#gella talks skwad | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gellavonhamster · 3 years

Text

ghost stories

Suicide Squad (2016) || characters: El Diablo feat. everyone else || post-canon, sort of a fix-it

ao3 link eng || this was first written and published on ao3 in Russian in 2016 but I didn't attempt to translate it into English back then.

Harley is the first to see him.

She catches the smell first. Something appears to be burning, and she checks cautiously if there is something wrong with the coffee machine. She doesn’t find anything suspicious – not that the appliances about to flame up smell like that anyway. Could it be that there’s a fire starting? That would be funny, but seems like there’s hardly a chance. It is the smell of a bonfire at the beach, of the fallen leaves being burned in the yards in fall, of a melting candle in the church; weirdly, all this at the same time. A smell that seems too pure for Belle Reve, for Gotham, for everything that makes up her life these days.

Harley looks around once again – and springs to her feet like she’s been stung.

Chato Santana is standing next to her cage.

“Diablo?” she whispers, unable to believe her eyes. She would’ve thought she’s lost her marbles if there were any left to lose.

“Harley,” says Diablo, and it’s his voice, his shy, sad smile, his eyes and his tattoos, and Harley squeals in delight as she rushes to him. The bars of the cage are live, so she only dares to stick out the tips of her fingers. He touches them with his hand – certainly alive, certainly not a product of her mind being tortured by boredom and monotony – and she laughs.

“You’re alive, alive, alive! How did you survive? And how did they let you in?”

“It’s a long story. And I don’t think I have much time,” Diablo looks guilty. He’s still holding her hand and looking at her so earnestly it’s almost worrying. “Harley… don’t go with him.”

“Huh? What do you mean, honey?”

“He’s coming here. Don’t leave with him, Harley, stay. It sounds strange, but this would really be for the best.”

“Don’t leave with whom?” she can’t follow him. He gives her a melancholic look – and suddenly disappears. Without any smoke or flames or any other special effects. She can’t wrap her head around how it happened – it’s just that he was here a moment ago, and now there’s no one beside her, and she’s reaching out towards nothing.

“Diablo?” she calls, and when she gets no answer, she decides to get things straight by asking the guards. What kind of cruel joke is this? Only one person is allowed to joke here, and that person is her. “Hello there! Mister jailer, yoo-hoo! Where’s my friend?”

No one is in a hurry to respond. Finally, one of the armed-to-the-teeth guards approaches the cage.

“Why are you yelling, lady?”

“Where’s my friend?” Harley asks petulantly. “He was here just now, and we didn’t finish talking. Where did you take him?”

“There was no one here.”

“What do you mean ‘no one’? I just talked to him!”

The guard examines her from head to foot. Looks like he’s chewing gum, which, combined with his empty apathetic stare, makes him look like a cow.

“Definitely crazy,” he sums up, and leaves. Irritated, Harley forgets to take caution, hits the bars and falls down on the floor right away, writhing in pain.

“Well, well, well,” she whispers, playing the recent events over in her head. Chato was very much corporeal – not a ghost, then. Yet the guards didn’t notice him, and then he vanished into thin air. Harley thinks about the being Chato transformed into by the end of the battle – an ancient one, as if straight from the walls of some Aztec temple. Could some petty bomb kill such a being? Could the Enchantress’s brother have survived too?

“I am friends with a god,” she informs the ceiling. “Incredible.”

About an hour later, her Puddin’ comes for her, and she forgets the advice Diablo gave her.

Croc sees him on the night of the same day. He knows for sure that it is night thanks to the TV listings – the only reference point for time and days of the week that he has. Not that it was bothering him too much, truth be told. Monday or Sunday, every day in Belle Reve is a carbon copy of the day before. However, Croc doesn’t complain. He has a roof over his head, water, food – even better food than he used to have in the sewers in days gone by – and a TV, and it is honestly not too hard to do without such extras as companionship and fresh experiences. Still, he is glad to see Diablo. Even though first he lunges at him with his fangs bared, because he doesn’t immediately recognize him and supposes that Waller and company are sick of feeding him and decided to kill him. Or to put someone else in his quarters, which would have been no less audacious.

“Croc, it’s me,” Diablo hastens to say, and lights up a flame over his left palm – so unusual and out of place in the dampness of Croc’s cell. Croc freezes and watches the flame for some seconds. That must really be Diablo; there are hardly many people in the world capable of such tricks.

“Hey, man,” Croc says. “Whatcha doing here?”

“Just checking up on you.”

Well, that must definitely be Diablo. Croc knows that there are hardly many people in the world who’d care to check up on him, but that sounds like something El Diablo would do. Back then, during the mission, he was friendly, asked “You okay?” after each skirmish, and could clap him on the shoulder without shuddering. And there are definitely even less people in the world that would touch him willingly.

“Did they just let you in like that?” wonders Croc. Diablo gives him a slight smile.

“They don’t know I’m here.”

“So you’re, like, a ghost?” Croc asks. It occurred to him from the very beginning, but it sounds particularly joyless when said out loud.

Diablo gestures vaguely. “I’m still figuring it out myself, to be honest.”

“Hmm,” Croc glances over his cell. A bag of food on the cot catches his eye. “You want a burger?”

“Nah, I’m good. Save it for yourself.”

“They’ll bring more today, I’m telling ya.”

“Then I want one.”

“Then you’re not a ghost,” grins Croc, and the fact that Diablo doesn’t flinch or try to look away also proves that this is the real Chato Santana, because most people don’t like seeing Croc smile.

And so he and Diablo, who kind of is a ghost but kind of isn’t, sit there eating burgers and watching some crap on MTV. Life has taught Croc not to be surprised by anything, so everything’s fine.

“So what happened after the bomb went off?” Croc asks. Diablo opens his mouth, and then closes it again, apparently at a loss how to explain.

“I was smoke,” he speaks finally. “Then I was flames. Then I became myself again.”

“I see,” Croc replies, although, of course, he can’t see shit.

“Who are you talking to?” comes the guard’s voice from behind the door. “Hey, scum!”

Croc puts the burger aside.

“Wait a bit,” he tells Chato, gets up, and heads for the door.

When he comes to the bean hole, the guard already looks like he regrets calling him.

“No one,” Crock smiles as widely as only he can, and the guard, who isn’t among the people able to watch him smile without blinking an eye, steps back reflexively. “But come inside, and I’ll talk to you if you wanna. How about that?”

When he turns around, Chato has already disappeared, and Croc could have assumed he has dreamed it all, but there are two half-eaten burgers on the cot, not one.

Digger sees him next, and he isn’t even amazed. The bastards keep drugging him with all sorts of shit to calm him down. Usually after the shot he just lies there, feverish, and can’t even move, let alone stand up, but who knows, perhaps they’re testing some new poison on him. Or they’ve started using something stronger because they noticed that a couple of hours after the usual stuff he’s already able to yell, bang at the door, and do everything he can to get the best of them while cooped up inside. Or it’s simply that there’s already so much of this shit in his blood that it’s impossible not to have any screws loose, try as he might to keep them in place. In any case, he’s not exactly shocked when, as he tosses and turns on the floor after another injection, he turns his head and sees El Diablo, large as life and twice as ugly.

“Fuck me sideways,” Digger says. He doesn’t have any energy to be mad yet. “I must be tripping.”

“You’re not tripping,” Diablo objects.

“You died. So I must be.”

“I didn’t die either.”

Diablo sits down cross-legged on the floor next to him.

“Has it crossed your mind that if you stop getting on their nerves, they might start treating you better?” he asks.

“Go to hell.”

“Message received.”

There’s a footfall outside; a whole bunch of people must be running somewhere.

“They’ve turned the entire joint upside down,” says Digger, because it’s been ages since he has spoken to anyone who’d at least pretend to listen, so a hallucination will do. “Blondie escaped.”

“I know,” Diablo replies gloomily. “I tried to warn her not to go with the Joker, but she didn’t listen to me.”

“Why warn her?” Digger asks. Harley Quinn is no bosom friend of his, but she kind of tore out the heart of the witch who kind of tried to end the world, and anyway, teammates probably should take interest in each other’s lives. Probably. He’s never really made sense of that teamwork stuff. “What’s he gonna do to her?”

“At best, what he always does.”

Two tiny figures of fire appear on Diablo’s open palm – a man and a woman. The man backhands the woman across her face, and she falls down. Digger watches the dancing flames with fascination, and meanwhile in his head, bit by bit, stroke by stroke, a plan starts to take shape. He wouldn’t be Captain motherfucking Boomerang if he fails to use any opportunity that turns up – even a ghost of one.

“Listen, mate,” he begins cajolingly. “If you’re really here and it’s not just me tripping… help an old friend out, won’t you? I’m fed up with being stuck here, you know.”

“I’m not gonna help you escape,” Diablo says calmly. “How do you imagine that would even happen?”

“Can’t you just burn the entire Belle Reve to the bloody ground?”

Diablo smiles.

“I can,” he admits. “But I won’t.”

The next thing he knows, the son of a bitch is gone without a trace. Anger and offence must be giving Digger strength, because he manages to leap to his feet. Like a lunatic, he thrashes around the cell, looking for at least some kind of proof that someone else was here a moment ago.

“Oi!” he shouts, knowing damn well that the guards have long stopped listening to what he has to say. “Grab the devil! A convict escaped! Hey, wankers!”

But he’s feeling lightheaded, and this shit must be really strong, and he collapses, badly hitting his head.

Tatsu sees him next – late at night, in her apartment. She’s a light sleeper, and wakes up as soon as she hears footsteps. The sword is close at hand, and she grabs it instantly, blade swishing through the air.

“Who’s there?” Tatsu asks, and then repeats in English. “Who’s there?”

There is nowhere to hide in her bedroom. The only furniture is the mattress and the pair of chairs she uses to hang her clothes on. Everything is on the floor or on the windowsill – weapons, her laptop, the book she tried to read before going to sleep but could not concentrate on. It is an ascetic, comfortless dwelling that does not look permanent and is not supposed to become so. Fate and Amanda Waller, though, seem to have other plans in this respect.

There is nowhere to hide in her bedroom – but someone’s definitely walking in the antechamber; she flings the door open – and sees El Diablo, standing by the entrance and looking around. In a blink of an eye Tatsu is next to him, and the blade of the Soultaker is pressed to his neck.

“Katana, it’s me,” Diablo says, unfazed. “Chato Santana.”

“Chato Santana is dead,” she says through her teeth. Chato Santana was a gangster who killed, albeit by a tragic accident, his own family – but she fought side by side with him, he sacrificed himself to save the world, he called their squad his family and died for them. That is enough for her not to let anyone use his name as a cover. “Who are you?”

“I’m alive,” Diablo replies. He puts his hands up to show he’s unarmed, and forks of flame appear on his palms. “Or sort of.”

Sort of.

Tatsu lowers the sword and looks warily at the man standing in front of her.

“How did you…”

“You’re gonna have a new mission soon. Demand that Waller tells you everything.”

“About what?”

“I couldn’t overhear that,” he says with regret. “But…”

Something knocks on the window. Tatsu turns around quickly, but that must’ve been just a tree branch hitting the windowpane. When she turns back to Chato, he’s already gone, and her apartment is silent.

It’s just four in the morning, but she can’t make herself fall asleep again. Having poured a cup of tea, Tatsu sits down on the mattress and thinks, think, thinks about what just happened. Tatsu believes in ghosts – her sword is teeming with them, so she wouldn’t say that her worldview is shaken. Still, this is strange, very strange. What did he want to tell her? Why did he disappear so abruptly? Like… a broadcast was interrupted.

Colonel Flag calls her at daybreak and tells her that there’s a shoot-out between two gangs on the outskirts of Gotham, with metahumans on both sides. When Tatsu arrives at Belle Reve, it turns out they must have considered it to be not enough to ruin her Saturday morning, because she is asked – more like ordered, actually – to escort an inmate from his cell, an inmate who attacks anyone who tries to enter and has already injured three guards with his bare hands, and it’s not reasonable to sedate him before the mission, and “he’s likely to obey if it’s you, Katana” – the last is Rick’s argument, and if he told that to her face and not on the phone, she would have had to strain every nerve not to hit him with something.

No one tries to attack her when she enters the cell of Captain Boomerang – Harkness is sitting on the floor quite still, his arms around his knees, and when he notices her, he even smiles with bruised lips.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he says. “Am I hallucinating you too?”

“No,” the question is unexpected and confuses her. “Why?”

“Well, they keep injecting me some crap, and lately I’ve been seeing things,” Harkness explains peacefully, even eagerly. His voice is quiet and hoarse, which, combined with his Australian accent, leads to Tatsu being barely able to make out half of what he’s saying. To hear him better, she crouches down next to him, still gripping the sword hilt – there is no telling if he isn’t just making her come closer to take her down and bolt. “Saw the devil yesterday.”

“The devil?”

“Our devil. Día… de fucking Muertos. Chato Santana.”

Tatsu gives a shiver and, having lost her balance, half sits down, half falls on the dirty floor.

She isn’t the only one to have seen him. She isn’t the only one he wanted to send a message to.

“Hey, luv,” Harkness frowns and reaches out to touch her knee lightly. “You all right?”

“Same as you, more or less,” she wants to reply, which of course would mean she isn’t, not at all.

“What did he tell you?” she asks him instead.

When Floyd sees him, he is hardly surprised, since the others have already warned him. Boomerang, Croc, and Katana tell him everything while they’re waiting for the helo, and had it been just Boomerang, who believes inexplicably that he has a sense of humour although he certainly doesn’t, Floyd most likely wouldn’t have believed his ghost stories, but it is even harder to believe that Croc, let alone Katana would agree to take part in such pranks. Which is why he listens to them closely and takes note: okay, then he doesn’t have to worry about his mental heath if the late Santana suddenly appears out of nowhere to give some advice or share some news or simply ask how he’s doing. So the four of them keep whispering to one another like kids at the back of the class until their transport arrives – just the four of them, which is a pity. If there is anyone on the team that he had missed a little, it’s Harley. Floyd knows some things about the Joker, for it isn’t possible, as they write in the papers, to belong to the criminal world of Gotham and not know anything about the Joker. Floyd knows what Flag had spilled to him when visiting him in his cell or escorting him there after a visit to Zoe. Floyd thinks that in his entire lifetime he hasn’t understood a thing about love – is it even possible to understand it, on the other hand? – but he feels like the mad and brilliant Harley, Harley the whimsical, Harley the loving deserves better.

“What’s with the gossiping?” Flag inquires suspiciously.

“Nothing!” Croc and Digger answer in unison, in unison, and Floyd facepalms because seriously, are they in some cheesy movie or what? They don’t tell Flag anything yet, but Floyd is almost sure that sooner or later Santana will visit him as well, because Flag is one of them too, after all. Not that he’s even trying to deny it; no one’s making him drop by Floyd’s cell every other day to chat about some nonsense through the steel door.

So Floyd is hardly surprised when, as he makes his way behind the dumpsters loading one gun after another, he notices a familiar, head-to-toe-tattooed figure standing nearby.

“There are snipers on the roof over there and around the corner of the shop,” Chato says instead of greeting. Floyd nods.

“I noticed.”

“Eight men in the drugstore on the other side of the street. Each with a machine gun.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve just been there.”

“Got it,” there’s no time for lengthy conversations. No time to say: glad you’re alive, man. No time to ascertain: are you alive, though? So he thinks over the plan of action, making a mental note to ask all these questions later, when there are no bullets whistling past their ears.

People like them deserve no guardian angels, frankly speaking, but they may have managed to earn one for all of them.

#suicide squad #el diablo #harley quinn #killer croc #captain boomerang #katana #deadshot #rick flag #dc #talk talk talk #my fic #gella talks skwad #this might have been the most challenging to translate so far #i'm so used to bookish slightly outdated speech and most of my fandoms allow that #and then bam modernity. ugh #also i know nothing about the geography of the dceu!united states. sorry about that.

39 notes · View notes

gellavonhamster · 3 years

Text

cold weapons

Suicide Squad (2016) || Captain Boomerang/Katana || post-canon

ao3 link eng || this was first written and published on ao3 in Russian in 2017 but I didn't attempt to translate it into English back then.

“So, what do you think of them?” Colonel Flag asks.

Tatsu puts the folder containing the rap sheet of Waylon Jones, better known as Killer Croc, on top of three other folders.

“They’re complicated,” she replies after giving it some thought.

The materials in these folders could have formed her first impression about the members of Task Force X – or, as Lawton has aptly put it, the Suicide Squad. Could have, but did not, because they were given their first task earlier than expected. Which is why she doesn’t say “villains” or “scoundrels” or “worst team imaginable” – her first impression of them was formed in combat, and then in an empty bar in Midway City where they all drank together thinking it may be the last drink in their lives. She remembers all of this and says ‘complicated’.

“Very tactful of you,” the colonel chuckles. Then again, what kind of colonel is he now – an unwashed shirt, black circles under the eyes. Just another guy struggling with a deluge of work, a hard-hearted boss, and a troubled relationship with his girlfriend. “But yeah, they definitely aren’t simple,” continues Rick Flag, one of her few friends in the country that will never become her home, and Tatsu cannot suppress a tired smile.

“You like them.”

“They’re… tolerable,” Rick admits, and takes another sip of coffee. Lately he seems to be living only on coffee and whiskey and the verb “must” and (so Tatsu supposes, although they don’t talk about that) the hope that June Moone, who still hasn’t fully recovered from all the horrors she’s been through, will be all right – and will stop isolating herself and avoiding him. These means for not letting yourself just fall down and never get up are far from being reliable, but Tatsu herself lives mostly on revenge and duty and, for that matter, whiskey as well, to a certain degree, so it’s not for her to judge. “Most of them, at least. All of them minus the Australian.”

“At least he’s a good fighter,” Tatsu points out. This is the only good thing she can say about Captain Boomerang with full confidence.

“He’s not cut out for teamwork.”

“When we were fighting the Enchantress, it didn’t look to me like that.”

She does not put much meaning into these words. It’s just that at some point Captain Boomerang saved her, and she saved him – and good thing they’re even, because the last thing she needs is to owe a favour to someone so incompatible with the very concept of duty. She could have said much about the man who tried to escape at the very beginning of the mission and got a teammate killed (and for some reason stood up for El Diablo when Harley Quinn lashed out at him at the bar, and for some reason came back before the battle after trying to desert), but the only thing she’s sure of is that he’s a fine weapon; she can confirm that, being a weapon herself. At the end of the day, that is all that’s required from him.

At the end of the day, that is all that’s required from her, too.

***

It is possible that what she said about Digger Harkness sticks in Rick’s memory, because when the need to comb the area arises during the next mission, he sends the two of them to search through the same building.

“If he gets up to something, do whatever you want to him. No one’s gonna weep for him,” he flings off. This is in the heat of the moment, of course – Boomerang almost got into a fight with Killer Croc on the helicopter over some nonsense. Or rather, it was Croc that almost got into a fight with Boomerang after the latter provoked him. Complicated.

“You heard that, darl?” Boomerang addresses her with a smile so wide as if he hasn’t heard the last remark. “I’m all yours.”

Tatsu looks the other way and pointedly takes her sword out of its sheath – not completely, just a little. No further comments follow, and they part company – Deadshot with Croc, Flag with his team of spec ops, Tatsu with Boomerang – and go on a recce.

In the basement, they discover something that looks like a laboratory – if a place so far from being sanitary may even be called one. All their hopes to move without making a sound crumble as soon as they enter the room: the floor is covered with broken glass. Those who ran the place must have escaped in haste and couldn’t take the entire stock of the serum with them, so they opted to destroy most of it. Tatsu’s attention is immediately drawn to the object on the table in the middle of the room – a metal container with tubes going from it to several smaller vessels. She heads straight for the table, shards crunching underfoot. Boomerang follows her, apparently kicking the largest shards on purpose so that they fly in all directions.

“Looks like a hooch still,” he comments, having come closer, and gives a whistle. “Whoa, fuck, is that blood?”

Compared to the first task of their squad, this one looks almost effortless. Two gangs, the members of one of which possess the formula of the serum that grants superpowers to those who take it. A gun battle, collateral damage, the entire district on lockdown. If a few people weren’t noticed literally floating through the sky, the police would have been handling this. But this is an emergency, which is why they’re here, and the flying gangsters aren’t flying anymore, for Lawton is an exceptionally good shot.

As it turns out, the serum that sparked the conflict is based on metahuman blood – hardly donated voluntarily.

“I’ll contact Colonel Flag,” says Tatsu, eyes locked on the bloodied tubes, and then someone grabs her by the neck.

For the first time in her life, she really has to fight blindly – because her enemy is invisible.

Later, when the dead bodies gradually become visible on the floor like an eerie animated movie, it turns out there were four of them. Before that, Tatsu manages to lose her sword, recapture it, almost choke when an invisible hand squeezes her neck, slash one of the attackers in half, and plunge the blade into another’s stomach. Boomerang takes care of the other two, knocking over the container in the process.

Tatsu is listening to the silence that came after the fight, wondering if any other invisible foes are lurking around the corner, when she feels that something is wrong. Something is wrong with her – she just can't figure out what. Sometimes it happens that one feels unwell but cannot determine what exactly the problem is – she is experiencing something similar now. Until she realizes: the mask. Until she looks up and makes eye contact with Captain Boomerang, who is staring at her and grinning.

“You lost anything, doll?” Harkness inquires innocently, with an emphasis on the last word, and his smile grows even wider and cockier.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The invisible man she fought hand to hand tore off her mask, and she didn’t even notice. But her partner, blast him, did – and picked it up.

“Give it back,” Tatsu demands, hand outstretched. She feels naked. In combat, during the mission, she is Katana, a single whole with her sword. A cold weapon. No one needs to see her face. Truly, if she was wearing only the mask and nothing else, she would have felt less exposed – all right, this is an overstatement, and she doesn’t even want to imagine such a situation. Meanwhile, Boomerang is in no hurry to return the mask.

“What did ya call me when that fucker was about to stab me?” he asks. Tatsu clenches the sword hilt. There is no telling how many enemies drunk on the magic serum are hiding in this house, and he’s dawdling. “You said…”

Damn it, what did she say? She saw one of the invisibles creeping up on him while he was fighting another – a bloodstain was floating through the air. She shouted…

“I said ‘George’”. Isn’t your name George Harkness?”

“You bet it is. It’s just weird. Most people don’t call me George, y’know.”

“How do they call you then?”

“Digger. Boomerang. Boomer. That Prick. All sorts of things, but never George. But you,” he winks, “can call me whatever ya want. I liked the way you say my name.”

“Give. Me. The mask.”

“And the magic word?”

“I will chop your hand off,” as a proof of her intentions, she puts the blade against his extended hand that is holding her mask. In fact, she would face no consequences for doing so. No one’s gonna weep for him.

Harkness makes a helpless gesture and hands her the mask.

“Can’t say no to you, luv.”

The mask helps her conceal her identity, but what is more important is that it helps her conceal needless emotions. Tatsu really hopes that her facial expression isn’t giving away that she’s ill at ease now. This is a weakness; weaknesses are not to be demonstrated. She feels deeply relieved when she puts the mask back on.

“Let’s get out of here,” she commands, turns around, and heads for the exit. Harkness trails behind.

“It ain’t fair, by the way. You know my real name, but I don’t know yours,” he muses. “Care to introduce yourself, eh?”

He asks the same question at least three times more before they return to Belle Reve, and each time she ignores him.

***

A week later, he still doesn’t know her name – but he learns something else.

They do away with the last members of the recent gang on the outskirts of the city. Both wretches have overused the unfortunate serum, in keeping with the best traditions of the clichéd movies about superheroes and supervillains that Hollywood keeps producing for some reason, even though it is more and more often possible to see nearly the same thing on the news. As a result, one of them got puffed up almost to the size of the creature that Superman died fighting, and the other couldn’t control the flames bursting from his mouth. He burned half of the shopping centre with customers, retail workers, and guards. With teenagers in the bowling alley on the second floor and children in the playroom on the first.

Santana… wouldn’t have approved.

Both problems eliminated, they leave: the firefighters and the cops will take it from here. Flag’s spec ops stay behind, because officially it is their victory; the general public shouldn’t know about the existence of Task Force X. Through backyards, they retreat in the direction of the abandoned construction site on the other side of the street; a car has been sent to pick them up there.

There is a workers’ trailer still standing by the construction pit. The door is not locked, and Rick, Deadshot, Croc, and Boomerang go inside. Jones’s arm is broken: his inhuman strength notwithstanding, he still was no match for his enemy – not the fire-breather, but the other one. Tatsu leaves them to figure out how to make a temporary sling, and wanders away. Not far from the trailer, a piece of tarpaulin stretched over the fence has come off, and she can see the building across the street. Tatsu sits down on the ground, puts her arms around her knees, and stares at the dandelions growing by the fence.

In her head, flames are raging.

She doesn’t look up, neither when she hears the footsteps approaching, nor when Harkness – and it is him, no one else in the Squad reeks of the mixture of booze and cologne like that – sits down next to her and cracks open a can of beer.

“You want some?” he nudges her. What extraordinary generosity. It is, however, perfectly possible that if she says yes, he’ll reply along the lines of “Well, then go and buy yourself some.”

“No,” Tatsu replies without looking and, after a short pause, adds, “Thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

With a sigh, she accepts the can from his hands, and takes a sip.

“This is disgusting,” she whispers, and takes another.

Harkness just snorts and opens another one. For a little while, they sit side by side in silence, drinking each from their own can, and study the wall opposite through the mesh of the fence – like out of a prison window. Old advertisements that are half torn off, graffiti, a writing proclaiming that life fucks us all – plenty of things to stare at to avoid looking the person next to you in the eye.

“So what the hell happened to ya?” Boomerang asks, and suddenly she could do with some serum for invisibility or, better yet, disappearing completely. Naturally, it is a fleeting impulse; she has no right to disappear. She has obligations – towards Flag, towards Waller. Towards herself.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You zoned out, Flag shouted himself hoarse before you heard him. Like you were someplace else. Didn’t ya?”

Why do you need to know? Tatsu thinks. If she almost rushed headlong into the fire, it’s her own business. If it only seemed to her that someone was there, it’s her own business. If she’s going to see things that aren’t there for the rest of her life, it’s her own business. He shouldn't have spoken. There is something comforting about being silent together.

“Nah, you don’t have to say if you don’t wanna,” Boomerang assents, and takes another pull on his can. “I just thought that you, well. Might wanna talk to someone.”

And they fall silent again. Yet now Tatsu feels awkward, which makes her angry at herself. She’s not obliged to pour out her heart to anyone who shows something that looks like care.

This silence doesn’t make it any easier.

“I have… bad memories,” she finally says. Now it won’t be as awkward: she answered his question. It won’t be, right? “About a fire”.

Harkness nods, looking at her attentively.

“Someone you knew died, aye?”

“My children,” she hears herself say, and wishes to disappear again.

“Fuck,” Boomerang says, embarrassed, and – unbelievable – looks like he actually feels bad about starting this conversation. “I’m sorry, I… well, uh, I had no idea.”

“It’s okay,” Tatsu says mechanically. Nothing is okay: she can still see Yuki’s tear-stained face, still hear Reiko’s voice, she is still watching the flames run up the curtains that she and Maseo picked together, she is still breathing in the smoke and still cannot believe she deserves a gulp of fresh air. She should have saved them. All of them.

Boomerang looks at her incredulously but doesn’t say anything, and bit by bit, the silence that she doesn’t want to run from returns – the kind of silence in which one is not alone.

Then there are footsteps again, and Flag approaches them.

“There you are,” he says with relief as soon as he sees her. Rick does not let himself overstep the limits of formality – they’re on a mission, after all – but he has obviously been worried. At the sight of Harkness, he frowns warily. “You! Quit getting on her nerves.”

“Who’s gettin’ on her nerves, Colonel? I was just tryin’ to help,” Harkness protests. It appears Rick’s words have wounded him a little.

“He was,” Tatsu says. “It’s all under control, Colonel Flag.”

Flag shifts his gaze to her and then to Boomerang again, and nods.

“Okay. In any case… follow me. We’re leaving.”

Tatsu gives her unfinished beer to Boomerang.

“Don’t talk about this to anyone,” she tells him. This might be an order or a request; she doesn’t really know.

He nods, and she thinks absentmindedly: who would have thought this man knows how to make a solemn face.

“Thank you,” she says again, hoping that he understands that this is not just about the beer or his promise to keep his mouth shut.

***

After a few days, Tatsu comes to visit him. In prison.

Actually, she comes to visit all of them, of course. Not more than fifteen minutes alone with each of them – Waller wouldn’t allow more. This request seems to have surprised her, but Tatsu is certain that Waller is already picturing the new threads she can use to manipulate her special operations puppets. So it is possible that one day this decision will blow up in Tatsu’s face – or in the faces of all of them. But she cannot shake off the feeling that she must do this – so that someone except Rick, who is already dealing with a lot these days, would notice in time if the inmates are treated with undeserved cruelty. So that she knows what’s on their minds, because it is safer to fight side by side with the people whose line of thought she can understand at least roughly. So that there is some kind of variety in their lives between the missions.

This is why she visits all three of them. Killer Croc, who looks like he’s not surprised to see her in the slightest and doesn’t really seems to care that she came, but doesn’t have any issue with that either. Deadshot, who looks like he is surprised, but doesn’t seem to mind answering her questions when she notices a stack of letters in the corner and asks him how his daughter is doing. And Captain Boomerang, who, when she enters his cell, looks like he can’t figure out if he’s dreaming.

“Katana?” he frowns perplexedly. He’s stripped to his waist, so she can see a couple of fresh scars he brought back from the last mission, and he’s got a black eye – when Tatsu saw him last, he had not. Must have quarrelled with the guards again. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.”

For a moment he seems not to understand what she just said. Then he breaks into a smile – or rather a grin, wide and pleased. Very pleased.

“Aha! Knew it would end up like this,” he pronounces in triumph.

“Like this?”

“You,” he looks like he’s just proven a theorem of immense complexity, “missed me.”

“I haven’t missed you, Captain.”

A very, very pleased grin.

“And still you’re here.”

“I visited Deadshot and Killer Croc earlier,” Tatsu says, and sees his facial expression change instantly. Not for long: the grin is quick to return, and she wouldn’t be able to tell right away that he’s disappointed.

“Did ya now? And how are our fellas doing? Better than me, I reckon?”

“So it would seem. Did you fight the guards?”

“Why do you care, gorgeous?”

Indeed, why does she? Most likely, he picked a fight himself – and got his just deserts.

“Make up your mind,” Tatsu says, “if you think that I missed you or that I don’t care.”

Harkness chuckles and really seems to ponder over this for a while.

“Beats me,” he concludes at last. “Care to throw some light on it?”

No, Tatsu thinks, I don’t get it myself and I’m not sure I want to.

Instead of answering, she comes closer to him – so close that she can smell his sweat – and studies his face. She has to look up to be able to do that, which must look comical. Then again, he’s hardly stupid enough to laugh at her height or anything else about her, especially when she’s armed and he is not.

“You lost a tooth. What happened?”

“Didn’t get along with one of the Wall’s watchdogs.”

“You could have tried not to look for trouble for a change,” all of a sudden, Tatsu realizes that she’s mad. Really mad at him. They might get dragged to another mission this instant; whether they like it or not, they have to be in good enough shape to protect the society that the most of them have to atone before at least partially. They shouldn’t spend their energy and health on nonsense. Black eyes and knocked-out teeth are nothing, but it mustn’t come to any of them being out of action when all of them are needed. All their powers, all their skills. All the anger they should rather aim at something other than the people who can just press a certain button at any point – and dispose of the wilful weapon.

Boomerang bares his teeth – not like Croc, of course, but still threateningly. He looks dangerous now – big, sturdy, more than a head taller than her. But he still isn’t more dangerous than her – and both of them are aware of that.

“And they could have tried,” he speaks through his teeth, “not to talk shit about my mother for a change. They wanna talk shit about me, they can knock themselves out. I’ve heard enough ‘bout myself, I don’t give a flying fuck about what else they gonna say. But they’d better leave my mother out of it.”

So that’s what it is. They have found a quick and easy way to infuriate the man who has “MUM” tattooed on his chest. In uneven letters, like a child's handwriting. Tatsu noticed that tattoo as soon as she came in but didn’t look too closely at it. Now she feels like she has the right to look, to let her gaze slip lower, at the ridiculous writing that heaves with each furious breath of his, and then to avert her eyes at once.

“They have power, and you have nothing,” she says. “Do you enjoy being their plaything?”

“Oh, so I’m a plaything, darl? And do I have much choice who to be now? In these four walls, and,” Boomerang points at his neck, at the place where a bomb is implanted under his skin, “with this crap in my neck?”

Tatsu looks up again, right him in the eye.

“You already know who you are,” she tells him. “You’re a weapon. Broken weapons get discarded. And you’re letting them break you.”

He stays silent, just looks at her in an odd manner, as if she’s speaking another language but he has a vague understanding of what she’s saying and doesn’t like what he just heard – because it is the truth.

Tatsu still doesn’t understand why she cares, and with each passing minute she has less and less desire to learn why.

“Also,” she continues, “if you call me ‘darl’ or ‘gorgeous’ one more time, you’re going to regret opening your mouth.”

“Yeah? And how should I call ya?”

“Katana.”

“What, and that’s all? Nah, we might be weapons,” and she probably ought to remind him that there is no ‘we’, but in this particular case he’s right. Perhaps that is why Tatsu feels drawn to all of them: they’re cut from the same cloth, “but we’re alive as well. So far. Seriously, what’s yer real name? You know mine.”

“I should not disclose that.”

“Oh, come on. Listen,” he breaks into a pleased grin again. Another theorem proven. “How about a deal? You tell me yer name, and I will try to keep my temper if anyone else decides to stir me up. What do ya think?”

“As if you’re going to keep your word.”

Boomerang makes a show of putting his hand over his heart.

“For you, ma’am… anything.”

For you. All at once, she recalls Rick’s words: do whatever you want to him. How many minutes of the visit she has already spent on this predictably fruitless conversation?

“My name is Tatsu Yamashiro,” she says, tired, and then he smiles – not the way he did before, but in a calmer and more sincere manner. Gratefully.

“George Harkness,” he offers her his hand with an earnest air. “Nice to meet ya.”

Tatsu hesitantly offers him hers. Her hand looks very small and fragile against his huge paw, and he must be thinking the same because the handshake comes out very careful. He could easily break her wrist. She could easily kill him with one hand afterwards. But he holds her hand gently in his warm, pleasantly calloused palm, and Tatsu hastens to take her hand away, because this is a mistake of an even worse kind than the time he saw her without the mask.

“So you promise not to fights the guards.”

“I promise to try,” Harkness assures, but he’s keeping one hand behind his back.

“Don’t cross your fingers,” Tatsu says sternly. Real mature.

With a sigh, Boomerang repeats his promise, this time holding his hands within her view.

“But I ain’t promisin’ not to call you gorgeous,” he declares in the end.

“You know my name now.”

“But you’re still gorgeous.”

“Time’s up!” shouts the guard outside the door, and Tatsu cannot help feeling relieved that she has to go. She doesn’t regret visiting him, but all of this is too strange and awkward, and both of them might be weapons, but her position is different from his, and it is better not to forget that.

“Can I do anything for you?” she asks him on parting.

“Well,” Boomerang smirks. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“With something I would actually agree to do?”

“Come again. Will ya?” This time he isn’t flirting; this time she can feel his insecurity, even shyness. As if he doesn’t like to admit to himself that what she answers is really important to him.

“I’ll try,” she says cautiously. She’s not going to make any promises: she asked Waller about one time only. She doubts if she’ll be allowed to visit them again – to visit him again.

“Try,” Harkness repeats, as if weighing the word on his tongue. “This means no.”

“This means I’ll try,” Tatsu says firmly.

And she comes again in a week. And the week after next. And a week after that.

***

“Why didn’t you walk away in Midway City?” Tatsu asks him once. “When Rick broke the control panel. You left then; why did you return?”

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the time Captain Boomerang dared to smart off Amanda Waller. Several successful missions, slightly more respectful attitude on his part – and his cell already bears a passing resemblance to a place for living, even if for living quite miserably. Now there is even a table, and a chair that she gets to sit on as guest privilege. Harkness is sitting on the floor opposite her. The question seems to catch him unawares, but only for a moment.

“Huh? Why did I return? Gotta live up to my name, that’s why. Have you ever thrown a boomerang, luv?”

I’m going to throw you somewhere one day, Tatsu thinks, yet without much irritation.

“And jokes aside?”

Boomerang attempts to feign an offended sigh.

“How do ya think? Plenty of options, all right. You gonna try to guess which one?”

Tatsu frowns.

“Is this a psychoanalysis session? Were you bitten by Harley Quinn?”

“Nah, Blondie didn’t bite me, I would’ve remembered. So don’t be jealous,” his voice gets playful again, and Tatsu stifles the urge to roll her eyes. “Lookie here… suppose I suddenly realized that I can’t leave you guys! ‘Cause you’re my mates. One for all, and so on. Don’t believe me?”

“You said something about plenty of options. What are the rest of them?”

He scratches his chin thoughtfully.

“We-e-ell… the second, ‘course, is that I wanted to save the world. Not that the world smiles upon me every bloody day, but I still wanna live! And for everyone an’ their mother to know that the bastards like us can also be heroes. Don’t you like being one of the good guys, eh, Tatsu?”

“I’m not ‘one of the good guys’”, Tatsu protests. “And it’s not me that we’re talking about. Any other options?”

“There was no point in leaving. That was still gonna be the end of the world, aye? So I’d rather meet it in battle and in good company than on the run. All the same it’ll be the end. There you go.”

He stops talking, and in the silence that falls Tatsu can hear the footsteps of the guards in the corridor. Once again she wonders what the duty attendants that monitor everything through the surveillance cameras think of their conversations. They must make for the strangest and most pointless reality show ever.

“The third one,” she says.

Boomerang looks a bit disappointed.

“Why?”

“Not the first one, because none of us meant anything to you then. You had just met us. And it didn’t seem like you were upset about letting Slipknot down,” Tatsu explains. She doesn’t intend to offend him – she’s just saying the truth. Once, he claimed it himself that they understand each other – here’s some understanding, he’s welcome. “Not the second one either, because you’re not stupid – no, stop smiling. You never believed that if people like us stop the Enchantress, someone would learn about that. Only the third option remains.”

Harkness nods slowly.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and his eyes turn pensive, abstracted, as if he is there again, in the night city frozen in anticipation of the apocalypse. As if he sees himself – and makes a choice once again. “And that’s what happened in the end, didn’t it?”

“So the third option, then?”

“So it is.”

But something in his face makes Tatsu think that he was hoping for a different answer.

***

Time flies; weeks and months go by. Tatsu spends them fighting, spilling someone else’s blood, occasionally drinking with Flag at a bar or in his apartment – a bachelor’s home again; reading books – most of the plots seem too naïve and unimaginative compared to what goes on in her life, and that is even for the best, and visiting the members of the Suicide Squad in Belle Reve. Some people go clubbing Friday evenings, and she goes to prison Friday afternoons.

“Don’t get attached to them,” Rick scolds her.

“That is rich coming from you,” Tatsu replies, and he has enough self-awareness not to argue. Lest he gets offended, she chooses not to tell him that sometimes she and Lawton talk a little about him good-naturedly behind his back.

During one of her visits, Harkness raises a topic she has totally forgotten about.

“Hey, come to think of it, we never had that drink,” he points out. Tatsu doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, and it must be written all over her face, because he continues. “Remember I asked you out for a drink? In Midway City, before we fought the witch.”

Tatsu has to make an effort to remember: indeed, he said something of the sort, but it never occurred to her to take those words seriously.

“We had a drink,” she counters. “When… when you shared your beer with me.”

He shakes his head, dissatisfied.

“At the construction site? That’s bollocks. I’m talking a proper bar… nah, a restaurant! With crystal glasses an’ candles an’ shit… Like normal people.”

“Candles,” Tatsu mumbles. She tries to imagine the two of them at the table at a restaurant; the picture turns out pretty absurd. On the other hand, a lot of what has happened in her life during the past few years can be deemed absurd.

“Yeah. Candles,” echoes Harkness, and continues with a crooked smile, “well, that’s me jokin’ around. In the near future,” he gestures in the direction of the small barred window of his cell, “I won’t be able to take you even to a fucking McDonald’s.”

They don’t talk about the hypothetical dinners at a restaurant anymore, but the absurd picture stays with Tatsu, who still feels somehow indebted to Boomerang – for no reason, as she keeps telling herself – for that conversation at the construction site. She doesn’t like to feel the weight of unpaid debts on her shoulders – yes, that’s what it is about.

One day, she finds a way to pay that debt back.

***

She waits for him in the car outside the prison gate. She hears him first; she cannot make out what exactly he is yelling at the guards, but that surely isn’t ‘good evening’. Then the door of the jeep is open, and someone must have kicked him in the rear because he literally falls into the car. Tatsu shrinks back on instinct.

Then Harkness looks up – and notices her.

“Katana?.. Hey, what the hell’s going on? They didn’t let me take the boomerangs, didn’t let me take anything…”

“Close the door,” Tatsu tells him, and when he, still confused, obeys, tells the driver, “Let’s go.”

The car pulls away.

“I still don’t get what’s happening,” Harkness reminds her. “Sure, I’m happy to see ya, but… you weren’t ordered to take me to the woods and finish me off under the radar, huh?”

“If Waller wanted to get rid of you, she would have had you killed in your own cell, and that’s all.”

“Wow, thanks for honesty. So where are we going?”

“To a restaurant,” Tatsu says, and turns away. Yet again it crosses her mind that it is a terrible idea.

“A restaurant?” Harkness drawls quizzically.

“As far as I recall, you said that the beer at the construction site is ‘bollocks’.”

She should turn back to him, of course. The problem is that Tatsu is ninety-nine per cent sure that if she meets his eye now, she will blush. And she is by no means going to give him any sign that might be interpreted as taking an interest… of a certain kind. She has already blundered more than a few times.

Therefore she stubbornly keeps looking out of the window. Then again, she doesn’t even need to look to picture how his facial expression is changing now; she’s seen this rakish grin enough times.

“Holy cow. Tatsu, are you serious? We’re really just going to a restaurant? We’re getting outta this shithole where they only give us porridge with rat crap to gorge ourselves on lobsters and drink wine? Oh, fuck me sideways,” in the end, she turns to him and sees him throw back his head and burst into laughter, narrowing his eyes happily. “I’ll be damned! Am I dreaming? I must be dreaming. Pinch me.”

“I can assure you you’re not,” Tatsu says, and realizes that she is also starting to smile despite herself. She has visited him and the others in Belle Reve often enough to know that porridge with rat crap, unfortunately, is far from being just a figure of speech. After such a diet, a meal at a restaurant must seem like the pinnacle of happiness.

Boomerang shakes his head, apparently still unable to believe her.

“Holy fucking shit. How did you do that? How do you even do all that? I’ve told ya you’re unreal, have I?”

“Yes, you have,” Tatsu confirms patiently. And more than once – too often for her to attach great importance to it, too fervently for it not to please her at all. “Let’s put it that way: this is Waller paying me for a… favour.”

“A favour, then. I take it a lot of some poor suckers died?”

“No,” she shakes her head. And it is true – but there still was a lot of blood. Both the man Waller indicated and his bodyguards turned out to be worthy adversaries. The whole thing went not as smoothly as she wanted it to – not that she wanted to; not that she would kill another person she knows nothing about if she could help it. Nothing to assure her: this one deserves it. Everything turned out rather… nasty. She had to burn the bodies. Then she got home in a haze, tended to a couple of fresh wounds – or rather, just scratches. And then she went to the bathroom and spent a long time soaping herself, as if the invisible filth that bothered her the most could be washed off with shower gel.

Afterwards, she rummaged through her modest wardrobe and dug out the only dress she has about in America. Nothing special: wine red, below the knee length, sleeveless but with a pretty high neckline – very demure. The first and so far the last dress she bought after… after. If she and Rick didn’t have to accompany Amanda Waller to some event once, she wouldn’t have bought this one either. She put it on, combed her hair, still wet after the shower, with her fingers, looked at herself in the mirror – and flew into a rage, pulled off the dress, and could barely stop herself from tearing it to shreds. Restaurant or not, what does it matter? The last thing she needs is for him to think she dressed up for him.

So the situation might be a little less absurd than it could have been. Both of them look like they’re going on another mission with the others, only she isn’t wearing her mask – he has already seen her face anyway – and he isn’t wearing his ever-present coat. It is no wonder he wasn’t allowed to take it – Waller wasn’t going to let him out of Belle Reve armed, and to let him wear his coat would probably be as unwise as to hand him all his boomerangs. Tatsu has no doubt that everyone and their dog have already searched through the personal belongings of the Squad, but she wouldn’t be surprised to learn that somewhere in his inside pockets Harkness has as many boomerangs as he is listed as having officially. She witnessed this man produce from his bosom at least four different lighters, a massive stack of dollars, a pocket knife, small binoculars, flat-nose pliers, and a toy unicorn. She has to admit: sometimes she doesn’t understand how he even does all that either.

It appears that the thoughts of Captain Boomerang also turn to the contents of his pockets.

“Hey, how the hell are we affording this, though? Make no mistake, I’d stand treat, but my stash is in the coat, and these assholes didn’t let me take it, y’know.”

“Don’t worry about that. Waller is paying for everything,” she explains, unable to suppress a grin, because this part, possibly the most unbelievable part of the entire affair, gives her a sort of silly, spiteful joy. Task Force X is a comparatively recent project, but they’ve already cleaned up so much mess for Amanda Waller that Heracles and his labours don’t even come close. A dinner at a restaurant is the least thing she could offer them. So when Boomerang explodes with laughter and gives her a conspiratorial wink, she looks him right in the eye and smiles. Another mistake. Then again, this is not the first time they share a secret.

He puts his hand on her knee, and she shakes it off immediately; this is way too far.

“I see you took your sword with ya,” Harkness observes, not giving any sign that something didn’t go the way he wanted.

“I am to keep an eye on you.”

“Yeah. How about…” he leans in closer, and the smell of cologne blasts up Tatsu’s nose. She can only hope it is due to external use only, “we chop off his head,” he nods at the driver, “and drive the fuck away from this? Huh?”

The driver, who can definitely hear everything, doesn’t turn, but Tatsu notices him tense up.

“You’re kidding,” she says dryly. He may be, or he may be not – with Digger Harkness, one cannot always tell.

“Why kidding, doll? Zip, and done. There’s no way you enjoy working for Waller.”

“I do not. But if you pull some stunt,” Tatsu feels for the sword hilt, and Boomerang sees that – very well, it is good for him to see that, “I will chop your head off. I really hope it won’t come to that.”

“And what’s it to you? Scared of me? But I’m unarmed,” he claps himself on the chest demonstratively, implying that he has no weapons on him. “Why do you care if it does?”

“I just wouldn’t like to do that,” she says firmly, and it’s true. It works well; he doesn’t even mention running away for the remainder of the day.

This might be the strangest evening in her life.

Waller’s man drives them to a French restaurant whose name she cannot read but is almost sure that the phrase was chosen solely because it sounds impressive. They are let in through the back door, so no one among the other guests, who are sporting evening dresses and suits, pays any attention to her crop top and sword or to his… appearance in general. Their table is one of those located in alcoves, away from prying eyes, but Tatsu feels they are being watched. Which means Waller doesn’t trust her too much – well, she can understand that. She is part of a special team composed of deranged madmen, and she must admit she likes these deranged madmen more than she likes certain normal people known to her. Of course, she is Flag’s right-hand woman, but it is most likely that Waller doesn’t trust Flag either. It is doubtful whether there are any people in this world that she trusts at all.

Waller is rich. Their little feast will not shatter her wealth, all the more so since the restaurant she sent them to is not the most luxurious. But they still have a field day ordering loads of food and a bottle of the most expensive wine on the menu.

“To honour among thieves?” she suggests, when they raise their glasses for the first time.

“Didn’t ya say yer not a thief?”

“That is true,” she admits, and adds inwardly, I’m a killer.

In the end, they drink to the Suicide Squad. Then to Lawton and Jones, currently languishing in their cells. Then to Zoe Lawton, who is acting in a school play next week. To a lot of things. He asks her about her life here, in America. At some point she finds herself trying to explain to him what taiyaki is, and him telling her about banana sandwiches, and she can’t remember why they started talking about this at all. The bottle becomes empty, and another appears as if by itself.

They don’t talk about the past. They don’t talk about the future, because there might be no future at all – they can’t know for sure, what with their way of life. That evening, Tatsu laughs and thinks: good thing I’m drunk – it almost gets easier for a while.

When it’s time to leave, Harkness gets pig-headed.

“Whoa, no, no, no. Already? It’s too early, are you kiddin’ me?” he booms out when they exit the restaurant. He protests, but she drags him by the hand and he stumbles along after all, treading heavily like a dancing bear. “Let’s go someplace else, luv. Look at the pretty stars.”

“We are already late. And you… you have to go back to jail,” Tatsu tells him. The stars are pretty indeed, but she regrets looking up at them, because her head begins to spin. Thankfully, she isn’t wearing high heels. Thankfully, she doesn’t have any high-heeled shoes at all, or she could have been possessed to wear them. “Sorry,” she adds when they get into the car and set off. “There is no other way.”

“Back to jail,” Boomerang repeats with disgust. Sprawling on the seat, he unzips his hoodie, and Tatsu is swept over by the smell of cologne again. Weirdly, it doesn’t annoy her as much as at the beginning of the evening. “I’m a fucking Cinderella. I’m not back by midnight, they turn me into a pumpkin.”

“Cinderella,” Tatsu echoes, and giggles: everything is way funnier now. The driver makes a sudden turn, and she is literally thrown at Boomerang. Her cheek presses to his chest – and stays there. Tatsu feels drunk and sated and drunk again, and sleepy too, and he makes for a decent pillow, and she can’t make herself move away.

“Oh, you think it’s funny,” Harkness mutters with mock offence in his voice. It seems he’s about to fall asleep too. “Well, go on, laugh.”

They drive back in silence, and through the drowse Tatsu feels the warm arm around her waist and thinks: good thing I’m drunk, I can pretend I’m asleep.

The road to Belle Reve is long, but it still feels like they reach it too quickly.

“Inmate,” calls one of the guards, “get out.”

Harkness, his eyes still closed, moans with discontent.

“Captain Boomerang,” Tatsu says softly, freeing herself from his embrace. “It’s time.”

There is nothing to be done. He’s already about to step out of the jeep, when he suddenly moves closer to her again.

“Hey, darlin’,” he says, looking her right in the eye. “Aren’t ya forgetting something?”

It takes her some time to realize what he means: he must be expecting her to kiss him. All at once she remembers everything that has happened this evening, and awful shame washes over her: it is no wonder he’s expecting that to happen.

“Inmate, get out!”

She shrinks back.

“Good night, Captain,” she tells him as dryly as she can. He looks wounded but says nothing, and almost obediently lets the guards escort him back to his cell. Tatsu closes her eyes and rubs her temples wearily. Tomorrow she is going to regret drinking so much. She already does – and that’s not the only thing she regrets.

She has to stop seeing him.

***

At first, she even succeeds. Next Friday Tatsu, as always, goes to Belle Reve to see the Squad – all of them save for Harkness. She feels sick at heart because if she did promise him anything, it was to visit him, and now she’s going back on her word because of her own stupid weakness. But there is no other way.

“He asked about you,” Waylon tells her a week later, when she brings him the latest issue of Playboy. Tatsu almost doesn’t feel weird anymore when buying it, and doesn’t try to imagine anymore what the news stand clerks think when she pays them for it. Such periodicals cause her a feeling of light disgust, but Croc, who gets let out of jail only to be thrown into another trouble spot, deserves at least some small joys.

“Who?”

Waylon, no doubt observant like all the quiet ones tend to be, bares his impressive teeth.

“You know who.”

It seems a logical solution to give up on these visits at all – but in that case she would betray all of them. Perhaps this little tradition is much more important to her than it is to the prisoners, but Tatsu is almost sure that it means something to them as well. She has no right to deprive the rest of them of this bit of understanding, companionship, normalcy because she wasn’t smart enough to stop the game she and Boomerang started before it became too late.

At home – not that the apartment she’s renting here deserves to be called ‘home’ – she, unable to fall asleep, unsheathes the sword and runs the tips of her fingers along the cool blade. A tender, habitual movement – like touching the cheek of a loved one.

“I’ve lost my way, Maseo,” whispers Tatsu. The place where the souls of the people struck down by this blade are trapped is still a mystery to her, but she knows that Maseo will come as soon as she calls him – as a voice from afar, as nebulous shapes in the swirls of smoke, as the peace and safety granted by the presence of someone dear. “I’m afraid of my own heart.”

I know your heart, Tatsu. You have nothing to be afraid of.

“It makes me act rashly. Makes me succumb to false feelings.”

I know your heart, Tatsu, and it incapable of falsehood.

Only the ones that are already far away can speak so vaguely and with such unrelenting honesty at the same time.

“I will always love you,” she whispers ardently. Not because she doesn’t want him to think it is not so; not because she herself feels like it is not so anymore either. She knows for sure that she is always going to love him, for she loved him as a lover, as a husband, as the father of her children, as the only thing she had left after all her life fell apart, burned in that damned fire. He will stay in her heart until her last breath – even if she has to close her heart to the rest of the world. Once she used to think that after all she’s been through, it isn’t going to be an issue.

And I will always love you, her husband replies, and Tatsu blinks back tears with a deep sigh.

“I just wish you were alive,” she tells him for what must be the hundredth, or maybe a thousandth time.

If he was with her – not as smoke or a voice, but as flesh and blood – he probably would have kissed her gently on the nape of her neck, as he often used to do.

I just wish, says her husband – no, the soul of her husband, which is already rushing away, deep into the world she shouldn’t hurry to go to if she doesn’t want this sword to fall into wrong hands, that you were happy.

***

Literally the next day there is a message from Metropolis that some giant snake-like beast is terrorizing the city and devouring people. The monster was last seen crawling into the building of the opera – which is where their squad heads to after reaching the city.

“Look at that freak,” Harkness comments in a low voice. The creature is curled up slumbering on stage, and they are watching it from the catwalks above. “Not a family of yours by any chance, eh, ‘gator?’

Waylon steps towards him, and the planks creak under his feet, threatening to break.

“Say that again,” he growls.

Tatsu bares her sword and wedges herself between them. Waylon backs off reluctantly.

“Knock it off,” she tells Boomerang. It feels like everything has come full circle – the day Harkness picked up her mask, he also had a run-in with Jones. The day they were sent to fight the Enchantress, she also put the blade of her sword under his chin. Why did she even think something would change?

“Oh, so you’re talking to me after all?”

“Enough,” Tatsu hisses. She really wants to try to explain everything to him. Maybe if she tries to put her feelings into words, many things will become clear to her, too. But if he thinks they are going to discuss this now, he is mistaken.

On the neighbouring catwalk, Rick is looking at them in a rage, gesturing both of them to shut up. Harkness steps closer; now the blade of the Soultaker is within a hair’s breadth away from his neck. A single careless movement, and blood will be spilled. A wild idea crosses her mind: it looks as if he’s into this. Tatsu licks her lips.

“Y’know,” Boomerang begins, lowering his head a little so that it is easier for him to look her in the eye, “I think you’re scared of me. Or of yourself, hell if I know. Am I right?”

A loud rustle comes from beneath, and the next instant the monster bites through the middle of the catwalk they’re standing on, and both of them are falling down. Tatsu manages to grab some rope, but when she tries to climb it, her hands slip, and she comes tumbling down.

The fall is far from being soft, even though she falls on the tatters of the curtain, which the snake must have torn earlier. She is lucky not to hurt her head, but her left leg and hip are aching. Only the awareness that there is no time to lie around makes her summon up all her strength and get up. Her sword is nowhere to be seen, and Tatsu is overwhelmed by fury: now she is useless.

The snake roars and shakes its head, trying to shake off Croc, who is trying to bite through its scales. Rick is shooting at the monster from above, and Deadshot, who is already on stage somehow, is doing the same from below, dodging the blows of its tail. Tatsu sweeps her eyes weakly over the stage and suddenly notices a hole broken in it. At the very edge of the hole, the hilt of her sword is sticking out of the floor. Moving as quickly as it is possible to do that with a limp, Tatsu hurries there.

The moment she pulls the sword out of the stage, Harkness’s head pokes out of the hole. Not waiting for him to ask for help, Tatsu helps him get out.

“Are you…” both of them begin in unison and drop it immediately, because the snake has managed to shake off the bothersome little crocodile – who is hopefully just somewhere on the floor and not in its belly – and is moving towards them, slower than before but still pretty speedily. They scatter, and Tatsu charges at the monster with her sword drawn. Harkness throws a boomerang at the creature, aiming at its eye, but it dodges at the last second.

Eventually, with joint forces they manage to kill the beast. To be on the safe side, Lawton fires a round into its open jaws. The long body shudders one last time and falls still. For some time, the five of them stand there looking at it.

“Where could this thing even come from?” Rick mutters.

“Remember what the Wicked Witch of the West said when she tried to get us to join her? The world is changing, the time of magic has come, blah, blah, blah,” Lawton reminds him. Rick nods absentmindedly; these are not happy memories.

Jones kicks the dead snake.

“Maybe it meant no harm,” he points out in his deep voice.

“Croc,” Rick says wearily, “it ate people.”

“So did I.”

“But at least you didn’t chew the curtain at the opera like a disgraced diva?” Lawton asks, struggling not to grin.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Well, then it’s okay.”

Rick titters nervously, and the next instant all of them are shaking with laughter.

Tatsu is drinking water straight from the tap in the restroom, when Harkness comes in.

“This is a ladies’ room,” she says reflexively.

“Hey, I just wanna wash my face, is all.”

Without waiting for her to answer, he comes closer and starts washing at the neighbouring sink. Tatsu casts a sidelong look at him and notices that the water is turning red.

“Show me your face,” she orders.

“It’s not a bad face, what’s yer problem?”

“I’m serious.”

He rolls his eyes, but stands still while she examines his face, only wincing when she dabs at the cut on his forehead with a paper towel.

“Just a scratch,” he assures at once.

“Just a scratch,” Tatsu agrees. She scrunches up the towel and throws it into the sink. She would like to keep her hand on his face, pretending that she’s still wiping off the blood, but she’s done pretending.

“How about you?” Boomerang asks quietly.

“Fine. A couple of bruises. You were lucky today,” she says just as quietly, and takes off her mask. Tomorrow they might not be as lucky. “I’m happy for you.”

“And I’m happy you got out alive… darl.”

For a moment she wants him to ruin everything. To reply with a jibe, to crack another dirty joke, to try to grab and kiss her only to get smacked. Not to stand motionless in front of her like he’s afraid to scare her off. It occurred to her once that from the outside their relationship might look like an attempt to tame a wild animal. Perhaps this is a mutual process.

Do whatever you want to him.

She stands up on tiptoes and kisses him.

For an instant, Harkness freezes – possibly trying to figure out again if he’s dreaming – and then pulls her closer and kisses back. Drinks her hungrily, like this is both the first time and the last. Bearing in mind what their lives are like, it really might be the last.

Tatsu doesn’t immediately realize why she suddenly doesn’t need to stand on tiptoes anymore.

“Put me down–” she starts, but gives up and wraps her legs around his waist. Boomerang grunts with satisfaction and switches from her lips to her neck. His beard, fortunately, is softer than could have been expected.

“Stop drinking so much,” Tatsu breathes out, now that no one is trying to shut her mouth. “You taste like…” all English words slip her mind, “like… a beer cask.”

It tickles her when he laughs into her neck.

Someone simply must enter now – Rick, Floyd, Amanda Waller, the president of the United States, but no, no one is trying to stop him from squeezing her hips, to stop her from running her fingers through his hair. Weapon to weapon, blade to blade. Red-hot metal to red-hot metal. Melting until something new is forged – without fear, without regret, without the past, without the future.

Clearly, Maseo wants too much: she remembers what happiness is, and she is sure she’ll never ever be happy again.

But she can take a shot at being alive.

#suicide squad #katana #captain boomerang #tatsu yamashiro #digger harkness #kaboom #captain boomerang x katana #boomerang x katana #dc #my fic #gella talks skwad #talk talk talk #my magnum opus lmao #amazed i managed to translate this. i am not a woman i'm a god indeed #once again i still know nothing about the geography of the dceu!united states #and whether a city like metropolis could have an opera house

15 notes · View notes