"I think you can love a person too much. You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else." - Jodi Picoult
•••
"Good evening, Miss Wayne."
The concierge at the hotel Bird had been staying at for the past few days greeted her with a tip of his hat.
"Evening." Bird politely replied with a feeble attempt at a smile.
The first few days she'd been staying at the luxury hotel she'd barely left her suite, but now she'd been making an attempt at getting some normality back in her life.
She'd had lunch with Oswald earlier in the day and had gone out to a late dinner by herself that night.
A dinner which she was currently returning from.
Her brisk pace slowed when she saw a cleaning crew hard at work in a cordoned off area just by the elevators.
Before she even had a chance to ask what had happened, the hotel employee let out a burdened sigh, "Hooligans."
When her only response was an arched brow, be continued to explain, "Some kids must have got into the lobby while I stepped out for a smoke earlier. Graffiti-ed the wall."
"Ah." Bird barely glanced back at him before starting for the elevators to return to the quiet of her room.
"What an eyesore."
She heard him mumble under his breath as she walked away.
As Bird stepped onto the elevator she only caught a glimpse of the rough painting on the wall. A large pair of eyes, pointed at the top edges with a smile constructed of the word 'HAHA' repeating up into a curve.
Several minutes later she'd shed the clothes, make up and hair up-do that she'd donned for the night.
Trying to keep up appearances on the outside to conceal the mess inside was exhausting.
Fake it till you make it, she'd told herself.
Hoping that if she acted like she was okay and looked fine then maybe one day she'd mean it.
But now here she sat, alone in her hotel suite -dressed for bed with her face scrubbed clean and her hair down in a frizzy mess. And the truth was she felt more like herself than she had all day.
She'd just started to feel like there was room to breath when her phone range.
Her stomach clenched in a knee jerk reaction.
She couldn't think of a single person she wanted to talk to.
Bird knew it was more than likely her brother calling her.
Apparently Selina's mother had shown up back up to get into her daughter's good graces -but it had all been a con game to try and extort money from Bruce.
When Selina found out she'd been absolutely crushed, but it had only deepened the blow to find out that Bruce had suspected it was a con all along and didn't tell her.
Now Selina was pissed and not talking to him.
It was a few days prior Bird had listened to Bruce tell the story, followed with an endless list of reasons why he'd made the choices he did.
He wanted to protect her, he didn't want to see her get hurt... etc.
Usually when Bruce was upset, Bird would drop anything and everything to come to his aid and try and help but not this time.
YOU ARE READING
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...
