#but the impeccable thing about gobblepot is that it HAS the range darling

[trophywifejimgordon]

ok fuck the ten year time jump me and my homies HATE the ten year time jump and i swear after this post i’m never acknowledging it again. but. i have been sitting on this gobblepot sequence of events surrounding it,,,

:). so basically,

oz & ed commit some crime, or they’re framed for it. or ed does something on his own and tries to bring oswald down. or their pardon is just generally ignored/abused.

whatever happens, they get arrested.

jim sees this arrest and knows it’s not right, but gotham’s new management really wants them put away. he says it’s not right. they threaten him. he fights back. they threaten everything he stands for. well....

he gives in. just another thing to feel guilty about forever, right?

they’re both going to be put in arkham indefinitely.

jim campaigns against this. he doesn’t waste time on ed (can’t, if he wants to sustain credibility), but vouches for oswald’s sanity, citing the certificate of recovery from his first stint in arkham, his mayoral campaign, the illegality of his second arkham visit, and his custody of martin.

he does not get oswald a pardon. he does get him 12 years at blackgate.

10, with parole, if he’s good.

jim prays he’ll be good

he keeps the news of his mostly failed campaign under wraps as much as he can, because he doesn’t want oswald to feel obliged to him for something that didn’t even save him from prison, and in fact probably made things a lot worse. as a result, all oswald ever hears about it is, “jim gordon had you sentenced to blackgate.”

he’s furious. he vows to Kill Jim Gordon

oswald goes to blackgate.

jim tries to visit him exactly once. oswald is so furious that the guards have to physically restrain him. he does not visit again.

oswald has enough of a reputation (and is smart enough to have earned it) that he is not touched in prison. in fact, he makes somewhat of a name for himself, and, while he doesn’t enjoy his time there by any means, it IS better than arkham. he’s at least comfortable; he eats well, he arranges poker games, he makes skillful connections that will last him years, and he keeps information flowing to him on the inside.

he starts writing passive aggressive letters to jim with thinly veiled threats on his life inside them. they keep getting returned to him unopened, and eventually he stops sending them. he keeps writing, though. eventually, these evolve and become not the threats and barbed comments that they were meant to be, but more love letters to a jim gordon of a bygone year, an idealized jim gordon that oswald knows never existed. he keeps them in a neat stack beneath his cot. 

oswald does not tell anyone about these letters.

jim looks into what happened to martin after oswald sent him away, and he gets the news that cobblepot lost custody entirely. apparently, he’s been jumping from foster home to foster home because he scares the people who want an undamaged kid and lashes out against the people who are just in it for a check from the state. all of them think they can get him to start talking. he draws disturbing pictures of them dying in creative ways. apparently, there’s talk of getting him sent to a correctional facility.

jim has him moved to a gotham-based orphanage, and visits him. initially, martin won’t acknowledge him at all. jim tries to explain that he didn’t want oz hurt, gets into their history a little, and after bribing him with books and things he hasn’t had since he was in oswald’s care, jim starts to win his trust.

he visits martin about once a week. what really wins him martin’s trust is that he gets it set up so the orphanage will allow him to visit oswald in prison regularly, on the condition that he doesn’t let oswald know who’s behind it. martin more or less behaves himself at the orphanage from then on.

those visits are the highlight of oswald’s week, and they keep him going more than anything else in those ten years. he starts learning sign language in his spare time.

on the other side of things, jim bumbles his way through learning it, too. they’re all accidentally a family without any actual interaction on oswald and jim’s side.

when barbara lee gets older, jim introduces her to martin. she asks why he doesn’t come live with them; jim tells martin it’s an option--he’s hesitant. jim understands, and doesn’t pressure him.

barbara lee is the highlight of jim’s life, and the only thing that really keeps him going. he’s worn out by the crime in gotham, by the way he’s been working for over 15 years and hasn’t made a single dent. he’s unfulfilled in his marriage, and watches barbara kean get better every day while he falls into familiar despair.

he starts taking risks. he starts going out into the field for the thrill of it, and leslie files for divorce.

in jail, oswald hears about jim getting hurt and worries, despite himself. he hates jim for making him care.

he writes more letters.

jim hears that bruce is returning, and feels that his time is finally done. he’s not actively suicidal, but he wants to die, and well... hm. everything is winding to a close. he turns in his resignation.

penguin is released from jail on parole. neither of them are surprised when oswald appears in the back seat of jim’s car. neither of them are surprised when they end up at the docks.

jim’s resigned to oswald shooting him. he decides that whatever happens, he’ll probably deserve it. 

but oswald can’t shoot him.

he doesn’t want jim dead. he wants jim to understand how much he’s been hurting for the past decade. jim sees this, and he jumps in the river--not to save himself, really, but to spare oswald the tumult. and because oswald’s very personal rage suddenly puts the arkham breakout in a new light.

in all the chaos, he doesn’t report the incident. 

martin is out of the orphanage now, going through college at gotham u, paid for by an anonymous source, perhaps tangentially connected to the wayne foundation. oswald comes to visit him, and during their reunion, martin lets something slip about jim.

troubled and frantic, oswald chases the thread. he ends up unraveling the whole thing, down to transcripts of jim fighting so hard for his acquittal. 

he confronts jim again, in tears. asks him why he’d let oswald hate him for so long--why he’d let oswald kill him--over something like this. jim just tells him he figures he’d deserved it. he treated oswald like shit for so long, everything now is too little, too late.

oswald hates him for this explanation.

he loves jim gordon.

they kiss. probably marry. oswald gives jim the support he needs to continue on as commissioner, jim doesn’t feel like he’s compromising his principles quite so much when he looks the other way while oswald reestablishes his empire. oswald eventually gives jim the love letters, and jim admits he’s been thinking about the ones he sent back unopened for years; he knew how much oswald hated him at the time, and the masochistic part of him wanted to read the abuse, but he thought it would be better for oswald if he could just get it out of his system and forget about jim. martin is best big brother to barbara lee. everyone pretends that they don’t know that batgirl is kind of totally threatening to beat up her beloved stepfather. 

the end :)