Dear Readers,

I'm Wretia a.k.a. OneBADday, and this is my first story on this site! I bet you can't guess what fandom I adore. This story is inspired by a lack of Reader/Jerome stories on this site and my fascination in studying his character. (Also, those gingers, right?)

I hope you enjoy this story, and please let me know in the comments below if you do! Also, don't forget to follow the story for part two, and follow me for more stories!

Thanks so much!

Y/N didn't really consider herself a particularly bad person. She was good in school, she took care of her sick father at home, and she was going to college to be a nurse. She even volunteered at Arkham Asylum's infirmary when she got the chance.

You wouldn't assume by looking at her that she would aid and abet a known and infamous criminal. You wouldn't think that she would be capable of housing such a man and murderer as Jerome Valeska.

But she let him in when he came to her door at an ungodly hour of the night with his mutilated face lit up with a smile and still wearing part of a dirty Arkham uniform.

Y/N met Jerome Valeska at Arkham when he got into a fight with another inmate. She'd been charged with cleaning up his bruised face and split knuckles while a guard kept a lazy eye on his prisoner and a greedy gaze on Nurse Y/L/N.

"Well, you're too pretty t' be in a place like this," were the first words out of his bloody mouth as he looked her up and down. "My mother probably would've paid good money for you, and she wasn't even into girls."

Y/N may have been a good person, but she was not a child and she had dealt with perverted minds often enough. "What a compliment," she said without much energy. "Can you open your left eye?"

Jerome snickered. "Tutz, I wish I could so I could get a better look at ya."

"Uh-huh."

Y/N pulled on a pair of latex gloves and wetted a cotton ball with alcohol and moved to clean the opened skin.

Jerome stretched his right eye to the side to watch Y/N as she dabbed at the wounds around his eye. "So, a tough girl, then, huh? I like tough girls, they're not as boring and whiny as the others."

"I like my patients quiet," Y/N replied. "So close your mouth unless you need to tell me you're dying."

Jerome threw his head back and laughed at that. The sound was wild and went up and down in pitch. When he stopped, he still smiled and it tugged at the split in his bottom lip. "You're fun. More fun than Robinson."

"Hold still," Y/N told him, pulling his head back to her cotton ball. "And if you're feeling so chatty, why don't you tell me why you got into a fight with him anyway? He's two times your size."

"I said he wasn't any fun," Jerome changed his stare to the large blubbering befuddled blockhead who was unconscious at the other end of the room. His voice darkened. "And I can't stand it when people bore me."

"That why you're in here?" Y/N asked, moving from the alcohol to some bandages. "Because you kept beating up boring people?"

"Pfft, this is Gotham, doll, that happens every day, no!" Jerome replied suddenly cheerful. "No, I killed my mom. I did talk about her in the past tense right? Yeah. Took a hatchet and hacked her up."

This made Y/N freeze for a moment. Her own mother had been angry and violent. She'd left when Y/N was just five, and five years was enough time to leave scars. Still, Y/N would give a lot of things to see her mother again. To try to help, to figure out why, even slap her once or twice. Y/N placed a layer of gauze over his eyebrow and taped it down. Y/N placed a layer of gauze over his eyebrow and taped it down. "Why would you do that?"

"She did something even worse that bore me," Jerome replied matter-of-factly. "She annoyed me."

"You don't sound like a very patient person," Y/N stated. She felt the stone cold tone taking over her voice.

"Oh, I'm very patient," Jerome replied. He studied her for a second and he grinned again. "You think I'm evil, don't ya? What did you expect when you came to work in the looney bin? Crazy-ass saints? Oh, everybody's got a little crazy in them, but they only lock you up when you break one of their rules."

Y/N said nothing. She moved on to his abused knuckles.

"Tough and moral? You should meet the guy who put me in here, you'd get along great." He ran his free hand through his orange hair in a failed attempt to fix it into a more stylish do. "What was it exactly that makes you so upset, huh? That I killed mommy-dearest, that I beat people up because it's fun, or that I don't tie myself down with rules?"

Y/N straightened to cut off a length of the bandage. "Try all of the above," she told him. "Sounds to me like you should be in Blackgate, not here."

Jerome shrugged. "Eight-teen-year-olds usually don't take joy in cutting up their whorey mothers and laugh when they get socked in the face. Guess I'm just special."

"I guess." Y/N clenched her jaw and moved on to the next hand. As she began to inspect it, he stretched his fingers and wrapped them around hers. She tugged at his grip, but he was deceptively strong and his hand held her tight.

He tilted his head. "You're too beautiful to be burdened with the weight of laws and rules. I think you need to have a little fun."

"Let her go, you creepy perv," said the guard and he pulled out his gun, leveling it at Jerome's head. "Now."

Jerome laughed again. "See? This is much more fun!" He let go of Y/N's hand and threw both of his own in the air.

"Put your gun down," Y/N told the guard. "For heaven's sake, he's crazy, don't shoot him."

"Whatever you want, sweetheart," he replied without moving the gun. "Finish this up and we'll get this kid back to his cell where he belongs."

Y/N grabbed hold of the guard's gun and yanked it out of his grip. He growled and took hold of her wrist. Jerome giggled. "You heard it, this creep's a criminal. What's a little threatening when he deserves death?"

"He'd just enjoy it anyway," Y/N said evenly. She glared at the big man in front of her. "Now let go of me and I'll give you your gun back."

The guard's grip tightened painfully. "You know what, I don't like your tone, angel. I think I want something more than just my gun."

He'd just grabbed hold of her other hand when a pillow hit him in the head with an ill-fitting clang!

He crumpled to the ground and Y/N looked at Jerome who was doubled over on the bed laughing. He pulled the pillowcase open and revealed the bedpan that had been stuffed inside. "Snuck that in when I got here," he snorted, another smile pulling at his injured lip.

"Criminal I might be, but at least I'm not a rapist with a badge."

Y/N glanced at the guard at her feet and then looked back to Jerome who studied her with an angelic grin, his hand resting on his chin. "I - uh - thanks."

Jerome seemed to light up in something like childish adoration and he clapped for her. "This is Gotham, doll," he repeated when he stopped. "We don't say 'thank you' in this town."

The next time Y/N saw him was over a year later when two beefy men dragged him into the infirmary while he chuckled at them. His face had been mutilated with sloppy stitches to replace the staples Y/N had seen him display on TV a week previously.

By that point, her father had been confined to a pathetic clinic near the Narrows that still cost more money than Y/N had. She begged Arkham to let her work for pay, and under the rough leadership from the transition over to a new head doctor from Hugo Strange, they allowed her to work full time for shoddy money. It was still better than her pathetic tips from the diner she waitressed at, so she quit there and took to working overtime, struggling to keep up with the bills and her school work. That fortune to pay would come later.

The so-called guards who were more akin to thugs strapped him to a bed while he cackled and she crossed the room to his side. "What's wrong with him?"

"Got in a fight with an inmate. Keeps coughing up blood," one of the guards grumbled.

"Think a rib might be broken or something," said the other.

"Don't lie to her," said Jerome with a stately smile. He met her eyes and grinned wider. "Doll-face, long time no see! These crooks beat me up while I was tryin' to sleep. Be a good girl and scold them for me, will ya?"

"That true?" Y/N looked up at the guards. "You beat him up?"

"Girly, don't believe everything yer told," said one.

"Lot'a liers in this city," added the other.

When they made sure their prisoner was tied down - much too tightly - they left, leaving Y/N alone with the criminal who had killed many people for fun, died, and then come back to do it again on a bigger scale.

"You've only gotten prettier, sweets," Jerome said cordially. There was blood on his lips and dribbling down his sewn-on chin. "Glad you didn't bolt from this hell-hole, I think you're the only decent person here."

"What did they do?" Y/N asked, ignoring him. She undid the belt around his chest and he visibly relaxed.

"Jumped me at bedtime and had their giggles," Jerome replied. "Don't think they're lying about that broken rib thing."

Y/N sighed and undid the restraint across his shoulders too. "Let's get you up and take a look."

Jerome grunted as she helped him sit up and when he snickered, another heavy drop of blood joined the tiny trickle down his face. "Ya know, doc," he said. "I never did get your name."

"Good," Y/N replied. "You probably would've used it to hunt me down and murder me and my relations for fun."

Jerome appeared to contemplate that for a minute, then he chuckled. "Nah, you're too fun, I'd never hurt you, doll. But I'd like to have something better than pet names to call an angel like you."

"It's charming," Y/N frowned, realizing she needed to take off his shirt to get a better idea of the damage. "Stick with it."

"Ha! Still a tough one," Jerome said happily. After a moment, he raised an eyebrow at her. A dark smirk took hold of his mutilated lips. "If you want my clothes off, I won't need you to ask, gorgeous."

Y/N frowned at him. "I need to get a better look at your chest, I don't think you punctured a lung, but you might still have broken something."

Jerome tossed his head back and laughed that laugh. "Oh, you're fun," he said. He smiled at Y/N. "But I do like to know the name of the ladies who take off my clothes."

Y/N rolled her eyes. "Y/N," she told him. Then she reached for the top button at his throat and began to undo them one by one. "Satisfied?"

"Again," he chuckled. "Y/N, a beautiful girl is undressing me, what's not to be satisfied with?"

When the top black and white striped shirt was free, there was only a white t-shirt in the way, and that Y/N pulled up over his abdomen to inspect the damage. Jerome snickered once again but stayed silent as she pressed her fingers against his pale lightly freckled skin.

She moved methodically up and tried to ignore the warmth and undeniable muscle beneath her fingers as she tried to route out the source of the bleeding. Y/N had to push the shirt up higher and higher. There was green and purple and blue in messy patches of abused flesh underneath her fingers and she found a concentration of it near his diaphragm.

"Whatcha findn', doll?" Jerome startled her after his uncharacteristic silence. Y/N flinched and then let his shirt back down, pulling the striped jacket up over it.

"I think your stomach's bruised," Y/N said, forcing her eyes to meet his. She wondered if they'd always been so blue and…captivating. She looked down at his throat. "Maybe your esophagus too. That's what's causing the bleeding. As for your ribs, just looks like a lot of bruising. Maybe one fracture."

"Marvelous," Jerome said. He clapped his hands together and raised an eyebrow at her, tilting his head. "So…"

"Why didn't they go for your face?" Y/N questioned, walking towards a freezer in the back of the room where she could acquire ice packs.

"That's a dick move, even for crooks," Jerome chuckled. "Already got this thing cut off, punched off and stapled more times than I could count. Guess courtesy counts for something when it comes to a cut off face."

"Right," Y/N replied. She picked up some cloth wrap and tape from her desk on the way back to the redhead. "How kind of them."

"Kind? I thought it was funny." Jerome laughed.

"You would," Y/N said. She set her things on the bedside table. She laid a hand on one of the wrist restraints and looked at him. "Don't try anything, got it? I've got a mean right hook and don't have problems punching off a face if it means I don't get felt up."

"Doll," Jerome looked disappointed in her. "I told ya all that time ago, a criminal I am, heh-" he paused to chuckle lowly. It was almost frightening. "But my mom, that bitch was the whore. Not me."

Something about the statement was completely reassuring, if vulgar. Y/N stared into his eyes and he stared back and it was a contest until Jerome chuckled again. "As you were, Y/N. These bruises ain't gonna disappear on their own. Actually, they will, but they'd appreciate the help."

Y/N said nothing and undid one wrist restraint. There was a tense silence while she walked around the bed to get the other. A glance at Jerome told her he was enjoying this, a smile was on his lips and his eyes followed her as she moved. She undid the second restraint and walked back. "Shirts off," she said without looking him in the eyes. "I trust you can do it yourself."

"Love to," Jerome said, and his voice was low. He shrugged out of the striped top and winced only slightly as he tugged it slowly off. With her wrap and ice packs ready, Y/N had nothing better to do than stare back into his eyes while he didn't move them from her, a dark smirk on his face. He had a little more trouble wiggling out of the t-shirt, but he still didn't take his eyes off her, and his smirk never wavered. He fisted both and dropped them dramatically to the floor, his arms outstretched. "Ta-da."

Y/N swallowed. Then shook her head. "Hold still."

Y/N was careful and gentle as she could be while she wrapped and then applied ice packs to Jerome's chest and abdomen.

"You know, as much as I love this lover's silence we've got going on," Jerome said when Y/N had just begun. "I vastly prefer hearing your sour voice, gorgeous."

"You killed a lot of people, I feel inclined not to amuse you," Y/N muttered.

Jerome snickered shortly. "Yet there it is. Tell me, Doctor, you know who I am, so why are you still so...I think eager's the word. Yeah, eager to help a pal out, anyway?"

"I'm not a doctor," Y/N said. She moved up from his bindings to grab the tape. "But just because someone does something wrong doesn't mean they should suffer for it. Not like this. No one deserves physical torture."

"Moral and tough," Jerome mused softly, almost sweetly. "I wonder if you know how ridiculously rare a beautiful thing like you is."

Y/N taped the end of the cloth and made sure it would stay. "Naturally a criminally insane zombie would be the first to tell me that. Only in Gotham."

Y/N finished her work and leaned up, only to find Jerome ridiculously close to her. Their noses were millimeters apart. "You deserve a man who would tell you that every day, every hour, every waking second until you believed it. Until you became selfish with it. Until he filled you up on words alone and you believed him." His voice was a hard and low whisper and once again, he didn't let his eyes leave hers. His gaze seemed to hold her in place, not allowing Y/N to move away.

Jerome's breath was on her mouth and her breathing was getting heavy enough that it left her lips and hit his. "And are you that man, Jerome Valeska?" Y/N's tone was every bit low and hissed as his. "Would you tell me those words while you blew up a terminal? While you carved the heart from a child? Would you like to kiss me under the fires of a city burning and to the music of people screaming?"

Jerome's next noise was a laugh lower than low and darker than dark. He neared her face by an impossible fraction while still maintaining their separation. "You tell me."

Y/N really wasn't sure how it happened. And if anyone asked, she'd swear it wasn't her that leaned in the rest of the way. But Jerome kept to his word, he didn't make any move to touch her. But then their lips were together and moving with surprising synchronicity.

At some point, her hands were in his hair and then finally his hands were in hers, pulling her closer. When oxygen became too much of a necessity, they pulled apart, both panting.

"So does that mean-"

"No," Y/N said. "It doesn't."

Y/N refastened his wrist restraints and gathered her things to leave.

Jerome did not stop laughing until long after she'd shut and locked the infirmary door.

The next months were spent seeing the red-haired young man in passing. It took barely any time at all until he had the entire asylum under his thumb, and it was a shorter time after that when the secret meetings in the numerous useless Arkham closets began.

Y/N wasn't sure at all how it happened. At first, a guard had lied to her about an inmate who was requesting her assistance in a closet, one who refused to see anyone else.

Perhaps it hadn't been a lie, but it was a crude summons nevertheless.

The fact remained that she began to sneak away from work to make out with and talk to Jerome. As the months proceeded, it was less sneaking, and more Jerome appearing at the infirmary entrance and smiling sweetly while all other employees averted their eyes and smirked.

Age didn't seem to matter much, especially considering Y/N had never officially finished high school and Jerome had been dead a year. If either of them was concerned - and it was only Y/N who stopped to take stock of just what exactly was happening, they were both twenty.

As far as the point of publicity went, the whole asylum new that they were to know nothing about Nurse Y/L/N and Jerome, or else they could be lobotomized in their sleep. They knew that could happen anyway as the redhead was given to violent bored swings where only reducing a man to the mind of an infant could satisfy his desire to have fun. Why make chances worse?

Y/N would go home late at night and drop into bed and in the seconds it took for her to fall asleep, she wondered at how her conscience did not destroy her when she realized that she made love to a murderer. But then she would fall asleep at two, wake up at seven, go to class, stop by to see her father for fifteen minutes, and then it was back to work by three. And then she would see a smirk and red hair, and then she'd be wrapped in the arms of a murderer and she'd be kissing him right back.

It would be more than desperate groping and sloppy kisses because sometimes Y/N would meet Jerome in the closet and they would just talk. He told her about his life in the circus and she opened up about her similarly abusive mother who left her years ago and her alcoholic father who had drunk himself to liver cancer. She was able to tell him about her struggles with keeping herself and her father alive.

In return, he "convinced" the institution to pay her more and include her father's care in insurance. It might've been a kind favor if he hadn't demanded repayment in a long and post-action painful meeting in their closet.

But he would talk about his mother, and his joy at killing his father, his annoyance about Galavan, and his dreams of a world run by impulse and death and without any rules or laws. His ideas were wrong, so very very wrong, and Y/N knew that and she knew it, but there was just so much about him that was appealing and attractive. Some impossibly strong magnetism that Y/N had no ability to resist.

So Jerome would walk into the infirmary, head held high, a smug yet dreadfully and childishly handsome smirk on his misshapen lips. And the inmates and staff would keep on. And Y/N would take his hand and step into some unused closet in Arkham with a murderer.

Disclaimer: I don't own Gotham or any of it's characters and I am not a medical doctor or expert in any way shape or form. Thank you! Don't forget to favorite, follow, and comment!