Chapter Text
It’s a good gig she has with the Penguin. The hideout is large, extravagant like Wayne Manor; there’s a fireplace and candlelit chandelier at the end of the long meeting table, but the flame doesn’t warm the place like it does in Bruce’s study. Here it makes more shadows. When there is a moment of quiet, and the gang is out making house-calls, she looks for dark corners to nap in. She always wakes with a start, wary and unsettled. The eyes of the angels in the wall paintings rest too heavily on her when she closes her eyes.
“Well, we can’t have that,” Penguin is saying. “What if everyone said that? It’d be anarchy.”
Butch sits to his right, totaling balances, and Selina is perched on her chair, watching him go through their collection of names. It is a long list. Whoever doesn’t cough up the money will have them to deal with.
Selina has no sympathy for Ogden Barker or any other poor bastard on the list. Anyone who was stupid enough to rely on the mercy of Penguin or Falcone or Maroni deserved what they got.
Penguin isn’t a bad boss. Selina can see how Fish trained him, whenever he flourishes his wineglass or smiles at a challenge. He’s sharper, though, more resentful, and it makes her cautious. He wears a carefully pressed suit, and employs a butler who wears little white gloves—nothing like Alfred, she thinks—but in all the places Fish was truly refined, Penguin has jagged edges. Now, as he stands to meet Jim Gordon, she can see where his savagery peers through.
“Leave us,” Penguin says, and the rest of his goons get up from their chairs. She stays in spite of the weird glint in his eye, because this? This is interesting. She always knew there was something a little off about Gordon.
“Hey Selina,” he says, “movin’ on up, huh?”
“Tryin.”
“Isn’t she darling? It’s like having a cat around the house, but no horrid dead mice.” It’s nice praise from Penguin, but everything he says is embellished. She wonders if he notices the way she still keeps her hair: swept to the side like Fish’s.
“I need a favor. I figure you owe me one.”
Selina watches as Gordon stares at Penguin. His expression, carefully blank, makes Penguin’s mouth twist in smug pleasure. She had known they had some sort of strange connection, back when they had been tied up in that empty warehouse, but she hadn’t known the extent of it. So it’s true, then. There is no such thing as a good cop. At least, not one without shadows.
While Gordon’s never been much of a leisurely guy, Selina’s never seen him so rigid. He grits out that he wants his old job back—boring—and the more Penguin questions him, stretched out against the back of his chair, the stuffier he looks. Everyone in the room knows the Penguin’s pose is for show only.
“Are you gonna help me or not?”
Penguin smiles, and it sets every hair on Selina’s neck on edge. “Relax,” he says, “I’ve already said I would help.” As Gordon rises from his chair, Penguin slams his hand on the table. She jolts off the armrest without a second thought. Gordon would protect her, she knows, if Cobblepot snapped, but it would be better just to run. To disappear.
“You want me to collect a debt for you?” Gordon asks, after Penguin mentions Ogden Barker.
“I want you to prove to me that our friendship is a real one, based on trust and equity.”
“That’s fair,” Gordon says, and for a moment Selina’s holding her breath. He wouldn’t do that. He was supposed to be a good cop. But, she reminds herself, a good cop wouldn’t be here in the first place.
“No, sorry, can’t help you. Congratulations on all your success,” he says instead, and looks at her. “Be good, Selina.”
“Always,” she says, without thinking, already edging back into the darkness.
“Don’t say no now, Jim,” Penguin is calling to Gordon’s retreating back. The danger in his tone raises goosebumps down her arm, and she shivers in her jacket. “Sleep on it.”
Without a sound, she darts out of the meeting room, away from the crackling fire. The money is good but it ain’t worth this. When she talks to Butch sometimes, her favorite of the Gilzean family, it’s almost like Fish is still here, her cheek resting on Selina’s head. But she’s gone, and the replacement is like those pots Bruce keeps in his mansion: delicately glued together. She won’t stay around for Gordon or anyone else to poke too hard at the Penguin. With one last glance at the gloom of the hideout, she unlatches a window and slips away.