Harley nodded once, indication of her gratefulness for the wolf accepting her apology. He was a big fella, and while she wasn’t even remotely afraid of him, she wasn’t stupid either. Her babies would protect her, and she had little doubt about who and what they could handle, but she wasn’t looking for a fight today. No point poking at something with fangs. It usually didn’t go so good.
And if the wolf was happy, the kid was happy. That much would’ve been obvious, even if she didn’t have a degree in psychology. Harley was actually a little jealous. She loved the hyenas, adored them actually, but they were really just awesome pets. There was a bit of pride that they were more hers than the Joker’s, though she was his so it was all the same in the end, but it wasn’t the same as what this girl had with the wolf.
Then again, she would’ve had to have been raised by hyenas to get that, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that she didn’t after all. Listening to Bud trying to hork up a glove just sorta reinforced that. Ew.
Doing the math in her head, she counted backwards. Dozen years, give or take, and the kid looked like she was somewhere in her late teens. Which meant she’d been a child, but not a toddler, when the wolves took her in. Which also explained why she could speak as well as she could. The language centers of her brain had already begun forming before she’d gone to live with the pack. Her speech would be stunted, but not lost. It was even possible that she could learn to speak more normally if she put in the effort, depending on how well the neural pathways had been developed when she was a child.
Harley had used her education many times when she helped out Mr. J, though she kept it sorta quiet that she was doing it. He was the one in the spotlight, which was where she wanted him to be, so she just used her skills to keep him there. This was the first time in a very long time that she was looking at something through a doctor’s eyes purely for the intellectual stimulation. It was kinda weird, kinda good, and it really had her curiosity fired up.
“So,” she sat down cross-legged, directly on the ground, even though it put her lower than the shaggy beast nearby. She was tired of standing, so she sat. Simple as that. “Do you remember anything from before you were a wolf? Is that how you remember to talk like a person? Or did somebody teach you later?”