A/N - tw for this chapter: descriptions of violent child abuse.
This chapter features a cameo by my friend Alex's OC Eve :) We have a bit of a shared universe going on, it's fun. This is actually one of my favorite chapters (true also of at least the next 3 chapters)- with the plot stuff stitched up for a little while, it marks a multi-chapter return to what this story is really all about: Jerome and Isabel being obsessed with each other. It's also a bit of a beast at 11k (there's a natural scene change where I could have split it in two but I... didn't want to do that) so make sure you've got drinks and snacks at the ready :)
7.
I know your face, I know your ways, I've entertained you
I'm not the same, I'm not the one that's gonna save you
If I could save you, then I might
I know I won't, at least I tried
At least you know you can confide in me—
at least you know you can confide in me. – Tatiana Hazel | Downer
Six hours. In the end, she gave him six hours before she just couldn't stand it anymore, and it was only that much because after the adrenaline of the morning's events wore off, she'd crashed for another three-hour nap before waking in a cold sweat to a dark sky through the window and no Jerome.
As always, waiting around was anathema to her, so she instantly moved to get dressed. She'd hung on to the van keys upon their return to the mansion; she figured if nothing else, she could return to the spot in the Narrows where she'd seen him last and try to trace his steps.
As it turned out, such a last-ditch effort wouldn't be necessary. When she got to the foyer, on her way out of the house, she ran into Scarecrow and Jervis Tetch, both clearly preparing to leave themselves. They all surprised each other; Isabel stopped short and the three of them stared at one another with wide eyes before, tentatively, she said, "…hey."
"Salutations," Tetch said, regaining his composure as soon as she greeted him and straightening up, hands behind his back. She'd had the impression of him as a particularly tall man since they'd met in the early hours of the morning, but now she realized that it was the huge Mad Hatter top hat that gave that impression—in reality, he was almost exactly her height. "What felicitous fortune finds us. Have you come to assist in the rescue?"
Isabel wasn't in the mood to pretend to know what he was talking about. "What rescue? What's going on?"
The men exchanged a glance. Scarecrow shrugged, Tetch nodded, and Scarecrow showed her something blinking red in his hand. "A safe measure," he said. "For if something truly dreadful happened."
Isabel stared at the little device as it flashed and emitted a soft chirp. "Is that a… tracker?"
"He activated it about five minutes ago," Tetch said calmly, staring at her with bright, beady eyes. "We were en route to retrieve him, as he's failed to show."
She fought down a little fit of pique—maybe this wouldn't be happening if a certain stubborn someone had let me come along with him—and likewise pushed away the little sting she felt at the realization that he'd entrusted these guys with a tracker, rather than her (she was beginning to realize that Jerome diversified his interests almost to the point of paranoia). Instead, she focused on the positive—that this was a much better plan than her initial one of searching the Narrows at dark in hopes of figuring out where he went—and looked from Tetch, to Scarecrow, then back again. "You guys need a driver?"
The door to Jerome's barren concrete prison unlocked right around the time he was starting to get bored of doing cell yoga. He'd always been blessed with excellent timing.
In no great rush, he sat down on the floor to put his shoes on, then picked up his coat from the floor where he'd laid it out as a makeshift yoga mat, shaking off the grit and brushing his gloved fingers over the little bump in his sleeve where the tracker beacon was sewn into it. Thank you, Bogdanowicz, he thought as he pulled the coat back on and checked his hair. The man was a phenomenal tailor, but he was at least as gifted in artificery.
After putting himself back in order (they'd also left his gun in his pocket, and he fished it out happily before leaving—serves you right for thinking this concrete block could hold me), Jerome strolled to the door to inspect it. There was no handle on the inside—in fact, when it was closed and locked it had blended into the rest of the wall, so Jerome hadn't even known where the door was until right this second—but when the locks had released, the door had also cracked open. Doubtless Tetch was here, had found Jeremiah and hypnotized him into opening the place up—Jeremiah, or that skinny girl who nonetheless packed one hell of a punch and had clearly been the one to bring him here. On second thought, he sort of hoped Tetch had found her. He wanted Jeremiah scared and confused as he realized what was going on, not in a comfortable dazed trance.
He pushed the door open and stepped out into the hallway, looking experimentally up and down the corridor. It stretched on emptily in both directions, and Jerome scoffed low in his throat as he eyed the cold, barren walls with contempt. God, Jeremiah was boring. After all these years, he hadn't bothered to develop a sense of taste. Sure, he could make an argument for the emptiness being more disorienting for anyone held captive in the maze, but a little splash of creativity could make things even worse for that hypothetical captive. If it had been Jerome designing the maze (which, it wouldn't be, because he wasn't a fucking nerd), he'd have decked the place out in color, but played around with rotating walls, pieces that shifted and changed so that anyone attempting to use them to get their bearings or as landmarks would be shit out of luck. It would certainly be better than whatever boring shit his brother was doing here.
Whatever. He needed to get to a twist or turn that looked familiar, something he could match to the stupid drawings Jeremiah had always been doing. If he knew his brother—and he did, not even the years apart could override the twin shit, he could feel it, just like he'd been able to feel Jeremiah's eyes on him through the little camera in the wall—Jeremiah would be hauling ass to the only exit in the building, and Jerome intended to beat him there. He started moving.
It didn't take long for his thoughts to jump to Isabel—it never did, these days. It was almost annoying. Maybe he should kill her. Scratch that thought; he liked the way she reacted to his teasing too much. He wondered if she was here, too. Probably. She was bossy as shit; there was no way she'd have allowed Jonny or Jervis to leave the house to come look for him without her supervision. One corner of his mouth crooked up at the thought. He'd actually pay good money to sit back and watch her be mean to his temporary partners. He liked them just fine, but he was one hundred percent positive they deserved a little bit of bullying, and he got bored of being the one to do it all the time. Isabel should sub in, pull her weight a little.
He reached a sharp turn in the hallway—a bit of an optical illusion, looked like it should be going one way but went the other—and placed himself instantly. This was Jeremiah's favorite design, the one he'd doodled at least once in every notebook he'd ever owned, and was therefore the one Jerome was most familiar with. Sure, it was the most complex of all his maze designs, but it was also the most predictable choice he could have made in the construction of this compound. God, Jeremiah was so boring.
He rounded another corner and came face-to-face with a girl. She'd been so quiet even in the echoing halls that he hadn't realized she was there until he was right on her, and he recoiled, whipping his arms up defensively like she was a snake trying to take a bite out of him.
"You're not Isabel," was the first thing to leave his mouth, since Isabel had been on the brain. She was about the right age, had similarly-colored skin and eyes, but that was where the similarities ended—instead of straight black hair, hers was brown and riotously curly; this girl was a little shorter and a lot thinner, seemed more fragile, somehow.
She was certainly quieter, murmuring something in response that he almost didn't catch: "You're not Jeremiah."
"He always did like 'em smart," Jerome teased, then frowned, belatedly realizing that not only was she not Isabel, she also wasn't the skinny blonde who'd knocked him out. He rubbed his sore jaw at the reminder, idly asking, "How many girls does he keep down here, anyway? Freak."
It was a rhetorical question, but she didn't seem to take it that way. "None, now that the doors are unlocked."
Jerome dropped his hand, eyes going wide. "Wait, really? He had you locked down here, too? And he thinks I got the serial killer genes." He pulled a face as he realized that the little bloom of warmth in his chest was pride, a nearly foreign feeling when it came to his brother. Yuck.
The girl watched him uncertainly, like he was a dog that might yet turn out to be rabid. Good instincts. "…what happens now?" she asked carefully.
Jerome propped his elbow on the wall and leaned into it—if he was blocking her path before, he was fully barricading it now. "I don't know," he said thoughtfully. "I'm torn between popping you back in your cell, y'know, to encourage that killer instinct of his, and letting you escape, because it'd be funny. What do you think? Don't answer that, I know what you think." He sighed as he scratched idly at his jaw with the barrel of the gun. Decisions, decisions.
The girl's eyes—already large—seemed to grow bigger. Hesitantly, and almost whispering, like she thought she might get in trouble for saying it, she said, "I can show you the way out of here."
Jerome scoffed. "Like it's hard? I know how to get outta here." He narrowed his eyes as a suspicion struck him. "How do you know how to get out of here?"
Mistrustfully, she said, "…how do you know how to get out of here?"
That question appeared to put them at a stalemate. They looked silently at each other for a second before Jerome pointed out, "I asked you first."
The girl didn't have to say okay, fair out loud—her twitchy little shrug of acceptance did it for her. "I… helped him build this place. I know it almost as well as he does."
"What a coincidence," Jerome said, tapping at his temple. "So do I." With a little pop of alarm going off in his brain, he remembered that he was supposed to be racing Jeremiah to the exit, and decided that it wouldn't be the end of the world to let this girl go. "Let me scootch past you there," he said, scootching past her there as she hugged the wall like she was afraid of him (and what had he ever done to her? It must have been residual PTSD or something from whatever Jeremiah was doing to her down here; Jerome wouldn't hold it against her, not her fault they had the same face). Once he was past, he pointed the gun at her. "Don't follow me," he said, and turned away.
"Um," she said to his back. "Are you… are you kidding? There's only the one way out, I… kind of have to…"
He ignored her, and moreover, he did her the favor of not checking behind him to see if she was obeying or not (he knew she wouldn't be, but if he didn't look, then they both had deniability, and as fun as it might prove to be, he really didn't have time to keep messing with her).
He'd extracted himself from the encounter just in time, it seemed—no sooner had he reached the purple neon light reading The End (the one pop of personality in the whole godforsaken place) and ducked around the corner to confirm that it was, in fact, an exit door than he heard a faint echo, a tread that he recognized even after years apart. He turned and almost ran into the girl again (he jumped, because she'd been a lot closer behind him than he'd realized—damn was she quiet—and then glared at her for making him jump). By then, Jeremiah's footsteps were nearer, so, impatiently, he grabbed the girl by her birdlike shoulders and moved her out of his way (she didn't resist, though she looked ready to go for the eyes or the balls if he put a finger out of place) even as he crooned out, "Helloooo, brother…", pitching his voice to carry.
The footsteps stopped, then shuffled briefly in the opposite direction, then stopped again. By that point, Jerome had emerged from the exit corridor to see that Jonny and Jervis had appeared behind Jeremiah, cutting him off as he attempted to flee. Jeremiah turned again, and the look of horror on his face when he laid eyes on Jerome was sweeter than anything Jerome had ever tasted.
Then his eyes slid right past Jerome, and, if anything, the look of horror deepened. Jerome glanced over his shoulder to find that the girl had followed him out, and she and his brother had locked eyes, staring at each other with an intensity that was almost physical.
"Jesus," Jerome said after waiting a polite half-second for one of them to say something. "Am I interrupting something, or…?"
"Eve," breathed Jeremiah, almost involuntarily. Then he seemed to realize he was showing a hint of quantifiable emotion—embarrassing for him—and, in a display that had been fascinating, if infuriating, to Jerome since their childhood, he visibly tucked that emotion away, clean out of sight, the cool robot part of him back in control. "Eve," he repeated, sounding much calmer now. "Get away from him. He's dangerous."
Jerome whirled around to look at Eve, pointing a baffled finger to his own chest. I know he's not talking about me, not after what she'd said about being locked down in Jeremiah's dungeon, too, and maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought he saw a similar sentiment in the girl's face, a sort of wry furrow in her brow as she met his eye. It didn't last long, though. It took her maybe a split second to realize that nobody was between her and the door, and without so much as a bye now, she ran.
Jerome pulled a face of exaggerated confusion as she bolted, calling out after her: "Okay, well, catch you later, I guess!" As the door clanged loudly shut behind her, he turned to Jeremiah with a chuckle. "Nice girl. Pretty. Way out of your league, girls like that always did just run away from you, I see why you kidnapped her."
"I didn't—"
"So," Jerome cut him off—he wasn't interested in hearing Jeremiah's lies; Eve had told him herself that she'd been locked in, just like him, and Jerome believed women—"How ya been?" His eyes crawled all over his brother, taking him in. It had been over ten years since they'd last seen each other, but identical was identical—despite the geek glasses, fussy hair, and suit that made him think Jeremiah had gone color blind since the last time they'd seen each other, he still had their shared face. Weird, now, to see it without the scars. "You look great," Jerome added, something like cuteness aggression making him clench his teeth around the words, and he laughed. "To think I used to be the handsome one, right?" He laughed again.
Jeremiah looked petrified. Sure, Jerome was pointing a gun at his face, but still, it stung a little, that he didn't seem to have missed Jerome as much as Jerome had missed him. When he spoke, it was only to ask, hushed, "How'd you find your way through the maze?"
His teeth were still clenched, but the warmth had vanished. "Oh, bro," he growled. He'd been distracted from the anger that had been simmering all day (and really, for years) by his escape from the maze, but it was back now, quieter than it usually was, definitely scarier. "We might not look the same anymore, but we still… think… the same." He punctuated the sentence by flicking Jeremiah in his head, gratified when his twin flinched back "Plus," he added, after enjoying the way Jeremiah was visibly trembling, "you used to draw those stupid things all the time as a kid. I paid attention."
They weren't getting anywhere with an audience. He glanced away from Jeremiah, turning his attention to Jervis, dismissing him and Crane so that he and his brother could talk in private.
Isabel, for her part, had gotten separated from the group during the scuffle with Jeremiah's bodyguard and the cops (and Jim Gordon had definitely seen her and had said her name, grimly, like he wasn't surprised to see her but he was disappointed—so much for her efforts in wearing a mask earlier that day, and also, who the hell had made Jim Gordon her dad?). When she'd looked up and found everyone else gone, she'd thought she was fucked, doomed to wander the maze for the rest of eternity, but then she'd spotted something—a scrap of burlap from Scarecrow's costume.
She'd thought it was a fluke, but then she'd seen another. And another. Whether he was bread crumbing for himself or, by some miracle, for her, it was a traceable path through the maze, and she moved him way, way up the list of her favorites of Jerome's associates. (He and Firefly were up top for being generally helpful. At the bottom were Oswald—politician, kind of a bitch—and Tetch—weird, bad vibes; when she'd witnessed the terrifying spectacle of him hypnotizing the blonde girl who answered the door she'd taken a second to pull him aside and warn him if he ever did that to her, she'd better end up dead, or else she would kill him when she came to. Fries, a virtual unknown at this point, was in the middle.) It seemed like only a minute before she ran into Tetch and Scarecrow, doubling back her way.
She frowned as they brushed past without explanation. "Is he…?" Tetch continued on, but Scarecrow paused long enough to point a claw in the direction they'd come from. "Thanks," Isabel said, still frowning, and they moved on.
She went until she could hear men's voices, Jerome's voice, his rasp, the slightly rough edges of his city accent, and she stopped just around the corner from the source of them, feeling nerves bundle up in her belly. He'd told her not to come earlier; now that she was here, would he be mad? Would she care if he was mad?
Another voice, this one quieter, much more monotonous, but crystal-clear. "You blame me for everything that's gone wrong in your life, but the truth is, Jerome… is you were born bad."
Isabel froze at the silence that followed, no longer debating whether she should move—now she was incapable of moving, straining to hear Jerome's reaction to that.
It came after a heavy pause of a couple seconds. "Born bad, huh?" Jerome asked, and Isabel's heart sank—his low, flat tone did not bode well. "So that's why you think I made her try to kill ya, right?"
"Yeah, we both kn—" the other guy—Jeremiah, she presumed—tried to say, but Jerome raised his voice over him.
"What was it again?" he barked. "What was it? I… put a… blade to your throat; no, no, nonono, I tried to… light you on fire!"
"We both know you wanted to!" protested Jeremiah, but Jerome wasn't listening.
"That was a funny story, wasn't it?" he mused.
Jeremiah took an audibly shaky, steadying breath before trying again. "Okay," he admitted. "Maybe it didn't happen exactly like that. But I didn't have a choice—and I was right."
"Hm?" Jerome prodded him for elaboration.
After another significant pause, Jeremiah, wounded and accusatory, said, "You killed our mother."
"She did deserve it, though," Jerome replied, low and mean, after a brief silence. "After that whore hid you away, she gave up on me." His voice was ratcheting up in intensity as he spoke, as he got angrier. "Poisoned by your stories. You turned everyone I ever loved against me! My own flesh and blood!"
Isabel's heart pounded. Her head buzzed with anger, feeding naturally off of his, making it hard to think about anything except that she was sure she was about to overhear a stabbing, but, ever committed to his own theatrics, Jerome got himself quickly under control. "Yeah," he said, calm and amused again. "I guess it's like what they say. We all could go insane with just one bad day. Well," he added thoughtfully, "I guess with you, it's more like one bad spray. You'll see," he said, giggling.
Guess now's as good a time as any, Isabel said, rousing herself from her stupor now that Jerome had somehow defused the conversation, and she rounded the corner. Jerome's eyes fell on her instantly, and his smile only grew. "There's my girl," he crowed softly.
Isabel tried to smother the little look of joy she felt creeping over her face in response to that before he saw, but even as she forced a frown, she saw the self-satisfaction dawn in his eyes. Busted. It's getting dire when you can't even see him without lighting up—and that was to say nothing of the swoosh of butterflies she'd gotten in her stomach, hearing him call her "my girl." It's appalling.
Then the guy he was with turned around, and she was seeing double. Jeremiah was quite distinct from Jerome—he wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses, lacked the devil-may-care slouch and stood up straighter, was more subdued in presentation and expression, and although they both appeared to have a taste for slightly off-kilter color combinations, Jeremiah's clothes were darker, more somber—but it was still something of a shock, seeing Jerome's literal twin standing there. He looked petrified, which normally would have elicited sympathy from Isabel (she knew what it was like to be on the business end of Jerome's gun), but his guilty admission was still ringing in her ears: maybe it didn't happen exactly like that.
She shot him a dirty look instead, one that Jerome wasn't intended to see, but Jerome clearly saw, his eyebrows darting up instantly in transparent delight at witnessing her giving his brother the stink-eye. "We need to get moving," she said, starting down the corridor towards them. "The cops are close behind."
"Don't worry about it, punkin," Jerome said idly, eyes fixed on his brother. "I sent the others to deal with them."
"That super doesn't make me feel any better," she told him, moving past Jeremiah—
—who got the bright idea to grab her as she went, and, surprised enough that she didn't struggle much (she really hadn't expected someone who looked smart to antagonize Jerome, who was holding a very conspicuous gun), Isabel found herself with her back against his chest and his arm around her neck. "Get out of my house," he snarled at his brother, shuffling backwards, out of Jerome's reach, and Isabel deadweighted him by reflex, but unfortunately, the suit seemed to have been concealing more muscle than she would have expected, and he lifted her along with almost insulting ease. Oh, I hate this. This is so not fair. Why are they both jacked?
Jerome, when she met his eyes, looked absolutely murderous—for a split second, anyway, and then his face flattened into boredom. "Oh, right. Forgot. Isabel, this is my brother Jeremiah. Jeremiah, Isabel."
"I'm serious," Jeremiah warned him, his voice only quivering a little as he gripped the crown of Isabel's head with his other hand. "I'll break her neck."
Jerome rolled his eyes, and instead of negotiating with his brother, he met Isabel's stare. "He won't," he told her directly. "Oh, he's got the potential, for sure, but he's a puma who's domesticated himself into a pussycat. Embarrassing, really."
That was good enough assurance for Isabel. Repeating a move she'd used on Jerome's cult followers before, she lifted her booted foot and drove her heel down as hard as she could on Jeremiah's instep, and when he gasped and recoiled in pain, arm loosening on her, she twisted hard out of his grip, spun around, punched him in the stomach as hard as she could, and fled out of his reach, to Jerome.
Who was laughing his ass off even as he reached out with his gunless hand to grab her and shove her behind him, towards the exit sign. "Sorry, bro," he cackled. "Should've warned you. She does that."
Jeremiah recovered somewhat, though Isabel was beyond pleased to see his hair in slight disarray, his glasses askew. Breathlessly, he asked, "What are you gonna do to me, Jerome?"
Jerome paused. He turned slightly to Isabel, and, pressing his mouth to her ear, murmured, "Go on, get outta here. I'll be right behind you. Swear."
For once, she believed him. She turned her head slightly to kiss him hard on the cheek, shot Jeremiah one last glare for good measure, and ran. Behind her, she heard Jerome, beginning to answer his brother's question. "Come on! I'm gonna kill ya. Of course. But first…"
His voice was lost to the background as she pushed the external door open and spilled out into the frigid night. The moon was almost full, and the forest was barren from winter, so she could actually see pretty clearly as the door banged shut behind her—good for making her way through the woods, less good for hiding from the cops, and a quick look around told her that they weren't anywhere near where they'd left the van.
She took off running for a few paces until she identified a little, leaf-strewn ravine to the side of the path, and she slid down into it fast, grabbing timber and leaf cover to build a sort of makeshift hiding place. She couldn't see the little structure leading to Jeremiah's bunker unless she leaned up and peeked over the hill, which meant that anyone coming from there wouldn't be able to see her, but the spot wouldn't stand up to intense survey, so she kept dragging branches over until she heard the door burst open again, and she froze for a second until she heard two pairs of footsteps tromping fast through the leaves.
She took a cautious peek to see Tetch and Scarecrow, making a run for it. They ran right past her hiding spot, and she let them go—maybe selfish thinking, but she was the one who had the van keys, and she didn't mind the thought of them leading the cops on a chase away from her. Besides, she heard gunshots ringing out faintly before the door closed, blocking off the sound: things were heating up.
Predictably, Jerome came tearing out through the door next, and she popped up quick out of the ravine, long enough to whisper-shout "Jerome!" and get his attention before ducking back down again—knowing Jim Gordon, he'd be right on his tail.
Jerome, always quick to move, reached her in an instant, sliding down into the ravine with her, and she carefully threw up some of the brush she'd collected over them. It was a small space, and once she'd hurriedly built their cover, they ended up with Jerome laying almost entirely on top of her on the angled hillside, slightly propped up on one elbow as he peered carefully at the exit to watch for their pursuers.
He was breathing hard and quietly and absolutely radiating heat—not unwelcome given that Isabel was pressed against the icy December ground—and she took advantage of the fact that he was not focused on her at the moment to really drink him in. The moonlight was good enough that from this low angle, she could see one hell of a bruise developing on his jaw (on the other side from the scratch marks), blue at the edges and purpling in the center like rotten fruit. Someone had really gotten him good, doubtless the means by which he'd been incapacitated long enough for them to bring him here. As she stared, she felt the alarmingly strong urge to reach up and bite the injured spot, both as a punishment—see what happens when you leave me behind?—and a response to the unexpected rush of desire she was feeling. At the very last second, she caught the impulse and suffocated it down. Jerome liked a little pain, but she figured he preferred to know it was coming, and probably preferred for it to happen when he didn't need to stay quiet.
This is dire, she thought again in faint despair, averting her eyes. It's been like seven hours since you saw him last and you're mooning over him like some woman whose husband has finally returned from the war. And he killed someone the last time you saw him. Get it the fuck together.
She wasn't any closer to getting it the fuck together when she heard the door blow open again. She tensed, and Jerome, absently, placed a gloved finger over her mouth—as if she was planning to suddenly pipe up. She watched him watch the cops, his eyes just barely peeking over the ridge, and she braced herself to run when Gordon inevitably displayed his usual pitbull tendencies and chased them down—but after only five or ten seconds, she heard the door clang shut, and Jerome was chuckling low in his throat.
"You know what I love about Jim Gordon?" he asked as he pushed himself up a little higher, onto his free hand, to get a better look over the crest of the hill.
"Nothing?" Isabel suggested quietly, her lips brushing his finger as she spoke.
"That man hates a foot chase," Jerome confided in her. "All you gotta do is leave his line of sight and he basically gives up immediately. I dunno, maybe it's an object permanence issue—you think?"
Isabel had had enough of the tacit shushing, so she bit his gloved finger—not too hard, but enough to get his attention. It worked. He removed his finger, using it to brush a strand of hair out of her face instead, and slid back down to his elbows, grinning at her. "Hi, baby."
He absolutely didn't need to know how badly her stomach somersaulted at that, so she channeled the sappy shit into put-upon annoyance, thumping him lightly in the chest with her fist. "You should have let me come with you like I said," she hissed.
"Okay, okay, all right," he said, enveloping her fist tight in one hand so she couldn't hit him again. "You can come with me everywhere from now on, deal?"
She narrowed her eyes. "That feels like a trap."
He chuckled. "Can't win with you, can I." The tone was more affectionate than the words, and even as he checked the door to the compound one more time, he absently lifted her fist to his mouth, kissing it briefly before letting it go. "Speaking of traps."
"You think they're trying to lure us out?" she said, whispering again. Easier to focus on escape plans than whatever her feelings were about Jerome being sweet to her.
"I know they're not," he said, standing up, and she had just enough time to miss the warmth and weight of him before he was taking her hands and pulling her to her feet after him. "Not Jim's style. They're going back in to get Jeremiah, probably want to take him into protective custody." He shrugged. "Not a bad instinct. Not that it'll help." Isabel plucked dead leaves out of his hair as he looked down at her: "We've got at least five minutes to get out of here. Probably more like ten. Where are you parked?"
Isabel looked around. They were surrounded by forest, with nothing else of note visible besides the little structure leading to Jeremiah's compound. She shrugged and pointed. "Tetch and Scarecrow went that way."
"O-kay," said Jerome, and took her hand. "Then I guess we're going that way. Hope we don't die of exposure out here."
They found the other two almost immediately, and it turned out that Tetch had an excellent sense of direction—he got them to the van in slightly more than five minutes, slightly less than ten.
The ride home was fairly quiet. Isabel assumed they were all somberly reflecting on having narrowly escaped getting shot by the cops (for some of them, for the second time that day). Once they got back to the manor, she absconded to the kitchen, suddenly ravenous after the long day. True to her worst suspicions, the Cobblepot household was an ingredients household, had very little in the way of snack food (she had sort of guessed as much, looking at Oswald, he seemed like the kind of guy who ran on spite more than calories), but she was able to find some granola and take the edge off her appetite before she became aware of a suspicious commotion a few rooms over.
She followed the noise to find Jerome tormenting the same youngish Arkham inmate—Carl?—he'd been bullying at brunch earlier, only this time it was considerably worse. It took her a second to realize what was happening, during which Jerome pointed his revolver at the man's face and pulled the trigger. "Damn," he snarled, rubbing his eyes hard like they weren't working right, and spun the chamber for another go. Her brain caught up with her eyes, and she sprang into action, lunging across the room to snatch the gun out of Jerome's hand.
He clearly hadn't expected anyone to challenge him—and in fact, Firefly was sitting just two feet away, watching the scene unfold, and caught a quick glare from Isabel just for being there—and he didn't react immediately aside from glowering at her, a silent, hostile question in his eyes. She glowered right back, too indignant to be intimidated by the way his mood had swung.
"That is not," she snapped, popping the cylinder open to confirm, to her dismay (if not surprise), that there was a single bullet loaded amid the other five empty chambers, "how you play Russian Roulette."
"Really," purred Jerome, his eyes bright with a warning. "What would you know about it, huh?"
At that moment, Isabel had a stroke of luck, divine intervention, or something—while Jerome was busy staring at her, the bullet slipped neatly out of the cylinder and fell directly into her coat sleeve. Instantly, before he could notice, Isabel spun the cylinder and clicked it back into place. Her heart was racing as her brain and body caught up to her reflexes and she realized that Carl had been seconds away from an untimely death, and realistically still was, unless she was able to see this through.
Jerome didn't really respond to pleading or cowering, so she made sure her fear wasn't showing, schooling her face into an expression of annoyance, maybe even a little boredom. "I'll show you," she said. Jerome liked excitement, liked people matching the reckless energy he put out, so even though it went against everything she'd ever learned about guns, she put the barrel of the revolver, still warm from its latest discharge, up to her temple.
Jerome's eyes sharpened as she drew back the hammer, and out of the corner of her eye, Isabel saw Firefly lean forward. She was paying attention to Jerome, though, saw the eagerness in his face, chased by something fleeting and shadowy—doubt, maybe? He didn't stop her, though, and she hadn't expected him to. She dropped her other arm to her side, making a cup with her fingers to catch the bullet as it rolled down out of her sleeve, and even as she slid it discreetly into her pocket with one hand, she pulled the gun's trigger with the other.
The click from the empty cylinder snapped the thick cord of tension in the room. Firefly leaned back again—disappointed?—as Jerome's eyes shuttered, an affectation of boredom that she thought seemed likely to be just a smokescreen for a different sentiment entirely. Isabel lifted the revolver away from her head, raised her eyebrows, and said, "I win."
Jerome laughed his low, creepy chuckle. "So you do." He nodded at the revolver and said, "You can keep that. I've got another one." True to his word, he produced another, nearly identical gun from his pocket, and despite the little pulse of frustration she felt at the sight, Isabel scoffed. Serves me right, trying to disarm him. Not even sure that's possible.
It was time to try a different tack. Jerome was rubbing his eyes again with the heel of his hand, clearly fighting impending exhaustion—he was going on probably forty-eight hours without sleep, and like a little kid, he was fighting it with everything he had, but like a kid, it was turning his mood rotten.
"I'm going upstairs," Isabel announced, stepping over to the fireplace, where Carl still sat—a quick inspection revealed that he'd been tied to his chair with a belt, and, annoyed, she bent down to loosen it. Jerome just watched, looking mistrustful, but he didn't intervene. "If you want," she said, undoing the belt and freeing Carl, "you can come with me." She paused momentarily, irritated when Carl just looked doubtfully up at her and didn't move. She grabbed him by the shoulder, roughly enough that she'd feel bad about it when she thought about it later, and yanked him out of the chair, pushing him towards the door. Go, idiot!
He stumbled, almost falling, but recovered himself and finally scrambled out of the room. Jerome tracked him the whole time, eyes bright and malicious, but he didn't stop him, and once he was gone, he licked his lips and looked politely back at Isabel, as if to ask now what?
"Or you can stay down here with your friends, building up your body count and stinking up Oswald's place," she added, putting the revolver in her pocket along with the bullet, since he'd said she could keep it. "Up to you."
Then she left. In all honesty, she didn't know if whatever vague lure she was setting out would prove to be effective—Jerome was a real fiend for violence, enough that she couldn't be sure he wouldn't find it more appealing than coming upstairs to find out what she had in mind—but regardless of what he was going to do, she had had about enough of everything for the day. Even after two naps, she was tired, since she'd been up all night with him, and she was feeling grimy and stiff. With or without him, she was going to get ready for bed.
Just before she reached the staircase, she spotted an opportunity: a maid had clearly just stepped away, leaving a bucket full of dusting rags and cleaner on the little stand in the hall, and, much more crucially: a cell phone. Isabel's heart started beating faster as she looked around, but she was totally alone in the hallway.
Probably locked, she cautioned herself as she approached, reluctant to get her hopes up, but when she picked up the phone, it lit up to the home screen, displaying a photo of three little kids that all looked under age eight. She felt a flash of misgiving, but talked herself through it—nobody will ever find out—and, after checking again to make sure she was still alone, opened the messenger app.
Apart from being one another's emergency contacts, she and Jane had been in enough capital-s Situations together that they'd long ago memorized each other's phone numbers. She entered Jane's number and typed out a quick message: It's Isabel. I don't have my phone but I'm okay. Can't make it tonight but dw about me, hopefully I'll be in touch soon. Don't text back, this is a stranger's phone and I'm giving it back to them now. She hit send, and watched impatiently until she saw the confirmation that it had gone through, then, hurrying, deleted the text from the maid's phone, clumsy-fingered, convinced she was about to get caught. Nobody came, though, and she quickly wiped the phone screen on her shirt before laying it back where she'd found it and escaping quickly up the stairs.
Rich people were weird. The dresser in the guest bedroom had a selection of spare clothes in various sizes, including matching pajama sets, not unlike the ones Jerome had favored when they'd been with the Maniax, only white instead of blue. Isabel decided not to question it (it was weird, though) and just picked out the set closest to her size and went to take a shower.
When she emerged twenty minutes later, clean and toweling her hair dry, she wasn't surprised to find that Jerome hadn't appeared, though she was faintly disappointed. So much for that, she thought with a sigh. At least she was clean and relaxed and currently out of danger; at least the borrowed pajamas felt like wearing clouds and at least there was a gigantic bed waiting invitingly across the room.
Her disappointment proved to be short-lived, though. Seconds later, the door banged open, and Jerome prowled inside, looking around as if he was checking to make sure she was alone.
It always came as something of a surprise—a borderline irritating one—the way her heart started racing whenever he walked into a room. She compensated with coolness, striding directly past him, acting as if she wasn't hyper-aware of the way he turned to keep sight of her, hyper-aware of every move he made. She closed and locked the door he'd just come through, was turning back to speak to him when he stepped in close, body-to-body, and buried his nose in her warm, damp hair, inhaling deep.
Chills shot down her spine, goosebumps breaking out over her arms at the touch of him. Oh, no, she thought as her eyes slid closed—he was barely even doing anything and she was still completely caught up in him. Worse, she was perilously close to tipping her hand and showing him exactly how into him she was, and after that, it'd be game over. He'd know he had her wrapped around his finger; if he was tough to handle now, he'd be impossible once he knew for a fact that she'd let him get away with anything he wanted.
The thought sparked a little pulse of rebellion. She put one hand on his chest and gave him a firm little shove, and, game as usual to let her take the lead, Jerome cruised a couple of steps backwards, staring at her in unblinking, expectant silence.
She took a second to collect herself, taking him in, and his heavy-lidded eyes reminded her. Right. She'd had a plan before he walked in and twisted her up. She gave him a pointed once-over, making sure he saw her looking, then, back to coolness, she said, "Take your shoes off, please. Everything above the waist, too."
His eyebrows lifted, and he stared at her for a second or two, like he was waiting for her to say sike, but when she just returned his stare with an expectant look of her own, he started moving, slowly, stripping off his coat and toeing off his shoes. He maintained eye contact as he loosened and removed his tie and unbuttoned his vest, like they were playing a game of chicken and he fully expected her to pussy out first, but if he really thought she was backing down, he had the wrong girl. He methodically folded each piece of clothing as he removed it, piling it in an armchair nearby. He removed his gloves, he removed his shirt, and, with one smooth move, pulled his undershirt over his head.
Oh, come on, Isabel thought in exasperation as she looked at him, her mouth going dry. He was fucking beautiful, because of course he was, skin all marble white except for where it was dusted with freckles along the shoulders and chest—and except for the scars that dotted and slashed haphazardly over his torso, various colors, various ages, various in severity. He wasn't cut like someone who made a career out of it, wasn't exactly popping with abdominal and pectoral muscles, but he was trim and lean in a way that was frankly intimidating to her, and the swell of his arms was a reminder that he hardly needed the glamor of magazine muscles to pose a threat.
At the realization that she'd been staring, she dragged her eyes back to his and felt immediately better about not exactly playing it cool, because he wasn't, either, watching her with eyes that practically glowed ember-hot, clearly gratified by the way she was looking at him, feeding off it. She swallowed once so that her words would come out calm when she said, "Go lie facedown on the bed."
There was a bit of a tremble in her voice towards the end, but she thought he missed it, because his eyebrows went up again—she'd surprised him once more. After a brief pause, like he was giving her the opportunity to take it back, he turned and skulked over to the bed. Half-naked and barefoot, the way he moved looked different, leonine, the coiled energy of him more clearly visible in the lines of his body. He placed his hands on the bed, crawled onto it, and, as he moved to lay flat on his stomach, asked, "Are you about to peg me, Izzy?"
Spell broken. Isabel bit her lip hard to keep from laughing.
"Because it's not like I'm averse, but that kind of thing usually takes a little more planning, y'know."
She wanted to jump on him and squeeze him to death, both because she liked him so much and because she wanted to kill him a little bit. "I mean, don't rule it out," she said, "but I kind of don't think that's what you need right now."
He sighed, a long, low exhale as he wrapped one bare arm tight around one pillow, burying his face in another. After a second, voice muffled, he asked, "So. What do you think I need?"
In lieu of answering right away, Isabel moved slowly to the foot of the bed, just taking in the rare sight of Jerome in (semi-) repose. Of course, he was far from relaxed, she realized as she watched him: the lines of his shoulders and back were taut, and the arm holding the pillow was hard and defined from how tightly he was gripping it. He was nervous, she realized with a little thrill—or, if not exactly nervous, then definitely a little apprehensive, probably not feeling great about being stripped down and prone, having his back turned to the room, to her.
But he'd done it, and he continued to wait like he'd been told. Thinking about it opened up a hot flood of something in her chest, something not altogether unpleasant but so intense as to be discomfiting, so rather than dwell on how this all made her feel, she took pity and climbed on her knees onto the bed, swinging one leg over him so she was straddling his waist. "Typically, this would involve, like, oils and new age music and shit, but our toolbox is limited, so bear with me," she said, and went to work giving him a (likely long overdue) back massage.
She'd barely touched him before she was groaning in despair. "Oh. My god. Jerome. You have more knots in your shoulders than anyone I've ever met."
"Thanks," he said, voice still muffled as he spoke into the pillow. "I worked really hard on them." She'd been a little worried that her proximity to him and her touching him like this would make him uncomfortable and he'd shove her off, but it appeared gently roasting him over his fucked-up muscles had been the right move, because she felt him relax a little under her hands.
He turned his head to the side, speaking a little more clearly now. "You, uh… you do this often?"
She scoffed a little. "Ever since they figured out I have the strongest hands in the friend group, I get no peace. Jane's the worst. It's always Isabelll, my neck is sorrreee."
"How the hell do you find out who's got the strongest hands?"
"When the same person's always the one opening the hardest jars, people start to figure it out," she told him dryly.
"Jock," he mumbled, and she pinched his neck at the juncture where it met his shoulder in retaliation. "Ow," he groaned. "Stop being so mean to me."
"Oh, you'd waste away if I stopped being mean to you." He buried his face in the pillow again—she suspected to hide a smirk—and subsided, giving Isabel some peace and quiet in which to work.
She figured he could stand a little pain, might even appreciate it, and although the goal was to get him relaxed enough to go the fuck to sleep, she didn't necessarily want to put him out immediately, so she didn't take it easy on him, working hard at the little nodules of tension with strong fingers and the heels of her hands, working the muscles of his shoulders and neck until they grew malleable and pliant under her touch, and through it all, Jerome didn't make a sound, which was… weird, the friends she was close enough to do this to were always either moaning or yelping in pain at this point, but it wasn't like there was one right way to get a massage, so she didn't think too hard about it.
As she worked, she silently admired him. His back was just as nice to look at as his front—the same pale expanse of skin blotted by more freckles in thick groupings along his shoulders and neck, further down on his lower back a scatter of little moles that reminded her of a constellation, and more scars, old and new alike. She had more time to examine these than she'd had to look at the ones on his front, and though some could be explained away as just accidents and injuries from a reckless lifestyle, there were a few that made her blood start to simmer—a couple of little round, rubbery marks that could only be cigarette burns, and one larger, beneath his left shoulder blade, that she hoped wasn't from a cigar, but knew probably was. They all looked pretty old, but that just made her madder: the older they were, the younger he'd been when he received them.
The scars combined with what she'd overheard him saying to Jeremiah (and Jeremiah saying to him) left her scrambling to hold on to her temper, and she practiced the four-square breathing Jane had showed her how to do when she was mad, because this wasn't about how she felt and she didn't want to throw a trauma grenade into what was supposed to be a calming time. The effort ended up moot, however. He had another scar, a little fresher, a swath of shiny pink in a crescent shape on the right side of his lower back, and she guessed she'd been sort of tracing it for a while without thinking about it, because Jerome spoke suddenly.
"That one's from a cleaver. Uncle Zach got mad I was in his kitchen and just… lost it. Swiped me on my way out. Course, I always thought he could have just told me to get out, but what do I know?"
Her hands stilled for a second. "Does it hurt?"
"Nah, none of 'em do." His face was turned again so he could speak clearly, but he was still slurring a tiny bit, sounded sleepy. Leave it to Jerome, to be put to sleep by a deep-tissue massage.
Isabel brushed her fingertips lightly against the glossy skin of the scar, like maybe she could erase the ugly memory that came with it, but she didn't linger, moving on to the rest of his back. "Your brother sucks, by the way."
"Hah." It was a loud, raspy bark of a laugh. "Tell me something I don't know. Why do you think I went to track him down?" A pause, and then he turned his head even more, trying and failing to catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye. "I know why I hate him. Why do you hate him?"
"I overheard what you guys were talking about, y'know, before I came out," Isabel admitted—she didn't think he would mind, and he should probably know what family information she was privy to, because it was his family, and if it was her, she'd want to know what he knew. "I… shit, there's a lot to say about the things he was saying, but mostly I'm just pissed that he lied about you when you were kids. Like… from what it sounded like, from what he admitted, that set off a whole chain of events that pretty much guaranteed you'd be relegated to permanent scapegoat. If he hadn't done that… everything could have been different for you."
"Could have," Jerome agreed. "Wasn't." He'd clearly done his dwelling on the topic for the night—despite the bitter edge to his tone, he changed the subject almost immediately. "Did you know he had a girl down there?"
Isabel frowned thoughtfully as she carefully worked the muscles in his neck. "You mean the stacked little blonde that kicked everyone's ass?"
"Certainly kicked my ass," Jerome said, though he sounded pretty cheerful about it. "No, not her. Another girl." He groaned softly as she targeted a particularly stubborn muscle group.
"What do you mean, he had a girl down there?"
"Locked in a cage, just like me. She got out when the locks released, too. Ran into me, told me all about it."
"What happened to her?!"
Jerome made an iunno sound and shrugged his shoulders under her hands. "She ran. Escaped like two minutes before you showed up. Maybe she's still out in the woods somewhere."
Isabel digested this. "So you're telling me your brother just had some random girl held prisoner down there."
"I don't think it was just some random girl." Isabel made an inquisitive noise. "Yeah," he said. "I mean, what do I know, I'm just his twin, but I recognized the look he gave me when he realized she was there with me. Same look he used to give me when I tried to mess with his tinker toys. Murderous. Like, get your fucking hands off my stuff. I don't know if it's a crush, obsession—maybe he's flat-out in love with her. Who knows. It's something."
After a few seconds, Isabel whispered, "What the fuck?"
"Not that weird," Jerome said. "Remember how we met."
She wasn't touching the implications of that statement with a ten-foot-pole. She hurried instead to say, "Yeah, but he seemed… I dunno. Law-abiding. Strait-laced."
Jerome scoffed violently and pressed himself upright on one hand, far enough that he could twist around and give her a look she thought was maybe disproportionately nasty. "Oh, he'd loooove to hear you say that."
She scowled and gave his shoulder a bossy little pat. "Settle back down. You're supposed to be chilling out, not getting mad."
He obeyed, but kept talking as he went: "I'm not getting mad," he said, sounding mad. "I'm just saying. For all his pretensions, for all his… lifelong efforts to be normal, our mother's womb was a cesspool, hm? Incapable of growing anything good, and he didn't exactly escape it unscathed. It's a lifelong habit, at this point. He loves to point at me and call me the freak, just so nobody notices that he's just as bad."
He'd gone tense again. Isabel patiently worked at his shoulders until he started to relax once more, then she said, "Is that what you meant when you said he was… what was it, a puma domesticated…"
"…into a pussycat, yeah," he finished scornfully. "And let me tell you something, it's a goddamn waste. Back when we were kids, before he decided the only way to live was straight and narrow, he had a gift. Y'know, I've always had balls, but Miah… Miah was brainy. If it was just me trying to pull a prank or a scam, half the time I'd get caught, but if he had a hand on the ball? Nobody ever even suspected us. It wasn't enough for him to get all the good grades—he had to be the mastermind, too." Despite the complaining words, his tone had an edge of annoyed admiration, even now.
Isabel paused, her hands resting flat on his warm back. "I never thought about that."
"What?"
"Grades. You guys were traveling, right? Not really conducive to standard education. What, were you homeschooled?"
He snorted. "Close enough. The circus had a tutor for the kids—there were about six or seven of us there permanently, with a few more cycling in and out as their parents came and then went. Miss Potter." He pronounced the name with a sneer. "Jeremiah was her favorite."
"I'm guessing you weren't."
"Yeah, well. I've never been good at sitting still." His tone was so dismissive that she instantly twigged that he was covering something with it, some old resentment or hurt. "I got the material easy enough, just never saw the point in sitting at a desk and writing it all back down again. I think maybe I had… a 1.0 GPA at the end of high school? I dunno, maybe lower. I didn't really care to keep track. Miss Potter had written me off as a moron by the time I was thirteen, and she also blamed me for Jeremiah leaving, so she pretty much left me alone after that. Silver lining."
"Sounds like Miss Potter was a moron," Isabel muttered darkly, getting an appreciative little scoff from Jerome. "And people act like your GPA is a measure of your intelligence, instead of how motivated and equipped you are to perform well. It's fucking dumb."
"Says you," Jerome said pugnaciously. "What are you sittin' on, a 4.0?"
"I mean, I was," Isabel said honestly. "Until shit really went downhill at home and studying became way less of a priority. I think maybe I had a C average when I dropped out."
"You're a dropout?" Jerome sounded delighted.
"Yeah," Isabel said darkly. "Long story." It was one she really didn't want to get into just then, either, so she snapped back to the initial subject. "That's exactly what I'm talking about, though. Someone could look at a transcript from my last two years of school and say I just turned into a stupid loser, but I wasn't living the kind of life where I could put a lot of energy into it. Like, I coasted, I made it as far as I did based on what I already knew and what I could cram in five minutes before a test, but it wasn't really my focus, you know?" She pressed pointedly against his waist with the insides of her knees. "I figure it was the same for you, because obviously you're as smart as Jeremiah."
"Obviously."
"Probably smarter."
"Don't be a kiss-ass."
She snickered, but he was relaxed under her hands, and whatever wound the discussion had opened up appeared to have closed again. It was just as well. The more that it came up, Isabel realized that she was somewhat irrationally emotional about the idea of Jerome as a child (usually the emotion was anger), so it was probably best to stop talking about it for now. The scars were one thing—anyone would get a little heated seeing evidence of child abuse—but she wasn't sure why his casual accounts of mistreatment got under her skin so badly. By his own admission, he'd been the kind of kid that acted out, and kids like that usually had a hard time with the adults in their lives—and that was it, if she was being honest with herself. That wasn't the way it should be. Children were children, adults were adults, and kids weren't the ones with the responsibility to keep themselves safe and secure. The fact that the kid in question had been Jerome, who she was personally attached to now, just made it worse.
She'd always understood his reasoning for becoming an unholy terror on the city, for why he thought she should follow his example and do the same, but this was the closest she'd gotten to sympathizing with it. Mother, father, uncle, tutor—all adults who should have done right by him, all adults who'd decided that since he was a "bad" kid, they didn't have to. That wasn't to mention his sphere as a whole—the other grownups working the circus, the cops, the government, all neglecting to check in, to care enough to see what was going on in the Valeskas' tempestuous home life. It wasn't an excuse she'd have ever accepted for herself (in part because her life had been more or less fine until she was thirteen years old—Jerome, she sensed, had had a rough go of it from much earlier), and in truth, she still didn't accept it from Jerome. He didn't have a right to turn around and torture and murder random civilians just because the world as a whole had failed him.
But she got the rage that made that seem like a fair response. She was feeling a full measure of it for his sake right now. Maybe that was why she hadn't yet confronted him about Billings, about the two men he'd killed in the office building, about Carl, who had been maybe five seconds away from death himself. She knew it was coming—she couldn't ignore the fact that his favorite hobby was homicide forever—but she kept putting it off, knowing it would shift the dynamic they'd been cultivating, knowing it could mean the end of this… honeymoon phase, or whatever it was, and she wasn't ready for that yet. She'd missed him more than she'd really let herself understand, and now, reunited, spending the day talking, flirting, touching, in nearly constant-contact, somehow not afraid of him or worried that he'd do her any harm, entirely confident that he was just as pleased to have her there as she was to be there… it felt unreal. She hadn't even hoped for this at any point. She didn't want to open the door and let the ugly things lurking just outside in. They'd crash in on their own soon enough.
She'd transitioned from massage into more of a backrub, stroking up and down his back, gentle with the scars, as her mind wandered. She was sort of surprised he was still with her—sure, it felt nice, but by his own admission and practically every action of his she'd ever witnessed, he had a hard time sitting still. It made more sense when she remembered that he was also one of the most tactile people she'd ever met. She didn't think she'd ever seen him recoil from a touch of any kind, had seen him basking under the fawning, eager hands of his cultists, had noted the way he took practically every opportunity to touch her that she gave him, and responded happily when she touched him in turn. It suited Isabel fine (she, too, was fairly touchy, at least once she got close enough to a person), but it also made her mad if she thought about it too much, because the level of touch starvation that had a person leaning gladly into even physical attacks was yet another thing that had to date back to a fucked-up childhood. It just made her hands firmer, more tireless as they roved over him, giving him as much as he could want, and he stayed receptive—if there was a point where he would decide that he'd had enough of her touch and attention, she didn't reach it.
She must have been doing that, rubbing his back, lost in thought, for upwards of thirty minutes, because once she tuned back in, she realized that he was completely pliant and relaxed beneath her hands, and a quick check revealed that he'd actually fallen asleep under her like she was just a big weighted blanket.
The wild torrent of affection she felt seeing his closed eyes and slack mouth almost scared her. In way, way over your head, she thought as she moved to climb off him, but as she lifted her leg clear of him, he surged into motion, twisting onto his side, his hand shooting out and catching her wrist hard. Fuck, I forgot how lightly he sleeps.
It probably wasn't a good sign that she could easily read his objection in his bleary, half-asleep eyes, a look of almost-betrayal, and she let herself topple sideways next to him, reaching out with the arm he hadn't imprisoned to hug him tight around the shoulders. "I'm not going anywhere," she whispered. "I was just laying down. Come here, chill out."
He glared at her mistrustfully—sleep clearly still had a hold on him—but unwrapped his fingers from around her wrist, and she sat up briefly to yank the coverlet out from where they'd been laying on it and pull it up over them. "Roll over," she told Jerome, whose eyelids were already looking heavy again, and he complied. She immediately spooned him, wrapping both arms tight around his chest (she'd regret it when the arm his shoulder was resting on fell asleep in the next five minutes, but that was the price of being the jetpack) and rested her chin on his shoulder. "Go to sleep, boy," she said softly close to his ear. "So fucking tired."
Jerome, ever the talker, mumbled something that she charitably would call English but that made absolutely no sense, clearly gone already. Isabel's last conscious thought was that maybe when he fell asleep deeply enough that she could get away with moving, she should turn the lights off, and then she was out, too. Neither of them would wake properly for the next fourteen hours.
A/N - jerome's legally blonde reference [handshake emoji] isabel's The OC reference
Jeremiah's catching strays from everybody in this chapter, lol. Everyone's just like "I don't like the cut of that guy's jib." Also ignore the fact that I made the same joke 3 times in this chapter, and ignore the fact that I clearly think it's funny for Jerome to politely introduce Isabel to literally everyone new she meets like a good boy.
If you are looking for a fun movie to watch, might I suggest Your Monster? if you enjoy the romance in this fic then you will probably like the romance in that movie because, shoot me, but I think it happens to be a little bit jerome/isabel coded. very satisfying.
next up: Jane encounters a fan. Jerome and Isabel finally get into it. If you're out there, say hi! See you next time.