She didn't spend much time with the rest of the team. She was an over glorified taxi most of the time. The rest of the hours outside of her cell were taken up hauling Rick Flag around while trying to gather whatever shit Waller wanted next. Everything from missile defense plans to dirty love letters slipped their way through the Way and into the Wall's formidable hands.
It was what she was meant to do today, except Flag was caught up in Squad garbage. They'd been waiting for over an hour on the tarmac, in the rain. It soaked the freaky carpet they had her standing on, her toes were going wrinkly on the bottom. Drenched to the skin, clammy and cold, Bridget was beginning to lose all of the reluctant fondness she had for the grunt.
She twisted the thick silver ring on her middle finger, rocked back and forth from heel to toe, made the guards twitch a little, and kept herself as busy as she could.
Finally, Flag's helo landed, spewing every man, woman, and thing with more cold water and blasting Bridget's hair into her face. He climbed down out of the loading doors, squinting against the storm.
"Walker! Let's do this!" He barked over the roar of the slowing rotors. His hand squelched when he roughly grabbed on to hers and practically pulled her off of the carpet patch. She wasn't allowed off of it unless Flag had a hold of her somehow. Bridget breathed deeply, in and out of her nose, and then once again, closing her eyes and thinking of the prickle of the cement beneath her pruned toes.
Rough and freezing rolled and flipped into silky and lukewarm. It reached up around her ankles and caressed her calves. All of the bitter, damp, chill that had wormed into her bones was gone. Flag still had his eyes closed tight. He'd never gotten used to it- closing his eyes in one world and opening them in another.
Bridget squeezed his fingers sharply and set off along the Way. A purple, green and black cosmos restlessly churned above their heads. Flag had puked his guts out the first time he looked at it. She didn't blame him, it was nauseating if you weren't used to it.
The bright golden glow from the path lit his face better than the grimy daylight they'd just come from. He looked like shit that had gone through a wood chipper. A giant black bruise marred one eye. A puffy gash leaked down his left cheek.
Safe guess, he hadn't slept in a few days.
Bridget got her bearings, counted the number of times Flag had saved her ass, and made a decision.
As he trailed behind her, favoring his left knee and half-stumbling, she knew her choice was right. The silence was only broken by the shuffle of feet and the shifting of the Colonel's pack as he tried to keep his balance.
The Way was not always kind to its travelers. To get to where Waller wanted, they would have to cross jagged, cruel ground that Flag was clearly in little state to deal with. Lucky for him, that wasn't where she was leading him, at least not for a while.
She took him past Gahenna, to a little rise in the path marked only by a dullness on one side, a dark patch that could've just been a shadow. It wasn't. It was a glimpse to what lay behind it. She snaked her fingers around its soft edge and pulled it back with her free hand, bracing against a nearby boulder with her opposite leg.
Flag looked even more confused than when he'd travelled with her for the first time.
The foxhole was reinforced with wooden braces, the floor and walls were compacted dirt, and to Flag's eyes at least, it looked freakishly Earth-y.
Bridget turned to him expectantly when he didn't make a move.
"Do I have to kick your bad leg out from under you?"
"The fuck's this?" He asked, free hand going to the tablet that she knew held the power to blow her head off at worst, give her a nasty electrical shock at best.
"Somewhere for you to sleep."
He sniffed and cleared his throat. "Hell no." His head shook emphatically. "Pyeongchang, now. I ain't getting dead by whatever the fuck follows you out here."
"Shape you're in, you won't get to Pyeongchang. Get in before I make you."
"Watch it, Walker. I know we've been buddy-buddy lately, but-"
"You'll still blow my head off. I know, grunt. I know."
He wouldn't budge.
"Luthor doesn't know this is here. It's in Ireland, 1972. The IRA forgot about it, the world forgot about it. I dug up once and freaked the shit out of a dairy cow."
Flag's lips tugged into a hint of the smile. "Still not goin' in there."
Bridget rolled her eyes and caught the back of his knee with her foot, buckling him into the hole. Their connected hands pulled her in after him and they landed in a heap. He grunted and swore and glared at her like she'd blown up a puppy.
His shoulder had knocked the air out of her lungs on the landing, and she was being to regret not just letting him struggle through to Pyeongchang. He was a heavy fucker, and a man who was 6' 2" fell harder than most.
"Time works funny here," She wheezed. When that didn't seem to work she added, "I pinky swear we'll get to Pyeongchang on time." She held out the said digit in earnest, watching the young officer with an old man's wrinkles fight between his body's needs and his orders as a soldier.
"I'm not going to kill you, Colonel."
"No, you'll just leave me here until I go insane." Flag muttered under his breath, scanning the edge of the path for a way out. They were stretched out as far as their bound hands would let them. His body was tensed, hand on the button that'd fry her nervous system.
"Won't do that either." She told him, trying to not flinch away. Flag read people like animals. Retreating would mean she was hiding something. Her pinky hovered unsteadily, as she kept eye contact with the Colonel. He was puzzling things out, from the look of his eyebrows. He was clocking exits, making sure he could always reach that damned button, trying to guess what horrible shit she had up her sleeve for him.
Bridget was almost as surprised as he was when he took it with his own, twisting them together in a sharp motion before leaning back against the foxhole's earthen wall.
"You pull anything, you're fried."
"I'm trying to be nice Flag."
"Now why do I not believe that?"
"You're an asshole?" Bridget offered, looking over the busted, bruised Green Beret with a shrug and a sneer. This was what doing nice shit got you- suspicion and threats.
He snored like a beached walrus, head tilted back, mouth agape. All of the tension had left his body, like his puppet master just dropped his strings and walked away.
It seemed like ever since she'd been locked up, all she'd been doing was thinking and waiting around for other people's shit. A few years ago, it would've driven her up the wall to have all this time to remember the shit she'd done. Now, well, she'd done worse shit since then. Worse shit to better people. It'd stopped gnawing at her guts so much. Except, of course, Luthor. Nothing, no amount of time, no matter what shit she shoved up her nose and poured into her liver, nothing would make Luthor go away.
He was just as much a part of her as he was part of the Void. What Waller never understood, what Flag was just beginning to know, was that the Void wasn't hell for Bridget. Hell was inside her.
Melodramatic? Sure. Reality? Yes.
But there were other things to ponder. So there they sat, awake and asleep, free and incarcerated. Staying as far away as she could with their hands tied, she peeled back the other edge of the Way, just enough for one eye to glimpse out of the foxhole. That was as much as she dared.
It still took her breath away, twenty years later.
Any other day, Flag would have them marching through here like Waller was personally after them with a whip. She didn't get much time to look for the sublime and terrifying. The longest she'd been able to stay on the path was half an hour since Luthor had- had become what he had become. This place was a lucky stumble after she robbed a South African arms dealer.
She really had dug her way up and run into a very concerned Guernsey.
Flag snorted and jerked in his sleep, eyes darting around under their lids.
He had to be dreaming of June Moon, who had been laid up in a coma after Enchantress died. Waller still had her, of course. Rick Flag would be under that woman's thumb until he was dead, and even then she might still own his soul.
Hours ticked by the hole, universes unfurled and imploded before her eyes, and neither Luthor nor Waller were none the wiser. A bloom of red had started to come towards them, bound by branching navy blue tangles of starstuff. It pulsed as it grew, beating like a great big bloody heart. A warning.
Bridget bit the inside of her cheek lightly and let the path close over them again.
She cleaned up Flag's face first, figuring it impolite to just let him sit there and bleed. The knee would be hard to splint without him waking up so she left it. His head fell forward onto her shoulder and with a jolt he was awake and flailing.
Her wrist was tight in his free hand, twisted back at an increasingly painful angle.
"Easy, cowboy!" Bridget barked, eyes bulging as she watched her hand go in the opposite direction it was supposed to.
Flag's panicked eyes settled once the focused on her face. "How long?" He asked, clearing his throat and dropping her arm.
"Full seven hours."
"It's eight. Full eight hours."
"Whatever."
She readjusted their grip and got to her feet. "You alright on that knee?"
He pulled himself as upright as he could get in the cramped space, and nodded, testing if he could place weight on it. It held up, for now. "We're good."
She led him out and back along the way they came for what could've been a mile, or less than a football field. He really wasn't paying attention to his surroundings. Of all the shit he had to do for Waller, this was the shit that freaked him out the most. His stomach flopped every time he heard his day included Walker.
Following her through the unending cosmos through which the ghost, the angry, vengeful, ghost of her first victim haunted her, with the chance of insanity or worse- simply not existing, was not on the top of his list in life.
She was alright, really. On her own, she was downright pleasant in comparison to her teammates. Her crazy didn't smack him in the face. It snuck into the corners of her, the parts she didn't show off. Her and Quinn were opposite sides of the spectrum, but both achieved the same thing. He had no idea what'd crack her open and what would make her shut down.
If he could get over the murder as a juvenile bit, he'd probably even like her. Then again, it literally followed them around every mission they went on, so the chances of that were slim.
Every edge had become jagged and sharp along the way, like some had taken a hammer to clay tile and they walked along the split. Her bare feet didn't flinch when they arched over what looked like black glass that scattered over the golden path.
Walker moved here with an ease she didn't possess on Earth, their plane, whatever the fuck she called reality. He wasn't even sure it was reality anymore, if there weren't more realities, if the one he was born to was the only place he would feel solid in anymore. When they came out the other side, he was always frozen for a few seconds, his mind trying to hold itself together.
She didn't have that problem. Which was either years of practice or a sign that she didn't have it together to begin with.
Digger Harkness kept bitching to the guards that she'd scream in her sleep, when she was awake, sometimes for an hour whole.
What nightmares could scare the woman, Flag had no idea.
Waller wanted her DNA. If she had the clearance, he'd bet his ass that she'd start some freaky metahuman breeding program with Walker. Her father was the Holy Grail of metahuman genetic material. Unfortunately for Waller, he was too old, clever, and charming to ever get caught, unlike his youngest. She was his last offspring in a run of over twenty.
He'd been in the room when the Wall told Walker who her father was. The binder she had on him was gigantic, bulging at the seams. Waller wanted him more than anything. Immortal, and capable of fathering any kind of metahuman imaginable, she probably saw him as the key to a metahuman army at her beck and call, capable of much more than Task Force X.
For now, thought, they were just supposed to use her for reconnaissance, observe her fitness to be involved with more and more members of the team.
"Here." Bridget said, plopping down on a seemingly random ledge.
He slung his pack off of his back, and unzipped it to reveal rations and water enough for four days, and a pair of small black sneakers. She loosened up their laces and closed her eyes, setting the shoes on her lap while her free hand felt around for something she only knew how to look for.
The jump would come soon.
Flag took one last look around. They were just out of the valley and stretched out before him seemed to be a great mirror, a perfect reflection of the almost daylight-bright stars that flooded above them. It rippled just then, a great heavy sigh of wind blowing across it, picking up bits of quicksilver that flashed and danced and fell.
It was beautiful. He could admit that. No matter how mind-melting his surroundings they were always beautiful in some shape or form.
"Got it. C'mere Colonel. Let's get bibimbap." Her sarcastic smile reflected the bright shine of the lake for a second, before they were being pulled, pushed, scrunched, twisted and then were back into a cold night filled with noise.
She toed into her shoes. "Boost?" Walker asked in a hiss, pointing the apartment's heating vent they were under. Flag didn't respond for a second before he nodded, eyes still squeezed shut. He took the bindings off of their hands.
He caged his fingers and knelt down, letting her step into his hold and lifting her up as she unfolded the Swiss Army knife on steroids that had permanent residence in her jacket pocket. She had it on her when she was hauled into Belle Reve.
In the half-dark of street lights coming through the blinds, she worked as quickly as she could to unscrew the vent grill and sneak her hand into it.
The feel of duct tape made her stop, and switch to the actual knife. She sliced the target out of its adhesive and tucked into her pocket. There were more little bumps of duct tape, some small squishy, some large and stuffed with American dollars. A fake passport was just icing on the cake.
Flag set her down when she tapped the top of his head.
The television was blaring in the unit just above them. A girl cried out in Korean, sad and desperate like the love of her life had been hit by a bus. The squealing of tires followed by gunfire confirmed Bridget's suspicion it was a soap opera.
The room was awfully clean for some mole's safehouse. A bed with its sheets corners folded expertly sat pushed up against the far wall, as far from the windows as possible. The kitchenette's faucet gleamed.
All of hers used to be covered in pizza boxes, empty beer cans, and receipts. One even had a stray cat that stopped by for old crusts.
She handed the contents of the vent to Flag, who dumped the lot into his pack before binding their hands together again, palm to palm. She shucked her shoes off, wriggled her toes, and squeezed his hand.
In another world, he'd like her. A world without a boy murdered at 12, six men driven insane, fortunes taken, heirlooms filched.
They had a different way back, shorter and steeper, bathed in phosphorescent light that sparked and fizzed as they passed by.
And they were back on the tarmac, in the rain, and when Flag checked his watch it had only taken them five minutes.
Bridget stepped back onto the carpet and waited for the guard to come with her boots. She stepped into them and watched the rookie allen wrench them closed. Flag unbound their hands for a final time and looked at her for a second. There wasn't much to read on her face. She looked tired, and resigned. The happiness of her time on the Way always faded fast.
"Thanks."
She gave him a short nod of recognition and turned to be led back to her cell. Alpha 02 took her arm with a jerk and frog marched her in out of the rain, wet hair plastered to her back.
Flag carried on with his day, to the astonishment of GQ and the rest of the men that'd been with him on the full team op. The seven hours on the Way, that small bit of rest without Waller or Belle Reve, took up his mind that night. He couldn't even figure out himself why he let himself sleep under her watch. Maybe the bandages on his face told him what he needed to know.
He would've liked Walker.
In a different world.