To Be Devoured

Harleen Quinzel knew better than anyone what it felt like to squeeze, to snake her fingers around the world and crush it like a beating heart. Oh yes, she knew the taste of another human's blood, sweet and metallic. Killing was such an easy thing for her to do.

But she did it metaphorically, from the safety of her plastic hospital chair. She was good at that, good at those inferring smiles and glances, those careful looks that made you wonder if you were sane in the head. She was good at using her long, slender fingers to jot down notes on a small wooden clipboard. She used a silver pen, one that glittered and shone and reflected a smudge of peach where your face should be in a mirror, stretched and disfigured.

Strictly speaking, she wasn't supposed to kill anybody, but they let her, anyway. They let her mangle minds and twist thoughts to fit her needs. They let her march up the asylum steps every day in stiletto heels and deep red lipstick, blonde hair hanging loosely down her back. They didn't do it because they didn't know – they knew all too well what it was she did when she pinned that neat little nametag to her chest – they just didn't care. She was a carnivore, they were carnivores, and they enjoyed hearing the inmates scream.

But, God, that asylum never learned its lesson. They thought she was one of them, thought she was sane if not a little – a little sadistic. But she wasn't. She may have been in the beginning, just another girl in a lab coat with fangs in her mouth, but she'd gone crazy a long time ago. Long before any of them realized it. And she reveled in her madness, too. Reveled in it like a sickly sweet disease, a lotion for her rotting mind.

"Darling, would you pass me the syringe?" she'd say as she pulled latex gloves over long, sharp nails.

And then her patients – her victims would howl and howl in pain and misery until the sedatives kicked in and the drool started leaking from their mouths, started crawling down their pale, hollow cheeks. Then she would sit up a little straighter and smile, lips stretching in a cold and painful way. She would cross and uncross her legs and then cross them again, heels clacking against the cracked concrete floor.

"Now then, let's talk about these anger issues of yours."

It was always the same thick, honeyed voice, slow and seductive and filled cyanide.

Slumped in their chairs, in their straitjackets, in their own personal hell, her victims would look up at her with bloodshot eyes. Some would threaten. Some would lie. Some would argue. Some would just sit there and stare into space, lost in a distant, faraway world.

But only one – only one of them said anything worthwhile. Only one of them could dominate her, could turn the predator into the prey with just one casual glance, one tiny, awful grin.

"Sweetheart," he would say, eyes rolling in their sockets, "loosen up these straps a bit and we'll…we'll do more than talk. Hee hee hee!"

And oh, how she was tempted, too. With just a tiny pull, she could unleash a beast onto the city, onto herself. Her legs quivered at the thought. Oh, to be devoured.

It was true that she had been crazy to begin with, but that was before she met him. When she traced his hideous clown-face smile with her eyes, when she heard that cruel and convoluted laugh, when he stared up at her with all the dark and horrible intentions in the world – that was when dear old Harley Quinn had really gone insane.

A/N: This literally popped into my head yesterday. At first her name was Olivia and it was original fiction, but then I got to the part about her marching up the asylum steps and I realized it was NOT Olivia, but Harleen Quinzel. "Let's be honest," I thought, "You REALLY want to write about Harley Quinn." It seems shorter now that it's posted, but when I was writing it, it seemed so long. Oh well. As long as the idea is conveyed...

And of course, the usual disclaimer. Not mine, yadda yadda yadda. Not doing this for profit or anything, just the kicks.