Midnight Manor Laundry Room; Sunday Morning

[totalwildcard]

Boy, had that gone poorly! Harley hadn't slept much, and some of the reasons why could maybe be inferred by how, come morning, her makeup looked like perhaps she'd been caught in a heavy bout of rain. Rain that also made your eyes look kinda red and puffy? It was Fandom, okay, genuinely much stranger things happened all the time! Leave her alone!

Also, thanks to the aforementioned lack of sleep, Harley wasn't actually feeling all that much better, come morning. She actually kind of felt like she needed to bite something.

Or maybe go egg the Wayne Foundation building in town.

Set something on fire?

... Or kick a dryer, apparently. Sorry about the occasional clanging noises (and the accompanying swearing), Midnightites! Midnighters? Midnightees...? People of Midnight. Sometimes you just had to laundry aggressively.

It was so much better than actually dealing with your feelings.

(open!)

Comments

[hasaknightjob]

"Anyway, point is it can be done," Marc said. Since there was a certain element of instinctively protecting Steven that meant he wasn't going to volunteer what those buttons were, even if some were probably fairly obvious. "Avoiding people. Unless they wanna make a point of bumping into you."

[totalwildcard]

Harley made another face. The messed up makeup was really helping accentuate it, too. "But I'm not gonna start changin' how I live my life and where I go and what I do just because she's here!" she said. "I might as well just leave if I felt like doing that."

[hasaknightjob]

"She's not yours," Marc pointed out. "Not - I get it. Somebody looking like Layla would freak me out too. But this multiverse stuff, even if it's like your home the most random shit can be different. Events. Countries. People. You'll go crazy if you try to treat them the same as the version on your world."

Then, since it was them, "Crazier. Not the fun way like we already have."

[totalwildcard]

Harley had absolutely been about to point that out.

But with that handled: "I wasn't tryin' to do that!" she objected, even though she'd definitely been doing it the previous day, and her current emotions were all kinds of muddled. (Eventually she should sleep. Eventually.) "I was just saying I'm not gonna upend my life to avoid her! That wouldn't be fair!"

To Harley herself, obviously.

[hasaknightjob]

Marc was honestly only thinking about the fairness to Harley. This was what you got when dealing with Marc Spector. Steven would've been more likely to think about fairness to other people.

"Yeah, but I'm saying she's not the same so it doesn't matter," Marc said. "Who gives a shit about her opinion? It's not the one you knew."

[totalwildcard]

Harley made a noise that sounded offended. "I don't care about her opinion, I care about --"

What did she care about? What was the central issue here?

Ah, yes:

"My feelings!!"

Sorry about the shrillness at such a close proximity, Marc.

[hasaknightjob]

Marc winced but it was nothing he couldn't handle.

"So what are ya feeling?" he asked. Possibly the first time in his entire life he'd asked that question, let alone actually wanted to hear the answer.

[totalwildcard]

"I don't know," Harley whined, loudly, as she finally pushed away from his embrace again - or at least attempted to. It wasn't because of anything he'd done wrong, it was just a question that seemed to call for pacing.

"Do you know how long it'd been since I'd even thought about her in passing? Like forever!"

[hasaknightjob]

Marc let her go if she wanted to. He never wanted her to feel like she was trapped.

"Fucking annoying when they show up again," Marc said. Of course his perspective was skewed by being the one who left.

[totalwildcard]

It was fine, Harley's was skewed by always being the one who got left behind.

"Yeah," she agreed, crossing her arms. Probably wouldn't last, with the pacing. "She left, never seein' her again was the point."

It had not been the point of her Pam leaving, but, yanno. Venting and ranting.

"And the least she could do was at least have the same story, but no! Gotta be weird and confusing on top of being here!"

[hasaknightjob]

"Freaking rude," Marc said.

Yes, he got that it was a different person. But he also got that sometimes just having to deal with shit was annoying regardless of pesky things like reality.

[totalwildcard]

Harley paced back and forth in front of the machines and, as predicted, gave up on having her arms huffily folded in favor of throwing one out in a different gesture of huffiness.

"I mean, she didn't even blink at seeing me like this!"

And Harley gestured at herself.

"I did not look like this when I was pursuing my PhD, but she recognized me from like a mile away!"

[hasaknightjob]

"That's weird," Marc agreed. "You're kind of distinctive."

[totalwildcard]

"I know!"

She'd worked hard to become this distinctive!

"Which has to mean things have worked out real fucking different, over there." See above re: how Pam hadn't even had the decency to show up with the same story.

[hasaknightjob]

"The other world shit is crazy," Marc said, with a wry look that said he hadn't forgotten what that meant in present company. "People have said they know versions of me. Fuck if I know what any of them are like."

[totalwildcard]

"I'm sure they're great."

Harley was stuck on sounding huffy, but she meant it. You know, as an aside.

[hasaknightjob]

"You've got backups if you're tired of me then," Marc replied.

[totalwildcard]

Harley stopped her pacing. Apparently that was important for confused frowning reasons.

"If I was tired of you, why would I swap you out for another one of you? Makes no sense!"

[hasaknightjob]

"I dunno," Marc admitted. "Maybe one of them isn't as much of an asshole."

That one was arguably multiversal, actually.

[totalwildcard]

Harley frowned some more, although now she also added on a shrug "What do I care?" she asked. "You're not an asshole to me. So, what would make sense is if you got tired of me, then I could swap ya for one that wasn't tired of me yet!"

[hasaknightjob]

"Wouldn't that be an asshole move?" Marc asked, because that was the point. "Tossing you aside 'cause I got bored?"

[totalwildcard]

"Why would ya keep me around if you got bored?"

No, that was the point now!

[hasaknightjob]

"I dunno," Marc admitted, because he was now bumping against the limits of his ability to use anything he was thinking here as fuel for self-reflection. "Sounds like a dick move is all."

So close. He'd get there someday.

"So do you wanna replace this chick with another version?"

[totalwildcard]

"I've been doing just fine without any version!" Harley exclaimed.

And immediately looked unsure about that. As most things with her, it was not subtle.

(And no, not about the replacing. About the doing just fine.)

[hasaknightjob]

"Don't have to do anything about it now," Marc pointed out. "Not like you owe this one anything."

He looked at whatever of Harley's laundry he could see, trying to spot a hand towel or something like it.