Batman: Father Figure

by iammemyself

One word can change the direction of a man's life. Arkham Origins AU.

'Father Figure'

By Indiana

Characters: Jim Gordon, Barbara Gordon, Edward Nygma

Synopsis: One word can change the direction of a man's life. Arkham Origins AU.

Jim didn't know why Loeb had bothered hiring him.

Nygma was too young for this job. For this city, really. Jim could tell right away he wasn't from around here. Took a recent resident to know one. Jim hadn't talked to him much, since their paths rarely crossed, but the feel of those eyes on him was hard to miss. Only Jim seemed to have realised – or cared, the latter being more likely – that the displacement of his supervisor and Nygma's subsequent promotion was neither a mistake nor a coincidence. And that made him steer as clear as possible. If Nygma was willing to take such steps this early in his career at the GCPD, there was no telling what other trouble he might stir up.

More than that, though, Jim was just disappointed. Every time someone new came in here, he hoped they'd have a bit of a conscience. Next thing he heard someone was fired or bribed or demoted. Or dead. Nygma was no different.

When he talked, it was loudly, as though he thought his words were something the entire precinct needed to hear. His hands were almost always engaged in some grand gesture, and his eyes constantly raked over his audience, searching out anyone who wasn't listening. All markers of a young man who thought he was a great deal more important than he would ever truly be.

Jim had to admit, however, he was good at his job. He had the highest solve rate that Jim knew of, and he did seem to be working the entire time he was there. The same could not be said for a great many of Jim's colleagues.

Once or twice Jim happened to be outside for a cigarette only for Nygma to appear as well, and Jim did his best to keep the conversation minimal. Nygma, to his credit, seemed to get the hint. The problem then was that he would watch Jim until he went back inside, and he didn't like that much either. Barbara, however, had taken a shine to him. She would hang around his desk and ask him about his work, and she had told Jim that he was polite to her, if somewhat standoffish. Every time she did this he would tiredly ask her to go find someone else to talk to and she would tell him he was being ridiculous and change the subject. One afternoon he walked in on them in the break room... playing chess.

"What's this, honey?" he asked Barbara, and she did not answer him so Nygma elected to do so instead.

"It's just chess, Detective. No shenanigans to be worried about."

He would think Jim was concerned about that. "Don't you have anything to be doing, Nygma?"

Nygma shrugged his shoulders. His arms were crossed over his chest. "You seem to overestimate the amount of effort my work requires."

Why did he talk like that? "I suppose you know what you're doing. Barb, I'm leaving soon."

"Mm," Barbara said, moving one of her pieces, which Nygma promptly removed from the board with one of his own. Jim had to frown.

"How much longer are you going to be?"

"Seven minutes," Nygma answered.

"Barb?"

She only shrugged. Seven minutes it was.

She was quiet in the car ten minutes later, and after glancing at her distant look a few times he asked, "Everything alright?"

"Yeah," she answered. "Just thinking about the game."

"You go too easy on him?"

"No, Dad," she said, frowning. "He was ten moves ahead of me the whole time."

"That many?"

"I'll have to ask him about it next time."

Jim sighed and tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. "Next time, Barb?"

"Yeah. He said he'd play me whenever I wanted. And then something about how everyone else at the precinct is a... had the collective intelligence of a sea anemone?"

"Do you really have to keep talking to him?"

He could feel her looking at him now. "You say the same thing all the time."

"I've never said that."

"If you say so. But yeah. I am gonna keep talking to him. He's interesting. Did you know he speaks French?"

"That's very impressive," Jim said, as neutrally as possible, and Barbara just sighed and started telling him about the ridiculous thing her math teacher had done during lunch.

/

Jim spent a lot of time doing paperwork, and that was what he was doing when Nygma came storming out of the commissioner's office. He sat down behind his desk with clear frustration and stared at his monitor for two or three minutes before pulling open one of his desk drawers and removing a pad of paper. He set it at what seemed to be a very precise angle and pressed the tip of a green pen to its surface. Jim glanced in the direction he had come from. Meetings with Loeb were never good news.

Nygma wrote intensely for a good forty-five minutes or so, until Barbara came bouncing up to his desk. He looked up at her and smiled, laying the pen down exactly parallel with the paper.

"Good afternoon, my dear," Jim heard him say.

"What's that?" Barbara asked, looking down at the paper, and Nygma folded the page over the back of the pad and slid it into his laptop bag.

"Just a personal project. Are we playing again?"

"Yeah! But you have to explain how you won this time."

Nygma smiled and blackened his monitor. "We'll have to see if there's time enough for that."

They weren't finished by the time Jim went to collect Barbara, but he elected to stand quietly by just this once. He did indeed explain to her his process, though not without a great deal of condescending language as usual, but far from being upset or irritated by this Barbara actually seemed quite excited. On the way out of the precinct Jim asked, "Does he always win?"

"Yeah," Barbara answered, holding the door open for a patrolman walking behind them. "But I don't mind. I'll learn faster that way."

"And does he always talk to you like that?"

"Not always," she answered, surprising him. "Dad, stop pestering me about him. He's not that bad. He just has very high standards."

That didn't sound very much better to him, but Barbara could take care of herself.

/

Jim tried not to stop by the precinct at night – more than once he'd been saddled with someone else's work for his trouble – but he'd gone out on patrol with another officer and accidentally left his car keys on his desk. He had only intended to run in and get them, giving anyone he happened to pass the ghost of a nod, but that plan evaporated when he walked by Nygma's desk.

It wasn't, Jim was told, uncommon to still see him there in the evenings after everyone else had left. No one quite knew what he was doing, exactly, and he wasn't really forthright with the information. But right now he wasn't doing much of anything. He was sitting at his desk with his elbows right to the edge of it, his head in his hands. Someone had turned the lights off despite him still being there, and his monitor lit up only the edges of his profile. His glasses glinted from their place on the desktop. Jim picked up his keys and hesitated.

"Are you all right, son?"

Nygma's head shot up, and he looked directly at Jim as though there were some thread linking their eyes together and he had instinctively followed it. He just stared for a long moment, but for once it didn't seem intrusive. And yet this was worse, somehow.

"What," Nygma said finally, in what was probably the quietest voice Jim had ever heard out of him. Jim pressed his keys into the pocket of his coat.

"Are you all right?" he repeated.

"I'm fine," Nygma snapped, pushing his glasses onto his face with an excessive force. "Why wouldn't I be."

Jim shrugged and turned away.

"What if I wasn't," Nygma said, with a markedly manufactured calm. "Then what would you do?"

"I suppose I'd… ask if there were anything you'd like to talk about," Jim answered. He did not really want to - he was tired and it was long past dinner – but an empty offer was just as bad as no offer at all.

"There isn't."

Jim nodded. "Good night, then."

He felt those unnerving eyes on him even after he had made it back to his car and closed the door.

/

The next morning there was a folder on his desk that he had not left there, and paging through it brought a frown to his face. There was a lot of quite frankly damning evidence for one of his cases, but he hadn't filed for any of the legal hurdles obtaining any of it would have required. Where had it all come from?

"That's enough, isn't it?" Nygma demanded, slamming his hands down rather insistently on the desk in front of Jim. He looked up from the folder and then back down again.

"You put this here?"

"Of course I did. Who else could have possibly – "

Jim closed the folder and offered it up to him. He only stared at it.

"I don't want it," Jim clarified. Nygma took it back with unnecessary violence.

"Why not? Now you can close this and proceed to something else!"

"Because you obtained it illegally," Jim answered calmly, opening his desk drawer. He was going to need to smoke after this.

"Why does it matter? You have it! It's the proof you need! Why does – "

"I'm not sure you understand the point of the police, son," Jim said, standing up and shrugging on his jacket. "We do it by the book or not at all."

"You're the only one around here who believes in that." His voice was low and he slapped the folder on his desk as he sat down.

"Why don't you think about what you just said for a while," Jim suggested, and he went outside.

Somewhere near the end of the day Nygma decided to push a good portion of the things in Jim's desk to one side so that he had room to deposit himself on top of it. Jim noted while politely rearranging his displaced papers that Nygma's legs hardly seemed to end.

"I've been thinking about it," he announced without preamble, "and I've decided you're quite foolish. Noble, but foolish."

Jim sat back in his chair and removed his glasses so as to better access his eyes with his fingertips. "Why is that." He wasn't offended, not really; he didn't think he'd seen Nygma dispense so much as a neutral comment to anyone since the day he'd arrived at the GCPD. The man was capable at a lot of things, one of those of note being the ability to find fault in absolutely everything.

"Nobody else here is stymied by the need to do things, as you put it, 'by the book'. If it gets the job done, why not do it? Is it so terrible to bend a few rules here and there in order to achieve justice?"

"This is a police station," Jim said firmly. "Not a collection of vigilantes. Our job is to uphold the law by following the law. Sometimes people are willing to break more laws to prevent that from happening, yes. But you don't fix a problem by contributing to it. If you really want to contribute to other people's cases, that's fine. But you have to do it right."

"But I already acquired all the information you needed!" Nygma argued. "Why can't you just use it this once and – "

Jim silenced him with a stare and folded arms. It worked on Barb sometimes too. "Because that's not how it works. There are rules in place for a reason. I don't want to see anything like that on my desk again."

Nygma's mouth condensed into a frustrated grimace and he slid off the desk with a little less grace than Jim had expected. "So you're saying that, hypothetically, I would have to jump through all the silly hoops to reobtain the evidence I already have for you to be willing to do anything with it."

"That's right."

"No wonder nobody likes you," Nygma muttered, snatching up his laptop bag and jacket and marching off in the direction of the exit.

"Can I ask you something?" Jim called after him, and he stopped just within eyesight.

"What."

"How old are you?"

Nygma frowned. "I don't see how that's relevant."

Jim nodded and went back to reorganising his desk.

/

The next several weeks saw Nygma frowning at his monitor for even longer periods than was usual for him. Jim did have to wonder what it was he did there all day, especially with the recent knowledge that Nygma was willing to break the law inside of a police station to achieve his goals, but there wasn't much use in looking into it. There were far worse men and women than Nygma in the department and the person willing to do something about it would be the one to take the fall. Not to say that Jim wouldn't be willing if the time came, but he did have Barbara to think of and his Chicago history couldn't bolster his reputation forever. The problem of the corrupt police department was not something to take on without even the hope of backup.

During one habitually overcast afternoon Nygma appeared while Jim was contemplating the smouldering tobacco in his pipe. He resigned himself to yet another demonstration of the man's acerbic personality. Nygma had his laptop bag over his shoulder, which was unusual, but it made a bit more sense when he reached into the front pocket and removed a rectangular object. He handed it to Jim, though he wasn't quite sure why he accepted it.

"Take that home," Nygma told him, zipping the compartment closed again. He turned around without any further explanation, and Jim asked,

"What the hell is it?"

Nygma's drawn eyebrows seemed to suggest he should have guessed. "It's a secure device designed specifically to contain sensitive data."

Jim rotated it. "And… how do I open it?"

"Barbara will know."

"I try not to get my teenage daughter involved in police business."

Nygma's laugh was somehow airy and arrogant at the same time. "You may want to try a little harder."

/

It seemed that he did, because a few nights later Barbara presented him with a small memory card that he didn't remember owning, and when he asked where it was from she remarked nonchalantly that it was from the metal box he had left on his desk.

"Barbara – "

"What? I was helping!"

Jim fingered the card, wondering if he wanted to know what was on it. Barbara handed him a card reader.

"You want to know what's on it."

Jim sighed and sat down in front of his computer. "I really wish you wouldn't do this."

"It was fun." She leaned on the back of his chair as he took the steps to navigate the card. To his surprise, it contained an extensive amount of files pertaining to the very case he had turned down the evidence from only a few weeks ago. Nygma worked hard and fast, it seemed. And through legal channels, this time.

"Is this for one of your cases?" Barbara asked. "Looks like this one's pretty much closed."

"I still need to know how he did it," Jim muttered.

"Who?"

"Nygma. He gave this to me."

"I'm more interested in this," Barbara remarked, picking up the opened metal box the memory card had been contained in. "Why would he design something that's so hard to open?"

"How did you open it?" Jim asked, looking behind him. Barbara shrugged.

"It had to do with some codebreaking he showed me."

"And he was showing you that why?"

She shrugged a second time. "I asked him to."

Well. He supposed she could be interested in worse things and worse people. So he just sighed and went looking through the files again.

He couldn't get the question of why Nygma had done this out of his mind, so after supper he went back into the living room and looked up the man's number in the department directory. After a moment's hesitation, he dialled it. Nygma answered almost immediately.

"Ah, so you figured it out!" he said without preamble. "Was everything to your… lofty moral standards?"

"As far as I know, but that's not why I called," Jim answered, winding the cord of the phone around his middle finger. "I'm more interested in why you went to the trouble of putting all of that together."

"It's quite a simple explanation, actually," Nygma said. "But I can't discuss it over the phone. You'll have to come over."

Jim checked his watch. "It's a little late for that, don't you think? Wouldn't it be easier to just talk at the precinct?"

"Oh, Detective," Nygma said with sarcastic exasperation, "that would be even worse than the phone! If nine pm is truly too late for you, drop by tomorrow after you've finished up at the station. I'm off tomorrow so I'll be home."

The only thing Jim had gleaned from this conversation was that Nygma was even more ridiculous than Jim had previously thought. He glanced at the calendar on his desk. He supposed he had an hour or so tomorrow to do as Nygma was asking…

"All right," he acquiesced. "I'll do that."

"Excellent!" Nygma said. "I will see you then."

Jim put the phone back into the cradle and hoped ignoring the whole thing hadn't been the better option.

/

Nygma lived in a condo in a better area of town than Jim could afford, which only deepened his suspicions. Employees of the police department who had notable savings were often working under the table on the side and Jim did his best not to be seen anywhere near their residences, for obvious reasons. But he was already here, so he might as well see this through.

Nygma was congenial when he buzzed Jim up, and equally so when he answered the door, but the sight of his décor did not do a thing to alleviate Jim's unease. It was all obviously very new furniture, and not anything a police officer could afford. Either Nygma was phenomenal at negotiating his salary, or he was even more corrupt than most people Jim had met in law enforcement – which was saying something.

"Have a seat," Nygma said, waving him in the general direction of a forest green living room set arranged around a circular coffee table with three television remotes lined up to the lefthand side. He himself sat down in the centre of the couch and leaned forward, hands clasped over his knees. "What were you aiming to discover, Detective? The reasoning behind such a seemingly paranoid container for a simple memory card, or my motive in the creation of such a thing in the first place?"

"Both, actually," Jim answered. He fiddled with a forgotten coin in the pocket of his coat and looked down at the seat he was expected to sit in. Trouble was, it didn't look like it was designed for such a thing. It seemed more like it had been purchased from some contemporary museum and there should have been a plaque around somewhere denoting its artist and title. He draped the coat over the back of it so that Nygma wouldn't insist such a thing and sat down.

It was a nice chair.

"You've been teaching my daughter codebreaking," he said after a moment, feeling that it needed to be brought up sooner or later. Nygma nodded and sat back, crossing one ankle over his opposite knee.

"It's taking some time, but she's getting it."

"Does she really need to?"

Nygma folded his arms. "It isn't illegal, Jim. I'm not turning her into some sort of criminal, if that's what you're attempting to insinuate."

They weren't going to get anywhere on that, then. "We were both wondering what the point of your device was."

Nygma leaned forward again, and it seemed the only thing preventing his eyes from seeing straight into Jim's brain was the respective lenses of both their glasses. "The GCPD is a cesspool, Detective. You know that, I know that. No information that passes through that institution is safe or secure. I can access any bit of data, any bit of evidence, and I don't even have to try. Now, I am not suggesting the average intelligence of the precinct comes anywhere near close to mine, but I am hardly the only person who has the knowhow to make things disappear or appear at my leisure. That is where the datapack comes in."

Jim was having trouble paying attention around the self-aggrandising. "It's going to solve all of our evidence-related woes, is it?"

"It would," Nygma answered, frowning and looking in the direction of his kitchenette, "if that idiot Loeb would listen to me."

Jim had to laugh. "If he did that, how would he get his kickbacks?"

"The purpose of the datapack," Nygma continued, still facing away from him, "was to create a secure device with which to store evidence so that only persons with the proper authorisation could access them. By use of a randomised passkey given only to one user, ideally, but the one I gave Barbara had to be a little different by necessity and so required some measure of intelligence to access. I hope you replaced the memory card in the device after you were finished with it. Retaining it in your computer leaves it open to compromise."

"That seems a little paranoid," Jim remarked, and Nygma redirected his frown.

"Did you know, Detective, that there is right now someone with extensive, unauthorised access to the GCPD servers?"

Jim looked up at him. "Who?"

Nygma shook his head. "They're proving difficult to track down. But whomever this person is has broken into the department's database and given themselves permission to use all of our information, for whatever purpose they deem fit. The datapacks, then, would eliminate this breach. And any other that might happen into the GCPD evidence room."

"It's a good idea," Jim conceded, and if he wasn't mistaken Nygma actually seemed to cheer a little upon his words. "But you mentioned a passkey."

"It would be necessary, yes."

"You would need someone to give it to."

"Yes."

"And enough people not on the take to ensure the evidence wasn't tampered with before it was locked into the… datapack."

"That's right."

Jim sighed and thought about his tobacco. "I don't think we have the means to pull that off." Nygma waved a hand.

"Oh, we will," he said briskly. "Not right now, and that's unfortunate. But it gives me time to refine the process somewhat, at least."

"Son," Jim said, wondering what he would have to say, exactly, to get him to drop this plan, "you have good intentions. But the first step is the hardest, and one no amount of good intentions can force to happen."

"You're talking about the fact that the mayor appoints the commissioner and this city hasn't had a mayor interested in public service in several decades."

"Exactly."

Nygma leaned forward again. "That will take care of itself, in time. The main concern now is ousting the dirty cops and finding a couple that don't mind sticking to that book you're so fond of."

Jim was almost completely lost. "What's your stake in this," he said. "You're going to a lot of trouble for something that really has nothing to do with you."

"Of course it does," Nygma asserted. "I spend all of my time acquiring evidence that mysteriously goes missing, for cases that inevitably get thrown out."

"So leave and find a new department in a different city," Jim suggested. "There's nothing tying you down here."

"It's not that simple." Nygma tapped his thumbs together and regarded them pensively. "I need the experience and the references. I can't go anywhere until I have them."

Jim frowned. "All you need is a degree and a good interview, right?" Nygma's jaw bunched.

"I don't have a degree. I don't even have a diploma. I selected this department because the interview process seemed so lax. What I didn't realise was that the rest of the proceedings here were similarly, if indeed not more, slipshod."

"That explains a lot," Jim muttered. Nygma bristled instantly.

"Which means?"

"I was wondering why Loeb even bothered hiring you," Jim elaborated. "He has never particularly cared for your department. He probably thought your lack of an education would mean you would be easy to sway."

"I don't lack an education," Nygma said with vitriol. "I just do not have the pieces of paper people seem to believe is proof of one."

"So he was wrong," Jim told him calmly, even though he internally felt much less so.

"Immensely." Nygma spent a moment readjusting both of the watches that were always present on his left wrist. "But you see my dilemma. My time and my skill are both being squandered at a dead-end job where I was never supposed to achieve anything, and yet I cannot leave it. The alternative, then, is to improve this job in some way so that I might achieve my goals."

"To do what you're proposing you would have to replace the mayor, the commissioner, and half the precinct. Where are you going to find that many people willing to turn the city around rather than act in their own best interest?"

Nygma rubbed one finger behind the ear of his glasses. "The important piece is the commissioner. It will all fall into place after that. Don't you worry, I'm looking into Loeb."

Jim threw up his hands. He just did not seem to be getting it! "Loeb's paper trail is as long as the city. The evidence is all there, we just can't get anything done with it."

"I'm taking care of it," Nygma said with the same calm assurance as before. "Now, when he's arrested it's going to be you up to take the position, so –"

Jim stood up. "I think this is enough for one night."

"It's going to work, Detective," Nygma said, rising also. "It's all a matter of string-pulling. Just a little bit at a time until the web has been strung and made inescapable. You'll see."

Jim shrugged on his coat and made his way to the front door. "And what if I don't want to be commissioner? Then how does your plan work out?"

Nygma's smile as he opened the door was entirely too knowing. "Then I would imagine you would leave. Perhaps return to Chicago. There's nothing for you here, after all."

Jim should never have gotten involved with him.

/

There was a department-wide meeting at the precinct a few days later where Commissioner Loeb expounded upon his virtues as a leader, police chief, and community-minded public servant before concluding his speech with a solemn vow to track down and levy action against the person or persons who had initiated a smear campaign against him in the media. As he was not a cop he was exempt from such gatherings, and so was not in the room when this announcement was made, but Jim knew immediately that Nygma was behind it. He had gotten started. He had to admit he was impressed. Upon their dismissal Jim moved directly to Nygma's desk and stood there in front of it until he looked up.

"Yes?" Nygma asked.

"You're fast," Jim remarked. Nygma's smile, for once, seemed entirely natural and not at all contrived.

"I know." He glanced back down at his monitor. "I hope you've prepared your remarks for the day you're selected commissioner."

"Let's think about that later," Jim said, leaving for his own desk.

"Don't wait too long," Nygma called, not taking his eyes away from the screen.

/

Later in the week Jim found Nygma outside chain smoking again, and despite himself Jim found himself concerned. He was far too young to be engaging in such a habit. He pondered his own tobacco for a minute, then asked: "Where is your family, son?"

Nygma's glance was sharp and brief. "I have none."

"They've passed on?" Jim said kindly.

"No." He pressed the end of his cigarette into the ground with a great deal of unnecessary force and turned back towards the door. "They just aren't."

Jim knew he was probably going to regret it, but he said, "Barbara is taking some… computer course in school now."

"I know," Nygma said, though without the habitual arrogance.

"I can't make heads or tails of what she brings home. If you're interested in dropping by I'm sure she wouldn't argue against the help."

Nygma's hand was frozen on the doorknob. "I thought you didn't want me talking to her."

Jim shrugged and put his lighter to the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. "I don't want her struggling in school, either."

"I doubt she's struggling."

Well, he'd tried.

"But I'll see if I have some time," Nygma continued unexpectedly. "I am very busy, you know. I don't have a lot of free hours to coddle teenagers."

And Jim didn't have a lot of free hours to coddle grown men, either, but here he was doing it.

/

Nygma did turn up at Jim's that evening, a little before Jim made it home himself, and he found the two of them at the kitchen counter in front of Barbara's laptop. It occurred to him as he hung his coat in the hall closet that Nygma looked almost content, for once. He usually carried an air of irritation, as though the mere existence of other people was inconveniencing him in some way. But not now. And Barbara was happy. She waved at him as he walked into the kitchen and looked inside the fridge. "Hey Dad!"

"Detective," Nygma said graciously.

"Hello." He didn't see anything that appealed to him so he settled on making a pot of coffee. "Getting lots of work done?"

"Oh, we finished it all already," Barbara answered with a worrying nonchalance. "He's showing me what we'll probably have to do next week."

"Probably have to do?"

"I don't exactly have her curriculum handy," Nygma cut in. Jim did his best to contain the urge to roll his eyes. The phone rang twice and before Jim could even turn around to look at it Barbara had picked it up and was eagerly chattering away on it. She put a hand over the receiver and said, "I'm gonna take this in the living room."

"Uh," was all Jim got out before she disappeared and he was stuck in his own kitchen with Nygma looking over at the abandoned handset. Jim poured himself a cup from the pot and figured it would be polite to offer it, at least. "Coffee?"

"No thank you," Nygma answered. Still trapped in the position of having to entertain him, Jim cast about for something to say and landed on, "I've been meaning to ask you something."

"Yes?"

"What possessed you to take an interest in my case anyway? Surely that had nothing to do with your goals."

"Cases," Nygma corrected. "I am working through proceedings on a few of the other ones."

Jim spread the hand that wasn't holding his coffee. "Why?"

Nygma slid his fingers together and placed them quite firmly on the countertop. He couldn't help but note that it was scuffed and scratched, unlike Nygma's spotless kitchen. "Do you remember that night when you came into the precinct for something and I was still there?"

"Yes," Jim said, having only a dim recollection of such a thing. The late nights were getting to him, in all honesty.

"You asked if I was all right."

Jim disguised his confusion by raising his cup in the hopes Nygma would elaborate on his own.

"No one had ever asked me that before," he continued, to Jim's relief. "I decided you deserved something for it."

"I really didn't," Jim said. "It was common decency."

"Ah," Nygma said, raising one finger, "decency it may have been, but I have just told you it was, in fact, uncommon. Nevertheless. Accept it for what it is."

"That explains the first case." Jim needed to refill his cup already. "You said you had moved on to several others. What's the story there?"

"Nothing." But his tone was a bit too snappy. "I was bored."

"You do other people's work for them because you're bored?" Jim shook his head. "We may not know each other that well, son, but even a stranger could probably guess that's not the kind of thing you do."

Nygma stood up abruptly. "It seems she's not going to be returning anytime soon, and I have business to attend to. Have a pleasant conclusion to your evening, Detective."

Jim stood there against the counter for several minutes, thinking over what he'd said that had so clearly put Nygma off all of a sudden, but did not come up with much. What did he know about this man? No education, no family, no friends, a career he had described as 'dead-end', a name that he had probably invented, and he wasn't from around here. All of these things pointed to 'criminal', but Jim didn't quite believe that.

Wait. Barbara had mentioned… French. Maybe that meant something. As far as Jim knew, it would make more sense if he could speak Spanish, not French. "Barb?" he called up the stairs when he didn't find her in the sitting room. That girl just did not stay put.

"One minute!"

It took her ten minutes but she eventually came to his new location in the living room, where he asked her, "You said Nygma speaks French, didn't you?"

"Yeah," Barbara said. "He has a weird accent, though."

"People who learn a second language generally do have their real accent on top of –"

"No, Dad," she said, waving one hand and inviting herself onto the couch, "he has a French accent. It's just weird. It's not like the kind you see on TV."

That wasn't much for Jim to go on, but he'd try to make it work.

/

Jim made an excuse to go outside at the same time as Nygma even though it was damned cold out, and they stood there for a minute or so while Jim put together just what he wanted to say. Nygma was not a man who took a particularly long time with his cigarettes, so it was almost too late when Jim finally decided on, "Where did you say you were from, again?"

The toe of Nygma's boot paused in its grinding. "I didn't."

Jim shrugged. "Oh, I thought you might have. Barb mentioned you speak French and it struck me as a little unusual."

Nygma took a long breath and pulled at the base of one glove. Jim still hadn't worked out why he always wore them. "A long ways from here. You've probably never heard of it."

"So not Paris, then."

Nygma snorted. "No. Not Paris."

"Wheareabouts, then?" Jim pressed. His reluctance to answer the question only added credence to the whole 'criminal' suspicion, but Jim still didn't feel as though that were the answer.

"Why?" Nygma snapped. "What could you possibly do with such information?"

'Track down your history' was the immediate thought in Jim's mind, and if he was not a criminal, it could only mean he was hiding from something. Perhaps the family that, inexplicably, no longer was.

"You're right," Jim said. "I don't need it. I was just curious."

Nygma had mostly walked through the door again when he paused and looked behind him. "If it sates your curiosity, my parents are French."

"From France?"

"I expected better from you, Detective," Nygma muttered, and Jim supposed it had been a little too obvious to be the correct answer. Everything about Nygma was unnecessarily convoluted, and his heritage would be no different.

/

Nygma continued to work his magic on Jim's cases while also completing his own and smearing Loeb, along with several of his favourite officers, and Jim was beginning to hope that maybe he'd been right, and the department could be turned around. But the question of why was still nagging at him, and when he thought he had it figured out he stood in front of Nygma's desk and said, "I have heard of Canada."

Nygma's smile was marginal and he leaned his chair back, twisting a pen between his fingers. "I see they didn't hire you on as a detective for nothing, Detective. Ah, Canada, the fifty-first state. Yes, that is correct."

"This is a long way to come for a job you don't even like," Jim pressed. Nygma just shrugged and put his attentions towards his pen. "There aren't any lax police departments up north you could join?"

"I'm sure there are several," Nygma answered noncommittally, but Jim was more interested in the way the hand in his lap was worrying his pantleg.

"It can't be easy for a young man to make such a move all on his own. Hell, just coming here from Chicago was hard, and I've got Barb with me."

Nygma opened his mouth and then closed it. Jim had never seen him so taken aback before.

It really had meant something to him, to be asked if he was all right.

"It's okay, son," Jim said quietly. "You can tell me. I'm not going to spread any of this around."

"Why do you keep calling me that." Nygma was barely audible. His pen had stilled. Jim couldn't help but frown.

"It doesn't have any special meaning. If you wanted me to stop you just had to – "

"No!" Nygma interrupted, immediately afterward folding his arms and looking away. "I mean. I don't care either way. Do what you want."

It wasn't too hard for Jim to guess where to go from there.

But maybe he shouldn't.

He stepped back. "Barb is taking physics now too."

"I heard," Nygma said, subdued. His fingers were rubbing against the side of his sweater vest.

"If your evening isn't too booked, I'd appreciate if you'd give her homework a look. She misses being able to come by here. She's just too busy nowadays."

"Mm." Nygma stared emphatically at his monitor. Jim shrugged to himself and went back to his desk.

He did show up to help Barbara later that night, however, and Jim was feeling congenial so he made the both of them that hot cocoa Barbara liked so much. She accepted hers with great enthusiasm, as usual, but he just stared at Jim as though he had handed him a mug full of deadly poison.

"Yes?" Jim asked. Surely he liked cocoa.

"How did you know?" he asked. Jim frowned.

"Know what?"

"Nothing." Nygma looked back down at the papers spread across Barbara's bedroom floor, sliding the mug over to press against his ankles. "Thanks."

Barbara suggested – though that was a kind word for it – that they invite Nygma over for dinner sometime, and Jim reluctantly agreed. When Jim passed along the message to him Nygma did not answer, electing instead to stare disbelievingly over at Jim's desk every twenty minutes or so, but he did show up. And with a very interesting dessert, the name of which he refused to reveal for reasons Jim was not terribly interested in wringing out of him.

Nygma continued to do his behind the scenes chipping away at the commissioner and some of his choice flunkies, and he seemed to be very good at somehow influencing public opinion without revealing he was doing it. There were quite a few visits to the commissioner from unsavoury, mob-related persons, but even if he had wanted to there was not much Jim could do about it. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, as the saying went, and Loeb had done a lot of that over the years. Some of the dirty cops had been ousted or found reasons to resign and been replaced with new officers, some fresh and some with a little experience, and Jim was doing his best to keep them pointed on the straight and narrow. It wasn't easy, especially when the alternatives were much less work and much more profitable. But he was determined to make the system work, now that he had a proper chance.

Jim discovered that he no longer minded ending up outside to smoke at the same time as Nygma; in fact, he had to say he looked forward to it. Nygma still held on to a great deal of his haughtiness, but he had dialled it back considerably and was a lot easier to talk to. Eventually Jim stopped inviting him over, mostly because he didn't have to; he would just show up instead, and sometimes he would even make dinner himself, which Jim had to say was nice. It was during one of these nights that Barbara had gone out and left Jim with Nygma on the front porch, where they were watching nothing in particular. Nygma usually made his exit before now and Jim figured his delay was due to him wanting to say something or other. That was usually what it meant. Sure enough, he eventually spoke.

"I suppose you deserve to know what all of this was about to begin with."

"I'm not going to wrestle it out of you," Jim said, wondering if this was a conversation he needed his pipe for.

"I didn't have a good relationship with my father," Nygma went on, as if he hadn't heard, "though that is a severe understatement. It meant nothing to you, when I asked, but in that moment where you inquired after my well-being and referred to me as 'son' you were a better father to me in one sentence than my true one ever has been my whole life, despite the fact that I consider you foolish still. Noble, but foolish.

"That night, Commissioner Loeb had found reason to rebuke me yet again in his office for daring suggest we do something to improve the security at the precinct. I voiced the opinion that there was hardly a point in coming to work if the mandate we were supposed to be fulfilling was naught but a fraud. He addressed to me only the choicest of vulgar adjectives and sent me out of his office. My intentions at that point were to figuratively set the city on fire and vanish someplace new, my goal of credentials be damned. I had had enough. I was going to use every tool at my disposal within the GCPD to gather as much information on the corrupt officials as possible, and then I was going to propose a ransom in exchange for what I was set to release. And afterward, when I had received exorbitant amounts extended from the hands that have accepted so many, I was going to broadcast the information anyway. And then leave. To where? Who knows. There are a lot of corrupt police forces out there."

"But you changed your mind."

Nygma nodded. "I'm not exactly an upstanding citizen even now. I've done things you probably don't want to hear about. I still find your insistence on legal proceedings odious and stupid when I could have had all this over and done with months ago if we'd done it my way. But I'm in a better place now than where I was heading." He stood up and offered a hand to Jim. "Thank you, Detective."

He had a good, strong handshake. "It's been long enough you can probably start calling me Jim."

Nygma's smile was probably the most genuine he'd seen yet. "I also meant to ask if you'd mind my doing something for Barbara. I can admit she's been stellar about my… less desirable qualities. She probably deserves something for that."

"Not at all. You wouldn't know how to build computers at all, would you?"

"Of course I do," Nygma said, but without the usual arrogance.

"She'd get a kick out of that," Jim told him. "She's tried to talk me into it but I just don't know how all of that works."

"It would be my pleasure," Nygma said. They went back to staring into the street, but amiably.

"Eddie," Jim said after a minute, "consider something."

"All right."

"In this life you can make the selfless choice or the selfish one. It sounds like things have steered you in the direction of the selfish choice, because that's what you needed to do at the time. But you've come to a point where you've seen what the difference is. I'm not suggesting you become a saint, and I'm not passing judgement on whatever it is you feel the need to do in your free time. What I'd like you to think about is the fact both of those choices benefit you but only one of them lets you do a lot more."

"Why the insistence on improving the lives of the faceless masses, Jim?" Nygma asked. "They'll never thank you. They'll never know what you put in for them. Most of them probably hate you merely for the career you've chosen. What's the point?"

"I can't tell you that," Jim answered. "You have to find your own justification. If you can't find it, you may want to consider a different career."

Nygma wrapped his fingers around the railing. "This one will do for the present."

"Keep doing it by the book and we won't have a problem."

"I'll do that," Nygma said, and it seemed that was some sort of signal for him because he held up a hand in farewell and walked down the porch steps. Jim watched until his car had vanished some ways down the street.

He'd been handed a big responsibility, and one he wasn't certain he wanted at that. But the goals of a police officer were many, and keeping a young man from destroying his life surely fell under them.

Jim nodded to himself and went back into the house.

Author's note

Edward brought nanaimo bars for dessert because nanaimo bars are fuckin delicious. But I don't think they have them in America so he would've had to make them.