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Harley knows he’s a good guy because he turns her down when they're drunk.
They’ve been drinking together for over an hour and the alcohol has made them soft and brittle. They’ve been talking about the past, reviving it in awful, maudlin ways. Flag is doing his version of moping, droning on about that crazy witch who used to be his girlfriend, and Harley…well, she’s going for triumphant and independent, but she also sounds a little sad as she describes the ugly process of putting her ex behind her.
They knock beer bottles together. And many other beverages.
Harley watches him through the slanted mirror of her vodka shot. He’s like a tame animal whose teeth have been filed down, but who can still break your neck if he squeezes for too long. She wants to do something reckless.
Harley stands up from the bar stool dizzily. “Well… it’s been swell, but I gotta go do some battery and assault to liven up the night.”
Flag catches her when she careens towards him. His big hands around her waist feel warm and a little unstable.
She looks up at him. His head is tilted, trying to assess how serious she is. His drunken breath fogs her glasses. Harley lowers them. Maybe she shouldn’t wear them in public. What is she, Superman?
Wait, she didn’t ask that.
“What are you, Superman?” he drawls with a sad smirk, tapping the side of her face, making her glasses slide down her nose.
“I could be,” she counters boldly. “I could be – I can be anything.” Anything you want, she almost says. Because that’s what she used to tell all the guys. I can be your fantasy. I am a fantasy.
“I know,” he says, like it’s a fact. He hasn’t let go of her waist yet and his mouth only needs a bit of encouragement to meet hers. It would be sweet.
Flag pulls away before it happens. His paws slide off her awkwardly.
“I’m s-sorry…’m wasted…shouldn’t have…won’t happen again, ma’am,” he mumbles, stumbling away from her, knocking the stool out of his path.
Harley tries to help him gather his bearings, but he pushes her hand aside gently.
“I’m good, thanks.”
The rigors of discipline return to him like second nature and he straightens his posture and makes a valiant attempt to walk out of the bar with dignity.
Harley watches him go. She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to feel at the moment, or any given moment really, but especially now. She’s mainly confused.
Wait, did he just call me ma’am?
Harley laughs with all her teeth. He’s such a polite mama’s boy. It’s refreshing, after all the assholes in her past.
When she turns back to the counter, the bartender informs her Flag has already covered their drinks.
Harley snorts, wiping mascara from her eye. Damn it, he won’t even let her commit one petty crime.
She can tell he’s not comfortable with her. When he finds out she’s joining them for the Corto Maltese mission, he’s visibly displeased, which for Flag means a clenched jaw, repressed politeness, and a tendency to avoid her eyes.
Harley sits next to him on the carrier. She nudges him playfully in the arm.
“You’ve been a stranger, Mister. No calls, no visits, no nothin’. I thought we were friends.”
Flag is tense, unyielding. He nods in her direction. “We are. That’s why I didn’t call. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my decision. I’m sure we all got matching Amanda Waller’s bitch tattoos on our asses.”
His lips struggle against a smile. “Sure, and you did nothing to land yourself back here?”
Harley shrugs, helpless against her habits. “I always do something.”
She doesn’t want to admit that she missed, well, the “team”. Not necessarily these guys sitting opposite her; most of them are strangers, except for Boomerang. But she missed being part of something chaotic and doomed. And she missed him. How would he react if she said so?
“Just make sure you watch your back,” he says stiffly and he gets up from his seat.
He stands in the opposite corner of the carrier for the duration of the flight. His expression is hard to read but she’s pretty sure he glares when she starts chatting up the Javelin guy.
It’s a bloodbath out there. The beach is littered with limbs and gun shells. The sand is black with blood and the explosions make it look like molten lava. There’s something really heartless and pretty about all this pointless destruction and it makes her blood sing. This is what she’s made for: guts, fireworks, survival.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a trap.
She runs across the no man’s land, zipping left and right to avoid the bullets. Someone’s gotta breach enemy lines, and it might as well be her.
“Damn it, Harley!” she hears his angry shout behind her.
Flag chases after her, covering her back, shooting anyone who tries to stop her.
She’s more worried about him getting shot, though. He’s so big. Such an easy target.
Harley groans and slows down. She starts shooting the guys who are shooting at him. It gets a little confusing.
“Run for cover!” Flag shouts at her.
Harley spots a large formation of rocks ahead.
“Come on!” she bellows, making a grab for his arm, but Flag grabs her waist instead. It feels nice. He runs with her. He throws them both behind the big rocks, crouching down as bullets fly over their heads.
They huddle together, Flag doing his chivalric best to cover her body from any stray fire.
It’s really nice for a while, until everyone gets slaughtered.
They watch, distraught, as the rest of the slapdash team meets their dire ends.
“Jesus, they’re bad, even for us,” Harley comments, unable to stop herself from seeing the funny side in this clusterfuck of awful.
“I didn’t pick the damn team,” Flag mutters next to her, leaning back in defeat.
They’re sitting shoulder to shoulder, heads turned towards each other, waiting for some kind of end.
But it can’t end like this, can it?
“Say…what would you think if I dyed my hair blue?” she asks him with a shaky smile.
“I’m pretty sure it was blue at one point,” he says, staring into her eyes like a man who has lost more than one battle.
“Oh yeah…nice of you to recall.”
She touches the side of his jaw. Maybe he can allow himself something at the end.
A big explosion cuts their moment short. Harley is thrown a few feet in the air. Luckily, she’s always been good with gravity. She lands, shakily, rolling down towards the shore.
She lifts her head in distress. He’s gone.
Gone, but not dead, she hopes.
She’d like to run a few more colors by him.
Silvio is pretty and mannered. He comes from very old and very stained money. His shirt pins are studded with diamonds and fossilized insects. He feeds her caviar on macarons, which is a combination that shouldn’t work, but it does somehow. He dazzles her with his body and he makes her laugh with his parrots. They lounge in his giant Jacuzzi, watching the sunset together. He slashes a priceless portrait for her when they fuck against it.
It’s a pretty self-indulgent fairy-tale, all things considered. She just wishes he wasn’t a shitty dictator. She can put up with him being a ruthless killer. Most of her friends are. But he’s also an oily politician who’s found ways to argue that his heinous actions serve a greater good. At least her crew doesn’t pretend otherwise.
And Harley has some kind of moral code. You kill your equals. You don’t kill kids. You wait for them to grow up, at the very fucking least.
So, she’s not that sad when she shoots him in the chest.
She’s just sad about the context. Another dead boyfriend, another failed attempt at connection. She’s been trying to make better choices.
Why do men suck?
As she watches Silvio’s pretty corpse bleed on the floor, she thinks, okay, maybe not all men.
Aw crap, why didn’t she wait to ask him if Flag was still alive?
The happiest memory she ever had was dancing to ABBA’s I Have a Dream at the junior ballet competition when she was eight.
It didn’t matter that only her mom was in the audience and she was a little drunk.
What mattered was that she had been chosen as prima ballerina, and therefore, she was allowed her own solo.
She twirled and leapt and dashed across the stage, picturing herself flying. The music was so loud and wonderful that no one heard her when she sang along.
I believe in angels… Something good in everything I see…
The song comes back to her in a whirlwind of childhood memories when she rounds the corner and finds Flag standing there, prepping the team to infiltrate the Ministry building to save her.
He looks at her as if she might have fallen from the skies.
“Oh my gosh,” she mumbles, tears rimming her eyes. “You were gonna save me.”
“Well…yeah,” he trails off sheepishly, looking anywhere but at her. “It was a really good plan, too.”
“I can go back in and you can still do it,” she says, lifting the javelin. She feels like twirling in her pretty red dress.
“That’s condescending,” Bloodsport grumbles, climbing down the building’s side.
“I – uhh…it doesn’t matter anymore. You’re alive,” Flag says, as a statement and fact and gravity center.
Harley leaps into his arms without thinking. You’re alive too, she wants to say, but she settles for hugging.
Flag’s hands come around her awkwardly. The gun he was holding caresses her back coolly. His embrace is shy and stiff and unsure. But his head drops into her shoulder and he breathes into the hollow of her neck, lips close to skin.
Flag mumbles an awkward “okay” and they break away when the others show up to greet her.
He doesn’t want to open himself up again. Opening up in general is not Flag’s specialty. But he really doesn’t want to go through it again; growing attached to a young woman with incredible talent and bravery, only for her to be snatched away from him by the jaws of really stupid, absurd death.
Plus, Harley is a happy-go-lucky grenade. She can fucking obliterate him in seconds while wearing that pretty shade of red on her lips.
He keeps pummeling the murderous idiot and the idiot keeps getting back up. They struggle on the dirty tiles of a derelict bathroom inside a bunker of atrocities. It’s hell. And he knows he’s on the verge of losing. Peacemaker is built differently. Yeah, Flag’s got a pipe to his throat, but his arms are shaking, strength depleted after so many fucking hits, and Peacemaker is about to stab him with a broken tile when –
An angel falls from the sky.
Harley lands on his back like a monkey, arms caged around his neck, making him stagger and almost collapse on Peacemaker. She grabs the latter’s hand and redirects his aim. She makes Peacemaker stab himself in the heart with one swift, decisive plunge.
Peacemaker stills in shock. Blood bubbles and sputters from his mouth.
“That’s what you get for not fightin’ fair,” Harley drawls, panting, hanging onto Flag’s back.
He manages to pull her off him and Harley falls into his arms.
“How did you…” he stutters, cradling her face in his hands.
“The building is collapsing,” she says, pointing up at the shuddering ceiling. “I couldn’t leave you behind.”
Flag is understandably confused. Or maybe in denial. He swallows thickly. “You should’ve got out without me.”
“Oh my god, you huge fuckin’ dummy,” she huffs exasperated, because she was going for a romantic gesture here.
She grabs his face and this time he doesn’t pull away. Their tired mouths meet above the bloated, bleeding corpse of Peacemaker. Flag kisses her back. He kisses her like a good soldier boy who just returned from war and didn’t expect for his sweetheart to still be waiting. He wraps his arms around her, fisting his hands in her tattered dress.
Maybe it’s not a fairy tale, but it feels really nice.
Eventually, Flag tells her they should probably get off the dead guy.
They run side by side, smiling, as the walls come crashing down.
Okay, maybe he’s fine with being obliterated by her.
Reality settles back in when they crash at one of the few bars still standing in the area.
They did it. That giant starfish was gobbled up by rats. The country is saved. The islanders cheer and sing and dance and cry and order more free drinks for them. Someone brings them flower garlands. She doesn’t know how they managed to find flowers in all that destruction, but she doesn’t complain.
Cleo is mourning Polka Dot Man, Robert is commiserating. King Shark has lost an arm and is licking his wound and pouring alcohol over it.
Rick is staring into his drink, looking a little disillusioned.
Harley nudges him. “Penny for your thoughts?”
“It was all for nothing,” he mutters bleakly.
“What? Did you not see how we saved millions of lives? I’m pretty sure you were there when I leaped into that giant starfish’s eyeball.”
Yeah, he’d been there. He’d tried to stop her, been terrified for her, but Harley will do what she always does. Fly into the eye of the storm, quite literally, and emerge untouched. Like some kind of angel.
There’s a ghost of a smile on his lips. “They’re gonna get away with it and do it again someday.”
“Who?
“My country. No one will ever know what the US did here.”
Harley’s shoulders sag. “Well…this can’t come as a big surprise for you. You’ve been working for those guys for decades.”
“Yeah, but…I don’t know, I thought there were certain lines we wouldn’t cross. I guess I was a pretty fucking stupid boy scout, huh?”
Harley chooses not to hit a man when he’s already down. “So, what are you gonna do now that you know?”
“I was thinking of quitting. I don’t want to be a part of it.”
Harley looks at him skeptically. They both know Amanda Waller would never allow that, but she decides to entertain his fantasy.
“And do what instead?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Retire on a farm somewhere. Grow some fucking soy beans.”
Harley giggles. “I’d look pretty cute in denim coveralls.”
Flag rewards her with a full smile this time. He looks her over, like he’s picturing her in them, and it almost makes her blush. “Yeah, I bet you would.”
In the shabby hotel room later he still hesitates. He’s a good guy, after all.
“Look, maybe this isn’t such a good idea…we’re high off the mission, I don’t want you to regret this –”
Harley grabs the front of his shirt and tugs. “What are you talking about? I’m never high.”
He scoffs. “I beg to differ.”
“Oh my god, Rick. If you don’t have sex with me right now I will think you got something against me. Don’t you like me anymore?” she whines like a sad kitten, biting her lip and she lets the excuse for a dress slip down her shoulders. She’s allowed to indulge in some old habits with the right partner. That’s what Cosmo told her, anyway.
His eyes widen. “That’s not even remotely – Jesus, Harley, of course I like you –”
“Then what are you waiting for? Amanda Waller’s direct order?”
He gets that dangerous glint in his eye, like the good soldier gone rogue. He pulls her into his arms like she weighs nothing, like she’s airborne, because she is. But he's not interested in her flying abilities right now. He has her on her back in two seconds, pinning her against the mattress, big hands on her body. He drags her legs against his waist. “Is this what you want?”
Harley swallows, delighted. “Uh-huh.”
Rick smiles one of those rare smiles. “Good, cuz I’m honestly kind of rusty –”
“You are so fishing for compliments right now.”
“I’m not. I haven’t done this in a while. So you gotta tell me what feels right, Harley.”
She is overwhelmed by his kindness, because it’s no big deal for him, because he couldn’t not treat her this way, because he has no idea what he’s doing to her, not really.
“Ma’am,” she adds softly.
“What?”
“Could you… call me ma’am again?”
People find her weird, that’s true. But few of them find her weirdness cute, or even remotely appealing.
He grins, lowering his mouth to her exposed belly. “As long as you keep calling me Rick.”
Yeah, she can do that. She can absolutely do that for him.