End: Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn Are Sentenced To Insemination

"Can't you take a joke?" Harley Quinn's broken smile held an edge of nervousness to it.

A figure stepped from the shadows, and the shadows clung to her, limned a gaunt female form with long, wild hair, hood drawn up to hide her eyes. The Enchantress stepped past Lois Lane and turned so that her left side faced the two women bound to the gynecologist chairs. She raised her hand...and green sigils glowed on the bare abdomens of the two villains.

"What are you doing!?" Poison Ivy said, her face a mask of concentration.

"Easy there love," a British voice said from behind her. "I can tell you're trying to use your powers, but I've disabled those particular neural connections."

"You **** and impregnated Lois Lane, to make her bear our children," the Enchantress said. "I can feel why. Your own wombs, are so polluted. All those chemicals, all that ****. Scars. Sterile fields where nothing can grow."

The sigils on the women's abdomens burned gold for a moment, and Ivy and Harley writhed in pain.

"Now, you are healed," the Enchantress said.

"We've been havin' a think about you two," Manchester Black said. "Incarceration doesn't help, you'll just break out again. Probably try the same scheme. So we're looking at rehabilitation. Miss Lane, if you would?"

The reporter pulled open her trenchcoat. She was naked beneath, and the Enchantress lowered her right hand to touch a spot just beneath Lois Lane's belly button. Green light wreathed the shadowy form of the mystic...and something emerged from the reporter's abdomen. Two glowing spheres of light. They floated in midair, mere motes in the darkness. Then they divided again...and again. Eight floating motes of light moved toward the bound women, as if on an invisible breeze. Ivy and Harley grew rigid as Manchester Black's mental control paralyzed their muscles.

So they could do nothing as the motes touched the glowing sigils, one by one. Four each.

The Enchantress lowered her arms. Lois closed the trenchcoat.

"It is done. Four embryos are now implanted in each of their wombs. They will attach soon...and grow."

"Lovely," Manchester Black said with a smile. He held a hand over each woman's forehead, not quite touching them as he exerted his mental powers. "This is the first part of your rehabilitation, ladies. You're getting the kids you want. And you're getting new lives, too. Our resident artificial intelligence Kelex has set you up with new identities, Steel and Lightray are setting up your house, and a greenhouse business that the two of you will run together. All we need to do is...and sorry for the intrusion...wipe most of your memories and add in new ones."

Tears ran down from Harley Quinn's eyes. Her toned, athletic body couldn't even quiver as the psychic scalpel of Manchester Black's psychic powers cut into her brain. Excising key parts of what made Harley Quinn the Clown Princess of Crime. Substituting in carefully crafted memories of Charleen Quinsley attending community college, marrying Pamela Pamlowski, starting a business together, going in for in vitro fertilization.

Lois Lane watched, her mouth a tight line, arms across her chest.

"It's for the best," Midnighter said. "They'll have money enough to live on. Ivy will forget about her powers. With eight kids, they'll be too busy to break the law, and we've taken steps to make sure none of their old enemies will find them. They've got a new life. Everything they ever wanted. Thanks to you."

The reporter's lower lip quivered. Doubt assailed her. Yet as Ivy and Harley's eyes rolled up into their sockets, and blood trickled out from their nostrils, eyes, and ears, she knew it was too late.

Goodbye Harley. Goodbye Ivy. This is what you get for fucking with Lois Lane. The reporter thought...but it was hard, very hard, to watch these two women have their lives taken away. Even after everything they had done to her.

"Do you think..." Lois said, as her stomach turned herself into knots. "...if we had asked them, they would have done it willingly? If we had made the offer, would they have taken a new life, without any strings attached?"

"No," Enchantress said, her voice hollow. "They are broken creatures. They cannot mend themselves. They will need time, together, to heal. To build themselves anew. In another world, another life, perhaps, they would have found their way...but in this one, they could not do it on their own. They could not make that decision."

"This is what the Authority does," Apollo said, as he placed a friendly hand on Lois Lane's shoulder. "We make the hard choices no one else will."

Ivy and Harley's eyes closed. Their bodies slumped, utterly limp...and Manchester Black sighed and withdrew his hands.

"It's done," he said. "Let's get these two ladies into their own bed. They've got forty weeks of morning sickness, swollen ankles, gestational diabetes, sore nipples, and God knows what else ahead. It's a good thing we sorted out a big nursery ahead of time."

Lois Lane watched as the two villains—now imperceptibly but profoundly pregnant—were cleaned up, dressed in matching pajamas, and laid together. Harley...no, her new name was Charleen—automatically curled onto her side, butt pressed against her wife's hip like a dog keeping contact at night.

The reporter looked at them and knew she was one of the few people that knew who they were. Who they had been. A secret she would need to take to her grave. A burden she had never expected to carry on her night out.

"Goodbye," Lois Lane whispered, and walked back through the golden door that would lead her once again to Metropolis and her own life. Leaving them to all the happiness and toil that awaited them. Free of Gotham, Batman, the Joker, Arkham Asylum, the whole mad game of caped cops and masked robbers. A part of Lois Lane almost envied them that. Yet as dawn rose over Metropolis, and a familiar caped figure zoomed overhead, she knew that world was not for her.