t: in my race to get out of this place i am checking my face in the back of spoon
a: paperclipbitch
f: Gotham
c: Harvey; Cat; Barbara (implied pairings)
r/wc: PG-13/2260
w: Spoilers for the Gotham season 1 finale; references to canon violence
s: Hey, tomorrow we’ll eat your guilt with pancakes, you can start all over again.
n: [Title from Geek Love by Nerina Pallot. Set after the Gotham season 1 finale, with some fallout for everyone.



i.

Harvey is drinking like a fish, and thinking about Fish, and ha, maybe that would have been funny, half a bottle ago.

His desk light is hurting his eyes and he isn’t going to ask anyone to drag the waters for a body that’s ancient history, but isn’t.

Essen told him to go home, and he told her he would, but he didn’t. None of the other guys in the mostly empty building look at him; it’s been happening less these days, with Gordon and his insane crusade to somehow turn Gotham into something other than a shithole taking up Harvey’s time, but everyone’s used to Harvey crawling inside a bottle at his desk. It’s nothing new, nothing smart or classy or heroic, but he’s never pretended to be those things: he used to know the right people, and when to keep his head down and his mouth shut and his eyes firmly averted.

Now he’s knee-deep in something that’s only going to get worse, not better, and Gotham is in the calm before the storm, before everything goes to hell and Harvey gets to wish Jim Gordon had just taken a bullet back when he was having his glorious military career and fucking up somebody else’s life with his infectious sense of determined justice. Sure, most of this could’ve and would’ve happened even without Jim, but Harvey would’ve just been contently caught in the maelstrom, would’ve been in a different position and wouldn’t feel the need to change the situation any.

Fish Mooney is missing, or dead, or lying so low that she’ll never be found, and Harvey doesn’t care except for all the places where he does, he does, he does.

“You’re here late.”

Leslie, Jim’s golden girl, that gentle smile she uses to set people at ease.

“So are you, Doc,” he says, and doesn’t blink, lets her look away first.

She perches on the edge of his desk, easy, and picks up the dying dregs of the whisky bottle. It’s not good stuff, because this is not an occasion for good stuff, this is an occasion for the shit that strips your throat raw as you drink it, roils in your stomach like a trapped animal, and leaves you wishing for death pretty much as soon as you swallow, don’t even think about the hangover in the morning.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

He laughs; hollow and battered and dry. “I’ve had better shrinks than you, Doc,” he says, “and your track record for this week is pretty shitty. Want to drive me to Arkham too?”

Leslie doesn’t flinch, doesn’t blink. Jim’s girl, brutal eyes, almost killed by his old girl: all of this tracing back to Jim, Jim, Jim. Jim, who doesn’t know not to shit where you eat, not to shit where you might eat, not to fall for a fucking mobster before they’re a mobster and before you’re a cop and before lines have to be drawn and chosen and picked.

“Tell him…” Harvey ducks his head, laughs, kneads his aching eyes with his fingers. “Tell him not to think he’s a hero. He can’t be. He had me thinking maybe we could all be heroes, but we’re not. One of these days the city will burn down and we’ll burn down with it and it won’t matter what side we chose or what we thought we were. Tell him to stop, before he gets anyone else killed.”

Leslie says nothing, and Harvey debates regretting what he said, decides in the end to take the whisky back from her unresisting fingers.

Her hands are small, so small, and all she says is: “feel better, now?”

Harvey wants to throw all her concern, her kindness, back in her face with enough force to bruise, to make sure she never tries to come back. He wants to shove her away from the memories he’s too scared to touch himself, let alone let someone else near them. He wants to lash out with everything left in him, but he’s so damn tired.

“Goodnight, Leslie,” he says instead.

“I’ll call you a cab,” she offers, and he shakes his head.

“Don’t bother,” he tells her. “Don’t… just don’t.”

Her face twists and screws and he doesn’t even know what he’s angry about , anymore. In the end, Leslie squeezes his shoulder and walks off through the department and into the night.

Her footsteps linger long after she’s gone.

ii.

It isn’t smart, having a place where people can find you, but it also isn’t smart to get hypothermia and die on the cracked sidewalks of a city that doesn’t care, and at the moment Cat is hedging her bets. Gotham is drowning itself, and Cat’s pinning herself to no one’s side until she’s sure that it’ll float.

A few days ago, Gordon dropped by the penthouse. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, unshaven and unkempt, and for a moment Cat wanted to run from him and all the damnation from the last time they saw each other, but she learned more than a few things from her short time with Fish Mooney, and she stood her ground.

“Barbara…” Gordon’s voice cracked, he swallowed and shook his head and said: “I guess you know what’s happened to Barbara.”

Cat still hasn’t decided how she feels about Barbara being gone; her feelings about Barbara being here were complicated enough, dripping between disdain and something that might tentatively have thought about being camaraderie, given the chance. It didn’t get the chance, though, because it turns out Barbara was hiding kind of a lot of pent-up bloodlust.

Maybe Cat would’ve been sorrier, a longer time ago, that Barbara fell apart that fast. All she can think, now, is that someone who did that much day drinking should’ve cracked quicker.

Gordon looked lost, looking around the apartment, full of Barbara’s belongings left scattered around, like she was coming back sometime. Cat’s been around long enough to know that people who go to Arkham? They’re not coming back. Not ever.

“You should-” he began, and rubbed a hand over his face, and Cat debated telling him that she was sorry that she was all ready to watch him die, but maybe she wasn’t. So she stood still and watched him and didn’t say anything. “You know what?” Gordon said at last, “keep it. Stay here.”

She was surprised, but she didn’t show it. Didn’t raise an eyebrow or twitch her mouth or tilt her head.

“I guess it’d be pointless to tell you to keep out of trouble,” Gordon said, and she wondered if he was lingering, and what he was lingering for. He smiled; a shadow of something that nearly looked familiar, mangled in conjunction with the bruises on his face and the defeated slump of his shoulders.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Detective,” Cat told him, and watched him out.

The apartment is hers now, though she’s not sure how long she’ll stay here; not when anyone could find her. It’s still waiting for Barbara to return; everything has a weird stillness, a sort of anticipation. Cat doesn’t spook easy, but it’s kind of uncomfortable.

Ivy doesn’t notice the haunted edges of the apartment: she’s too busy trying on Barbara’s clothes and jewellery, dancing on the sparkling wooden floors in shoes too high for her. They’ve already cleared out all of Barbara’s hidden stashes of pills and weed and sold them; that’ll probably be followed by anything else of value, before everything really does turn to shit and the fences are flooded with stolen goods, plummeting the gain for everyone. Cat’s not completely sure what she’s going to do when that eventually happens; maybe by then she’ll have picked a side, and they’ll haul her out of the quicksand. Past experience makes that seem unlikely; but there’s got to be a first time for everything.

Cat stands with her palms against the clockface and looks out at the night, at the churning city below. Things are in freefall now, and everyone’s kind of on edge, like they’ve seen the lightning strike and are just waiting for the thunder. And somewhere out there is Bruce Wayne. She shuts her eyes for a moment, stamps angrily down on that thought, because that was a fairytale she toyed with for a few weeks but realistically there’s nothing the Wayne name can give her unless she takes it for herself. Bruce Wayne has sad eyes and the softest smiles and his hands tremble a little in her presence in a way that makes her teeth chatter, but he’s worthless to her in the long run, and if she’s going to survive this, she can’t be soft. There can’t be any tender places in her for anyone to drive in a knife.

Ivy is asleep in Barbara’s bed, puddled up in the expensive sheets, but Cat can’t sleep these days, is giving up on even trying. She can’t pinpoint when, but a break is coming, and when it does, she’s got to be ready to jump.

iii.

Arkham is quiet at night, with a sort of restlessness that makes it feel like being inside a pitching ship on an uncertain sea.

That might just be all these drugs, which make Barbara’s head swim and eyes itch and whole body feel like it’s made of string and secrets; secrets that were secrets before, anyway, but are probably not now. Barbara’s finding it difficult to keep things inside her head these days, everything spilling bloodily out of her mouth and hands.

Blood. Blood. Oh, that’s a thought, one of the ones they ask her not to have anymore, chained to the wall, Barbara, Barbara, Barbara.

They’re not particularly interested in her getting better; they just want her to be quiet.

“All I ever did was drink wine and wait for someone to bring your body home,” she tells Jim, who turns up more and more often these days, a wavery hallucination that looks disappointed in her. She’s not sure that she used to hallucinate before she came here, before they started forcing pills down her throat and telling her to keep her hands to herself, but how could she tell? She was pretty sure she wasn’t mad until they pried the candied red knife from her hands.

“I thought you could save me,” she adds, because as long as she isn’t screaming, no one’s going to come in and watch her talking to no one, spitting out her demons on the wall. She’s been waiting for whoever replaced Leslie to come for an appointment, tie her wrists down so she can’t do any more stabbing, talk her through everything and tell her that it wasn’t her fault, except for the parts that were her fault, of course, keep a steady expression and a half-smile and make endless notes on a pad of paper. But it’s been days – years? – and no one at all has come.

At least if she’d gone to prison, she’d be allowed visitors. Maybe Renee could turn up, to look pityingly at her through the glass, delicately hold the phone with those fingers Barbara that rode like a pro, and thank fuck that she got out in time. That she climbed out of the pit and kicked Barbara in the face on her way up. She could maybe ask why, and Barbara could tell her all kinds of things, none of which had to be true.

Orange isn’t exactly her colour, though.

“Are you here so I can work out my issues with you?” Barbara asks her imaginary Jim, who looks bruised and tired and stretched sort of thin, like she can’t even pretend in the vestiges of her daydreams that he’s a hero, that he’s any better than the rest of them. “How you wanted to save the city but you couldn’t even notice that I needed you?”

That’s all Barbara thinks she has ever done; need, need, need, and the need has always been flung back in her face, fuck her for requiring anything. Fuck her for wanting. Fuck her for trying.

“Oh,” she adds, “and you couldn’t fuck me worth a damn.” Jim’s face finally flickers, and she thinks, ha. “That’s funny, right, my knight in shining armour couldn’t even make me come the way the bastards who liked me with bruises did.”

She tips her head back against the wall; her hair is lank and dirty and her nails are all broken and the other inmates look at her like she’s the crazy one, like they understand anything at all. Gotham is mean and shitty and was always going to destroy her, full of people to wreck and ruin and to say hey, tomorrow we’ll eat your guilt with pancakes, you can start all over again.

Barbara believed for a few minutes with Jim Gordon’s ring that she could be someone other than what she is, but not even he believed that, it turns out.

Something cracks in her hallucination’s expression, and she expects him to fall in fragments of pottery and glass and shrapnel, but he doesn’t. He just stands, pulls his coat around him, knocks at her locked door.

“You can let me out now,” he says, and Barbara tilts her head, and thinks: you should’ve loved me better.

“I should’ve done,” he agrees, and he looks sad, and the door clangs behind him, and maybe in the morning none of this will have happened at all.