Title: Javawocky
Rating: T
The bell on the door tinkles, signalling the exit of the last customer of the day, and Jim flips the Open sign so that it displays Closed, and goes to grab the spray bottle and rags to wipe down the tables. As he wipes down the tables methodically, he thinks about how he's come to this point: James Gordon, owner of Javawocky Coffee, a small, but fairly busy little coffee shop.
To think that, once he'd been an up-and-coming GCPD detective. How times change; though, really, he can't complain- he's found his niche, found a family amongst his employees, and, he thinks, perhaps they, too, have found a family. He hopes they have.
The bell above the door tinkles again, and he turns to reprimand Selina for forgetting her phone, again, "I thought I put a note-" and stops short. There's a man, breathing heavily, a hand pressed to his ribs, dressed in all black. "You're not Selina," Jim says, dumbly, and the man cracks a weak smile. Then, "Oh my gods, is that blood?"
The man looks down, lifts his hand slightly, and clamps it back down when there's a stream of blood that leaves splatters of red on the floor. "Hmm," he says, "yes, I think it is."
Jim draws a sharp breath. "Did you get shot?" he asks, and the man looks to answer, only to collapse to the ground, and Jim's caught between panic and screaming. Thankfully, the part of his mind that's the sharp, focused bit that he had to train into himself when he was in the army, because if you panic on the field, people die, takes over, and kneels and unzips the man's jacket, untucks and unbuttons his shirt, pulls out his pocket knife and makes a cut into the fabric, rips off a strip, binds it tightly around the wound, repeats the process until the red stops seeping through the fabric, and picks the man up and carries him up the stairs to his apartment.
After that, it's a blur of cleaning, rebandaging and rebinding the wound that leaves Jim feeling exhausted. He goes back to the bathroom, this time to wash the blood off of his hands, and looks at himself in the mirror. His hair's dishevelled, his eyes are wild and there're splatters of blood on his face. To be frank, he looks awful. He wets his hands, then soaps them up and washes them again and again until the bloodstains wash away from his skin, and splashes water on his face and then soaps it and washes away the specks of blood and dries his face and hands on the soft, cream-coloured towel above the sink. His hands are shaking.
He opens the bathroom door, goes back to his bedroom and checks on the man. As he checks to mack sure the wound hasn't started bleeding again, something nags at the back of his mind, and he takes a minute to look at the man's face. For some reason, it seems familiar. Then, it clicks. Dark clothes, guns, those are all things that the common Gothamite wears, but there's one thing that the everyday Gothamite- or even the common criminal- would have. There, tucked into the man's breast pocket, is a small white pocket-square, embroidered with a purple umbrella.
There's only one man other than Mayor Oswald Cobblepot who ever wears a white pocket-square with a purple umbrella. His bodyguard- and, if rumours are to be believed, and, this is Gotham, so most rumours are true- personal assassin, Victor Zsasz.
This is really, really, really bad. Sure, Jim voted for Cobblepot, hell, he thought the man was a fantastic choice, but, well, to say they have history would be putting it lightly. In fact, the last thing Jim ever did as a GCPD detective was to help Cobblepot escape death, an action that later caused Falcone to pull strings and get him fired. To be honest, Jim bears no ill-will towards the man, but a conversation after this long is bound to be tense and terse.
Jim stifles a groan. And he had thought that, for once, things were going good for him. But, because he's not a cruel person, he carefully- gently, softly, to not disturb- riffles through Zsasz's pockets, looking for his phone- and bites back a gasping laugh because it's a fucking flip-phone because of course it is.
It isn't passcode protected, though, so it takes Jim under forty seconds to scroll down the list of contacts and eliminates some- because there's no way in Hell Zsasz would have Oswald Cobblepot's number saved as Hot Danm…probably- leaving him with a single contact labelled Enguinpa. Jim rolls his eyes- penguin in pig-latin. How original- and crosses his fingers before he hits the call button, hoping it's the right contact, because some of those contact names leave Jim feeling uncomfortable.
After just three rings, the person on the other side picks up with an exasperated yet fond, "What is it now Victor."
"Victor is, I'm afraid, currently unavailable. As in, he's passed out in my bed and bandaged up, because he was shot."
"What?" Cobblepot, because that's the only person it could be, practically screeches. "Is he okay?"
Jim rolls his eyes. Honestly. "Yes, he's just fine. Not. He was fucking shot. He's not dying, but he was."
Cobblepot lets out a breath of relief. "Good, okay. By the by, who happened to save my dumbass boyfriend's life?"
From in the background, someone yells, "Victor what? I am going to strangle him when he gets back here." It sounds suspiciously like Ed, Cobblepot's Chief of Staff.
Hmm. So the rumours are true. Huh. "That would be me, James Gordon, owner of Javawocky Coffee."
"Ja-?" Cobblepot starts to say, before there's a thunk and muffled voices, and the sound of someone picking up the phone again.
"Jim," says Edward, "Please tell me that that dumbass didn't go and get himself shot."
"...he didn't get himself shot," Jim says, and Ed sighs.
"You're a terrible liar," he complains, "we'll be over there momentarily."
"See you then," Jim replies, "and don't forget to pick up pizza along the way. I doubt Victor'll die if you're a few minutes late."
"Aww," Ed cooes, "such a romantic."
Jim rolls his eyes. "Come get your other boyfriend, Ed," he says, "And tell Cobblepot that he's welcome to come along, if only to yell at his boyfriend with you."