Harper had been cooped up in her room in the Watchtower for most of the following day. Every now and then someone would knock on her door, or ask to speak with her, but Harper was adamant on pretending as if she were invisible. By now the entirety of the Justice League must have been aware of her...unique situation, and she wished to avoid any conversations that might reflect the one that she had with Bruce. More than that, there was some small part of her that didn't want to be seen in that wheelchair; to be caught so vulnerable was a terrifying thought.

It was an unfortunate truth, however, that Harper still had to eat. She was starving, and if there was one thing that was going to get her out of that room, it was the prospect of food. She knew by now that The Flash kept a massive horde of chips, pizza, pies, chocolate, and practically any other delicious and highly unhealthy food in seperate cabinets around the Watchtower. He would definitely notice if something was taken, but that was probably preferable over having to go to the cafeteria, which was usually the most crowded place on the orbital station.

Harper placed her hand against a scanner that was mounted by the exit. It glowed bright blue, then chirped brightly in confirmation before sliding open the door.

The hallway was deserted, or that's how it initially appeared. Harper had barely managed to push herself forward before the towering visage of Superman rounded the corner. He appeared a little surprised to see her outside, but smiled nonetheless. Harper grimaced. It took all of her willpower not to turn around and hurry back into her room.

"It's good to see you, Harper." Clark said with such genuine relief in his voice that it almost made Harper cringe. If there was one thing worse than hatred, or judgement, it was pity; and Superman seemed to extrude sympathetic energy towards every suffering soul. It was annoying. She didn't want his commiseration. "I was hoping to talk to you."

Harper groaned. "And I was hoping not to talk to anyone."

Despite her semi-hostile tone, Clark didn't appear bothered at all. He simply stepped forward a few more times, and spoke regardless of Harper's wishes. "It won't take long. I just wanted you to know that Bruce told us everything, but that doesn't mean that we all share his opinion on the subject."

"I wouldn't care even if you did." Harper retorted in a low, weak voice. She had never been a good liar...apparently even two hundred years of knowledge hadn't improved that.

"Of course not." Clark's bright blue eyes saw right through her tough facade of indifference. "I would though. I don't want you to think that you'll be treated any differently."

"Look, I know that you're trying to be nice...but you're delusional if you think that people are going to treat me the same as they did two days ago." Harper snapped, trying to unclench her hands from the armrests on either side of her. It felt like she might snap them off if she held on any tighter. "I've already had more people try and visit me today than in the entirety of my time here."

"I'm sure they were just worried about you."

"They never worried before..." Harper muttered. A frown had embedded itself on her lips, and absolutely refused to leave. "But now that I'm halfway to becoming Stephen Hawking they want to treat me like a charity case...to tell me about how sorry they are, despite having nothing to do with it, and then assure me that they don't care that I'm a clone. I've seen and heard it all before. I'm sick to death of it, and more than that, I'm sick of people saying that they won't treat me any differently; just by saying those words you already are."

A cold breeze crept into the walls as surely as the silence did, then creaked against the structure around them like the awkward voice of a spectator. Superman placed his hands on his hips, in a pose so painstakingly iconic that Harper could almost envision a marble statue of it constructed in front of a Supreme Court building. "You're right. I'm sorry, I didn't think about it that way."

"What our friend is trying to say," The voice of Martian Manhunter suddenly reverberated around the hall. He appeared beside them almost instantly. "is that things will be different, but not because our trust in you has changed."

Clark sighed in relief. He liked to imagine that he could get along with most people, but Harper reminded him much of his fiancée; they were both extremely complicated, and didn't react to good intentioned words in the same way as most others. Perhaps her similar nature to Silvia was what made him so desperate to reassure her initially, but now he could see that they were nothing alike at all. Silvia would have sworn a lot more. She was more aggressive, and even blindly defensive, but Harper was simply distant from almost everything.

"Thanks, J'onn." Clark smiled. "You always know what to say."

"Maybe your trust in me should have changed, especially after what I did to Victor." Harper retorted with a disturbing lack of emotion. "And after I deceived you for almost a year."

"We all have our secrets. I don't think you intended for yours to cause any harm..." Superman started, but within the span of half a second his gaze had shifted from her to the ground. There was a mist in his eyes, as if they were focused on an object too far away for Harper to even comprehend. It was probably something on earth. "Sorry, there's a ship sinking in pacific."

"Isn't Arthur stationed nearby?" J'onn asked inquisitively.

"He hasn't checked in for a few days now." Superman admitted, though it was clear that it was a little more serious than that. Harper suspected that Arthur had dropped off the map entirely, and if she gaged Superman's powers correctly, he probably knew exactly where Aquaman was hiding...but he didn't want to invade the king of Atlantis' privacy. "I'll have to deal with this myself."

Harper, who had been growing increasingly anxious about the sinking ship as time passed by, finally showed a modicum of emotion when she yelled "Stop dawdling! Just go!"

There was a gust of air that propelled Harper's wheelchair back a few inches, and then Clark was gone. Harper's face scrunched into immense dislike. "He took his time. People could have died while he was standing there talking."

"I respect your disapproval of Superman's personality, but I can assure you that no one was in danger. Not as long as he was keeping an eye on them." J'onn replied calmly, and much more objectively than Harper had expected.

"He takes advantage of his powers. One day they might fail him."

"Perhaps, but that day is not today." J'onn shifted slightly on the spot, but his gaze never left hers. "But I am not here to speak about Clark, I have come to express my deepest admiration for your recent bravery in revealing the truth of your origin, especially to someone as paranoid as Bruce."

"That wasn't bravery, it was necessity. After the attack I was left with no choice."

"There is always a choice. You could have left, or lied, or feigned cluelessness. Instead, you decided to tell the truth. That is often the hardest path to take." J'onn paused for barely a second, examining Harper as if she were translucent. "But not for you, is it? You have so many memories of so many lies, that the mere act of concealing the facts has lost all appeal. It was almost a relief to finally unveil such a vital secret."

Harper frowned. "Don't read my mind. That's a serious invasion of privacy."

"I do not need to read your mind, you are more apparent than you think." Martian Manhunter rested his hands behind his back, which only succeeded in making him look taller than ever. Perhaps it was because Harper was stuck in a wheelchair, but she was starting to feel as if she were almost level with the ground compared to everyone else. "You dislike lying, but you were afraid of the truth...being different is no crime Harper Reid, no matter what Bruce might lead you to believe."

"Okay, thanks for the pep talk. I'm gonna go." Harper rolled her eyes and started back down the corridor, but the relief that she felt was undeniable. J'onn could feel that strong emotion despite Harper's attempts to contain it but chose not to mention it, and simply let her leave without another word. He knew that their words had lightened a small part of her burden without Harper verbally confirming it, and that was enough for him.

Meanwhile, Harper was pushing her wheelchair as far away from the telepathic alien as she possibly could in such a short span of time. She knew that he wasn't scanning her mind, but she had always felt uncomfortable around him anyway; as if he knew her entire story with just a single glance... In an attempt to tear her focus away from the previous encounter, Harper mentally outlined her plans for the day. She was going to grab something to eat, first and foremost, then she was going to install a chip in her wheelchair that was directly connected to her neural implant (so that she could move with merely a thought...just like operating her mechs), and finally she would try and stabilise that black hole device that clone 2902 was using. Unbeknownst to Bruce, she still had a few more lying around.

Unfortunately, Harper only managed to tick two tasks off this list when Victor found her. She was in her usual spot, the hangar, testing the link between her wheelchair and the implant. She moved forward without ever touching the wheels, and in that small span of seconds, she had confirmed that it worked. Victor leaned against the far side of the wall, watching as she masterfully steered this device with nothing but her own mental strength. She was a natural at it, and that wasn't shocking considering that Harper moved her giant suits the exact same way.

"You upgraded it already?" Cyborg spoke in a voice much calmer than she could ever remember hearing from him.

Harper's shoulders tensed, but still she asked "What are you doing here?"

Pushing off from the wall, Victor stepped closer to Harper's small work station. "I just wanted to talk."

"Apparently you're not the only one..." Harper groaned at the recollection of her previous conversation with Martian Manhunter and Superman. "I'm all talked out for today."

"I'm sure you'll find the strength to bare with it for a few more minutes." Victor crossed his arms, and the high-pitched noise of metal scraping against metal pierced the air. It was a sound that Harper was used to now. The cyborg let his gaze linger across the room, as if he wasn't sure what he wanted to say...or even how to say it. The words escaped him, as they always did, and joined the wreckage of ideas that had all failed to be expressed. "When you told me that you were...well, that we were similar...I thought you meant that we both hated our dads or something. I never imagined that it was because we were both artificial."

Harper sighed. "You're not artificial, Victor. Not compared to me anyway. You were born, just like everyone else. I was created."

"I was saved by alien technology. That makes me at least partly artificial." The atmosphere, Victor noticed, was much less welcoming than usual. There was a rift between them; one that had appeared and grown entirely over night. "I didn't react the way I wish that I had. My silence might have felt like a rejection of who you are, but that's not how it was intended. I was just...so shocked. I couldn't find the right words to say. I needed time to process this whole thing."

Harper chewed on her bottom lip. Each sentence from Victor's lips never entirely reached her. She could hear what he was saying, but in fear of his disgust, Harper tried not to decipher his words for any deeper message.

"What I'm trying to say is that I get it, and that this hasn't changed my opinion of you."

Harper finally seemed to fully comprehend his acceptance, but in such a vulnerable state she could do nothing but push it away. "How can you lie so easily? I'm a copy of someone else. A cardboard cut-out of someone that lived two hundred years ago. You've seen where I was created, and you've seen the original. How can you not look at me and see those tubs full of half formed clones? How can you consider me as anything but that old and immobile woman that you saw in the vicinity... I saw the way you looked at her. You were repulsed."

"I was repulsed by her and her lust for power, not by you. You're nothing like her. I know that much is true." Victor rested a hand on Harper's shoulder but she refused to look at him. "You want to know what I was really thinking about when I was looking at her? If clones could age, and if you did, would you look like her... I was thinking that I might never get to experience it. That I would be stuck like this forever."

This seemed to grab her attention, finally, and when her gaze met his there was a clash of colour in the once dull room. She had almost forgotten how deeply brown his right eye was, and how the red lense of the other clashed with it. "What do you mean? You can't age?"

"I don't know. I've been like this for almost six years now, but the organic side of my face hasn't changed at all. It's made me wonder about a lot of things, especially about the concept of growing old...and how terrible it would be to be stuck like this forever. I looked at that old woman and saw a nightmare of a future. One where you aged, and died, and I was trapped in a life without you." Victor bent down towards Harper, and moved his hand from her shoulder to her face. His touch was cold against her cheek, but the smooth metal was somehow comforting. "You accepted me so completely that you never even considered feeling sorry for me, I could never judge you on something like this. You're Harper Reid. The only Harper Reid that I care to know. The others are just white noise."

He inched closer, never stopping until his lips had finally brushed against hers. A gasp of shock escaped Harper's throat, but it disappeared between their lips. She had expected hatred, and repulsion, and regret...but she hadn't expected such overwhelming support. Least of all from Victor, who likely suffered the most from her little secret. She couldn't reject the certainty he gave her though.

Harper's eyes fluttered shut and she wrapped her arms tenderly around his neck. It was a little awkward, given Harper's new position in a wheelchair; she couldn't reach up for him or follow his lips as they moved away...but it was equally the most passionate kiss that they had ever shared. It was a silent reassurance that nothing could shake their relationship, not even an underground lair full of inconceivable secrets.