It's Irresistible

Jim freezes in the doorway to the hospital room and wonders for a minute if he’s dreaming. Or having a nightmare. Bex is lying on her back on the hospital bed, still hooked up to monitors and an IV, but she’s not alone in the room. Victor Zsasz is sitting in a chair next to the bed, slumped down with his eyes closed, and he’s holding Bex’s right hand. Bex seems to be sleeping well and none of the monitors are showing that she’s in distress, but she’s holding an assassin’s hand. Does she know who Victor Zsasz really is?

“I think they look sweet together.” Jim’s not even surprised when he looks over and sees Cobblepot looking into the room as well, because he’s already seen the unbelievable.

“He kills people for money.” He’ll never forget the first time that he saw Victor Zsasz. The assassin stood in a room full of cops and demanded that they leave their own house, and they did exactly as he asked.

“And she sings in a nightclub. Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it?” Cobblepot is smiling when Jim looks over, and he really doesn’t have the patience to deal with this today.

“She said she didn’t have any family, so I wanted to check up on her.” It’s hard to tell, but Jim thinks that Zsasz is awake. He hasn’t moved, but something feels different. The air in the room somehow feels changed.

“Bex may not have any living relatives, but she isn’t alone. I’m sure she’ll appreciate your generosity, Jim, but she’s being taken care of.” He must be making some kind of face, because Cobblepot pushes out a hard breath and narrows his eyes at him. “Can you think of anyone else that she’d be safer with?”

“If she remembers any more details from last night, she needs to call me.” Safe with Zsasz. It’s not a concept that he can completely understand, because he’s not sold on the belief that she’s safe from Zsasz.

“Of course, Detective.” Instead of telling Cobblepot to stay out of police business, Jim nods once and turns to leave. That’s an argument for another day.


Victor waits until Gordon leaves to open his eyes, and he straightens up in his chair as Cobblepot walks into the room. He eases himself down into a second chair on the other side of Bex’s bed with a quiet sigh, and Victor waits for the other man to speak. Cobblepot always has something to say, so he knows he won’t have to wait very long. After a moment, Cobblepot rests his umbrella against the side of the bed and then looks at Bex’s face. The right side is swollen and nearly black, and Victor gets the urge to shoot something every time he sees the discoloration.

“How has she been today?” Cobblepot asks quietly. It’s only a little after noon, but Victor hasn’t left Bex’s side.

“She couldn’t keep her breakfast down, and she’s been sleeping most of the day. Doctor said it was normal,” he reports in the same quiet tone. She’d had a sharp throbbing headache the entire time she’d been awake, all of one hour, so he doesn’t want to wake her up and cause more pain.

“The men responsible?” Victor shifts in his seat but doesn’t disrupt his grip on her hand, and he thinks over how to answer. Halfway honestly?

“One of them didn’t make it. Two of my girls have the other one. I’d like to be the one to take care of him.” The man’s life belongs to Bex, but he’s not going to tell Cobblepot that. The man has no idea who Bex really is, and it’s going to stay that way until she says otherwise.

“Of course. He’s all yours, Victor. Just clean up after yourself.”


Jackson tails the assassin and his girl, but he notices that something is off on that very first night. He gets a good look at the two of them as they leave the nightclub and meet up with a little girl, and he watches as the three of them walk down the street. One of the most feared men in Gotham is wrapped completely around the small woman’s finger; Jackson can tell because he lets her pull him around. There’s also the little things. The subtle things that most people don’t look for. The woman has no problems meeting his eyes, and the man always angles his body towards her. The woman is the one in charge.

The woman…is familiar. He watches her walk down the streets of Gotham for two nights in a row before it clicks, and he almost hits himself for not recognizing her sooner. The last time he saw her, her hair was blue and completely straight. She’d also been dressed in full tactical gear with hardly any skin showing. Now he knows why. Scars and tattoos like that are great identifiers. It doesn’t really hit him until his second night tailing them, when she slips away from Zsasz and skips backwards down the sidewalk while laughing. It’s the skip and the laugh that jogs his memory. Bexley Barba.

The man, Mark-Something, that reports to Hawthorne said that Zsasz was involved with a singer named Cavanaugh. She might be using a different name, but he knows Bex. It just took him a little bit to recognize the young assassin. It’s obvious that Hawthorne has no idea who he’s dealing with, and there’s no way that Jackson is going to take out Bex. It goes against his moral code. If he backs out of the contract though, Hawthorne will find someone else. That someone else might not recognize Bex and may treat her disrespectfully, and Jackson can’t have that. So he keeps watching and waits for a good time to drop in.

Then Bex goes and gets herself into a scrap. Not noticing the partner is sloppy; Bex has always been a little eccentric, but she’s never been sloppy. He follows her to the hospital and sets up shop across the street, but she doesn’t have a lot of traffic. Her assassin stays by her side, constantly. A cop and a mob boss both visit; the cop just once and then leaves quickly, but the mob boss stops by two days in a row. Oswald Cobblepot. The Penguin. He’s smaller than Jackson is expecting, but Jackson respects him for checking in on his employee. (Because he’s assuming that the mob boss doesn’t know Bex’s true identity. If he did, he wouldn’t be so worried about her recovery.)

On the third day, early in the morning, Bex is released from the hospital. Jackson watches from a rooftop a few buildings over as Zsasz walks her to a car, and he runs a hand through his hair as he prepares to follow after them. He’s gotta talk to Bex, and soon. Hawthorne is getting impatient, so he won’t wait too much longer to make his move. Jackson needs to talk to Bex, but first…he wants to see where they’re going, because she lives in the opposite direction.


“Oh! What about Ivy? I was in that damned place for two nights!” Bex groans and slumps back against the seat. Her stomach still feels a little off and her head feels fuzzy at times, but she’s more or less okay. All of the stitches are itchy though.

“Jade’s been dropping off food for her. Keeps calling her a pet,” Victor drawls out as he makes a turn. Bex focuses on the street and realizes that they’re not headed towards home. Since she knows Ivy has been taken care of, she moves on to a more pressing topic.

“Where are we going?” Victor’s smile is all teeth when he looks over at her, and Bex twists around in the seat so that her back is against the door and her feet are propped in Victor’s lap. (Max came by around six in the morning with some of her clothes. A pair of purple leggings that were easy to pull up, because of her uncooperative left hand, and one of Victor’s black tee shirts. She’s also wearing one of Victor’s jackets and a pair of flats. Well, she’s barefoot at the moment with her flats kicked off in the floorboard.)

“I got you a present,” Victor says and makes another turn. She turns to look out the windshield and realizes that they’re heading towards the warehouse district. It’s where they held Mark to start with. Her nausea and slight headache seem to melt away as heat spreads through her veins, and she quickly moves to the other side of the bench seat. Her arms wrap around Victor’s shoulders, carefully so that she doesn’t mess up his driving, and she props her chin on her arm.

“Did you get both of them?” she whispers. She’s been beating herself up for letting the second one catch her off-guard, when she was conscious. And when she wasn’t violently upheaving her stomach’s contents. (Victor had held her hair for her and then carefully wiped her face with a cold washcloth, and it makes her that much more possessive of him. He’s been so good to her.)

“The one you stabbed didn’t make it, but Max and Jade tracked the other one down.” That’s a little disappointing, but she’s angrier at the first one anyway. He was the one that killed the woman in the alley. He was the one who cut her up and then threw her into a wall. He’s the one that she really wants.

By the time they reach the warehouse district, Bex is bouncing in her seat. She knows that she’s going to pay for all of the movement later, her temples already feel hot and tight, but she doesn’t care at the moment. All she can think about is tearing into the asshole who killed that poor couple in that alleyway, and then turned around and hurt her. She can use both hands equally, it pays to be ambidextrous in her profession, but she prefers her left hand. She’s so worked up that she follows Victor out of the driver’s side instead of moving back to the passenger side of the car, and Victor just smiles down at her before scooping her up into his arms.

“I can walk!” she says through a laugh. Victor has one arm hooked behind her knees and the other across her back, and she has her arms looped loosely around his neck. She trusts Victor to not drop her.

“Doc said to take it easy.” She raises her right hand to trace the line of Victor’s jaw and his cheekbone, because the man has excellent bone structure, as she hums quietly.

“I’m gonna violate the doctor’s orders for a little bit, but I’ll take it easy after we get back home,” she promises. She’ll probably only lay around in bed for a day before getting antsy, because she’s never been very patient when it comes to recovery.

“Hey, Miss Bex! Feelin’ better?” Jade asks as they walk into the warehouse. It takes Bex’s eyes a moment to adjust, and she quickly takes in her surroundings. Jade and Max are sitting on the single metal table in the room, and the man from the alley is hanging from the ceiling with a chain wrapped around his wrists.

“Getting there. I heard you met Ivy?” she asks. Victor is still holding her, which is just fine with Bex.

“Cute little street rat. Got a stare like a doll.” When Bex just raises her brow in question, Jade grins and answers. “Cold and lifeless.”

“Maybe I should meet her,” Max says quietly. The chains rattle, interrupting the conversation, and Bex looks over at the man again. She squints to get a better look, because it looks like there’s something in his mouth.

“What is that?” she asks.

“A bow.” Max’s smile is close lipped, but there’s a look in her eyes that Bex has seen before. Dark humor, her favorite kind.

“We thought about wrapping him for ya too but decided against it. He’s all yours, boss lady,” Jade says and slips off the table.

“Have fun, Miss Bex,” Max adds and follows after her. Victor waits until both women are gone to sit her down, and Bex takes a moment to just enjoy standing on her own two feet. Being confined to a hospital room was not fun, it made her restless, so she’s going to release some of that pent-up energy.

“Let him down, Victor.” Her smile after saying the words is genuine, small and innocent-looking, because this is going to be fun.


“Me and you, we’re going to do this fair. My partner is gonna sit right where he is and look pretty, instead of sneaking up behind you. Doesn’t that sound fair to you?”

“What do you want from me, you crazy bitch?! You’re alive!”

“You killed that man. Raped and killed that woman. Look at what you did to me. That’s not forgivable.”

“I’m not scared of you!”

“You really should be.”

Two hours. Bex played with the lowlife for a total of two hours, while Victor sat on the metal table and watched. It was better than watching a movie or going to a theater. He’s not vain, but he knows that he does good work. Bex? She’s like a force of nature. She let the man lunge at her at first, danced around him until he was nearly foaming at the mouth in anger. Then, just when he was reaching his breaking point, she struck. No weapons whatsoever. She went at him barehanded, and barefoot, laughing all the while.

The room is painted in red. The idiot just kept getting back up, and Bex cheered every time he came after her again. Because it meant that she got to tear into him a little more. Various fluids and small chunks of flesh are scattered across the warehouse floor, and Bex is covered in dried blood and some that’s still fresh. The man is finally lying flat on the ground, on his back, with his stomach torn open. Bex had dug her fingers in and literally ripped the flesh apart, but the man hadn’t been able to get away because she’d already broken his limbs. Both legs. Both arms. Several times. Even now, the man’s intestines are lying slick against Bex’s thighs where she’s straddling him.

“I want you to remember this, remember me, in your next life. No touching without permission, okay?” Bex is holding one of his arms and snapping his fingers at each knuckle, quickly and efficiently, and blood is frothing on the man’s lips.

“In…sane,” the man manages to mutter out. Bex is working on his other hand now, quiet snaps are echoing in the warehouse, and she hums as she breaks his index finger. The man doesn’t even so much as twitch.

“Yeah, I probably am.” After the last finger is broken, Bex stands up. She just looks down at the man, and her head tilts to the side as he starts to gasp. One, two, nothing. She spins on her bare toes and looks over at Victor, and her teeth are stained red when she smiles at him.

“Feel better?” he asks her. She bit into his neck somewhere around the one hour mark and tore off some skin, but she was careful not to make it fatal. Her feet make quiet smacking sounds on the concrete floor followed by the suction sound of having dried blood on her feet as she walks over to him, but she doesn’t reach out for him.

“I feel like I transcended to another plane or something. It’s like yoga for lunatics,” she sighs happily. Her left cheek is flushed because she looks paler than usual, and he can see the dimple despite her bruised right cheek.

“You’re not a lunatic,” he says as he stands up. She twists around to look behind her, and the black stitches on the side of her neck stand out under the single bulb in the room.

“His insides are on the outside. I think I might be a little loony.” She’s grinning as she looks up at him, and she might have a point. Maybe she is a little crazy, but who isn’t in Gotham? He raises his arms to reach for her, but she dances back away from him with her hands raised. “I’m filthy. I don’t wanna get blood all over you.”

“Then let’s go home.” Her arms fall to her sides as her smile returns, and she looks…peaceful.

“That sounds like the best idea ever. I could really use a hot shower.” She reaches up to scratch at her left cheek, and blood flakes onto the ground. With one last smile, she walks past him and heads towards the door. As he follows behind her, he makes a quick call to get the warehouse cleaned. In a few hours, the body will be gone and the warehouse itself will be spotless. It’ll be as if nothing happened.

As if nothing happened. He’ll never forget the way that Bex completely let loose and destroyed the man who put her in the hospital. Victor has seen more than his fair share of killings. He’s seen efficient ones, personal ones, bored ones…He’s seen practically every motivation for killing there is. Bex’s motivation was more than just personal. She enjoyed the kill. Even now, perched on the edge of the passenger seat to avoid getting blood everywhere, she’s humming quietly to herself and smiling softly. She kills because she likes it. She really is just like him.

When they reach Bex’s apartment, home, he opens the door for her. She ducks around him and skips to the elevator, and he follows after her. He always follows after her. Once they’re inside the apartment, Bex spins around on her toes and throws her arms out. Her eyes catch his on the fifth turn, and her teeth are still stained pink. The right side of her face is still swollen and nearly black, and she’s covered in blood. Victor’s still sure he’s never seen anyone more beautiful. She winks at him and turns quickly, and the sound of her now ruined flats tap against the floor as she runs.

Despite being nearly a foot shorter, she reaches the top of the stairs before him. He doesn’t catch up to her until the bedroom, and she’s got one foot past the bathroom doorway when he grabs her. His arms wrap around her middle and lift her into the air, and she laughs with her head thrown back against his chest as he carries her the rest of the way into the bathroom. She’s still laughing quietly when he places her back on her feet and starts peeling her clothes off, and she rests her hand on his cheek when he bends to slip her flats off. The inside of the shoes are caked with blood, so he tosses them into the black laundry basket followed by the rest of the clothes she’s wearing.

“Are you going to give me a sponge bath, Victor?” she asks when he stands back up. He gently grips her left wrist to raise her arm, and his fingers are careful as he unwinds the bandage wrapped around her fingers.

“Something like that,” he answers. He starts the shower first and waits for the water to heat before letting Bex get in, and she blows him a kiss before closing the shower curtain. It only takes a few minutes for her to wash off the blood, and he can hear her cursing quietly as the water makes her wounds sting.

“I think I want a bath,” he hears her say right before the shower cuts off. When she pulls the curtain back a few minutes later, she’s reclined back in the bathtub with bubbles rapidly spreading around her. He takes a moment to think it over and then begins rolling his sleeves up. Once they’re rolled up past his elbows, he lowers himself to the floor so that he’s at Bex’s eye level. “Do you think I was born this way? Did I ever have a chance at being normal?”

“What’s normal?” His voice sounds distracted as he picks up her purple sponge and reaches into the bathtub for her left foot, and she makes a quiet sound as he starts to carefully clean her.

“Normal is not enjoying ripping someone apart. Were we born this way, or did something go wrong afterwards?” Once he reaches her knee, he sits her leg back down and reaches for her right foot to start the process over.

“Nature versus nurture?” he asks her. Her brows are pulled down tight, which probably hurts the bruised half of her face, and her eyes are staring up at the ceiling. It’s like her mood and personality did a complete one-eighty in the span of seconds, and he doesn’t know how to make this Bex feel better.

“My mother was good. Religious and kind.” Her right hand traces across her right collarbone, along the rosary and roman numerals inked into her skin, as she speaks. “My father was a compulsive gambler, but he wasn’t violent. Were your parents ever violent?”

“No.” His parents were mild-mannered, and people kept telling him at their funeral just how good they were. He starts to move the sponge up her right arm, and she turns to look at him.

“Is there something wrong with me? With us?” He lets the sponge go so that it just floats on top of the water, and Bex’s right hand shakes as it reaches for him. Their fingers lace together, and she uses the hold to pull herself upright.

“The world needs people like us,” he says slowly. He can see the question in her eyes, so he continues. “The world needs balance. Good can’t exist without opposition.”

“Opposition. I like that.” Her smile is smaller than he’s used to, a fragile looking thing, but it’s a start.

“Are you ready to get out?” She’s supposed to be on bedrest, and she’s been very active since she was released. She needs her rest. When she nods her head, Victor uses the hand not holding hers to pull the plug and let the water drain out.

The next fifteen minutes are quiet. Bex doesn’t make a sound as he dries her, dresses her, and tends to her wounds. She doesn’t even say anything after he lays her on the bed, but he can feel her eyes on him as he undresses. His shirt has blood on it, from where he grabbed her, but the rest of his clothes are clean enough and don’t need to be thrown away. He changes into a loose pair of sweatpants before sliding into the bed next to her, even though it’s the middle of the day, and she immediately plasters herself to his side. Her legs tangle with his and her unbruised cheek rests against his chest, and he can feel the fingers of her right hand tapping along to the beat of his heart against his ribs.

“Thank you, Victor.” Her voice is nearly silent. He feels the words against his skin more than he hears them, and he tightens his arms around her instead of replying.


When Bex wakes up, it takes her a moment to remember where she is and what’s happened. She remembers the alleyway, remembers the hot feel of the blade slicing her skin and the quiet sound of the woman’s dying words. She remembers officially meeting Detective Gordon, Jim, but most of her time spent in the hospital is hazy. She remembers Oswald stopping by to check on her, and she knows that Victor never left her side. He stayed with her and took care of her, and he got her a present. She remembers killing the man who hurt her, the man who killed those people in the alleyway. Remembers what it felt like to have his bones snapping under her feet, the taste of his blood thick on her tongue.

Those memories are stained red now, which isn’t uncommon for her. She always loses herself a little when she kills like that. When she makes it messy. She knows that Victor watched her the entire time, and he took care of her afterwards. Cleaned her, dressed her, and even tended to the new marks carved into her when she faded away again. She hates that feeling. The one that comes…after. It doesn’t happen every time, but it always leaves her feeling unsettled. Like now. Her skin feels too tight; it feels like she’s not right.

“You’re thinking too loud.” She moves on autopilot at the sound of Victor’s voice, and she blinks as she realizes what she’s done. Victor is lying flat on his back, and she’s sitting on his stomach. Dark eyes are looking up at her, calmly, and she presses her palms flat against his bare chest. She can feel his heartbeat against her right hand, but the bandage on her left hand stops her from feeling his skin.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers and watches the way her clean nails press against the smooth skin of his chest.

“For?” he drawls out. Faint pink lines are left behind when she raises her hand, and she forces herself to look away and up at his eyes.

“Going all melancholy. It happens sometimes,” she shrugs.

“Why?” He just sounds curious, so Bex tries to get her thoughts in order. She’s no shrink, but this isn’t the first time that she’s had a seriously low comedown after a good kill.

“When I was killing that guy, it felt right. It felt good, ya know? Like, of course I had to kill him. There’s no question about it. A guy I know, also an assassin, compared it to getting high. At the height of it, when I’m taking away a life, it’s amazing. But after? Coming down? Sometimes it’s okay. Sometimes it leaves me giddy for days. Sometimes I just go normal, like nothing happened. Sometimes I go numb. And then sometimes…sometimes…”

“You go all melancholy?” Victor supplies. She lets the left side of her lips pull up and traces the fingers of her right hand across Victor’s collarbone. She knows just how much pressure to apply and at what angle to break the bone, but she’d never hurt Victor.

“Yeah. It’s like I can hear my mother quoting scripture or…when I’d do something bad, she’d cup my face to make me look right into her eyes and tell me that I’d done a bad thing. ‘God will forgive you, Bexley, but you must realize that you have done wrong. Admit your sin and ask for forgiveness.’ That’s what she would say.” When she repeats her mother’s words, she lowers her voice into the hoarse whisper her mother used when she got suspended for fighting in the first grade. The boy that sat behind her had put gum in her hair, so she’d hit him in the face with her reading textbook. It’d broken his nose. “So I can hear her, and I know that murder is wrong. But it doesn’t feel wrong. It feels right. How can I ask for forgiveness if I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong?”

“You don’t,” Victor states simply. She narrows her eyes at him, because that’s easier said than done. At the look, Victor presses his hands against the mattress and pushes himself up. She slips down so that she’s in his lap, and she has to tip her head back just the smallest amount because he’s a little taller than her. She could raise up on her knees and make him look up at her, but she likes sitting in his lap. Likes feeling so close to him.

“Just like that?” she asks. One hand raises to brush under her chin, the only part of the right side of her face that isn’t bruised, and she shivers as his pinky finger brushes across the stitches on the side of her neck.

“I don’t know why you are the way you are, or why I am the way I am. Does it matter? We are who we are, for better or worse.” He grins around the words, almost like he’s teasing her, and she rests her hands on his shoulders. Nothing in life is really that simple, but they can make it that simple. Can’t they? Victor likes who she is. She could see it in his eyes. Even when she was covered in blood (and possibly entrails), he looked at her like she was the only real thing in the world.

“Victor?”

“Hmm?” His other hand is under her shirt, tracing around the slashes on her left ribcage, and her skin is starting to flush. It’s like her body is just starting to wake up. Parts of her thoughts still feel fuzzy, but she’s in a cliché and wanting mood.

“Make me feel real.”

His thumb lightly presses against her jawline as his lips brush hers, and she breathes out her answer to his silent question. No more holding back. No more waiting. His lips firm against hers as her arms wind around his shoulders, and she makes a quiet sound as his tongue flicks against her bottom lip. She thinks about denying him, but she wants to taste him. Wants to lose herself in him. So she parts her lips and presses against him as his tongue glides along hers. His hand moves to tighten in her hair, to hold her still as he presses harder against her, and she reaches down with her right hand for the bottom of her shirt.

Once her shirt is gone, she’s only left in a pair of panties. There’s a sense of urgency to her movements as she presses tight against Victor, until she’s sure that she can feel his heartbeat against her chest, and fingers push into her back on either side of her spine. She can already picture the blooming bruises in between the scars on her back, and she pulls away from Victor with a soft cry. She doesn’t have the patience to wait anymore, doesn’t want to wait anymore, so she pulls down Victor’s sweatpants just enough and then pushes her panties to the side.

“Bex,” Victor growls out. Maybe she should have given him some warning before slipping him inside of her, but she’s assuming from the tight grip on her hips that he doesn’t mind. Despite the tight hold, she manages to give small rolls of her hips to help her adjust and lets her head fall back at the feeling.

Teeth dig into the left side of her neck, and she’s sure that the fading bruise there will be dark again the next time she looks into a mirror. The laugh that comes out of her throat is nearly breathless and turns into a moan as Victor shifts under her, thrusting upwards whenever she rolls her hips down, and the sensation is unlike anything she’s ever felt before. Maybe because it’s Victor? She cries out as she’s flipped onto her back, and she braces one foot on the mattress as she raises her other leg to hook her ankle around Victor’s neck. His grin looks feral as he pushes against her, presses deeper inside of her, and she tightens the muscles in her legs as she moves against him.

It takes a moment, but Bex forces her eyes to open. Victor’s teeth are denting his bottom lip, and her eyes trace the lines of his body. From the sweat pooling in the dip of his collarbones, to his contracting stomach muscles, to the sharp ridges of his hipbones. She claws her fingers against the mattress as he presses her thigh tighter against his chest, and she can hear her stuttering breath over the sound of their bodies meeting. She’s close, so close that she’s starting to shake, and she arches her back to shift the angle of Victor’s thrusts

She bites down on her lip as her orgasm hits and tastes blood, and her body is still pulsing with aftershocks when Victor leans over her and licks the blood from her chin. The sound she makes comes from deep in her chest as Victor goes still over her, but his hips continue to move against her. Drawing it out for both of them. Bex’s skin is slick with sweat and her chest burns when she tries to breathe, but she can’t help laughing at the solid feeling of Victor as he pushes her down into the bed.

“We’re definitely doing that again,” she sighs as she digs her nails in between his shoulder blades. Victor hisses against her jaw and then nips the bruised skin, and her hips push up on reflex.

“Food first.” Victor pulls back enough to look at her, and her smile is completely genuine as she notices the light dusting of color on his cheeks. It’s a good look on him. One that she plans on seeing a lot of.

“Deal.”