What Are the Odds?
Disclaimer: I don't own either of these two lovely ladies, although I'd like to find out about renting Wendy from Joker some weekend.
“So, tell me again why I’m here with you,” Nancy requested as the two young women started across the parking lot from the car toward the large, looming liquor shop.
Liquor Box, she read silently from the massive blinking sign above the place. Classy.
Wendy thought very carefully, before turning to smile pleasantly at the taller girl.
“Well, you did ask if I could give you a lift to the gym. And the gym is very near my flat, so I thought I’d just stop off here on the way instead of dropping you off first and then coming all the way back. I need to pick up a bottle of whiskey, because I like to have it on hand for when Mr. Joker catches a cold. He finds that it helps him more than anything else. Personally,” she confided, leaning closer and giggling slightly, “I think it’s because he gets so drunk off of the smell alone that he forgets he’s sick.”
“Uh…huh. So, why am I here?” Nancy asked again, her mind working valiantly to try to separate the useful information from the extensive trappings of useless ramble.
“Oh, dear, my purse!” Wendy noted sadly, stooping to retrieve the little black bag.
“Oh, I just remembered,” Nancy announced with a slight smirk, watching attentively and recalling that she was willing to put up with a lot for that sort of view.
“Remembered what?” the little blonde asked, blinking. Then she brightened. “I remember this one time, when I missed a step getting off the train and twisted my ankle, Mr. Joker offered to rub it better for me. I don’t recall that he ever got to the ankle, though,” she concluded, pondering this matter very carefully.
Nancy suppressed a groan with great difficulty, but was unable to suppress a comment.
“Oh, great, that’s just what I want to hear about: Joker’s exploits with his secretary.”
“Well, I’m not really his secretary; I’m more like his administrative assistant.” Then she frowned. “Did I just say that out loud? Usually, that’s only what I tell handsome men I meet at parties. Not that I really go to a lot of parties anymore; Mr. Joker is worried that I never meet anyone new. Says he enjoys having me around and all, but he doesn’t want me to become socially maladjusted or something.”
“Perish the thought,” Nancy said flatly, pushing the door open with a violent shove.
As they stepped through the doorway of the shop, klaxons and alarms began to sound, and Nancy thought vaguely that there was a bell somewhere nearby. Lights flashed, and confetti and streamers drifted down from somewhere high above them.
It was fairly clear that something was not right.
Apparently, this fact had, surprisingly, not escaped Wendy, either.
“Miss Makuhari! Are you trying to sneak a bottle of liquor into the store?”
“Yeah, you got me.” Nancy smirked again. “I’ve hidden it somewhere on my person. Now, why don’t you try to find it?”
Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on several factors such as point-of-view, altitude, barometric pressure, and wind-speed – Wendy had no time to reply, for at that moment, an oldish man in something resembling a bowling shirt hustled toward them, a slip of paper in hand.
“Congratulations!” he beamed. “You’re our one-millionth customer!”
“Which one of us?” Nancy asked flatly.
The man looked confused.
“Em, I’m not really sure. The counter picked up one of you, but I don’t know which. Tell you what: why don’t you split the prize?”
Nancy sighed impatiently, brightly shining hopes of her temporary chauffeur finishing up her business and getting her to the gym sometime today quickly evaporating.
“What is the prize?”
“Yes; do we win a free beer to share, or something?” Wendy asked.
“Probably a mini bottle of Kahlua,” Nancy muttered.
The clerk’s beaming smile wilted slightly.
“No, actually; you win a free liquor shopping spree, valued at £1000!”
Wendy gave an excited squeal.
“Ooh, lovely! I can buy Mr. Joker a really nice bottle of whiskey for £500!”
The dark-haired girl froze and then turned very slowly to glare at the blonde.
“If you waste £500 on something for a guy who probably spends that on his socks—”
“It’s true,” Wendy conceded. “He does wear very nice socks.”
“—I’m going to shake you until your teeth rattle.”
“Well, then what am I going to spend it on?” Wendy asked, eyes wide and perplexed as the clerk bustled back and pressed a large shopping basket into each girl’s grasp. “I don’t really drink a lot; Mr. Joker says that’s not good for you.”
Nancy pressed one hand wearily to her forehead.
“Look, let’s just go shop. I have a feeling I’ll need some alcohol very, very soon.”
“…And then, after that, Mr. Joker said I’d done very well, and he was going to have me bring him all his tea from now on, because it was the best damn cup of tea he’d ever had! Apparently, that’s an honour worth being proud of,” she added aside, flushing with pride over the memory as they wandered down the champagne isle.
Nancy stared blankly. How in the hell could so much noise come out of something that tiny? It had been at least forty-five minutes since they’d begun filling the shopping baskets they’d been presented with at the door, and her little liquor-shopping buddy had yet to move onto a topic that was distinctly un-Joker-related. Or hell, even stop for breath.
I’m going to kill her. I’m going to break this bottle and use it to kill her, unless she shuts up very, very soon.
“So, Wendy. Do you think that maybe there’s a reason you don’t get invited to many parties?” she asked in a voice very much like rich chocolate syrup laced with cyanide.
Unfortunately, it seemed that Wendy had, over the years, built up an immunity to cyanide. If she was like this around everyone, Nancy didn’t doubt it.
“Well, it’s probably because Mr. Joker keeps me so busy,” the little blonde replied, deadly serious and wide-eyed, as she dropped a bottle of something nice for Joker for a Christmas gift into her basket. “I don’t really have a lot of time to meet new people. In fact, this is the first Friday night I’ve had off in months! Usually, Mr. Joker has some last-minute things to finish up before the weekend, and I stay to help him. Then sometimes we go and have some coffee at this little place he knows nearby. When we were there the other night, he ordered a piece of chocolate cream pie, which is really kind of strange, because I didn’t know that he liked chocolate cream pie. I know that Mr. Gentleman likes it awfully well, because Mr. Joker told me that once…”
Anyone else on the planet would have taken that as a hint, Nancy thought, tuning out the rest of the monologue.
As Wendy continued to chatter on, Nancy wondered if she was looking as completely stupefied as she felt.
I can’t believe I’m not killing her. Why am I not killing her? Could it be that this chatter has dulled my wits to the point that I can’t even function as an assassin? I can barely move, and I think my eye is twitching.
It took her a few steps to register that Wendy had come to a halt, and was looking at her oddly.
“Miss Makuhari, your eye is twitching!”
Yup, Nancy thought.
“Right; off to the gym, then?” Wendy asked brightly as she started the car fifteen minutes later. She glanced back anxiously at the four big brown paper bags filled with bottles of varying size, label, colour, and shape, and then pulled very carefully out of the parking spot.
“You know what? No,” Nancy replied, her voice muffled by her hands. “I’m not up to it. I don’t know why, but I’m exhausted.”
“Oh, that’s not good,” the little blonde said fretfully. “Maybe you’ve caught a cold. You ought to go home and get some rest.”
“I’ve got a better idea: let’s go give all this stuff a taste test.”
Wendy frowned.
“But I thought you said you were sleepy.”
“Hey, I’m never too tired to forge a new friendship,” Nancy said. And maybe being drunk will make her talk less. Or make me hear less. Either is good at this point.
“Oh, what a nice sentiment!” Wendy exclaimed, eyes wide and a little misty. Then she giggled. “I’ll drink to that!”
“Not in the car,” Nancy said automatically. If this is my last memory, I’m going to be really pissed off.
“D’you want to have another?”
Nancy lifted her head from the arm of the sofa with great difficulty, and peered in the direction of this slurred offer. As it turned out, being drunk didn’t stop Wendy from talking; she was beginning to have her doubts about the ability of a nuclear holocaust to accomplish that miracle.
And drunk Wendy was – apparently, this kid had yet to learn that most people did not “sample” their brand-new liqueurs by filling up a coffee mug and having at it. At about the hour mark, the chattering little fluff ball had decided that they shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach, or two empty stomachs – since there were two of them, of course – and had made a nice pot of soup. This might have been substantially more helpful, had both girls not arrived at the simultaneous conclusion that the soup was lacking something, and chosen to correct this by dumping in a good half of the very nice bottle of whiskey that Wendy had recalled a split second too late was supposed to be for Mr. Joker. Nancy had had hard work to take the phone away before Wendy could phone her boss up and invite him over for some soup.
Why she’d let the Joker-obsessed little energy molecule talk her into this method of drinking – both with the coffee mug and the soup pot – Nancy was still trying to figure out. Maybe more alcohol would help.
Later.
After a nap.
“No, thanks; I think I’ve had enough for now,” she replied, stretching her arms above her head and arching her back slightly.
“What!” Wendy exclaimed, aghast once she stopped being mesmerized by the glimpse of beautifully toned stomach revealed when her drinking pal’s shirt slid up a bit. “But you’ve only had…this many.”
She began to count her fingers with careful and painstaking slowness, and eventually gave up after repeatedly losing count at three. Nothing daunted, she reached for the phone and punched in a number.
“Hello; Mr. Joker?”
“Uh…no,” came a very confused male voice from the other end of the line.
“Oh; okay,” Wendy agreed happily. “What comes after three?”
“Uh…four,” the man who was very decidedly not Joker replied after a long moment.
“Four! I knew that,” Wendy confided to her new friend with a giggle.
“Y-yeah,” he said hesitantly. “Glad to help.”
“Okay; see you Monday, Mr. Joker!”
With that, she hung up and turned back to Nancy, triumphantly holding up four fingers.
“That many!” Then she stopped and frowned. “I think…”
“I wanna go out.”
Wendy blinked at Nancy, who had just sat bolt upright and began to move across the couch towards her, a strange gleam in her eye.
“You’re going?” she asked sadly, missing the gleam and the abrupt bolting upright, as well as their possible significance in signalling the second bizarre twist of fate in the same day. “Well, okay. You said you weren’t feeling well; you should probably go get some rest. D’you want a drink for the road?”
“No! I wanna go out!” the blue-haired girl repeated, slapping her hand down on the couch cushion for emphasis.
It was a few seconds before Wendy’s slowed reflexes led her to leap back slightly with a startled squeak. Then she frowned.
“But…I thought you were tired.”
“That was then,” Nancy scoffed. “It’s Friday night! Who sits around drinking in their apartment on Friday night?”
“Well, maybe not everyone likes going out all the time,” Wendy countered a little defensively, flushing guiltily and curling up against a soft fluffy white pillow. “And I don’t stay in every Friday.”
“Yeah; like this Friday, for example.”
“Lovely! Where are we going, then?”
“I don’t know yet,” Nancy snapped, settling back onto the other end of the couch. “Let me think about it.”
“Alright,” Wendy agreed reluctantly. “But you shouldn’t drive; I think you’ve had too much to drink. Give me your keys,” she finished, climbing to the other end of the couch, almost into Nancy’s lap, and holding out her hand expectantly.
“I don’t have my car; you drove us here.”
Wendy frowned, leaning back on her heels.
“Did I?”
Now it was Nancy’s turn to frown. She crossed her arms and pondered this.
“I think so…”
“I don’t think either of us should drive,” Wendy said sadly, then brightened and grinned mischievously. “Maybe we should try to find a handsome man and seduce him into giving us a ride!”
“You have a lot of those stashed in here?” Nancy asked, peering interestedly at the closed door of the broom closet, vague images of a little leather-clad blonde whipping a legion of well-oiled men into submission drifting across her mind. Of course, a leather-clad her whipping a legion of well-oiled men and a little blonde, also well-oiled, into submission was better.
Wendy’s face fell.
“Oh, right; this is my house. I forgot,” she confessed, rubbing the back of her head sheepishly. “Well, then, maybe we should find a pretty girl and seduce her into giving us a ride!”
Nancy arched an eyebrow.
“And you have a lot of those stashed in here?”
“Bloody hell!” Wendy exclaimed, voice wobbling slightly. “Why don’t my plans ever work?”
“It’s just as well,” Nancy shrugged. “We’re independent women; we don’t need men to do things for us. Or women. Unless they’re hot,” she added aside.
“Right,” Wendy agreed happily, her pouting of a second ago completely forgotten. “So, shall we call a taxi?”
“If it’s a hot woman.”
“I think it’s actually a car. Most taxis are cars,” Wendy informed her very seriously before scrambling to the other end of the couch and snatching up the phone again.
She punched the first button on her speed dial, and waited patiently, bouncing slightly in place.
“Hello!” she greeted brightly when a sleepy voice finally answered on the fifth ring. “Are you a taxi?”
“Wendy?” Joker asked from the other end of the line, trying desperately to clear the sleep-fog from his brain. “Is that you?”
“Yes, it is! But how did you know my name, Mr. Taxi?”
“It’s not a taxi, actually,” he replied slowly. “It’s Joker.”
“Oh! I talked to you earlier,” she noted happily. “You told me what comes after three!”
“Er…what?”
“After three!” Wendy repeated. “The number, you know.” Then she laughed. “Mr. Joker, have you been drinking?”
“No,” he replied slowly. “I’ve been sleeping.
“What a silly thing to do,” she giggled. “You’re silly.” She cupped one hand over the mouthpiece, and grinned at over her shoulder at Nancy, who was in the process of seeing what parts of her little hostess made the best noises when pinched, poked, or otherwise manipulated. “He’s silly,” she whispered.
As Nancy’s arm snaked over her shoulder, she turned her attention back to the phone.
“So, when are you going to come to pick us up?”
“Where are you?” Joker asked hesitantly, as one fearing the answer.
“We’re at my house!”
“Good,” he said emphatically. “Just…just stay there, and wait for me.”
Wendy glared at the phone.
“Don’t tell us what to do! We’re independent women who live our lives the way we want to, and if we ask you to come and get us, you should just do it, because our money is as good as anyone else’s! You’re a bad taxi!” she concluded angrily, before slamming down the phone. She crossed her arms and nodded in satisfaction. “Well, I told him, alright.”
“Yeah,” Nancy agreed, blowing gently on the back of the other girl’s ear. “But now we don’t have a taxi.”
Wendy shivered a bit, and then snuggled back against Nancy enthusiastically enough to set them both off balance and send them tumbling back against the couch cushions.
“That’s okay,” she beamed up at Nancy, reaching up impulsively to run her fingers lightly through the deep blue hair fanning out over the cushion, that had been steadily fascinating her more and more all evening. “I don’t really want to go out anymore.”
Nancy smiled wickedly.
“Really.”
Wendy nodded emphatically, nearly causing substantial damage to Nancy’s shoulder, her own chin, and very possibly surrounding environment in general.
“I want to stay here and snuggle with my new friend instead!”
“Snuggling. Well, we can call it that, if you want…”
“Hooray!”
Several seconds passed. Then…
“I think I’m ready for another drink now,” Nancy said.
“So, he says ‘off you go, then’, and smacks your ass?” that same Nancy asked half an hour later, her makeshift Cosmopolitan served in a coffee mug tipping slightly.
Wendy, in the act of leaning over the opposite arm of the couch to refill her glass with the last bits of beer remaining in the bottle, peeked over her shoulder and nodded.
“That’s about it,” she replied cheerfully. “Our little ritual.”
“Like this?” Nancy asked, bringing her hand down sharply on the girl’s conveniently posed backside.
“Ack!” Wendy yelped, nearly dumping the rest of her drink onto the carpet. She blinked, her breathing speeding up slightly. “Well, sort of like that. He doesn’t usually linger like that, though. Just a slap, and then off I go. He doesn’t generally do all the…um…rubbing and squeezing.”
“Really?” Nancy asked, continuing to both rub and squeeze.
“Well, sometimes. But he’s stopped doing it after he sends me to get something because…um, because I…get all distracted and…um…what was I saying?”
“You were getting another drink.”
“Oh, right!” Wendy blinked. “Was I?”
“Yeah; you were getting me one, too.”
“Right, then; what’ll you try this time?”
“What you’re having. I want to see if I’m drunk enough for beer to taste good.”
Wendy half-skipped, half staggered into the kitchen, and Nancy picked up a magazine placed “artfully carelessly” on the side table. After a few minutes, she heard a thump, and a pained whimper, and the little blonde emerged from the kitchen, two bottles of beer tucked under one arm, and rubbing her nose sadly.
She handed Nancy one bottle, and curled up at the other end of the couch with the other.
“Bloody wall,” she muttered, glowering darkly at the edge of the doorway between living room and kitchen.
“Funny how walls are always jumping out at you like that when you’ve had too much to drink,” Nancy said with a yawn.
Immediately, Wendy was on hands and knees, crawling across the couch, dragging the little white cushion with her.
“Are you sleepy?” she asked concernedly. “Do you want to have a sleep?”
“Yeah, okay,” Nancy agreed indifferently, one eye watchfully on the girl kneeling in front of her as she took the cushion.
She laughed, the sound answering Wendy’s startled shriek as the blonde found herself being pulled down. However, the laugh quickly turned to a slightly wheezing gasp as it began to occur to her in the shorter girl’s weight forcing the air very suddenly out of her lungs, that maybe she hadn’t thought this through.
Oh, well. She might be a noisy, klutzy little chatter-box, but she was warm, and with a little coaxing, she’d be getting a lot warmer.
If only, Nancy thought, stifling another yawn, she could drudge up the energy to do a little coaxing.
I don’t believe it, she thought bewilderedly. I’m just lying here, letter her cuddle, for God’s sake.
Cuddle, cuddle, cuddle, Wendy sang silently to herself, smiling happily.
And thus passed several minutes. Or maybe it was only a few, and both girls were simply too drunk to correctly estimate the passage of time.
Nevertheless, one of said girls was getting bored, and felt decidedly that this party needed a little livening up.
“Know what?” Nancy said abruptly (because, as she decided the third time she tried to move to either push off her little human blanket or initiate something a lot more fun than nap time, only to have her limbs fail utterly to cooperate, one had to go about this party-starting business slowly), startling Wendy out of the half-sleepy, half-giddy fog obscuring her brain from reality. Or reality from her brain. Or a little of both, just for good measure.
The blonde looked up, accidentally resting her cheek against something delightfully warm and pillow-esque and grinning enough to call into question the accidental nature of the action.
“Hmm?”
“One of these days, I’m gonna beat up the library.”
Wendy thought about this very carefully.
“That might be a little difficult; it’s a big building. You’ll probably need to rent a wrecking ball.” With this, she pulled back and continued excitedly. “Can I come with you? I’ve always wanted to play with a wrecking ball!”
“No! I’m not beating up the building; I’m going to beat up the people! Those bastards are all going down. All those smug Special Operations bastards. But I’ll let you live,” she finished. “You can come be in my harem.”
“Oh, that sounds fun!” Wendy squealed. “Can I wear a pretty scarf with lots of beads and things?”
“Sure, but that’s all.”
“That’s not very practical!”
“You’ll find a way to keep warm.”
“Well, alright, then. Will your harem have any men?”
“Maybe. If they ask nicely.”
“So, what will your harem do?”
“Uh…”
“Will we have sleepovers?”
“Of a sort,” Nancy replied carefully.
“Hooray! Will we have pillow fights at the sleepovers?”
“Yup,” Nancy said with a slightly unsteady grin. “But my pillow fights are special. Wanna go practice?”
The combination of trying to nod enthusiastically and scramble to her feet at the same time proved to require more coordination than Wendy had at her disposal, and Nancy blinked, startled, as she toppled to the floor with a thud.
Nothing daunted, Wendy was on her feet in a second, and in another, both girls were racing happily off to the room in the house that might provide the most pillows. As well as a conveniently placed bed.
And for several hours, the pillows flew to and fro without rest.
“Good morning!” Wendy greeted cheerfully, before wincing in pain as her head reminded her with an emphatic throb that it still hadn’t forgiven her for last night.
“Hey,” Nancy said with a small smile, not requiring a reminder that her head was still holding a similar grudge. She ran a hand through her hair, still damp from the shower, and peered at the coffee pot on the stove.
“Oh! I’m making coffee,” Wendy announced rather unnecessarily. “Do you want some?”
“Sure.”
After several minutes of repeatedly dozing and waking up to recall after a bewildered second exactly where she was, Nancy laughed softly.
“So. You enjoy the pillow fight?”
“It was...um. Nice. Lots of fun,” Wendy said, blushing beyond pink and somewhere into the neighbourhood of fuchsia. “Although, I still don’t understand why you had me wear those glasses.”
Nancy shrugged, smiling wickedly.
“I do like a girl in glasses.”
Wendy giggled, setting a steaming mug of coffee down in front of Nancy and taking a moment to surreptitiously brush against her shoulder.
“There’s someone you should meet. The next time you see Mr. Joker, ask him about Agent Paper…”
End Notes: Whee! More silly-fun nonsense fic, in the form of a Girl’s Night Out. Well, a Girl’s Night In Spent Happily Getting Drunk. But that just sounds so unwieldy. I think a lot of this worked pretty well, but there were some lines that felt really off to me. Maybe I'll just be cheap and chalk it up to the beer/wine/Cosmopolitans/etc.
Anyway, any thoughts are very much appreciated. Even if they're just "I'D like to get drunk with Nancy/Wendy/Yomiko/all three sometime..."
Deviant Hearts Archive | Back to main index