Chapter Text
AMANDA
Amanda Waller steps off the jet and out onto a private airfield in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. The skies are pitch-black overhead; night has long since fallen.
Still, the lampposts shed bright white light on the airfield, illuminating everything from the blackened tire marks on the asphalt to the thick greenery crowding the borders on every side.
In the near distance, the blocky silhouette of Belle Reve Federal Penitentiary looms—guard towers lit at every post, cameras trained on every inch of the somber facility, the communal prison yard desolate save for the occasional two-man patrol… all this behind miles of electrical fence topped with gleaming spools of barbed wire.
Her heels click on the tarmac and the rhythmic thud of the Colonel’s bootsteps are perfectly in time with her own—a steady metronome for the melody of pure elation eclipsing her thoughts.
Years of planning; endless meetings spent kissing the asses of egotistic geriatric white men who hold positions of considerable power they’ve done absolutely nothing to earn… all that blood, sweat, and tears, finally culminating to bear fruit.
Lord, she feels giddy just thinking about it.
Focus, she scolds herself. You’re not there yet.
A couple hundred feet down from the jet, a helicopter has touched down neatly in a painted-white circle atop the tarmac. Recently, too, by the looks of it.
The pilot dismounts, pries open the back doors to reveal…
It’s only years of hard-earned discipline that keeps Amanda Waller from clapping her hands together and squealing with delight like a little white kid on Christmas morning.
Three stretchers come rolling out, one right after another.
It must’ve been a tight fit in the chopper, Amanda thinks to herself.
On the first—a tall, Black man with broad shoulders and a featherweight boxer’s build. A considerable beard lines his jaw, soot streaks his swarthy features, and his typically heavy-browed expression is lax—peaceful in his drug-induced sleep.
On the next—a thin, shapely woman with wild curls of brown hair; pouty lips; and a black latex catsuit clinging to every curve like a second skin. Her features, too (pretty as they may be), are grimy and soiled; striped with blackened ash. Selina Kyle. Something of a last-minute decision on Amanda’s part, but upon seeing her now, she certainly doesn’t regret it. She, too, is out cold even despite the intensity of the LEDs overhead, thanks to the IV filled with sedatives attached to her gurney.
And, last but not least—two figures are curled up around each other on the last bed: a willowy ghost-pale young woman with girlish platinum-blonde pigtails (the edges dip-dyed blue and pink, respectively), full lips that bleed from a split in the lower of the two, and angry-looking bruises littering nearly every inch of exposed flesh all across her lithe body.
Snuggled up into her side, snoring peacefully into her neck—a young, exhausted-looking little blonde boy with a bit of soot smeared across his plump cheek, thin eyelids swollen and pink from crying. He whimpers in his sleep, then; and, as if Harley senses it—even knocked unconscious as she is—her thin, blood-streaked arm tightens around the boy and tucks him closer.
Harley Quinn, and her… nephew? Adoptive ward? Son ?
Now, wouldn’t that be something.
Psychiatrist-turned-maniacal-delinquent, a mother.
She makes a mental note to order a full DNA work-up, stat. Perhaps the child truly is his mother’s son.
She and the Colonel pause to let them by, returning each armed escort’s nod with a curt one of her own.
She turns to the Colonel. “ETA on Tatsu and Isley?”
The Colonel doesn’t blink. “Already here, Ma’am,” he drawls in that nasally, accented tone of his. It grates on Amanda’s nerves. “They’re waitin’ for us inside.”
She nods. “Good.”
Then, without a word, they fall into line, making their way directly into the jaws of a place Harley Quinn and her band of cavorting misfits will never, ever escape from.
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