Devil's Playground • Gotham Fanfiction •

VIII - Deception

"Problems always start long before you really, really see them."- Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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"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.