"Problems always start long before you really, really see them."- Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects•••
"Chief of staff!" Bird angrily repeated, shaking her head back and forth, "Can you believe that? He's known Nygma for all of like ten seconds and he's going to choose him as his Chief of Staff?"
Jim looked up from the scattered papers he'd spread out on the bed as he hunted for any sign of Jervis Tetch. Any crimes where the perpetrator had been hypnotized. Any mentions of the name Alice.
Anything at all that could give him a lead on Tetch's location.
He mildly felt like he was grasping at straws. Searching for traces of faded smoke in the air.
Barnes and Bullock both had told him Tetch was probably about as far away from Gotham as he could get; but Jim felt differently. He knew he'd eventually try and extract revenge for the loss of his sister.
Bird agreed with him, stating an obsession like that -like the one he had with his sister doesn't die even when the object of the fixation does.
"Did you hear me?"
Jim's eyes darted over to where Bird had now poked her head out of the large walk-in closet and was starting at him.
"I didn't know you wanted to be the mayor's chief of staff." Jim contributed to the near one-sided conversation that had been going on since what felt like the night before.
Bird's nose wrinkled at him and just as quickly as she'd appeared she vanished back into the closet and he started to look back down to the article he'd been reading about a string of missing young women near a college campus; that was until Bird yelled out from the closet, "I don't want to be!"
"I'm already juggling too much." She continued to complain as she walked out of the closet wearing a shiny dark gray blouse she was buttoning up as she spoke, "But just the nerve of him, you know?"
"Nygma?" Jim tried to follow.
"Oswald!" She loudly corrected with a dramatic toss of her arms out to the sides.
"I..." Jim sighed as he watched her continue to button up her shirt, "I don't know what you want me to say."
"I want you to say what you're thinking." Bird stared at him.
"I think Oswald Cobblepot has no business being mayor in the first place-" Jim freely admitted, but pulled in a breath to stop from saying anything else about that.
With raised brows he added, "And I think you should fix your shirt before you leave the house."
Bird looked down to see she'd missed a button on her blouse and she no doubt looked like a mess.
"Gah!" She exclaimed as she dropped her head back and screamed out in frustration at the ceiling.
"Hey. Take a breath." Jim said as he stood from where he'd been sitting and walked over to her and repeated, "Breathe."
"If this is bothering you so much why are you even going today?" He questioned. Looking up at her from under his brows as he fixed the order of the buttons on her shirt.
Giving him a small appreciative smile she explained, "It's the soup kitchen visit this afternoon. I have to be there. It's a photo-op thing. Good PR. And I'll be damned if Nygma's going to be in those pictures with Oswald and not me."
"Oh my god." Jim took a step back but didn't take his eyes off of her. She saw the corner of his mouth twitch as he realized, "You're jealous."
"I am not!" Bird defended, knowing it was lie before she even spoke the words.
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Devil's Playground • Gotham Fanfiction •
Fanfiction"Sometimes you have to just sit back and watch people destroy themselves." Bird's own words after watching her biological mother die. Little did she know that apparently it was something she'd inherited. Maybe that's just part of the madness of life...