Relationship Harley Quinn

Once upon a time, inside the tall stone walls of Arkham Asylum on the misty edge of Gotham City, there worked a bright young psychiatrist named Dr. Harleen Quinzel.

Harleen had studied for years and years to become a doctor, and she was very good at her job — patient, thoughtful, always ready with the right question at exactly the right moment, and always kind to even the most difficult patients at Arkham Asylum. One day, her supervisors gave her the strangest assignment of her whole career: study the Joker, the most unpredictable patient Arkham Asylum had ever locked away, and try to understand what truly made him tick.

So, session after session, Harleen sat across from him in a small gray room, notebook balanced carefully on her knee, pencil at the ready.

But something odd kept happening. Instead of answering her careful questions, the Joker told her jokes. Instead of Harleen studying him calmly and seriously, he somehow always managed to make her laugh — a real, genuine laugh, the kind that surprised her every time it slipped out. Slowly, week after week, without quite meaning to, Harleen found herself looking forward to every single appointment more than she looked forward to almost anything else.

She told herself it was simply good research. But deep down, she knew it had become something more than that.

Then, one foggy night, everything changed. Harleen did something nobody at Arkham Asylum ever expected from her: she helped the Joker slip right past the guards, out through a side door, and into the misty Gotham City night. She left her white doctor's coat folded neatly on her desk and, in its place, put on a costume of her very own — bright red and black, jingling softly with little silver bells, with a big, cheerful cartoon mallet slung proudly over one shoulder.

She wasn't Dr. Harleen Quinzel anymore. Not that night, and not ever again.

She was Harley Quinn.

Together, the two of them became Gotham City's most unpredictable double act, a pair nobody could quite figure out how to stop for very long. Harley drove the getaway car whenever the Jokermobile needed a little backup, honking its silly circus-music horn around every corner. She tossed her own trick playing cards right alongside his, laughing louder than anyone in the room at every single one of his punchlines. Where the Joker schemed and plotted late into the night, Harley executed the plan with a cheerful bounce in her step. And where he occasionally stumbled — because even the Joker stumbled sometimes — Harley was always right there to catch him, popping back up from every failed prank with a bright "Whoopsie!" and a grin nearly as wide as his own. Between capers, the two of them liked to sit at a corner booth in an all-night diner near Crime Alley, sharing a milkshake with two straws and comparing notes on which prank of the week had gotten the biggest laugh.

Batman and Commissioner Gordon learned rather quickly that catching one of them usually meant catching both, since neither one could ever quite resist showing off for the other, even in the middle of a chase across the rooftops of Gotham City. But underneath all that mischief and glitter and honking circus music, there was something real between them too. The Joker was, in his own strange and chaotic way, protective of Harley, always making sure she had the fastest escape route and the safest seat in the Jokermobile. And Harley, for her part, never once doubted — not for a single moment — that being his partner in chaos was exactly, precisely where she belonged.

Every scheme the two of them cooked up together ended the very same way, of course, no matter how carefully they planned it. Outsmarted. Outmaneuvered. Caught, eventually, by Batman or Commissioner Gordon or, quite often, both at once. But even then, even with the handcuffs clicking shut, the two of them laughed the whole way to the police wagon, leaning against each other, already whispering about their very next adventure through the twinkling streets of Gotham City.

Goodnight, Harley, dreaming of your next milkshake and your next punchline. Goodnight, Mr. J. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, is always full of new mischief, waiting just around the misty Gotham City corner.