Tenderness

The twinge. Like a germ that's been planted inside of him and feeding, so foreign it could be death. No, he's more familiar with death.

He resists that tug, its odd warmth and softness. He doesn't know its name and that gives it power.

Rage is like blindness, spotting across his eyes.

Emotion so ferocious it pours itself out in the dull thunk of knuckles against bone.

Over. And over. Again.

It stirs, shifts and flaps somewhere deep and dark inside of him. Melts and blossoms outwards like blood billows in water. Brilliant and viscous.

It niggles for his attention.

She drives him crazy. And that's why she drives him crazy. And it won't be smothered.

So instead he smothers her. Fist in straw blonde hair, face first into brick wall, the pointed toe of a brilliant black shoe rammed directly into a soft tummy.

He pounds out his rage onto her body, branding her with it so that she will see and he will see and neither of them will ever forget.

He'll never forgive her for this. Not for this.

How far she has brought him down, not all the way – could never be all the way – but enough for it to burn, to sting, deep inside. To hiss and be noticed, like hunger savagely wrests need from want, and consumes.

She will never consume him.

She won't drag him down, not all the way back down, instead he'll lift her up, send her hurtling beyond with him, spinning wildly outside of orbit. He'll take her there.

But if he takes her there then she's won, again, she's won.

Either way it's no longer just Him and him. It's them. And we. And Us.

No longer does he echo back against himself, alone and solitary. Now she consumes the space and his isolation is muffled.

It drives him forward and beneath him, beneath his fists and beneath his feet she is making a high, hissing sound that's breaking but he drives on.

Blood spattering up against his face, tangy on his tongue, cream skin blistering red and black beneath his blows. The blink of broken blue eyes split into adoration and fear.

In these moments she is most perfect and it stirs again, too sweet for him to stomach. He wants to suck her lips between his and drink her down.

This is not his vengeance.

This is just his fury.

Later when he taunts, when he mocks, when he refuses to kiss and to caress, when he turns his back and ignores her, when he laughs in her face and kicks her out…

… when her tears fall, hot and wet, and her heart breaks in a thousand new ways, he will have his revenge.

And she will never know. Because he will never tell.

She may have his heart. Stirred it. Woken it. Made it bloom, an ugly blood-black nightshade painfully twitching in the hollow of his chest.

But she'll never stop paying for it.

oooo

Author's note: Yes, a slightly more experimental style from your loving Tortugan Whore. Are we all on the same page here? Did I make myself clear, dears?

I imagine a part of why Joker lashes out at Harley (apart from being a sociopathic madman who reacts to things exactly as his first instinct tell him to) is because she stirs up entirely new feelings of affection and tenderness. They're foreign to him, he doesn't understand them and he doesn't know how to relate to them, so they confuse and frustrate him. What he does know, however, is that Harley is the cause of them. Too bad for Harley.