Batman: A Maroon in Midnight Blue (Wattpad Edition)

CH 16.1: Minstrel's Story as Told by Ivy as Told by Harley

Here's the story as I know it:

Harley Quinn and the Joker went out and see a show one day. It was Joker's idea, Harley wanted to stay in that night. But as always, it wasn't her choice. He'd seen a commercial that promised "The best clown in the world" and decided that he needed to see for himself if this clown was funnier than him.

When they arrived at the circus, it quickly turned into a shit storm. They wanted a private showing, so they arrived the night before opening. No one wanted them there, least of all the ringmaster. When he tried asking the couple to leave, the Joker only remarked that he thought the ringmaster frowned too much. He offered to fix that.

To say it was a massacre would be an understatement. Harley spared me all the gory details, but she made it abundantly clear why I'd never heard of the incident before—there were no witness left to describe the incident as anything other than an accidental fire. You didn't need to be in Gotham for the police to be blase about a bunch of circus freaks dying in a fire.

While they were setting the place ablaze, Harley went into the ringmaster's trailer. The ringmaster's wife was there, getting ready for the dress rehearsal she'd already had planned. Harley really liked the plastic tiara that the wife was wearing, and asked if the woman would gift it to her. They fought over it. The woman called Harley some rude names that I'd only ever heard Harley utter when her cereal came without a prize. Harley snatched the tiara out of her hands, and the woman fell back and cracked her skull against a countertop.

Harley looked around the rest of the trailer while the Joker was outside, causing more havoc. She was wearing the tiara and singing a little made-up song while she searched. She managed to find their safe hidden in a cupboard, and inside the safe, she found a very peculiar photo album.

It was large, the kind that people typically used to store entire generations' worth of family photos. But there was only ever one person in all the pictures—a little Black boy. Harley was immediately suspicious, because both the ringmaster and his wife were white. She kept thumbing through the album, trying to figure out who the kid was. But even after she'd gotten nearly halfway through the album, she didn't see a single picture of the boy with the couple, only pictures of him all alone.

And in a lot of the pictures that Harley found, the boy was naked.

That's when Harley got really scared. She took the pictures out of the plastic sleeves and checked the backs for a name or anything else that she could use to track the kid down. But all she found written on the back were prices. Going rate for a little kid's innocence? Twenty goddamn dollars.

The Joker called to her, and she bolted from the trailer screaming about how the circus was "full of a buncha sick fucks." But when she finally found the Joker, she stopped screaming.

The little boy from the pictures wasn't so little anymore. He stood with Joker, who knealt down beside him to whisper in his ear. In the boy's hand was a gun, and on the other side of the barrel was the ringmaster. He was on his knees crying, begging for his life, and gurgling on the blood that kept sliding down his throat. It was a familiar sight and sound for Harley, one that she'd seen whenever the Joker gave someone a new smile. I knew there was a time that she found that sight hilarious, and almost erotic in a way; she didn't mention enjoying the sight then.

Joker kept whispering to the kid. Harley couldn't hear what he was saying, but could easily guess what he was talking about. The photo album was still in her hands, and with a morbid curiosity, she continued flipping through pages. The images disgusted her, they even brought tears to her eyes, but she couldn't look away for long. She'd look at the pages briefly, then look at the boy before her, and her mind raced with questions that she couldn't even put into words.

And then she found the worst pictures, the ones where the little boy started to look more like the older boy with the Joker in his ear. In those pictures he wasn't alone, he was with the ringmaster's wife.

Harley told me that when the boy pulled the trigger, it was the loudest thing in the world. Not the shot itself, but the friction of metal against metal as the gun's inner mechanisms activated. Harley could hear it all in excruciating detail over the screams of all the circus performers and the roar of the fire.

"Bang!" The Joker screamed. He laughed at his own joke, as he was known to do even back then. Harley laughed too, and so did the boy.

The only one that didn't laugh was the ringmaster. He only let out a confused grunt when he realized that a bullet hadn't gone through him. He opened his eyes and saw that a little flag with the word, "Bang!" on it had grown from the barrel of the gun.

The Joker ran up to the ringmaster and lifted him to his feet.

"What's wrong, frown clown? Smile! It's only a joke!"

The Joker slapped the ringmaster on his back, but he still didn't laugh. He cried, and cried, shouting that he was sorry and begging all of them, even the child, to just leave them alone.

The Joker shook his head, "Don't like that joke, huh? I got another one for ya!"

He spun the man around and held him at eye level.

"Everyone loves this one," The Joker said to no one in particular. "The old, spray-flower trick!"

A stream of glowing, steaming, green liquid shot out from a plastic daisy in the Joker's lapel. It burned the man's face down to the bone, and he didn't—couldn't go out quietly. He screamed his entire way into the night.

Continued in CH 16.2