A Moment of Compassion
She has an agenda, and they both know it. How could they not? She is the daughter of the Falcone crime lord, and he is a power in his own right. He would be a fool not to suspect her of having ulterior motives, and from all reports, he is no fool. A fool would not have survived as he has.
But she has learned her lessons well. Her father taught her ruthlessness, coldness. Her mother taught her gentleness, kindness, warmth. In her own time, she has learned that one catches more flies with honey than vinegar. And more alliances with sweet words than harsh ones.
More to the point, she knows her father's lessons will not work with this man. He is far too used to them. And for all his apparent frailty and weakness, there is a core of steel to him, a measure of viciousness and violence that his small size masks. Strike at him and he will bend, possibly fall, but he will not break, and he will return stronger. So much she knows from careful observation.
And so she turns to her mother's lessons, and her own information. Her first offer, a taste of home (she worked hard to produce it too), goes awry, and thus she finds herself in his club, his lair, his secondary home, attempting to mend whatever break the error has caused.
In retrospect, she thinks she understands. His mother died only a few years ago, and from all accounts, including his own words, they were close. Perhaps she would have done better to order the cooks to make the recipe similar, rather than identical. In truth, she only wished to show him the effort she would make to align with him, to form a cordial relationship.
Standing before him, she sees only anger and suspicion in his face. Then it changes, drains away into a mask that seems a little tighter than normal. It is meant to be cold and uncaring, she is sure, but instead it seems to her only a thin veneer over something else. Something he doesn't want her to see.
He orders her away, then limps past her to the lounge seat, sinking onto the black sofa. She could leave, and perhaps she should, but she wants to understand the change in his demeanor, to understand him. Understanding is the key, if she wishes to make any headway with this man.
She turns in place, carefully neutral. "I only want to help."
"Try leaving." The words are taunt, meant to be a sneer, and yet...they lack the venom of anger or contempt. The tightness of his voice and expression speaks to her not of dismissal or rage, but something else.
Her gaze travels over his face, his hunched shoulders, then follows the line of his rigid arms to where his right leg is crossed over his left knee. Both hands are clenched over his ankle, and as she connects his movements with the ice bag he tossed aside at her entry, she understands.
She knows, as does most of the criminal world, about the beating he sustained years ago. Discovered to be allied with the MCU, he was brutally beaten, one ankle and foot crushed beyond repair. Rumor has it that this injury is the source of his curious gait, and his nickname, the name he has since made his own, and one to be spoken with respect. Penguin.
But of course, an injury that cannot be healed must certainly pain the man who bears it. She watches his hands clench over the wounded limb, the white fingers that unconsciously undo the fastenings of his boot and knead the misshapen joint, seeking relief. A moment of observation is all she needs to be sure that it is pain that has altered his demeanor.
She speaks the words softly, seeking confirmation. "Your foot."
"It's just the weather." The words are a lie, his voice roughened by agony rather than anger now. She knows this is something she is not meant to see, in all likelihood a large part of the reason he tried to refuse her entry. She wonders in that moment, just how much he must suffer, daily, and how much more his injury torments him now, to force him to reveal his pain in her presence.
Sympathy for the devil. Ulterior motives aside, she cannot help but feel some compassion for this man, so strong and stubborn, and yet currently so tortured, at the mercy of a wound that will never fully heal, never cease to burden him.
It is that compassion that leads her to move forward, to set aside her handbag and kneel on the hard floor in front of him. He goes stiff at her approach, and under that stiffness runs a thread of fear, born of numerous attacks. Men like her father, who would have mocked his wounds, perhaps taken his vulnerability as a reason to cause him more pain, to try and topple him.
She answers his startled question with slow, gentle movements, approaching him the way she would a starving animal. She lays gentle, careful hands on his leg, and misses neither his violent flinch, nor his startled cry. "Don't!"
Don't. A single word with several meanings. Don't look. Don't touch. Don't pity. Don't help. A multi-shaded command that she can readily appreciate, but has no intention of obeying.
She lays her fingers over his, looks into his eyes. "I won't judge."
She can be sincere in this. After all, she knows the stories. What lies under his white-knuckled hands and the thin wool of his socks will not shock her. And she cannot judge him pitiful, when she has already acknowledged his strength. And as her father's daughter, she has seen worse, and men who have born less debilitating injuries with less fortitude than he shows, even now.
Her sincerity silences him, startles him. She takes the opportunity to move his hands to the side, uncurling his fingers. He lets her, though she sees the way his hands fist in the seat on either side of him, fingers curling and digging in like talons in the midst of his pain and uncertainty.
One wrong move, and those fingers might draw a gun to shoot her, or lock into a fist to strike her. But she does not fear him, or those hands.
She tugs the boot loose and away, but not quite off. That, like the goulash, might be a step too far. So she only moves it far enough to expose the broken, mangled joint. Her fingers caress the ridges of the poorly knit bones, then she tugs his sock down to reveal the scarred flesh, encasing damaged bone and tendons.
He allows it, knowing as she does that he has allowed too much not to. Still, she sees his head whip around, turning his face to the side, away. Shame pales his face, lips compressed in a grimace that mingles pain of body and pain of spirit.
She finds it strange, and yet also understandable, that he should flinch from his wounds. He built his power on the strength required to overcome his handicap, and yet...she is learning this man is a strange mix of strength and damage. Of wounds and will. Oswald's character is a curious combination of savagery and softness, a complex blend she imagines confuses most people.
She understands. She was raised to be a meld of silk and steel. It is the silk she draws upon now.
She begins to gently massage the tortured limb, her mind searching for a way to make this moment less of a violation and humiliation for him. She knows she needs to give him something, or he will remember this moment later with shame, when she wants to make of it something better, something that might become the foundation for a bond between them.
She finds the answer in a childhood memory, and in a lesson of her mother's, a lesson of long ago. She gathers the memory close, then breaks the silence, speaking slow and soft to soothe his anxiety. "When I was young, I broke my ankle playing with my cousins. My father told me to put some ice on it, to toughen up and get over my tears. But my mother...she told me cold increases the pain. What's needed is warmth."
She matches actions to words, caressing, soothing his agony, letting the warmth of her hands drive away the chill and the torment. The combination startles him into looking back at her, eyes wide.
She meets his surprise with compassion, with kindness, unfeigned in this moment. Kindness without a price tag. Compassion without pity. She suspects he has had little of either, and offers both without reservation, wrapped around the memory of a mother's loving warmth.
It works. Something in his eyes thaws, melts away to reveal fully the vulnerability he has tried until now to hide. Shame fades under an incredulous, tremulous gratitude. It is hard to say which is greater, his physical relief or his mental, but it hardly matters.
What matters is the hesitant relaxing of his shoulders, and the soft response he offers a moment later, a memory traded for a memory, kindness for a kindness. "My mother used to sing."
She could take the information, make of it a conversation. She has similar memories, and it would be no difficulty to draw him into speaking, into sharing. But that isn't what he needs, not in this moment. And it is actions, not conversation, that will cement how he remembers their interaction later. If she has her way, there will be other times for exchanged confidences and the trading of childhood memories.
It is with that in mind that she changes her reply from one of words to one of actions. A wordless tune, a lullaby her mother often hummed or sang for her, a song she has remembered and treasured throughout all the long years of her childhood and adulthood. She does not try to sing, remembering again the lesson she learned with the goulash, but she lets the melody flow from her, liquid and low and calming, the rhythm a match to the motions of her hands as she continues to smooth away the anguish of knotted muscles and overwrought nerves.
The faint smile he gives her, weak and trembling as it is, would be reward enough. But moments later, as her hands work what must be an excruciating knot out of his ankle, he relaxes, shoulder sagging, hands unclenching. The masks, all his efforts at hiding, fall away.
A single tear slips free of the ice-colored eyes, traveling down his pale cheek. A tear born of relief, of release from pain. A soft sigh breathes past the quivering lips as he slumps, his whole body trembling under the effects of her ministrations.
This is a precious vulnerability, something she doubts he allows anyone to see. She knows better than to mistake it for complete trust, just as she knows better than to push any farther in this moment. What he has given her is enough, and she knows that he will look later on this moment with gratitude for her kindness, for the respect and compassion she showed him. If he regrets this moment, it will only be his own demons which cause it, rather than her actions.
He is still a leader of a criminal empire. She is still Falcone's daughter, with all that the title implies. They both still have their own agendas, their own goals, and neither is foolish enough to think this moment will change that. Here and now, however, there is only the soft sound of her humming, the soft breaths of his relief, and the bond born in a moment of compassion.
And for now...that is enough. For both of them.
Author's Note: I haven't seen much Gotham, but I watched this episode, and the characters just WOULD NOT shut up. So...I wrote this, and now I'm probably gonna go binge watch the rest of the series.