A/N - another day, another late update! travel season is upon us, I keep traveling on weekends without my laptop, I keep missing planned update dates. one of these days I'll keep strictly to a schedule!
cw for emetophobes in this chapter for obvious reasons.
11.
Now I don't want to seem like it's split at the seams
See the pain on the wall? See the blood in the street?
There is nothing you've got when you die that you keep
You were all that you were, were you all you could be?
In the blink of an eye, there's a hole in your belly
Your body recoils ironically into the family planning aisle
Overhear, "I don't know where I'm going, I'm going anyway
Don't let 'em tell you that I never found—"
You, and me, and nothing in-between,
It's right and wrong, goes on and on and on. - Manchester Orchestra | The Wolf
Isabel had a nasty feeling about December 26th from the moment she woke up. She'd known things were about to turn sour even before then, in truth, in her brain from the beginning of this little jaunt with Jerome, in her guts from the time Jerome had gone weirdly cold the night before and quit talking to her. She woke that morning with the distinct sense that the timer she'd always known was counting down had finally run out.
She was alone in the bed, alone in the room. Normally slow to rise, she came alive with a jolt of nervous adrenaline, like she'd just snorted a line of caffeine, her brain instantly online. She slipped out of bed, going over to the crate containing some of her personal effects that Jerome had had brought over a couple of days ago, searching for something to wear that she wouldn't hate herself for picking when shit hit the fan. It was harder than she would have hoped—Jerome's people seemed inclined towards color and flash, and she didn't love any of her options for heading into potentially a very ugly situation. She finally landed on a navy blue jumpsuit: short-sleeved, wide-legged, a little v-dip of a neckline, and if it was a little jaunty to wear to a fight, it was at least easy to move and run in, wouldn't ride up or fall down or require adjustment.
She went into the bathroom to change and brush her teeth and wash her face, on edge enough that she noticed immediately in the mirror when the door behind her swung open, even though it was perfectly noiseless. Jerome's unmistakable shape lurked in the doorway, leaning to one side, and she fought the powerful urge to grab the nearest heavy thing and fling it at his head. Even though she knew something was about to turn rotten, she was reluctant to be the aggressor, to be the one responsible for escalating it. She just met his eye in the mirror, steady, making sure he knew that she knew he was there.
"You look pretty," Jerome said, and though the words were nice, there was something shitty in the way he said them.
Isabel matched his energy. "So do you." He was back in the full outfit he'd picked up at Bogdanowicz's, and as she watched, he picked idly at his teeth with one gloved fingertip. Bad sign. He hadn't worn his gloves in days.
She didn't want to be the aggressor, but it didn't necessarily follow that she was going to let him set the pace. "What's this?" she asked, waving her hand back and forth in front of the mirror in front of his image. "What's happening?"
He dropped his hand, sucking his teeth dismissively. "Seems like you already know."
"I'm about tired of getting cornered in bathrooms by you," Isabel said, stalling for time, looking for a weapon. Her first instinct was to go for a curtain rod, but Oswald continued to prove worse than useless—the rainfall-style shower was enclosed in glass doors, no shower rods to be found. Likewise, the toiletries were like those you'd find at a hotel, miniature, with no heft or weight to any of them. She could probably use them as projectiles, but they wouldn't do her much good.
"You could try not resisting," Jerome suggested, idly stepping into the bathroom and closing the door quietly behind him.
Isabel made a face, keeping it light for as long as possible even as her heart pounded in her chest. "No fun in that."
"Attagirl," Jerome said, then went for her, scarily-quick. She whipped around, chucking the only solid thing in reach—a soap dish, soap still sitting in it—at his head. He ducked it, of course, his reflexes as fast as ever—or almost as fast as ever, anyway; the dish just barely glanced off the edge of his temple, but it was enough to throw him slightly off-balance, enough to give Isabel a second's advantage to retreat further into the tremendous bathroom. It was a losing game, backing into a corner, but there was no way he'd let her get past him, and even if by some miracle he did, the door was closed and in the second it took her to open it, he'd be on her, so for now, her goal wasn't to escape so much as to cause problems for him. She retreated towards the shower at the back of the room, dragging open cabinet doors behind her, opening up the linen closet, just so he had more obstructions to deal with.
He recovered in a flash, of course, battering the doors in his way shut as he advanced. Isabel too-quickly found herself with her back to the shower, and she grasped for the handle, wondering if she had time to get in there and turn the cold water on. Maybe he'd think twice if she could douse him. Jerome, seeing her intent on her face, said "Hey" in a sharp huff, drawing her eye immediately, and once she'd met his gaze, he gave her a warning look and again said "Heyyy—", this time with a bit of a lilt, almost a question and definitely an order: don't even think about it.
Isabel's hand closed on the shower door handle. She jerked it open, and Jerome pounced, his hand hammering flat against the glass to shove it shut again before she could worm her way in. She whipped her hand back and got her fists up, ready to take a swing, but with one more step, Jerome was almost chest-to-chest with her, then he was chest-to-chest with her, his arms like steel cables encircling her tightly, pinning her elbows to her sides. She tried breaking loose (to no avail), then tried using her fists anyway on whatever parts of him she could reach (also to no avail), then she tried to headbutt him in the nose, but he jerked his chin back in time and laughed a loud, echoing laugh.
"Oh, I forgot how fun it is when you're fighting back," he said, a bit pitchy as she tried to wrestle free. "We really gotta do this more often."
That gave her just a second's pause as she realized that unfortunately, whatever he was feeling, she was feeling it too. Her skin felt hot and prickly, and there were butterflies in her belly like there had been the first day she met him—she was excited, bloodflooded. Jerome caught her eye, saw what was hiding there (it was a really a two-edged sword, the fact that he could read her like he could), and grinned.
Isabel's mouth quirked ever so slightly in a little smile. Then, since he appeared to have forgotten that she had a pair of extremely strong legs, she slammed her knee up as hard as she could in between his.
Well, kind of in-between. He wasn't foolish enough to leave himself totally open in the middle of a fight, but he also hadn't been expecting the hit, so it was kind of a half-bullseye. It certainly turned his grin into a peeved scowl, and he growled "Ow" as she redoubled her efforts to break free. He fought the pain manfully for maybe fifteen seconds, but eventually, the full-body effect of a shot to the balls took hold, and—still with some difficulty—Isabel tore free.
She wasn't about to waste the opportunity, either. She was going to do what she should have done the second she woke up—make a run for it, leave the house, remove herself from whatever situation was unfolding under her nose now, before it was too late. She dashed to the bathroom door, pulled it open, took two steps out into the bedroom, then stopped dead.
She whipped around to glare at Jerome, who was staggering after her as he fought to recover, and hissed, "Not fucking fair."
"C'mon. Since when do I fight fair?" he asked, sounding notably strained as he paused to prop his elbow against the bathroom wall, taking a bit of a breather. He knew he could afford to—he knew, as he likely had from the beginning, that there were about ten of either his cult members or his Arkham followers (or, realistically, a mix of both) waiting out in the bedroom, a safety net for if Isabel managed to get past him, all staring at her with wary, determined eyes. If she tried to run past them, she'd be dogpiled-on immediately, and everybody knew it.
Jerome took his time now, slowly straightening up, pretending to adjust his hair (which once again had maybe a gallon of gel in it and, even after he'd taken the hit, wasn't doing a single thing he didn't want it to do), and then, finally, leveling a stern, disapproving stare at Isabel—not the first indicator she'd gotten that he was solidly back in performance mode again after acting mostly like a regular human all weekend. "Now," he said, his tone distinctly chiding, only a little breathless from the subsiding pain, "are you going to be a good girl? Or are you going to make trouble for me?"
Isabel chose trouble, which is why maybe an hour later she found herself in the back of a windowless van, hands cuffed together, honest-to-god shackles like the kind they used at Arkham chaining her feet. She was furious. Also a tiny bit smug. She wasn't alone in the van, under guard by several of her erstwhile attackers, and it was satisfying to see a black eye here, a split lip there. She'd done some damage before they'd finally pinned her down. (Jerome's gang members had numbers and pretend-crazy on their side, but they were undisciplined and unorganized, and in the time it took them to figure out a strategy and work together to subdue her, she'd hit, kicked, or thrown something at every last one of them at least once.)
They'd gotten her down and chained her up and hauled her out to the van (not before Jerome, who had stayed out of the scuffle, tucked her coat around her shoulders—"Nippy outside today," he'd explained to his people rather than Isabel, and they'd seemed to understand and sympathize) and they'd been driving now for maybe forty-five minutes. She was mad and she was bored, and she was dreading whatever Jerome had planned next.
Things had been going well. Things had been, she suspected, going too well—she'd noted it when he frozen her out the night before, pretended to sleep rather than keep talking to her. She'd hoped it was just a touch of cold feet after they'd put an official stamp of sorts on their relationship. She got it, she really did, because she was feeling something similar. Before last night, they'd still just been goofing around. It didn't matter how emotionally intense things got from time to time, because they weren't a "thing"—they were hostage and captor, old friends catching up, fuck-buddies, nothing with any implication of a future. Talking seriously about cementing their relationship, talking seriously about staying together any longer than tomorrow, and maybe the day after… well. It changed things.
She wanted to stay with him, and thought he was genuine in wanting the same—wanted it more than anything, really, but committing to doing that had a way of dredging up all the reasons that commitment would have to fall through. She'd felt the awareness of it, cold in her guts, even after she'd agreed to his proposition. She suspected he felt the same. The same old thing stood between them: his need to punish a world Isabel felt required their help instead, and with it, it dragged thousands of other, smaller things in its wake. It wouldn't work. It couldn't work. They were both just pretending otherwise as hard as they could.
Except, apparently, Jerome had stopped pretending, and Isabel hadn't gotten the memo. She whacked her heel into the wall of the van, annoyed, furious with herself that she'd been caught unawares. She'd known a trick was coming, and if she hadn't been so stupid as to want to play house just a little bit longer…
The van's driver put on the brakes suddenly, and she fell sideways into one of Jerome's lackeys, who didn't even seem to notice her. They had all quit paying attention to her, really, looked like they were getting excited, hyping each other up, and for a split second Isabel entertained the idea of running—but where? The back doors only opened from the outside, and she didn't even know where she was.
She didn't have long to wonder. The Arkham cronies, the cult followers—they'd seemed to merge into the same group, and even the stripes and red costumes and clown makeup were starting to combine, making it hard to tell which had been which to begin with. It didn't matter. They were all at Jerome's beck and call, and when someone pulled the doors open, they got it together before Isabel could make a break for it. Two of them grabbed her, one on either side, and they towed her awkwardly out of the van.
Once her feet were safely on pavement, she looked around, placing herself immediately. They were just outside of Paisley Square, a public outdoor venue in midtown where the city often put on shows and festivals, and, like a lightning bolt to her brain, she remembered—December 26th, a music festival at Paisley Square, she'd been invited by friends a week ago but had turned them down because the lineup was shit and it was supposed to be freezing out. Oh, you son of a bitch. She'd told Jerome he was addicted to spectacle, and if he was crashing the festival… it was going to be some spectacle.
She spotted a few small crowds of people, heading down the street towards the stage setup in the square. Some of her friends would be here today. Even if they weren't, these were just innocent people, braving the cold to prolong their Christmas festivities. She wasn't worried about looking like a crazy person, especially given the company she was keeping. She screamed at them. "GET OUT. DON'T GO TO THE—"
The rest of her warning was muffled by a gloved hand clamped tight over her mouth, and she was being dragged backwards behind the van by strong, familiar arms. Only one person had bothered to look over at her screaming—she saw them frown just as she disappeared from view. It was something. Maybe they'd raise the alarm. Maybe they'd get out clean. She didn't have much time to think about it, because she was being spun around and slammed backwards into the van.
It was Jerome. Of course it was. His hand clasped over her mouth, tight enough that she couldn't really move her jaw to follow her first instinct and bite him. He looked over his shoulder and said to someone, "Can we get some duct tape over here?"
Isabel tried her best to kill him with her eyes. She also tried to wriggle out from where he had her pinned to the van, but his other hand gripped her by the elbow, holding her tight in place. Jerome looked back at her and scoffed a little bit, clearly amused by the way she was glaring at him. "Aw, come on," he said as a lackey came over with a roll of duct tape. "Don't be a sore loser. Hold her," he told the guy, who happened to be gigantic and had Isabel immobilized before Jerome even let her go to start tearing strips of duct tape off.
Isabel knew she only had a few seconds before she wouldn't be able to talk anymore, so she needed to make them count. "You're a two-timing son of a bitch traitor and I hope you get anal cancer and die in horrible pain."
Jerome paused and blinked like she'd just conked him over the head with a mallet. "Wow," he said after a moment. "Better out than in, I guess. Hold still." She didn't hold still, twisting her head back and forth as he came at her with a strip of duct tape, but it didn't do any good—he sealed it over her mouth, then followed up with approximately eight more strips, so even if she could work off the first one, she still had the rest of them to contend with. She exhaled from her nose as he placed the last strip, annoyed, but giving up for now. She'd be better off trying to find a way to get out of her restraints first.
"There you go," Jerome said, gripping her jaw in both hands and angling it this way and that so he could see his handiwork. "You can go," he said to his goon, who lumbered away without a word, leaving them alone.
Isabel tried gamely to knee him in the balls again. The shackle on her ankle caught her, pulled her short before she could make contact. Jerome didn't seem to take offense at the attempt. "Settle down," he crooned, using his gloved thumbs to brush strands of hair out of her eyes. "This would be happening with or without you. You don't gotta feel guilty that you didn't leave in time."
Her heart sank into her guts, and she went still. How does he always know? she thought, looking him in the eyes, trying to see if she could find the answer there. "You're not exactly the guy who can hand out absolution," she said, or tried to say—the duct tape rendered it a mess of muffled, weirdly-emphasized vowels and not much else.
Jerome nodded very seriously. "That's a great point," he said. "I'll take that into consideration." He paused, checking over his shoulder, just in case, but the van was parked alongside the supports of the Carter Bridge, big concrete slabs that meant nobody could sneak up on him or spot him, hidden as they were behind the van. He turned back to her, and his gaze was thoughtful. He rubbed his thumbs down along the edges of her face, the leather of his gloves soft against her skin.
"Y'know," he said, "I'm starting to put together a sort of… pet fantasy. Wanna hear about it?"
Isabel stared at him. She knew she should shake her head, but couldn't quite muster the will, couldn't quite fight her own curiosity. "So, that's a yes," he said confidently. He dropped his hands away from her face, planting one over her head, on the roof of the van, and leaning in close and lowering his voice into something quiet, something intimate. "I think you and me oughta drive over to 5506 Poplar Drive. We oughta go up to Apartment 3D. And we oughta pay old David Taylor a visit. You don't want the satisfaction, that's fine. I'll do it. I'll beat him to death with a hammer. I'll make it slow—tie his hands behind his back, beat his hands and arms till they're just… skin sacks, full of meat. I'll only go for the face and brain after he's suffered for hours already. Then, once he's dead, once it's over, I'll take you and I'll fuck you in his bed. Does that sound good to you?"
He looked her in the eyes like he was truly waiting for an answer. She looked back, feeling all at once like she was standing in quicksand. Her gut reaction was one of disgust—even though there were plenty of people in the world she felt deserved to die, and David was certainly one of them, she was never keen on drawn-out suffering, felt like a bullet to the head was the cleanest, simplest way to deal with things, if it really did come to that—but it was a fleeting one, replaced by the heat in her chest, the tingle of arousal low in her belly. Not for the first time, her feeling that Jerome shouldn't have the right to name himself judge, jury, and executioner warred against the way it made her feel when he turned that violence towards people who were a threat to her. It wasn't right, it wasn't the way to build the kind of world she wanted to live in—but it woke something deep in her, something primal. It felt like iron tethers, emerging from him and wrapping around her, drawing her in closer and closer, binding her to him until nobody would be able to mark where he ended and she began.
Jerome saw this. He saw all of it, she could tell by the way his eyes narrowed in satisfaction. "Thought so," he said in that same low, intimate tone of voice, and he leaned forward, pressing a kiss to her duct taped mouth—she felt the pressure of his mouth, the heat of his exhale from his nose, and tried her best not to lean into him—before pulling abruptly back. "Gotta get this show on the road. Talk later."
"Jerome, you don't have to do this," she tried to say, but again, the duct tape made the effort useless.
"Can't understand you. You gotta enunciate better," he said, and waved a couple of his guys over. "Get her set up like we talked about." Isabel gave up on trying to argue, since clearly it wasn't doing any good. Jerome walked away without another word.
Isabel was "set up" backstage around the time Jerome was battering The Zaps' frontman's brains out with a mic stand. They pushed her down into a fold-out chair in the wings so she could watch the goings-on, still chained, under guard by two beefy inmates with guns, and though she kept her eyes peeled for an opportunity to escape, she began to resign herself to the idea that she was in this for the long haul. A sort of numbness set in as she watched Jerome's little show play out, as he put out the call for Jim Gordon—Jim Gordon, who would either find a way to shut this whole thing down, or make it much, much worse. With him, you could never tell.
From her position, she couldn't see the crowd, though she had a view of the stage and the buildings surrounding the square. She didn't know if it was worse that she couldn't see the hundreds of people Jerome was holding hostage or not—if she recognized her friends' faces, she might go apeshit, but not knowing whether they were there was making her a little bit crazy, too. Either way, he and Bridgit were terrorizing hundreds of innocent people. She spent some of the time waiting for Gordon to show up trying to shoot laser beams at them through their eyes.
A side-effect of this pastime was that she was spending a lot of time looking at Jerome, and, that being the case, she noticed that things seemed… off… with him. She wasn't sure exactly what was going on, what she was twigging onto—he was in full-fledged ringmaster mode, his addresses to the crowd dynamic and attention-grabbing, the rest of the time clowning around on stage, dancing to the music, neatly navigating the bloodied corpse of the singer he'd demolished earlier, all without a single slip-up. It was something about his face, though, his eyes when he didn't think anyone could see. He looked angry, true, but more than that: he looked distant. His big moment was happening, and to Isabel, it seemed like he kept getting lost in his own thoughts, like he was trying to figure something out—a man stuck in a maze.
Gordon didn't leave them waiting long. Isabel, stuck in the wings, didn't see it when he showed up with a whole brigade of cops, fire trucks, and ambulances, but Jerome did—she saw him notice something out in the crowd, signal to kill the music, and then go for the mic. For a while, he and Gordon haggled over Jerome's demands—or at least, Gordon tried to haggle. Jerome didn't seem interested in humoring him.
It wasn't till Jerome demanded Bruce Wayne as a prize hostage, though, that things took a turn. Gordon, his voice ringing out over the crowd with no need for a megaphone, demonstrated the black and white thinking Isabel had come to expect from him and said, flatly, "No."
Isabel, watching Jerome, saw his face change, expression dropping into that empty, dead-man's expression she'd seen from him several times now and always hated, and his voice, too, became dangerous, hollow. "No?" he repeated, like he was giving Gordon a chance to take it back.
Maybe Gordon heard the warning in his voice and made a conscious decision that it didn't matter, or maybe he was just too caught up in his own heroics to notice at all. "You can take me," he offered bravely. "I'll sit up there with one of those things around my neck, but I won't let you have him."
Wrong move, Jim, thought Isabel, closing her eyes for just a second. She'd seen already that Bruce Wayne was a touchy subject for Jerome—obviously more than she'd even realized, if he was demanding Bruce right alongside his brother; Jeremiah she could at least understand—and seeing Gordon try to protect the kid at the potential cost of his own life was guaranteed to stoke up whatever weird jealousy or resentment Jerome felt when it came to Bruce.
Sure enough, his voice got even deader, even uglier as he said, more quietly than he usually did when he was doing the whole showman act, "Well, I don't want you, Jim. I want my brother. And I want Bruce. I want them now."
"All right," said Gordon faintly, and for a split second, Isabel harbored hope that he was finally reading Jerome's warning signs (to her, they were neon, technicolor, screaming klaxons; she didn't know how anyone could miss them), but then he went on and her heart sank: "Let me get these people out of here, I'll come up there, and—"
Jerome's quiet gave way to an angry bark of a shout: "You are not listening to me." Isabel heard startled little gasps from the crowd at the outburst, and once they faded, Jerome, sounding resigned now, said, "And that is forcing my hand."
At that point, Jerome seemed to decide that it was time to demonstrate that the murder-switch in his hand worked. It, in fact, worked extremely well. Once the pulp and splatter that once had been Commissioner Hayes' head settled onto the stage (Isabel, off the opposite side of the stage, didn't get hit with blood spray, though from some of the gasps and retches that followed, it sounded like some of the crowd had), Jerome returned to the mic. His voice was calm, collected, in-control, the bloodshed clearly having centered him. "Bring me my brother," he said simply. "Bring me Wayne. Bring them now."
Gordon, it seemed, had finally gotten the message. Isabel didn't hear from him again, and soon, she heard car motors running as several vehicles clearly left the square.
More time passed. Jerome stalked around the stage, monitoring the scene. He performed a tight five for the crowd, none of whom seemed like they were in a laughing mood, but he didn't seem to mind. He joked around with his remaining hostages, who seemed even less willing to tolerate him, but were clearly too scared after the bomb display to just tell him to go fuck himself. At one point, he came over to the lady hostage, leaned his elbow on her shoulder—she flinched like he'd hit her in the face—and said, "Hey. Izzy. Remember her?"
Isabel did not have a reason not to tell Jerome to go fuck himself, but unfortunately, due to the tape, she was the only one who couldn't. She tried it anyway; Jerome read his own meaning into the muffled sound. "Yeah, you do," he said with a showboaty frown. "This is Gertrude Haverstock. Ya met the other day, in the van, remember? With the other lady, who had the—" he paused to sketch a grin around his face.
Isabel glared at him. Jerome flashed her a wicked, conspiratorial little smile in return before looking down at Gertrude. "She's the chairwoman of Gotham's Moral Authority Committee," he said in a sarcastically puffed-up, self-important voice, before returning to his normal tone to add, "She's probably personally made life harder for a bunch of your little friends. A bunch of your little charity cases, too. What d'you think of that, Iz?" He glanced back at her, eyebrows quirked up inquisitively. "Think I should do her next?"
Isabel made eye contact with Gertrude Haverstock, who looked terrified. "I didn't—" she sputtered, glancing back and forth rapidly between Isabel and Jerome; "I don't—"
"I didn't, I don't," Jerome mimicked her before growing bored, straightening up and squeezing her shoulder where he'd been leaning—probably too hard, if Gertrude's wince was anything to go by. "Ah, don't piss in your panties, Gert. Isabel here's a soft touch. She's not gonna ask me to kill you, even if she knows you deserve it." He leveled a poisonous little smirk at Isabel, who tried to convey a zesty FUCK YOU through her eyes. "You just gotta worry about me."
Gertrude did not look reassured in the slightest. Jerome, losing interest, strolled away, and once he was on the other side of the stage, she leaned as far over towards Isabel as she could and whisper-shouted, "I have money. I will give you more money than you could possibly want if you get me out of this."
Isabel's eyebrows shot up, then rushed down. She couldn't say "Are you fucking kidding me, lady, do I look like I'm capable of getting even myself out of this right now" out loud, but she thought she did a good job conveying it through her face and body language—and anyway, Gertrude seemed to get the picture, straightening up in her chair and turning away from Isabel and stubbornly not looking in her direction again.
That was fine, because Isabel had been distracted by a flash of motion. She lifted her head, watching the buildings around them, and took ten minutes to be sure that what she was seeing was, in fact what she was seeing. Then she started making a commotion.
She lifted both feet so that the shackles wouldn't stop her and she kicked her first guard in the shin. "Stop that," he grumbled, scowling at her.
"Get me Jerome," she said against the duct tape.
He shook his head. She kicked him again, then kicked her other guard. "Knock it off!" snarled the other guy.
"JER-OME," she said pointedly. "Jerome, Jerome, Jerome!" She punctuated each unintelligible sound with another kick, and when the guys wised up enough to move out of her range, she stood up out of her chair. One of them rushed in to push her back down into her seat. She kicked him again.
"Jesus," snarled the guy. "Hey, boss!"
Great. He's got them calling him boss again, she thought, as Jerome, now carrying an electric guitar that she'd had no idea he knew how to play, in the middle of trying to coach the band through a rock'n'roll version of "Kokomo," craned his neck and frowned over in their direction. "Something's wrong with your girlie here!" the guy said.
Jerome looked back at the band, removed the guitar strap from his shoulder so he could put it down, waved a hand in the air—a signal for carry on—and then came offstage, over to Isabel. "What's up?" he asked, squatting down in front of her, pasting on an expression of concern that almost looked genuine.
"Get this duct tape off of my mouth," she tried to say, jerking her chin to convey the message as best she could. It was a pretty clear one, at any rate, and Jerome glanced thoughtfully back to the stage before shrugging.
"Ahh, what the hell," he said. "Not like screaming for help's gonna do you any good anymore, right? Don't do it anyway, though," he added as he reached up with both hands and started working the edges of the duct tape free. "You'll disrupt the show."
"Careful," Isabel tried to say—one of his hands still held the dead man's switch, his thumb holding the button down, and she wasn't keen on the idea of him accidentally letting up on it because the rest of his fingers were busy trying to un-tape her.
"Yeah, yeah," he said dismissively. "I know what I'm doing."
It took a minute, because he'd been so generous with the tape, but when it came off, it all came off at once, and it all came off painfully. "Fuck," Isabel barked with feeling, seeing Gertrude Haverstock's shoulders stiffen at the profanity, not exactly caring that she was shocking Gotham's moral authority at the moment.
Jerome cackled. "That'll wake you up in the morning, huh?" He tried to drop the tape, it stuck to his fingertips, he aggressively shook it off. By then, the pain had died down enough for Isabel to remember why she'd called him over in the first place.
She leaned down, getting right in his face, and whispered, "Snipers."
Jerome raised his eyebrows, curious. "Snipers? What, like, you think I should get some?"
"They've set themselves up in vantage spots," she said, using her head to indicate. "One on the roof across the way. One in the window right there. I saw them moving. I saw their guns. I bet there are more."
Jerome sat back on his heels. His free hand wound up her calf, clutching warm at the back of her knee. He had a strange expression on his face—a frown, but not an unhappy one, more like one of concentration, like he was trying to solve a puzzle. Eventually, he asked, "You trying to save my life?"
Isabel blinked, straightening up so that she wasn't quite so close to his face anymore. She'd expected him to just take the info and move on—she hadn't been planning on answering for her motives, which, truthfully, she hadn't examined herself. "I'm—you're holding something literally called a dead man's switch," she hissed. "If you die, so do all these people."
A smile was forming, slow, nearly invisible, more in his eyes than anything, in the slight purse of his mangled lips. "Nahhh," he said, patting her knee with something dangerously close to affection. "You're scared they're gonna get me. You don't want me to die of anal cancer. You don't want me to die at all."
It shouldn't be this mortifying, fessing up to her literal actual boyfriend that she cared if he lived or died. Gertrude Haverstock was clearly listening to every word, given the way she'd gone on to resemble a block of marble at the words "anal cancer." "Shut up," Isabel muttered, feeling the heat of embarrassment rise in her face.
Jerome stood to his full height—Isabel tilted her head back, visibly annoyed that she had to look up at him now—and put his hands on his hips. "Don't worry about the snipers. Here's the thing. I've been thinking about this all wrong. I know, I know," he said, putting his free hand out to ward off any objections she could make before she could make them. "Unusual for me, but everybody makes mistakes from time-to-time, even yours truly." Isabel rolled her eyes. Jerome didn't seem to notice, too wrapped up in his little soliloquy. "See, I've been thinking that this is the end of us. You're not really the forgiving type to begin with—I didn't see you forgiving, ah, a 'mass event'—" he crooked one gloved finger twice to make air quotes—"easily. Honestly, I didn't see you forgiving this at all."
"Yeah, it's not looking good," Isabel said flatly.
Jerome shook his head. "That's just it. The reason you get so mad at me about all this—" he waved a hand dismissively out towards the remaining hostages on the stage—"isn't because it's going to make you leave. It's because you know that, no matter what, you're gonna stay."
Isabel felt her insides freeze to ice. For his part, the weightiness she'd seen in Jerome's expression all day seemed to have completely vanished. He looked like a kid on Christmas. He looked like he'd found his way out of the maze.
"I'm right," he said. It wasn't a question. "This isn't the end of things. It's just the beginning."
"Jerome," said Isabel, hearing a quiet desperation in her voice. "You can't believe I'd never leave, no matter how bad things get." He couldn't believe that. If he did, he had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, and she couldn't imagine much worse the situation would be once he decided that.
"Sure, you would," he said, nodding energetically. "Sure, you'll storm out from time to time. But I only just now realized: you're always gonna come back. You can't quit, even with lives on the line. Can you?"
"I can quit right now," Isabel snapped, a show of bravado meant to scare him away from the topic—and a hopeless one. "Get me out of these chains, and I'll show you."
He wasn't buying it. He leaned down, sliding his free hand down the side of her face to cup her chin, holding her so that she couldn't look away. Not that she would. No matter how much time she spent around him, sometimes the sight of Jerome just mesmerized her, made it impossible to tear her eyes from him, and now was one of those times—his eyes were green and bright in their bruised pits, and they bored into her, locking her in place.
"Listen," he said. "No one's ever loved me the exact same way I love them. Ever. I wondered why for years. Now I know. You and me, Isabel, it's fucking fate. You understand? These people don't matter. They won't get in the way of this. They can't."
"If they don't matter, then let them go," she said, trying to ignore the way her heart had begun pounding at that word, love.
"Aww," he growled, using his grip on her chin to wiggle her head back and forth. "You're adorable. But seriously." He glanced over to the stage, where Gertrude Haverstock was studiously pretending not to eavesdrop, and where the cardinal and the mayor both were visibly straining to hear details. "I gotta deal with this. Hm? With Jeremiah. It's something I have to do. But once it's done, we'll talk, huh? Start fresh. New beginnings."
"Jerome," she started to protest, but he leaned in and kissed her, cutting her off. Despite herself, despite wanting to stiffen up, to shut down, she relaxed into the kiss, which was sweet, closed-mouth, just warmth and pressure, feeling the reassurance he was communicating with it and wanting to trust it with everything she had in her.
He broke it too soon. He straightened back up, tapping the edge of her jaw with his index finger. "This'll be over soon. Sit tight."
"I hate your fucking guts."
"I know, baby," he said, unable to resist ducking down again to press one more parting kiss to the corner of her mouth.
Then he was walking back onstage, his hostages scrambling to pretend they hadn't been watching the whole scene unfold. "Jerome," she called after him, frustrated.
"Don't make me tape you again," he said over his shoulder. She believed the threat, and, disgruntled but resigned, fell back.
Very soon after, shit, as they said, hit the fucking fan.
Despite being arrested at the scene, Isabel didn't actually find herself in an interrogation room until well into the night. She'd taken another conk to the head (shouldered out of the way by a fleeing cultist, going headfirst into the metal stage scaffolding) and had been taken to the hospital in handcuffs (different handcuffs than the ones Jerome's cronies had put her in; if she'd been less stressed, she would have been amused by the way the officer who grabbed her uncuffed her just to put his own on her) to get checked out. They kept her separate from injured members of the crowd and captured cronies in need of medical attention alike, and nobody would tell her anything, the staff ignoring her questions like she was speaking a language they'd never heard before.
It had taken hours to get the all clear—the hospital was busy after the chaos of the incident at Paisley Square, and, ethical or not, they'd obviously prioritized treating the injured civilians over the people who'd been pulled in from Jerome's side. Isabel spent most of those hours shackled to a bed, waiting for a doctor to have thirty seconds to spare so they could come shine a light in her eyes and tell her what she already knew: that she was fine. As she waited, she replayed the events of the last half hour at Paisley Square again and again through her mind, like maybe if she did it often enough, she'd unlock some sort of psychic power that would let her follow Jerome after he'd left her line of sight and find out what had happened to him, where he was now.
Chaos had rapidly erupted, and she wasn't sure what had kicked it off. All she knew was that one second, Jerome had been kicking Jeremiah's ribs in, and the next, guns were going off, Jerome had taken a bullet to the shoulder (but honestly seemed not too much the worse for wear—he'd still tried to trigger his kill switch, but something had happened that rendered it about as useful as a lump of stone), then everyone on the stage was fighting, Bruce Wayne about three feet away from Isabel, wrestling Firefly's flamethrower out of her hands. The last she'd seen of Jerome, he had hopped off the stage, laughing, fleeing, with James Gordon in hot pursuit.
Isabel had been shocked when one the lackeys who'd been standing guard over her paused long enough to unshackle her feet before he ran—must have been following prior orders—and she figured it was time to go. Of course, she'd almost immediately tripped over Jeremiah when she tried. He was still crumpled on the stage, recovering from his brother's onslaught, and when she stumbled, over him, he gave her a wounded look that immediately raised her hackles—she realized after a beat that it was because it was coming from a face that so strongly resembled Jerome's, and that look from Jerome would have been nothing but a ploy, a means to get sympathy.
It didn't matter. She wasn't sticking around, anyway. She'd turned—and immediately gotten shoved straight into the metal stage structure. Soon after, a big, meaty cop had grabbed her and tossed her into the back of a cruiser, where she remained cocooned until the chaos died down. From there, she'd been re-handcuffed, read her rights, and driven to the hospital—all by strangers, with Gordon and his shlumpy partner nowhere in sight.
There'd been a blimp there, too, for a little while. She still wasn't sure what all that was about. Something terrible Jerome was doing, no doubt.
Finally, she'd been cleared and released and taken directly to the police station. By then, it was midnight. She hadn't had water all day, save for a paper cupful brought to her by a nurse at the hospital when she'd asked. A headache was growing out from the center of her skull; her eyes were beginning to feel like there were tiny shards of glass behind her lids, but she didn't bother to ask for water, for rest—she was being treated as an enemy, and didn't think they'd be too eager to cut her any slack. At any rate, she wasn't going to beg.
When Gordon finally showed up, it came as a relief. She'd spent the day plotting her approach, coming up with clever lies, defense after snappy defense, but by the time the door buzzed open, she was too weary to employ any of it. Gordon came in alone and grim-faced. He tossed a thin folder on the table between them, then remained standing, hands on his hips.
"Hey, Jim," said Isabel.
"Isabel," he graveled. He seemed even less excited to see her than she was to see him, and her level of excitement was somewhere around getting a cavity drilled.
"Long day, huh?" she asked, digging the heel of her hand into her eye. She wanted nothing more than to demand answers, demand to know what had happened, but she knew she had to be careful with him. He'd be watching for any missteps; if she came out and asked directly about Jerome right off the bat, she might as well sign a confession right then.
"Yeah," Gordon said, the word loaded with meaning, and finally, he pulled his chair out and took a seat, sitting down perhaps a bit too heavily. "Maybe you wanna tell me what happened."
Isabel deemed it safe, since she had an opening, to say: "I was going to ask you the same thing. Lotta holes in my knowledge."
He narrowed his eyes at her. "Let's stick with your personal experience."
Damn. "What do you want to know?"
"For starters: what were you doing with Jerome Valeska? Again?"
Isabel studied him for a beat. She'd objected to the idea when Jerome had first suggested it, but was finding out that she'd had a change of heart in the interim—after committing three murders on camera, it wasn't like Jerome was going to get in any more trouble, and she wouldn't do him any good if they were both incarcerated. She took the plan Jerome had already built the scaffolding for and ran with it. "He took me out of my apartment four nights ago—five, now, I guess. I've been his sort of live-in hostage ever since."
Gordon's brows furrowed. "Again," he repeated, this time even more skeptically.
Isabel shrugged. "I guess he's a creature of habit."
"You don't seem all that upset about it."
"I guess I could be having a crying, screaming meltdown," she allowed. "I never much saw the point in that kind of reaction, though. Especially now that it's over."
"Yeah," Gordon said grimly. "It's over." The finality in his voice gave her a little chill, but before she could press for details, he was moving on: "And that night at Jeremiah Valeska's compound?"
She frowned; shook her head. "What about it?"
"I saw you there with Jonathan Crane and Jervis Tetch. You didn't look like you were under duress."
"Did I look like I was there under hypnosis?" she asked pointedly.
Gordon looked faintly exasperated. "You're claiming you were hypnotized?"
"Yes, Jim," she sighed, too tired to draw out the act. "I'm claiming I was hypnotized."
He stared at her for a few seconds. "I don't suppose you have any proof," he said eventually, sounding as tired as she felt.
"Can there be proof?"
"No," he said, not sounding happy about it. "That's part of what makes Tetch such a huge pain in the ass. I guess we could always ask him, once we bring him in."
"Yeah, I'm sure he'd be keen to tack that on to all of his other confessions," Isabel sighed, rubbing her sore eyelids again with her fingertips. "He seems the cooperative type. Where is he, anyway? Where is everyone?"
"So let me get this straight," Gordon said. "Your story is that you've been held against your will by Jerome for the past five days. That you weren't complicit in his schemes. That it's just a case of wrong place, wrong time—for the second time."
"Well, it sounds crazy when you say it like that."
"Stop messing around," Gordon growled, baring his teeth. "This is serious."
"Come on, Jim. This can go one of two ways and we both know it. First, you believe me, let me out of here after a few hours, and that's that. Second, you don't, you charge me with… something or other, and this eventually goes to trial. Either way, I'm on your schedule. I can answer the questions you ask, but don't ask me to take this shitshow seriously. Jerome doesn't deserve that. I'm not gonna do it."
Gordon was looking at her now like she was a strange, ticking device. He was looking at her like she was a wild animal acting odd. Speaking cautiously, he asked, "And Meyer and Hayes?"
Isabel did a credible impression of bafflement, shaking her head. "What's Meyer and Hayes?"
"So that wasn't you in the mask at the Meyer and Hayes offices. Just someone with your exact height and build." His tone said you're full of shit.
Isabel's shrug said show me the proof. "I can't help you with any of that."
Gordon flipped open the folder on the desk in front of them, rummaging through the assortment of papers there—Isabel spotted a photocopy of her resume—before pushing a color printed photo across the desk. It was from earlier in the day, probably a screenshot from the festival's camera feed. Someone had caught hers and Jerome's little moment backstage, when he'd kissed her, and she looked with interest despite herself. The photo was pretty damning. Far from pulling away and recoiling from his touch, she was leaning into him, giving the same energy she was getting. If she hadn't been cuffed and shackled, it'd have been a home run for the jury.
"You wanna explain that?" Gordon asked, sounding grim again.
Isabel pressed two fingers to the photo and slid it back over to him. "If you want to send me to jail for doing what I could to stay alive, I can't stop you," she said, looking him steadily in the eye. "I don't expect you to understand the way situations like this can get complicated. Not all of us have the luxury of sticking to our rigid principles when we're in a madhouse full of killers. I wasn't exactly free to walk out the door. The thing about Jerome: everyone is scared of him. Nobody messes with him. If they thought I was with him, then nobody messed with me, either. If I have to argue that in court, I will. I can't undo the past few days. I can just tell you the truth: none of this was my decision."
It helped that half of her felt like she was being completely honest. Gordon didn't seem to like what he was hearing, but he didn't seem to think it was total and complete bullshit, either. He leaned back in his chair, relaxing just the tiniest bit, and Isabel pressed the little advantage she saw. "Anyway, why are you asking me about all this? I don't know shit, when it comes down to it. Ask Jerome. I bet he'll tell you the truth." That was a gamble—he might spill the beans just to see if he could get her in Arkham alongside him—but it was one she was willing to take. She was willing to bet he'd lie for her, after all the work he'd put in giving her plausible deniability.
"Yeah—Jerome's not going to be offering up testimony anytime soon," Gordon said, and this time, his grimness seemed edged with a certain satisfaction. "He's dead."
The shock to the system was like getting hit by a Mack truck. Isabel blinked for a few seconds, then said, "What?"
"He's dead," Gordon repeated. "He took a tumble. Five stories, dead on impact." He was watching her carefully. She knew that her performance here was crucial, that she had to sell him on glad, had to sell him on relieved, but the best she could manage was stunned.
"I…" She heard a tremble in her voice, cleared her throat to get rid of it. "Um, are you. Are you sure? Cause, um, last time it didn't take."
"Pretty sure," Gordon said. "If the fall hadn't killed him, the bullets would have. He'd taken a gunshot wound to the gut just before. He's a hard little cockroach to kill, but I think it stuck this time."
She'd known it had been a possibility, but she'd spent the bulk of the day successfully not thinking about it, and when the idea did occur to her, she'd talked herself out of it. He learned from last time, she'd told herself. He doesn't want to die twice. He won't put himself in that position again. Not after what he said to me. He's planning to stick around.
She knew it was important to play it cool, but the news froze her. She was silent for long enough, in fact, that Gordon, squinting at her, asked, "Isabel, are you okay?"
"Me?" she asked, eyes going wide with surprise. "I'm yeah, I'm fine, I just… don't believe you."
There was that familiar look of exasperation. "You don't believe me," he repeated.
"Nothing personal," she assured him. "It just doesn't really seem possible."
Gordon had reached the end of his tether. "Okay," he said. "Well, they're doing his autopsy two rooms over. His corpse got here about the same time you did. They're cutting open his chest cavity, poking around in his brain. You want to head over there and take a look? Would that help it sink in?"
"What is wrong with you," Isabel said, voice cracking a little, forgetting to try and sound calm.
Gordon, who liked to think of himself as possessing a finely-tuned conscience, had the grace to look abashed. He looked away, visibly collecting himself, then scrubbed a hand over his face. "Sorry. Like you said: long day."
"May I please go to the bathroom?" Isabel asked, taking advantage of the fact that he was feeling guilty before he could recover his train of thought and start pressing in on her again. "I've been here a couple hours. Um, I could use a minute."
He looked a little suspicious, but only his normal amount. "You'll have to have an escort."
"That's fine."
He collected the contents of her file together, closing the folder and rising. "Give me a minute."
He found a cop to go with her, a woman a few years older than she was who seemed a little annoyed to be on babysitting duty but was otherwise perfectly professional. Isabel didn't really need the bathroom, but she had the idea that if she could just get a few minutes out of the interrogation room, maybe rinse her face with cold water and clear her head for a second, she could put the news about Jerome out of her mind, could withstand the rest of the interrogation and talk her way out of there. Unfortunately, her body had other plans it hadn't let her in on. The second she pushed the bathroom door open, her stomach heaved and lurched. She made it to the first open stall, to the toilet, but it was an extremely close call.
She vomited. It wasn't smooth or pleasant. Her stomach was totally empty, so she was just gagging up burning bile, her stomach cramping and convulsing as if she'd suffered a bout of food poisoning. It seemed to go on forever—she was vaguely aware of her cop escort standing at the stall door, making faint sounds of disgust (and maybe one or two of sympathy)—but finally, after a couple of minutes, it tapered off. She spat streams of residual saliva into the toilet, feeling totally wrung out, waiting with her head over the toilet to make sure no more was coming.
The cop cleared her throat. Isabel turned her head to see the lady was offering her some paper towels. Isabel took them and started wiping her mouth.
"You pregnant?" asked the cop bluntly.
"No."
"Hm," the cop said. "Well, you don't look like you're in withdrawal."
"Not that, either," Isabel said. Feeling her stomach settle down, she dropped the paper towels in the toilet (you weren't supposed to flush them, but right now she didn't really care if she fucked up the GCPD's plumbing).
"Both of my babies, I couldn't keep anything down for the whole first trimester," the cop confided. "Then, as soon as the second trimester started, I'm talking the very first day, it was gone. No more puking for the whole rest of both pregnancies."
"Good to know. I'm not pregnant," Isabel said, hitting the flush button and slumping backwards against the stall wall. Not unless two forms of birth control failed, and not unless I'm, like, two days pregnant, which isn't really how this nausea stuff works, I think. She didn't say any of that to the cop. The last thing she wanted was to open her sexual history up for scrutiny by the GC-goddamned-PD. She was pretty sure the only reason Gordon hadn't asked her directly if she and Jerome were fucking was because they had a personal relationship through Lee, as thin as it was, and it would have made him feel awkward. Thank God for small mercies.
Anyway, it was all moot. She wasn't pregnant. She was just beginning the process of understanding that Jerome was well and truly dead. For good this time. She leaned back over the toilet and heaved again once or twice at the thought, but she'd already cleaned her stomach totally out, and produced nothing but more saliva.
The cop didn't say anything else, thankfully, just looked skeptical, which Isabel could deal with. The latest bout of retching cleared, and Isabel got clumsily to her feet, staggering backwards into the stall wall, the handcuffs throwing off her balance. "You good?" asked the cop, touching her shoulder.
"Yeah. Let me just rinse my mouth out. Wash my face. Then I'll be ready to go back."
The cop waited for Isabel to freshen up—she rinsed her mouth three times, getting rid of the taste of bile, drank for a while from the faucet, and stuck her face in the stream of water, shaking off the drops and using her sleeve to dry her skin. Once she was done, the cop took her by the arm and led her back through the station.
Isabel was mostly trying not to look back at the dark doors that led to the back rooms, knowing from experience that the infirmary was back there, right beside the morgue, that Jerome was being cut apart somewhere behind those walls. In trying to avoid looking there, her gaze skittered across the bull pen, over the holding cell that contained a dozen or so of Jerome's brightly-dressed gang, and, by complete accident, her stare landed on a familiar face.
Oswald Cobblepot was sitting at a desk across from some officer she didn't recognize, unrestrained and un-arrested. As soon as she spotted him, their eyes locked. She saw his eyebrows go up—in surprise and alarm, she thought—and then, pointedly, he looked away.
She, too, averted her eyes. If he was pretending not to know her, that meant the cops didn't know he'd been hosting her in his home for the past five days. That meant they didn't know about his involvement in Jerome's scheme—at least not to a degree that would get him in trouble, going by the fact that he was clearly a free man. That was fine by her. If he wasn't going to blow up her spot, then she had no interest in blowing up his. If he ratted her out, though, she'd have no trouble doing the same with him. Mutually assured destruction. He was a canny, crafty sort of creature—she had the feeling he'd see the wisdom in keeping both their secrets under-wraps.
The cop took her back to the interrogation room, where Gordon was waiting, shoulders slumped with exhaustion. "Better?" he asked tiredly as Isabel took the seat opposite him again.
"Yes, thank you," she said, sitting up straight, resting her cuffed wrists on the table between them. It was the truth. The puking had somehow cleaned her out, put the torrent of ugly feelings away—temporarily, she sensed, but hopefully for long enough that she could play nice and get out of here.
Gordon ran his finger along the edge of her file as he regarded her. It was weird—she'd never seen him look this defeated before. She didn't think it was just because she wasn't giving him much to work with. At length, he said, "Tell you the truth, Isabel, with Jerome dead, most people are gonna want to move on and forget the whole dirty business. His accomplices out there will catch sentences, but they'll be light. His co-conspirators from Arkham, well, they're in plenty of trouble in their own right, not so much because of their association with him. You, on the other hand, are the odd one out."
"How's that?"
"If I charge you—if this goes to court—it'll be a goddamn circus. The court battle will be over whether you were just an innocent victim, dragged along in his path of mayhem and destruction, coerced into anything you may have done to assist him, or whether you were the accomplice. His right hand, his girlfriend, twice as bad as he was, because he was never one of ours, and you always have been. Half the city will take your side. The other half will be calling for your blood."
Isabel waited to see if there was more. When it appeared that he was finished, she pointed one thing out: "If you charge me."
"If," he allowed. "The thing is, Isabel—and I shouldn't be telling you this—I can't be sure, myself. If you're his accomplice, you should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And if you're truly just an innocent victim, I could never forgive myself for putting you through all that."
He stared at her for a while. He looked miserable. Isabel, for her part, couldn't see her own expression, but she certainly felt numb. "God," he sighed eventually. "I'm tired."
"Yeah," she agreed, barely louder than a whisper.
He let the silence rest for a few more seconds. Then, he picked up her file, rapping it on the table to straighten its contents out. "I'm not gonna charge you," he said. "Not yet, anyway. If I do it, I wanna be sure, and there are still too many missing pieces. Too many unknowns. That doesn't mean you're off the hook, you understand? Don't leave town. Don't talk to press. Don't get in trouble. How you act over this next week or so will have a direct impact on how this eventually plays out. In fact, you'd be best off pretending that you're under house arrest."
Isabel couldn't resist asking. "But I'm not under house arrest. Right? Not really."
"Not officially," he said, narrowing his eyes at her, a bit of a warning. She just nodded, her thoughts churning. After a few more seconds, he made one last bid, leaning slightly forward: "You know you can talk to me, Isabel, right? Lee and I may be on the outs, but you know I care about you, if only for her sake—if only because I know the good you've done in this city. I can help you. You just have to talk to me."
Isabel believed he believed it. In fact, she probably felt warmer towards Jim Gordon in that moment than she ever had—which wasn't saying much; their relationship had always been frosty at best and contentious at worst. He seemed like he truly wanted to spare her the worst, almost as much as he wanted to pry open her mouth and forcibly yank out the story of what had really happened with Jerome over the past few days. Unfortunately for him, the worst had already happened.
She found it in her to reach forward, grasping the edge of his hand lightly with both of hers, making intent eye contact with him. "I know. But I've already told you all I know to tell. I was in the dark. You're gonna have better luck tracking down the Arkham gang—they're the ones he confided in."
(She'd feel worse about pointing him towards the Horribles if they hadn't all effectively turned on her, including her frenemy Firefly, who'd been just fine letting her sit chained up stage-side while she played fire support for Jerome. Scarecrow was maybe the only exception. Scarecrow had always been decent to her—but she gathered he wasn't great for Gotham as a whole, so she was mostly neutral on the prospect of his capture.)
Gordon's jaw tightened. He nodded, nodded for a few seconds too long, then stood up. "All right. We'll get you outta here in a bit—just hang tight. And remember what I said about leaving town."
"Don't worry about that, Jim," she said, slumping wearily against the back of her chair. "I've got nowhere else to go."
A/N - Poor Jim- he always wants to do the right thing. Hard for him to really grasp that sometimes, things are just too messy and complicated to identify the "right" path forward.
particularly love the song for this chapter, btw. The bulk of the album ("A Black Mile to the Surface") really reminds me of Jerome, it's worth a listen.
Next time: a sickened and bereaved Isabel, after being shored up by friends, travels to Jerome's grave for closure. There, she meets another pilgrim, who purports to offer a tempting- albeit crazy- cure for her grief.