Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

i.

“You ever been in love?” Harley asks him in mid-mission, her makeup a smoky palm-print smear across her cheek. Mere seconds ago, she had clubbed a meta-human’s testicles with her baseball bat until something splatted. She’s having a bad day.

Rick humors her, because they all have bad days. “Well, you know about June,” he says. He keeps his rifle at ready, casually tracking the ring-leader of this whole shit show across an adjacent rooftop. He won’t beat Lawton to the kill, but watching that Hail Mary shot will be a thing of beauty.

“Who’s June?” Harley wonders. She slides her arms over his shoulders, pressing her breasts against his spine.

“June, my—the woman I love.”

“Oh honey,” she says. “That ain’t love. I mean, you ever been stolen?”

He’s watching Lawton line it up—like he’s got all the time in the world, always—and her body heat is comforting, the kind that asks for and takes nothing from him. “I guess?”

“Fresh like new snow,” Harley mocks, her gunky fingers in his hair.

Rick winces, and tries not to imagine what she’s leaving behind up there. “You know… it doesn’t always have to hurt,” he says, even as he knows better. “It can be quiet, and safe.” He’s thinking about waking up in the watery morning light to June’s baited-breath kisses and the nightmares stripping away like gray, leathery lather.

“What you’re remembering is her illusion,” Harley whispers in his ear. “Lemme let you in on a little secret: if it don’t hurt, it’s phony.”

She picks herself off his back before he can react or even process that she’s right about the hoarded memory. Across the divide between the buildings, their target’s head cracks like a perfectly split egg, the bullet passing clean through to lodge into a billboard for Wayne Enterprises.

ii.

The thing is, Rick knows he’s the mouthpiece.

He gives the orders. He talks the talk and walks the walk. He’s got a remote detonator securing Task Force X’s fate to his thumb, and permission to press that button whenever any of the psychopaths step out of line. But the orders are stale water running through him, filtering into his ear from Waller’s direct line and out between his teeth, just as foul as they’d sounded coming in. The posturing’s just that—they’ve seen him cry, and they’ve seen him crumple. Rick relays Waller’s messages and directs his patchwork “suicide squad” to the next target, and the target after that, but he doesn’t bother to keep one hand on the detonator anymore. They’ll do it for their espresso machines and television privileges and the illusion of normalcy.

They’ll do it for smart, sweet kids who ace their geometry tests.

Hell, sometimes they’ll do it for fun.

Waller doesn’t know he smashed the detonator, before. She doesn’t know he’s already shown his true colors; he’s lost his authority. Rick figures what Amanda Waller doesn’t know is so little that it can fit on a pinhead and still leave room for the alphabet, so he’d better relish the reprieve while it lasts. When she finds out, that’s it for Rick Flag.

The weird thing is, the squad knows. They’ve got him by the proverbial balls. But they don’t say shit, and while they make his life a living hell, no one hands him over to Waller as used goods.

Rick figures, maybe they don’t wanna break another babysitter in.

(“Shit, it’s better than having a chauffeur,” Lawton says once, as Rick leads him away from his latest visitation in cuffs, pushing him down into the backseat of the government car stalled at the corner. “Throw in some champagne, a sun roof, and a guy could feel real special.”)

iii.

Lawton gets his visitations with his daughter. That, and the letters. That’s the deal. It’s enough. That honeypot’s plenty to keep Lawton in line, as much as Lawton can ever be kept in line, and when Lawton is kept in line then the rest of the squad falls in like dominoes. Rick’s under no illusion who’s maintaining their shaky truce.

So if Rick does a little extra on the side—checks in on the girl, keeps a wary eye on that Darnell asshole—maybe puts in a regular order to the nearest grocery store to have fresh vegetables and Twinkies delivered—folds the Scholastic Book Fair pamphlets into Lawton’s incoming mail—well, that’s keeping them even. That’s paying his dues. It’s just a little thing here, a stupid thought there. A guy saves the world, he ought to know his baby’s got her basic nutritional needs met.

Plus, Zoe is a great kid. One time, Rick is waiting patiently in the hallway during Lawton’s visitation until she pushes the door open. She looks up at Rick with her big, beautiful dark eyes and says, “Can Daddy come to my recital next Thursday? He said I had to ask you.”

“He did, huh?” Rick glances at Lawton, who’s as smug as ten fucking cats.

“I had to learn sign language for it,” she says.

“Really? That’s—intensive.” He crouches a little, trying to get on her level. He’s not got a lot of practice with kids, so his smile is more awkward than gentle, but hey, it feels like it’s working out okay. “Well, I don’t think we can make the recital.” He can see the chaos now. “But maybe I can come and tape it, and make sure your daddy gets to watch the video? Then he can tell you all about it next time.”

“The hell,” says Lawton.

Zoe grins, toothy and big. She’s losing her timidness around him. “Okay! And the Science Fair is in October.”

“Milk it, baby,” Lawton says. “Don’t forget about the Christmas play.”

“I was thinking about taking ballet,” she says.

Rick immediately regrets going soft. He regrets it even more when he’s jostling middle-aged mothers who want to know which child is his, and why they don’t know him, and who look at him with pity and say, Thank you for your service.

But later, when Lawton watches the video over static intervals on a small television set—a temporary loaner from the guard’s break room—and he spreads his fingers across the glass like he can hold her grainy image in his hands, something pulls hard in Rick’s gut. Something with a serrated hook, something that drags boggy heat down into the cradle of his bones. Lawton says, reverently, “Look at you, my girl.”

Floyd Lawton is textbook sociopath. He’s a damn good shot. He’s a better father than Rick’s was, too, and isn’t that just typical.

iv.

It’s a Tuesday—that’s about all Rick has to say about the state of things—and there’s a giant monstrous praying mantis taking chunks out of Metropolis. It’s uncomfortably close to a bad B movie for Rick’s taste. Waller drops the “packages” in a sad little warehouse some four miles from the destruction, and the squad emerges bleary-eyed and bitching. Christ, there’s times when Rick is almost fond of these assholes.

“Suit up,” he tells him, straight to business. “We take off in ten. Briefing along the way.”

“Hi, Flag,” Lawton says, because he’s the biggest asshole. “Nice to see you. How’s it goin’? How about the weather, man? How about them—damn it, Boomerang, help me out.”

“You gonna ask the Australian, mate?”

“Red Sox,” suggests Croc, and what.

“Don’t be dumb,” says Harley, holding up various embellishments to her body and studying them against her contour. “Half Mast here likes golf, not baseball.”

Rick bristles, ready to demand how she’d found out because that’s a serious privacy breach and he hasn’t picked up a club in months, but then he actually goes over the crazy pouring out of her mouth. He’s stupefied. “What the hell did you just call me?”

“Wait, that right?” Lawton looks genuinely surprised. “You grease your poles?”

“Whacks off on the green,” says Boomerang, chortling.

Crock cracks his scaly knuckles. “Plays with his balls.”

Harley zips up her teeny jean shorts and tuts at them. “Some boys like to fill holes,” she says, admonishing. “It’s perfectly normal!”

“I can blow all your heads off,” says Rick.

“Your ten minutes are up, Half Mast!” Lawton slaps him on the back, hard enough it’s going to leave a bruise. He’s grinning and it’s the feral happiness of a predator on the hunt, scenting blood in the gloaming and along the baseboards of the world. “It’s time to let the big boys save the world.”

As she passes him, Harley blows a cotton-candy scented bubble in his face. “It’s a word play on your name and your penis,” she explains.

“Yeah,” says Rick.

v.

The fucking name sticks.

And because he can’t let them see how much it pisses him off, Rick lets them have it. That’s what it’s like, having power—knowing when to pick your battles. The name is inconsequential. It’s middle school stuff.

Also, he knows they’ll only stop over their cold, dead, gaseous bodies.

Then again, it’s kind of like being part of the team. Rick doesn’t want to be “part of the team,” but maybe he’s tired of not being part of anything else. Katana spends more time speaking softly to her sword than to Rick, and what loyalty she’d given him before is served in a veneer of silent appraisal (waiting for him, inevitably, to become the criminal). He’s served his country for years and given up the ticky-tacky corners of his brain to waking horrors, to the dead desperate to cling to their names. He’s given himself over entirely, and what has he gotten for it? A boss who’d sooner put a bullet in his brainpan than forgive him for overhearing the wrong word. A girlfriend used and manipulated by his own government to go into hostile territory. A lifetime of sinking into the dark places, as Lawton had called them.

The dark places. Yeah, Rick knows them. He’s drank the groundwater there and retched on his swollen tongue.

(When Waller overhears the nickname for the first time, she keeps it to herself until the post-mission briefing. “Getting chummy,” she says then, flat and loaded. Rick knows when a gun’s pointed at his nuts, even if her hands are clasped on the table.

“No, ma’am,” he says.)

vi.

June wants him to quit. “There’s nothing keeping you tied to her,” she urges, kneading his forearm. “You were only helping her because of me—but I’m free now. We can go away. We can start over. We don’t have to live as her tools, Rick.”

“If we aren’t under her power, we’ve got no reason to be afraid of her,” he says, and that’s such a bald-faced lie that June goes squinty-eyed.

“Don’t you want to stop?” she asks. In shades of twilight, she’s as far from the Enchantress as a woman can be: blotchy flesh-toned makeup, uncomplimentary shadows, glasses that distort the color of her eyes. Rick loves her, truly. Even though he’s starting to realize he has never known June Moone as a person without a monster curled nervously around her hips, he sees goodness in her and redemption.

Strangely, since the squad, Rick has felt less and less like he’s needed redemption.

“If we go,” he tries, testing it in his mouth, “if we leave, then they’re alone. All of them. Who knows what clown Waller will assign as handler?”

“They saved my life,” June says, tremulously. “But we don’t owe them more than our gratitude.”

God, but she’s beautiful in the same way that lonely flocks of birds breaking out into a green-glass sky are beautiful. It’s that same lifting in his chest, and the knowledge that sadness can escape its marsh. She’s the kind of woman Rick’s waited his entire life to find. He wonders if she would’ve been able to crush his heart, if he’d asked her. He wonders if she would’ve marched up the steps to the swirling vortex, ready to go all in.

Of course she would’ve. But thinking about it, Rick realizes he wouldn’t have wanted her to. June does, and always will, deserve better than the world’s underbelly.

(How easy it seemed once, when they saw each other and recognized: this is another living body with someone riding its back. Now June is free, but Rick has been ground into raw meat, until he can’t tell the difference between the waking world and his nightmares, until he’s scraping chunks of himself away whenever he drags his feet.)

“Can you please just stay with me?” he whispers into their bound hands, steepled like a church between their mouths.

June kisses his mouth, his cheek, the tiredness under his eye. She doesn’t say yes. She doesn’t say no. She just leaves in the night, perhaps expecting Rick to follow, perhaps ready to reinforce the walls of her own heart lest it fall into someone else’s hands. Even Rick’s are not so safe.

vii.

He wakes up to an otherwise empty bed, sheets still mussed from her elbows, and covers his eyes. He stays where she left him for a long time.

viii.

Two weeks later—with four times as much sleep as Rick usually gets, but none of it helps—he accepts that June isn’t coming back. Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe she can have the lazy, sun-swept mornings in bed by herself and drink tea on the fire escape and bask in the buttermilk-sour taste of her own breath, untwined with another’s, not the Enchantress and not Rick and not anyone. Maybe that’s what June needs, and Rick’s not the guy who’s going to deny her that.

He’s just another mudman kissed into life and discarded.

It’s tempting to fall into the bottle. He doesn’t. His sleep is wounded and ill, and he gets no relief from it. He can’t bring himself to move beyond the mattress except to eat stale Twinkies and microwave cup soup, anyway. Even shitty, sleep is still better than listening to how a room sounds without any hope of her.

But Rick gets over it. He’s got a job to do.

World to save.

A little girl who wants her spelling bee recorded.

ix.

“Is this going to be a problem?” Waller asks.

Rick stares at her and feels the hours creep back behind his eyelids, dry and acrid. His whole body is weighted like lead. The clock on the wall is keeping time that Rick can’t feel, passing in increments, snips of a rope. “What’s that,” he says.

Waller looks at him toes to nose. She taps her fingernails on the table: dead cells crunching, keratin leaving its signature. “So I shouldn’t look for your replacement?”

He keeps his expression closed off, impenetrable. “For now, I don’t have anywhere else to be. I’ll let you know if that changes.”

(He can’t read her. He has to hope she swallows the bait.)

x.

There are days you will feel the absence of your heart and question what has replaced its essential cycles, says Katana, stroking the curve of her blade with a lover’s benevolence. She does not look at Rick. She looks at no one, truly, except those she sends to death. Has it made you a machine? Or something more organic, a base alchemy of wet, faulty things struggling to surface?

I have a job to do, Rick tells her.

She sheaths the sword and walks from his side. You have given up on jobs. You will follow whatever moves you, and that is a dangerous calling.

“Are you going to leave me?” he asks.

Katana opens the door for him. Don’t force me to, she says.

xi.

Rick doesn’t expect Task Force X to notice any differences. Of course, that bites him in the ass because they do, with an alacrity that blinds him.

“You look like shit,” says Lawton.

“Like masticated liver,” says Croc. He’s got a lean, hungry set to his mouth.

Rick checks his clip and disengages the safety. They’re not going to need it where they’re going: two miles of subway tunnels swarming with skinheads ready to bring the whole infrastructure down on their heads to appease someone with a nasty overbite and delusions of apocalyptic reign. “Enough sweet talk,” he says. “We’ve got less than an hour before they’re dispersed enough to set the charges.” Jesus, he feels like shit, though: stretched to breaking like a water balloon, eye sockets bruised and set three inches back into his skull.

Harley actually pets his face and he’s so fucking tired, he just lets her. “Honey, you need a vacation. One of them spa trips. Exfoliate.”

The way Lawton is looking at him, assessing, like Rick’s a mark, raises the hair on his forearms. It’s easy to forget—too easy—that Lawton is a sociopath beneath that nice dad facade and good-natured ribbing. Rick meets his gaze because not doing so is as much an admission of weakness as laying his neck on the block.

“Better look alive,” Lawton says, cocking his finger like a gun. “You’re on candid camera.”

Rick doesn’t need the warning or the reminder.

“Yeah,” he says, baring his teeth, “can’t you see me smiling?”

xii.

And it’s going fine—for a clumsy definition of the word—two of his men eat a bullet before the team can even make it underground, and Katana leaves a gouge in Boomerang’s thigh that won’t stop trailing blood—until a swarm of the assholes floods into the subway station they’re clearing and the barrage of shooting starts. No undead mudmen here, only the kind of loose goose the Joker might bring under wing, scumbags who love their drugs and the promised importance of their death.

Harley is in her element: she takes a particular vicious pleasure in cracking teeth open like jawbreakers with her bat. “Fore!” she howls.

“What,” says Lawton.

“It’s golf,” Rick says, raising his voice as he empties another round on the next row of fanatics. They have to end sometime, right? “Or, she thinks it’s golf.”

“Harley, that ain’t golf,” Lawton says. “It just looks like you can’t count.”

When the charge goes off, Rick is thinking, This is the most fun I’ve had for ages.

The blast throws him back and he recognizes this sensation well: the piercing heat that hides under his clothes, the feeling that he is flying, a sudden quiet in his brain. Like any wild animal, his whole body plays dead. Then the pain is a normal, earthly thing, and Rick coughs a cloud of chalky plaster into his hands, and he’s got Lawton picking him up by a fistful of his jacket.

Half of the station wall is gone, and the tunnel is partially caved on one end. Rick takes stock of the situation: backed into a corner in the tunnel, crouching on the tracks. It’s a terrible position, low ground and blind, and he’s proven right when the gunfire starts up again and presses them down to the ground. The concrete fractures into confetti chips above them. Not for the first time, Rick wishes that Santana had made it. He could use massive fire power with a conscience right now.

“Boomerang!” he barks. “Cut them down!”

“There’s only one of me,” Boomerang protests, but he’s sliding his weapons out from his coat as he says so.

“Deadshot, we’re covering him. Now!”

They rear up in tandem and the sheer balls of it is surprise enough for an opening. Lawton hadn’t even hesitated. Sometimes it’s like this between them, like having a tether, or being tethered. Rick’s studied enough of Lawton’s logic—seen him work at murder like it’s a timed puzzle—that he aims where his bullets are best laid and trusts Lawton to pick up his slack.

Boomerang cuts down the remaining masses. Harley is at Rick’s feet, fixing her post-explosion hair.

And Rick’s tired, okay? He’s burnt out. He’s missing June and he’s not sure what he’s doing here anymore, but that’s no excuse for dropping his guard. The bullet suckerpunches into the soft junction of his shoulder and neck, and leaves a toothed kiss.

Sound cuts out. He thinks, Ah fuck. An artery would’ve been faster.

He’s on gravel and the tracks are cutting into his ribs. Harley puts her palm over his forehead like he’s a sick child. She’s curled over him, a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes, the carnival taste of marigolds born sickly sweet. She says something but he misses it.

“What do we do?” Croc asks, and that breaks through like a rock.

Flag, Waller is saying in his ear, do you copy. Flag.

Boomerang is back—is it done? He can’t hear anymore gunfire. “Leave ‘im,” says Boomerang, trenchcoat hem bathed in blood. “I’m not goin’ back to jail.”

“But he’s got a nice butt,” says Harley.

“Goddamnit,” Lawton says, and he’s leaning over Rick, too, his eyes aphotic and angry, his beard powdered like it’s been snowing. “He dies, we die. You know that. We all know that.”

“Nah,” says Croc. “He won’t push the button.”

“We have no idea what kind of sadist Waller will stick with us next. But I tell you, the next one? He will push the button.”

Confirm your status, Waller says.

Katana is waiting, her sword dripping. She watches them and there is a promise in her stance that’s a hairbreadth from completion.

“An artery would’ve been faster,” Harley says to him, softly. She smiles upside-down and Rick tries to smile back around the sticky film gluing his throat closed. Got it in one, he thinks. She’s smart as hell under that getup.

“The fuck you smiling for,” says Lawton, and he’s pushing Rick’s head to the side so that the blood runs out from his lips in dashed lines. “If you die today, it’s gonna be your own fault.” His hand is heavy on Rick’s temple, and he smells like gun oil and sweat. It’s—grounding. It’s nice.

Without June, he’d been ready to go back into the place where no one touched him. But Lawton has him. Harley has him. His squad has him.

“Like that,” Lawton says, low. “There you go.”

He plucks the comm out of Rick’s ear and lifts away. Rick strains over his own juddering pulse to hear what Lawton’s saying to Waller, but he can’t make out the words. The tempo of his voice sinks into Rick, though, stringing him along. It’s just noise with no intent.

“You owe me a new jacket,” says Harley, and he can feel the vinyl and glitter pressed in a hard mound against his wound. “Not just any jacket, okay?”

An upgrade, Rick mouths. He’s as cold as a full night of rain. Colder.

(In some other world, Amanda Waller leaves him to die because no mission is worth compromising for one run-of-the-mill soldier. But because she knows commodities, and getting people to act against their own self-interest for the national security of the United States is what she does for a living, she sends in a medical and evac team. She saves Rick’s life, and in doing so, she holds it hostage.)

xiii.

Rick dreams about mice distorting and growing cancerous lumps in the darkness of sewers. He dreams they look up at the moon and fear that it will come down on them. In his dreams, Rick is afraid, too.

All of that white, it’s like a skull—like a mask. One eye looks down on the flat landscape, and Rick wonders if this is how June had felt when Enchantress took over her body. He’s stuck in a small, dank place, watching something ancient converge on his haven with the intent to grind it into atomic waste.

xiv.

He wakes up twice for blurred, confusing intervals. When he wakes up the next time, Rick breathes in that piss-scrubbed hospital smell and feels like his whole head has been wrenched out of his musculature. He’s alone. There’s no one to stand vigil at his bedside.

“Shit,” he says.

But he can move. It hurts like a bitch, but he’s got limited mobility and he’s not dead. That’s probably a good thing. He’s got to make sure it stays a good thing.

He only gets four hours of reprieve—spends most of them eating slimy blue Jello and fucking with the controls for his bed—before Waller strolls in wearing a smart tweed suit and shoes that seem too sensible for a woman who’s stabbed a heart with a ballpoint pen. She’s smiling, albeit grimly. It goes to Rick’s pounding head like a warning shot.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” she says.

“Ma’am.”

“Funny thing. You were as good as dead. I have a binder full of men like you—too hard to go back to civilian life, and too soft to be trouble. No skin off my back. Just need to choose another one. Find out what makes him run.”

He doesn’t dare break eye contact. His life is still on the line.

“Funny thing,” Waller says again. “Lawton picks up your radio instead of leaving you to die. You know what he said?”

Rick doesn’t, but he knows when damage control is necessary. “It was the technique,” he says. “Lawton’s a professional. Nothing pisses him off more than a messy shot. That’s all it was. That’s all it was about.”

“He said: Fix this, and this one’s on me.”

Rick feels his throat seize up. He gives it away with his eyes; he knows he does, because Waller’s satisfaction creeps over her like a shroud. She puts her hand over his uninjured shoulder with something like a snake’s smile, unmoving lips and expulsion of air.

“I think I’ll keep you around,” she says.

xv.

Rick wants to rage. He wants to punch something. He wants to shove Lawton into the fucking prison bars and demand to know what about any word of that sounded like a good idea. Doesn’t he know how this works? Doesn’t he understand leverage? In one sentence, he’s screwed them all over.

Rick is not June Moone.

He is not June Moone.

He isn’t, because Task Force X may tolerate him, may even like him on their better days, but between the choice of freedom and imprisonment, they will choose freedom. If Waller pushes them, they’ll push back. They’ll let Waller do whatever she wants to Rick, and once Waller figures out that Rick isn’t the leverage she was hoping for, she’ll dump him like a bag of bricks down a deep well. Harley loves her “friends” but will leave them stranded for her lover. Croc is as likely to sink his teeth into a teammate as he is an enemy. Rick is alive because it was an easier route than letting him die and dealing with the consequences, not because of any existing affection.

(Or worse, Waller is right and Rick is going to be kept in a case as a bargaining chip. He remembers, uncomfortably, being packed in and surrounded by the squad as they protected him from the mudmen. He is afraid that there is even the smallest chance Waller is right. That Lawton hadn’t made a choice so much as verbalized it. That Lawton’s capable of standing on the other side of his former profession, willing to pay to hold another person’s life in his hands, and maybe, just maybe, Lawton wants Rick alive.)

Either way, Rick’s life is forfeit. He’s fucked.

xvi.

Rick forgets sometimes that Waller was the one who introduced him to June, who saw something tentative and fragile and gave it space to grow. She is an expert in cat’s cradle; she understands people, and knots, and the construction of both. Traps are her forte, and she builds them out of skin.

Three weeks later, he gets the papers in the mail.

He gets Waller on her personal line, which he’s never used before. “What the hell is this,” Rick demands, his voice shaking more than he’d like.

“I see you received your copies.”

“Take it back.”

“I’ll have an apartment set up for you,” she says. “Or if Gotham doesn’t suit your tastes, there’s a country home for sale in Louisiana. Visitations will get easier. The United States government will foot the bill.”

“I refuse,” says Rick. “I quit. This isn’t just something you can doctor up and sweep under the rug, this is—this is wrong.”

“You can do whatever you want, but she’s your problem now. Full custody, Flag. That means you’ll need to do more than keep her stocked in snack cakes.”

He sits on the hotel bed, hard. He’s going to be sick. “You’ll kill her mom,” he says, hoarsely.

“It took less than two hours to persuade her this was for the best,” says Waller. “Maybe Zoe Lawton takes after her father a little too much. I couldn’t care less.”

She hangs up, and the line gone dead. The sound gets louder and louder until it deafens Rick from the inside out, an artificial scream he hurts too much to match. He cups a hand over the puckered, healing scar on his neck and stares at the carpet weave: uneven, distorted lines the color of burnt umber, walked over to the point of compression.

It looks like he’s getting a bigger box.

Chapter Text

xvii.

Rick chooses the apartment personally. The United States government has uprooted Zoe Lawton’s entire life and stolen her away from her single mother—whether she’s as neglectful as Lawton’s hinted or as uncaring as Waller implied, Rick doesn’t know and doesn’t care—the least Rick can do is keep Zoe in the same school system. His goal is to ensure that this situation is as easily reversed as possible. At some point in the future, Rick will either be dead or useless to Waller, and if so, he might be able to make things right again for Zoe.

Gotham leaves a sour taste in Rick’s mouth; he hates living in the shadow of the Bat. It’s like being a rat in a maze, feeling eyes on his back wherever he goes. But all he’s got is a storage shed and a hotel room, and Rick sure as hell isn’t moving to Louisiana. Rick’s done his time in the bayou. Gotham it is.

If he concentrates on the practical questions, he won’t panic. It’s not unlike planning a military operation. He carefully deliberates over the choices in apartments—one is in a bad neighborhood, the other teetering on the border of Zoe’s school district, the third reeks like something died under the floorboards—and pours over the paperwork involved in the transfer of custody, trying to find a loophole. Making sure Waller hasn’t left any surprises to spring on him later. There are none. Rick Flag is the lawful guardian of a little girl he’s met less than a dozen times, with no relation to her except that he knows, to some degree, her father’s deadly aim.

It’s fucking terrifying.

He settles on a small but clean two-bedroom unit, captured in part by the muted lavender paint and a balcony overlooking a nearby rooftop garden of sprawling snapdragons and parasitic mint. The child-sized bedroom has locks on the windows and isn’t anywhere near the fire escape, and there are weathered smiley face stickers adhered to the baseboards. Rick thinks this apartment is the best he’s going to find. It feels like an okay place for a kid. The rooms smell strongly of Chinese food from the takeout kitchen in the retail space two floors below, but even that is comforting, like fried eggs and the watery, clean scent of steaming rice. The walls aren’t near thick enough, but there isn’t a wall in Gotham that can keep a loud television contained.

It doesn’t feel like a home. It shouldn’t, not for Rick. It’s nothing more than a nice cage they’re going to be kept in to ensure that Lawton’s toes stay on the other side of the line. He’s not even paying for the damn thing.

“Homey,” Waller says, when he briefs her.

“Have you told Lawton?” Rick asks, because hell if he goes anywhere near the man until Lawton’s heard and had some time to absorb. Rick’s not stupid enough to assume he’ll be okay with this arrangement. Lawton is going to take the first chance he gets to put a hole in Rick’s head.

“I told him myself.” Waller signs the paperwork to authorize the purchase with a flourish and slides it back across her desk. Rick takes it. “He had a lot to say about it.”

“I bet.”

“Give him the weekend, Colonel,” she says, and dismisses him.

xviii.

That Saturday, Rick moves his paltry few possessions into the apartment. It’s silent and sad, even with the promise of company to come. He goes out to buy some used furniture: a shaky bedside table, a sofa with too much give, bluebird dishes, plastic multicolor cups, all the things that a child might find comforting but that make Rick feel like a fraud. What the fuck does he know about parenting? What does he know about homes and homework and keeping a little girl in shoes that are the right size? He never had any siblings. He couldn’t even keep the woman he adored happy enough to stay with him. His own parents were leading examples of how to make love taste fetid and thin.

He stands in a department store and stares at the twin-sized bedframes for almost an hour. He’s faced firing squads with less terror in his heart.

Then Rick has an epiphany. No one has asked him to be a parent.

Just another jailor.

With that realization, Rick sits on the lumpy sofa in the dark of his apartment and stares at the floor. He comes full circle in his thoughts. He gets angry. Hopping mad, his grandfather would’ve said.

Waller picks up on the first ring, perhaps sensing the growing storm. “Don’t tell me you need my opinion about curtains,” she says. It confirms what Rick’s known, intuitively; he’s got more eyes on him now than the Bat’s.

“Zoe needs an actual parent in her life,” says Rick. “If I have to do this, Lawton gets weekly visitation rights. Every weekend, and for more than an hour. I’ll supervise.”

Waller scoffs, but he’s not done.

“And I’ll need a direct line so that I can call him if I need help with Zoe. We need to be able to contact him, no matter what time it is, for anything. That stops him from murdering me the next mission, and that keeps me quiet for this little charade. That’s the deal.”

“There is no deal,” Waller says. “You don’t get a deal, Flag.”

“You do this,” Rick tells her, “and you’ve got us both wrapped. Good as done.”

Waller doesn’t say anything for a long time. He can hear her breathing, measured and patient, across the line. She is never rushed. She takes the time she needs to. In a frightening way, Rick thinks it’s the closest sound he’s ever heard to a lullaby, a slinking procession that descends down into the places you sleep.

They both know, though, that the threat of having something taken away is much more effective than a reward. Lawton has everything to lose. And Rick? He’s a good soldier.

“Nothing is going to go well with that crappy paint color,” she says at last. Good as done.

xix.

He visits Lawton because this’ll be like a field amputation—better to get it over with quickly, punch the pain into one place and stopper the bleeding. If he waits, if they end up with a mission before talking, Rick knows he’s a dead man. This is Zoe.

“He’s in a real mood,” the guard says, wearing a shiner like it’s a badge of honor. He spits foul, syrupy stuff into a plastic Donald Duck cup.

“Yeah, that’s probably my fault,” says Rick.

“Well, fuck you, too, buddy.”

“Just open the cell.” Rick rubs his face in exhaustion. His whole head still hurts, the healing wound an itching, sore scar across his flesh. His jaw feels broken; chewing remains a problem.

Lawton is ruining his punching bag, working it over to the point of sad, split disrepair. A trickle of sand shakes loose whenever he pounds into it. He doesn’t look at Rick, and Rick sets his bones hard and plants himself on the ground after he’s inside the cell. Probably would’ve been smarter to do this through the view window, but that’s as good as baring his neck, as good as drawing a line in the dirt. He needs to show that they’re in this shit show together now for better or worse.

“You got some balls, Flag,” says Lawton. He’s covered in a sheen of sweat that bleeds off of him.

“I didn’t know,” Rick says. “She didn’t even tell me until it was done.”

“That makes it all peachy,” Lawton snarls. He turns and Rick is ready, he came ready, but it still shocks his system to be slammed into the hard cement wall. Lawton’s got a fistful of his shirt and his thumb pressed deep into Rick’s entry wound, and jesus fuck god, that hurts, it hurts, it hurts so much that Rick doesn’t process being trapped in by Lawton’s body or the expression he’s wearing to battle. Pain narrows the world.

“That is my child,” hisses Lawton, and not even the cushion of gauze is stopping his thumb from digging into ligament.

Rick can’t help his full-body twitch, a violent seizure of agony. He clamps onto Lawton’s wrist to slow its progression, wedging his arms in between them for as much shield as he can get. In a fair fight, he could probably take Lawton. He’s got the training, the muscle, the hand-to-hand experience. But he’s tired, and taking pain medication, and he’s not here to fight.

“No argument there,” he gasps. “Lawton, you gonna listen to me or what?”

“Or what.”

“Seriously, just—fuck! Fuck, fuck you, fuck.” Rick punches his arm. “Asshole! You get her every week—stop! You get her every week, Floyd.”

Lawton makes an angry noise and rams him against the wall again. But he pulls his fucking fingers out of Rick’s shoulder, so.

“Talk,” he says, eyes like a thunderstorm verging on dead lands.

Rick does.

He explains the current situation and the paperwork, and he emphasizes the new deal he’s pressed on Waller to accept. He admits that he has no idea how to make her comfortable or keep her healthy—he’s never even had a pet, for chrissake—and shows Lawton the cell phone he gets to keep, with only one working line, with 24-hour access. He says, “You have to give me something to work with. I don’t know anything about this kid.” He says, “I’m trying here, Lawton.”

Lawton listens. He’s become unreadable. At some point, he lets Rick go and gives him a few feet of space, which is enough for Rick to realize that he’s barely breathing.

When Rick is done talking, Lawton scratches his throat. “I’m not okay with this,” he says, flatly.

“I think there is no one who’s okay with this,” says Rick.

Lawton sits on his bed and sighs. He rubs his head, which needs a shave again. “I spent years trying to figure out to get her away from her mom,” he says, and there’s something like regret there. “Always thought my girl would do better with me. That was the plan.”

“It’s not perfect,” Rick says, “but this might be the closest you get to that plan. Probably the closest you were ever gonna get after the Bat showed up.”

“Shut up, asshole,” says Lawton, and that’s not perfect either but it’s the closest Rick is gonna get to acceptance.

He’ll take it. Better than the bullet that’s probably still to come.

xx.

Rick knows better than to think they’re not watching him. He just doesn’t give a fuck. Every day he steps out on the street, he lifts a middle finger just for Amanda Waller.

When he picks Zoe up from her mother’s apartment building, there is another car already waiting and packed with her things. She’s standing at the curb: blank-faced, with red-rimmed eyes and in a dress that only Lawton would have picked out for her. Her mother is nowhere in sight. The blinds to her old apartment are shuttered, one broken plastic flag waving out from the rows. Rick feels more self-loathing in this moment than he has in his entire life, even when he’s had a hand buried in a man’s throat, even when he crushed the heart keeping his girlfriend alive between his palms like it was straw.

Zoe gets into the passenger’s side of Rick’s car without a word. She buckles her seatbelt. She picks at her fingernails, painted the yellow of canaries, of buttercups.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Does Daddy know?” Zoe asks, after two blocks have passed them.

Rick keeps his gaze on the road. “He does. He’s going to visit you at the end of the week to make sure you’ve got everything you need. He’s going to visit you a lot more now, actually. Every Saturday, that’s the agreement. And you can call him whenever you want, for whatever you want. You can call him now if you need to.”

“I can?” she whispers, and oh lord, she’s going to cry. She is crying and he didn’t realize.

Rick rips his cell phone from the charging cord plugged into the cigarette burner. He scrolls down to the special number Waller had provided him and then offers his cell to her, fighting his panic. “You bet. Whenever, for whatever. No questions asked. Just, you know, don’t promise to do anything for him without running it by me first, okay?”

Zoe takes the cell from him, delicate in her movements, as if she’s afraid of his. She presses the call button and holds the set to her ear and asks, tremulously, “Daddy?”

To Rick’s relief and gratification, the way Zoe’s face crumbles is answer enough as to who’s on the other end of the line. And although she doesn’t say a word the rest of the ride—just holds onto that cell like it’ll be taken from her, listening intently—by the time they’re, well, home, Zoe isn’t crying anymore.

Rick parks and sits there, and doesn’t move things along until she says, “Okay, Daddy. I love you.”

xxi.

Lawton gives him a list of Need To Know things:

“She’s smart. She’s the smartest kid I ever met, and she’s smarter than I ever was. But she’s a kid, so sometimes she needs help to get there, you know? Sometimes you gotta remind her to do her homework. But you don’t make ultimatums, got it? You just remind her and she’ll do what she’s gotta do. You treat my daughter like you’re anything other than her butler, I’ll kill you.”

“Butler,” Rick says. “Sure.”

“She’s allergic to nuts. That means no peanut butter, no almonds, no hazelnut chocolate, no pistachio ice cream, no fucking nuts. When you shop, you check the labels, Half Mast. When you eat out, you ask the waiter if the mac and cheese has nuts in it. You ask if the hot dog has nuts in it. You ask, always.”

“No nuts,” agrees Rick. “No nuts, ever.”

“You only ever talk to her at half your usual decibel, man. You sound like a drill sergeant even when you’re not drilling. Lower the tone, keep it nice. Practice in the mirror.”

Rick tries for soft-spoken and feels like a douchebag. “Like this?”

“Like that,” Lawton says, and laughs at him.

All in all, it had been an initial two-hour visit followed by a parade of texts, late-night phone calls, and more communication than Rick has ever had with a subordinate, before he even has a semi-complete picture of who Zoe Lawton is and the care and feeding of her person. And he just takes it without protest. He’s not going to turn down valuable reconnaissance. He’s the guy asking for help here. Even if Lawton is the most overprotective, annoying father that Rick’s ever had to listen to at 3 a.m.

Besides, it’s completely worth it for the moment Zoe opens her bedroom door and sees the ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars.

(“She’s always wanted that shit,” Lawton says, wistful and brought lower than Rick’s comfortable hearing. “Her mom didn’t want to deal with what adhesives would do to the paint job. I told her, someday.”)

“That’d be your dad’s idea,” Rick tells her, and her beam makes him think that there are worse prisons for them to inhabit.

xxii.

That first night, Rick lays like a stiff board on his mattress, staring at the popcorn textured ceiling. His head hurts. He can’t sleep. Every shadow is just another way he’s not prepared for what’s coming.

He gets up and stands silently outside Zoe’s door until he can make out the damp, measured pace of her breathing. In and out. In and out. Somehow, he wasn’t expecting her to be able to sleep. There are sirens bleating in the distance, coming closer.

xxiii.

Lawton 5:12 A.M.: make her french toast
Lawton 5:13 A.M.: use vanilla, bitch

xxiv.

Life gets weird, after that.

Rick should probably count his blessings that he’s alive, but he’s not so sure that’s a good thing. When he gets up in the morning—too early for Zoe Lawton to even contemplate opening her eyes—he showers, shaves, and searches for something in the mirror that makes any kind of sense. They have separate bathrooms, but somehow there’s still a mermaid nightlight plugged in beside the sink, like maybe in his early days of panic Rick had decided that would help remind him to make soft spaces. Rick runs his fingers along the electric-warm scales while he’s brushing his teeth. Soft spaces, he thinks.

He thinks about calling Katana. He thinks about that every single day. But they are not—friends, exactly—something amalgamated in blood and the clean lines of a mission—and he can’t wrestle together an idea of what she might say about his situation. I’m trapped, he might tell her. I know you live on the death walk, but you must remember children, your husband must have dreamed of their feet. I can’t just walk away from her. Maybe, if the sound of her breathing fades out altogether and she has no words, only the silent recrimination that he’s gotten himself into this mess, I’ve always known you’d only follow me so long as my decisions were clear. You didn’t sign up for this. I know. I know.

He doesn’t call.

Routine is something Rick excels at, so he sets one. “Good morning,” he tells Zoe when she wanders into the kitchen, already neatly dressed for school. Rick has breakfast ready: French toast with too much cinnamon, sad-looking eggs, maybe oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins grown plump in it. He tries to vary it up, but Zoe likes what she likes, and Rick just likes her to eat.

“Morning,” Zoe says, and she pours her own orange juice. She won’t touch it if Rick leaves a glass waiting for her. He’s learning.

Over breakfast, he is quiet until she’s halfway through, and then he asks polite questions about what’s ahead for the day—is she ready for the math test? Will there be an assembly? Did she pick up her reading list from the hall table? Zoe’s responses are brief, hedging, until Rick asks if she wants to talk to her dad before they leave to drop her off at school. Then, he can count on a smile. But she still watches him like a wary animal beneath the shadow of a large wingspan.

Each day passes. Rick buys groceries. He checks Waller’s updates and cleans his guns. He does laundry, because he’d thought Zoe would want to do her own, but instead she’d looked at the machine like it might bite her and started wearing socks three days in a row until Lawton texted do the damn laundry dick. There’s a rash of violent robberies that the Gotham police are trying to pin on the Joker, and Rick is leery that his team might be called in until the Bat does his job and cleans up shop. It’s a relief. Rick’s not sure it’s safe to be in the field with Lawton yet, and definitely not on home turf.

In the evening, Zoe does her homework at the willow desk in her room, one of the few pieces of furniture she’d brought along. She comes out for dinner and Rick tries not to feel like a jailer. Is this what all parents go through? No—it’s not. He knows that. He feels like a jailer because he is one.

He tries to be a kind one. “Let me know if you need anything,” he tells her.

Zoe looks at him like she’s trying to read his face. She scrunches her nose and nods, dutiful, but her silences get longer and bluer.

(It takes too long to arrange the visitations, but before the month is up, Rick manages to push the paperwork through. The first weekend visit, Zoe cries out, “Daddy!” She wraps around him like a koala cub, and Lawton’s grief is clean enough that Rick can read its every word. He leaves them alone. They go into the bedroom and the door is shut until dinner, when Lawton has to leave them. That’s how the second weekend visit goes, too. And the third. Rick’s worried that she’s crying to him, but he’s too afraid to ask and too lost to know what he’d do with the answer, whatever it may be.)

There is no mission from Waller. Radio silence—lots of that in Rick’s life, these days. Hours are just static interludes speaking in an unfamiliar frequency, bent by starlight and men who live in towers.

xxv.

The fourth weekend visit, Rick looks up from a recon report Waller’s passed on to him—suspicious meta-human activity in Baltimore, the kind that spells trouble for him and his own—and realizes that he’s no longer alone in the living room. The lack of awareness is more than embarrassing; it’s dangerous. Somehow it’s harder to remember he needs to keep an eye and ear open for Lawton’s presence when it’s—well, his home.

Even more embarrassing, he’s not sure when he started to think about this place as home.

“When are you gonna get a TV,” Lawton asks, curled around Zoe on the lumpy sofa. She’s munching on a little Debbie cake, frosting on her nose. “Seriously, Flag, this is sad. I gave you the benefit of the doubt at first. But I come today, and what do I see? No TV.”

Rick considers the living area: the sofa, the armchair he’s occupying, a beat-up coffee table, a small desk with a clunky old computer humming on it. The walls are bare. He’d put some family photos up there, but then it felt like it wasn’t Zoe’s place anymore, so he took them down. “I thought kids watched TV on the Internet these days,” he says.

Zoe laughs at him. It’s a first.

Lawton groans. “Yeah, but you cast that shit to a TV. You’re gonna ruin my baby’s eyesight.”

“You what?”

“Cast it. Fling it from—here, baby, where’s your tablet?”

Zoe makes a gesture that resembles flicking water from her fingers. “Like that,” she says. “And it shows up on the screen.”

Rick stares at them. Now that he’s thinking about it, he’s seen that—he’s even done it during briefings, moving data and video from the computer to the main screen so that his team can see them. He just hadn’t thought of it as a—civilian thing. For television shows. Or whatever kids watch, because he’s not sure it’s all television anymore.

“Well,” he says, slowly, “we can get one. I didn’t think about that.”

Lawton grins and claps his hands together. “While we’re at it…”

“What? C’mon.”

“Zoe, tell ‘im.”

She straightens in her father’s arm, and looks Rick in the eyes without any wariness. Her curls are mashed to one side of her face from resting against Lawton. “Can I please have a computer chair that swivels?”

Rick hides a smile beneath a different kind of smile. “The swivel is important?”

“Duh,” says Lawton. “Seriously, this setup is sad. It’s like you didn’t even try.”

“I don’t have a lot of experience filling a place,” Rick admits, even though it stings a little. He had tried.

“Daddy’s really good at shopping,” Zoe says, proudly. She wiggles around in place. “He bought me almost all my clothes, and my tablet, and my desk and my favorite bedsheets. They’re Egyptian cotton and they never get hot. They’re pink but not loud pink.”

Rick looks at them. Lawton is just watching Zoe now, one corner of his mouth quirked up, and Rick’s only ever seen this kind of humanity in him when he’s looking at his daughter. There’s real love there; it comes to him as easily as killing, maybe easier. It’s why Rick had kept those letters. It’s why he’d fought hard to make Lawton prove what his daughter had obviously believed so wholeheartedly.

He puts aside the recon report—work can wait. “I guess I’ll get my credit card,” he says. “We’ll see if your dad can work his magic on the World Wide Web, huh?”

Lawton gives him a slow, predatory smile. “Gonna trust me with your money, Flag?”

Rick says, “I’m not an idiot. You fill the cart, I’ll pay for it.”

Zoe squeals.

(If he lets Lawton get away with purchasing a ridiculously expensive set of scrolling shelves that Rick’s not even sure he can put up, well, it’s the happiest he’s seen Zoe since this whole thing started. Rick’s got back pay. He can learn how to hang something on a wall straight. There’s a tool for that, probably.)

xxvi.

Lawton 9:21 P.M.: i’m redoing those shelves
Lawton 9:21 P.M.: who taught you anything g-man
Flag 9:43 P.M.: U still up?
Lawton 9:45 P.M.: why, will you read me poetry
Flag 9:46 P.M.: Plz explain a hypotenuse to your daughter.

[incoming call]

xxvii.

The apartment fills up. It starts small: a flat screen television, a new leather sofa with cup holders, shelving. Lawton frames some of Zoe’s pictures—schoolmates in matching bandanas, her mom’s solemn and cautious countenance above a birthday cake, Lawton and Zoe making faces at a caged tiger—and nails them to the walls in weirdly artful patterns. The hall table gets a doily, which is bizarre. One of Zoe’s coil pots from art class takes a position there, catching keys and business cards and Zoe’s escaped rubberbands. She’s got them in every color in the rainbow and then some.

Rick puts up shelves in her room and changes out the bedframe for a pretty little daybed with cheerful embroidery. It’s nice. It’s actually better than nice. Lawton has good taste and a decade of fatherhood under his belt, and it shows.

The new dishes patterned in garnet and black mosaic are a little unnecessary. So’s the waffle maker, because it only ever gets used on the weekend during Lawton’s visits, when he makes a monstrosity called The Waffle Tower for Zoe’s entertainment. Rick zips it and clicks Submit Order, though, because if Zoe wants waffles decorated in strawberry peaks then she’s going to get them.

After a while, it’s not even about his guilt. He genuinely wants to see what stupidly expensive, classy crap Lawton’s picked out next. First, a recliner that swallows Zoe completely and can be programmed to play tunes from an mp3 list on the computer. Then the color-coordinated coffee table with glass-blown boxed shelves beneath its delicate surface. The kinds of photograph frames that connect together in a web, hooked between sleek black spindles. Rustic egg cartons propped up in wires to separate dirty clothes in Zoe’s bathroom, and a matching set for Rick’s, which Rick takes without question. He’s not sure why the living area is modern and the bathrooms are apparently going for a refurbished farmhouse look. He refuses to get rid of the mermaid nightlight, though.

And Zoe, she talks to him now.

“I don’t know why Winnie’s so mad,” she says over dinner, in between inhaling Rick’s much-improved pot roast (courtesy of Lawton’s pointed purchase of the Easy Slow Cooker Meals cookbook). “It’s not like Paul snubbed her. He asked everyone to go, that’s all. It’s his birthday, I mean, isn’t the point to go out as a group?”

Rick grins at her. “I bet he doesn’t even know Winnie likes him.”

Zoe makes a face. “Everyone knows. It’s so obvious.”

“What about you? Do you want to go to the arcade, too?” He pauses and reconsiders. “Is there a chaperone?”

“Paul’s mom will be there.” She looks at him imploringly, but they both know it’s not Rick who needs convincing. “I should bring him a birthday present.”

“Ask your dad. About going, and about what to get him.” Rick cleans his plate off with a chunk of dinner roll, and chews the doughy ball.

“Yeah, but if he says yes, I can go, right?”

“Sure. Just give me a list of names and let me do a background check on the group.”

Zoe’s expression of horror is perfect.

xxvix.

Some nights, Zoe brings her homework out to the kitchen table. Rick sits with her and they go over the Industrial Revolution and what differentiates mammals. The cell phone is left on the table, and when they’re both good and stuck, Rick says, “Wanna use a lifeline and call a friend? Or should we ask the audience?”

Zoe is too young to get the joke, but she laughs, anyway.

Lawton always picks up on the first ring. “Riddle me this,” he says, and somehow, he always knows the correct answer.

(The panic attacks where Rick has to go to the bathroom, and clutch the counter, and gasp at himself in the mirror until reality settles its weight back down around his shoulders, come fewer and farther between. The kid is alive. The kid is smiling again. He hadn’t wanted to be alone after June, but sometimes the act of sharing his life and space with another human being is too much to stand, and he misses pain in those moments, how it can feel bright and break through the surface of so much normalcy. What they have is an illusion. Like what the Enchantress gave him, it exists solely to blind Rick to how close he is to dying.)

xxx.

[incoming photo]

Flag 1:20 P.M.: The party dress looks nice.
Lawton 3:01 P.M.: thanks
Lawton 3:02 P.M.: what the fuck did you do to her hair
Flag 3:10 P.M.: I youtubed it
Flag 3:11 P.M.: Shut up

xxxi.

There comes a period when Zoe seems to accept that Rick means her no harm, but hot on its heels come the episodes. Tantrums? Rick isn’t sure how old a child needs to be before tantrums are called an argument. But he had been expecting this well before it happened—he’s the only person she can set eyes on who holds some responsibility for her circumstances.

So she’s pushing some boundaries. Rick remembers doing that as a child, too. But Rick doesn’t react like his own father and grandfather had—thinks beyond snapping pain in his ear and being pushed to exhaustion under the buzz of cicada and locked closets like hot boxes—can’t, honestly, imagine their thought process. But they were both military men. They did what they knew. Rick is also a man of wars.

But he knows other things, too.

One night, Zoe throws her tablet at him and breaks it against the wall, shouting about how it isn’t fair to her, who does he think he is.

And Rick says, “I know it’s not. I know. I know.”

“I hate you!”

“That’s okay,” he says, and it is. It doesn’t hurt. She’s a little girl.

“I hate you,” she cries, too small to contain the shaking in her frame. “I want momma. I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s not fair. I want to go home.”

Rick picks up the pieces of the tablet so she won’t hurt herself, and thinks about calling Lawton. He doesn’t. He goes into the kitchen and makes hot cocoa, and then he goes to find Zoe where she’s landed, curled between her desk and the bed in a small two-foot space. Her whole face is wet. She’s wiped her nose on her sweater.

He tentatively places the mug between them, like a peace offering. But she’s not interested. That’s okay, too. Rick’s gotten used to the idea that having a kid around means he can’t avoid some waste in his life anymore, that waste as a concept means something different now. It no longer applies to things.

“Listen, I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” he says, wishing he knew how to comfort her. He’s not even sure how to touch her. If he ought to try. “We’re all doing the best we can with what’s happened. That includes you. So sometimes, if it’s too hard, that’s okay, too. You didn’t deserve this.”

Zoe sniffles miserably. She won’t look him in the eye.

“But listen, this won’t be forever,” Rick tells her, and means it. “And your mom and dad—they’ve raised one tough cookie. You’re going to see the other side of this, Zoe.”

He hesitates, then takes the risk. He rests a clumsy hand on her hair. Just that. Nothing more, and slow enough that she can see it coming.

She doesn’t shrink away. She doesn’t flinch. With a loud hiccup and new seizure of tears, Zoe launches into him instead, headbutting his chest. The heat of her is unfamiliar; she smells like her berry lotion. Rick’s body tenses, reading the first volley as an attack, but then all the muscle goes out of him and he holds her together between her shoulder blades. Jesus, this is the worst. He’d rather be in the field, dragging two of his people half-dead behind him through hell than here, fucking this up.

But Rick lets her cry, rubbing her back. He puts Lawton on speakerphone over dinner that night, and makes a soggy, leaning Waffle Tower under his strict instruction. It’s basically mush and bananas, but Zoe eats.

xxxii.

It’s taken a few months, but Rick falls right into Waller’s trap. He’d thought the trap was left for Lawton, but the sinkhole’s got room enough for two bodies.

She always did prefer his service to hang on the safety of someone he loves.

Rick thinks about that for a long time after Zoe falls asleep, banana mash dried in the corner of her mouth. He checks on her through the night. He thinks about texting Lawton, but doesn’t. This is a secret he intends to keep close to his chest, even closer than he’d kept June, buried so deep that only Zoe can feel its warmth, a shuddery, terrified thing in the pitch.

That night, he calls Katana. He’s going to need safe passage.