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♡♦♡ I'M GOIN' STRAIGHT I PROMISE ♡♦♡
When Harleen first arrived to Arkham, she was prepared to share an office with one or two other people. At the asylum, however, there was plenty of office space to go around. Her office was big, too, not enormous, but you could open the door without it hitting the desk. There was even a window.
No one would have called the view scenic — Arkham Asylum was out in the middle of nowhere, in an area where the landscape wasn't inspiring even in summer. Just outside her window was a very old, twisted tree, which since then has been cut down. She wasn't sure what kind of tree it was; no one else seemed to know, either. Dr. Leland had warned her not to touch the weird, misshapen leaves; Poison Ivy had been taking care of it at the time and had done something to it which lead to the leaves producing a highly toxic substance, worse than poison ivy.
When the wind blew from just the right direction, the long, skinny branches at the end of one of the gnarled boughs would tap on her window like someone was trying to get her attention. Harleen always thought she could probably have climbed out onto it if she were ever trapped in her office and needed a quick getaway. Which was a rather silly idea. Arkham Asylum was pretty outré and, as she'd seen on her first day, dangerous. But thinking she might need to use the tree outside her office to escape — that wasn't even crazy, only childish. It was more like something that would occur to a seven-year-old, not a fifteen-year-old with a medical degree.
On the other hand, it wouldn't have been a silly kid's fantasy for seven-year-old Harleen. That little girl hadn't been given to idle make-believe; she hadn't even believed in Santa Claus. When she had stared down a mobster's hired muscle on a pier at Coney Island in the middle of the night, it hadn't been Santa who had come to her rescue.
Harley Quinn can still remember the morning before the Joker ran chaos to her workplace — four months after her hire — Dr. Leland tapped at the door and poked her head in to say, "I thought we'd continue introducing the men on the firm to the schizophrenics today."
Harley Quinn smiles at the wooden desk that still remains. Ever since the Killer Croc incident, Dr. Leland had been her new best friend. The same day she hired her, she took her through the ward housing the least dangerous patients, those thought "to have some chance of leaving Arkham." Harleen was far more interested in meeting patients closer to the Killer Croc end of the spectrum. But she was the new kid; she had to be patient.
A hand grabs her by the shoulder, giving it a small squeeze. "Harley, we need to go," Ivy warns, cautious. For a moment, she had imagined her being Dr. Leland, but of course that would be ridiculous. The last she heard of her — just two days after she came back to Gotham — she overheard that she had fallen pregnant with Jim Gordan's baby. She is currently in maternity leave and will most likely return to the hospital three months from now.
