Devil's Playground • Gotham Fanfiction •

I - Tell the World I'm Coming Home

And now here she stood alone in the figurative rubble of what she'd left behind.

Wondering at which point in the last sixty days he'd finally give up on her.

It had been six months since they'd went after Hugo Strange and nearly all lost their lives inside of Arkham.

That was when they'd first confessed their love for one another and later diffused a bomb which saved countless lives.

That was six months ago.

26 weeks.

182 days.

4,380 hours.

262,800 minutes.

15,768,000 seconds.

Approximately, of course.

Bird knew this because she'd looked it up on her way back to Gotham on her new phone.

Trying to pinpoint the moment where everything had gone wrong, but some tasks are far too impossible to accomplish and this was one of them.

It wasn't any one single moment.

No span of seconds grouped into minutes.

It wasn't abrupt; more like the tarnishing of once fine silver.

A slow decay.

Two months.

8 weeks.

60 days.

1460 hours.

87,600 minutes.

5,256,000 seconds.

Approximately, since the night she'd packed a bag and left town.

Since she stood on the bridge staring across the dark water to the illuminated city skyline at night.

In the same spot she'd stood with Falcone once before and declared Gotham her home as she'd chose to stay.

She wasn't sure why she'd stopped there by the bridge two months ago.

Her lungs had collected enough of the city's stale air to last lifetimes after all.

Maybe she thought there would be something there to keep her leaving this time around too.

After all, she had more to lose now, but she couldn't stay.

So she sent a group text to Jim, Oswald and her secretary Charmaine -letting them know she was leaving town.

That she had to go but didn't want them to worry about her.

She'd typed it all out; which really only equaled out to a few lines on the screen, distorted under the droplets of tears that had splashed onto her phone.

Then she hit send, exhaled for what felt like the first time in so long and threw her phone into the river.

-And then she got back in the car and left the city lights to fade in the rear-view.

••• flashback •••

"Stop it!" Bird yelled.

Wriggling out of Jim's arms she pushed him back away from her, but not before he'd managed to snatch the glove off of her left hand.

Quickly spinning around, she turned away from him and looked down to her injured hand, then cradled it against her stomach.

"Let me see it." Jim's voice had quieted significantly since the screaming match they'd been in for the last several minutes.