Chapter 23: The Rooftop Return
The steel beam had won. It always won. Y/n’s shoulders screamed a chorus of specific, detailed complaints as she keyed herself into the building’s lobby. The marble floor was too bright, the elevator music too saccharine. She smelled of concrete dust, diesel fumes, and her own sweat. A sharp, metallic twinge in her left wrist suggested she’d tweaked it trying to convince a two-ton I-beam it wanted to go left, not right.
Leo had bought her a greasy burger as a peace offering after the foreman’s meltdown. It sat in her gut like a brick. All she wanted was a shower so hot it’d turn her skin pink, and maybe twelve hours of unconsciousness.
But as the elevator ascended, bypassing her own floor and continuing its smooth glide upward, the ache in her muscles began to feel different. Less like punishment, more like a testament. She was coming back from something. To something.
She stood before Margot’s door, suddenly aware of her grime. She wiped her boots awkwardly on the mat, a useless gesture, and knocked.
The door swung open almost immediately.
Margot leaned against the frame, backlit by the warm glow of the apartment. She’d changed into soft-looking black leggings and an oversized navy sweater. Her hair was down, a messy cascade over her shoulders. She didn’t smile. She just tilted her head, and her expression slid into something wide-eyed and unnervingly placid.
“Well, well, well,” the Harley Quinn voice chirped, bright and tinny. “Look what the cat dragged in. Or… what dragged the cat in? Y’look like you lost a fight with a cement mixer, sugar.”
Y/n sighed, but it was a sigh with a laugh trapped inside it. “It was a steel beam, actually. More of a draw.” She stepped inside, the familiar scent of jasmine and clean linen enveloping her.
“A draw, she says.” Harley-Margot closed the door and trailed her as Y/n dropped her tool belt with a heavy thud near the entry table. “Sounds like you need a drink. Or a psychiatrist. I know a guy!”
“I need a shower,” Y/n said, rolling her stiff neck. “And about a gallon of water.”
“Boring.” The voice followed her into the open living space. “You’re all work and no play. Didn’tcha learn anything from my movies? Smash stuff, have fun!”
Y/n turned, leaning against the back of the sofa. The exhaustion made her bold, or maybe it was the persistent, playful glint in Margot’s eye underneath the character. “I learned that you have a disturbing affinity for oversized hammers and that your psychiatry license is… questionable.”
Margot dropped the voice for a second, her own laughter bubbling through. “It’s revoked, actually.” Then she snapped back into character, circling slowly. “But you’d know all about my movies, wouldn’t ya?”
There it was. The opening. Y/n looked down, scuffing her boot on the perfect rug. “Might’ve seen one or two.”
“One or two?” The Harley voice was closer now, right in front of her. “See, I got a theory. I think a certain quiet, tall drink of water with grease under her nails has seen ’em all. The DC ones. The other ones too. The weird indie where I cry a lot. The dumb comedy where I trip over a rug for two hours.”
Y/n’s face was warming. She could feel it. It was ridiculous. She was a grown woman who worked with rebar and power tools. “So what if I have?” The defensiveness brought her own accent rolling forward, the Brooklyn edges softening her usually measured tone. “You’re a good actress. It’s not a crime to watch good work.”
“‘You’re a good actress,’” Margot parroted, but she stayed in Harley’s register, turning the compliment into something teasing and childlike. She stepped in until the toes of her bare feet almost touched Y/n’s boots. “That’s real sweet. Real professional. But I don’t think you were watchin’ for the, uh, artistic merit, puddin’.”
Y/n opened her mouth, closed it. The day had sandpapered her brain smooth. She had no clever retort. The truth was too simple, too exposed. “I liked watching you,” she finally said, the words rough. “All of it. Even the dumb rug one.”
Margot went still. The Harley facade didn’t break, but it deepened, intensified. The playful glint solidified into something more knowing, more predatory. She reached up, not touching, just tracing a finger in the air an inch from the strap of Y/n’s tank top. “You liked it, huh?”
The Brooklyn in Y/n’s voice thickened, a shelter for her vulnerability. “Yeah, I liked it. What’s the big deal? People like your movies.”
“But you’re not ‘people,’” Margot whispered, and it was pure Harley, a conspiratorial, intimate hiss. She finally closed that last inch of space, her body a soft, warm line against Y/n’s tired, grimy one. She leaned in, her lips brushing the shell of Y/n’s ear. Her breath was warm. “You’re my neighbor. With the big, strong arms. And the quiet eyes. Who watches all my movies.”
Y/n shuddered. A full-body tremor that started in her exhausted knees and rattled up her spine. She was pinned—by exhaustion, by the voice, by the dizzying reality of Margot Robbie breathing a fictional psychopath’s lines into her ear.
Then Margot’s teeth caught the lobe of her ear. Not a bite, not really. A slow, deliberate pressure, a capture. The sensation was electric, a white-hot wire trailing from her ear down her neck, straight to her core. It was possessive. It was a question.
All the air left Y/n’s lungs in a quiet, surrendering rush. Her head tilted, granting better access, her hands coming up to rest, heavy and unsure, on Margot’s hips. The tool-belt calluses snagged slightly on the fine wool of the sweater.
Margot released her ear, her lips grazing the same spot. She didn’t drop the voice. It was lower now, a smoky promise lodged against Y/n’s skin. “Think you need that shower now more than ever.”
She pulled back just enough to look Y/n in the eyes. The character was still there, but Y/n could see Margot underneath, triumphant and tender and blazingly curious. The performance was the conduit, but the current was entirely, devastatingly real.
Y/n, stripped bare by the day and by the admission, just nodded. Words were gone. Language was a concept for other people, in other elevators, living other lives.
Margot took her hand. The gesture was suddenly, shockingly gentle. She led her, not toward the guest bath, but toward the primary suite, her other hand lifting to mimic swinging an invisible mallet, a silent, playful whack at the empty air.
The city’ neon glow bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows, painting everything in pulses of blue and red. Y/n followed, the throb in her wrist forgotten, the ache in her shoulders transforming into a different kind of anticipation. The water would be hot. The voice, for now, would remain. And she was done fighting it.