Chapter Text
The place was a fucking mess.
Harvey kept tabs on all his men, always, in case they’d pull a stunt just like the one Willis had done. Willis had been smart, surprisingly so, but not smart enough, or else Harvey wouldn’t have been here in this cramped flat that seemed to crouch inside the apartment building it was wedged into. Ambitious was probably the better word, now that Harvey thought about it.
Sell out Harvey’s new location as it was being built, and throwing in a meeting point of a new drug shipment on top of it to show that he was loyal to his new employer? That he was a good boy that could be patted on the back?
“If they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you,” Harvey had growled to whatever lowly Crime Lord had been yelling down Willis’s burner phone before smashing it.
Harvey would have to change location now because of this mess. More money, more men, more time wasted, more headaches, more time rubbing his temples than counting his profits. Hell’s Gate’s new operations would have to be on the pause for now. And that Crime Lord, whatever nobody they were, wasn’t getting that drug shipment. There’d be two snipers waiting for them instead.
And Willis wasn’t seeing tomorrow. The coin had come up bad, and his body had dropped to the stained carpet of the living room floor harder than how the man allegedly smacked his woman. She was dead, too, but Harvey hadn’t killed her.
No. She was a cold corpse on the couch, her eyes as black as Gotham’s sky outside, her arm bruised with track marks, skin gaunt and sunken.
Catherine Johnson, Harvey recalled. He’d known she was a heavy drug addict. Every Drug Lord and dealer did. Willis would constantly use her as a crutch for higher pay. His poor wife that was sick, that needed help. It was a common outlet of escape in this city, and Harvey couldn’t blame those who took that path. He wasn’t a stranger to it either. There was a drawer of pills and powder in his desk for when his head got too loud.
“He’s stripped, boss,” one of Harvey’s thugs said, holding up a zip-lock of Willis’s personal belongings with a gloved hand.
Harvey nodded. It was common procedure to clean his dead men of wallets, papers, phones and such to give the police – and that Batman figure – a harder time. The GCPD were already under pressure as it was. Harvey doubted they’d give a poor drug using scumbag the time of day.
“Boss.”
With Catherine placed on the couch like that, dead and rotted with heroin, and a bullet in Willis’s head, it could look like a mourning suicide. Yes, Harvey wasn’t worried, and it was time to go.
“Boss?”
But something was missing.
“Boss-”
Harvey snarled. “What?”
The thug pointed at the open archway that led from the trashed living room to a less than savoury kitchen. The tabletops were clear, and the sink was empty, but it all looked… stained. Yellow, like a smoker’s teeth. Mold on the ceiling, but it seemed someone had tried to clean it with a cloth at one point and then never again.
But just there, in the doorway, stood what was missing.
Willis’s son.
He couldn’t have been older than nine or ten, and he was a scrawny little thing. Not too thin – it seemed Harvey’s decent pay had gotten the child fed at least – but Harvey only had to look around to know that most of it had gone to drugs and whatever packets of junk he’d kicked from his feet on the way in.
“Boss?” the thug enquired again, and that slight shake in his voice couldn’t hide from Harvey.
Two-Face had been known to shoot dead the kids of men who had truly double-crossed him if fate had deemed it so. He knew most of his men didn’t like that, and they’d look away, their mouths pressed into thin lines as the gun went off and the crying was silenced. Others didn’t care.
But that was Two-Face, not Harvey. Still, Harvey hated himself when he’d get a flash of the memory, of how his hand had held the gun that had stolen innocence. But Two-Face wasn’t here. Willis had been one of his best men, the very best, and he’d been so close to promoting him to be above the rest, so close, but then he’d gone and done all of that.
Harvey mourned, really, in a way. Willis wasn’t a good man, but he’d been a good man. And now a child was about to go hungry.
“Boss, do we-”
Harvey shot out his arm to shut him up. “Clean up everything that’s been touched and proceed as normal.”
The thug nodded and off he went.
Now, here was a problem… that could easily be solved by Harvey phoning child protection, or the police, and promptly leaving. In fact, he ought to do so, but this kid was staring at him. Really staring, with his dull, blue eyes that belonged to a fatigued adult, not a young boy. He was wearing an AC/DC shirt and a pair of joggers a size too big, and they crumpled over his stained sneakers. It was like someone had just tossed clothes onto a hanger. The kid looked like a laundry basket.
Harvey’s jaw twitched as he spared the flat one last look around. It was a collection of sad stories. Cracks on the walls, holes that had been punched in, shattered glass that had been haphazardly brushed off to the side and never picked up, a box of crayons near the TV that were worn right down to the end, much like how Harvey’s cigarettes would be when he was stress-smoking. Drawings of Sesame Street characters, of a smiling family that probably never really smiled, an ashtray full of butts. An empty syringe not too far away.
The boy hadn’t said a word, so Harvey took a slow step forward and gazed down at him. His eyes ran over his arms. No sign of any needle pricks, thank God, but those deep, plum bruises above his wrists and biceps… how hard had he been grabbed?
Harvey kneeled to the boy’s height. “What’s your name?”
“Jason,” the boy said after a long while of staring, as if analysing him.
Ah. Harvey knew that. He recalled Willis mentioning his name a few times during the begging. “Jason-”
“You’re very tall. Taller than my pa’.”
Harvey scoffed. “We’re aware. We’re taller than most men.”
Jason’s eyes moved behind Harvey, to Willis, and Harvey thought that he should shield Jason from the sight, but this kid seem eerily unphased. Like he’d seen things like it before, his face dull and unimpressed like it was another rerun of a show he was sick of.
But then his eyes turned to Catherine, and Harvey watched as Jason approached her, his little hand gripping at the white tank she wore. Harvey found his breath shallowing. For a moment, he wasn’t in Willis’s flat anymore, rather in his dad’s old apartment that was always dark, lit only by a blaring sports game on the TV, his stomach hollowing and crying from hunger, tugging on his sleeping father’s shirt to try and wake him from his drunken stupor.
“She’s gone,” Harvey said, as gently as his voice would allow.
His New Jersey accent was more articulate than most, deep and primed for courtrooms, as slick as the polished floors he used to tread along, but a small rasp had been starting to creep in from the copious cigarettes he’d sucked down the past few years. At least it wasn’t as bad as the other guy’s, who was being oddly quiet. Watching, no doubt, waiting for Harvey to do something stupid.
“Gone,” Jason repeated, and Harvey saw his face scrunch.
But he didn’t cry aloud. Silent tears slipped down his face, little rivers that Harvey knew would never truly dry, and his eyes screwed shut, and his chest shuddered for breaths, and he made sure not to make a sound, maybe not to wake a very dead Willis up, and Harvey wished he wasn’t looking into a mirror.
Maybe the police were the best option. Harvey could do nothing for this kid. He had taken away his family, as shattered as that family already was. If there was truly any justice in this city, Harvey would suffer for what he had done tonight.
But he knew that day probably wouldn’t come.
Harvey stood, dipped his hand into his blazer and pulled out a burner phone-
“Are you calling the pigs?” Jason suddenly asked, his eyes large and wet and staring at him again through the messy strands of his coal-coloured hair.
Harvey froze. “Pigs?” He hadn’t said it like an insult; he’d said it like it was what he truly believed they were called.
Jason nodded. “The pigs. They wear blue.”
“You mean the police, kid.” But pigs was fitting. Harvey wasn’t fond of them either.
“I know they have another name.” Jason looked down. “But don’t call them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like when they come here, but they haven’t been here in a while. Ever since dad started wearing suits.”
Ever since Harvey hired him. Ever since he’d bribed officers to turn their heads away from Willis. “We see.”
“Is pa’ gone too?”
This time Harvey really should have taken Jason away from the scene. He stammered slightly and swallowed down a cough before approaching the child again, carefully, as if he was cornering a nervous cat for capture. He gently placed a hand behind his head and coaxed him to walk, but Jason didn’t walk.
“Where are we going?” he asked. “I don’t want to leave ma’ here.”
Harvey looked at Catherine under his lashes like he was at a funeral he’d begrudgingly agreed to attend. “You can stay with her. But if you do, we have to call the police.”
But then Harvey fell silent. He couldn’t do that. This kid was as coherent and aware as any adult. Aged by a home that had forced him to grow up. He’d answer the police’s questions honestly. Jason hadn’t seen Harvey shoot Willis – he’d obviously been hiding somewhere once the yelling and the bartering started – but Harvey wouldn’t be at all shocked if Jason told the GCPD that he’d done it.
Harvey could easily evade the police, but he’d prefer to not have another murder on his thick record of crimes. That meant more bounties. That meant more looking over his shoulder. It meant more money, and Hell’s Gate was drilling a hole in his wallet. He was bleeding dollars. He needed time.
Jason shook his head. “No pigs.”
“Fine. Then we have to leave.”
Jason’s eyes screwed up again, and there were more of those silent tears. He looked back at Catherine, but Harvey wondered why he hadn’t spared a glance to Willis. Too horrible to look at? Too scary?
Was it weird to see the monster under the bed in daylight, asleep?
Death was such a dull thing to Harvey now. He had never mourned, he didn’t know how. His father wasn’t dead, but when he eventually did go, Harvey wasn’t sure he’d care. He couldn’t even imagine turning up to a funeral. So how could he help Jason? How would he have wanted someone to help him? Had Harvey even been a child before? Sometimes it was hard to believe he had.
“You’re allowed to say what you’re thinking,” Harvey tried.
Jason shook his head. “No.”
“That’s ok too.” Harvey was a master at that particular one.
He decided to wait on Jason. He watched the kid slightly shake Catherine, as if there was some hope that she’d rise with a smile and embrace him, that she was just having a nap – which Harvey knew drug addicts tended to take – but after a few minutes, the shaking stopped, as if he had cried all that hope out. A fawn next to its dead mother.
Then, finally, he turned to Harvey, eyes low. “Can I get my bag?”
“Yeah.”
And off he went, through the kitchen, around the corner, out of sight. Harvey released the breath he’d been holding and fumbled around in his blazer for his cigarette case. He didn’t want to look at Willis anymore, of what fate had done. But who was he to deny fate? That was that.
As he popped a cigarette in his mouth, the flat’s entrance door creaked opened. “Boss? The car’s waiting.”
“Keep waiting,” Harvey grumbled. “We’ll be there when we’re there.”
Jason returned with a red schoolbag that was falling apart at the seams. Threads stuck out of it like it was having a bad hair day, and the immediate, overpowering scent of deodorant waffled up Harvey’s nose. Harvey’s sense of smell wasn’t the best anymore, not after the…
It just wasn’t the best anymore. But now Harvey wondered why Jason hadn’t pointed out the glaring other face he had. Weren’t kids blunt like that?
“That’s a strong smell,” Harvey said as he lit up with his golden S. T. Dupont.
“I have to so the other kids don’t smell the house.”
“Other kids?”
“At school. They laugh at me when I smell like cigarettes.”
Harvey moved his lips around, and he almost dropped the cigarette entirely. Fuck. School. Yes, of course the kid went to school. Wait, what the fuck was Harvey doing? Taking in this kid? No, he’d drop him off somewhere. An orphanage. The GCPD. Somewhere. Harvey wasn’t a father and he couldn’t be one. He was barely a person. He couldn’t be a part of Jason’s life, he shouldn’t even be talking to him. Even mentioning the f-word made his stomach cave in on itself.
“Actually,” Jason continued, his voice trembling, “I should go and pack clothes-”
“No,” Harvey interrupted, because he really wanted to leave now. “No, we’ll get you some new clothes, yeah? And some food. How about that?”
“You have enough money?”
“Yeah. Enough.” Harvey gestured him forward. “Come on, kid.”
“And you’re going to help them even though they’re gone?”
“We’ll do what we can.” A half-lie.
“Ok.”
And finally Jason walked, his bag on his back, eyes blinking to stop the tears. The thug that had been standing at the door raised a brow at Harvey, but he knew to say nothing. Just roll with it. Always roll with it.
Jason headed out, his tiny frame made even tinier beside a tall, statuesque Harvey, and Harvey spared no glance back into Willis’s decaying flat as the door shut behind them. The police, or someone, would eventually find them. They’d eventually get ID’d. They may find a lead to Harvey, they may not.
Either way, their bodies would be added to the ever-building graveyards of Gotham. More victims of the city’s rot, of Harvey, one of its purveyors. And they’d be forgotten. An overlooked column on the papers the next morning.
Jason leaped and skipped in a sad little hopscotch motion as they descended the flight of stairs. He was still crying. And if he wasn’t careful with where he placed his foot, he’d-
“Fall, you’re gonna-” Harvey gripped his little hand in his large, veiny one. “Jesus Christ, kid, do you wanna break your neck?”
Jason didn’t answer. He tucked his chin to his neck as if he’d been scolded, but he didn’t pull away from Harvey’s grip. In fact, he seemed quite content to hold a monster’s hand, and Harvey let him all the way out to the car. If it gave him comfort, so be it.
It gave Harvey comfort too.
You’re atonin’.
There you are. You’ve been quiet.
I’ve been watchin’.
And?
And you’re a funny one. I see what you think. Baby Harvey right there, desperate for a dad, for love. You think you can give him that. You’re cute. What, is it some conviction, Harvey? Kill the dad, take care of the kid? That your sentence? Eighteen years plus community service?
That’s not what it is.
That’s not what it was. Harvey just felt bad for the little tyke, that was all. The least he could do was help the poor boy. It’s what he’d want someone to have done for him. The GCPD could help. Gordon was still there, he was a good cop, always was.
And yet Harvey got his man to drive by, to continue on. The kid was hungry. Nothing a quick stop at the 7/11 or a Bat Burger couldn’t quickly fix.