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“Hmm, what about…” Harley trailed off for a moment as she looked over the papers spread out in front of her, “this one?”
Flipping her chopsticks around, she pressed the blunt end into the paper and folder that she was looking at, and slid it over to Rick. He watched her, knowing far better than to question her methods of doing anything at this point. It would’ve been just as fast to hand the folder over to him, but there wasn’t much of a point in saying so.
Setting down the box of takeout that he’d been holding onto while sifting through his own pile, he grabbed the information sheet and its corresponding folder that she’d given him. He looked it over, trying to snag the main highlights to figure out if it was worth doing any kind of deep dive on whoever it was that she was electing to join the team.
At first glance he wasn’t seeing much that was worthwhile.
He looked back up at her, confusion written into his features. He waved the folder in the air. “Why this guy?”
She laughed, leaning back in her chair and carefully balancing her plastic container in one hand, using the other to pluck pieces of chicken and broccoli with her chopsticks. “I dunno. He’s cute in a kinda dopey way, isn’t he?”
Rick rolled his eyes and tossed the folder back onto the table. “Right. Well, I need someone who is lethal in a kinda deadly way.”
With a dramatic huff, she leaned forward again and started to sift through the files once more. “So picky.”
It would’ve been too easy to go down the rabbit hole of how hard he’d fought to be able to be picky about the team. So many years of having no say in the team and having to watch people die over it, and he finally had accumulated enough bargaining chips to get some control over who was on his team. It was going to make things easier in the longrun, even if it seemed tedious right now. He’d told her all that before. He had also told her that she didn’t need to sit around and help him out with it. He would have been perfectly happy going through all of these by himself. It would’ve been a much more peaceful affair that way.
Harley hadn’t so much asked or offered to come over and help as much as called Rick saying that she was on the way with two bags of takeout so he should unlock the door for her now because, “With how I’m drivin’ I’ll be there before you know it!” Going off the laugh that she ended the call with, Rick knew that her being on the phone while being behind the wheel was probably the safest part of whatever she was doing. So he made sure to listen for her so he could unlock the door.
Now here they were, paperwork scattered across Rick’s tiny kitchen table as they tried not to spill anything on the files that he was going to have to bring back to Belle Reeve within the next forty-eight hours so he could tell them what his decision was.
“You can still get most of the old band back together, right?” Harley asked as she skimmed over the file of a man who could apparently shoot flames at people. It would’ve been helpful, even cool, if he could shoot them from his hands instead of his feet but it didn’t appear that that was the case.
Rick aggressively tried to pick up his lo mein with his chopsticks and managed to get a few noodles looped over them. “Old band?”
“Yeah! Boomer’s back in, isn’t he? And Milton never left.”
Rick chuckled, food tucked into his cheek as he said, “You know he hates it when you call him that.”
Harley waved dismissively. “He’s not even here. How’s he gonna find out what I’m callin’ him?”
He shrugged and took another bite of noodles. “Fair.”
It grew quiet between them again as they went back to focusing on the real task at hand. Every time that Rick looked through a file and found nothing promising, he would toss it onto the seat of the empty chair to his right. Each time, the sigh he let out would get a little more dramatic as he reached for the next set of papers. There was a brief moment every time, though, right before he reached for the next folder, that he would look across the table at Harley. Usually she had her nose shoved in a folder, looking amused or bewildered at whatever she was reading. Other times she was mid-bite with broccoli and her chopsticks sticking out of her mouth. Regardless of what she was doing, it got a tiny, split-second smile out of Rick each time before he returned to the land of work-related frustrations.
He knew that he wasn’t the first person Harley called when she got out of Belle Reeve the most recent time. Truth be told, he didn’t want to know who topped the list. At some point, though, in the weeks following her release, she’d gotten ahold of his number and called him up. It had been surprising then, to hear her voice coming through the speaker of his cell phone and not the other end of their comms line for Task Force X.
Rick hadn’t invited her over then either, but she invited herself. It was the first and last time she showed up to his place empty-handed. She stepped in, took one look around, and immediately branded his apartment a ‘certified bachelor pad, and not in the fun way’. For as much as she made comments about the lack of décor in his apartment, it never seemed to stop her from being able to make herself at home. More than a couple times over the weeks he had wanted to ask her where she was staying, but it always felt like an overstep. Harley was a chronic oversharer, and if she wasn’t telling him something, he figured there was probably a reason for it. So he handled all the jokes at his expense as they came, and only grumbled a little bit on the occasions that she would end up staying too late, getting too tired, and passing out on his couch. After it happened the second time, he made a point to leave a blanket draped over the back of it for her. When Harley had come over the time after that, she said it was the closest thing to a decoration that his living room had. She wasn’t too far off.
Now that she was out, Rick knew that he shouldn’t have been telling her about anything having to do with Task Force X. If the wrong people found out that he was telling her things about the missions, and now not only showing her the files of potential members but actually collaborating with her on them, there would be some kind of hell to pay for both of them. But she was always popping in, and she was nosey—she was bound to find out eventually.
The other part of it, the part that Rick barely admitted to himself inside his own head let alone to her or anyone else out loud, was that it felt strange doing anything with the Squad without her. It was good that she was out. Of course it was good that she was out and seemed to be on a hot streak of at least not getting caught causing trouble if not staying out of it completely. That was the goal. That was the main enticing offer that came along with participating in the ops. Rick just hadn’t thought far enough ahead as to what would happen when people actually got released.
He and Harley had been in it from the beginning. They’d both been dragged into this kicking and screaming. Things with Task Force X had never been anything but an uphill battle, but it was even more so in those early days. Every bond and ounce of trust between them, and with the other rotating members of the team, were hard fought and earned. They were all still a mess, but they were a mess that had better understandings of each other. Throughout all the years and each of the missions, Rick and Harley had been the constants, the de facto leaders. It was hard times when they were supposedly the beacons of stability, but that’s what it was. But now she was out and it was down to Rick. He didn’t know what that was going to look like.
Harley tossed another folder across the table and managed to land it where Rick had been piling the rejects. The action snapped him out of his thoughts just in time so that he was paying full attention to her when she said, “They gotta start catching better bad guys.”
Rick let out a tired laugh, but he nodded. “Yeah—that’d be nice.”
“Too bad I won’t be around to help ya, huh?” Harley asked, finally eating the last piece of chicken from her meal.
Rick knew that he was supposed to say something in response to that, but no words were coming. She was expecting a joke, some comment coated in a healthy dose of sarcasm. He couldn’t think of one, though. He was too busy thinking about how right she was.
“Yeah,” he finally said, sounding awfully far away even though he was only across the table from her, “guess I never really thought that far ahead.”
She tilted her head as she studied his reaction. “What, you never thought I was gonna make it outta there?”
He shook his head. “Not that. I just,” he drummed his fingers on the tabletop, “it was always the two of us, y’know? Never stopped to think about what would happen when it wasn’t anymore.”
Her smile grew so wide that it damn near split her face in half. She gave a bashful wave of her hand as she looked away from him. “Oh, stoppit.” When she looked back at him again, she perched her chin in the palm of her hand. “You can't be this much of a softie with the new Squad, you know. They’ll eat you alive.”
He chuckled, his moment of honesty and the way she was looking at him both causing his face to feel warm. Clearing his throat, he tried to play it off and move along. “Yeah, I’ll remember that.”
Still keeping her chin in her hand, she grabbed the next folder out of the pile. Her eyes were scanning over the information in front of her. “You’re just gonna have to find your new Harley. Quinn 2.0.”
He shook his head, unable to stop himself from looking at her, and unable to stop himself from talking as he said, “There ain’t gonna be another Harley.”
She expected him to follow it up with a slightly back-handed remark of some kind, or a laugh, but it never came. Diverting her attention from the pages in front of her back to Rick, she smiled, but this one was almost shy.
“Gettin’ all sentimental on me now, Flag?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood, redirect them from whatever road they were starting to go down. They were going to be out of turnarounds soon enough.
“What’d you think you were gonna do when you got out?”
She shrugged, gesturing around them to Rick’s tiny kitchen, his small minimalist apartment. “Whaddaya think? I’m doin’ it.”
That got him to laugh. “C’mon, Harley. You can’t tell me that you were sittin’ in Belle Reeve all those years wanting to be out, and when you pictured gettin’ out, you pictured it sitting and eating takeout with me while we looked over confidential files you definitely shouldn’t have access to.”
“Alright, so maybe some of the details are a little different,” she conceded with a small laugh. “But, I dunno. I didn’t really have much of a plan, I guess. I just…I knew when I got out I wanted to spend time with my friends. With people who…who cared about me.” Her voice got a little quieter, something that Rick wasn’t quite used to, “People I care about.”
The words hung in the increasingly heavy air between them. There was something so much more real to the words they were saying now than anything they’d said during their excursions together over the years. There were no explosive implants, no one holding guns on them. And, yeah, sure, they made points to save each other over and over again as the years had gone on, and even lorded it over the other’s head when it suited them. They did all those types of things. They refused to leave each other behind. It was all honest and true, too. But at the end of the day during all of that, they would always be returning to two very different worlds. And there was no room for lingering looks and soft spoken confessions once the wrought-iron door slid closed.
There was nothing separating them now, though. There was just one world, and it only reached to the edges of Rick’s one-bedroom apartment. Honesty carried a different weight now, and they were each feeling that weight pulling at their heartstrings.
“Look—”
“Har—”
They both started and stopped at the same time. Rick couldn’t figure out if it relieved some of the tension or thickened it, but it at least got both of them to laugh. Shaking his head, he made a small gesture indicating that she could go first. She looked hesitant for a moment, but Harley had never been one to back down from much of anything, so she forged onward.
“Look,” she repeated with another laugh, “if this is too weird or whatever, I get it. Just tell me that and I’ll go and—”
“No,” he stopped her short. Shaking his head at her, he said, “That’s not what I was gonna say.”
“Yeah, well, you weren’t saying anything. And, I don’t know about you, Rick, but when I tell someone that I care about them and then they don’t say anything, I get a little nervous. Not to tell ya what to do, but usually people say—”
“I care about you too.” It was half-interruption, half-confession.
“We just finish each other’s sentences, don’t we?” Harley joked, her nerves surrounding the situation still evident.
Rick was leaning forward onto the table now. The takeout was long forgotten, his forearms covering up the photos and liner notes buried in the files on the table. None of that was the point of this anymore.
“I mean it, though. I, I do care about you. A lot.”
“If you’re just sayin’ that because I was giving you a hard time…”
He chuckled and shook his head. “You’re always givin’ me a hard time. When has that ever made me change my mind that easy?” She smiled and he felt some of his worry begin to fade. “I don’t think I ever let myself…I never bothered to think of what it was gonna be like when you weren’t on the team anymore because I didn’t wanna think about it. I didn’t want to think about what my life was going to be like when you weren’t a part of it anymore.”
Harley felt the little prickles of tears beginning to form and tried not to think about it. Too many damn emotions crammed into her chest—they always managed to fight their way out through the waterworks.
She blinked a few times in the hopes it would make them go away. It didn’t work. “Well, here I am, right?”
Rick smiled. One of those soft ones that he didn’t have often. His lips curled up and there was the tiniest flash of his teeth, his eyes crinkling at the edges. He wanted to reach across the table and take her hand in his own—it would’ve been so easy to do.
Finally, he nodded. “Yeah, you are. I don’t think I really let it sink in until now. Was afraid…I don’t know…I was afraid that each time was gonna be the last time and then you were gonna be moving onto something else.”
For a moment she looked confused, and then mildly offended. “Onto what?”
He laughed and turned his hands so that his palms were facing upwards, a small gesture to show that it was another one of those things that he hadn’t thought through. “I dunno, Harley. You’re one of those people that’s always gettin’ into something, though.”
She smiled again. “Yeah, I guess that’s fair, huh?” She leaned forward a little more, nearly matching his positioning. “But we don’t leave each other behind, right?”
Even if she hadn’t been pointing at him accusingly, his answer would’ve been the same. He nodded. “That’s right.”
She gave a satisfied nod. “Right.” Taking a deep breath, she slumped back in her chair. “Glad we got that sorted.”
Rick chuckled. “Yeah, right, if that’s what you wanna call it.”
“What would you call it then?”
It wasn’t until he really heard her question that he realized that he had backed himself into a corner. He could either duck his head and back away, or he could face this thing head-on. And he hadn’t ever been the type to run away with his tail tucked between his legs. The honesty carried more weight, but it was worth that much more now than it had ever before.
“I wouldn’t call it sorted. I…I’d say that this is all just barely gettin’ started.”
She pinched her brows, head tilting in confusion. “Say more words.”
The directive got another laugh out of him before he continued, hoping to find his courage and the right words along the way. “We’ve always been there because we, because we had to be. And that was good. Obviously. I cared—we, we both did. But we were also counting on each other. There was no surviving without the other. We had to, you know?” He got up out of his chair and walked over to her side of the table. He loomed over her, something that should’ve made him seem larger than life but the gentle look in his eyes keep him close and tangible. “Now it’s…it’s want. I want you. Here. In my life.”
The tears that were in Harley’s eyes now had no hopes of being blinked away as she looked up at him. “I want that too."
He didn’t realize just how nervous he had been about her response until he felt his shoulders sag in relief at her words. He reached up and ran his hand back through his hair as he nodded. “Alright,” was all he could manage as he felt a stir in his chest that he hadn’t felt in years, a feeling he didn’t know what to do with just yet.
Harley was giggling now, cheeks taking on a tinge of pink. She reached out, catching Rick’s hand and tangling their fingers in the small space between them. “Feelin’ a little more sorted now?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Absolutely not, but—”
Whatever he was going to say next didn’t end up mattering. Harley hopped up out of her chair and before Rick knew what was happening, she was kissing him. Her hands were cupping the sides of his face, her body flush against his as she leaned into him. It took Rick a second to catch up with it all, but once he did, he wrapped his arms around her. His hands splayed across her bank, fingertips dragging across the soft, thin fabric of her tank top.
Warmth seeped into every inch of Rick’s body in a way he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt before. He could’ve sworn that he felt Harley’s hands everywhere at once. Running over his chest and shoulders, dragging along his neck, carding through his hair. All the while her lips never left his. Kissing him with the type of hunger and intensity he should’ve known to expect from someone like her. There was nothing to do but give into it, try to keep up.
When they pulled apart, Rick thought that Harley must’ve been able to feel the way his heart was thudding. If she could, she didn’t say anything about it. She looked up at him, smiling and batting her eyelashes like she hadn’t just turned his entire world on its head.
He leaned down and kissed her again, softer this time. He dragged it out, like he was trying to make sure that it was all really real. Things in their world just never seemed to go this well—it didn’t hurt to check.
His fingers were interlocked behind her back, her hands resting on the muscular planes of his chest. He was fighting to find the right words as she looked up at him, but his mind was blissfully blank.
When she spoke, her voice had that familiar humorous lilt to it. “You’ve still got a team to pick, Colonel,” she said with a grin.
Rick laughed and shook his head. “I’ll figure that out tomorrow.”
She tossed a quick look over her shoulder before looking at him again. “I mean—”
He kissed her again, short but enough to make her knees knock together. His lips were nearly brushing against hers as he said, “I’m just gettin’ started.”
It was the first time that he’d ever felt someone’s hum of laughter as they kissed him. He steeped himself in the feeling, knowing immediately that it was the kind of thing that people spent their whole lives chasing after.