Endless Legacy Ch. 46 (DC Comics) (Patreon)

A/N: In which lots of questionable decisions are made.

-x-X-x-

No way. There was just no way. This couldn’t possibly be happening. Barbara wanted to scream. She wanted to get up out of her chair, confront Harley and Ivy, and ask them what the fuck they thought they were doing!

Obviously, she can’t do that. For one, she’s not Barbara Gordon, Oracle, or Batgirl right now… she’s Hope Laville at the moment. Even Harley, who knows her the best, isn’t likely to recognize her, so there’s no reason for Barbara to blow her cover. For two, she doesn’t have nearly as much sway with Poison Ivy as she does Harley, and the sway she DOES have with Harley has to always be taken with a grain of salt.

Mostly because the bitch was crazy. And that wasn’t intended as an insult, or at least not just an insult. It was an immutable fact that Harley Quinn was fucking nutso, for all that her backstory was undeniably tragic.

Going from a bright young psychologist as Doctor Harleen Quinzel to the Joker’s main squeeze after he managed to sink his claws and teeth into her was bad, but her story hadn’t stopped there. Sure, the Joker had created Harley, but to his no doubt considerable chagrin, he’d failed to keep control over his creation.

See, the Joker liked to think HE was the crazy one. In actuality, he was evil first, crazy second. He wanted people to think that everything he did was on a whim, and that he was the epitome of unpredictable… but that wasn’t the case. In truth, as insane as the Joker and his schemes tended to be, he could always be counted on to do something evil, or diabolical, or downright heinous. Evil first. Crazy second.

Harley, on the other hand, was everything the Joker wanted people to believe he was. She was just pure crazy. Broken into a million pieces and put back together by the Joker himself, but he’d fucked up somewhere along the way. He’d failed to instill his particular brand of malevolent darkness in Harley. She wasn’t even crazy first, evil second… she was just plain insane.

It had taken years for this to come out, because for years Harley had been the Joker’s right-hand woman, his girl, his greatest piece of art. Until finally, he’d gone too far in trying to contain her, in trying to keep her at his side.

Barbara could still remember the night they’d first heard that the Joker and Harley Quinn had broken up. Dick had been the one to voice the question on everyone’s minds.

“She can DO that?!”

As it turned out, yes… yes she could. In fact, as they’d all learned over the years, Harley could and would do pretty much anything she wanted. She was the chaos incarnate that Joker wanted to portray himself as, and Gotham itself almost seemed to support her zany and often times inexplicable antics.

However, as chaotic as Harley was, she wasn’t evil. In fact, there had been a few times where she had even teamed up with the Birds of Prey to stop some of Gotham’s real bad guys. It was enough for Barbara to tentatively see Harley as less of a villain and more of a force of nature… when she wasn’t pitying her for being a broken woman who was probably beyond any conventional help.

Unfortunately, Harley wasn’t in one of her ‘ally to the Birds of Prey’ phases right now. Because even though the Joker was currently in Arkham, Harley was still in her OTHER toxic relationship… that being her friendship with Poison Ivy.

Ivy wasn’t as bad as the Joker, but that was like saying a hurricane wasn’t as bad as a tsunami. They were both evil, plain and simple. Even if Ivy had her own tragic backstory, it didn’t change the fact that she was a villain, through and through, and not someone that Barbara would ever even think of working with, even on a temporary basis.

“Wallets, watches, and jewelry on the tables! Yes, that includes the gold and diamond cufflinks, no matter how emasculating you find us calling those jewelry you old fucks!”

As Ivy’s plants keep control of the crowd and Harley flits around the room with a wide, shit-eating grin on her face, Barbara assesses the situation, trying to figure out what to do. Only, before she can do anything, a hand suddenly closes on hers and she blinks, looking over to see Luke smiling at her.

“It’s alright Hope. You’re going to be okay.”

Oh. Wow, that was honestly very sweet. Honestly, if she hadn’t got so caught up in her own thoughts, she probably would have played her role better. She should have definitely been panicking more at the very least, maybe whimpering and even crying like some of the other women in the Ocelot’s dining room were currently doing.

Instead, she’d sat there frozen and incapable of making a move. And Luke had taken that as her fear response and sought to comfort her. She plasters a wavering smile on her face and squeezes his hand back. At the same time though, Harley is closing in on their table, so it was probably time to give up the goods, so to speak.

After she got done divesting herself of the jewelry she’d purchased for the evening, she would be sure to press the panic button she had hidden behind her left ear, signaling for Huntress and Black Canary to swoop in and back her up. Obviously, they were only supposed to be her back up in case Luke somehow proved to be a threat to her, but the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

However, before she can do any of that… Luke surprises her by standing up. Suddenly rising from his seat, the man quickly draws the attention of both Ivy and Harley with his antics, even as Barbara watches on, gobsmacked. What the hell did he think he was doing?!

“Ladies! Ladies, please… there’s no need to frighten anyone. You have us all well in hand already, don’t you think?”

Harley and Ivy exchange an incredulous look that makes it clear they’re feeling the same level of bafflement as Barbara. This is followed by Harley skipping over to their table all the faster, until she’s right in front of the tall doctor, peering up into his eyes.

“Hmm… and who are you supposed to be, exactly?”

Harley’s eyes do flicker over to Barbara for a second, but they barely seem to register her, let alone see through her disguise. That’s good and all, but it in no way salvages the utter disaster that this situation is rapidly evolving into. Especially when Luke doesn’t so much as quail in fright before Harley, despite the crazy bitch’s ability to fold him in two with a single swing of her hammer.

He also doesn’t glare in defiance at her either. The easy grin on his face is likely to be more infuriating to the pair of villainesses however, or at least to Ivy, as he matches Harley’s energy with his own.

“Nobody special. Name’s Luke, I’m the doctor at the newly opened clinic funded by the Luthor Foundation. Look, I know you gals aren’t out to hurt anyone. Surely-!”

Whatever he was going to suggest, Barbara never gets to hear it. The moment that he gave his identity, a change had come over both Harley and Ivy. Harley’s attention on Luke, which had been only half there before, suddenly becomes laser-focused despite the poor woman’s Super ADHD. And Ivy… Poison Ivy immediately begins walking over to them, her plants keeping everyone else from trying anything foolish.

Mid-sentence, Luke is interrupted by Ivy winding an arm around his neck and pulling him into one of her signature kisses. Barbara chokes on her own spit, hoping against hope that Ivy is using the mind-controlling toxins on her lips tonight, and not the instantly fatal kind.

Fortunately, when she pulls back, Luke doesn’t immediately keel over dead. He also doesn’t say anything though, suddenly swaying in place with a dazed look on his face.

“It seems we have a volunteer to carry our bags and make sure the police don’t make any… mistakes when we leave. Go ahead and collect the payday, Luke.”

Mindlessly, the doctor proceeds to do as he’s bid by Ivy. The plants form a large basket for him to carry, and he fills it up with all of the valuables from the Ocelot’s other patrons. No one can even be that mad at him as he does so, most of them just have pitying looks on their faces. That or relief that they weren’t the ones singled out by Ivy or Harley instead.

Barbara sits frozen at her table in disbelief at Luke’s stupidity, as he mechanically walks over to Harley and Ivy waiting at the hole in the wall they’d made. Harley cackles and loops her arm in one of Luke’s as if he’s escorting her somewhere, thrusting her hammer up into the air in victory.

“Booze money secured!”

And then… they’re gone. No one moves initially, because the plants are still very much active. But then they retract back into their vases or fall limp where they extended, and everyone takes that as their cue to begin to freak out.

As Pandemonium ensues, Barbara is finally shaken out of her stupor by the sheer cacophony of noise… and curses to herself as she FINALLY reaches behind her ear and hits the hidden panic button there. She should have hit it earlier, but she’d just been so shocked by the sheer idiocy Luke had displayed that she hadn’t been able to do much of anything.

… Hopefully, it wouldn’t cost the young man his life…

-x-X-x-

Lucien found himself in a bit of a conundrum. It had always been his plan to try and convince Ivy and Harley to focus on him instead of anyone else in the room. This wasn’t out of some vaunted sense of heroic spirit or anything like that, however. Rather, Lucien had figured he might be able to nab the blueprints of their biology somehow.

There was always the risk that they would try (and fail) to kill him outright, but he didn’t think they would, just based on what he knew of them. They weren’t there to send a message or to kill a bunch of rich folk, they were just there to rob them. So Lucien figured it would probably be okay to catch their attention and then open a dialogue afterwards, since he figured he might be able to help both women out with his powers.

His decision to act was also helped by the reaction his date had to their presence. She barely reacted at all, except to stare with a sort of wide-eyed, horrified fascination as everything proceeded. When he touched her hand and pretended to be trying to comfort her, the read he’d got from her biology was that of controlled panic. This situation wasn’t her doing, but she also wasn’t nearly as afraid as she should have been.

If he wasn’t walking into a trap set by ‘Hope’ by drawing Ivy and Harley’s attention, then he figured it would probably work out for the best all the same.

There was just one small problem with all of that, in the end.

“Can’t believe how easy this gig was! He literally delivered himself to us on a silver platter, bahaha!”

“Heh, indeed. The bravado and arrogance of men knows no bounds.”

“Half a million for each of us… this is the easiest payday of my life!”

“… So long as Black Mask actually pays up, of course. Don’t let your guard down, Harley. You and I both know he’ll stab us in the back if he senses even a hint of weakness.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t gotta nag me, Ivy, I know, I know! I ain’t about to get all chummy with Black Mask of all fuckers. Let him try something, I’ll happily put him in the ground!”

… Yeah. They’re currently traveling through Gotham’s extensive, apparently expansive sewer system on a plant creation made by Ivy that easily holds them all. Lucien isn’t restrained or anything, but that’s because they think Ivy’s kiss has him under her hypnotic control. It doesn’t, of course. The toxins in Ivy’s body don’t work on him, for obvious reasons.

That said, he feels like he has a bit of egg on his face. Apparently, while he hadn’t walked into a trap set by the fake Hope Laville, he HAD walked face first into another trap entirely. It would seem that the robbery was just a cover, a complete façade. In actuality, their real target all along… was him.

Lucien should have known, but how could he ever have guessed? Sure, whoever Hope was, she was certainly interested in him to the point of inviting him to dinner, but beyond that, how had he garnered the interest of Gotham’s Underworld quite so fast?

As they continue along, Lucien wracks his brain for everything he knows about Black Mask. The man is a Gotham Crime Lord with a fixation on masks and a reputation for being ruthless and sadistic.

… And that’s about it. Yeah, look Lucien had never lived in Gotham in his previous life, and while he knew about certain individuals more than others, Black Mask hadn’t been one he paid much attention to. He knew OF the man and had heard of some of his deeds, but didn’t know much beyond that.

In the end though, knowing more about Black Mask probably wouldn’t have influenced the decision Lucien now had to make one way or another. It wasn’t really about Black Mask in the end… it was about who precisely he wanted to expose his true nature to… if anything at all.

His first option was to break out of Ivy and Harley’s grasp right here and now and knock the two women unconscious before they could even react. They’d definitely know he escaped them though, and they would almost certainly come after him later. There wasn't much point in blocking their memories of him, not when everyone had seen him go with them in the first place.

His second option was to let them deliver him to Black Mask and then once they were gone, break free THERE. He could then block out those memories of anything he had to do, though that would only be a half-measure at best. Still, it would mean only Ivy and Harley would know he'd done something to get free of Black Mask, since they would be the only ones to know they'd taken him to the Crime Lord in the first place.

Final option was to hold off entirely. Blackfire would almost certainly be rescuing him by the end of the night if he didn’t rescue himself, so he could allow Harley and Ivy to deliver him to Black Mask, then see what Black Mask wanted with him, and all the while wait for Blackfire to swoop in and bust up the joint getting him back.

It would expose her as his superpowered bodyguard and let everyone in Gotham know that the new clinic was protected by a metahuman mercenary, while keeping his cover intact.

Regardless of what he chose though, sacrifices were going to be made one way or another. Quite the conundrum, to be sure.