Warning(s): explicit language, explicit violence, explicit sexual situations, mentions of sexual assault
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A shining flash from the corner of Gia's eyes pull her attention to the freshly cleaned mirror in the interrogation room, making Gia cross her arms tighter around herself, leaned back in her chair, brows arched angrily in irritation, the toe of her boot clicking against the floor as she taps out her uneasiness, awaiting her brother or Renee to come in and speak to her.
James watches on the other side of the glass, his hand opening and closing around a stress ball, exhaling sharply, coffee in the other hand as Renee cuts her eyes at the younger Gordon sibling before side eyeing Jim.
"She guilty or not guilty?" She asks him, curiously, wanting to see how he responds, and he looks at her.
"How am I to know?" He replies, slowly meeting her eyes.
She knows it's tearing him apart to see his sister in this position, but also doesn't necessarily put anything past her.
It wouldn't be the first person to fall victim to the Joker's ability to gut people's minds and turn them unrecognizable to their former selves.
The door opens, and instead of her brother or Renee, it's someone she thought was dead...at least he'd been dead to her for years.
Officer Bryer clears his throat upon seeing her, shutting the door, and she's lurching away from the table abruptly, startling Jim and Renee as the steel chair legs scrape against the concrete flooring, and Tom blinks at her.
"Have a seat." Tom tells her, tossing her file onto the table, between them and she takes in heavy breaths, her chest heaving as she looks to the mirror.
"She's nervous." Renee tells James, skeptically.
"C'mon, sit down." Ryber tells her once more.
"And she should be. He's the best we had at getting people to squeal." Renee adds.
"She was brought up in a rough neighborhood...the amount of crime she witnessed in a place where you die if you even look at a cop like you know something..." Jim shakes his head. "My sister's not much of a squealer."
"Well, she can't stay silent forever. If she asks for a lawyer then we know we've got her cornered. And why would she feel corned if we haven't hit something she knows about?"
"Innocent until proven guilty, Montoya. Gia's not a puppet for the Joker. If she were he'd boast."
Gia slowly sits back down, her mind scrambling to shut down, to black out until she's gotten this over with and he's gone.
"I assume you've been read your rights?"
"Yeah, I've been read my rights." She says, uneasily.
"We've seen the footage. We've seen the documented visits, dated and timed...one of which lines up perfectly with a previous run-in with you and a patient at Arkham Asylum back in November. You were arrested. Arkham wouldn't tell us exactly who you had flipped out on, but now we've had to intercept given the circumstances." He continues and she rolls her jaw. "Did he not say 'bless you' when you sneezed or something?" He asks, raising his brows, and she curls her fists up. "What business do you have with the Joker?"
"I don't have any business with him."
He shoves the file over to her, opening it, his finger going to dates and times she visited.
"We've also got footage of an undocumented visit during the night where you broke in, somehow, someway, and got in the goddamn cell with him." He adds, crossing his arms, and Jim takes in a deep breath. "I'm not even going to comment on the position you're in on the tape but it's evident you're in bed with him-if not physically, then figuratively-and that has caused quite a domino effect in the last couple days."
"You of all people talking about who's in my bed?" She bites out and he tenses up, Renee and James furrowing their brows at the comment. "I'm not having sex with the man who's tried to kill me countless times, no more than I've helped him escape. He wants me dead. Why would I poke the bear and then let him out if his cage?"
"Then why were you visiting him?"
"I was on a spiritual journey of forgiveness and wanted to talk through our problems so I could die and not burn for eternity for holding onto hatred for him." She tells him. "When you know you're dying, you get your priorities straight." She adds.
"You attacked him."
"I said I was on a spiritual journey, not that I had turned into God and was immune to human emotions like inconsolable rage."
"Did he say anything in particular to upset you?" He questions.
"He's breathing. That's what upset me."
"What about when you broke into Arkham undetected and was in his cell with him?"
"Zoom in and you'll see me strangling him." She grits out.
Tom looks at the mirror before exhaling, shutting her file.
"One last question, Miss Gordon."
"Mrs. Todd." She bites back and he grinds his teeth.
"Mrs. Todd...where were you the night of August 19, 2010?"
The night Robin was killed. The night she aided Joker—who had threatened her brother—to be the bait in his trap for the boy wonder.
"The hell is he talking about?" Renee asks Jim, but he doesn't have time to answer before Gia's keeping her cool, despite wanting to beat him with the chair.
The clown wound him up with information to throw in her face to fuck with her head, and Tom has fallen into Joker's trap, not Gia.
"I can't remember, really, my brain blurred so many of my memories together as a result of trauma after you raped me two years later and gave me HPV."
It's as if a record is scratched to a halt, the room going quiet to the point that only the quiet buzzing of the light over Gia and Tom's head is heard, the silence just as heavy on the other side of the mirror, Jim and Renee both just standing there, stunned, and it takes less than three seconds for Gia to stand up, snatch her file from the shell shocked officer, and pull the door open before walking to the door of the observatory, it opening before she can do it herself, and she's face to face with her brother.
"Next time, make sure the asshole you send to talk to me next, isn't someone who gave me fucking cervical cancer." She bites out and shoves the file to his chest, turning to go.
"G-Gia," He scrambles after her.
"Jane Doe." She states as she turns to look at him. "The Jane Doe that you and many more of your cops got on a stand and countered her charges by taking up for him in front of a judge and had the case dropped." She throws at him. "Joker's escape isn't on me, but Tom Bryer walking free after assaulting me is on you. Keep that in mind before you accuse me of doing another fucking thing that has nothing to do with me."
"Gia, you should've told me." James argues, tears in his eyes.
"Can I go now? I have a husband in Miami."
Facial bone cracks under the sharp impact of brass on bloodied and dirtied skin, the force shooting through Jason's hand, but he's angry enough to not even feel it at the moment, gritting his teeth as he stares down at the man he and Roy are questioning.
"Where is he?" Jason demands once more, getting a smart-ass smile in return.
"It's not 'where'." The man gasps out, hoarsly. "It's 'who'."
"Who. Is. He?" Jason grabs his throat, and he doesn't answer, just chuckling a little at their attempt to get him to talk.
The mans teeth are split up into his gums, an agonizing scream following the sound and gush of blood spilling from his lips, his top lip hanging by merely a piece of skin from being hit into his teeth.
"Joseph Adler."
The same name given to Jason before he left Gotham to come down here where he was told he'd be.
Jason tosses his body down that's already been coated in gasoline as Roy takes another inhale of his cigarette before handing it off to Jason, who crouches by the man and gets one drag off of it to burn the butt at a higher temperate before he's quickly casting it.
It catches on the fumes the moment it leaves Jason's hand, and a sickening, gurgled scream chases after the two men as they walk to the exit of the warehouse.
"What next?" Roy asks Jason as he puts his helmut back on.
"I don't know." He admits. "We'll regroup and try again tonight." He adds, seeing the sky is starting to get a tinge of light at it's base, signaling the early stages of sunrise.
"What about Gia?" Roy questions.
"I don't even know if she's coming back. We're not talking right now." Jason tells him.
"About what?"
"Apparently she'd rather me accept money from the man who turned his cheek after I got beat to near death with a crowbar, than me go out and get it through my work elsewhere." He sighs.
"...Does she know what we're trying to take care of, now?" Roy asks.
"No. And she can't, or she'll take it the wrong way and completely lose it and this shit isn't worth our relationship."
"You seriously think she'd leave you for trying to track down someone who can reverse her freaky snake shit?"
It was an odd conversation for the two to have once Gia left for the airport after Jason took her back to the hotel and told her why she needed to go to Gotham.
"She might." Jason says.
He told Roy everything, including that the job they were trying to wrap up tonight was actually one Jason had been attempting on his own back in Gotham. Finding someone with the capability to undo what had been done to Gia.
She won't accept it, even if he were to find a "cure."
She likes having some of the power, and he knows it, but he also knows with new power comes new responsibilities and a sense of control, and if it's mishandled, that power and control can be a deadly weapon.
A weapon that he believes Gia just isn't mentally sound enough to carry right now.
Of course, that's hypocritical of him given his rejuvenation through the Lazarus pit, which turned him into a completely different person for years, and even now he's not back to "normal," but it's not like he went out and found Talia to heal him like the way Gia went out and found the Joker.
Jason gets to the safe house he and Roy got when they started working down here, the same house Roy's ben living in for the last six months while Jason's been gone. He changes before he heads back to the hotel he and Gia are at for the next two weeks. Well, the hotel he's at for the next two weeks. He doesn't know if she's coming back or not.
A part of him wonders how her talk with the G.C.P.D is going to go. He hopes she doesn't tell them anything too incriminating. If he can just get her back to her old self once he finds this Dr. Joseph Adler, any contact she had with the Joker is null and void, and they can't prove that she participated in any malpractice.
He wants Jeremiah to pay, and he wants the Joker to pay...but he knows that if they gone down, Gia goes with them.
"Just don't do anything stupid until I get you back to yourself, Gia, please." He mumbles to himself, his mind and heart heavy with the burden of knowing that she doesn't have the knowledge nor the discipline to hold back once she gets confident enough to use what's been given to her.
Box after box after box, shelf after shelf after shelf...Jim wipes his eyes once more, clearing his throat that's coated in sniffled back snot and tears. Even with heavy eyes and a very, very tired mind, he refuses to go home. He won't until he can find the box marked "Jane Doe" with the date that the kit was done on that aligns with the year Gia had thrown out whilst revealing that Tom Bryer had hurt her.
"Dad..." Barbara says softly once she stops her chair in front of the aisle he's on, the room only being lit by a single light bulb in the ceiling. "...It's really late."
"He babysat her for us, Barbara. If we had to go somewhere she didn't want to go to, instead of making her go, I'd leave her with him and his wife."
"I know." Barbara replies, trying to keep her voice from cracking.
"I should've just made her fucking go with us." He states, and his daughter breathes out, not shocked in the slightest by her father's strong choice of words.
He has every right to be angry.
"I trusted him. He's been my friend since the academy. I've always had his back. I was his best man at his wedding..."
"Dad--"
"--And he not only hurts someone so intimately and personally which is sick and foul and atrocious all on it's own, but he does so to my sister." He shakily lets out. "And I stood up for him, insisted that it was a misunderstanding because there was no way that a man like Tom Bryer could ever do such a thing as that. We all did, my whole force took up for him and the judge tossed out the case because we were so adamant and there was barely a case to even build for someone maintaining their anonymity."
"You didn't know, dad."
"It doesn't matter. The kit should've been tested to see if his DNA was a match. But we didn't bother with it once the case was dismissed. But we've got his DNA now, I just can't find the goddamn kit." He hits the shelf, angrily, after spending hours trying to find Gia's, and failing.
"Please, go home and try to get some rest." Barbara pleads. "He's in custody, he'll be here when you get back. Just go home and try to get a few hours of sleep."
"Everything that happened to her...everything the Joker's done...all the times she's nearly gotten killed by him...I always thought I had failed her anytime he was able to get ahold of her. But this beats anything he's ever done to her. This...I have failed her. I've failed her and in doing so, I've failed so many other people that have possibly fallen victim to Tom and his sick game."
Worn down padding takes the impact of a heavy punch, delivered by a wrapped fist before another from the other hand quickly follows.
A bead of sweat drips from Richard's hair as his rage is taken out on the punching bag to keep himself from going down to the G.C.P.D.
His jaw is locked together tightly.
"Can you just come on? You've been working out and training for two hours." She says, and Dick catches his breath before chugging several sips from his water bottle.
"No such thing as training or working out too much." He retorts, stepping to her.
"We can workout in other ways, you know." She hints, her palms running down his arms, feeling the muscles that are still tense from his weight lifting, earlier.
"That's not as efficient." He replies with a chuckle, his thumb grazing her chin before he's stepping past her.
"Seemed pretty efficient last night." She states. "And this morning, and lunch...and the entire month we've been hooking up."
"I can't spend my entire Saturday having sex all over apartment, Gia." Richard tells her as he goes to the kitchen, smiling.
"Doesn't sound that bad to me." She shrugs, pulling his t-shirt over her head, taking her panties off, and once he's done getting some more water, he turns to see her.
They've only been messing around for a month, but it only took a week for him to realize how absolutely insatiable she is.
She has the libido of a bunny—which probably worked just fine in her relationship with Jason, but that was the issue at hand.
Richard isn't Jason.
And Gia's nearly drove herself crazy trying to keep herself distracted through work and sex so she didn't have time to even dwell on the fact that Jason was gone. She'd already spent two months in the throws of grief and was getting angry when she realized it'd take more than two months to process his death in which she took part in.
Dick slowly steps to her, finishing off his water again before putting the cup down on the coffee table in the living room.
"You're selfish you know that?" He asks her, lightly, cracking a grin and she smiles. "I need a shower." He adds, raising his brows.
"Oddly enough I need one, too." She replies.
Why didn't she tell him?
She had always told him everything, even the things he didn't want to know.
Whether she went to the cops about Bryer or not was her business, but to keep it from him?
His hands hit at the bag harder and harder, so hard that the sound keeps him from hearing Barbara approach him.
"I didn't tell you just so you could keep me awake, you know." She comments and he steadies the bag with his palms.
"Would you rather me go down to the police station and handle it?" He asks her, sharply, and she breathes out.
"Dick, I know you're angry. But beating the man to death isn't going to change what he did to Gia."
"It'd make me feel a hell of a lot better." He scoffs.
"Momentarily. Then the adrenaline wears off and you're still left with the reality that she was hurt and we couldn't protect her from it and no matter how badly you hurt Tom, it won't turn back time and give you the chance to make sure that never happened to her."
"You can go back to bed, Barbara, I'll be in there in a few minutes." He dismissively puts it, unwrapping the tape from his hands, and she just blinks at him before turning to go back to their room.
"Richard," Gia gasps out, her legs shaking, her palms on his knees as he looks up at her, his hands spreading across her hips, her waist, up to her chest before she's putting her hands over his, keeping the slow, torturous, but fulfilling pace on top of him while he moves up to meet her as she slides down onto him.
He flips over, keeping her under him, Gia turning over on her stomach, shifting to her knees and arching her back, letting out a soft breath when she feels his lips graze against the skin of her spine, going up to her shoulder blades as his hand moves between her legs, her head dropping, her eyes rolling back.
When he pushes into her, her hands ball up into the sheets, a moan leaving her throat.
"You okay?" He asks, making sure he's not hurting her.
"Yes." She assures him, breathlessly, and he continues until her face is buried in the sheets to muffle her sounds of pleasure, her toes are curling and she's tightly wrapped around him as she finishes, Richard turning her on her back, and she claws at his arms when he gets back inside of her, getting an ego lift when she's expressing how she feels, her back arched, her hand grasping his and pulling him down to her for a kiss before she says, "take it off," in reference to the condom in use.
He nearly laughs because he thinks she's joking.
But it's obvious she's not.
"Gia," he starts, about to get off of her but she wraps her legs around him, stopping him.
"Please, Richard," she asks.
It then dawns on him that she and Jason probably rarely used any given neither of them had any issue tossing out possible consequences if it meant getting to get caught up in the heat of the moment.
Richard pulls away from her, his sexual appetite now gone, and neither of them say a word as he goes to shower.
They stopped sleeping together for a couple weeks after that, but he eventually gave in—lack of contraceptive included—when he could see she was going back to her hole of depression.
He tried to fill Jason's shoes in more areas than just sex to her. They never dated, but they got as close as two people could without actually having the label of being in a relationship.
For five more months they played house, until Gia came home and told him she was pregnant, and that she had made an appointment to terminate it.
That was like throwing a brick at his face, and the two stopped talking altogether for a couple of years after it.
He didn't realize within the two years that they weren't speaking, she'd get assaulted, and that she wouldn't tell him because, well...they weren't even acknowledging each other's existence at the time.
Bruce watches, repeatedly, the shattering of glass, Gia's lack of reaction to the glass...
"You've been watching that same clip for nearly half an hour." Alfred pipes after coming down to check on him for a second time since he's gotten back.
He pauses and slows down the footage, seeing the position her hands go through the glass in, stopping it.
"That's not possible." He mumbles, shaking his head, her hands making impact in an outstretched manner, versus a fist, then he looks at the time stamp. "Forty-eight milliseconds, Alfred." He states.
"She's got good reflexes." Alfred suggests, although knowing it's impossible.
"The average person blinks once in two-hundred milliseconds." Bruce says next, furrowing his brows, before typing up, how fast does a snake strike?
Snakes can reach forces up to thirty times the force of gravity when striking , able to strike up to four times in an single average human blink of the eye.
He pulls back up the video and watches it once more before he thinks about the things Gia's endured throughout her cancer battle, how desperate she was for Bruce to green light her experiment on herself, how heartbroken she had been, how angry...he doesn't know how but it appears she's managed to succeed in her experiment.
It explains how she got rapidly better, the squeaky clean cat scan, how she looks healthier now than she did even before she got sick. She's had a lot of help by something that she was not naturally born with, but forcefully implemented into herself.
"What's the next step, sir?" Alfred asks him.
"We can't let her leave Gotham."