Helena Wells-Quinzel is H.G. Wells (indelibleink) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2015-07-04 17:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, h g wells, harley quinn |
Who: Harley and Helena
What: After three nights of being assaulted by dreams, Helena’s not exactly the same as she was.
When: 6/28
Where: Helena’s house
Warnings: Language, references to psychological torture
Status: Complete
The past three nights had been utter torture, even moreso than during the day when she was awake but unable to move. Helena, when she was awake, was more than grateful that Harley was there, that she wasn’t alone. Because in her dreams? She was completely alone.
One hundred and ten years of alone with nothing but her memories to keep her company while she was a conscious statue. The memory of her daughter’s death had played on repeat in her mind, and it had utterly broken her. Helena didn’t know how many more of these dreams she could handle, but finally, someone in her dreams had released her from her prison. A man by the name of McPherson.
This time, when Helena woke up and her eyes opened, her body responded to the commands her brain gave it. And as such, she bolted upright in bed and screamed as she grabbed her head. It was a scream that managed to be a mix of anguish and pure, unbridled anger.
Harley hadn’t slept much, though careful use of white makeup had hidden the bags in her eyes. It was mostly for Helena’s sake. The only reason Harley hadn’t called for an ambulance was because of the… odd… nature of what was happening.
She tried to be flippant about it, joking for Helena’s sake, but spending hours while Helena slept having a nervous breakdown. More than once she’d taken her lipstick and smeared it all over her face in increasingly erratic patterns, only to wipe it clean in time for Helena to be awake again. To give Helena a faux cheerful face.
She’d given into a cat nap when Helena bolted away screaming. The sound caused her to flail out of her chair and land hard on her tailbone. She pulled herself up by the bed and grabbed for H’s hand. “Helena! H!”
Once the heat of the moment was past, Helena would more than appreciate the joking Harley had done during the times she’d been awake. But right now, her mind was reeling. She could feel it break the same way it had in her dreams. And there was a moment where she didn’t know what to do other than scream.
At least until she felt Harley’s hand grab her own. Helena’s scream died away and she looked at her hand in Harley’s. Even though Harley had been there with her, it had felt like decades since she’d last touched Harley’s hand. Her gaze moved up to Harley’s face, and it was obvious that Helena had suffered in her dreams. There was a deep seeded sorrow in her eyes as well as a new note of what could be best described as something primal. It went deeper than simple anger or insanity, it was a very dangerous combination of the two.
“H-Harley…?” She asked, her voice a bit scratchy.
“Hey. Hey I’m here.” Harley’s smile was tight, but genuine. She put her other hand on Helena’s back, rubbing in circles, but otherwise letting Helena decide how much touching she wanted right now. She didn’t look frightened or taken aback by Helena’s eyes. They didn’t phase her - if anything they made her a little sad. Harley knew madness
It was a strange sensation. Rationally, Helena knew that only three days had passed. But after the dreams she’d had, the torture she’d sustained and clearly woken up with this morning, it felt like more than a century had passed. She suddenly felt old and tired, but also angry. There was a hate that was burning in her heart the same way it’d burned in her heart in her dreams.
“Is this...is this real? Am I awake and not a statue?” Helena asked as her mind was still reeling. For the moment, she leaned into Harley’s touch, desperately trying to grab onto anything that took away from the insanity she felt clawing at her mind.
Digging her nails into Helena’s back, Harley tried to demonstrate sensation. Not enough to mark her, but enough to act like a pinch in a dream. “If it’s not real then we’re both crazy.” They both might already be crazy. “It’s nice not having to have blinking conversations.”
At the feeling of the nails in her back, Helena hissed slightly, body arching in response to it. It was definitely needed, and all at once it hit her. The anger. The rage. The pain. The torture. She’d been broken in the dreams, and now she herself felt broken upon being awake. Helena clenched her jaw, biting back emotions as best as she could. She ran her hands over her face.
“I was tortured,” she said after some moments. “In the dreams. It was supposed to be a prison, a way to stop myself from hurting other people. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t relief. I was conscious the entire time.” She knew it didn’t exactly make sense. She didn’t have any physical wounds, so that left many questions open for Harley to ask.
She wanted to kill them. Whoever had hurt Helena, whoever had done these things. Harley didn’t move her hand from Helena’s back. Her throat bobbed and she internalized her own anger. “A prison? You imprisoned yourself? Who tortured you? How did they torture you?”
Harley wasn’t doing a very good job of internalizing the anger, it tinged her voice like blood on a knife.
“Yes, I did. When using my time machine to save my daughter’s life failed, I turned to finding other means to time travel. Which meant abusing Artifacts with time travel abilities. One such instance resulted in my accidentally killing a fellow agent, so I turned myself in to my superiors and asked to be bronzed. Which was sort of like being cryogenically frozen except one’s body is encased in bronze and you are turned into a statue.” Helena explained, drawing in a breath. And she heard the anger in Harley’s voice, and it only served to fuel her own anger.
“I had thought it would render me unconscious, that I could spend time asleep and safe from myself. But it didn’t. The bronzing process left me completely conscious. For one hundred and ten years.” The amount of animosity she felt towards the Warehouse for that was only growing within her. She looked at Harley, her eyes taking on a harsh glint within their dark depths. “For one hundred and ten years I watched the memory of my daughter dying playing over and over again with nothing to stop it. I couldn’t handle it.”
And, suddenly, Helena remembered her daughter in this life. “Christina. Where’s Christina? I need to see her.” And with that, Helena moved to get up, but her legs weren’t ready for the sudden movement and her knees buckled, sending her towards the floor unless Harley managed to catch her.
“You’d make a dead sexy bronze statue, like one of them greek goddesses,” Harley said. She tried to lighten her tone, but it came across flat. “Wait, how did you...is that what they did? They made you watch that? Over and over? What kind of.. H!” She grabbed for Helena’s arm, wrapping one of hers around the woman’s waist. “She ain’t here, she’s with your folks! But she’s okay. She’s okay. You want I should get her on the phone?”
“Only truly heartless people would trap people in such a state. And there were others who had been bronzed far longer than I was. All of them are ticking bombs waiting to be released so they can unleash their fury.” Helena was one as well, and she had a plan. Oh boy did her dream self have a plan. When Harley caught her, Helena grabbed onto her, cursing under her breath. Her body was sluggish in its response time. No doubt residual effects from the whole being a statue in her dreams and being unable to move when she was awake.
“Oh, yes, that’s right.” Her mind was more focused on the trauma she’d just endured that she’d forgotten her parents had even been here. “Not now, perhaps later when I’m more collected.” Which hurt, and her hand tightened its hold on Harley a bit. “I am sorry for the past couple days. I wasn’t able to move because I was a statue. Clearly the effects are a little slow to wear off.” It was more a statement of fact than it was anything else.
“It’s okay. Talk it out. Ain’t nothing wrong with talking it out.” There wasn’t much else they could do. They couldn’t take a pound of flesh if that flesh it belonged to wasn’t around. And Harley was more than willing to harm people who deserved it.
Helena would be more than okay with tracking down and killing the Regents, but they didn’t exactly exist outside of her dreams. So she would simply need to find other ways to handle the overwhelming rage she felt within. “During the time I was bronzed, I had enough time to concoct a plan. If I was ever released from my prison, I was going to find the pieces of an Artifact known as the Minoan Trident. It had devastating destructive powers that unleashed the power of a supervolcano when it was used. It was responsible for the sinking of Atlantis in my dream world.” Helena drew in a breath. “I was going to take it to a place with a supervolcano and use it, which would bring about another Ice Age that would kill the entire human race, and most everything else on the planet.”
Murder, dismemberment, disappearing. The right person deserved no better than that. Harley tilted her head and whistled. “Supervolcano? You mean like if Yellowstone ever went kablooey? Now that’s some supervillain level shenanigans, doll.” It went way above her paygrade. That was something that Supes or Wondey would deal with. The people that frequented Gotham rarely had that level of violence. Crazy maybe. “No offense but you’d be right at home in Arkham Asylum.”
“Yes, like that. Unleash enough force like that and the Earth would be plunged into a premature Ice Age complete with mass extinctions.” Of course there would be some life forms that survived. There always would be. But the majority of things would die out. “Thank you. Sometimes when you’re angry, you simply have to go out with a bang.” And she managed some dark humor there, though she also meant it literally. She knew her dream self was looking forward to the death that would come to her, but she wanted to go out on her terms. “You think so? I’m fairly certain Arkham Asylum would be a far better experience than being a conscious statue for over a century was.”
“At least we’d be able to waltz into Zales and walk out with whatever we wanted. Wear that latest miniskirt to the apocalypse.” Harley wrinkled her nose. “Oh. Well probably. But it was the definition of a funny farm. All the worse possibly things you can think of when it comes to an asylum. But it was..actually better than the jail for a lot of us.”
“I would not say no to walking out with diamonds and rubies.” The miniskirt, well, not so much. Helena wasn’t the miniskirt kind of woman. Though she’d certainly admire Harley in one. “Was it?” That was interesting, that the asylum was better than the jail. “It at least seems as though it’d be more favorable than prison or the prison I just experienced. At least I’d be able to talk to people in Arkham.” And she wouldn’t be alone.
“We can do that too. I’ve still got some masks. Scooby Doo this time.” She covered her mouth. “Oops. Anyway. At least at Arkham they tried to help you, you know? Most of us were a little cracked in the had. Okay, all of us were a little cracked in the head. Plus it was on an island and locking all the crazy super villains on an island was probably the safest option. And yeah, you could talk! Like the cells where I usually was held were kind of like reinforced clear plastic or something. Could look right across at Red. Nice view.”
“I would not be opposed.” No, right now Helena wasn’t thinking clearly. In fact, she was seeing red and felt as though she’d been put through an emotional gauntlet. Which she sort of had been in her dreams, but she was feeling the effects even while awake. “The safest option is not always the correct one.” Which was something she knew given the dreams she’d had the past three nights. This time as she stood up, her legs cooperated and she slowly stood up, took a breath and looked at Harley. “Were you isolated at all there?”
Harley looked over Helena, and she developed a sly smile. “Want a small collection of rubies and emeralds? Cuz we can get you a small collection of rubies and emeralds.” Harley looked up as Helena stood, then lifted her hands to her lover’s wrists. “Sometimes. When I was a naughty little harlequinn.”
“I would, actually.” Anything that would help get her mind off of what she’d just dreamed would definitely be welcomed now. When she felt Harley’s touch to her wrists, it was enough to briefly pull her out of the turmoil going on inside of her head. “No one should be isolated like that. It only exacerbates the issues.” And then Helena needed further reinforcement that she was, indeed, awake and not alone. For all she knew, she could be making up the fact that Harley was actually there with her currently after the dreams she’d had. So there was little warning as Helena closed the distance between herself and Harley and kissed her almost desperately.
“I need you to look-” At me. Harley was interrupted by Helena’s kiss. She cupped her face with one hand, and then with both hands, returning the kiss with equal desperation. Three days worth. Three days of fear and worry and covering everything up with jokes and false bravado. Harley was so good at false bravado, that she let Helena kiss her and use her like a boulder in the sea.
As Harley’s hands cupped her face, Helena’s arms wrapped around Harley’s back, holding her close and tight. Even in the desperation, Helena still savored the contact, the fact that Harley was actually there, that she wasn’t alone or isolated. After what seemed like several eternal moments, Helena broke the kiss gently, though she kept her arms around Harley. “Thank you. For being here. And for the past couple days.” Her voice was quiet, almost hesitant, but trying to mask the fear she felt over being alone.
Make-up running, Harley still smiled brightly. “I know what it’s like to feel alone. Maybe not in the same way you were or nothing and not even to that degree, but a little bit. And I’m here, I’ll always try to be.” Only sane people promised to always be there. The crazies knew that was impossible. “Lets do something distracting.”
Mind still reeling to catch up with itself after the dreams, Helena drew in a long, slow breath to try and help center herself. It didn’t quite work, but having Harley being there was certainly helping. “Thank you.” Helena would definitely reciprocate, being there for Harley whenever she needed it. At the suggestion of doing something distracting, Helena managed a little smile. “Yes, please. Distraction would be wonderful.” Because she needed to get her mind off of the dreams, off of the fact she could feel her mind break as her dream self’s mind broke. And only bad things could result if she dwelled on it all now.
“Crime spree?” Harley asked, unsure if now was an appropriate time to suggest other, more naked ways of distracting Helena.
“Crime spree,” Helena agreed. And now wasn’t the best time to ask about the more naked ways of distraction. Later, though, it would be better received after getting some of the feelings she had pent up inside vented out.
“We’ll swing by my place, pick up some masks. How does Scooby Doo sound?” Harley straightened and stretched her back. “And how are you at hotwiring a car for the getaway?”
Retail therapy, Gotham style.
“Scooby Doo will do just fine.” Helena responded. And then she smirked slightly. “With my new found skills from my dream self, hotwiring a car should be of no problem.” Not at all. And hey, retail therapy was most definitely direly needed. After that, well, perhaps some good old fashioned naked times with Harley.