a/n - hi, sorry for dropping off the face of the earth for 3 weeks! I lost all my impulse control and got really, obsessively into hockey and didn't want to focus on anything else (and this chapter required a bit of a rewrite, and it wasn't hard, and I knew exactly what I needed to do, but I was procrastinating). I should have posted this on Valentine's Day, because thematically it would have fit beautifully, but day late, dollar short, yadda yadda.
anyway! hope you're all prepared for another beefy chapter, high drama, and some excessively badly-timed sexual content! Definitely a chapter that makes you go oh, yeah, everyone involved in this story is a stupid kid. and also an idiot. enjoy!
8.
I am loosening my grip,
I don't give a shit if we fuck or we date
I'm not making myself sick
I'll give what I get, you can leave, you can stay
Well, I think you want me… – Annie diRusso | Legs
Jane Reilly—formerly known as Jane Vanderholt until she'd ditched the name for good earlier that year in favor of her mother's maiden name—sat in her car outside of the huge creepy fuck-off goth mansion and tried to work up the nerve to go up to the gate.
Something had happened to Isabel. It had been strange—though not unheard-of—when she'd failed to respond to Jane's several the party's still on tonight, right? texts the day before, but it wasn't till Jane had arrived apologetically late to find that Isabel still wasn't there that she'd really begun to worry. The party was in swing anyway, and she worked her way through it, checking with all their friends to find that nobody had been able to reach her, though everyone had assumed she'd turn up sooner or later.
Jane was working her way up to panic when her phone had buzzed with a text from a strange number—from Isabel, if the message was to be trusted, making her apologies, declaring herself safe, and closing off contact for the immediate future. Jane had stared at the message for a long time, waiting for herself to come up with a plan. She had an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach, a gut feeling that this somehow had something to do with the Arkham breakout that had happened the previous night. The news had been light on details—all they'd said was that a considerable amount of patients had escaped, most of which had already been rounded up again by the police—but the timing couldn't be a coincidence.
Finally, she gathered up her stuff and left without a word. She headed to Isabel's apartment building, but stopped short of actually going in when she saw two police cruisers outside, lights flashing. Not good. She'd hesitated in a bit of a panic, wondering if she should approach, to find out what they knew and share the message she'd received, but Isabel's distaste for the police (combined with the not-impossibility that whatever she was doing might land her in trouble) made her turn reluctantly away. It wasn't like the cops were going anywhere. She could always tell them tomorrow.
A new idea struck almost immediately, though. She called Jade, who was still at Isabel's party—raging on despite the absence of the guest of honor—and got a few details. An hour later, she was knocking on an apartment door that swung ominously, immediately on its hinges, unlocked. Jane, heart starting to race, entered.
"Cassie?" she called out nervously.
There was no response, but Jane could hear the faint sound of—sword fighting?—and spotted a stream of blue light coming from the back room. Carefully, she went to the door and pushed it slowly open. "Cassie?" she said again.
The room was a real bachelorette pad, mattress on the floor, dirty laundry scattered about, and a huge, cluttered gaming setup, at which a girl a year or two younger than Jane was posted. A glance at the screen showed that she was playing some type of medieval game—World of Warcraft, maybe? Jane didn't play video games—and upon Jane's arrival, the girl glanced swiftly sideways, said into her mic, "Hang on a second, guys," then pressed mute. "Are you Jane?"
"Yeah—you're Cassie?" At the girl's impatient nod, Jane held up her phone. "Your sister told me you maybe could track this message I got and tell me where it came from. I could pay you two-hundred fifty."
Cassie's eyes were already back on her screen. "Easy."
Jane waited, but when Cassie just continued to play, she said, "Um, I'm in a bit of a hurry—do you think we could do this now?"
"Not until this raid is over."
"Can't you just pause it?"
Cassie shot her a withering look. "You can't pause."
That sounded like a pretty shitty game design to Jane. She did some quick budget arithmetic in her head then said, "I'll pay you double if we do it now."
"No can do," said Cassie breezily. "I can always make more money, but if I dip out now, I ruin this for twenty-nine other people for a whole week. You'll have to wait, chica."
Fucking gamers. Still, "later" was better than "never," so Jane went back and locked the apartment door, then returned to Cassie's room to wait. The game wore on as Jane scrolled her phone and tapped her foot and eventually succumbed to the late night and fell asleep on the mattress, only to wake up to faded light streaming in through the window and Cassie standing impatiently next to her, asking, "Are we gonna do this, or what?"
After all that, it took Cassie less than five minutes to plug Jane's phone up to her computer, run some program, and then point to a map pin on her screen. "There. That's where the message came from. I'll drop it in your maps app. Pay up."
And now here she was. Because Jane was who she was, and she'd grown up how she had, she knew the area, if only by reputation. In the 80s, it had been trendy among the new rich to buy one of these old, crumbling manors on the outskirts of the city and restore it completely. Eventually, as new wealth got more tech-y, the fashion changed, and the rich started buying out glossy penthouses uptown instead, so now these big old mansions were considered a little quaint, a little unfashionable. (Old money families, of course, lived out in the Palisades, a meticulously green, discreetly forested neighborhood that was notoriously difficult to buy property in unless you had the bloodline to go with the money—it had been a thorn in her father's side for years that the Palisades were effectively closed to him because his money was only one generation old and he'd only moved to Gotham in the 90s.)
All this did nothing to explain why Isabel was out here, though. If she'd been fundraising, that was one thing, but she generally held distaste for the rich as a class, and certainly wouldn't socialize with them willingly. That, combined with her having been impossible to reach for at least twenty-four hours, gave Jane the sinking feeling that she was here against her will, if she was even here at all and Jane wasn't just on a wild goose chase based on a single strange text message. She wouldn't know until she mustered the guts to get out of the car and buzz the gate.
She liked to think she had gotten braver overall since her career had begun to take off, but she still never did this kind of thing. Just cold-approaching a stranger's house to ask if they knew anything about her missing friend seemed insane to her, but it was the only idea she had. She just had to brace herself and do it.
Easier thought than done. She sat there for a few more minutes, trying to work up the courage. She was almost there when someone tapped on her window. Jane yelped and jumped a mile.
"Sorry!" said a man's voice. "Sorry, didn't mean to scare you."
The man standing at her window was dressed all in sleek, uniform black, which, combined with the total lack of hair on his face and head, made his white skin look nearly translucent. Looking at him, she thought he either had alopecia or was a fashionista (in Gotham it was often hard to distinguish if people looked out-of-the-ordinary on purpose or not). Something told her this guy fit both categories. She thought he looked to be maybe in his early thirties—certainly sounded young—though it was hard to tell, and he clearly wanted her to roll down her window.
She stared at him, heart pounding. She'd been in therapy for generalized anxiety, and her tendency to people-please, and her anxiety about her tendency to people-please, and her anxiety about what would happen if she didn't people-please, and she liked to think she'd was doing a little better, but she was still grappling with both. Her compromise between the people-pleasing (this guy is probably security, you should roll down your window) and the anxiety (fuck no, this is Gotham City, you're an idiot if you open up to any weirdo knocking) was to crack her window open just an inch—he'd be hard-pressed to even get a finger through the little gap. "Yes?" she asked, stress making her tone curt.
The guy stooped down, leveling his eyes even with the crack. "Are you okay?" She stared at him, her mind blanking immediately, because what did you say to that? After a pause, the man went on. "I just ask cause you've been sitting here for, like, half an hour, looking like your puppy died."
"It has not been half an hour," Jane said, surprised.
The man lifted his wrist, consulting a sleek black watch he wore over a sleek black glove. "Thirty-two minutes, actually."
The specter of looking weird hovered, keeping Jane from noticing right away that it was weird of him to have been watching her long enough to time her. She moved instead to explain herself so she didn't look weird: "I'm… just meeting a friend."
"In there?" he asked, gesturing to the house.
"Yes."
"Well… do you like this friend? Cause you don't seem to be excited about it."
Jane felt a little stir of annoyance. Nosy. "It's fine. Thanks for checking."
It was a dismissal, but he didn't seem to notice. He just stared at her with lashless brown eyes for a few more seconds, then said, "Hey, I don't mean to be weird, but, uh…"
Oh, god, thought Jane, trying to remember where she'd packed the pepper spray and weighing the odds that she could shoot a stream out the window crack without fully gassing herself as well.
"…you wouldn't happen to be Jane Reilly, would you?"
She stared at him. It took her a second for the question to register, and another for the little rush of panic to dissipate. "Yeah…?" she said after a second, her voice small.
He grinned, a flash of teeth whiter even than his skin. "Oh, my god," he said, and put both hands up in a wait, pause gesture. "I saw you playing Elaine in Arsenic and Old Lace, like, a year and a half ago. I think I cracked a rib laughing. You were so good. Elaine doesn't usually even rate in the top three funniest characters of that show, but you stole the whole goddamn thing out from under everyone."
"Wait, really?" Jane said, breaking out into a smile of relief.
"Yeah, really," he said, like he couldn't believe she had to ask. "And then—flipped the script completely as Vera in And Then There Were None. So opaque. Impossible to read, impossible to look away from. I saw it twice."
"That's… wow," Jane said. "That's really nice to hear."
"Look at me, gushing," he said, straightening up. "You must get weirdos like me all the time."
"I do get weirdos, sometimes," Jane said, "but like… you're being really cool about it, actually. They usually want to, like, smell my hair, or be best friends without any of the background, you know? Less about the actual story and work and more about… I don't know, proximity to me?"
"Yeah, I could see that," he said. "Nothing to really offer, no creative instincts of their own so they gravitate towards you because all they can do is consume."
Jane didn't say anything to that, in part because it was exactly how she felt about a specific breed of fan but she was worried it would come across as too cunty and up-her-own-ass to say out loud. "Well," she said after taking a second to think of something diplomatic to say, "I'm not that famous. Enough that it's sort of nice that you recognized me."
"Yeah…" he said, thoughtfully turning to look at the big house, and after a second he clicked his tongue. "Kinda wish I hadn't, though. It'll make this harder to do."
Then he tapped her window with the edge of a gun she hadn't even seen him pull. She stared at the gun for a second, heart sinking, and then her eyes flew back up to his. "Are you serious," she said flatly.
"Unfortunately so," the man said, turning the gun so the barrel was pointing at her face through the glass. "Would you step out of the car, please?" Reflexively, Jane's eyes darted over towards the passenger seat, where her bag and phone—and pepper spray—were sitting, but the man said, "Please don't. Right now I'd say you've got like a ninety percent chance of survival, depending on what happens in there. You go for the bag and it drops down to, I dunno, fifty?"
A one in two chance isn't the worst thing in the world, she thought grimly, but ultimately, she chickened out. She reached for the door handle and threw open the door, sort-of-kind-of hoping to hit him with it (he stepped gracefully out of the way), and climbed out, glaring the whole time.
"Attagirl," he said as she looked desperately back towards the road in hopes of spotting a cop car, or even just regular commuters, but this place was well outside of the bustle of the city, and the usual crowd of reliable witnesses had dried up into nothing. "If you'll just… stand still and let me…"
He reached forward and patted her down—she was wearing an oversized sweater over a miniskirt, tights, and boots, not many places to hide weaponry, and the action seemed perfunctory on his part, like something he was doing out of habit or training, rather than because he thought she posed a real threat. Looking at him now, she couldn't believe she hadn't pegged him as ultra-suspicious before—the all-black outfit, given some perspective, looked less runway model and more ultra-assassin, with straps like bandoliers crisscrossing his chest and holsters and knife sheaths at his waist she hadn't noticed when he'd been bending down to look in through the window.
"Okay, good," he said, taking a step back once he'd determined that she was unarmed and giving her a once-over. "Jane, I'm Victor. I need to go into that same house where you're meeting your friend, but I'm… not exactly welcome there, at the moment. The plan is for you to act an insurance policy—"
"You mean a human shield?"
"—call it what you like," he said, barely pausing to register the interruption, "so I can get in and do what I need to do. Once that's done, I let you go. Bada-bing, bada-boom, we're done, you're none the worse for wear. Sound good?"
Weirdly, she actually did appreciate that he was giving her an outline of what was going to happen, though she wasn't about to tell him that. The last time she'd been taken hostage, she'd been left in the dark the whole time, and the fear of what might happen was way worse when you had no idea what your captor had planned, it turned out. "What is it that you need to do?" she asked, trying to sound as brave as possible (it mostly worked; her voice barely trembled, which was great progress that she mostly attributed to stage experience at this point).
"Oh. Um. Kill a guy. Don't worry," he hurried to say when she felt her face twist in horror and disgust. "He deserves it."
She felt her expression shift again, this time to one of skepticism. After a second, she said, "Can I just say that I am not on board with this at all."
"Duly noted," he said, and put his hand on her back, turning her around to face the mansion. "Stay close. Don't run. You can't outrun a bullet."
"Not gonna try."
She let him escort her forward to the black iron gate set in the high stone wall surrounding the property, moving surprisingly steadily, for all that her knees had turned to water. "Pause," he said when they got there, turning her around to place her back against the stones while he eyed a keypad set in the wall. "Get ready to climb," he added as he started punching in numbers. "He might not have changed the security code, so we'll give it a shot, but I'm guessing—oh, wow," he said as the keypad beeped and the gate started to creak open. "He didn't. Careless. Not gonna complain, though."
He took Jane's arm and steered her ahead of him, grasping her by the shoulder and moving her forward at arm's length, muttering as he went (to himself or her, she wasn't sure)—"Let's just see real quick if he's tightened security at all…"
Jane's heart pounded as they inched into the front courtyard, expecting at any second to hear a bang, a whiz, then lights out, her brains splattered backwards all over Victor's pale face, but they got inside and the gate creaked shut behind them, and nobody seemed to notice. The courtyard was empty; the house beyond it still. Little wisps of snow fell from the sky, a continuation of the teasing little flurries that had begun the day before, not enough to stick or to muffle the ambient noise of the city, just enough to make the wind bitter. Jane shivered as a gust cut through her tights, felt goosebumps forming on her legs.
"Nippy," Victor agreed. "Let's get inside." He started moving her again—not towards the front door, big and grand in front of them, but around the side. "Can I just say," he said as they moved along, slowly, carefully, "you're being remarkably chill about all this."
She was taken-aback for a second. She didn't think anyone had ever described her as chill in her life, let alone remarkably. "That's only the outside," she said once she found her voice. "In here it's like seven panic attacks happening at once." She tapped her head even as she realized that wasn't strictly true—she wasn't calm, exactly, more like too scared to panic. It helped that she didn't really have any decisions to make. He'd made it clear that she was just a passenger on this little trip of his; with a gun to her back, her responsibilities had been effectively removed. This emboldened her to add, "But it's also happened to me once before. I guess getting taken hostage has diminishing returns on freaking me out?"
"Oh, yeah," he said slowly. "I remember that. You got kidnapped because—isn't your dad that chode Mark Vanderholt?"
Jane surprised the hell out of herself by giggling, though she stopped as abruptly as she started. Inappropriate. "Um, yeah, though I don't think that's why they took me, they let me go without asking for ransom."
"Huh," he said. "Don't you use your mother's maiden name on stage?"
"It's my legal surname now. The petition went through six months ago."
"Congratulations," he said, a surprisingly sincere-sounding sentiment immediately undercut by what he said next. "But we all know who your dad is, anyway."
The reminder stung a little. She leaned into it. "Yeah. I guess that and the public kidnapping gave me a leg up in auditions, no matter whose name I used."
"Wow. An honest nepo baby. Good for you," he said, sounding approving. "If you've got privilege, might as well use it, right? One sec." They'd reached a little side door; he reached past her and tried the knob. It was locked. "Don't scream," he warned her, and lifted his gun, aimed at the knob, and pulled the trigger. It must have been suppressed, because the sound of pressurized air was loud, but nowhere near as loud as an open gunshot. The bullet punched right through the doorknob, obliterating the lock, and Victor pushed the door open.
"Why would I scream about that?" she asked, and he shrugged.
"Dunno. People can really freak out about guns going off. And it's a stressful situation. You're doing great, by the way." He paused, looking at her for a second, then said, "I hope this next part isn't too weird." Before she could start to worry about what he meant, he wrapped an arm around her neck, stepped in close, and put the gun close enough to her head that she could feel the warmth from its recent discharge. "Nice and easy, now."
The gun to her head really should have triggered a panic attack, but Victor defused it immediately when he said, "This isn't like a sexual thing, if that helps at all."
Just like that, Jane was too confused to panic. "…huh?"
"Cause I know you're gay," he said like he thought he was clarifying something as they crept inside, into a parlor empty of people but heavy on the dark furniture, low lighting, and creepy portraits. "And I'm—well. Hm. I'm not sure there's a label for what I am. Not straight, I know that much. Not a sexual threat to you, is the bottom line."
Again, she experienced the weirdness of feeling a little rush of appreciation for the guy who was using her as a hostage, though, again, she wasn't going to tell him that. Still, it was nice that he was laying everything out in the open before she could come up with a way to worry about it. "I didn't think you were," was all she said, and then he pulled her abruptly to a stop. After a frightened, breathless second, she realized why. She heard voices.
"Nice and easy," Victor whispered again, and moved her forwards into a little hallway. The voices grew clearer as they went along, sounded like a boy and a girl talking. Jane's heart sank all over again when they drew near enough that she could tell it was Isabel's voice, loud and clear.
"Why are you preheating the oven?" she was asking, and then: "Eight hundred degrees?"
"That's my friend's voice," Jane whispered, barely louder than a breath, scared to talk and invite Victor's ire but more afraid for Isabel. "Please… please, don't hurt her."
"It's not part of the plan," he whispered back, and then they eased through an open door into a kitchen.
Isabel was there, bare-faced and bed-headed, in a set of pajamas Jane had never seen before, looking cheerful and decidedly not in any trouble. She was at an island in the center of the room and someone was behind her, going through the fridge, blocked from view by the door. Victor and Jane's arrival drew her eye, and when she looked up, the blood drained visibly from her face. "Jane?"
"Isabel?" Jane asked, wishing her voice wasn't coming out so small. "What are you doing here?"
A raspy voice answered before Isabel could. "Aw, she was just missing her daily dose of Vitamin J—" and then the refrigerator door closed and Jerome Valeska revealed himself, slinging one arm over Isabel's shoulders. "Hi, Jane. How the hell are ya?"
His words fell like lead in the sudden silence. Jane hadn't seen him in person for more than two years, and she'd avoided any news coverage of him since, since even the thought of him made her feel vaguely sick, so the sight of him now was more than a little shocking. Gone was the baby-faced boy who looked at once angelic and impish; now his face was ridged with scars (she remembered, against her will, that it had been severed when he'd returned from the dead in January, good God, what was wrong with this city), his voice was a croaky rasp, and he seemed a lot bigger somehow. He was in gray sweatpants that looked a little too small and a white undershirt that showed off freckled, muscular arms and he seemed perfectly happy with his arm around Isabel.
More troubling (because he'd always had a thing for Isabel, it had been obvious from the first second he'd laid eyes on her), Isabel didn't seem threatened by or uncomfortable with this at all. She hadn't really gone into a ton of detail about what had happened after she and Jane had been separated—the last time Jane had actually seen them together, Isabel had just punched him in the face—but Jane knew that things had gotten weird and uncomfortable. She didn't know exactly how, and didn't want to ask and make her friend relive it, but given that Isabel never seemed to talk about it, she figured it must have been bad, and the way she had screamed and fought when Jerome's cult had come to abduct her that January just cemented the idea in Jane's mind. Now, though, watching Jerome hug her close without Isabel telegraphing any signs whatsoever of discomfort with it (something she was not shy about doing), Jane got the terrible feeling that she had misinterpreted just what uncomfortable and weird had meant.
She had no idea what to say. She had no idea what to do. Victor, in what was becoming a trend, soon removed the burden of making a decision from her shoulders. "Um, hi?" he said, waving the gun slightly. "Can we do my thing real quick?"
Isabel was already glaring at him, effectively snapped out of her surprise by the fact that he was holding a gun to her friend's head. "Who are you?"
"Don't worry about that," Victor said breezily. "Where's Oswald Cobblepot?"
Jerome slid his arm off of Isabel, leaning forward beside her to brace against his fists on the countertop instead as he squinted for a better look. "I know you. You're Victor Zsasz."
"And you've got to be Jerome Valeska," Victor replied.
"Who is Victor Zsasz and how do you know him?" Isabel asked Jerome without taking her hard stare off Victor. "And why does he have a gun to my best friend's head?"
"Not sure about that last part, but he's a famous assassin."
"How can you be a famous assassin?" Isabel asked with a touch of contempt.
"By being really, really fucking good at it," Jerome said, his expression turning admiring as he said to Victor, "I'm a huge fan of your work, man."
"Thanks, man," said Victor warmly. "I like yours, too. Really creative; you've got something special." Jerome put his hand to his heart like he was flattered as Isabel rolled her eyes. Victor poked Jane's head with the barrel of his gun again, making her flinch, and repeated, "Where's Oswald Cobblepot?"
"He's not here," Isabel exclaimed, her eyes flicking rapidly from the gun to Victor to Jane.
"Ah," said Victor reprovingly, like he was catching her in a lie, "he's always home on Saturday mornings."
"Maybe that's true when it's not two days before Christmas with snow in the forecast and a house full of asylum escapees," said Jerome with a shrug. "He knew if he had anything to do in the city he'd better get it done now. Just like us," he said to Isabel. "We're going in an hour, giving you a heads-up now."
"Going where?" asked Isabel.
"Are you serious?" asked Victor, and at Jerome's firm little nod in response, he slumped. "Well. Shoot." In one fluid move, he removed his gun from Jane's head, his arm from her neck, and stepped away from her. "Sorry about that, Jane, turns out I didn't need you after all. Is that coffee?"
He made a beeline across the kitchen to a bubbling coffee pot on the counter. Isabel, watching him warily, stretched a hand out to Jane, but given that getting closer to Isabel would also mean getting closer to Jerome and Jane was equidistant from both killers where she was, she stayed put. She couldn't quite believe that Victor had given up so easily, that he wasn't about to just gun them all down and call it a day, so she watched him, tenser than she'd ever been in her life, but he just opened a cabinet and removed a coffee mug like he'd lived here his whole life, flipping it up in the air and catching it before setting it on the counter, whistling idly and appearing to be perfectly comfortable with his back turned to them.
Isabel glanced at Jerome, a question in her eyes, and in response he pulled a little that's that, then face and shrugged. Seeing them communicate without speaking sparked something angry and ugly in Jane, something that only grew when Isabel shout-whispered "Jane" and re-extended her hand, like Jane could have possibly missed it the first time.
Jane still didn't move. Instead, staring hard at Isabel, she asked, "What are you doing with him?"
Nobody could be confused as to who him was. Victor, having poured his coffee, leaned back against the counter and took a sip, his dark eyes peeping over the edge of the mug as he watched the scene unfold with interest. Jerome and Isabel exchanged another quick little glance, then Jerome said, "I kidnapped her again. Obviously."
"No," Isabel said, giving him a little glare. "He didn't." Jerome smirked at her and didn't bother arguing.
Jane just stared, and when it became obvious that she wasn't just hearing things, she said, "Okay… so, what? You're here… what, on purpose?"
"Hey," said Jerome, raising his hand over his head, "I've got a question. How'd you find her?"
"I'm not talking to you," Jane said coldly.
"She must have tracked my phone," Isabel said in an aside to him, but Jerome shook his head.
"No—no, I took the battery out of that thing, like, instantly. Can't track something with no juice. Why do you look guilty?"
"I don't," said Isabel guiltily.
Jerome narrowed his eyes at her. "You did something, didn't you. You know, we're gonna have to have a conversation about that later."
"Hello?" Jane demanded. "Still waiting to hear why you're hanging out with our kidnapper?"
Isabel opened her mouth, shut it again, opened it again to say, "Jane…" Jane had no intentions of letting her out of the hot seat, though, and just waited. After a few more seconds, Isabel said, "Can we talk about this somewhere else?"
Victor straightened up like he was about to protest but Jane beat him to it. "Uh, no, we really can't," she said, crossing her arms and scowling. "What is going on?"
Isabel seemed at a loss for words. Jerome, in an undertone that was still clearly audible from all the way across the kitchen, said, "Now, I know I left some hickeys that one time, are you really telling me she didn't—"
"What!" interjected Jane, shrill enough to break glass.
Isabel whipped around, and if looks could kill—"I know you think you're helping," she hissed, swatting him on the chest, "but stop."
"I don't think I'm helping," said Jerome, rubbing his smacked chest with a wounded expression belied by the gleam in his eye.
"Are you two together?" Jane asked in horror.
"Define together," Jerome said, and exaggeratedly flinched back when Isabel turned on him like she was about to hit him again.
Back to Jane, she said, sounding a little desperate, "Look. I don't really know how to explain it. I guess… we bonded a couple of years ago, after they let you go, and then, when he was… resurrected, I guess, I eventually visited him a few times. I didn't want to say anything to you because it was only a few times, and he was in Arkham, so I didn't see the point in worrying you, but now he's out, and I don't want to lie and say I didn't want to go with him this time, because I don't want to do that to you. Or him. And because…" She dropped her eyes, and her voice lowered into a mumble as she said something else.
"Uh, sorry, what was that?" Victor said, cupping his hand around his ear. "Didn't catch it."
Isabel shot an utterly murderous look his way. "I wasn't talking to you," she snapped.
"No," Jane said icily, "you were talking to me, and I didn't catch it, either."
Isabel gave her a wounded look, but Jane wasn't in the mood to be nice right now. Eventually, with difficulty, Isabel said, "Because I think this is real."
Jane let that sit in the silence between them for a second, slowly pursing her lips and raising her eyebrows as Isabel squirmed. "The… situationship with the homicidal circus boy who kidnapped us two and a half years ago is real," she repeated, just to make sure she had it right.
Behind Isabel, Jerome was practically glowing with happiness. For her part, Isabel had crossed her arms and was starting to get a look that Jane hated—next-door-neighbor to a pout, a mulish little expression that said she wasn't backing down, regardless of whether she was wrong or right. "Yes," she said simply.
Jane went knives out. "Does he think that?" she asked, a nasty little edge to her tone.
She probably should have expected the outcome. Isabel glanced at Jerome, a little uncertainly, but he just arched his brows high and said, "I was saying it years ago. She's only recently come around."
Jane's gaze flicked from his rippled, scarred face to Isabel, who was trying to hide her reaction to hearing that—now she was practically glowing. Obviously they were honeymooning, making it easy to present a united front. She switched tacks, appealing instead to the common sense Isabel usually had and that must be hiding somewhere in that head of hers. "How much time do you think you guys have actually spent together?" she asked. "Like, combined?"
"Combined? …maybe three days?" said Isabel, a little bit softly, enough that Jane knew that she was hearing the craziness of it and wished she wasn't.
"Oh, it's gotta be four days by now," Jerome said, distinctly unembarrassed.
"Uh-huh," said Jane, chewing on her lip and watching them unhappily. "Uh-huh. Well, I guess I know why you didn't tell me about this. You knew I'd tell you that you were the one who belonged in the Asylum."
"Sick," Victor said. Jane got the distinct impression that if he hadn't been across the room from her he'd have given her a high-five.
"What, ninety-six hours and you think it's 'real?' What has he done to you? The Isabel I know would be slapping some sense into you right now. That's not enough time to know! And, oh my god, I'm catching the crazy," she said, tapping her temples with her fingertips. "Who cares how long it's been—he's a terrorist and a killer!"
"Well," interjected Victor, "let's not rule him out for those reasons. Terrorists and killers deserve love, too."
Isabel glared at him. "A and B conversation," she hissed. "C your way out."
"Nice one, babe," Jerome said, sotto voce.
Victor appeared completely unbothered. "Okay, so you're clearly using me as your scapegoat for whatever negative feelings this conversation is dredging up," he said. "Probably so you don't have to be mad at your friend. But maybe make a mental note that I was making a point in your favor."
"I don't need your help!"
He screwed up his face into exaggerated sympathy. "Mm, the way this conversation is going, it kinda seems like you do."
"We are straying off-topic," Jane said, exercising herculean effort to not start screaming her head off right then and there. "The point is, Isabel, that there's no way you're so dickmatized that you can't see all the reasons this is a terrible idea. You've literally always been my smartest friend. This cannot be your blind spot."
"It's not," Isabel said after staring at her for a long moment. "I'm not blind. You're right, it is a terrible idea. I know trouble's coming, probably soon. But…" Her eyes darted over to Victor, who was still paying close attention, and she sighed. "I hate that you're here for this," she muttered under her breath, then, at normal volume, she told Jane, "I've never had… y'know. This. Before. I'm not sure I can give it up."
"Would you like some help?" Jane said, her stare as hard as diamonds as she started advancing towards the island. Once again—two too many times for one day, for her whole life, if she was being honest—she found herself suddenly face to face with the barrel of a gun as Jerome clicked back the hammer of the revolver he was now pointing at her.
"Red light, Jane," he said. His expression had turned flinty, and Jane stopped short, suddenly remembering that she was fucking petrified of him. Easy to forget when he was acting like just some regular boy with Isabel, even despite his appearance.
"Hey, whoa," Victor said, drawing his own gun and aiming it at Jerome, which, if she wasn't so busy being scared, Jane might have found strangely touching.
"Stop with the guns," snapped Isabel, grabbing Jerome by the wrist and pulling his gun hand down—and to Jane's shock, he allowed her to, although he kept leveling that terrifying stare at Jane. Victor, in turn, lowered his weapon, though like Jerome, he kept it out and in his hand, ready to come back up at any second. Jerome kept glaring at Jane for a few more seconds, then Isabel must have pressed on his wrist or somehow signaled for his attention, because he looked at her instead for a moment, and they had another one of those infuriating silent exchanges.
Then Jerome looked back at Jane, pasting a gleaming white smile over that ugly expression. The result was somehow more frightening. "I think maybe we're all a bit too excited," he said, reaching forward with his other arm and hooking it around Isabel's collarbone, pulling her a step backwards into his chest with a casual air that did nothing to disguise the possessiveness of the move. "Isabel's free to go whenever she wants. But only if it's her idea." He drew his brows together and lowered his voice into something bossy and playful, like it would make Jane forget that he just had a gun pointed at her face. "No busybodies."
"Are you scared I'll get through to her?" Jane blurted, shocking herself—the words had come out before she'd really thought about them and gotten too afraid to say them.
Jerome smile shifted instantly into something sharp and poisonous that almost had her cowering again. "Why don't you try? Find out what happens."
"Jerome," said Isabel flatly. "Stop menacing my best friend."
Eyes still on Jane, Jerome leaned forward, pressing his mouth against the shell of Isabel's ear and muttering, not quite low enough for Jane to miss it, "You sure she's still your best friend?"
The fact that a shadow of uncertainty crossed Isabel's face hurt Jane more than anything else that had happened that morning. She felt the heat of tears rising in her eyes, and grasped instead for her anger, desperate to keep Jerome Valeska from ever seeing her cry again. Once again, though, Victor intervened.
"Augh," he said in faint disgust, setting down his coffee cup. "All that does is make me want espresso. What do you think, Jane? Since we both obviously wasted a trip out here—let me buy you breakfast, as, like, sorry I used you as a human shield?"
Isabel's eyes widened. "She's not going anywhere with you."
It was the worst thing she could have said. Jane was an admitted chickenshit, but she was also a world champion at cutting off her nose to spite her face; she'd been doing it for years under her father's roof. She asked Victor, "Can you really go out in public? You've got a pretty recognizable look."
He practically beamed. "Sure can. I mean, best to avoid the police precinct, you know, but I've got my watering holes. There's this café I know that makes killer vegan crêpes. They also do the best London Fog I've ever had, if that's your thing."
"Jane," Isabel pleaded, slipping out from Jerome's grasp—and he let her go easily, interesting—and coming around the island like she was planning to grab at Jane. Victor, barely looking at her, stopped her in her tracks when he smoothly lifted his gun again, putting her in his sights.
"Come on, man," complained Jerome, lifting his own gun and trailing it on Victor.
"Everybody stop with the guns!" Jane exclaimed in a near-shriek. Neither man actually lowered their weapon, but Victor made the concession of switching his aim to Jerome instead.
Isabel was focused on Jane again. "You can't go with him," she said. "Seriously, Jane—he's not just some harmless weirdo. He's an assassin."
Jane was so indignant she thought she'd choke on it. "I can't go with him… like you can't date a psychotic spree killer? Something like that?" Isabel had the gall to look like she'd been slapped, even as behind her, Jerome raised his eyebrows and pulled a thoughtful face, like she's got a point. "You know what? I'll make you a deal," said Jane, getting impossibly madder at her friend's silence. "I won't leave with him—if I'm leaving with you instead. We both walk out of here now, just us. What do you say?"
She expected Jerome to object again, but although he was watching Isabel with alert and dangerously sharp eyes, like he was ready to pounce on her at any second, he didn't intervene. Victor, too, remained silent, waiting to see how all this would play out. All eyes were on Isabel, who looked utterly miserable. She glanced back at Jerome, who responded by shrugging his shoulders, seemingly leaving the decision up to her.
She looked back at Jane. After a few false starts, she finally said, "Jane, please…"
Jane felt a rush of rage, hearing Isabel's decision in her tone. "Wow. Awesome. Choosing a boy over potentially saving us both. I hope you're proud of yourself. Victor, let's go."
"M'lady," he said as he sprang up from his lean against the counter—that, more than anything, made her doubt her decision to go with him, but she'd already committed to her course of action, and wasn't about to show weakness by changing her mind now.
"Jane," Isabel called after her, sounding raw and desperate, but she'd already had her chance. Jane whisked out of the kitchen, the assassin hot on her heels.
"That got intense," he said as they exited into the courtyard. "For what it's worth, though—Jerome Valeska isn't exactly known for sharing, and, well. You saw the look on his face. No matter what he said, he wasn't about to let her walk out of there, even if she'd wanted to."
"Still would have been nice for her to try," was Jane's clipped response as she ignored the stir of unease Victor's prediction awoke in her. "Should we take my car?"
They left through the gate, moving much faster now that they didn't have to worry about maintaining the captor-hostage arrangement. As Jane circled around to the driver's side of her car, Victor, standing at the passenger door, paused, looking at her over the car roof. "You don't actually have to go anywhere with me, you know." When she peered inquisitively at him, he put an earnest hand to his chest. "I mean, I'd love to hang out for a bit, pick your brain about what it's like, having a stage career, but I'd understand if you just agreed to get under her skin and just can't think of a way to back out now. Seriously, no pressure."
Funnily enough, Victor giving her the easy out made her not want to take it. She was still coasting on the flood of rebellion, still wanted to show Isabel what it felt like, having your best friend hanging out with a killer, and honestly, given the circumstances, Victor had been surprisingly considerate. She studied him for a second, chewing the inside of her cheek, and then said, "I've turned down some roles, you know."
His expression turned questioning. "Yeah," she said with a little nod. "Like, sometimes I can tell they're just drooling over me because of my dad. If I get that vibe, I'm out. I don't need that shit."
She wasn't sure exactly what she was trying to say, but Victor seemed to understand, nodding. "I get that."
Jane nodded back, then clicked the unlock button on her key fob. "All right, let's go."
Isabel was having a shitty, shitty day. Granted, not as bad as Gloria Bainbridge, but despite her best efforts, she hadn't been able to do anything about that. She could still save herself, though.
It had started off fine. Good, even. She'd jerked awake at around 10 am to find Jerome's face literally two inches in front of hers, his eyes wide open, staring at her. After glaring at him for a few seconds (she wasn't a morning person on the best of days, and waking up to anyone that much in her face was deeply disorienting), she'd snapped out of it enough to say, "Oh, wow. Your mouth looks way better."
"Burns heal fast," he said, unblinking. "You've got morning breath."
"Big deal," she groaned, rolling over and away from him. "So do you. I'm starving."
They'd gone down to the kitchen to scrounge up some breakfast, and that was when Jane arrived with an assassin on her tail. That had gone catastrophically, but somehow, after she left, the day got worse.
Upon returning from the little murder outing Jerome had toted her along on, Isabel made a beeline for the room they'd been sharing. She'd redressed in her clothes from the day before, so she didn't really have much to collect, but she wouldn't say no to transport out of here, and, battery or no battery, she would prefer to have her phone back. She figured she had a safe five minutes to search before Jerome came after her, and started searching the room for keys and her phone.
She figured wrong. Jerome must have been hot on her heels, because barely a minute passed before she heard the door creak slowly open. Isabel felt chills race down her spine immediately, but didn't want to give him the gratification of seeing her notice him, so she ignored him and kept searching.
"Um," he said after a few seconds. "What're you doing."
She also didn't want to give him the gratification of thinking she cared enough to actively ignore him, either, so she glanced coolly sideways at him for a bare second before resuming her search. "I'm tapping out. That was too much for me."
She practically heard him roll his eyes. "Oh, don't be a pussy," he said scornfully.
Just like that, she was too angry to keep up the pretense that she was indifferent to his presence. She straightened up, jabbed a finger at him, and said, "I did not sign up for whatever that was. I'm out."
He looked at her like he had her under a microscope for a second before his tone switched to conciliatory. "Maybe we should all calm down, huh?" Isabel, who felt very calm—just angry—scowled at him. Jerome turned to close the door, turning the lock firmly, a move that made Isabel nervous but also stoked the sense of anticipation she was feeling. "All right, let's do this," Jerome said with a sigh, turning back and starting to remove his coat. "One and done, though, hmm?" he said, wagging a scolding finger at her before moving on to strip his gloves. "I don't want to re-litigate this every time you get squeamish about something."
The audacity of him to act like this was just some casual couples disagreement would have taken her breath away if it wasn't so utterly predictable. "Fine," she said, her tone bright with chipper, biting sarcasm as she folded her arms over her chest. "You want to try and sell me on what the fuck just happened?"
His eyebrows arched high. "You want to try and tell me you weren't expecting it?"
"That, specifically? No. Jerome, what was that? That shit was like a horror movie." She felt a stab of ice in her belly at the memory, the way the lady he'd sprayed had laughed and laughed until the blood drained from her head and her mouth split wide open across her face. Isabel had been so freaked and upset that she'd even tried to take a swing at Jerome, finding herself held back by Fries, who was either supernaturally strong or powered by the suit he wore, because his grip had rendered her almost completely immobile, and all she could so was shout and scream out her horror and rage, drowned out by the screams of the other civilians Jerome had abducted. Eventually, the woman had slumped to a lifeless heap on the floor of the van, and Jerome had tasked half of the Horribles to tend to the remaining hostages, returning home with the others and Isabel.
"Glad you asked," Jerome said now, his eyes beginning to shine. "That's a little project I've been working on for some time. Collaboration, really," he added generously. "Without Jonny, I wouldn't have gotten very far. Now—I know you're not in the mood to appreciate it right now, Isabel, but you witnessed history. Truly."
And now she knew this was a bad scene, because she legitimately couldn't tell if he was fucking with her (he could easily be; he never seemed to be able to resist even when it was in his best interests) or if he honestly expected her to be impressed with his little serial killer moment. "Okay," she said softly, tightening her arms around herself. "Well, I hated it. And I don't want to be a part of whatever this is anymore. So I want my phone back, and I want to go."
Jerome stared at her. She'd been trying not to notice that he hadn't moved away from the door and was effectively blocking her exit, but it was getting harder as the tension in the room grew. She didn't want to tip him off to the fact that she'd become aware of their unfortunate positioning, because it felt like that would escalate thing much more quickly than she was prepared for them to escalate, so she worked on standing perfectly still, looking calm and resolved and, most importantly, in control. She wasn't sure if he was buying it, but she was prepared to fake it as if he was until proven otherwise.
After a significant pause, Jerome took a quick breath and said, "Well, I think maybe you should reconsider." Her frown deepened, which he seemed to take as an invitation to elaborate. "Sure. Jane's little… visit, it clearly shook you up." He drew his face down into a cartoonish frown. "All those nasty things she said. Anyone would be a little disturbed. I think you should sleep on it before making any big decisions, don't you?"
He was right in thinking Jane's visit had upset her, and dead wrong in thinking the visit had anything to do with the afternoon that had followed, and her decision to leave now. "It's not about Jane," she said with a long sigh, making a snap, last-ditch decision to be totally sincere with him and hope for the best, even though her instincts told her that was a fool's wish. "It's about what it's always about. We've been putting it off, but we've run into a dead end now. I can't stomach murder. And you can't stop."
"You can't, or you won't?" asked Jerome softly. It was only a few days after the winter solstice, and dark had come early outside despite the fact that it was only about 4:30, and neither of them had bothered with the overhead light, so the lamp that was the only light source in the room cast eerie shadows on his face.
Isabel felt the same misgiving that characters in horror movies might feel just before entering a dark basement, but she was no coward, and besides, the only way out of this now was through it. She knew for sure that his question was a trap, and that answering it would put her on the defensive—she wasn't interested in that at all. She wasn't the one who'd gone homicidal killer; she wasn't the one who'd forced this fight. "I can't imagine how that would matter," she said stubbornly.
"Oh, but it does," he said, eyebrows darting up earnestly. "Because it's not can't, is it, Izzy? It's just won't. It's always been won't."
"It doesn't matter whether it's can't or won't because the end result is the same," she said, keeping a firm hold on her temper. "I'm not gonna just stand aside and let you murder people."
He was leaning his shoulders back against the door now, and shrugged, arms crossing over his chest. "Okay. So I'll do it behind your back." She glared at him—that was not a solution, and he knew it—but he wasn't done. "Is that what you wanna hear? Is that what you need so that your conscience—" he pronounced the word with a mocking sneer— "will let you fall asleep at night? Because, newsflash, Isabel, I've been killing people the entire time you've been with me, just not right in front of you. We could go back to doing that."
"We really can't," she snapped.
"Why? Cause you know it's happening now? It doesn't count if you don't know about it? Jesus, Izzy, what are you, two years old? You're smarter than this. People die all the time, with or without me. Most of them deserve it."
"I'm not willing to be the kind of person who's happy deciding whether random people should live or die!" she said, raising her voice now. "I can't believe that you are."
"Oh, sure, but you didn't shed a tear for Billings, I bet," he said, pinning her with a hot, unblinking stare. "The lady I gassed today, y'know, Mother of the Year? She campaigns so queer kids on the street can't get into shelters, you wouldn't piss on her if you walked past and she was on fire, but suddenly, cause I'm the one who set the fire, you're all on a moral high horse, ya fuckin hypocrite," he snapped, jerking a hand out towards her in a gesture of contempt.
"Don't even pretend like you're, what, some kind of freedom fighter, picking targets for the greater good," she snarled.
"Yeah? Well, don't pretend like you're some kind of saint who actually cares if these people live or die," he snarled right back. "You want to think you're good, Iz; you get off on 'giving back,' on being the bad girl made good, but I haven't forgotten. I still see you for who you really are. You're just like me. You see someone who deserves it get their teeth kicked in and your blood sings. I know it does."
"I can think of someone who deserves to get their teeth kicked in right now."
Jerome ignored her. "You can admit it to yourself, and step into the life you're meant to be living—or you can keep denying it, and be just like everyone else. Just like everyone who's ever disappointed me. Everyone I've stepped on on my way up." He shrugged again, feigning boredom, though his eyes were still white-hot and angry. "Up to you."
"Oh, give me a fucking break," Isabel said loudly—she was playing with fire, and she knew it, but all she wanted to do at the moment was make him angrier, make him feel like she felt. "What, am I supposed to try to prove myself to you now?" She laced her hands in front of her chest as if in supplication and, in a plaintive whine that grated on even her nerves, said, "Please, Jerome, I'm not like everyone else! I'm not like the other girls, I'm not like the people who let you down, I'm not like Jeremiah, I'm not like your fucking mommy." He took a fast, erratic step forward at that, face contorted into a truly vicious scowl, and she wasn't so steely-nerved that she didn't take a quick step back out of his reach, though she didn't shut up, either, dropping the whine so he knew she was dead serious. "I've been proving myself to you this whole time. Every time, I've chosen you, Jerome. I chose you over a job I love—I'm definitely super fired now. I chose you over Jane today, do you know how insane that is?"
"You're not choosing me now."
"Because you're not choosing me! You're choosing, just, killing anyone you feel like it, whenever you feel like it, and I just get to be okay with that! It doesn't work for me, Jerome! Every time, I'm sick to my stomach. It should never have happened; I shouldn't have stuck around for even one more corpse after Greenwood."
"Who I killed for you," he said watching her like she might vanish if he took his eyes off her for even a millisecond.
"Who I didn't ask you to kill for me."
"You didn't have to. He had to go, so I made the call. I'll keep making that call until you finally come around and admit it to yourself." She shook her head, but her tank was running on empty, and Jerome took another long step forward, crowding close into her personal space now, reaching out and pressing his long, pale fingers against both lines of her jaw. She reflexively tried to drop her gaze; he lifted her face up, forcing her to meet his eyes.
The anger had been swallowed up into something she'd seen in him before, something not quite hungry, more like the rotted version of hungry. She felt a pulse of fear in her belly, reaching its roots out into all of her limbs. She still didn't believe he would hurt her physically (if he hadn't done anything after that crack about his mom, she didn't think he ever would), but he didn't have to hurt her physically to do some damage right now, not when she was scared and off-kilter and wanted nothing as much as she wanted him to make it so she could stay, so that the huge wall that was always going to crop up between them suddenly didn't matter anymore.
"Isabel," he rasped, his nose nearly bumping against hers. "What do you want from me?"
"I want you to care about people other than yourself," she said, not trusting herself to speak much louder than a whisper—worried that her voice would betray something to him that she hadn't even pinned down and understood herself.
"I care about you," he said simply, as if the admission wasn't all she'd wanted to hear from him for a whole year, as if it wasn't utterly devastating to hear now.
"I want you to care about people other than yourself and me," she amended.
He leaned back slightly, looking distinctly unimpressed. "Okay. Well. That's insane, you get that, right? I mean, where does it stop?"
"It doesn't!" she said with a despairing little laugh. "That's the whole point. Choosing to hate everyone, to not care if they live or die? That's easy. People are hateable. Choosing to care about them even though they're hateable, that's the hard work. That's the work that makes a difference."
He paused. Still cradling her face in both hands, his face slackened a little bit, went distant for a few seconds as he seemed to lose himself in thought. Then, he snapped back into himself, and he was shaking his head. "Uh-uh. Sorry. Nope. We're just never gonna agree on this, Isabel; might as well make peace with it now."
"That's what I've been saying," she said, hating the quiver in her voice. "It's insurmountable. We aren't going to move past it."
"Oh, sure, we are. We'll just ignore it like we have been doing."
"Until the next time you execute someone in cold blood right in front of me?" she asked bitterly. "Then I'll just be expected to get over it, and you keep doing whatever you want to do, just like always? Does that sound fair to you?"
He frowned a playful little frown and touched the tip of his nose to hers. "Fairly sure I offered to do it behind your back from now on."
"Even if I could accept that, you're in love with spectacle," she said, shaking her head. "That might work for a week." He wasn't taking her seriously at all, and his grip on her wasn't loosening—he just stared at her, waiting her out, waiting for her to give in. That icy fear in the pit of her stomach was growing, tingling and strange. Because it was Jerome—because despite everything, she'd always been able to tell him anything and rely on him to understand what she meant, even if he didn't agree—she spoke her thoughts out loud, as dangerous as they were. "I'm really, really scared of you right now."
He grinned at that, the corners of his eyes crinkling with pure delight, the long slits at the edges of his mouth seeming to stretch now across his whole face. The fear in her belly shot down, morphing—upsettingly—into something warmer, something more dangerous. "I want to ask you to let me leave," she continued, "but I'm scared if I do, then you won't let me go."
"I think you're lying to me, Isabel," he said, close enough now that she thought she could feel the faintest brush of his lips against hers. "I think it's the opposite. I think you don't want to ask me to let you leave… because you're terrified I will."
He drew back slightly, and nodded, continuing to nod at her until she was nodding along with him. She wasn't sure if it was because she believed he was right, or because she wished she did. "Good girl," he muttered, and pulled her forward, pulling her mouth right against his.
He wasn't fucking around tonight, either. He clearly had no intention of starting slow and teasing, like the last time he'd kissed her—he thrust his tongue full into her mouth, almost choking her, almost more than she could handle, and simultaneously pushed her backwards with his body, hard and fast enough that in seconds the backs of her knees hit the bed, and she fell backwards with a gasp. Before she could even try to recover her balance, he was following her down, the weight of his body settling on top of her, his mouth finding hers again immediately.
The intensity should have frightened her—and it was frightening her, a bit, but the fear was swallowed up by arousal, warm in her core and thrumming out in hot, steady ripples to the tips of her fingers and toes. She tried to gain some equilibrium by reaching up with her hands, skimming along the sides of his face, but lightning-quick, he caught her wrists and pinned them down to the bed above her head, which unfortunately only turned her on more, more so when he switched his grip on both wrists to one hand and reached down with the other to paw at her breasts. The rough handling should have soured the whole thing for her, likely would have with anyone else, but with him, she just pressed up into his touch, testing his grip on her wrists as she did and perversely satisfied to find that she couldn't budge him.
That answers that question, she thought in a haze. She knew Jerome had submissive tendencies, she'd exploited and enjoyed them a few times already, but she had occasionally wondered—especially after seeing the top dog approach he always seemed to employ with his colleagues—if those tendencies were exclusive, or if he liked to switch them up. Mystery solved.
Isabel herself was bossier than not, and hadn't historically seen the appeal in ceding control to even her most trusted partners. There were myriad significant ways in which she didn't trust Jerome, but she was realizing right this second that sexually wasn't one of them. She let him hold her down and kiss her like he was punishing her for something, and she liked it too much to feel even a bit weird about the unexpected switch-up.
Eventually, he came up for air—she'd caught his bottom lip between her teeth, and sucked on it a second before letting him pull fully away—and she took a second to admire the way his pupils had dilated, turning his green eyes near-black. They were both breathing hard by now, and she took a second to catch her breath before telling him, "This isn't going to fix anything."
He rolled his eyes and leaned down to catch her earlobe between his teeth, before sucking on the spot just below her ear that made her gasp and shift her legs so that he was slotted between them instead of on top of them—easier that way to grind against the welcoming hardness in his pants. His breathing quickened in her ear at the new pressure, and she turned her head slightly to whisper in his: "This is only going to make everything worse."
He rose slightly, looking down at her with pitch-black sincerity. "I love it when things get worse."
As long as we're both clear on that, she thought dizzily as he released her wrists and reached down for the button on her pants. She helped him peel off her pants (at some point, mindlessly, she'd already kicked off her boots) and her top, then, feeling that it was unfair that she was the only one in a state of undress, she started working on the buttons of his shirt. She'd gotten them undone and had slid his shirt off his shoulders, was reaching for hem of his undershirt, when he grabbed both her hands and said "Wait, wait, wait."
She froze, already mentally running through a list of potential things she could have done wrong. Jerome looked very seriously into her eyes and said, "You're not a cop, are you? You have to tell me if you're a cop, otherwise it's entrapment."
By way of response, Isabel jerked his overshirt over his head and left it there, covering his face. Not funny. He chuckled low in his chest, whipped the shirt off the rest of the way, then leaned forward to kiss her again—she could feel him grinning against her mouth, so pleased with himself, and nipped his lower lip in reproof. He growled at her, a sound that went straight to her knees.
For a while they stayed that way, making out messy and warm, enjoying the new sensation of skin on skin. Isabel could quite possibly have been content like that forever, in stasis, without having to worry about either the before or after, but after a while Jerome rose on one knee, gripped her tight by one soft thigh, and dragged her down to the foot of the bed. Her heart felt like it was going to beat its way out of her chest as she watched him kneel on the floor in front of her, suddenly all business as he pulled her underwear down and off and grabbed one knee to pull her legs apart. He licked a warm, wet stripe down the inside of her thigh, and then, agonizingly, he paused, looking up at her with a mischievous glitter in his eye. "If you still want to go," he said with irritating earnestness, "you can leave right now."
"Jerome," she said, something of the old waspish exasperation rising in her tone as she glared at him, "for once in your life, do something more useful with your mouth than ta—"
The word ended in a sharp gasp as he proceeded to do just that. She threw her head back and grasped tight at the rumpled covers on either side of her as her whole body seemed to turn into electricity, energy humming through her, little jolts shocking through her thighs, her stomach. Jerome wasn't fussy, eating her out like it was a pleasure rather than a chore, and the sounds he made as he took his time, obscene slurps and low groans of pleasure, fired Isabel up and brought her to the edge faster than she thought possible. She was beginning to feel the telltale signs of orgasm—muscles tensing in her thighs, that point in her middle tightening, tightening, building up to a climax—
And Jerome stopped. She should have anticipated it, really, given his entire nature, but still, she raised her head and gave him the most woeful, wounded look she could muster. Wiping his mouth casually on the back of his arm and looking horribly smug, he said, "Told you I knew where it was."
She dropped her head hard back onto the mattress. To the ceiling, breathing hard, she said, "I think I get the murder thing now."
He laughed out loud—not his typical high-pitched, performative cackle, but instead a low, almost affectionate snicker that seemed to make her skin hum—and climbed back onto the bed, onto her, and despite her annoyance, she welcomed him back, putting her arms around him and tasting the warm, earthy taste of herself on his tongue. She shifted her legs again, cradling his hips between her knees, then broke away with mild annoyance. "Your pants are still on," she whispered against his mouth. "That's a problem."
"Easy enough to fix," he said with a shrug, and rose up on his knees to unbuckle himself. Before she really got a chance to admire, he pressed a kiss to her mouth, said, "Hold on a sec," and left her, going across the room to where he'd left his coat, rifling through the pockets.
He was back in a flash, and when she saw what he was holding, she let out a breathless little giggle. "Wait," she said, "you really got condoms?"
"Well, yeah," he said, huffing out a little laugh, again nothing like his showy deranged cackles, again weirdly normal, weirdly human. "All that talk about potential twins—you scared me. I mean, your kid would probably be fine, but I don't want to gamble on another me. Do you?" He grabbed the condom wrapper between his teeth and tore it open.
"Not really," she conceded, wondering if she should tell him that she'd gotten the implant in her arm the day after she'd first visited him at Arkham and scrapping the idea immediately. The more protection they had going for them, the better (she wouldn't put it past him to have superhuman sperm), and besides, she didn't want him to look too closely into the timing of her birth control decisions (although if she was being honest with herself, any conclusions he drew about it would be correct). "Just—ugh—go."
He didn't need to be told twice. He rolled the condom on, grabbed her hand and pinned it over her head again, twining his fingers with hers, then finally—finally—sank into her.
Isabel was borderline pissed off to find out that the cheeseball romance writers some of her friends favored might have had a point. She'd had plenty of sex before, with boys and girls, bad and neutral, satisfying and good, she'd always thought sex was just sex and all the emotional shit was largely played up, but it was different now, with Jerome. The feel inside of him buried to the brim inside of her lit her up, made her feel whole in the way she'd always thought must be just bullshit. She moaned a little moan of frustration at the slick pull of him drawing out, the little shock of him thrusting back in.
"What?" Jerome panted, ever in tune with her, clearly aware that the sounds she was making weren't just sounds.
"I don't want to tell you," she said sullenly, then caved instantly when he leaned down and kissed that spot below her ear again. "Ugh," she yielded, catching her breath between sentences. "Don't make fun of me for this. You're perfect. I'd really hoped you wouldn't be."
Jerome leaned back to catch her eyes. He looked smug, but also like a kid on Christmas, which just made everything so much worse. "No, you didn't."
"No," she agreed, holding his stare. "I didn't."
He lowered his mouth to hers again, and she rose up to meet him gladly. It only took a minute or two more, Jerome's mouth moving to her neck, then sucking at her earlobe, before she delivered on the temptation his tongue had offered earlier, coming hard and long. Jerome joined her after a minute as she worked through the aftershocks, growling in her ear and flattening her body with his as he came too.
They lay there in half-stunned, fucked-out silence for a minute or two, catching their breath. Jerome, predictably, was the one to break it, his words half-muffled by the skin of her neck as he said "Nice work, Izzy. Ready for round two?"
A/N - Jerome's little "I don't think I'm helping" moment was a joke directly lifted from a Lord of the Rings tumblr post (it was Legolas's line).
Next up: Isabel and Jerome renegotiate and enmesh further. Jerome takes his POV back (tired of only Isabel getting a say). Snow arrives, and they go for a visit. I think it's my favorite chapter- and definitely the one with the most trigger warnings. See you then :)