Ain't even about the dough [Reinhardt]

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

When she reentered the laundry room twenty minutes later, there still wasn't a washing machine empty. Which wouldn't have been a problem, except that half of those machines weren't even spinning.

She set her can of soda down on the counter. Then, she went to the closest washing machine, opened it, and tossed every single piece of wet clothing out onto the top of the washing machine next to it. If some of the clothes slipped off the washing machine (also not running - God, what the **** was up with people in this apartment?) onto the floor - well, too bad. That was so not her ******* problem.

From the corner of her eye, Vienna spied a pen on the counter. That gave her an idea. She retrieved it and then snagged a flyer off the bulletin board.

She flipped over the paper, wrote on it, and then triumphantly pinned it up again, the side she'd written on out in the front.

PICK UP YOUR SHITTY CLOTHES, PEOPLE. Or I'm going to start tossing it in the trash.

No one could say she hadn't given warning.

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

The trick to having a good weekend was to end it on a positive note. While Reinhardt was by no means enterprising, he had sufficient experience living in college dorms to know the importance of having a head start while everyone else nursed their hangovers and/or indulged in a well-deserved sleep-in. Sunday afternoons were damning to morale, which is why he chose to spend them asleep rather than chasing after a free washer or dryer. It was pleasant to take an afternoon nap on freshly cleaned sheets, and far easier to give in to the afternoon lull when one’s list of chores was done and dusted.

This was why the lanky brunet was sauntering down to the basement without a care in the world, phone and keys tucked into his back pocket. Reinhardt hadn’t bothered with shoes, sporting his worn fuzzy slippers, those fancy suede and wool ones he’d taken off dad’s hands many years back. The alarm had chimed no more than ten minutes ago, alerting him that both loads in the dryer were ready. He’d taken his time coming downstairs, wanting the zippers in particular to cool before he retrieved his clothes.

“Well, well, well,” he greeted, rounding the threshold as he made for the dryers along the back wall. He haphazardly tossed the plastic basket onto the top of a washing machine, the pile of wet clothes appearing in his line of sight.

“Yuck! Who did that?”

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

At the exclamation, she turned her head. Was he one of the culprits? The laundry basket he'd set down was empty.

"I did." She gave him an unrepentant stare.

Okay, she would have been pissed off if someone had tossed her clothes on top of the laundry, but this was deserved! And he wasn't the one who'd had to dig around in the laundry for someone else's underwear. Clean underwear, but still.

With the pen, she gestured toward the notice she'd just put up.

"How hard is it to remember to pick up your clothes?" she demanded. "Other people need to use the ******* washing machines too, Fourth Floor."

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

Reinhardt was halfway through emptying the first load of dried clothes when he paused to look at her. His gaze shifted to the noticeboard behind her, though it was too far for him to make any of the scribbling out without his glasses. With an unimpressed shrug, he returned his attention the task at hand, luxuriating in the feel of soft, warm sheets. They’d finally lost that starchiness telltale of new bedding! Yet another small victory this weekend. Simple pleasures were the silver linings in life, though he doubted she’d be a willing recipient to his philosophy. He kept the win to himself.

“I take offence to being pigeonholed with the Fullers from four-seventeen,” he replied lightly.

With practiced ease, Reinhardt cleaned out the lint filter and compressed its fuzzy contents into a ball. He set said lint ball next to his basket, then began to retrieve the load of darks from the second dryer. He wasn’t in the mood to engage with her wildfire of a personality, so he didn’t point out that there were now two empty dryers—soon to be three—into which she could have transferred those wet clothes. Some people wanted to watch the world burn, and today he was decidedly not amongst them.

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

Oh. Well. It wasn't him, unless he had more than two dryers' worth of clothing. He was at least twenty minutes too early to be one of the reasons she was pissed off. He'd even cleaned out the lint filter. Clearly, they had the laundry equivalent of a Boy Scout here.

Vienna shrugged. "Okay. Fine. You're not at fault. Though..."

She frowned at him, sitting onto the counter. "That's really specific. How do you know who those clothes belong to?"

Setting her borrowed pen down beside the sink, she cast a dubious look back at the counter. Was there something particularly distinctive in that pile of clothing? Something with a name on it, perhaps?

Who the hell were those Fullers anyway? If she'd met them at one of those terrible apartment socials with half-melted ice cream, she didn't recall.

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

Reinhardt tossed the last of his dark linens into the oversized basket with a flair of triumph. Done.

“I don’t—” the rest of the sentence hung heavily in the air, conversation momentarily paused as he then cleared the lint from the second machine as he’d done the with first. Though this time, he tossed the mismatched fuzz into the bin.

“—but they seem like the type who would,” he finished noncommittally. There were so many things the Fullers did that rubbed their neighbours on level four the wrong way that this could easily be yet another display of their misplaced entitlement. He wasn’t above swinging low if the opportunity arose to knock them down a few pegs; they thought far too highly of themselves.

Distractedly, Reinhardt reached into the basket and began folding his clothes.

“If you want to avoid rush hour though, you could come down earlier,” he offered without malice.

“Place starts to get busy around ten.”

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

'They just seem like the type' had to be the least convincing reason she'd ever heard. So he didn't know that they were responsible, and he was just going to name-drop them anyway? Clearly, there was a story there.

She laughed. There was a story there.

At the next comment, she frowned, studying him. It seemed like advice rather than criticism, but it still brought her hackles up for a moment anyway. "Get up earlier and let your Fullers or whoever get away with hogging the machines?" She shook her head. "No thanks."

Rush hour wouldn't be so bad if people didn't take over the machines for so long. And getting up earlier would be giving in.

"How'd they manage to annoy you, anyway?" She raised her eyebrows. Unspoken went the implication that he wasn't that easy to annoy. He put up with her, for one.

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

Reinhardt spared a thought for his younger sister. It had been quite some time since they’d lived under the same roof, but he missed her nevertheless, and made a mental note to give her a shout at some point in the day. Vienna was nothing like Jenny, but her hardened edges reminded him much of himself at her age. Perhaps it was that unexpressed truth which rendered him more acquiescent of her attitude than he’d otherwise be. He didn’t care much for her in the grand scheme of things, nor did he feel any inclination to dislike her. She simply was. She remained, for the time being, a recurring walk-on in the masterpiece that was his life. It was likely that she never would be of much consequence, and it was that very assumption which made him so amenable to their interaction.

“In five words or less? God-fearing hipsters.”

Reinhardt deftly folded another shirt, piling atop the others. After a beat, he added with a shrug, “Not that people aren’t free to be whatever the **** they want, but their relentless attempt at shoving their ******** down everybody’s throat is so... annoying. And that’s coming from someone who generally doesn’t mind things shoved down his throat.”

His all-encompassing sexuality and fluid interpretation of gender did put him at slight odds with the Fullers—particularly Ned, the husband. Reinhardt was convinced the guy was so far back in the closet he’d found Narnia. He wasn’t going to touch that challenge with a ten-inch pole. It wasn’t just the hypocrisy that perturbed him, it was... They were exactly the kind of people he’d left back home, here, in his new life, in his new apartment, on his floor, eager to befriend him, envelop him, suffocate him. Just like his mother had.

“It’s their holier than thou act. It’s just... They’d be the type to do that,” he concluded, gesturing in mid-fold towards the pile of wet clothes.

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

She snickered at the description. "Hipster" and "God-fearing" made for an incongruous image.

Five words or less, he'd said, and he gave her three - and then another twenty more. Clearly, they were a sore spot, and given that what he'd said about not minding things shoved down his throat, she had a guess that it was about more than hipster drama and a superior attitude.

She tilted her head. "I'm not sure wearing skinny jeans and telling you to accept Jesus is that related to bad laundry habits," she pointed out. It probably not the most tactful thing to do, considering just how serious he was about this, but she just couldn't resist.

She did cast a glance back at the pile of clothing though, checking for anything particularly hipsterish.

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

It was a dangerous thread of conversation to tug at. It could quickly unravel to its source, forcing his hand to reveal what made him so bloody irritated at the mere thought of god-fearing Christians. It extended past Christianity, if he was honest. Too much harm in the world came from extremism, and the narrow-mindedness of people so caught up in their grand delusion to have any common sense riled him beyond what was characteristic. Then there was his mother, obviously.

It was harder than Reinhardt expected to let the evident dig go, but he focused on the briefs he was folding and centred himself. Today was a good day, he reminded himself. He was halfway through his folding, with just his bed left to make upon returning to his apartment. He’d order a pizza after his nap, save himself the effort of cleaning up any further than he already had this morning. Living in a clean environment was a necessity, but not sufficiently to spend every other hour picking up after oneself.

“Either way, if you started earlier you’d be done by now. Unless you’re pre-destined to become laundry sheriff.”