ATLAS: HEART, tim drake

short of breath

Rose Oaks' laundry room is dead at eleven-thirty in the evening.

You retract the thought as soon as it forms.

No, no, not dead. Silent. Calm. Yes, that's better.

In Gotham City, it's best not to associate things or people with the word dead. Lest you, you know, tempt fate.

While it is true that Rose Oaks, your fifteen-story apartment building situated between Chinatown and the Upper West Side, is safer than the previous complex you lived in in Burnley — it has a doorman and everything, how fancy is that — you tend to err on the side of caution.

Of course, you're also contradicting yourself since you're coming down to do your laundry at eleven at night and if your parents knew, they would be very disapproving.

But no one is perfect.

And anyway, you're halfway done. You're moving your clothes and towels from the washing machine to the dryers, pouch of quarters rattling around in the pocket of your hoodie as you go.

Kneeling in front of the open dryer, you tense when you hear the door open. You peek around the dryer door, watching a guy your age — early twenties — walk inside with a laundry basket propped on his hip.

Your eyes quickly catalog lean muscles, dark hair, and pale skin before you force yourself to turn around and finish tossing in the wet clothes bundled in your arms, detangling some of them as you go.

When you stand, turning back to the wall of washers, you glimpse his back, shoulders stretching out a white t-shirt.

You go back to the washers you were using, a couple feet away from him. He is dumping his clothes inside. All of them. You get it. You were raised to separate your darks and whites and bright colors but when you have to pay to do laundry, you cut corners when necessary.

You only separated your stuff for a few months before you got tired of paying the extra dollar and fifty to run another load.

You bend forward to pull out another armful of clothes, careful not to let the whole world see the few pairs of underwear there, then turn and go back over to the dryer to throw them in.

When you step back to the washers, you glimpse the guy intently studying the back of the bottle of laundry detergent. Like it's got the secrets to the universe and not just the instructions on how to use it. Another bottle sits on the edge. Wait a second...

You pull out another armful, cross the room to deposit it into the dryer, then on your walk back, you squint to get a good look.

Oh, yup. Fabric softener. Yikes. You don't even think that can be used with these washers? The cheap ones that last, like, two decades and don't exactly rotate like a regular front-facing washer does but rather very aggressively spins.

Like the cherry on top, he seems to be using the measurements on the cup, the ones that the instructions tell you to use but you shouldn't because you don't actually need that much detergent, the companies are just trying to get you to use more and thus buy more.

Oh, you can't look anymore. It's just too much.

You grab your final armful of clothes, toss them in the dryer along with a dryer sheet and close the door. You just need your towels now.

The guy is doing the fabric softener now. You look away, opening the lid on the other washer. 

Inside the circular washer, your towels are plastered to the sides. You reach down to unstick them. See, this is what you mean. It's just cheap. For such a nice building, they should have better washers and dryers. Or better yet — apartments with an in-unit set. But this one was in your pay range and only half a mile from the school, which did sway you.