Anthem

Princess watched him leave, cocking her head to the side in a very confused manner. Take to the sewers. Take to the sewers! Take to the sewers? What did he mean by that? And then it clicked. She gasped. Did he want her to live in the sewers? That was disgusting!

Princess sighed, shaking her head. She really had nowhere else to go, so she decided to go ahead and take his advice. It took Princess nearly four hours to find the way to Gotham Public Library, and by the time she did, the sky had darkened, the streets were devoid of the living and sober, and the library was closed.

She found the manhole cover easily, heaving the thing off of the hole and climbing in. She shivered in the dank wetness of the sewer; her sundress didn’t really offer much protection from the swiftly cooling weather and she’d forgotten to put on shoes before she left the Scarecrow, and she sure wasn’t going to head back there for any now. She stepped in a puddle of what she hoped was water, and she felt like crying.

She stared around herself. The darkness was nearly overpowering, but she could see a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel ahead of her. Robotically, her frigid legs made for it.

Light means warmth, she assured herself.

Light is fire. Light is a heater. Light is lightbulbs and ovens and civilization.

The light seemed to be an infuriatingly long way away. The closer she tried to get to it, the farther away it seemed to get. She struggled with her mind, trying to console herself into believing she was moving forward to the light. It was more difficult than she thought it would be. She tried closing her eyes for a number of steps and then opening them to see if that would make the empty dark space shrink any faster. It didn’t seem to work. Eventually, after what felt like hours, the light was upon her. She blinked rapidly, attempting to get her eyes accustomed to the brightness after being so long in the dark.

She had discovered a rather homey section of the sewer system, complete with a couch, electric lighting, and a television. There was even a bed behind the TV. Princess gasped. Someone lived down there! She glanced at the bedspread. It had ducks all over it. The television was on, and tuned to a special about sparrows. The couch featured a festive cardinal print.

Someone in this sewer must have a sick obsession with birds. She concluded, timidly seating herself on the only slightly dirty couch. It smelled bad, as bad as the sewer itself around her smelled, worse than the couch in the Scarecrow’s home, but it was rather comfortable, and Princess soon found herself unable to hold on to consciousness, drifting pleasantly off to a dreamless sleep.

A sharp poke in her injured side awoke her some four hours later.

“Ah!” she screamed, sitting up and glaring at the stranger who’d poked her. Her glare soon turned to a look of amazement, however. The guy who’d poked her was short and rather rotund. The object he’d used to stab at her side was the end of a long, grey umbrella. He wore a dirty tuxedo, complete with coattails, a top hat, and a monocle. His nose was long, curved, and pointed. It reminded her of a beak.

“It would seem a little lost dove has flown into my humble nest.” He said, laughing. It sounded like a quack. Princess squished herself farther back onto the couch, hoping that he wouldn’t hurt her. However, for some reason, she trusted him. The clown had sent her here. Why would he send her down to the sewers only to have someone else kill her? He seemed more like the type to take care of his own dirty work rather than shuffling it off to somebody else. The man withdrew his umbrella and sat on his bed. “You may sleep here tonight, little one, but tomorrow you must leave.”

Princess smiled at the odd man, settling in for her most restful sleep in a while, free of fear, dreams, and the Scarecrow. Abruptly, she decided that whoever this man was, she liked him. He was polite, and aside from poking her he hadn’t hurt her. And in his defense, he didn’t even know she was hurt.

She awoke to a harsh, blinding light shining directly in her face. She tried to block the bright light with her hand, but soon found something cold and metal holding her wrists tightly to her back. She was still lying on her stomach on the smelly old couch she’d fallen asleep on.

“You are under arrest.” An unpleasant male voice said, heaving her to her feet. He shined the flashlight directly in her eyes. “You have the right to remain silent.”

Princess chose to take full advantage of this right, staring straight at the ground while the unpleasant male police officer read her Miranda rights to her. Her brows knitted tightly together in confusion, and she stared down at her pretty sundress, now smudged with sewer water, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong, why they were arresting her. The policeman grabbed her arm, a little too roughly, and started heading for what she assumed was an entrance to the sewer. She stumbled a little on her cold, bare feet, but he refused to slow down. He kept looking forward and backward, as if nervously checking for some unseen danger.

From deep in the depths of the sewer, something growled…

As the policeman dragged her out of the sewer and towards the back of a squad car, she managed to ask him, “Why are you arresting me?” in a voice so small she was surprised she could hear it.

“You are in league with the Penguin.” He replied simply, shoving her too roughly into the back of the cop car and slamming the door behind her. She winced as the seatbelt dug into her already hurting ribs. The Penguin? What penguin?! There hadn’t been any penguins in the sewer! If they could consider her to be in “league” with anyone, it would be Scarecrow, and she had run away from him! Princess began to feel a little ill. She hadn’t eaten anything the day before, and it was beginning to catch up with her. On top of that, the stress her body had been put through recently was enough to make anyone sick.

“How did you find me?” she asked the man as he started the car.

“Anonymous tip,” he said reluctantly, “from some jokester. Said ‘what’s pretty and small and lives in the sewer in front of the library? A good worker.’ Creep.

Princess blinked a few times, trying to comprehend what he had just said. Then she felt hurt. She knew who had done this to her: the Joker! But why? Why had he saved her just to give her up to someone who was going to blame her for something she didn’t do? She didn’t trust the policeman. Much less than she had trusted the Joker himself, or the man in the sewer, even.

A mental hospital. That was where the judge had seen fit to send her. The criminal psychologist at downtown police headquarters had deemed her mind “confused and fragile”, along with a bunch of other essentially meaningless psychobabble that basically meant she was too crazy to be in public. On her court date she had worn the sundress the Scarecrow had given her. The psychiatrist pointed out that she was wearing the clothes she had as Penguin’s accomplice as evidence to her insanity. It almost made Princess cry. It wasn’t that she wanted to wear those clothes, she just didn’t have anything else, and her only two options were the dress or an ugly orange jumpsuit.

The judge had managed to convince the jury that he was right, and they had seen fit to send her to a hospital specifically for youths in a city called Metropolis, as the one in Gotham was apparently for the more deranged, dangerous crazies. The Metropolis University Children’s Hospital was actually a very nice state-of-the-art facility. Everything was clean and tidy, and the doctors and nurses were very kind. The mental ward was a short hallway lined in clear Plexiglas. Inside each room was a sort of observation chamber where sessions and observation took place, separated from the actual living area with a wall. The observation rooms all looked eerily similar, the only differences being slight variations in the arrangement of furniture. Princess had no idea what the living areas looked like in the other rooms. Aside from observation, sessions, meals, and planned activities, the patients were never allowed outside of their cells.

Princess huffed angrily as a large male nurse escorted her back to her room after breakfast one morning. Already she had grown tired of the monotonous day after day routine. Her blue slippers blended in to the blue tiled floor, and also her blue uniform. Everything was so blue and white and green and sterile; it was enough to make even a sane person go crazy. Not that Princess believed she was in any way crazy, just that the police in Gotham had misunderstood her circumstances, as well as the court-appointed psychiatrist. She had amnesia, not some crippling mental illness that left her unstable and liable to poke someone’s eyes out with a spoon at any given moment. As the nurse opened her door for her, she glanced at the boy whose cell was opposite hers. His mouth was pressed against the glass and he was puffing his cheeks out. He reminded her of a blowfish.

It was the same routine every day. She would get up, be escorted to breakfast, be escorted back to her room to be “observed” by psychology students in silence, sleep through lunch (as she usually fell asleep at some point during the observation), eat dinner, go outside to the playground for a bit of exercise, go to the library to listen to a story read to the group, and then sleep. She was beginning to become increasingly bored with her life. It figured that the only mental institution the state had seen “fit to care for her specific needs” doubled as a learning center for college students interested in psychology.

Only that day was different. Instead of the eager to learn five students that usually observed her, there was only a single, nice-looking blonde one. And she was the only one. She smiled at the blue-clad girl as the nurse dropped her off at her room. Princess lied down on the observation couch, expecting her doctor to come along at any minute to explain to the girl that she was a textbook example of retrograde amnesia, and she has exhibited some schizoaffective tendencies.

“Hello.” The blonde said pleasantly. “My name’s Harleen.”

“Hi.” Princess replied meekly, honestly startled by the speaking. Her meetings usually took place in silence on the part of the students. Her doctor would ask her questions, and she would answer, trying to ignore the students frantically scribbling notes. “I’m Princess.”

Harleen laughed, brushing a stray piece of straw-colored hair out of her eyes and attempting to wind it back into her low ponytail. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

Princess licked her lips, uncomfortable. “Why are you talking to me?” she blurted.

Harleen’s brow creased like she was trying to solve some absurdly confusing puzzle. “Do you prefer to be ignored?”

Princess deftly stood up and strode over to Harleen, expecting her to flinch or show fear like the others before her had. Princess had done plenty to the others before, hoping that something could get them to talk. The pretty blonde merely met Princess’s gaze with speculative, fearless eyes.

Princess shrugged. “Not really. It’s just the others that were in here before never talked to me. In fact you’re the first person to initiate a conversation with me since the day I got here, other than my doctor, of course.”

The crease in Harleen’s brow deepened, only now she looked unhappy rather than curious. Princess smiled. “I’m really glad for the company,” she said, “my doctor’s a real bore. I mean, c’mon. He’s in his mid-sixties, easy. You think he’s got anything in common with me? All he ever wants to talk about is what got me here, what I remember, and how my day went.”

“You mean the nurses and the other patients don’t try to make friends?” she asked.

Princess was a little surprised. “No,” she said. “Why are you even here?”

“Well,” Harleen said, twirling her pencil around in her fingers in a way that hypnotized Princess, “I’m almost done with this internship, and as part of it we each have one session with an actual patient, rather than observing group sessions.”

Princess nodded. She liked this woman. About an hour and a half later, Harleen looked at her watch. “Woah, is that really the time?” she asked.

Princess laughed. “I guess time flies when you’re doing something that is actually enjoyable.”

Harleen gathered up her things, and an awful thought struck Princess. “Am I… Are you going to come back and see me again?”

Harleen put down her bag and moved a little closer to the girl. “Of course I am,” she cooed, “What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t? I’ll see you Wednesday, as a matter of fact. That is, if you’re not busy?”

Princess laughed again. “Busy? Me? Well, I’ll try to pencil you in.”

Harleen rolled her eyes, grabbed her bag, and left.

As Princess laid herself down on her bed that night, she reflected on meeting the young Ms. Harleen. She felt that this woman was going to have a profound impact on her life, that she was going to help her. And she felt like she really was going to come back.

Months went by and Harleen, or Harley as she constantly insisted, and Princess discovered they had much in common. For example, they both really had a thing for music (although Princess’s taste was limited to the hip-hop that the janitor blared on his nightly runs, and the inane humming of some of the more artistically-minded patients) and also both had a severe mistrust of the Gotham Police Department and police in general. They both liked to laugh, and neither were afraid of clowns, a phenomenon Harleen had noticed amongst the general population in her studies. They both had the same opinion on them: they were there to make you laugh. If they tried to scare you, they were out of a job. They became better and better friends every time they met, which got more and more frequent until it was a cause for concern if Harleen didn’t show up right around lunch. In fact, they were such good friends that when she was declared mentally stable, and no adult had stepped forward to claim her as their own, Harley decided to take her in.

“This is wonderful! Thank you so much!” Princes shouted, giving Harley a hug, jumping excitedly on her best friend when she heard the news of her release to her.

“Oh, it’s nothing, pumpkin’! What was I gonna go? Let a little thing like you go out on the streets?” she said, a bit of her Brooklyn accent shining through. A gigantic grin adorned her face like an extravagant bow on the best Christmas present ever.

“There’s a couple of problems, though,” she said, and Princess’s earlier feeling of joy all but vanished, replaced instead by apprehension.

“Like what?” she rasped in a monotone.

“It’s only minor things!” Harley said, immediately wishing she could take back her sentence and replace it with a less terrible sounding one. Her little friend had the tendency to overreact about the littlest things, so she had to be careful about phrasing.

“Like your age, for example. Since you don’t know how old you are, we’ve decided to make a guess based on your teeth, maturity, and intelligence, so we decided to put you in the eleventh grade. Are you okay with that?” Harley asked kindly, and Princess realized for the first time how weak and convincible her voice was. She had the feeling that if she were to argue, she could get her way on just about anything. Harley’s voice offered no resistance to opposition. It was much different than her ‘doctor’ voice that she had used upon their first meeting. That voice was smooth and controlled, a powerful voice mismatched to her weak-looking body.

Princess nodded, and Harley took it as a sign to continue, “also, you’re going to need a new name. I talked with the head of police, and we decided that it would be best for you to get a new name, since we don’t want anything that would be associated back to crimes attached to you.”

Princess mutely nodded again. Harley looked at her, expecting her to make a decision about what she wanted her new name to be. “I don’t like my name, anyway. I don’t think it’s my real one, just what he called me. Can you help me? I don’t know that many names,” Princess finally said.

Harley pondered for a little bit until she offered, “What about Tara?”

Princess tried not to show her discomfort. Her best friend, her only friend, the woman who had just offered to take her in, to keep her from becoming a statistic by living on the streets, was trying as hard as she could. “I like it,” she carefully lied, “but why that name?”

Harley shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “I dunno,” she mumbled. “I always wanted to name my daughter that.” She was making a good attempt at not meeting her friend’s eyes by watching her hands twist around each other in her lap.

Suddenly she was pulled into a hug. “I love it.”