Chapter Text
Life was once just fine with Harley.
She had a bunch of gigs handed to her at a time, toured with her band that Gotham Magazine declared had “the most potential of the year,” and had enough groupies at after parties that she didn’t even need to worry about the supply of uppers and downers. And, best of all, she had Jack Napier. Like, had him.
After every show, he was there. He was either waiting in his dark green pick-up truck in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette inside the venue, or scrolling on Instagram Reels backstage. Then, when Harley got off stage, he'd open his arms and stretch his lips so widely, flashing his picture-perfect smile—but he’d quickly push her off after her stage sweat began sticking to him.
To Harley, that was enough. That was rock and roll: a hot boyfriend years older than her who was just as famous as she was, teared vocal chords ripping apart more and more with each gig, getting high on whichever drugs she wanted at whatever times she wanted. Everything just seemed to click into place onstage, like it would all be just fine, and those grueling rushes of anxiety and uncertainty only meant that she was alive. Her career, for the first time in her life, was turning up! She had everything she needed, got all the praise she wanted, and now all there was to do was live comfortably with her boyfriend and the success.
Of course, that turned out to be far from reality. It happened a lot faster than she thought, too; her band hadn't even finished touring by the time she was at a hotel rooftop party throwing chairs off the balcony and shoving people into the pool.
Harley kind of wished the end of her career was cooler and more complex than it really was, like how Barbara Ann Minerva was cancelled for owning a wild tiger as a pet; but really, everything happened and ended so quickly that by the time she came to her senses, her career was already in the process of cremation.
She caught Jack cheating at an afterparty to one of her concerts, with him stuck in a janitor’s closet two doors down from where the bathrooms were. The girl was younger than Harley, maybe by three or four years, and probably from one of the colleges nearby the venue.
It wasn’t the first time Harley knew of Jack’s infidelity. The first three times, she was able to convince herself it was all in the spirit of rock and roll—yet this time, Harley immediately screamed for the girl to “get the fuck out,” leaving herself alone with Jack once the girl scurried and nearly tripped on her own foot on the way out.
His shirt lazily slipped back on him sometime during all of Harley’s pandemonium. He stared up at Harley from a stray stool in the closet like a guilty dog, frowning, but not opening his mouth to say a word.
“So?” Harley probed for an explanation, though she didn't know what she would do with it, and crossed her arms. She was already drunk enough that her world was spinning; she wasn't really capable of a logical argument about this right now. Usually, when this happened, she'd sleep it off and Jack would come knocking on her hotel door with flowers in his hands, asking for a second chance. Or a third chance. Or fourth—that part didn't matter.
Jack just shrugged his shoulders limply. “My bad.”
”Is that all you have to say?”
”What do you want me to say?”
By this point, her head and heart burned out of sheer anger, but the amphetamines she had just taken proved to be a great candidate responsible for it as well. “Well—explain yourself,” she told him. It wasn't like this was the first time, anyway.
”Uh…” his voice trailed off, eyes petering about the dark closet as if there were any convictions hidden for him in the mold-stained corners of the walls. “I was drunk. I was dissociating. I was…baby, I have BPD and that was my alter ego."
Harley couldn't tell if he was being serious, so she kept her mouth shut for now.
Jack stood up from where he sat, and only then did the tightness of the closet sink into Harley. She never considered herself claustrophobic before, but the full volume of his body that consumed the space between them incited enough fear for shivers to run down her spine.
"You're just exaggerating things," he said. "Making all this a bigger deal than it is. I mean, we talked about this. I need—we need to live on the edge. ‘Cause we're rockstars and we’re famous and everyone doubted us. It's different. We're not a suburban married couple, Harl," he told her, smiling at his own joke.
"But you’re not the rockstar. I am," Harley pointed out.
Which was true. Jack stuck around with the band a lot, but he never made any real contributions to it—certainly not enough to call him a “rockstar” in any case. Plus, Jack was famous in his own way; he had nearly a million followers on social media for posting videos of his jawline to Lana Del Rey songs.
Jack didn’t seem to agree with this though: his eyes rolled out so far that Harley feared they’d bulge out of their sockets. “Oh my god,” he said. “Everything’s so serious with you. Where’s the humor in that? Where's the old gal I fell in love with?—where's her sparkle?"
“Babe,” she said, interrupting whatever spiel he was about to begin, “you said that last time was the last time.” And the second time. And the first time, too, but she didn’t say those parts aloud.
”Did I? I did?”
”Yeah. You said it right to my face, you said you promised. Then you played me that Leonard Cohen song on guitar? Remember?” Harley said, hoping it would ring a bell.
Jack waited a few seconds in thought before groaning and shaking his head, ”I don’t think I said that.”
”Well, you did.”
“Well, I didn’t. I don’t even like Leonard Cohen! I always thought Bob Dylan was streets ahead."
”So, what? Now you're saying I'm lying?"
“I didn't say that, but maybe, yeah. Maybe it's 'cause you’re fucking—you’re insecure. And that’s what this is. You’re just being dramatic, that’s it. Can’t take a fucking joke.”
Harley didn’t take years of college-level psych for nothing: “Are you trying to gaslight me?” she asked, almost soberly, through her drunken stupor.
“No! There it is again—the drama, the insecurity. I should've known you'd do this."
Harley felt as though every moment in the closet suffocated her like a medical cast on the neck that, instead of healing, drove knives into each artery it could while avoiding the fatal ones: brutal, slow, painful, and totally humiliating! She needed air, or perhaps just for Jack to get out of her sight.
”I’m leaving," she declared at once, ending this conversation at least for tonight. Her hand was already on the doorknob behind her, but her wrist was overtaken by the chillingly cold mass of Jack’s hand.
”You can’t be serious,” he said. “You’re not going to leave.”
Harley’s eyes widened, heart quickening its pace. The heat of her adrenaline had to have worn off by then, otherwise the unwarranted chill that slinked down every nerve and tightened her chest like a snake coiling around its prey wouldn’t have shaken her as much as it did. She forgot who she was facing.
”I need air,” she said. But Jack’s glower didn’t falter in the slightest, and she didn’t take one step from where she stood in that closet.
“Stop it, Harley. We can just talk, like we always do.”
The irony of that statement gave enough certainty to Harley to have her twisting on the knob and leaving despite Jack’s hand. With the amount of times Jack laid his hands on her, the words "talk” and “we always do” in the same sentence made Harley nauseous enough of his hypocrisy and insincerity to vomit.
Now, with her boots clicking mutely on the carpeted hotel floor and with tears threatening to smudge her mascara, all she could think of was to get very, very far away from her boyfriend. Then, it didn’t necessarily strike her yet that their relationship would be “over” (as it would be vehemently proclaimed later that night), but rather all it seemed to be was just another one of their lovers’ quarrels. Which happened fairly often.
Jack and Harley’s relationship wasn’t perfect, of course, as was nothing in the world. But when they fought with blowups big or small, Jack always would have made some kind of grand gesture that let Harley know that he cared, or he didn’t mean it, or anything that let Harley know their love was so powerful and all-consuming that it felt like they were at the center of the universe—and every time, it really did feel like they were.
That was what this was to Harley. Or at least what it felt like. Harley was smart enough to know when Jack fucked up and which logical fallacies he tried to deploy, but something in her always wanted to let go of all of it—all of that stupid logic—and keep loving him. Because love was all she had. It was every lesson she learned from fairy tales, every dream she had as a teenager, every word she sang in her songs. Love was in the center of her universe, and if they broke that orbit, then…
Harley knew everything would go terribly wrong.
But for now, this is what they did: fighting in closets, running away from said fight in hotel hallways, and Harley screaming to Jack, “Don’t follow me” as he continued following her while saying, “I’ll do what I want.”
“Where are you even going?” he asked her, struggling to keep pace.
“Away from you!”
”You’re going to the roof,” Jack observed after one last corner turn. Their room was on this floor, and yet Harley was running off toward the direction of the elevator. She preferred to avoid her problems with the help of drugs and martinis at a rooftop party, instead of doing it alone in an above-average hotel room with all expenses already paid for by her manager; this did not seem to surprise Jack at all.
”Yeah, and you’re not. I said stop following me.”
”Don’t go to the roof, you look like a fuckin’ mess. Fix yourself first."
“Shut up. Go away,” she said, putting both hands up and spreading her fingers out wide. Once she caught sight of the elevator, she rushed inside of it and tried her hardest to push the button fast enough so that it’d close in Jack’s face, but he managed to slink his way in at the last second. Slimy douchebag.
”You know you’re just gonna embarrass yourself if you go back up.”
”You’re just scared I’m gonna call you a cheater and embarrass you,” Harley argued. “Which you are. A cheater," she felt the need to clarify. "A dirty, disgusting, no-good, sucks at sex—"
Jack struck his fist right into the elevator railing, outraged. His knuckles were red and raw, the railing already dented. All she could focus on was the bulging vein on Jack's forehead. The flared nostrils, the sweat beading out in sparse droplets on his neck. His loud breathing. It was like a wild animal. It was like Barbara Ann Minerva’s tiger.
“Won't you quit this? You couldn’t have been anyone without me. There would be nowhere for you to even go back to without me. Stop pretending like you don’t know this,” he snapped, his knuckles jittering by his side like an eager child. Harley’s breath caught in her chest. “I have given you every privilege, every luxury, everything you fucking have now—and this is the thanks I get. It's ridiculous."
The elevator dinged. Harley still stared right into Jack’s eyes, paralyzed in place. Paralyzed in disbelief, in indignation, in anger—in fear, mostly.
Nothing in her body could move, and no words could leave her. No thoughts could even be conjured in her brain, not with her mind filled with an impossible amount of fog.
All she had the courage to do was stick her arm out in front of the closing elevator doors and step back out into the night. People expected her to be back; all she had said was that she was going to pee, there wasn’t any way for people to know that she would find her boyfriend cheating on her.
“Yo, Harley,” one of Harley’s friend’s boyfriends had called out to her, “and Jack, dude, what’s up? Y’all look like you saw a dead body on some The Shining shit.” Harley whipped her head around to see Jack with his arms crossed and his foot tapping impatiently. She didn’t even know he followed her out.
”I need a drink,” Harley said at last, ignoring her testosterone-filled introduction back into the party.
She flirted with the bartender as she acquired the fourth vodka martini of the night for herself. She knew she looked fucked up. She knew she was fucked up, but both failed to discourage her from ordering more drinks and flirting with more strangers. This was still her night! Everyone was here to celebrate her and her band’s successful (or at least not terrible) gig, and everything could wait until the morning, when it was no longer all about her.
She wasn’t even on her third question with the bartender (“Beyonce or Rihanna?”) when Jack suddenly had something to say and was clapping and standing on top of one of the chairs near the pool. Harley rolled her eyes as far as she could manage; it was hard to have that much control over her optics when she'd drunk enough vodka and taken enough uppers to kill an opossum. “That’s my asshole boyfriend,” she mouthed to the bartender, who nodded her head at Harley slowly like she was someone’s grandfather at a retirement home.
Later in life, after Harley bumped into this same bartender, she came to find that she only managed to say “That’s my asshole” before the last word was slurred into oblivion.
"Everyone,” her asshole was saying, still on top of a pool chair. His legs looked so flimsy from where Harley sat, she just wished someone would kick the back of them and launch him into the pool. But she wasn’t so lucky, so all she could do was sit from her stool, hammered, watching and wishing. “Tonight’s a special night, huh? We’re all here to celebrate one fabulous, talented”—he gestured over to Harley, who lazily smiled at the positive advocations finally coming her way. Finally, she thought, he’s coming to his senses and acknowledging how great I am. “—poser,” he finished.
"What?” Harley said aloud. “What’d he say?” she asked the bartender, who repeated what he said word for word. But that couldn’t be right.
"You all know Harley Quinn. Well, maybe not all,” he interjected, smiling at his own joke, “but you should all know me. I’m her boyfriend—well, I mean, we’ll save that for later. I kickstarted her career, was beside her through it all. I gave her a manager. I gave her my resources. Hell, I even gave her her own band.” Harley cringed at how all of his sentences started with the word I. “Obviously, that’s a lot. That’s too much, even, some would say. But I did it all in the name of love.” To that part, Harley grinned. “But you know what I got in return? Nothing.” Harley’s grin was wiped off as fast as it appeared. “See, your Harley Quinn here’s too involved in diva culture. She’s too focused on herself, speeding so fast that she can’t read the signs. Not once has she thanked me, not once has she met me with gratitude, not once has she done anything in return for me. People: isn’t it clear now?” Jack perched down from where he stood and delivered a nasty scowl Harley’s way.
“Harley Quinn is an ungrateful leech who expects the world but with nothing to give back for it. And now, I can finally say I’m done. Good luck, Harley, being on your own now. Maybe then you’ll find the words ‘thank you’ in your vocabulary, but then again, maybe not.” The entire party gave her glances the same caliber as Jack’s own, full of disgust and hatred and cringe that they would ever go to her party, the so-called "ungrateful leech.”
Who even uses that word?
Harley booed him, giving him a fat thumbs down along with it, but she was met with silence. It felt like the same amount of impact as being shot in the head, knowing that Jack was right for once in their relationship: these people weren’t here for Harley; they were there for Jack. And of course, none of them would take her side over his.
"Harley,” Jack said, with such sadness in his eyes it made Harley sick to know he could fabricate an expression like that, that if she didn’t know any better she would have fallen for it like everyone else on this rooftop. “You can boo me all you want. But I’m not being your victim anymore.”
"Fuck you!” The words escaped Harley’s mouth before she could stop them, but she was glad they came out. “You’re not the victim. You’re literally making everything up. You…you prick!” Somehow that was the only insult her mind could make up at that moment.
And then she threw up.
And then she wasn’t able to remember anything after that. But she knew what she was told: sometime during the night, she pushed some guys into the pool and threw a chair at who she thought was Jack over the roof, but it turned out to just be a pool inflatable of Brobee from Yo Gabba Gabba. Definitely not her proudest moment, sure.
But what she did know was that as soon as she awoke in the morning on the rooftop with sunlight beaming relentlessly into her eyes, two hashtags were trending and her Twitter inbox was full of mentions.
The first hashtag: #leechquinn. The second: #hereforjack. That fucking bitch!
Nearly hundreds of mentions crowded her inbox, all requotes of the same Deuxmoi video of Jack standing on the chair, but the first one she saw irritated her more than the others because it had the most likes:
marissa is #HEREFORJACK @marissasnapier
y’all are seriously being insensitive as hell to jack napier rn. reminder that it’s never the victim’s fault. i honestly expected more from @harleyquinn but like what can we expect from a straight white woman
@brucesdog119: Like my boy Jack was in love!! She clearly took advantage of him and as a long time fan I’m super disappointed :/
@quinnsfave: so, like, is she cancelled now? if so GOOD cuz the real fans can buy tickets now
@marissasnapier: it’s pretty weird that all you care about right now is ticket prices but ok…
She debated commenting on the fact she was indeed not straight but ultimately found the courage to think better of it. She may just have been publicly humiliated and broken up with, but even she knew it wasn’t for real. She knew Jack would come back to her; that it would only take time. And she could prove herself to him: even without his help she’d still be thriving.
But first, she needed a plan.