Suicide Squad
Once upon a time, there was a prison unlike any other, called Belle Reve Penitentiary. It was not a fun place to be locked up. The walls were thick, the guards were watchful, and the days stretched on and on with very little to break them up.
That was exactly why a very serious woman named Amanda Waller liked to visit Belle Reve from time to time, walking the halls slowly, studying the prisoners with sharp, calculating eyes. She had an offer for certain ones — an unusual, dangerous offer.
"Join Task Force X," she would say. "Complete one mission for the government. Survive it, and you'll earn time off your sentence."
There was a catch, of course. There always was. Anyone who joined got a tiny device implanted at the base of their neck — a little insurance policy, Waller called it, to make sure nobody who agreed ever changed their mind halfway through.
Harley Quinn was halfway through another long stretch at Belle Reve, locked up after one caper too many in Gotham City, when Waller came to make her offer. Harley didn't even wait for her to finish explaining the rules. Her hand shot straight up into the air, delighted at the sheer novelty of it all. A secret mission? With a whole new team? Sign her up immediately.
The team that formed around her turned out to be a strange and unlikely bunch.
There was Deadshot, the deadliest marksman anyone in Gotham City had ever heard of, a man who barely spoke except to complain about the accommodations. There was Captain Boomerang, who grumbled constantly and helped himself to snacks from everyone else's rations without so much as an apology. Killer Croc mostly kept to the shadows, quiet and watchful. And there was El Diablo, who carried a deep, quiet sadness that Harley — more than anyone else on the team — seemed to understand without ever needing to ask a single question about it.
None of them had signed up hoping to make friends. Not one of them, if you'd asked. But somewhere along the way, without anyone quite deciding it on purpose, all of them ended up needing each other anyway.
Their very first mission dropped the whole squad straight into the middle of a city that had been overtaken by an ancient, world-ending threat. It was chaos from the very first moment — buildings crumbling, strange creatures pouring through the streets, alarms blaring on every corner. And in the middle of all that noise and danger, Harley discovered something about herself she genuinely hadn't expected.
She was good at this.
Not just the fighting part. She had always been good at that, ever since her gymnastics days. What surprised her was how good she was at the trusting part. During one especially fierce firefight, she found herself watching Deadshot's back instead of bolting for the nearest exit, the way old Harley might have done without a second thought. She cracked jokes exactly when the squad needed them most, timing each one perfectly to keep spirits high under pressure — because, as it turns out, a good jester always knows how to read a room, even a room full of soldiers and monsters and crumbling buildings.
Then came the real test.
In the middle of the mission, Amanda Waller tried to abandon the whole team in order to protect a secret she'd been guarding all along. It would have been easy, in that moment, for the squad to turn on each other, to panic, to scatter. But Harley wouldn't let that happen. She rallied everyone together — Deadshot, Boomerang, Croc, El Diablo, all of them — and convinced the whole team to fight their way out side by side instead.
It wasn't heroism, exactly. Not the cape-and-symbol kind you read about in the Gotham City papers. But it wasn't villainy either. It was something in between — something new.
Task Force X taught Harley Quinn something that Arkham Asylum never had, not in all her years there. It taught her that she could be trusted with other people's lives, that a team could actually depend on her, and that trust, once she'd truly earned it, felt better than any bank heist she'd ever pulled off.
When the mission finally ended and the bomb collar came off her neck, Harley stood there for a long moment, rubbing the spot where it had been. And strange as it sounds, she almost — almost — missed the weight of it.
Almost.