Harley Quinn (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
totalwildcard) wrote2025-02-16 12:13 pm
totalwildcard) wrote2025-02-16 12:13 pm
Apartment Above Needful Things; Sunday
It was supposed have been the most fun week of the year for both Harley and for her gleeful lack of impulse control. And yet, Friday had sucked.
And somehow, Saturday had sucked even worse.
And Sunday? Sunday wasn't really looking up, either. The pollen was gone, but she barely even noticed, because let's be real, she'd stopped noticing sometime on Friday when various other sensations and feelings had completely run over her happy hormone induced high, ruining her fun.
Because that was all she'd tried to have. Fun! Simple! Easy!
(Ha ha.)
So yeah, it was day three of suckage, and as had already been amply demonstrated, not in a fun way. Harley had a headache, first of all, a pounding thing (again: NOT IN A FUN WAY) that felt like her skull was being drilled into by entities that presumably hated her. Whether it was from the drinks she'd tried drowning her sorrows with, or all the helpless and angry (ugly) crying she'd done after that hadn't worked... Well, ¿por qué no los dos? All Harley knew was that everything hurt.
And that it had taken her a very long time to drag herself out of bed. Or, correction: to sit up in bed, since she had limited interest in leaving. What was the point? In her sad, drunken stupor last night, she'd remembered talking to that other... shrink... guy (Harrison? Lester?) and that he'd mentioned the radio, and so she'd set rum out for the filthy rodents to get sloshed with, so that she could keep herself from getting humiliated further by having her private stuff blasted all across the town's radiowaves even more than it presumably already had been.
Consequently, there was also rum all over the stairs leading up into the apartment from the back of the store, now. Someone, at some point, would have to clean that up. But it was nowhere near anyone's priorities.
(Turned out Bruce didn't like rum. Probably good, since Harley had no idea what it did to hyenas.)
So yeah, Harley was just turning her bed into a burrow, like maybe it could swallow her up and save her from the general cruelty of the world. As for sustenance, once the head-drilling demons let up enough for her to feel like whatever went down wouldn't immediately fight its way back up again? An obscene order of takeout. Which she sent Bruce down to get once the delivery guy showed up.
Now, no, of course Bruce couldn't actually get the food from the guy. Or even, in fact, open the door. But what he could do was make very scary hyena noises at the guy through the door (and the window next to it, for an extra scare factor), until the guy abandoned the bags at the door and took off, at which point Harley could slouch her way downstairs and pick the things up without ever having any sort of contact with another human being at all.
(Sure, contactless delivery was an actual option. But where was the fun for Bruce in that?)
(Also, just think of the fun Bruce had experienced earlier when Harley had let him go out for walkies by himself!)
And with her heavy bags of assorted food secured, and brought back upstairs, Harley settled back into her bed nest like some sort of puffy-eyed dragon hoarding its piles of gold (fries) and jewels (burgers and tacos). She grabbed a giant milkshake from one of the bags, her favorite, and took a big gulp, hoping the sugar and various "natural" flavorings would finally bring a little hit of joy into her day.
It barely tasted like anything.
Like, no. It probably tasted just fine. It was Harley that was the problem. Harley's... stupid bruised feelings, over stupid Pam clearly being happy choosing literally any-fucking-body else but her to have fun with, which shouldn't even have surprised her, because Pam (a different Pam, she should have been keeping the two separate but it was hard and this was her meltdown, okay??) had found her so easy to drop years ago, too, and that shouldn't have been a surprise either, because wasn't that the story of Harley's life? She served her purpose, if there ever even was one, and then she got left in the dust or out in the cold or feeling stupid about ever kissing her back --
She really needed to talk to someone. Like, vent? Venting, that was a thing people did, in an effort to not feel quite as shit? And there had to be someone, right, in her phone contacts? Someone who'd help?
Anyone?
There was an obvious number, of course. One that would reach out to someone she'd been missing desperately since Friday (okay, obviously since way before Friday, but a lot of that had been with different parts of her), but one that she wasn't going to call, despite how long her thumb hovered right over the name on the screen. Because, here was her reasoning: either he wasn't going to be there - because why would he? it wasn't his vacation - or he'd come through, thinking it was an emergency, but it wasn't. It was just...
The consequences of her own actions. Second fiddle trying to be something better than she was.
And she obviously wasn't going to call the kid, either. Even Harley had a limit about what she was willing to lay on Cass, and apparently this was it. Now, granted, it was way less about what she thought was appropriate for Cass to hear about, and way more about Harley trying to preserve at least some sense of the kid looking up to her, purely for Harley's own benefit. Crying about being turned down for a casual screw? Not a good look. She was aware of that.
So Marc and Cass were both out.
A whole lotta other people (not everyone, she wasn't organized enough for that) in her contacts were in, though.
... You know. In terms of Harley calling them, not so much the venting. Several people didn't pick up at all. Several did, but only to curse her out, some in very graphic terms. At least one number was no longer in service because the person it had belonged to was dead, and at least one other had been passed on to a little old lady Harley would gladly have talked to, in her desperation, if they'd actually had any sort of a common language.
It wasn't going great, in short. In fact, no matter how much pasted-on cheer she forced into her voice, every call just made her feel worse. Bruce had clambered onto the bed with her, resting his head on her leg. She was absently scritching behind his ear as she scrolled way down to the bottom of her list of contacts. Squared her shoulders, conjured up another desperate smile, pressed the call button.
After a brief moment, the call clearly connected, but the line stayed silent.
Harley wasn't going to let that stop her.
"Hiya!" she called. "Someone there? Or did I call the Perfect Silence Hotline by accident ag--"
"Quinn?" came a gruff voice, terse, suspicious - and, right, that was who Marc had reminded her of when they'd first met! Colonel Rick Flag! "There you are, Flag, how long's it been?" she cooed, only to continue without waiting for an answer. "Too long, I know, but hey, we're still friends, right?"
He sounded confused. "No? What? Where'd you get this --"
No.
Harley hung up.
And tossed her phone across the bed, for good measure, and then stared into the middle distance for a moment. Call it a revelation. The sum of everything that had just happened, of her sitting alone at the bar trying to keep it together, of spending all day long before that rolling around in her misery alone like some sad little pig in its single occupancy sty.
"... I don't have any friends."
Well, fuck.
(NFB, but open?)
And somehow, Saturday had sucked even worse.
And Sunday? Sunday wasn't really looking up, either. The pollen was gone, but she barely even noticed, because let's be real, she'd stopped noticing sometime on Friday when various other sensations and feelings had completely run over her happy hormone induced high, ruining her fun.
Because that was all she'd tried to have. Fun! Simple! Easy!
(Ha ha.)
So yeah, it was day three of suckage, and as had already been amply demonstrated, not in a fun way. Harley had a headache, first of all, a pounding thing (again: NOT IN A FUN WAY) that felt like her skull was being drilled into by entities that presumably hated her. Whether it was from the drinks she'd tried drowning her sorrows with, or all the helpless and angry (ugly) crying she'd done after that hadn't worked... Well, ¿por qué no los dos? All Harley knew was that everything hurt.
And that it had taken her a very long time to drag herself out of bed. Or, correction: to sit up in bed, since she had limited interest in leaving. What was the point? In her sad, drunken stupor last night, she'd remembered talking to that other... shrink... guy (Harrison? Lester?) and that he'd mentioned the radio, and so she'd set rum out for the filthy rodents to get sloshed with, so that she could keep herself from getting humiliated further by having her private stuff blasted all across the town's radiowaves even more than it presumably already had been.
Consequently, there was also rum all over the stairs leading up into the apartment from the back of the store, now. Someone, at some point, would have to clean that up. But it was nowhere near anyone's priorities.
(Turned out Bruce didn't like rum. Probably good, since Harley had no idea what it did to hyenas.)
So yeah, Harley was just turning her bed into a burrow, like maybe it could swallow her up and save her from the general cruelty of the world. As for sustenance, once the head-drilling demons let up enough for her to feel like whatever went down wouldn't immediately fight its way back up again? An obscene order of takeout. Which she sent Bruce down to get once the delivery guy showed up.
Now, no, of course Bruce couldn't actually get the food from the guy. Or even, in fact, open the door. But what he could do was make very scary hyena noises at the guy through the door (and the window next to it, for an extra scare factor), until the guy abandoned the bags at the door and took off, at which point Harley could slouch her way downstairs and pick the things up without ever having any sort of contact with another human being at all.
(Sure, contactless delivery was an actual option. But where was the fun for Bruce in that?)
(Also, just think of the fun Bruce had experienced earlier when Harley had let him go out for walkies by himself!)
And with her heavy bags of assorted food secured, and brought back upstairs, Harley settled back into her bed nest like some sort of puffy-eyed dragon hoarding its piles of gold (fries) and jewels (burgers and tacos). She grabbed a giant milkshake from one of the bags, her favorite, and took a big gulp, hoping the sugar and various "natural" flavorings would finally bring a little hit of joy into her day.
It barely tasted like anything.
Like, no. It probably tasted just fine. It was Harley that was the problem. Harley's... stupid bruised feelings, over stupid Pam clearly being happy choosing literally any-fucking-body else but her to have fun with, which shouldn't even have surprised her, because Pam (a different Pam, she should have been keeping the two separate but it was hard and this was her meltdown, okay??) had found her so easy to drop years ago, too, and that shouldn't have been a surprise either, because wasn't that the story of Harley's life? She served her purpose, if there ever even was one, and then she got left in the dust or out in the cold or feeling stupid about ever kissing her back --
She really needed to talk to someone. Like, vent? Venting, that was a thing people did, in an effort to not feel quite as shit? And there had to be someone, right, in her phone contacts? Someone who'd help?
Anyone?
There was an obvious number, of course. One that would reach out to someone she'd been missing desperately since Friday (okay, obviously since way before Friday, but a lot of that had been with different parts of her), but one that she wasn't going to call, despite how long her thumb hovered right over the name on the screen. Because, here was her reasoning: either he wasn't going to be there - because why would he? it wasn't his vacation - or he'd come through, thinking it was an emergency, but it wasn't. It was just...
The consequences of her own actions. Second fiddle trying to be something better than she was.
And she obviously wasn't going to call the kid, either. Even Harley had a limit about what she was willing to lay on Cass, and apparently this was it. Now, granted, it was way less about what she thought was appropriate for Cass to hear about, and way more about Harley trying to preserve at least some sense of the kid looking up to her, purely for Harley's own benefit. Crying about being turned down for a casual screw? Not a good look. She was aware of that.
So Marc and Cass were both out.
A whole lotta other people (not everyone, she wasn't organized enough for that) in her contacts were in, though.
... You know. In terms of Harley calling them, not so much the venting. Several people didn't pick up at all. Several did, but only to curse her out, some in very graphic terms. At least one number was no longer in service because the person it had belonged to was dead, and at least one other had been passed on to a little old lady Harley would gladly have talked to, in her desperation, if they'd actually had any sort of a common language.
It wasn't going great, in short. In fact, no matter how much pasted-on cheer she forced into her voice, every call just made her feel worse. Bruce had clambered onto the bed with her, resting his head on her leg. She was absently scritching behind his ear as she scrolled way down to the bottom of her list of contacts. Squared her shoulders, conjured up another desperate smile, pressed the call button.
After a brief moment, the call clearly connected, but the line stayed silent.
Harley wasn't going to let that stop her.
"Hiya!" she called. "Someone there? Or did I call the Perfect Silence Hotline by accident ag--"
"Quinn?" came a gruff voice, terse, suspicious - and, right, that was who Marc had reminded her of when they'd first met! Colonel Rick Flag! "There you are, Flag, how long's it been?" she cooed, only to continue without waiting for an answer. "Too long, I know, but hey, we're still friends, right?"
He sounded confused. "No? What? Where'd you get this --"
No.
Harley hung up.
And tossed her phone across the bed, for good measure, and then stared into the middle distance for a moment. Call it a revelation. The sum of everything that had just happened, of her sitting alone at the bar trying to keep it together, of spending all day long before that rolling around in her misery alone like some sad little pig in its single occupancy sty.
"... I don't have any friends."
Well, fuck.
(NFB, but open?)