Saving Gotham

Once upon a time, on a night nobody in Gotham City would forget for a long while, the Riddler decided to prove, once and for all, that he was smarter than Batman.

His plan was enormous. He rigged the old sea gates near the harbor to burst open all at once, and the water came rushing in, turning entire blocks near the Gotham City docks into fast-moving canals almost overnight. It was meant to be a puzzle, a riddle only he understood, a way of showing the world just how clever he truly was.

But down in those flooded streets, nobody was thinking about riddles. Families were trapped up on rooftops, waving flashlights out into the darkness and calling for help that hadn't arrived yet. Streetlights blinked out one after another beneath the rising water, and the whole southern half of the city grew quiet and dark and frightening.

Nobody expected Harley Quinn to be part of the rescue that followed. Least of all Harley herself.

On any other night, she might have watched a scene like this unfold from a safe, dry rooftop somewhere, laughing at the chaos below the way she always used to. But this night was different, somehow, right from the very start. She was the one who spotted it first — a whole apartment building trapped by the rising tide, water climbing steadily past its second-floor windows, faster than anyone inside seemed to realize.

She didn't stop to think it over. She found Poison Ivy nearby, tending calmly to a rooftop garden as if the flood outside wasn't happening at all, and grabbed her by the arm.

"Ivy. We need a boat."

Together, they commandeered a rowboat from a capsized dock near Robinson Park, and Harley grabbed the oars herself.

"We're not exactly heroes," she told Ivy as they paddled hard through the dark water toward the flooded building, water splashing up over the sides of the little boat. "But we're not gonna just sit here either."

They reached the building just as a family was climbing out onto a narrow ledge, and Harley and Ivy worked together to guide them safely down into the boat, one at a time, calm and careful despite the current pulling at the oars and the rain beginning to fall harder overhead.

Batman arrived only moments later, gliding down from a nearby rooftop, fully expecting to find more trouble waiting for him. Instead, he found Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy carefully ferrying an elderly couple — and their startled, soaking-wet cat — safely out through a broken second-floor window.

He didn't say anything about how strange the whole scene looked. There simply wasn't time for that. Instead, he tossed Harley a length of rope to help secure the next rescue, and the three of them fell into an unlikely rhythm together.

For one strange, soaking-wet night, Gotham City's most notorious troublemaker and its most famous protector worked the very same rooftop, side by side, pulling neighbor after neighbor to safety, boatload after boatload, without a single argument passing between them. Nobody stopped to comment on how odd it all was. There simply wasn't time for that either.

By the time the Riddler's whole scheme finally came undone — Batman found him wading through his own flooded plan, muttering half-finished riddles to himself in the dark, more confused than triumphant — the water level had dropped enough for the very last families to walk safely home through the shallow, receding streets.

Afterward, Harley sat down on a curb, completely soaked to the bone and shivering slightly in the night air, and watched quietly as Batman loaded the Riddler into a waiting police car.

"Don't get used to this," she called out to him, wringing water out of her pigtails as he walked past.

Batman almost smiled. It was the closest thing to a real grin that Gotham City had seen out of him all week.

Because after enough strange nights like this one, Batman had learned something important about Harley Quinn, something he never said out loud but had come to believe completely: you should never, ever count her out entirely.

Not when it really mattered. And on this particular night, in this particular flood, in this particular corner of Gotham City, it had mattered more than almost anyone would ever fully know.