I came to back at our house. Covered in clean bandages, and I could feel a few stitches itching on my brow.
I sat up with a groan and took a look around, I was hooked up to an IV and Da was sitting in a chair by the window with a cigarette hanging from his lips.
"Fucking 'ell, Da…" I groaned out, catching his attention and he quickly surged forward, moving to check up on me.
"Jaysus on the cross, boy! You're some kind of special, y'know that?" Da fussed over me like I was a six year old who fell out of the tree out front again, "damn near gave me a heart attack."
A weak chuckle escaped my lips as I gave Da a grin.
"Gotta be careful at your age, Da."
"And you ought to be more careful with who you piss off, Henry." This voice came from the doorway to my room, "how you feeling, kid?"
Oswald Cobblepot. It ain't the first time he's been in our home, but it's the first time he's here because of something I did.
"Like I got hit in the face with a crowbar, Mr. Cobblepot." I deadpanned, earning a slight grin.
While Cobblepot was a shorter man, he wasn't diminutive. He had narrow shoulders and a bit of a gut, his hair was receding, and he had a prominent face scar to the right of his nose.
He settled into a chair to my bed's right.
"Anybody who takes a beatin' like that and still tells the Black fucking Mask to pound sand can call me 'Oz', kid." Cobblepot speaks, leaning forward. "We found a decent handful of teeth when we got here, went down swinging, huh?"
"Knocked Jimmy Darmody out cold." I confirmed, earning a pat on my shoulder from Da.
"That's my boy." He spoke, a proud grin on his face shining through the worry.
"That he is, that he is. Pat, I'm gonna need you to step out for a sec. You know the drill." Cobblepot quickly crosses his heart when my Da hesitates. "Christ on the Cross, I'll take it easy on him. I've known him since he was in diapers for goodness sake."
Da gives a stern look that Cobblepot meets beat for beat before nodding and stepping out of the room.
Cobblepot lets out a deep sigh before addressing me once more.
"The man can turn me into a damn pretzel, but he still listens to me. Can't put a price on loyalty like that." He speaks softly, the normally haughty expression of his face replaced with one of weariness. "You had your first taste of the Life, Kid. It's always like this. Weddings and funerals, every weekend. Weddings and funerals."
"I've done everything I can to stay out of the Life, Mr. Cobblepot." I spoke, earning a nod.
"I know, kid. I also know you didn't say shit, so relax." I let out a heavy sigh of relief and allowed myself to fall back into my resting position.
"Got to put on a show for the other underlings?" I asked, earning a nod.
"Can't show favorites. Breeds rivalries, makes people stupid. And, I gotta talk to you about how things are gonna be moving forward."
"I ain't gonna work for you, Uncle Oz." I quickly cut in, earning a hoarse bark of a laugh.
"Oh fuck no, Pat'd kill me, and he knows where to put the body to get away with it too." Cobblepot chuckles for a minute, letting out a forlorn sigh as the humor wanes. "Haven't heard you call me that in a long time…Henry, you can't stay here. Neither can Pat."
"The Narrows are gonna turn into a warzone." I muttered, earning a grimace from the mob boss.
"I got a place for you, Henry. Away from this. Pat's saved my ass more times than I can count, that's a debt I can't leave unsettled." He speaks, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a folded piece of paper and a wrapped package. "It's just bad business."
He hands me the paper first, there's an address on it.
"That there is an address to a recently sanitized safe house about three blocks down from GTU. Paperwork's clean, nothing inside to link to me or any of my business interests. It's no penthouse apartment, but I know your old man likes you living 'modestly'. Been paying the man six figures for thirty years, and he hardly does anything with all that cash."
He lets out a scoff, shooting me a look that told me exactly what he thought of that bit of opinion.
"Now this one…" He lets out a soft sigh, placing the wrapped package in my lap. I unwrapped it slowly, but I could tell by the weight exactly what it was.
"I can get you out of the Narrows, I can make it known to my boys that you're a civilian. But I can't control the Italians. I can't call off a Green Light."
The revolver in my hands is a snubnose large frame. I quickly pop the cylinder open and check the chambers, empty. Good.
"I just want to go back to school, Uncle Oz." I speak softly, meeting the shorter man's eyes. He gives me a grin filled with regret,
"You know that it ain't gonna be that easy, kid. Not with who you just fucked with." He leans back in his chair and draws two cigarettes from his jacket. Politeness makes me accept the one he offers me and he lights the two of them.
"Sionis is a vindictive fuck, but he's indecisive. The way I see it, there's two things that might happen. One, the preferable option: he does things the right way. The proper way. He focuses on me and your old man, leaves you out of it." He takes a drag from his cig and I take a pull from my own. It's this bougie brand that's strong, bitter, and warms my lungs not unpleasantly.
"Option number two is he stays true to his character and I got to look over my shoulder for every Associate and their mother who wants to earn favor." I speak, letting out a groan as the nicotine hits.
"No, you're too small time for that. Opportunists. Desperates. Someone needs to apologize for fucking up. That's who'll come looking for you. However, that's what that Iron's for."
"And I just got to keep praying to Sonny Jesus that I never have to use it, is that it?!" My accent doesn't normally come out, but at this point I'm tired, angry, and done. So I'm spitting poison sounding like I'm straight out of a Belfast pub. "I study plants, Uncle Oz. I haven't even fookin' held a gun in years!"
"Then you'd best start hitting the range, boy! Like it or not, this is the option you've got." He snaps, pointing at me with a stern glare and a crooked finger. He collects himself and gets up with a sigh that releases a cloud of smoke into my room as he steps into the doorway.
"You're stubborn, Henry. Not a bad trait in this town. But this ain't an issue that can be ignored and bulled through because you got sand, boy. You want to keep chasing that dream? Keep living as a civvie? You pray I win this war."
With that, he stepped out and left me to my Da's tender mercies.
If being cussed at by an angry-worried Irishman can be considered tender mercies.
———————————————
The whole incident occurred over the course of only a day and a half or so. I lost track of time after the first bop to me head.
I was back in school the next morning, getting lecture notes, and stonewalling any questions that Harley asked.
"Come on Mackie, you didn't even have a proper doctor look at your stitches?" She had cornered me in the cafeteria, where I was nursing a black coffee whilst going over three different sets of notes.
"And get whacked by Stocky Brown while waiting in the lobby? I'm not stupid, Harley."
"I'm just saying that getting looked at by a Doc called 'Fingers' probably isn't the best thing for your health, kiddo."
"You're literally two years older than me, ya daft bint." I muttered, earning a smirk,
"If you're gonna insult me, Mackie, at least do it in plain English. I'm a colonial remember?" She drawled, purposely exaggerating her Jersey accent.
"b' e sin Beurla thu amadan."
"Oi! American! Hot Dogs, Baseball, Superman!"
We both bust out laughing when neither of us could keep a straight face. One of my stitches popped, and I winced quickly bringing a hand up to it, sighing in relief at the lack of blood.
"I'll tell you one thing, Mackie." Harley quipped, settling back in her seat and swiping my coffee. Bitch.
"You're gonna have one hell of a scar."
———————————————
I wasn't looking forward to Lab, but the levity had took some weight off my shoulders and took my mind off of things.
So, I was content to get the lab set up and go through my tasks as expected of me from the Botany professor here. I watered the plants, got the tools sanitized in isopropyl alcohol, and made sure all the chemical cabinets were still locked and secured.
"What on god's green earth happened to you, Henry?!"
I let out another heavy sigh, turning to face the duo of doctors that just walked in.
"Hello, Doctor Woodrue, Doctor Isley. How are you today?"
———————————————
I stonewalled any further inquiries so that I could just move on, it ticked off Woodrue enough that he had me scrubbing Petri dishes the entire shift.
Dick.
Still, the work needed to continue, and I had to make up for missing work yesterday.
I got through that light bit of cold shoulder and moved on.
Doctor Woodrue was a bit of a control freak with a bad habit of using risky methods to get more extreme results. A staunch environmentalist, but a bit…disconnected from people. He put up a mask, but if you look closely at his eyes, you can tell he just isn't quite…there. He's the Old Head of the lab, being in his mid 30s, he held dark hair and was a tall lanky man.
Doctor Isley was the more personable one of the two, also a staunch environmentalist. Kept a succulent garden in her apartment.
Also had terrible taste in men by the ga-ga eyes she was always giving Doc Woodrue. Still, she was smart enough to know that that was probably a bad idea considering he had a tendency to try to use me as a lab rat.
Still, I enjoyed the work itself. Even if it was menial labor, I learned a lot about botany, soil composition, nutrient counts and the like.
I probably couldn't grow potatoes on Mars, but the experience here would help me get a job someplace nice. I was hoping STAR Labs, they had a good bioscience program based out of metropolis. Still, that was three years to go at this point.
I mused on this on the way to my new home, only to find a man waiting outside. He wore a long brown trenchcoat, wore a graying mustache and had red hair speckled with gray.
"Henry Macleod?" He asked, bringing out a shiny GCPD badge out of his coat.
"Detective James Gordon, do you mind answering a few questions, son?"