Harley Quinn (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
totalwildcard) wrote2025-08-25 11:17 am
totalwildcard) wrote2025-08-25 11:17 am
Needful Things Building to Ink, Holes & Smoke; Monday Morning into Afternoon
After yet another restless night, Harley woke with a start.
And then immediately sank back down with a groan, because Christ, her nightmares really did love to just run reruns on her, didn't they? Mr J and an operating table this, Belle Reve straitjacket bullshit that, it was all just the same shit on a loop for ever and ever, regardless of the specific intricate psychological context of the waking hours that was pulling them back out into rotation in the first place. The lack of imagination was honestly insulting, at this point.
She stretched her arms above her head and blinked the sleepy blur out of her eyes, and looked at the room.
... The living room slash kitchen situation, yes, where she was lying on the couch under a pile of blankets. Despite Pam's best intentions, Harley had still not made any moves towards restoring the bedroom back into a habitable environment. Or the rest of the apartment, either. Takeaway trash kept piling up, and almost every bit of furniture was placed awkwardly in ill-fitting spots, like the way the couch itself continued to halfway block the bathroom door. Cans and candy wrappers and empty bags of nachos kept getting underfoot every time Harley moved around the apartment.
In essence:
"God this place is turning into a real shithole of a dump, ain't it?"
Bruce made a noise from his pillow nest on the other side of the room, where the couch had previously been.
"Yeah, you're right, I should fix that."
Maybe it was time.
Felt like it was time. This had been her home, in the before times, and it had kinda been turning into this... depression bunker, and -- yeah, if the impulse to do something about that was rising now then Harley was just going to do what she did best and follow it. Wasn't like she had anything else vying to occupy her time (here, in the beginning of the week, in the cracks -- right, not going there right now).
Harley got up. She took Bruce out for his morning walkies, and fed him.
And then she got to work.
-----
It took a good long while. Especially since Harley wasn't content just getting the place back to what she'd always considered an acceptable level of clutter, but suddenly found herself with the drive to go beyond that. And that meant all the trash had to go. Not just what had accumulated over the past three or so weeks, but everything, every random item she'd slowly gone blind to while they patiently waited for her to get around to removing them from her house. It all got shoved into trash bags now - yes, all in the same bags, sorry if that was an environmental issue, Pam. Everything had to go, and it had to go now while the energy was there!
So she moved furniture, and she shoved trash in bags, and she --
Seriously hesitated with one empty bottle in particular. A pretty thing of glass with a classy drawing of a naked lady on it. Harley didn't open it but she knew she'd still get a whiff of tequila inside if she had.
She looked at it for a long moment.
And then she did something she wasn't particularly proud of, which was that she tucked it away on a shelf, behind Beaver, away from prying eyes. Because whatever, what ever, this was her bout of semi manic cleaning and she chose what went and what stayed! That little bit of paper with nothing on it except a dash and a single letter was around here somewhere and guess what? That was staying too!
(All that wondering about why she'd built a bonfire out of stuff that was technically all hers, when the traditional or at the very least more widely accepted approach would have been to burn the other party's stuff, and here was the thing:
She didn't even have anything of Marc's. She never had.
All that time and she was tucking away an empty bottle and a scrap of paper, because she couldn't exactly pull the memories out of her head and decide whether to burn them or keep them.)
None of the rest was cause for any such contemplation, even briefly. Just work. And once she was finished with the main room in her apartment, and had taken a look inside her bedroom only to decide it could stay a crime scene for a little while longer (she needed to look into getting a new bed, first, everything else would just be built up or taken down based on that), the energy still wouldn't let up so she ended up scrubbing the bathroom top to bottom, too. By the time she was finished with that, all the shampoo bottles and bath stuff had never been in anything as closely resembling order as they were just then!
And yet, the fucking energy.
It had started out as a helpful thing, but now it was this clawing, demanding sensation inside her that was still nagging at her as she was washing her hands up to her elbows, having cleaned some awful gunk out from under the sink. She sighed, and looked up into the mirror above the sink.
And looked at the reflection of her jaw.
And felt the stew that had taken residence inside her skull roiling again, with the N E T T O R of it all, with the too hurt and the doing the wrong things and the trust of it all.
Roiling, roiling, roiling, and then.
-----
As soon as her hands were dry, Harley was down the stairs and out the door and down the street, past one store front and then right in the door of the next business - where she slapped her hands against the edge of the counter.
And asked the tattoo parlor guy behind it, "Hey, you guys got that laser removal here?"
They didn't, actually, but still.
There were many ways to start cleaning up many messes.
(establishy!)
And then immediately sank back down with a groan, because Christ, her nightmares really did love to just run reruns on her, didn't they? Mr J and an operating table this, Belle Reve straitjacket bullshit that, it was all just the same shit on a loop for ever and ever, regardless of the specific intricate psychological context of the waking hours that was pulling them back out into rotation in the first place. The lack of imagination was honestly insulting, at this point.
She stretched her arms above her head and blinked the sleepy blur out of her eyes, and looked at the room.
... The living room slash kitchen situation, yes, where she was lying on the couch under a pile of blankets. Despite Pam's best intentions, Harley had still not made any moves towards restoring the bedroom back into a habitable environment. Or the rest of the apartment, either. Takeaway trash kept piling up, and almost every bit of furniture was placed awkwardly in ill-fitting spots, like the way the couch itself continued to halfway block the bathroom door. Cans and candy wrappers and empty bags of nachos kept getting underfoot every time Harley moved around the apartment.
In essence:
"God this place is turning into a real shithole of a dump, ain't it?"
Bruce made a noise from his pillow nest on the other side of the room, where the couch had previously been.
"Yeah, you're right, I should fix that."
Maybe it was time.
Felt like it was time. This had been her home, in the before times, and it had kinda been turning into this... depression bunker, and -- yeah, if the impulse to do something about that was rising now then Harley was just going to do what she did best and follow it. Wasn't like she had anything else vying to occupy her time (here, in the beginning of the week, in the cracks -- right, not going there right now).
Harley got up. She took Bruce out for his morning walkies, and fed him.
And then she got to work.
It took a good long while. Especially since Harley wasn't content just getting the place back to what she'd always considered an acceptable level of clutter, but suddenly found herself with the drive to go beyond that. And that meant all the trash had to go. Not just what had accumulated over the past three or so weeks, but everything, every random item she'd slowly gone blind to while they patiently waited for her to get around to removing them from her house. It all got shoved into trash bags now - yes, all in the same bags, sorry if that was an environmental issue, Pam. Everything had to go, and it had to go now while the energy was there!
So she moved furniture, and she shoved trash in bags, and she --
Seriously hesitated with one empty bottle in particular. A pretty thing of glass with a classy drawing of a naked lady on it. Harley didn't open it but she knew she'd still get a whiff of tequila inside if she had.
She looked at it for a long moment.
And then she did something she wasn't particularly proud of, which was that she tucked it away on a shelf, behind Beaver, away from prying eyes. Because whatever, what ever, this was her bout of semi manic cleaning and she chose what went and what stayed! That little bit of paper with nothing on it except a dash and a single letter was around here somewhere and guess what? That was staying too!
(All that wondering about why she'd built a bonfire out of stuff that was technically all hers, when the traditional or at the very least more widely accepted approach would have been to burn the other party's stuff, and here was the thing:
She didn't even have anything of Marc's. She never had.
All that time and she was tucking away an empty bottle and a scrap of paper, because she couldn't exactly pull the memories out of her head and decide whether to burn them or keep them.)
None of the rest was cause for any such contemplation, even briefly. Just work. And once she was finished with the main room in her apartment, and had taken a look inside her bedroom only to decide it could stay a crime scene for a little while longer (she needed to look into getting a new bed, first, everything else would just be built up or taken down based on that), the energy still wouldn't let up so she ended up scrubbing the bathroom top to bottom, too. By the time she was finished with that, all the shampoo bottles and bath stuff had never been in anything as closely resembling order as they were just then!
And yet, the fucking energy.
It had started out as a helpful thing, but now it was this clawing, demanding sensation inside her that was still nagging at her as she was washing her hands up to her elbows, having cleaned some awful gunk out from under the sink. She sighed, and looked up into the mirror above the sink.
And looked at the reflection of her jaw.
And felt the stew that had taken residence inside her skull roiling again, with the N E T T O R of it all, with the too hurt and the doing the wrong things and the trust of it all.
Roiling, roiling, roiling, and then.
As soon as her hands were dry, Harley was down the stairs and out the door and down the street, past one store front and then right in the door of the next business - where she slapped her hands against the edge of the counter.
And asked the tattoo parlor guy behind it, "Hey, you guys got that laser removal here?"
They didn't, actually, but still.
There were many ways to start cleaning up many messes.
(establishy!)