the man’s face and it seemed he had left at least enough other cuts to write an actual signature.
“He was your man,” Two-Face said, slurring through the haze in his head.
Joker glanced over his shoulder, cocking his head and squinting for a closer look, “Was he?” with a shrug he turned back to Two-Face.
Unsurprised, Two-Face let his head fall back down the pavement, closing his eyes against the mounting light of pre-dawn that grayed the sky and sent lightning through his skull. He could hardly think, unable to piece together what had left him splayed on the ground. Nothing except…
“Rachel,” he grunted with the effort of sitting upright. Something in the tone of his voice drew the Joker’s attention, and he watched as Harvey struggled to his feet, tongue darting in and around his lips like a snake. He hardly moved as Harvey flew at him, grabbing him by the vest and dragging him forward, “What did you do to her?”
Joker’s lips quirked and he glanced around as if anything was more interesting than the deformed man screaming in his face. “Who?”
“Rachel! She was here, what did you do to her?” said Harvey.
Plucking at the clenched fists on his lapel as if they were some distasteful piece of dirt clinging to his coat, Two Face quickly took the hint and removed his hands from the Joker, who cricked his neck to the side and then met Harvey’s gaze with his own, “I, uh, hate to break it to you, Harv, but there wasn’-t anyone here but you and, uh,” he gestured with his knife to the crumpled corpse, “him.” His dark eyes glinted with something, perhaps amusement. “Maybe you get that checked out. Wouldn’t want you getting any crazier than you are now,” he said with a high-pitch lilt ending with a giggle that spurted out from between his scarred lips.
With a grunt of frustration and disgust, Two-Face spared one last glance for the Joker and his grisly plaything before stalking off the dilapidated roof, the Joker’s giggles ringing in his ear and the burn of shame at having fallen for what must have surely been on of the clown’s tricks on the good half of his face.
The Joker watched him go. Once out of an earshot he sidled passed the bleeding corpse, humming madly to himself as he approached a tumbledown tower of wooden crates that lay in the shadows at the corner of the roof. As the sound of his footsteps grew louder, something whimpered, drumming its feet against the wall in a renewed effort to escape.
“Oh, sh-sh-sh-shhhh. He’s gone now,” said the Joker, grabbing his quarry by the throat, keeping a firm grip despite its struggles, “Lovely performance, by the way, I almost believed you were her. But we both know that’s not true, don’t we.” Throwing the woman over his shoulder he staggered for a moment under the weight before righting himself and roughly adjusting the weight, “Not anymore.”
----
Two-Face poured the remains of a bottle of scotch into a crystal glass and flung himself into the leather armchair where he had found Falcone’s right-hand man not a week ago. The man himself was long dead, but the name Two-Face was well known enough now that there wouldn’t be vengeance for some time.
It had been a long time since he had thought of himself by that old name. Harvey Dent, a dead man’s name.
Ask anyone in Gotham.
The harsh liquid burned down his throat, creating a pool of heat in his stomach. Traces trickled through the hole in the side of his mouth, but he ignored them, waiting for the alcoholic haze to descend and numb the persistent ache in head and sharp pain in his heart.
He drew the Liberty-head coin from his breast pocket, and enjoyed the familiar sensation of the cool metal running between his fingers, soothing his jangled nerves as much as the alcohol soon would. The familiar compulsion pulled at him, heads or tails.
He studied the blackened face. He had seen the carnage of the ruins, the scars of the explosion scratched deep into the walls. No one could have survived such a horrific conflagration.
Flipping the coin to the other side, he regarded the delicate face of Liberty etched in silver. On the other hand, he had seen her, heard her voice. Surely the months that had passed since she died had not dimmed his memories. It was impossible, but when the other explanations were even more implausible, there could be the only solution.
Heads, she had somehow survived the explosion and lived in Gotham for the past six months, without a word to him or Bruce about her survival, only to appear on a rooftop just in time to stop him from shooting a two-bit criminal.
Tails, it was a trick, probably by the Joker. Why and how would have to wait.
He positioned the coin onto the edge of his index finger and touching his thumb to the underside, prepared to send it whirling into the air. Let chance decide, fifty-fifty, reality or trick. Frankly, he was probably giving the former more credit than was due.
But…
He hesitated.
If it was heads, if it really was her, then what?
Two-Face ran his gaze around the room, the sumptuous furniture and stocked kitchen. Spoils of war, of his personal crusade to take out the mob from the inside out, chance alone deciding who escaped his justice. Or so he told himself. This wasn’t the clean, legal vengeance from his days as the DA. When the mob hid, he did what it whatever it took to bring the cockroaches out into daylight. Murder was only the first step.
He slipped the coin back into his pocket. If this was a trick, chance would play no part in his vengeance. If it wasn’t…
He closed his eye, placing the good side of his face into his hand.
If she’s alive…
---
The subsequent kick to her stomach drove vomit to her lips, flecked with blood.
“Ha, ha, hee, haa-Harley, how many times are we going to have to do this?” he said, almost sweetly, as he crouched down to her level.
“The door was open,” she said, hating herself for trying to justify it, for trying to think of anything she could say that would prevent the next round of violence.
He glanced away, running his tongue around his ruined, red-stained lips. She had no time to react as he plunged his hand into the thick of her hair, dragging her up by the scruff of the neck like a day-old kitten. “You’re…not very bright, are you? I knew what you would do, and then you did it. Very disappointing. I thought, by now, you’d have rea-lized.”
The pause lengthened and she could feel the roots of her hair beginning to give way, though he gave no sign of relenting. He was waiting for something, “Realized what?”
“Funny you should ask. See, I’m an old-fashioned kinda guy. When something is in,” he gestured, “my house, it’s my property. Which makes you…”
“Property,” she finished. Her head struck the ground as he released her.
“It can learn!” he giggled but the sound was distant and fuzzy, like a badly tuned radio as her mind skittered in and out of consciousness. In an instant, he was back at her side and through the nausea that quaked her body; she felt an instinctive shudder of terror. “Now Harley, I’m willing to forge-t this little…episode, if you promise it won’t happen again. See, I’m an understanding kind of guy, aren’t I?” a frown flickered across his painted features at her silence. Grabbing her face in his leather-clad fingers, he shook her head forward and backward, sending black stars across her vision, “Thought so.”
He abandoned her there on the ground and closed the door behind him, plunging the cell back into its usual darkness.
Dragging herself forward despite her body’s wails of agony, she managed to make it to the bed before her strength gave out. Pulling herself onto the cot, she went over the little rituals that had so far kept her sane in this place. She wiped bile and blood from her lips and spit the sick from her mouth over the side. For once she was thankful at the shortness of her hair, as dragging her fingers through it was much easier.
In the dark, no one could see her attempt this little act of normalcy, making herself presentable to a public that would never see her again, at least not until the Joker had broken her into little pieces and reformed her into something as twisted and maniacal as him. But they soothed her and allowed her mind, constantly in motion, to overcome the nausea and ignore the blow to her pride that had come from trying to mollify that monster.
After all, pride was all she really had left.
“My name is not Harley,” she growled to the prison door. Closing her eyes, she let her mind drift back to the events of that evening, and allowed the first tears to leak from her eyes.
"Harvey..."
Title: Familiar Faces (tentative title)
Author: Avelera
Universe: Nolanverse, post-film AU
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Harvey, Joker, Harvey/Rachel (more to come, don't want to spoil it)
Word Count: 2,019
Warnings: Spoilers for The Dark Knight
Summary: A woman claiming to be Rachel appears before Two-Face, sending him into a spiral of self-doubt. Has she really returned from the dead, or is this just another of the Joker's tricks? Then again, why can't it be both?
Author Note: Inspiration provided by Crossfade’s song “Colors.” I’m not really sure where this story came from, but I like it. I hope you all like it too, this is my first serious attempt at writing the Joker and I think I did passably well.
I’m trying to be a little experimental here, in an attempt to avoid my usual meandering descriptions that lead up to the action. Everything in this chapter is very “in medias res.” I’m worried that it makes the drama a little too clipped. I guess I’m looking for a beta, if anyone’s interested. I’d very much like to see this story turn into a multi-chapter fic, but I’m just not really sure where it’s going yet. I can only promise there will be no OCs ;)
----
Perhaps the fire had ruined the senses of the left side of his face, but even so, he could never understand how she had snuck up on him. Soundless. The whimpers of his gagged victim were the only noise that could have masked her approach.
“Harvey, what are you doing?” Rachel said, her voice trembling.
Two-Face whipped around his heart freezing dropping to his feet. He looked back at the bound prisoner, the petty mobster’s eyes lolling like a rabid animals. Looked down to the gun in his, the finger resting on the trigger. “Rachel?”
“Harvey, put the gun down,” she began to walk towards him, her palms open and held out before her. “You don’t want to do this.”
“I--” he looked down to the gun in his hand, feeling its solid heft, the cold reality of the steel barrel. Could this be a dream? But he could feel the metal against his hand, the subtle throbbing of the old burn scars on his face. Earlier he had smelt the acrid terror of piss and sweat on the scum behind him. That could only mean….
He extended his arm, leveling the nozzle of the gun straight at Rachel (no, not Rachel, impossible), “Whoever you are, I think you should back off.”
Her arms fell as her face went impossibly white, “Harvey, no,” she whispered.
His heart twisted and his finger tightened on the trigger. Her voice, the same cry she had uttered when he had last heard her voice, in that room so long ago where had had listened to her die.
“Lady, I think you have the wrong man. Harvey Dent is dead. And so,” he took a step forward, still holding the gun to her head, “is Rachel Dawes. It would be in your best interest to leave here and forget you saw anything.”
“Harvey…”
“STOP,” he roared, “saying that name!”
“But it’s me! Please, you have to believe m- look out!”
Two-Face turned just as stars exploded across his vision and agony seared the ruined side of his face. He collapsed to a knee, grasping at his head as his vision swam, the gun forgotten in his hand. As the world swam back into focus he had only a second to see the thug on his feet, chair held aloft like a club just as he brought it down again, plunging Two Face into darkness.
The gun went off. A scream rang out.
Then nothing.
---
He awoke to a throbbing head and the sound of cloth rustling. Opening his eyelids despite the jackhammer assault on his brain, he turned his head to see a familiar figure in a purple suit crouched beside a shapeless form that lay prone on the concrete.
“’Morning, Har-vey,” said the Joker, wiping the blade of knife clean against a piece of cloth that resolved itself into the torn and bloody shirt of Harvey’s victim, late victim rather. The Joker had cut his signature grin across the man’s face and it seemed he had left at least enough other cuts to write an actual signature.
“He was your man,” Two-Face said, slurring through the haze in his head.
Joker glanced over his shoulder, cocking his head and squinting for a closer look, “Was he?” with a shrug he turned back to Two-Face.
Unsurprised, Two-Face let his head fall back down the pavement, closing his eyes against the mounting light of pre-dawn that grayed the sky and sent lightning through his skull. He could hardly think, unable to piece together what had left him splayed on the ground. Nothing except…
“Rachel,” he grunted with the effort of sitting upright. Something in the tone of his voice drew the Joker’s attention, and he watched as Harvey struggled to his feet, tongue darting in and around his lips like a snake. He hardly moved as Harvey flew at him, grabbing him by the vest and dragging him forward, “What did you do to her?”
Joker’s lips quirked and he glanced around as if anything was more interesting than the deformed man screaming in his face. “Who?”
“Rachel! She was here, what did you do to her?” said Harvey.
Plucking at the clenched fists on his lapel as if they were some distasteful piece of dirt clinging to his coat, Two Face quickly took the hint and removed his hands from the Joker, who cricked his neck to the side and then met Harvey’s gaze with his own, “I, uh, hate to break it to you, Harv, but there wasn’-t anyone here but you and, uh,” he gestured with his knife to the crumpled corpse, “him.” His dark eyes glinted with something, perhaps amusement. “Maybe you get that checked out. Wouldn’t want you getting any crazier than you are now,” he said with a high-pitch lilt ending with a giggle that spurted out from between his scarred lips.
With a grunt of frustration and disgust, Two-Face spared one last glance for the Joker and his grisly plaything before stalking off the dilapidated roof, the Joker’s giggles ringing in his ear and the burn of shame at having fallen for what must have surely been on of the clown’s tricks on the good half of his face.
The Joker watched him go. Once out of an earshot he sidled passed the bleeding corpse, humming madly to himself as he approached a tumbledown tower of wooden crates that lay in the shadows at the corner of the roof. As the sound of his footsteps grew louder, something whimpered, drumming its feet against the wall in a renewed effort to escape.
“Oh, sh-sh-sh-shhhh. He’s gone now,” said the Joker, grabbing his quarry by the throat, keeping a firm grip despite its struggles, “Lovely performance, by the way, I almost believed you were her. But we both know that’s not true, don’t we.” Throwing the woman over his shoulder he staggered for a moment under the weight before righting himself and roughly adjusting the weight, “Not anymore.”
----
Two-Face poured the remains of a bottle of scotch into a crystal glass and flung himself into the leather armchair where he had found Falcone’s right-hand man not a week ago. The man himself was long dead, but the name Two-Face was well known enough now that there wouldn’t be vengeance for some time.
It had been a long time since he had thought of himself by that old name. Harvey Dent, a dead man’s name.
Ask anyone in Gotham.
The harsh liquid burned down his throat, creating a pool of heat in his stomach. Traces trickled through the hole in the side of his mouth, but he ignored them, waiting for the alcoholic haze to descend and numb the persistent ache in head and sharp pain in his heart.
He drew the Liberty-head coin from his breast pocket, and enjoyed the familiar sensation of the cool metal running between his fingers, soothing his jangled nerves as much as the alcohol soon would. The familiar compulsion pulled at him, heads or tails.
He studied the blackened face. He had seen the carnage of the ruins, the scars of the explosion scratched deep into the walls. No one could have survived such a horrific conflagration.
Flipping the coin to the other side, he regarded the delicate face of Liberty etched in silver. On the other hand, he had seen her, heard her voice. Surely the months that had passed since she died had not dimmed his memories. It was impossible, but when the other explanations were even more implausible, there could be the only solution.
Heads, she had somehow survived the explosion and lived in Gotham for the past six months, without a word to him or Bruce about her survival, only to appear on a rooftop just in time to stop him from shooting a two-bit criminal.
Tails, it was a trick, probably by the Joker. Why and how would have to wait.
He positioned the coin onto the edge of his index finger and touching his thumb to the underside, prepared to send it whirling into the air. Let chance decide, fifty-fifty, reality or trick. Frankly, he was probably giving the former more credit than was due.
But…
He hesitated.
If it was heads, if it really was her, then what?
Two-Face ran his gaze around the room, the sumptuous furniture and stocked kitchen. Spoils of war, of his personal crusade to take out the mob from the inside out, chance alone deciding who escaped his justice. Or so he told himself. This wasn’t the clean, legal vengeance from his days as the DA. When the mob hid, he did what it whatever it took to bring the cockroaches out into daylight. Murder was only the first step.
He slipped the coin back into his pocket. If this was a trick, chance would play no part in his vengeance. If it wasn’t…
He closed his eye, placing the good side of his face into his hand.
If she’s alive…
---
The subsequent kick to her stomach drove vomit to her lips, flecked with blood.
“Ha, ha, hee, haa-Harley, how many times are we going to have to do this?” he said, almost sweetly, as he crouched down to her level.
“The door was open,” she said, hating herself for trying to justify it, for trying to think of anything she could say that would prevent the next round of violence.
He glanced away, running his tongue around his ruined, red-stained lips. She had no time to react as he plunged his hand into the thick of her hair, dragging her up by the scruff of the neck like a day-old kitten. “You’re…not very bright, are you? I knew what you would do, and then you did it. Very disappointing. I thought, by now, you’d have rea-lized.”
The pause lengthened and she could feel the roots of her hair beginning to give way, though he gave no sign of relenting. He was waiting for something, “Realized what?”
“Funny you should ask. See, I’m an old-fashioned kinda guy. When something is in,” he gestured, “my house, it’s my property. Which makes you…”
“Property,” she finished. Her head struck the ground as he released her.
“It can learn!” he giggled but the sound was distant and fuzzy, like a badly tuned radio as her mind skittered in and out of consciousness. In an instant, he was back at her side and through the nausea that quaked her body; she felt an instinctive shudder of terror. “Now Harley, I’m willing to forge-t this little…episode, if you promise it won’t happen again. See, I’m an understanding kind of guy, aren’t I?” a frown flickered across his painted features at her silence. Grabbing her face in his leather-clad fingers, he shook her head forward and backward, sending black stars across her vision, “Thought so.”
He abandoned her there on the ground and closed the door behind him, plunging the cell back into its usual darkness.
Dragging herself forward despite her body’s wails of agony, she managed to make it to the bed before her strength gave out. Pulling herself onto the cot, she went over the little rituals that had so far kept her sane in this place. She wiped bile and blood from her lips and spit the sick from her mouth over the side. For once she was thankful at the shortness of her hair, as dragging her fingers through it was much easier.
In the dark, no one could see her attempt this little act of normalcy, making herself presentable to a public that would never see her again, at least not until the Joker had broken her into little pieces and reformed her into something as twisted and maniacal as him. But they soothed her and allowed her mind, constantly in motion, to overcome the nausea and ignore the blow to her pride that had come from trying to mollify that monster.
After all, pride was all she really had left.
“My name is not Harley,” she growled to the prison door. Closing her eyes, she let her mind drift back to the events of that evening, and allowed the first tears to leak from her eyes.
"Harvey..."