The moment Harley opened her eyes, she found herself huddled in a corner of a dilapidated room. She tried to lift her arms and found that one arm seemed to be dislocated. She rolled up her sleeve with her other hand, saw the bruise imprinted on her forearm, and concluded from the abrasions on her waist and the side of her leg that someone had dragged her by her arm into this place.
Aside from the initial movement, Harley remained still, her eyes half-lidded, looking around the room through the narrow field of vision beneath her eyelashes.
As a local of Gotham, Harley recognized the room after a quick glance around; it was likely a dormitory in some sweatshop. The term 'dormitory' was apparently an exaggeration; it was just a corner sectioned off from the factory to provide some space for child laborers to rest. There were about fifteen to sixteen children about the same age as her in there.
It took Harley about five seconds to remember how she had come to be here. She then realized that this could be some kind of illusion, and she knew it was an environment created by allies; otherwise, Gotham wouldn't have been selected as the location.
After sorting this out, the first thing Harley did was close her eyes and go back to sleep.
This body had probably never enjoyed a full meal. It had worked all day, shivering from exhaustion; it looked like she may have offended a supervisor, dislocating an arm in the process. There was a high probability of having no food to eat all day tomorrow. If she didn't seize this time to rest and let her body adapt, she ran the risk of falling into a coma due to low blood sugar.
Harley slept through till the next morning.
It wasn't until the weak light seeped through the cracks in the door, that Harley got the chance to look carefully at herself. The little girl she inhabited was about seven or eight years old, skinny like a stick and as frail as an egg placed on a chopstick.
Her arm lay weakly at her side and her complexion looked much better. After all, Harley was never afraid or worried. After a sound sleep, she felt well-rested, at least mentally.
Having recovered a bit of strength, Harley first pushed up her arm forcefully, grimaced, and managed to reset her arm.
Harley found that her guess was indeed right; this should have been a habitual dislocation. After resetting her arm, other than the sour pain, her movements were not hindered.
After a while, a plump woman wearing a greasy apron walked in. She was carrying a basin filled with leftover food, and a dirty bag filled with hard bread.
After she threw the food into the room, the initially weak children attacked the food like starving tigers. Harley was the quickest, and without even glancing at the bowl of soup, she grabbed at least five large pieces of hard bread.
She held three pieces against her chest and stashed two under her arm, executed an agile roll on the ground, kicked aside a slower child that was in her way, and swiftly returned to her original corner.
She placed the four pieces of bread in the corner behind her, blocked by her body and the wall, effectively hiding the bread from view. Then, like a beast, she used her teeth to tear into the only piece of bread in her arms.
It was a joke; she had survived on the streets of Gotham, Harley thought. Her uncle, along with his mob, had chased her away just two days after her parents' death. Without weapons and taken by surprise, Harley had no option but to leave for her own safety.
A middle-class girl suddenly displaced, with no mob connections and overly attractive. Harley pulled all stops to survive. She hid on that street for three months, not only outwitting the other kids on the street, but also starving stray dogs that couldn't compete for food.
Within seconds, Harley had crammed a large piece of hard bread into her stomach without choking. Then, she pounced on the child next to her, biting his ear.
The boy screamed out in agony. Harley wiped her bloody mouth with the back of her hand, pushed the boy away, picked up his discarded bread on which sand was sticking, and, undeterred, began stuffing her mouth hungrily.
The nearby children recoiled in fear, shifting slightly in her direction. Harley's gaze landed on a person's bread every three seconds; those under her scrutiny immediately grasped their food and shifted away.
It seemed like a lot of food was thrown in by that black woman, but there were fifteen to sixteen children here. If it were divided evenly, each child could get about a fist-sized piece of hard bread; the remaining vegetable soup had a little salt and sugar in it. So, essentially, it sufficed to keep them from starving, but certainly not to satiate their hunger.
However, the issue was that food was seized not served; Harley alone seized five pieces of bread, which meant that perhaps four children had nothing to eat. But the bread was not really the bone of contention; the real battle was around the soup pot that was brought in.
Although bread could fill the stomach, the soup was hot, containing butter, which these children lacked most - fats. It was evident there was a small group in charge of the soup pot. A few robust children watched their every move, but they did not dare to approach recklessly. The rest, who were excessively thin and had failed to obtain any bread, could only squat on the side, hoping to get a little leftover soup.
However, in another corner of the room, a boy stood out starkly. He had a head of strikingly red hair, his face was covered in common freckles you'd find on a Caucasian, and he seemed stronger than the others, but he squatted in a corner without saying a word or making a move.
Naturally, Harley also noticed the oddity of the boy. She scanned him from head to toe, concluding that he must be Little Bruce.
It wasn't hard to figure out. Little Bruce was not yet Batman, and some of his habitual gestures were not consciously hidden.
Harley had long discovered that when Little Bruce was in thought, his right index finger would lightly tap on his arm as a reflex.
Harley chuckled to herself, she didn't need to think to know that Little Bruce must be contemplating, contemplating about who brought him here, what kind of scheme they might have, where this place was, and how to escape this trap.
Harley took another vicious bite of bread, rolling her eyes. She thought back to the days just after her uncle had kicked her out of the house, when she also sat and pondered on the banks of Gotham River. In the end, if it hadn't been for the hidden trash can at the street corner that no one had rummaged through, she would have starved to death.
Finishing the small piece of bread she'd stolen, Harley brought out another piece from behind her and continued to gulp it down. Glancing at Little Bruce, she thought, this pampered young master surely wouldn't know that this might be the only proper meal they'd have in the next two days.
Because she had experienced real hunger, she knew that even though the bread they stuffed into their mouths was hard and didn't taste good, it was filling. No sweatshop that employed child labor could afford to feed them such a thing with every meal.
Indeed, Harley's assumption was entirely correct. Apart from this morning meal, they only had cold water for lunch and dinner.
This was a food seasoning processing factory. The children's job was to pour bags of ingredients into the pot and stir them. Don't ask why there wasn't a production line; electricity was much more expensive than bread and soup.
To adults, a bag of ten-plus kilogram ingredients wasn't considered heavy, and even with the constant hauling and stirring, the work wouldn't be considered physically demanding. However, the ones doing the manual labor were seven to eight-year-old children at most, who could barely carry the bags of ingredients. Moreover, they had to stir a large pot by themselves, with absolutely no time to rest between six in the morning till midday. Even Harley, with her determination, found herself feeling dizzy from exhaustion.
This was followed by a half-hour break at noon, not to rest, but to have their faces and hands washed clean in the washroom, to avoid sweat dropping into the pot.
In the washroom, Harley noticed Little Bruce looked dreadfully pale. His entire arm was shaking as he washed his hands. And if nothing unexpected happened, he would not be able to lift his arm in a few hours.
Completely wrong way of exerting force, Harley thought shaking her head. Failing to tighten his core and exert force simultaneously from his back and shoulders, solely relying on his arms for stirring, he wouldn't even make it through to the next day.
Clearly, Bruce Wayne at this age had never done any heavy lifting. When his parents were still alive, the heaviest task he had ever attempted was carrying his children's bike down the three steps at the garden of the manor, and even then, Alfred was there to help.
Harley remembered that he didn't eat anything that morning, and his body had probably been starved for two days now. By the afternoon, the harsh lesson of low blood sugar would teach him a tough lesson.
Little Bruce nearly fell headfirst into the soup pot, if not for the quick reflexes of the supervising adult nearby, who pulled him back out. His arm, however, touched the heating section underneath and got a burn blister.
After the overseer pulled him out, he just dragged him out and brutally beat him. If Little Bruce had really fallen into the soup pot, the batch of soup would have been ruined, and that was worth a lot more than he was.
When Harley returned to the dormitory after a full day's work, she saw Little Bruce curled up in a corner. One side of his face, neck, and arm were all badly bruised, and his anklet was swollen, looking as if he couldn't walk.
Harley didn't go to the washroom to clean herself and therefore arrived earlier than the others. She approached and squatted down beside Little Bruce, grinned at him, and Little Bruce immediately recognized her from her maniacal smile.
"We need to find a way... find a way to escape..."
"Escape to where?"
Little Bruce opened his mouth, just about to speak when Harley interrupted him with a click of her tongue, "Don't tell me you think there's a place better than here? Wake up, young master! You're not Bruce Wayne anymore!"
Little Bruce clenched his fist, obviously angered by Harley's words. He didn't understand how Harley could so readily accept the fate of being abused, not only without resistance but actively participating in the work.
"I belong here, Bruce," Harley's tone got unusually gentle, "Children of Gotham all belong here. This isn't suffering; this is our lives."
Little Bruce remained silent, curled up on the floor without uttering a word, but his eyes showed his refusal to accept his fate. Harley shook her head and sat down in a corner on the other side.
After a while, she said: "If you can't survive in this environment, how are you going to escape? If you don't become strong and healthy here, you'll realize that your perception of hitting rock bottom can have much deeper depths."