A/N - for some reason, there still appears to be issues with viewing chapter 8! If you try to visit it and get a "chapter not found" notice, try erasing "I-m-Your-Man" from the URL. for me that makes it come up.
this is a big one for potential triggers. Please read the following warnings carefully and read responsibly.
tw: an explicit discussion of self-harm, specifically cutting. A character talks in some detail about how, in their perception, cutting was beneficial to them. This is not an indicator or a sign that you should start or resume cutting or any other form of self-harm.
tw: descriptions of child abuse involving alcohol
tw: descriptions of grooming
tw: a very vague, non-detailed allusion to past CSA
these are almost all just discussed in a long conversation and not things that are actively happening to characters, I just don't want to inadvertently cause distress. ok done now, proceed as you will!
9.
Yeah, you!
In the middle of the night I get a craving and I wake up for you. – alt j | Bane
Jerome was just talking shit, of course—even he couldn't go again so soon—and after a quick break to clean up, they were back in bed. He lay face-down, one arm wrapped around a pillow, so still that Isabel was pretty sure he was asleep already. She sat upright beside him, wrapped in a sheet, her back against the headboard, looking at the ceiling, feeling the flood of endorphins fading comfortably into the background and reality rushing back into sharp focus.
Well, that solved exactly nothing. In fact, her warning to Jerome that sex would just make the situation worse was proving immediately prescient. She'd had a vague idea that maybe once they'd gotten it out of their systems, she could just quietly collect her stuff and sneak out, but that had been the pipe dream of all pipe dreams. He was far, far from out of her system. Maybe it was just her, but she felt like they were more tightly stitched together now than ever, and got the feeling that getting up and going would feel something like ripping herself in half and leaving one of the pieces behind.
Stupid. How could she have been so stupid? She'd finally taken a strong position, then immediately undermined it. It was humbling, the realization that she wasn't above making dumbass decisions about a guy the way she'd thought she was. Jane was right. Dickmatized.
She didn't get to self-flagellate for long—she hadn't noticed that Jerome had cracked an eye open and was watching her till he spoke up out of nowhere: "Maybe don't stare at the ceiling like a shellshock victim. Makes a guy start to worry about what he did wrong."
She managed to put aside her inner turmoil for long enough to whack him with a pillow, which he just grabbed and tossed backwards onto the floor. "You didn't do anything wrong. Not in the last half-hour, anyway."
He read her tone and immediately shifted, turning onto his side facing her. "Oh, that's interesting. So you did?"
"I should have left," she said honestly.
He narrowed his eyes a little. "Buyer's remorse, huh? Kind of a bruise to the ol' ego, but don't you worry about me, I'll survive."
She rolled her eyes. "You were good and you know it. That's not what I'm talking about; you know that, too."
"I think the word you actually used was 'perfect.'"
She buried her face in her hands. "I knew I was gonna regret telling you that." He reached up and peeled the hand closest to him off her face, tucking it warm against his chest and holding it there. Isabel glanced over, watching him watching her, his pupils contracted down again so that the green of his eyes really stood out, especially this close. He seemed calm and relaxed, and also seemed like he was perfectly content waiting for her to say what she really wanted to say.
She obliged. "You made your point. I don't think I can leave you. Even if I can, I don't want to."
A slow grin crept over his face. "That good, huh?" he asked, performative arrogance, she thought, to cover the look of very real pleasure that crested his eyes at hearing her finally admit it.
"It doesn't make our problem go away," she pointed out.
"Buzzkill," he accused her. "And we were having such a nice time."
"It's gonna keep coming up. And I think it's gonna get uglier and uglier every time."
"Hmm." His eyes turned distant, the way they did when he got stuck in his own head, as he idly lifted the back of her hand to his mouth and left it there, pressed to his lips. She waited him out, her heart rate picking up again some as she watched him, as she felt the foolish—truly brain-dead—hope that maybe, somehow, he would pull something out of his endless bag of tricks that could fix this for them.
And impossibly, in a way, he came through. After maybe a minute, his eyes refocused on her, and he lowered her hand from his mouth to say, "Out of curiosity, Izzy: what is it that you think leaving would accomplish?"
She stared at him. "I don't understand what you're asking."
He started to say something, then appeared to think better of it and cut himself off. After one more false start (by then, Isabel was burning with curiosity), he finally said, "Look. Don't jump down my throat over how this sounds. I'm not saying stay or else," he said, pitching his voice mockingly growly and low to distinguish the threat from the rest of what he was saying, then going back to his normal baritone rasp, "but don't you think things go better for everyone else when you're here than they do when you're not?"
Realization was beginning to dawn, but she didn't have anything to say just yet, and he went on: "I mean, look at Carl. I was gonna kill him before you stepped in, now he lives to fight another day. I can only imagine how many plans of mine you're going to ruin in the future." He paused, his forehead furrowing as he frowned. "Hm. Hadn't thought that through. Maybe you should go."
"If I thought I'd even reach the threshold before you were dragging me back inside, I might try," she said almost absent-mindedly, watching him with a narrow little stare as she turned the idea he was offering her over and over in her mind.
He shrugged. "Just sayin'. You could take some big, moral stand by leaving, and maybe you'd even feel good about it, but practically it would amount to jack shit. If you stay where the action is, you'd have a better chance of stopping the things you don't like. Not a great chance," he admitted. "But, y'know. Better than if you're not around at all."
Her eyes narrowed further. "And me constantly trying to ruin your schemes isn't going to piss you off?"
"I'm sure it will," he said cheerfully.
"Jerome."
"Isabel?" he replied, low and warm.
"I'm serious," she said, a declaration he met by pulling his mouth and brows down into a "taking-this-seriously" frown. "I don't think you're thinking this through. Like, I can't see me intentionally putting you in danger, or turning you in or getting you caught, but there's a lot I could do to gum up the works besides that. If I stay—if—" she said, jabbing a threatening finger towards his face—"you'd be working with a permanent handicap. What, you're just… cool with that?"
He thought about it for a few seconds. "Yeah, sounds good," he said, brightly, at last.
Isabel wasn't convinced. "I'm going to keep freaking out whenever you try to kill someone. We're gonna keep having this fight."
"If it ends the same way every time, I'm fine with that."
"It won't."
"Not with that attitude. Party pooper." She didn't really think about the fact that she was frowning until Jerome reached up and poked the little wrinkle between her eyebrows. "Stop," he complained. "We fixed it. It's going to be fine."
"I'm one hundred percent sure we didn't fix it, and it's not going to be fine," she said.
"…but?" he asked, watching her closely.
"But," she allowed. "You may have a point. One I hadn't really considered before. I don't know." She frowned deeper. "I'm willing to try it," she said finally.
"Attagirl."
"But for the record, I still think this is going to implode."
"Oh, so what?" he said, finally starting to sound a tad grouchy. "We'll do it till it doesn't work anymore. Could be tomorrow. Could be fifty years from now."
"Probably not fifty years."
"Probably not," he agreed. "In the meantime, shaddup and roll over. I want a power nap."
"I wasn't the one who started yapping in the first place," she muttered, but she slid down and turned onto her side anyway, and he fitted his body behind hers, pillowing his head on one arm and hugging her close around the collarbone with the other. She dipped her chin down to idly kiss his freckled forearm, and felt him relax into silence against her, his slow exhale stirring her hair.
She felt better. She felt guilty for feeling better. She had the creeping sense that she was taking the easy way out, that she'd only accepted his justification for her staying because she already wanted to stay, and that no matter what they'd decided, the right thing to do, the moral thing to do, would be to leave. You couldn't be in a relationship with a known killer and be a good person. Those two things just didn't go together, no matter what way you tried to twist them to make them fit.
"Stop tensing up," Jerome said from behind her, sounding half asleep already. "It's like spooning a block of wood."
"Mind your own business," she said reflexively, and he bit the shell of her ear in retaliation before subsiding. He was right, though. Obsessively thinking it through wouldn't change anything tonight, and it was dark outside (she doubted they'd sleep through the night—it was only 5 PM—but a nap sounded good), and he was warm and solid against her. She closed her eyes and tried to relax, to live in the moment, where things were currently good.
The bad could wait. It certainly wasn't going anywhere.
Just after midnight, Isabel sat again with her back against the bed's headboard while Jerome, sprawled on the floor beside her with his elbows on the edge of the bed, drew on her legs with a black sharpie he'd found and pocketed all the way back at Meyer & Hayes and had just rediscovered in his coat pocket. Over his objections, she'd covered up with his shirt ("I'm not just wandering around tits-out all night, Jerome, that's not fun for me," she'd said, which he thought was stupid, but whatever)—he was slimmer than she was, given the aforementioned tits and an overall softness she had that he totally lacked, but she'd done a few buttons where her waist dipped in, enough to keep everything important covered. She was playing with his hair, which she'd told him had too much gel in it (not that that was stopping her), and seemed lost in thought. That was happening a lot to her tonight.
Jerome didn't mind. He was enjoying the opportunity to get up close and personal with her legs, which he'd always had a fondness for, scrawling out violent scenes (stick men getting sucked into a tornado, stick men stuck in a fire, stick men getting chopped in half with a ninja sword) and also making the occasional note about his post-Christmas plans as they occurred to him, because he didn't want to forget and figured he'd probably be seeing her legs a lot between now and then, so it was a good place to jot them down.
He'd noticed something when he started, an aberration, high up on the insides of both thighs, almost up to the crease where they met her pelvis, clearly designed to stay hidden—it took him a moment to identify the shining white marks there as scars, because they weren't exactly like any he'd seen before. They looked like neat rectangles, spanning half the width of her inner thigh, and it was only when he looked closer that he realized that the shapes were made up of dozens of straight little lines, cut meticulously one at a time into her skin to add up to the overall shape. He couldn't count how many there were in total. In fairness, it could have been just a plain old body mod, but he'd clocked the way she tensed up when she noticed him noticing, and the scars were older, white instead of pink, and he knew his scars, knew that the way they looked put them at five or six years old—she'd been doing this at age fifteen or sixteen, a little young to be into scarification for beauty purposes. Not too young to hide an x-acto blade in the bathroom, though.
Because she was clearly scared he was going to say something about it, he hadn't, shrugging it off and filing it away in a quiet place in his mind for later use and returning his attention to his drawing. She'd slowly relaxed, and by now, in between bouts of thoughtful silence, was asking him questions, some of which he liked, others, less so. (At any rate, he liked to listen to Isabel talk. She had a nice voice, mellow and calm, when she wasn't yelling at him, anyway. Not that he much minded that, either.)
"What horrible thing do you have planned for tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow—today—" he amended after a quick glance up at the clock hanging in their room to see that they were already in the AM hours—"is Christmas Eve, so. Yanno. Nothing."
"Nothing, really?"
"Yeah, really. The city's basically shut down for the holiday, especially if it dumps down snow tomorrow like it's supposed to. Nothing fun going on at all—believe me, I checked. We're staying put for the next couple days."
"Don't sound so grim," she remarked, sounding amused. "Like you're talking about your own funeral. What happens after that?"
"After my funeral?"
Her nails scraped his scalp, pulling a little growl out of him. "After Christmas."
He lifted the marker off her skin as he answered so that he wouldn't get distracted and ruin his drawing. "Obviously I'm not gonna tell you anything now. Not with you waiting around to jam a stick in the spokes."
She looked at him suspiciously. "Does it have to do with Jeremiah?"
"Yes," he sighed at the reminder of his brother, returning the marker to her leg. "It has to do with Jeremiah." He had very genuinely considered scrapping the plan completely and going solo back out to that compound to finish the job without having to wait two days to do it, but had reluctantly decided that there'd been too much work involved and it was too good a plan to just ditch at the last second. Besides, he'd bet his eyeteeth that Gordon had Jeremiah squirreled away to a little hiding place by now. The current plan accounted for that reality; running half-cocked off to Jeremiah's little torture labyrinth again didn't. She was right, though, he'd never been very good at being bored. If the prospect of being holed up with Isabel all weekend hadn't been so inviting, he couldn't have sworn to it that he wouldn't just jump the gun and do something reckless instead.
"Something occurred to me earlier," she said after a while.
"Tell me," he murmured.
"The night you came to get me, I'd been out drinking."
"Yes?"
"Well… I mean, I obviously wasn't thinking about it at the time, but is that like a trigger for you or something? Like, people smelling like booze or being drunk around you?"
"No," he said, screwing up his face dismissively at the idea that he might have any triggers. "Just don't be a sloppy drunken wreck, but that's a good rule of thumb in general. It's not like I'm a teetotaler, myself. Actually," he amended rapid-fire, "I sort of am, but that has more to do with the acrobats than Mom."
Isabel's hand stilled on his head. "The acrobats?"
"Yeah," he said, distracted by his efforts to do detailed shading on the depiction of Jeremiah's severed head that he'd sketched right above her left knee—he wanted the blood placement on the neck stump to be tasteful. "I was… hmm, dunno how old. Maybe eight. I know it was before my brother left, because he didn't want to play, so I was looking for something fun to do. I told you about acrobats, right?"
"They party," Isabel recollected with a tone of misgiving.
"They party," he agreed decisively. "And one night, y'know, I was already a cocky little shit, I just strolled up and asked to join them. And they let me. Gave me everclear."
"They gave you everclear?" Isabel repeated, her voice jumping up into a register he hadn't known she could reach.
"Or some sort of grain alcohol," he said with a shrug. "All the same thing, really. I thought I was hot shit, being included by the adults, so even though it tasted like hell and burned twice as bad, I choked it down. Course I didn't know they just thought it was funny to watch a little kid get blackout drunk. And, y'know, when I inevitably passed out, they also thought it'd be funny to put me up on the tightrope platform—you know, middle of the main tent, about twenty feet up in the air?"
"You're joking." Isabel's tone had gone completely flat.
"Swear to god. Don't know how they managed it, they were all drunk themselves. They left me there, passed out. I guess they thought it'd be hilarious when I woke up all the way up there and freaked out."
"Don't tell me."
"Yep. I rolled right off."
"You fell twenty feet." He finally registered her tone of voice and glanced up to see an unreadable expression on her face—unreadable, but certainly not good.
Thinking she was accusing him of lying, he retaliated with a punctilious, condescending tone as he told her, "There was a net, Isabel." Her expression shifted just a touch, but he still couldn't really make it out. "Not that it helped much," he grumbled as he went back to his drawing. "I must have bounced out of it and onto the ground. Broke my elbow on the landing, not that I know for sure that's what happened, I was unconscious the whole time. Just woke up the next morning to a screaming pain in my arm, sick to my stomach. It still clicks when I do this, listen." He swung his left forearm rapidly back and forth to produce a wet little snapping sound with each motion that, going by the look on Isabel's face, grossed her out. He chuckled. Ah, well, no accounting for taste.
"Got the whole story from the acrobats later. And, you know, the elbow wasn't the worst part, not by far. I was sicker than I've ever been in my life. I threw up for days. Ever since then, I've steered clear of the booze." The memory made him chuckle—he'd been such a dumb little rascal—but when he got nothing from silence from Isabel, he looked up, and this time, he didn't have trouble interpreting her expression. "Okay. You're looking at me like maybe that wasn't a normal kid thing to have happened."
"I'm looking at you like if you remember the full names of anyone else involved in that story, I'd like to hear them," she said stonily.
Another tick in her bloodthirsty column, and he could have hassled her about it, but the reality was she was looking at him like he was some sort of wounded animal, which he hated, because every time she did it, he questioned whether he was somehow one, which always made him feel slightly pathetic.
Both to make her stop looking at him like that and to raise a subject he knew would distract her, he reached for the point of interest he'd filed away earlier—she wouldn't like it, but he didn't like being the one in the hot seat, so: tough. "I don't know why you're looking at me like that. I was surrounded by shitheels, sure, but I made it out all right. Looks to me like you were having a pretty tough time, yourself." He glanced pointedly at the scars on her thighs, then caught her eyes so she couldn't pretend she hadn't seen him see.
A shadow crossed over her face. She went with her knee-jerk reaction to defend herself, though she really didn't have to, not from him, not about this. "Teenagers cut."
"Sometimes." At some point he'd abandoned his marker and instead was clutching her leg in an unmarked spot just below the knee, squeezing lightly—someone watching might say reassuringly, though that someone would be a moron, he just liked that he was allowed to touch Isabel's legs.
"It wasn't a weird thing for me to be doing, with the way everything was. Super common reaction to feeling powerless."
"It is," he agreed mildly. It had never been his reaction, of course, which, like just about everything about them, was an example of them being two sides of the same coin. Jerome had found his control in turning the knife on others; Isabel had clearly found hers in turning it on herself. She was still doing it, in a way, though these scars were old and she obviously hadn't physically cut in some time—he wondered what else she would call putting herself through the agony of fundraisers, rubbing elbows with puddles of human excrement like the GCPD, like Billings, all that do-gooder stuff she made herself do.
She was silent for a while. Jerome didn't think of himself as patient generally (more like good at distracting himself from his own impatience), but it seemed easy with her, waiting for her to decide if she wanted to tell him more or change the topic entirely. As he waited he did what he'd been wanting to do since he'd seen the scars, reached up and brushed his fingertips against one of them, feeling the smooth, tough texture of the new tissue, contrasted against the velvet of the soft skin around it. Isabel shivered, and he saw the goosebumps breaking out on her legs a split second before she seized his wrist.
"Can we just—pause for a second," she said in a strange tone of voice as she lifted his hand away, pinning it firmly beside her on the bed instead, and, reading the room, Jerome put up zero resistance. "That's… a lot."
She was panting slightly—or maybe it was just low-level hyperventilation. Jerome watched her intently, waiting, and after she got her breathing under control, she finally met his eyes. "Did you bring this up because you really want to know about it, or because you want me to leave you alone about the acrobat thing? Because if it's the second thing, then I can do that without getting into this. It's just that it's, like, a little more nebulous than your thing and might take a little while to explain. I don't want you to feel like I'm trying to one-up you."
She knew him so well, it made him want to just grab her by the head and squeeze till something crunched. "Ooh," he purred through clenched teeth. "It was the second thing, but now you've got me really curious. Go ahead."
She took one long steadying breath, then another one before she started. "You remember when you asked if my stepdad ever molested me, and I said no?"
Oh, that was interesting—the question alone sparked a sudden little flame of raw rage in him he hadn't felt since his mother was alive. There would be no need to ask that question unless it required some clarification, and "were you molested" should have had a simple yes/no answer that needed no clarification at all. Something of the rage must have surfaced in his unblinking eyes, because she sounded a little rushed when she said, "He didn't. But, like…"
"There shouldn't be a 'but' there," Jerome said, low.
"But as I got older, shit got weird." Her eyes were distant, the spot between her eyebrows creasing as she thought back. "Like… like I could tell… he wanted to?" She shook her head. "I don't know. I was just—I was sixteen, and all of a sudden, the vibes were totally different. It was bad enough when I was a kid; this was much worse. He took my bedroom door off the hinges. Nailed the window shut. I started being scared to change clothes in the apartment. Christ," she said with a totally humorless little chuckle, "Eventually, I was scared to go to sleep.
"And through all this, he never even did anything, that's the part that made me feel insane. He wasn't doing anything to me, he just always seemed to be there, lurking around, waiting in the wings. He even stopped hitting me after I turned seventeen, but I almost wished he didn't, because there was, like, this expectation now? And he quit trying to date. And he just seemed like he was seething all the time. Like something was building up.
"I started trying to stay away, stay with friends as much as possible, which he didn't like at all. My grades tanked. My hair started falling out, I was sleeping like three hours a night when I was at the apartment—and that's when I started doing this. It just… made me feel less crazy. Not for long, but in little doses, it was enough. And as I got closer to eighteen, I realized that I didn't think he was going to let me leave once I legally could. Something bad was coming, I knew it.
"So one day in the summer when I was still seventeen, I waited for him to leave for work, then packed up everything I had that I wanted to keep and I just left. For good. I didn't have anything saved, didn't have an apartment, but I knew if I stayed I was never actually gonna get out. I couch-surfed when I could—stayed at Jane's a lot, actually, till her dad sussed out that she's a lesbian and said I couldn't anymore. Other times, especially when the weather was good, I lived outside. Couldn't go to shelters, you know, David was a cop—like, twenty years ago, and not in Gotham City, but you know the PD, if he showed up to file a missing persons report on me and they found out he used to be a cop they'd move heaven and earth for him, and I didn't want to take a chance that they'd be checking the shelters. That's why I dropped out of school. He'd be able to find me again there, make me go back.
"Eventually I was able to save enough money from my serving job, and Jane and I both turned eighteen, and we were able to get an apartment together. And I stopped cutting almost immediately. Like, shit was still tough, but I suddenly didn't need it anymore. Your hand, honey." She gently touched the back of his hand, and he realized that he'd been grasping her leg now a little too tightly. He let go like he'd been zapped with a cattle prod.
"Sorry," he muttered under his breath, rubbing lightly at the little divots his fingers had made, the little red marks, like he could wipe them away.
"So like," she said, taking a deep breath and then releasing it again slow, "when you touch me there like that, and it turns me on, it's…. weird. Really loaded. I think maybe good? But also maybe bad. Either way, definitely fucked up, and I'd like to avoid having a panic attack in the middle of sex, so maybe something we table for a while."
It turned out that sex was about the furthest thing from Jerome's mind at the moment. In perfect honesty, what he wanted to do was get up from the floor and walk out of the house and go kill Isabel's stepdad, in all the worst ways he could think of, which took him aback some. He was used to feeling that way about his own relatives, now and again. He wasn't used to feeling it for other people's sake. He also wasn't used to impulse control, so not immediately leaving to go kill Isabel's stepdad felt weird, but something was holding him back—maybe the knowledge that she deserved to feel what it was like to kill the person who'd made her teenage years a living hell. He'd gotten to do it twice already (three times if you counted his sperm donor, which he didn't, not really—Cicero's crime was indifference, which was bad enough; he hadn't actively tormented Jerome like the other two). He wanted that for her.
But they'd just had a whole thing about him killing people, and she'd already shot his suggestion to kill her stepdad down at least twice before, so he reluctantly jammed the idea into a back pocket—not gone, but on ice for now.
Still. If he thought for more than a second at a time about anything she'd just told him, pictured any of it, he could feel that homicidal rage bubbling up again, the same rage that carried him into the murders of his mother, his father, his uncle, and hopefully soon, his brother. He didn't like to let people see it. Really fucked with his favorite presentation of himself as a carefree, go-with-the-flow kind of guy. Emphasis on carefree. As in free of care. As in unbothered and unfazed by anything anyone could do to him, and doubly so unbothered and unfazed by anything anyone could do to anyone else.
Except Isabel, unfortunately, was anyone else, and he was starting to get the uncomfortable feeling that he might care at least as much about what happened to her as what happened to him, and that had been a totally foreign feeling to him since Jeremiah left, at least. The realization freaked him out some (also not a good thing to let on that he was feeling), and he started to shift backwards—maybe make a break for the shower, let the weird atmosphere settle into something he actually had some idea of what to do with—but she was still pinning his wrist down to the bed beside her, and her grip just tightened on him as he started trying to pull away.
"Hey," she said. "There's something I think you should know."
At this point, he wasn't sure if he wanted to know anything else, but his curiosity had always been his most irrepressible trait, so he raised his eyebrows and tilted his head a little and asked, "What's that?"
"I don't think about him when you're around. Like, ever. The reason for that being that I've known for, like, a really long time now that if it really came to it, if he for any reason popped back up, you'd kill him before he could get to me."
Jerome was touched. For maybe the millionth time, he felt seen by her. He'd wanted to kill that motherfucker from the first time he'd met Isabel, and about a hundred times more now. "They'd be finding his blood in every borough," he said deliberately, really taking his time with the pronouncement, letting her hear just how much pleasure he drew from the thought.
She nodded. "I know that. Like, I more than just think that—I know that, on a physical level. There's this feeling I get when I'm around you now—this sense of, I don't know, security I haven't had since before I was ten years old. From anyone." Her voice was getting fainter, and she released her hold on his wrist abruptly so that she could dig the heels of both hands into her eyes, like she was rubbing them, but Jerome suspected it was really just to mask that she was welling up. He didn't think he knew anyone who hated crying more than Isabel. Even he found shedding crocodile tears now and again a useful tactic; Isabel refused to do even that if she could help it. "Yeah," she said, her tone a little harder now, a little more blustery. "So. I just figured you should know that. And know that I would like to be the same for you."
Jerome's usual instinct to crack a joke wasn't going to work out for him here, he could tell, because the way this conversation was going, not only would Isabel not laugh, but she also wouldn't even get mad at him (the second most desirable outcome). She'd probably just look wounded, and that would make him feel somehow caddish, given the topic of discussion. So fuck it. Ask her again. Worst she can say is no. He climbed up on the bed in front of her—she dropped her hands away from her eyes when she felt him move and quickly pulled her legs up to give him room—and took both her hands in his.
Looking her in the eyes, he took a breath in preparation, then, with gravity, said, "I really think you should let me go ahead and kill him now." Isabel was already shaking her head; Jerome dropped one of her hands so he could reach out and press a finger against her lips. "Ah. Before you say no, hear me out. It'd be really easy. I already know where he lives."
"You know where he lives?" Isabel said in shock, not silenced by his finger at all.
He furrowed his brow. "Yeah. David Taylor, right? 5506 Poplar Drive, Apartment 3D? Fifty-one years old, about, I dunno, six-three, three hundred pounds?"
Isabel's beautiful brown eyes had gotten huge. "How do you know all that?"
He dropped his finger from her lips, since it clearly wasn't doing any good. "I got people," he said with a modest shrug. "You don't think I was just chewing the fat during all that time in Arkham, do you?"
She was rocking forward onto her knees, and Jerome put his fists up, prepared to defend himself as she came at him, but she just wrapped her arms around his neck. Oh, we're hugging, he thought, and dropped backwards, falling on the bed and pulling her with him. "Is this a yes on the killing, or…?" he asked as he tightened both arms around her waist.
"No," she said with truly disappointing firmness, letting go of his neck and pushing up on her elbows so she could see him. "I want to pretend he doesn't exist. Imagine the cops get called while you're doing it and you get gunned down? Because of him? No fucking way."
Jerome was offended. "As if I would ever get gunned down by the cops."
"He doesn't get to factor in my life anymore," she said. "That means he doesn't get to factor in your life, either. Okay?"
Jerome sighed, dropping his head back to the mattress. The odds weren't great that David Taylor would go unmurdered forever (Jerome didn't have that kind of patience, especially for creepy middle-aged men who'd tried to groom their teenage stepdaughters, specifically when that teenage stepdaughter had grown up to become his—Isabel), but he figured he could wait at least a little longer. She'd come around, he knew she would. "Well. You'll let me know if you change your mind."
Isabel nodded—he was pretty sure she was just humoring him, and stared into his eyes a few seconds before announcing, "I kinda want to fuck again, but not so soon after talking about that creep. I'm kinda hungry, too. We didn't have dinner."
Jerome felt his brows shoot up. Now that he'd gotten a little distance from his own anger, sex was certainly back on the table, but one of the few drawbacks to not being on asylum schedule anymore meant that there were no set mealtimes anymore and he frequently forgot about food until someone mentioned eating and he suddenly realized he had a headache and his insides felt painfully hollow. He figured he didn't really have to choose—they could always do one, then the other. "You wanna do midnight snacks?"
She grinned and kissed him briefly on the mouth. "C'mon. I bet everyone else is asleep."
Jerome awoke suddenly from a nightmare (more like a memory, doubtless dredged up by the details of what Isabel had told him the night before: that dark tent, made more dreadful in the way of dreams than he'd even found it as a child, the suffocating smells of molding hay and vanilla and sickness choking him in his sleep), grasping for the knife that was never far out of reach—except he wasn't in his bed in the wagon, wasn't even in his cell at Arkham, and he'd awoken because Isabel was hovering over him, straddling his waist.
"I have something I want to ask you," she said, leaning over him, her hair tickling his nose. Weird that she was awake before him, he didn't usually sleep as much as he had been lately. He must have needed it. Or maybe it was the bomb-ass massage Isabel had given him the other night—his shoulders hadn't been that relaxed in years.
"You gotta be more careful," he grumbled, his voice all rocky and low from sleep as he lifted his hands to rub the grit out of his eyes. "I coulda stabbed you."
She seemed totally unconcerned by the prospect. "Can we go see Jane today? It's Christmas Eve, and I want to make sure she's not, like, dead after leaving with that guy."
Jerome stretched his eyes open wide and then blinked the last of the sleep out of them. He'd been prepared to spend the day bored and tormenting the other Horribles, which was basically the same thing he'd been doing at Arkham for a whole year, so he'd probably go grocery shopping with Isabel if she wanted to at this point. "Sure," he said, one hand drifting to rest on her hip. "I like Jane."
Isabel beamed her bright, beautiful grin at him—he could think of worse things to wake up to, honestly—and planted a quick one on him before jumping off him. "The snow finally came," she said, and disappeared into the bathroom.
Glad she's feeling peppy, he thought, dragging himself up into a sitting position against the headboard. Things had gotten heavy the night before, and he'd been prepared for some moping. Then again, sex always mellowed him out, and they'd gone another couple rounds after getting back from the kitchen, so maybe he should just take it as a compliment that she was in a cheery mood.
Bright, white light streamed in through the window, and he could see thick chunks of snow whirling through the air. The clock said it was around nine in the morning—too early, especially since they'd been up half the night, but whatever, he was awake now—and as he looked out at the wintry city, he called to her: "She's probably fine. Killing is Zsasz's job, he's not gonna do it for free, and he's never been all that bashful about people seeing his face, so unless someone put a twenty-thousand dollar bounty on her head, he probably just let her go on home."
Isabel popped back into the bathroom doorway—she'd clipped her hair up on top of her head like a messy Gibson girl and was rubbing some kind of white soap all over her face. "I wouldn't put it past her father," she said. "He's still so miffed that she went no-contact with him. But so far he just takes pot shots at her in the press and sometimes pays theaters to recast roles she's won, so taking out a hit on her is kind of a drastic jump up from that petty shit. And I think he and his girlfriend have a new baby so he's kind of focused elsewhere now. Still don't feel awesome about her leaving with an assassin who's apparently prolific enough that you knew him on sight."
In fairness, Zsasz had a pretty distinct look—it hadn't taken much to recognize him, even though they'd never met. "Doesn't feel good now that the shoe's on the other foot, huh?" Jerome teased.
Isabel glared at him and went back out of sight. "Not the same thing," she called as she ran water in the sink. "I've known you for two and a half years now."
"Are we counting the dead year?"
"Yes," she said, sounding so annoyed that it made him laugh. By then, he was awake enough to decide he should probably get ready for the day, and he rolled out of bed, wearing nothing but his skimpy boxer briefs, and prowled into the bathroom behind Isabel.
She was bending over the sink, rinsing the soap off her face, and he grabbed her ass by way of good morning as he passed by. She blew a few drops of water away from her mouth and caught his eye in the mirror and said, "I think we should maybe go by my apartment, too."
"Hm," he said, reaching over her for her toothbrush in the holder by the sink. The bristles were wet, she'd already used it that morning. "Why?"
"Because I've been in the same clothes going on the third day now, aside from this," she said, gesturing to the pajama set she'd put on again, "and I'd like to get something different. Oh—that's not—" she began, belatedly processing why he was squirting toothpaste onto her toothbrush, but she gave up as he jammed it into his mouth. "Okay," she said, defeated, as if they didn't have all the same mouth germs at this point. It was like she didn't appreciate romance.
Through the toothpaste foam, Jerome said, "We could go, but I don't think we'll need to."
Isabel apparently understood enough of that to ask, "Why not?"
Good timing favored Jerome once again as someone knocked on the door. When Isabel turned a confused look on him, he wiggled his eyebrows and said around the toothbrush, "Go get that, wouldjya?"
She trusted him at least enough not to ask too many questions, by now doubtless aware of his flair for surprises. She left the bathroom—not before grabbing his ass on the way out, which made him chuckle— and Jerome finished up brushing his teeth and then splashed icy water on his face to really put any residual drowsiness to bed. By the time he was drying off, Isabel was back with an armful of clothing.
"You sent your minions to get stuff from my apartment?"
"Isabel, please," he said reprovingly. "Goons."
"You sent your goons to get stuff from my apartment?"
"I sent them to pick up some stuff for me from Bogdanowicz, and since they were in the area, I told them to stop by and raid your closet, yes," he said, staring at her in the mirror.
She stared back suspiciously. "How'd they get in?"
"Do you really not know the answer to that question?"
She sighed and slumped against the door frame. "I guess it'll just be nice to wear something fresh." He turned around, preening a little when Isabel's stare got a little sharper, pricking little pins and needles of awareness across his skin as she gazed at him. He'd always been a good-looking guy, even now, with the scars riddling his face and body, but it was always nice to be appreciated by someone else, and Isabel was very appreciative. She definitely wasn't shy in general, but there was something furtive about the way she looked at him now, like she wasn't sure she was allowed to.
He watched her calmly back, enjoying the sight of her fresh face, for now not frowny or upset. They'd made up for a lot of lost time last night, and he knew she was feeling it too, could see it in the calm on her face—many of the things left up in the air had been discussed, if not completely settled, and as far as he knew, neither of them was planning on going anywhere. The certainty of it—the unspoken commitment—would be making him feel sort of jumpy if not for the specter of Paisley Square, waiting in the back of his mind, waiting to chuck a grenade in the middle of this new understanding he and Isabel had. That would be the real trial by fire. That, he expected, would send her packing for good—provided he allowed her to go.
All the more reason to enjoy the now. "Let's get moving," he suggested. "We're burning daylight."
They got dressed in companionable quiet, Isabel picking clothes out from the crate his Arkham cronies had dropped off, tight black pants and a fuzzy red sweater that did really incredible things for her already-impressive tits. On his end of things, Jerome figured he should try for civilian, so he rifled through the box from Bogdanowicz, finding a pair of blue jeans, a red and black buffalo flannel jacket that he zipped up almost to the throat, and brown hiking boots. He finished up by jamming a black beanie on his head, covering up his hair (the scars were a little more difficult to hide, but without his eye-catching hair or usual flamboyant clothing, he figured he could pass under the radar easily enough, people barely noticed him on the street when he was in Arkham uniform unless he was making too much noise), and at that point he caught Isabel staring again. "What?" he asked.
She jumped guiltily, like he'd caught her doing something wrong. "Nothing."
Unfortunately for her, the guilt just made him zero in closer on her. After peering suspiciously at her for a second, he felt a delighted little smile creeping over his face. "What, do you like this?"
She looked a little flushed as she jumped to defend herself from the teasing he wasn't even doing yet. "It's just different. You're always either in prison clothes or something totally ridiculous."
"Hey."
"Fly," she allowed, "but ridiculous. It's just—yeah. Different."
"Would you like it if I was a normie?" he teased, dropping on one knee to the floor to lace up his boots. "Fifty hours a week working as a prison guard, home to our apartment by eight every night for hamburger helper and disappointing missionary sex before doing it all over again the next day?"
"You say that like you're burning me, but you're the one who has it all thought out, like a pet daydream or something," she jabbed back, grinning a little now as she pulled on her own boots. "A prison guard, really?"
"Not a big jump," he said with a shrug. "They've got a lot in common with the inmates. Ready to go?"
He grabbed the van keys, and Isabel got her coat, and they headed out. As they were passing through the foyer, someone called out—Jerome went smoothly into reverse, taking a few steps backward to peek into the little den the voice had come from. Jonny was there, doing his standard creepy lurk, and Bridgit by the fireplace, about as far away from Jonny as she could get, which was probably wise. "Where are you two going in influencer cosplay?" she asked.
Isabel ducked her head in beneath Jerome's arm braced against the door frame. "Just visiting a friend."
"Let me come."
"Sorry," Isabel said, somehow looking like she meant it. "I'm already pushing it bringing him along. Definitely can't include anyone else."
Bridgit glowered at her. "Nice hickey."
He actually hadn't left any marks on Isabel this time—nothing that was visible while she was dressed, anyway—but she put her hand self-consciously to her throat anyway, making Bridgit (and Jerome) smirk. "Oh, fuck you guys," she said, realizing she was being teased, and left.
Jerome moved to follow, and Bridgit protested: "We're supposed to just sit here, twiddling our thumbs?"
Jerome leaned backwards to stare thoughtfully at her for a second. "I don't really care what you do," he said at length, and followed Isabel out of the house.
Outside they found an easy four inches of snow, with more still coming down. They got on the road after an impromptu snowball fight in the courtyard that Isabel started, but didn't finish (Jerome won in short order after shoving an entire fistful of fresh snow down her shirt; she'd screamed like she'd been murdered and spent half a minute shaking snow out of her clothes before it could melt and cussing him out the whole time as he looked on, totally unrepentant—if she hadn't wanted the smoke, she shouldn't have gone looking for it). The roads were busy—the traffic would all but disappear once it was actually Christmas Day, but people were out last-minute panic-shopping—and Jerome drove while Isabel, perched in the passenger seat, gave directions and kept him company.
"Aren't you worried someone will spot you?"
"Nobody looks at anybody in this city on a normal day, let alone on Christmas Eve in a snowstorm," he said dryly. "It'll be fine."
"Do you think any of the other Horribles can drive?"
"What? Why?"
"Because they never offer to do it, and then they all act like they're stranded at Oswald's house even though there are several cars."
"I don't know," he said. "Probably not."
"Why do you know how to drive?"
"Why do you?" he countered. She was a working-class city girl, after all—there was no reason she couldn't make do with Gotham's semi-decent public transport, and no way she'd had regular access to a car.
"Because Jane's from a rich family and has a car and taught me," she said. "She used to get anxiety about driving in the city and I figured it'd be a useful skill to have, so it worked out for both of us to just have me take us wherever we needed to go if we didn't want to do the train."
Fair enough. "Well, the circus was always going out into Bumfuck, Nowhere," he said. "If you couldn't drive, you were stranded in the middle of whatever million-acre field we set up in until we moved again. Mom taught me once I turned fifteen so that she didn't have to sober up long enough to go get cigarettes."
"You were a teenager and they sold you cigarettes?"
"And liquor. The midwest is a lawless place. And Mom was always good at—heh—making friends. I just had to tell em it was for her and they'd hand it over. And it was worth it, you know, keeping her stocked with booze if it meant I could get out for a couple hours every now and again. Even if I paid for it later."
"Did you ever think about running away?"
"Tried. A few times, when I was too young to really pull it off. You know, under fifteen. Always got picked up and brought back, or came back on my own when I realized I had nowhere to go. Then, when I was older, there was always a reason not to—no money, didn't want to end up in fucking Ohio, stuff like that. In reality, I just didn't want her to win, and just leaving without a word felt like letting her. You know, she gave me hell, but I gave her hell right back. I didn't want her to be rid of me that easily." A quick sideways glance at Isabel, and he said, "You did it the right way. Clean break, close enough to eighteen that the cops wouldn't spend a bunch of time hunting you down, no weird power plays, no going back. Just get up and ghost."
She was tapping her mouth meditatively with a fingertip, staring at him. "Do you think things would've gone better for you if you'd done that?"
The question made him laugh. "Better than what? I'd say things are going pretty fucking a-okay for me, wouldn't you? How many guys can say they've died and come back to life? How many guys have you riding shotgun for em? Sticking around long enough to gut that bitch was the smartest thing I've ever done if it put me on this specific path."
"I'm not sure if that feels more romantic or bone-chilling."
"Who said you had to choose?"
"Did you know your city accent has gotten a lot stronger than it used to be?"
He hadn't really noticed, but it didn't come as a shock. "I'm not surprised. This is the most amount of time I've spent in Gotham consecutively since I was born, even subtracting the dead year."
"The dead year," she muttered under her breath. He took it that she didn't like the terminology, but what else was he supposed to call it? "Turn left here."
"Have you ever left the city?" he asked idly, making the turn.
She didn't answer right away, instead staring at him long enough that he twigged to the fact that she thought it was a stupid question, then, in a breathless, bodice-ripping sort of voice, "Oh, no, that would be much too dangerous, papá said there are roving bands of rednecks outside the city walls!"
"All right," said Jerome, though his tone said fine, you got me, no need to rub it in.
"Of course I've left the city. I'm not exactly jetting off to, like, Ibiza, but we're so close to everything up here you don't need a lot of money to take day trips, just a friend with a car and cash for gas. Jane went through a shelling phase when we were sixteen; we went up to Maine a ton."
"Shelling?"
"Yeah, you know, when you comb the beaches for pretty shells to use in crafting or, like, to decorate? New England beaches have really good ones, especially Maine."
He absorbed this, then said, "So Jane's looking for nice shells while your hair's falling out and you're dodging the stepdad from hell?"
She cackled. He was glad she could laugh about it, he guessed—it didn't seem very funny to him. "Sounds awful when you put it that way."
"Is there another way to put it?"
She glanced sharply at him, realizing that he wasn't kidding. "I mean, it got me out of the city and away from him for a day at a time, so I was pretty happy about it. Got her out of the house, too. You know Jane also had a fucking garbage home life."
"Sure," he agreed. "Must be terrible to have a parent with a net worth of forty billion."
"It was. A different kind of terrible. All that money meant he could completely rule her life. I know I'd have been totally fucked if David had access to that kind of money."
"Hm," he said. "I dunno. Seems to me that if you gotta be in a cage at all, a golden one is the way to go. I bet you'd have swapped places with her in a heartbeat. I sure would have. Has to be better to be abused in a mansion than to be abused in a shithouse."
"Well, maybe it's not a competition," she said, scolding just a touch, but she stretched out her arm and put her warm hand on the back of his neck, gently rubbing the soft pad of her thumb against his hairline. It was a little olive branch, a thank you for caring at all. She changed the subject then, and he let her, suddenly sick of talking about who'd all gotten hurt, and how badly. "Who's older, you or Jeremiah?"
"Me."
"You sure about that?"
He shrugged. "It's on our birth certificates. I was born ten minutes earlier."
"What about now, now that he's been alive for more time than you?"
His forehead notched into a little frown. He didn't like the thought of that. "Big whoop. Legally, I'm still the oldest."
"Do you even have real legal status?" she wondered. "I'm guessing you got issued a death certificate, but what happened when you came back? Not like there's a precedent for resurrection. Are you, like, stateless now? Do you have to pay taxes or have you gotten out of that forever?"
His frown deepened. He got the distinct sense that he was being teased. "I've got an idea," he said, mock-cheerful. "Let's enjoy a few minutes of quiet time."
She laughed at him. "You're the one who keeps telling people I'm your lawyer. I'm just trying to play the part."
She let him be, though, and soon they were pulling up to the nondescript brick building in the east side that she'd told him was Jane's. She gave him a doubtful look after he parked the van on the street. "You sure you won't get recognized?"
"You have too much faith in people," he told her for the millionth time. "Look at em." She followed his pointed nod, watching the few passersby out in the storm as they scurried along, hoods up, heads down, not thinking about their fellow citizen so much as about getting out of the storm. Unless Jerome deliberately blocked someone's path and looked full in their face, it was unlikely they'd notice him at all.
"Okay, point."
Honestly, at this point, given Isabel's Mother Teresa act, he was more worried about one of her charity cases recognizing her. "Let's just move fast," he said in light of that, pulling the hat a little further down, covering the ridge of scarring on his forehead. "It'll be fine."
Isabel knew the door code. Jane was on the second floor, in a little shoebox at the end of the hall. Jerome leaned backwards against the wall a few feet down, hands in his pockets, keeping watch as Isabel knocked on her door. After maybe half a minute, Jane answered, barefoot in blue jeans and a chunky ivory sweater, and a series of expressions flashed over her face all at once: Jerome saw relief, happiness, guilt (?), and, finally, when her eyes landed on him, open dislike. What a shame. The feeling had never been mutual. He'd always thought Jane was a ton of fun—but then, he was used to liking people who really didn't like him back. Happened all the time. That was the entire basis of his relationships with both Lee Thompkins and Jim Gordon (he liked Jim a lot less than he liked Lee, though).
"What's he doing here?" she asked Isabel.
"We're kind of sticking close to each other right now, given… everything," Isabel told her, which she and Jerome hadn't talked about, but was true—he was pretty sure he wouldn't have let her come here alone if she'd wanted to. The cops could pick her up, Jane could talk her out of coming back to him—there was just too much of a chance that she wouldn't come back, and he couldn't take that chance.
"I feel really bad about the way things ended yesterday," Isabel was saying softly now. "Can we come in for a minute and talk about it?"
Jane hesitated, and looked at Jerome again—he widened his eyes as innocently as possible, hoping that the upstate blue-collar-boy ensemble would sell harmless well enough that Jane would let them in out of the open and he didn't have to force the issue. It hadn't been that long ago that he'd been pulling this same act on Jim and Lee, swathed in cozy sweaters and making his mouth all soft and vulnerable, shedding those crocodile tears—he'd used to be able to sell it well, but he was kind of out of touch with the method now. More than that, Jane had always been weirdly suspicious of him, even more so than Isabel, who hadn't exactly been an easy mark when they'd first met, either. Maybe it was that Jane was completely immune to his previously boyish, now undeniably rakish charms. Kinsey scale six, that girl.
She didn't appear to like what she saw, her scowl deepening, but she was rolling her eyes and stepping away from the door. "Ugh, fine, you might as well. Make sure the carnie wipes his feet," she said to Isabel, and went back inside.
Jerome pushed off the wall with his shoulders and came to Isabel, smirking. "Has she always been this mean?"
"No. She's never this mean. Only to you," Isabel said, a furrow in her brow.
"I've always known I was special," Jerome said, carefully wiping his feet before following her in.
Only to run directly into her back as she stopped dead just inside the apartment. He looked over her shoulder and quickly spotted the source of her concern—Victor Zsasz was sitting at Jane's little kitchenette table, holding a huge, fluffy white cat that would have looked exactly like that one from that Disney movie about cats if not for its impressive resting bitch face.
"Hey, Zsasz," said Jerome, planting both hands in the small of Isabel's back and pushing her forwards out of the little hallway she was blocking him into. Jane's apartment had a ton of windows with the curtains thrown open, letting in the snowy-bright light, and it smelled like fresh coffee and fresh linen—light and cleanliness, that tracked for Jane.
"Valeska," said Zsasz with a polite little nod, petting the cat's head.
"What is he doing here?" asked Isabel flatly, planting her feet again once Jerome had budged her enough to get past her—he went to explore the little living area beyond, extremely tidy, with books and a TV and stacked clear containers full of yarn and soft cloths and other evidence of fiber crafts. He made a show of prowling nosily around, although he was discreetly keeping a close eye on Zsasz—the assassin struck him as pretty easygoing, which he guessed was an easy thing to be when you could kill everyone you met with just your pinky finger, but he knew Isabel and he knew that she was probably going to be rude to him. He didn't want to just assume that Zsasz would be okay with that, and was on standby to strike first if things looked like they were going to get messy.
"Whoa, whoa," said Zsasz, frowning. "What's with the hostility?"
"And why is he holding Princess Peach?" That answered that question—Jerome had been wondering if the cat was Jane's, or if Zsasz had brought it from home.
Jane was leaning against her kitchen countertop, forming the third point in a Zsasz-Jane-Isabel triangle, and she folded her arms defiantly at the question. "Princess loves him."
"Princess doesn't love anybody."
"Princess likes everybody but you."
Isabel, still glaring at Jane, said, "Jerome, please go try to pick up that cat."
Jane's eyes flashed to him and she said, "Don't you dare touch my cat."
Jerome's eyes cut to Isabel. "Uh, probably shouldn't," he said, holding up both hands to show his palms. "I don't have a great track record with cats."
"What does that mean?" Isabel demanded. He gave her an exasperated little look—c'mon, do you really want to get into this right now?—before Zsasz stood abruptly, drawing everyone's attention.
"I think we should all just calm down," he said, and he hadn't gone anywhere near a weapon, still had both hands tied up with the cat, but him just moving had been enough to get everyone to go back into their respective corners.
Isabel was doing a thing she did now and again that Jerome always found very funny to watch: she clearly wanted to spit and cuss and kick somebody's ass, but she was visibly leashing her temper, with mixed success—she always managed to swallow down the ugly words he just knew were brimming at the surface, but she also always still looked fit to kill someone by the time she let herself speak again. "Sorry," she said, not sounding very sorry at all. "Zsasz, is it?"
"You can call me Victor," he said with a sort of warm innocence that Jerome didn't buy. The whole almost boyish, polite, let's-all-just-be-friends act didn't pass the smell test in general, given Victor's line of work. Jerome had to admire it. He just knew it threw people off-balance.
"Right," Isabel said flatly, and looked back at Jane. "So, what, are you two friends now?"
"So?" asked Jane, jutting her chin out stubbornly.
"So it doesn't bother you that your new friend is a hitman?"
"Does it bother you that your boyfriend has at least sixteen murder charges under his belt, with more pending?"
"Someone's been Googling," Jerome said. By his count, he was up to at least twenty, more if you counted murders he'd been involved in but hadn't done with his own hands, but the cops always had been slow on the draw, so he figured Jane could be forgiven for not being perfectly up-to-date.
"It super does bother me, actually," Isabel said, which Jerome should have expected—it was kind of her thing—but it still hurt.
Jane appeared taken slightly off-guard by the admission, though. Her mouth dropped open for a second, and she appeared to struggle before she managed to speak again: "Well, I like Victor. He knows a ton about art and theater, and he's very cool."
"Aw," said Victor, beaming. "Thanks, Jane. You're cool, too."
"And the assassin part?" Isabel asked, sounding slightly despairing.
Jane shrugged. "I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. It hasn't really come up."
"Not for nothing," Jerome interjected—Jane turned a wicked glare on him, which he didn't think he'd really earned, at least not today, but whatever—"but this seems like the kind of thing that would normally have you shaking in your boots. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you never struck me as much of a risk taker. What gives?"
Jane shrugged again. "I don't know. He hasn't given me a reason to be afraid. At least not after the first five or ten minutes."
"When he held you at gunpoint?" Isabel muttered.
Jane pointed an index finger accusingly at Jerome. "He kidnapped you!"
"Ladies, please," said Victor, leaning down to set the cat gently on the floor. "So you both have men in your lives now who operate… hmm, say, 'outside of the law.' I don't think that's going to work as a gotchya on either side anymore."
"Okay," said Isabel, fake-chipper. "How about this? You met this man yesterday and have already invited him to your apartment."
Victor reached into a side pocket and took out a phone. Jane opened a drawer beside her and fumbled through it without breaking the glare she was directing at Isabel. "Jerome broke out of Arkham Asylum three nights ago and you're basically living with him." She found what she was looking for—a lint roller—and took it over to Victor.
"Aw, thanks, Jane," he said, taking it with one hand, still holding his phone with the other. "46 Milliner Lane, Apartment C6?" he read from the screen.
Isabel froze. "What?"
"46 Milliner Lane, Apartment C6?" he asked again.
She shook her head, and sounded deeply wary when she asked, "Why do you have my address?"
"I didn't until about thirty seconds ago," he said, tucking the phone into his pocket and beginning to use the lint roller on the lapels of his black suit, which Princess Peach had shed all over. "I'm just making a point. If I wanted to know where Jane lived, I could figure it out that quick. Her inviting me here doesn't really make a difference at all."
Jerome saw Isabel's expression change as she switched targets from Jane to Victor. "What's going on with you, anyway? What's your goal here?"
"Today?" Victor looked confused, though Jerome was pretty positive it was an act. "The goal's to go to Messiah."
"Messiah?"
"Yeah, Handel's? The Gotham City Symphony is performing it today."
Isabel looked suspicious. "At eleven AM?"
"No," Victor admitted. "Not till the evening."
"So why are you here now?"
"Jane said she had a cat. I wanted to meet her."
Isabel shot a look at Jane, who shrugged, corroborating. "Okay," she allowed, "that's today. What about overall? What's going on?"
Victor visibly dropped the pretense, shoulders squaring, expression icing over. "Well, I think your friend is interesting and talented. I enjoy talking to her and as long as she's amenable, I'd like to pursue our shared interests together."
"Shared interests?"
"Theater, mostly. Performance, stagecraft." Victor was staring at Isabel so hard that Jerome found himself tucking his hands into his jacket pockets, where he'd stashed a gun on one side, a knife on the other. He didn't think Zsasz was stupid enough to try to hurt Isabel in front of her best friend, but he wasn't going to count on it. For his part, Victor flashed a glance towards Jerome, some sixth sense alerting him, clearly wanting Jerome to know he knew he was armed.
Jane was watching all of this, and intervened. "Okay, whoa," she said softly, taking a step towards her three guests and putting her hands up to call for peace. "Let's just… take the temperature down a little bit. Isabel. What's the problem?"
Isabel held Victor's stare for another few seconds before looking over at her friend. "It scares me that you're hanging out with him."
"Great," said Jane. "I feel the exact same way about you."
"I feel like you're doing it to spite me."
"Maybe I was, at first," Jane allowed. "Not anymore."
"It's been one day."
"How much time have you spent with Jerome, again?" Isabel was stress-chewing her thumbnail, and didn't respond. "Anyway. I'm not the one you need to be worried about. The cops are looking for you."
"That doesn't surprise me," sighed Isabel. "Gordon knows I'm with the Arkham crew. He saw me." Jane closed her eyes as if she was in pain. Isabel, defensively, said, "There was a lot going on."
"So what's the escape plan?" asked Jane, surprising Jerome by directing the question to him. "How are you gonna keep Isabel out of jail?"
Jerome shrugged. "Don't get caught."
She laughed a bitter little laugh. "Your track record isn't great, there, pal. You've gotten caught twice. Three times if you count when you got killed."
"It's a learning curve," he allowed. "I'm out again, though."
Jane looked at Isabel. "I see him flaming out again, soon. Then when he's dead or captured, where does that leave you?"
Jerome glanced swiftly at Isabel, expecting to see that Jane was making inroads, to see fear on her face, but she just lifted her chin and coolly said, "I guess we'll find out."
The girls stared at each other for a beat, then Jane said, "Then I guess there's no more to say."
Somehow, acknowledging it cut through the tension. Isabel relaxed and said, "I love you."
"I love you. Be careful."
"You, too," Isabel said, approaching to put her arms around her friend. Looking past Jane's head at Victor, her tone got several degrees icier, and she said, "Don't hurt her."
"I'm not going to."
Hearing him say it seemed to make Isabel feel better. Jerome, sensing that they were wrapping up, prowled to the door, and was waiting there when Isabel returned.
Jane shot him one last glare for good measure. "If she gets hurt, or arrested, I'm taking it out on you." Good ol' Jane.
"Be careful out there," Victor added. "It's coming down."
Isabel shot him a mistrustful look as Jerome opened the door for her, but at length, all she said was "Merry Christmas." Then she left the apartment, Jerome at her heels, closing the door behind them.
A/N - my apologies to Ohioans
Jerome: scoffs at the idea that he might have any triggers whatsoever
Also Jerome: goes briefly nonverbal/near-catatonic hearing vague details of his not-girlfriend's abuse at the hands of a parental figure. he's doing great
Next up: Cobblepot raises an issue. Isabel takes issue, prompting Jerome to make a bold declaration about their relationship. If you're out there, tell me what you're thinking! I'm hungry for feedback and I'm nice, I promise! See you next time :)