We Were Born Sick • Gotham Fanfiction •

L: Mafia Princess

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

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"Bird." Don Falcone greeted as he walked into one of the sitting rooms in his mansion and found her looking out of the window.

As she turned to face him, he saw she appeared slightly disheveled, her hair didn't appear to be combed and there were dark circles under her eyes, not to mention the clothes she was wearing were wrinkled as if she'd slept in them.

"Forgive me for saying this, but you don't look at all put together today." He observed, waiting on her explanation.

"No, I can't imagine I do." She agreed, glancing down at herself before she said, "I had a pretty rough night, Don Falcone."

"Everything is okay now, I hope?" He asked, taking a drink of his coffee.

"When you went to your doctors appointment weeks ago, I paid someone there to get me a vial of your blood." Bird admitted, her eyes locked in a harsh stare on him as she spoke.

Raising his eyebrows he took another drink of his coffee and asked, "Ah, I see...and now why would you do a thing like that?"

"To have a friend test it against my blood –a paternity test." She explained, feeling anger start to bubble up inside of her as she spoke to him. With an unhinged laugh she held her arms out to the side and said, "Congratulations, you have a daughter... but something tells me you already knew that."

Setting his coffee cup down on a table, he started to walk closer to her, but she backed away angrily shaking her head back and forth as she said, "I spent my whole life wondering about my birth parents, thinking what I'd say if I ever met either of them. Then come to find out you're my father and you know, I spent all of last night thinking what I wanted to say to you and then I started thinking about how you backhanded me so hard that day at the club it was a wonder I didn't lose any teeth, and how you put Harvey in the hospital to punish me and now I don't even know what the hell I'm doing here, because I don't have anything to say to you."

"I'm sure you have plenty to say." He argued, watching her closely.

"I don't, but you should know that I spent the first five years of my life living in one hell after another –different orphanages and foster homes, each one was worse than the last. I was starved and beaten and... and I kept thinking that my parents had to have been dead to let me go through that." Trying to control her breathing, she shook her head back and forth as she muttered, "Whatever, it doesn't even matter."

"I thought you were dead." Falcone admitted, looking her over as he spoke. "For years, I looked far and wide for you... but the one thing Gotham is overflowing with is homeless children and I-"

"It doesn't matter." She cut him off, violently shaking her head back and forth, "I don't care."

"You do or you wouldn't be here." He argued with her.

With that she started to walk past him and out of the doors, but he called after her, "You have to understand that I didn't know you were still alive until you were twelve."

Turning around she said, "That was well over ten years ago and considering we met when I was seventeen that still gave you plenty of time to tell me."

Ignoring what she'd said he continued, "There was a community fundraiser event in the park, in the spring that year and your school put on this play." He remembered, with a small smile, "A forty-five minute production of As You Like It, and you played Rosalind. I knew the minute I saw you that you were my daughter."