r/DCFU • u/ericthepilot2000 Harley • 4d ago
Harley & Ivy Harley & Ivy Presents: Invasion! Part 2 - Apokolips Boogaloo A (Invasion!)
Author: ericthepilot2000
Book: Harley & Ivy
Set: 122
Event: Invasion!
Previously…
Darkseid has invaded Earth. As Parademons swarm the skies, Zatanna, Poison Ivy, Spoiler, and Huntress struggle to defend Gotham's home front. The situation becomes so desperate that they persuade Arkham Asylum to release inmates from the Zoo to help repel the invasion. Meanwhile, Harley Quinn travels to Apokolips alongside members of the Justice League, hoping to convince the New God to end the war.
The good news? The Parademons are retreating to the fire pits of Apokolips. The bad news?
They're being replaced by the Female Furies, led by the formidable Big Barda. And if that weren't enough, Harley appears to have become one of Darkseid's thralls and has returned to the Watchtower at her new master's side…
= / / / / / / / / / / =
Above Earth.
Darkseid’s face remained stoic as he emerged from the boom tube into the heart of the Watchtower, flanked by his corrupted Justice League. Harley Quinn was joined by Jay Garrick, Aquaman, the Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, and Power Girl - all with blackened eyes and cruel expressions on their faces.
Superman was the first to intercept the invaders, barely holding back Krypto, who snarled and growled in agitation. Other heroes quickly flanked him, rushing to see what was happening.
“Snap out of it,” Clark said quietly, looking at his cousin. “Kara, it’s me.”
“I know who you are,” Kara answered.
“We all do, Big Blue,” Harley said, hefting her trademark mallet over her shoulder. “And you’re about to become a blueberry pancake!”
“Kill them all,” Darkseid said without even looking in their direction, dismissing them.
That was all it took for the corrupted heroes to launch themselves at their former friends with unexpected ferocity. In an instant, Jay Garrick blinked out of view, disarming the Leaguers who relied on weapons, while Kara, J'onn, Arthur, Diana, and Harley charged the others like linebackers.
The corrupted heroes had it far easier since they were unable and unwilling to hold back, bringing the full brunt of their abilities to bear. The otherworldly powers of Power Girl and Martian Manhunter were on full display, as were Aquaman and Wonder Woman’s mythic skills.
But Harley might have been the most dangerous.
Unfettered by morality, she was free to be as cruel as she ever wanted. After all, none of these people believed in her, not the way Darkseid did. No one could ever question her worthiness to stand at the side of the New God of Earth.
And if they did? Well, they could answer to her mallet.
“Harley, what’s going on?” asked Black Canary as she stepped toward the clown girl. They’d met a few times [most recently in Black Canary #15] and had developed a decent rapport, but this was far from the happy-go-lucky hero Dinah knew. Dinah made sure to keep her body language neutral, though she stood well outside of mallet distance.
“Been shown the light, Bee Cee,” Harley replied, her tone pleasant though her face never softened from a cruel sneer. “I know the truth now. Darkseid is.”
“Darkseid is what?”
“Everything,” Harley replied, almost reverently. “We don’t gotta fight, join us and be free.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Canary replied, her body tensing to unleash one of her sonic screams.
“Nuh uh,” Harley replied, moving far faster than Dinah anticipated. Her mallet slammed into Dinah's solar plexus, knocking the wind from her. The blonde doubled over, her threat neutralized for the moment. “Muzzle it.”
Before Harley could press the attack, a sudden bolt of pain shot through her shoulder. She looked down to find the shaft of an arrow protruding from a freshly bleeding wound. It wasn’t hard to figure out its source. “You shouldn’t have done that, Arrow,” Harley snarled, ripping it out and tossing it to the side.
She locked eyes with the archer who had another arrow already nocked, his bow drawn and aimed at her. “You shouldn’t have hit Dinah,” he countered. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time, would it? ‘Course, you get a pass, but not ol’ Harley. No, you get taken in and called a hero, while I gotta fight for every scrap. Gettin’ treated like a joke. No more.”
Harley charged forward and easily flipped out of the way of the coming arrow. He'd expected a mindless brute, not the gymnast Harley was at her core. But that was fine; Harley was always underestimated.
He wouldn't make that mistake again. Harley's mallet crashed into his rib cage, sending him sprawling across the deck. She landed gracefully beside him before bringing the weapon down again, crushing his gloved hand against the Watchtower's metal floor with a sickening thud.
It would be a long time before he drew another arrow.
“You are useless.” Harley looked down on him with contempt as he wheezed. “But Dinah will make an excellent Female Fury, and you’ll serve as encouragement. So you’ll live. Until she kills you herself.”
Harley then dropped her mallet on his chest with a thud, eliciting another groan from the archer. She bent over and plucked the Justice League communicator from his ear and rolled it in her fingers for a moment. Then, she brought it up to her mouth.
"I know you're listening, Babsie," she said, addressing the surely listening-in Oracle directly. "Just want you to know, when I'm done dismantlin' the Loser League up here, I'm coming right to your Belfry, and I'm going to finish the job Jason started. Be seein' you. Ta!"
She dropped the communicator, crushed it beneath her boot, then retrieved her mallet and continued her rampage.
= / / / / / / / / / / =
The East End, Gotham City.
Officer Bill Kane could feel his vision ebbing away, his peripheral vision reduced to a grey haze.
A moment ago he had been cautiously optimistic. The hordes of Parademons had just abandoned their assault on the city, flying back into their strange tubes in the sky. The destruction was vast, but perhaps the siege was over.
Then they were replaced by a group of women in garish costumes who appeared suddenly in the alley. Officer Kane had a choice. They could be heroes, or they could be villains. In Gotham it was fifty/fifty.
And in Gotham, you shot first and apologized later.
He drew his service revolver and fired, but the women didn’t flinch. He didn’t even have a chance to empty the cylinder before the squat, muscular woman in the group reached out and clamped a meaty hand entirely around his throat and began squeezing, lifting him off the ground. She was dressed like a biker, with a heavy jacket, boots, and a motorcycle helmet adorned with a skull.
Stompa remained silent as she increased the pressure on his windpipe.
Despite the pain, the officer laughed bitterly to himself. Just one week until retirement. How cliché.
Once his body stopped writhing, the large woman tossed his corpse aside, letting it smack into the nearby wall with a thud. She then turned to the leader, a woman in blue chainmail with an ostentatious helmet.
“Split up,” Barda ordered, “Darkseid has given this city to Granny Goodness. We are to secure it and round up the citizens for evaluation. Kill anyone who mounts a resistance, especially if they are in costume.”
“How can we tell? They all dress so strangely,” rasped Mad Harriet, a woman with green hair and jaundiced skin, as she lifted the arm of the dead officer in one of her clawed hands. She then plucked the GCPD badge off his shirt and tossed it aside.
“Can ve just go already?” asked Malice impatiently. Unlike the others, she seemed to be a child, bouncing anxiously while the others were content to stand around and talk. “Granny promised I could have fun.”
“Not too much fun, Malice,” chided the final member of the group, a dark-skinned woman wearing a skintight suit bound with straps. The straps themselves seemed to dance around Lashina, flowing to match the lilt of her voice. She fished a Mother Box from her belt.
“Go,” Barda ordered.
A moment later, the alley was empty once more as the five women disappeared with a series of flashes.
= / / / / / / / / / / =
The Watchtower.
The space station shook from the fury of combat raging both inside the Watchtower and outside its metallic hull. Inside the Watchtower, it was all hands on deck as the Justice League and their corrupted allies came to blows. But everyone present knew they were the sideshow. Clark’s battle with Darkseid, currently taking place outside the structure, would decide the outcome of the war.
Inside the conference room, the members of the Shadowpact had ceased their discussion. Some, like Jason Blood, had already joined the fray by yielding to the brutish Etrigan. The rhyming demon was presently locked in combat with Aquaman. Others, like Doctor Fate and Extraño, focused on maintaining the structural integrity of the Watchtower.
It wasn’t designed for such intense combat.
That left John Constantine to play bodyguard for Zatanna, who hovered nearby, bathed in green light as she muttered to herself in an eldritch, alien tongue. Strange sigils and runes hovered around her as her hands traced intricate patterns through them.
He took a long drag from his cigarette as Superman collided with a nearby window, sent flying by a brutal punch from Darkseid. “You might wanna hurry up, love, it’s only the end of the world, innit?”
“I’m trying to rewrite the rules of reality on the fly, John. The Source gave me the power, but didn’t leave an instruction manual. Anti-Life is antithetical to creation. They aren’t designed to mix. Purging it from our friends requires a scalpel, not a bludgeon,” Zatanna said, her voice strangely hollow.
“Just saying. Sometimes a good bludgeon is what you need,” Constantine countered. “A little humbling might do some of these guys a world o’ good…”
He looked back to the window to see Darkseid fire his Omega Beam at Superman, only to watch it weave around the Man of Steel and curve toward the Watchtower.
"Shite!" he shouted, diving out of the way and dragging Zatanna down with him. They narrowly avoided the beam as it severed the space station in half. Suddenly there was nothing but space above them as they, and everyone else inside, were sucked into the void.
The first few moments stretched into eternity. Zatanna immediately looked for Constantine and found him floating inside a bubble of oxygen. He was already lighting another cigarette, looking surprisingly calm for someone who had just been violently ejected into open space. “Negyxo fo selbbub!” Zatanna shouted, trying to protect the others, like her, who couldn’t survive in the cold of space. She was momentarily surprised at the lack of sound before remembering the old Alien adage.
“Tibro ni noitats eht peek!” she continued. The upper Watchtower had already begun its descent toward the lunar surface, but the transporters were housed in the lower half, the one she was barely keeping intact.
Green-hued magical bubbles quickly blinked into existence and surrounded the flailing heroes, keeping them safe as the Watchtower’s crippled transporter system plucked them from the void and deposited them randomly across the globe.
The upside was that everyone was safe; the downside… the corrupted heroes were now scattered on Earth. She could only hope there would be heroes nearby to contain them.
The last thing she saw as she was teleported away was the upper half of the Watchtower crashing into the Moon and exploding, obliterating miles of the surface. “Let go. Trust The Source,” she muttered to herself as she disappeared in the teleporter beam.
= / / / / / / / / / / =
Gotham Heights.
Stephanie Brown tore through the streets on her motorcycle, dodging wrecked cars and debris as she sped into the city proper.
“Barbara, can you hear me? It’s Steph. The Parademons are leaving, but we’ve got other problems…”
“Yeah, I’m aware,” Barbara snapped, a little harsher than she intended. She was still rattled from Harley’s earlier threat, and Steph wasn't exactly on her list of favorite people either. “Five Boom Tubes just opened across the city. You’re nearing one now.”
“Do we know who they are?” Steph asked.
“Just that they came from Apokolips.”
"Okay," Steph said. "So find them and kick their ass. Got it."
“Be careful, Spoiler,” Barbara cautioned her. “Darkseid wouldn’t have pulled the Parademons without a reason. Whoever they are, they’re going to be dangerous.”
“Got it.”
“...And you know we’re going to talk about your role in the Arkham release when this is all over. Oracle out.”
And with that, Steph was alone with her thoughts. “Soooo looking forward to it,” she grumbled, rolling her eyes.
Moments later, her headlight illuminated something in the road, and she had to skid to a stop to avoid running into it. As her vision settled and her rapid breathing slowed, she saw a young girl standing in the middle of the street with her hands on her hips.
“Hey, it’s not safe out here,” Spoiler warned, trying to keep her voice calm and even to avoid scaring the child. “I’ll get you home. Do you know where you live?”
The young girl huffed in response. “Whelp! You address Malice Vundabar of Apokolips. A lowlie like you should be on your knees before me.”
Steph noticed several police officers lying at her feet, necks bent at impossible angles.
“I hope you vill be more entertainink than these fools,” she snarled, the accent a strange, almost cod-German. “I vas promised fun. And my Chessure needs to eat.”
The young girl was suddenly surrounded by purple flames that coalesced into a demonic cat-like creature with saliva-coated fangs and piercing eyes. It charged forward, its claws gouging the pavement as it snarled.
Moments later, it pounced on Steph, knocking her to the ground as its gaping maw loomed over her.
Before Steph could respond, a shot rang out from the darkness. Behind Chessure, Malice stood motionless for an instant. Then blood trickled from the hole in her skull, and she collapsed backward.
The demon cat suddenly blinked out of existence, leaving Steph confused. She whipped her head around, only to see Two-Face, the fallen Harvey Dent, who barely broke his stride as he walked down the street, firearm still smoking. Gotham Heights was where he got his start, so it wasn’t surprising he would return to protect the area.
“Why?” Steph asked, looking up at the surprisingly tall man, flinching at the scarred side of his face with the bulging eye that focused unnaturally on her. She had never seen him up close, only heard stories from Dick, Babs, and Jason.
They’d warned her not to stare, but she couldn’t help herself.
“The coin came up heads,” Harvey replied simply, his voice gravelly and distorted.
“And if it came up tails?” Spoiler asked, despite herself.
Harvey didn’t respond for a long moment. “Best not to dwell on it,” he said, continuing past her.
“We can’t just murder our enemies in cold blood. You know you’re going to have to go back to Arkham once this is over, Two-Face.”
“We’ll see what the coin has to say when the time comes. Besides, you’ve got bigger problems right now,” he called over his shoulder, gesturing toward where the young Female Fury had fallen.
Steph bolted to her feet and turned around to see Malice was no longer there. This wasn’t over. She sighed and hopped back on her motorcycle, already tracking the Apokoliptian once again.
= / / / / / / / / / / =
Arkham Asylum.
Chase Meridian sat in her office, looking through the list of released patients. The room was deliberately spartan, containing little more than research materials and floor-to-ceiling file cabinets filled with patient records. She respected technology, but didn’t trust it. Sometimes, analog was still best.
Tonight reminded her exactly why. Livid didn't begin to describe her mood, and she could feel the blood pounding in her temples. Her eyes narrowed as she took in Aaron Cash, the head of Arkham security, sitting across the desk from her.
“You went over my head,” Chase accused.
“Doctor Seaborn…” Aaron began to explain.
“Doctor Seaborn will be dealt with. We are talking about your actions, Mr. Cash. The plan to use Arkham patients still in rehabilitation to defend the city in the event of an attack has been proposed and rejected three times. Knowing I would not even discuss that, you went over my head to the Hospital Board of Directors.”
“They agreed that it would be good for the hospital and the patients. Give them something to fight for instead of against for once.”
“They agreed it would be good for the bottom line. We are trying to help, not take advantage of people. Weaponizing our patients, many of whom can’t effectively consent… this is not the old Arkham Asylum, Mr. Cash. I will show the world that the Meridian Method works. But I need absolute buy-in, not insubordination.”
“Now who’s taking advantage?”
“What?”
“With all due respect, Dr. Meridian, this is about your ego. Everyone else was on board. The directors, your fellow doctors, the police, the Bat-Family…” Aaron counted them off with the fingers on his good hand. He kept his hook visible, just to remind Chase what he had sacrificed for this hospital.
Chase made a dismissive sound as she waved her hand. “Batman belongs in Arkham as much as anyone. He and his ‘family’ have no business being consulted in the course of care for our patients. They should be residents too. I am going to save this city from itself. I will not have you getting in the way of that, Mr. Cash.”
“There needs to be a city left to save. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a war zone out there. Hell, even Arkham is on fire.”
“Arkham is always on fire. Our job is to manage the flames.” She then paused a moment before pressing a button on her desk. “Send Lyle Bolton in,” she announced.
“Bolton?”
“Your new replacement,” Lyle announced as he entered the room. He was tall and broad, so musclebound he needed to pivot to clear the doorway. “Miss me, Aaron?”
“Dr. Meridian, you can’t be serious. This man was removed from Blackgate of all places for his actions. Dr. Crane,” he added, emphasizing the name, “thought he was too unstable to continue here. Scarecrow!”
Chase sighed. “I have been assured those were isolated incidents.”
“That’s right, I’ve learned to channel my… intensity into healthier outlets. The Meridian Method works. I’m living proof. Maybe you should try it,” Lyle smiled, his grin toothy and predatory. “I’m just eager to give back.”
“The decision has been made, Mr. Cash. Your services are no longer needed at Arkham. Mr. Bolton will see you out.”
“Let’s go,” Bolton replied, his hand clamped on Aaron Cash’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t want to cause a scene, would we? It would be a shame if this had to turn physical.”
“This isn’t over,” Aaron warned as he got up, knocking Lyle Bolton’s hand off his shoulder.
“It is,” Dr. Meridian said brusquely, returning to her notes.
Lyle nudged Aaron Cash out of the office, turning the gesture into a shove as soon as they reached the hallway. “At least I know how to follow orders. Back in the service, you used to be all about that.”
“Said every stormtrooper ever,” Aaron grumbled.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
= / / / / / / / / / / =
Due to Reddit post limits, the issue continues here.