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Harley calls Floyd “Daddy” sometimes. Just to piss him off.
He’s tried telling her it’s not sexy. In fact, he’s rather explicitly told her that it’s an instant boner killer, that she’s tainting his own daughter’s innocent name for him.
By the time he spits all of this out, Harley’s hand is halfway up his thigh and her lips are curled over her teeth in that deviously manic way she probably practices in the mirror. She palms his dick before retreating, and he’s caught between annoyance at her because she’s batshit crazy and annoyance at himself because his blood is rushing south and no amount of mental stability is gonna stop that.
He’s resigned himself to the fact that, while he’s on a mission to acquire freedom and his daughter, Harley’s on a mission to drive him insane.
She’s always wandering off and getting herself into trouble. If it’s not so she can privately text her sociopathic sweetheart, it’s because there’s fairy dust in her vision and she’s following a trail to some magical land.
Floyd’s used to keeping track of her out of the corner of his eye, stalking off mid-assignment to reel her back in. Sometimes he finds her with the beaten carcasses of baddies at her feet, ponytails crooked like the smirk on her face. This time he finds her with tears in her eyes, hands shaking like she’s been electrocuted.
“Harley,” he calls, hesitant at first. Her back’s to him and there’s no sign that she’s heard him. He yells her name a little louder; her body wracks with a tremor.
It’s not until he’s just about a foot away that he can hear her mumbling, something like I can take it I can take it on a loop. There’s an electrical wire at her feet – maybe she had been electrocuted.
“Harley.” He’s close enough now to return to a gentler cajole, pressing at her elbow with his index and middle finger. She jumps and then snaps her gaze to him, already hefting her bat into the air like she might take a swing.
He’s been here before.
“Just me,” he reminds, hands up in their customary surrendering position. It’s never occurred to him to ask what this is all about – he already knows the answer, deep down inside.
Harley snaps out of it quicker than the last time, blinks at him twice as clarity eclipses the frantic look in her eyes.
“Why’re you always checkin’ in on me?” she whispers.
Floyd’s throat feels tight. He shrugs in response.
It’s easy to find a pattern with her. For all her irregularities and quirks, she likes to memorize combat moves like clockwork and Floyd’s learned that it’s real damn easy to heft her over his shoulder for a vantage point or bounce a bullet off the refined cuff on her wrist when she angles her arm just so.
He’d ask why she trusts him intrinsically but then he’d have to ask himself the same question.
She can be real fucking funny, too. She’s always prodding Flag because she’s bored, taunting Digger because he’s a shithead, bolstering Croc’s confidence because no one can tell if he’s sincere or insecure. She’s even got some weird repertoire going on with Katana where Katana regards her with steely solemnity and Harley responds with delighted laughter.
For Floyd’s part, he likes to think they’ve got a tag team thing going on.
When Flag decides that he’s going to pay June a visit immediately following a mission that almost exclusively involved being projectile vomited on by goo monsters, Floyd can’t resist stopping him with a hand at his shoulder and a vague gesture to his face.
“You gonna go like… that?” he asks, eyeing Flag’s matted hair and dragging clothes.
In turn, he knows Harley’s about to jump in by the spring in her step. “You look like a drowned gopher,” she says helpfully.
“Yeah. Like a gopher that drowned, rescued itself, and then threw up… everywhere,” Floyd adds.
Harley scrunches her nose. “And bathed in it.”
Flag’s rolling his eyes but Floyd’s watching Harley, an amused uptick at the corner of his lips. She catches his stare, pulls on the elastic gum in her mouth and practically shimmies.
“Somethin’ funny, Daddy?” she smirks.
He takes it back. She’s not funny. Not funny at all.
Her most notable quality, though, is that she always comes back. The Joker rescues her sometimes, takes her on a joy ride or two so they can wreak some havoc before they inevitably end up in a fight and he drops her back off at Belle Reve, her new little holding incubator. Sometimes she’s got a split lip or a limp to her step; sometimes the damage is only psychological.
This latest time she’s got a purple bruise clumping at her temple, likely from a pipe or maybe even her own bat. She’s as smiley as ever when Floyd sees her before the next mission.
“You sure you’re good to go?” he asks, tipping his chin towards her face even as he bends to unlatch his trunk. He’s moved it right up against hers so he can talk lowly and only she will hear.
She’s already dug halfway through her costumes. “Don’t I look ready?” she challenges.
He chews the inside of his cheek for a minute, caught between thinking about what to say and concentrating on strapping himself into his suit. Finally, “I don’t know how to say this delicately, doll face, but you look like a tractor drove into the side of your head.”
She pauses in her efforts to dress and fixes him with a glare. He winces a bit.
“A pretty tractor,” he amends.
Harley smacks her lips like she’s placated, but her mind’s already focused in on the next problem: she can’t seem to get her left glove on without wincing. It’s then that Floyd pays a little more attention, notices that her pinkie’s crooked and swollen with spots of blue and pink. He lets out a long-suffering sigh, shuffles over to her and takes hold of her wrist with one hand while disassembling his pistol in the other.
“For the record, this is what I was talking about,” he whispers. Harley just watches him discard pieces of his gun.
“What’re you doin’?” Her voice is all quiet wonder.
He doesn’t answer in words, just gets the right pieces out of the way so he can access the recoil guide. Once he’s got that in hand, he grabs for a shirt Harley never wears, tears a strip of fabric off and then sets her pinkie against the recoil guide and starts wrapping it up. She lets him work without question, only biting on her lip once or twice to quell the pain.
“Zoe sprained her pinkie once,” he says as way of explanation. He doesn’t know if Harley’s listening or not, because her gaze is fixed on his face and her eyebrows are furrowed like she’s deep in thought.
“Floyd,” she says. Stops herself.
He wants to tell her not to go back to him. He can feel it unfurling in his chest, crawling up his throat, weighing at his tongue. Has no clue where it came from or how long it’s been living inside of him.
Instead, he kisses her forehead just shy of where the Joker had marked her. His hands linger at her hair before he pulls away and trudges on back to his trunk. He leaves it at that.
The problem is that she’s so fucking reckless. She’s got a death wish that likes to crop up at the most inopportune times, always towards the end of a crucial fight when everyone involved is in the most danger. Maybe she’s just toying with the self-sacrificing hero role, trying it on for size like she would a new dress.
Floyd can usually catch her in time. Right now, however, he’s knee deep in rubble and rock-type metahumans, there’s a cloud of dust permeating the air and reaching into even his mask, and Harley’s nowhere to be seen.
Her name’s out of his mouth before he thinks twice about it. The king of this particular metahuman army is staring him down, hurtling boulders and pieces of crumbled building every which way, and Floyd’s busy yelling Harley’s name. He’s dropped everything in favor of searching for her. It’s like he’s just forgotten what the fuck he’s supposed to be doing.
“You can look for her later, mate!” Digger yells, midway through a launch of his sturdiest boomerang. Floyd’s too busy lifting rubble with a kinetic kind of franticness, his movements jolting and impatient.
Flag joins in then, fingers grasping at the back of Floyd’s collar as he hollers, “Deadshot!” It sounds like an order, like Floyd’s one of his soldiers.
Floyd shrugs off Flag’s grip and dives for another pile of rubble. “Where the fuck is Harley?”
She’d been hurt more than she wanted to admit earlier. It suddenly feels like his responsibility that she’d come to fight anyway.
Maybe Flag and Digger give up after that – distracted by the battle and the very real danger of death – because Floyd doesn’t hear anything more from them as he digs up rock after rock, marble and debris and everything in between. Eventually he comes by a fallen column at a forty-five degree angle to the wall, scattered shards of pavement surrounding it but enough of a hidey hole left over that someone who’d been injured might crawl in there as a last ditch effort for safety. And, well, of course that’s where she is, passed out cold with her neck propped at an awkward angle.
He checks for a pulse first, careful fingers at her neck and then her wrist, and when he finds a bass drum kicking away as aggressively as ever, he lets out a long sigh of relief. Then he’s hauling her up and into his chest, a familiar carry if not for the fact that she’s limp as a doll.
By the time he’s made his way back to the group, the dust has settled and the battle is over. Floyd hasn’t got a clue how they beat the king.
“Thanks for the help,” Digger snarks when Floyd’s close enough, but it’s not as cutting as it could be. There’s something like understanding in his eyes, and there’s downright empathy in Flag’s.
Floyd can’t decide how to respond, so he doesn’t at all. Just looks at Harley’s obliviously dozing face, the darkened bruise on her temple and the scar left under her jaw from God knows what else.
Maybe Harley called it, that first day that they’d met. Maybe he’s full of shit.
She’s nothing if not resilient. It might be his favorite quality of hers.
Though it takes a while for that to come through, she does eventually wake up. They’re already back on the helicopter, and Floyd’s got Harley strapped in tightly next to him so she doesn’t jostle around during her slumber. When her eyes start peeking open, he’s reading the latest batch of letters from his daughter and contemplating a blank page that’s meant to be filled with his reply to her.
Harley stretches out, all feline sinews and laziness, and catches his eye.
“Sleep well?” he asks.
“Like a kitten,” she sasses. He can’t help the way his lips curve in response – half entertained, half grateful she’s still kicking.
Then she nudges at his knee, head tilted in curiosity as she regards the letters in his lap. “Figured out what you’re gonna write back yet?”
Floyd’s gaze drops as he shakes his head.
“Start with the best parts. Like your favorite stuff about the squad.” She pauses then, and he can see her crinkling her nose in his periphery. “Maybe leave out all the shit about prison.”
He looks up at her then, and he can’t help it: he’s kind of staring. Here she is, bruised and broken and probably half-dead, and she’s giving him advice. Sincere and heartfelt advice that’s not cloaked in a thousand layers of erratic bullshit. Whatever they’ve built between them, it’s one of the few good things he’s got going right now. He wants her to feel that way too. And that’s enough to give him an idea.
Turning away from her, he starts scribbling at his empty little page, shoulders hunched just so. Even when Harley unbuckles herself and tries to peek over his shoulder, he shifts his work out of her field of vision.
She huffs at him. “What, I help ya and I don’t even get to see? No fair.”
He waits until the helicopter lands to hand her what he’s written, a crooked tilt to his lips on an otherwise stoic expression. Then he stands and hurries out of there, having already decided he’s not going to stick around for her reaction.
The note reads: Harley Quinn’s my favorite part of the squad. I’d prefer it if she’d try not to die anytime soon.