#wilson going to see his brother... being late... it going wrong... house keeping him company

[heph]

05x17

A night at Mercy 🕊️

[tilltheendwilliwrite]

A Painter’s Embrace

Chapter Ten

Master List  |  Steve Rogers Master List  | Series Master List

Previous Chapter

Pairing: Alpha!Steve Rogers x OFC  |  Word Count: 6042 Warnings: none

This update brought to you thanks to @horrsegal and @texmexdarling through Coffee Updates. Thank you for your love and support.

Natasha glared down at Barnes angrier than she’d been in a very long time. “How dare you act like nothing happened.”

“Natalia…”

“Do not speak!” She pricked his skin with the point of her dagger. “You haven’t the right.”

Sam crouched down a few feet away. “Natasha, I know he’s been beetled-headed of late-”

“Wilson,” Barnes growled.

“-But he came for Peter.”

She snapped her wings up and outward, allowing the deep black of her Widow’s persona to overcome her. “You listen to me, Lord Barnes. Miss Stark has become a dear friend. The wrong you have done her will not be easily forgiven. Do not seek to enter my home while she is here. Your presence is not welcome.”

It appeared the shock had worn off for Barnes Will began to pour from him. “Natalia, remove yourself from my person.”

She gritted her teeth and dug her knife in deeper. “Not until you understand the severity of my words.”

The sharp tang of metal filled the air, his eyes turned red, and his right hand snapped out to wrap around her throat. “Remove yourself this instant, woman!”

His Will hit her like a slap, causing Natasha to jerk backward. “I gave my word to Lord Stark. Distress his fledgling, hurt her in any way, not even your Will shall keep me from slicing you open.” She stood and took a step back. “You destroyed her. She does not eat. She barely sleeps. She smells of death and a broken heart. It took hours of Lady Heartright’s pleading to see Miss Stark agreeing to accompany her. I will not allow you to hurt her again. She’s important to Lizzy, nearly a nestmate, and Lizzy is Steve’s omega. You would not want to be responsible for upsetting Lizzy. Not with Steve so close to his rut.”

Bucky picked himself off the ground and shook out his wings. “Steve will not be in rut for a few weeks yet.”

She shook her head and glanced at Sam. The other beta nodded his agreement. “If you bothered to use your nose, Lord Barnes, you too would smell the change around him. Instead, you think only of yourself.” She spat a sentence at him in Russian, one best not translated, and turned to go only to pause on the stairs. “You are a fool when it comes to Miss Stark. Constance is a wonderful woman you have hurt quite brutally. Until such a time as you pull your head from your arse, do not try and see her. Do not be in her presence. Do not even attempt to speak to her. And remember who my mate is. Your Will cannot stop an arrow, Lord Barnes.”

Bucky’s eyes were still red when he glided toward her. “I wished only to offer greeting before I left for Winter Hall. Would you have me be rude, Natalia?”

“You have already proved yourself a cad and a rake, breaking her heart, James Barnes. Being rude is the least of your concern.”

His face fell, the red leaching from his eyes. “I cannot be her alpha.”

Natasha lifted her chin. “You boneheaded fool. You already are.” She flicked her wings, returning them to their unassuming brown, and walked away.

Moments later, the snap of down-swept wings was followed by another as Bucky left the keep and Sam went with him.

***

“Will Miss Romanoff be alright dealing with Lord Barnes?” Jarvis asked the woman gently holding his arm.

She was radiant in her red glory. She did not downplay her colouring by attempting to offset it with a contrasting dress but wore a gown as red as the rest of her. It was bold. Daring. He suspected it expressed her personality quite well.

He could smell her scent on the wind. Subtle. Soft. Sweet. Raspberries and sugar. It made his mouth water as no female ever had before. Only a beta, he had not the drives nor instincts the alphas did, but still, this stunning female called to his inner beast. But something about her, about the way she moved and smelled, it bespoke omega yet… not. Like the boy on the steps, she was more than she seemed.

“Natalia is most skilled. Lord Barnes will know his place. He has angered the entire weyr with his callous behaviour. If worst comes, he will not win out against the Colonel and myself. But… I have faith, da? He is,” she waved her hand, “confused. His mind is very mixed up after his time in France.”

“Pray forgive my ignorance, Lady, but how would you be of assistance to the Colonel against Lord Barnes?”

Wanda smiled up at him, giving him a hint of fangs. “You think me omega, da?” Her grin widened when Jarvis nodded. “I am not. I am alpha.”

She spread her wings behind them, high and wide, and he felt it — the brush of Will that wrapped him in a ribbon of sensation. It poured through him, covered him, coated him in more of her delicious scent, very nearly sending him to his knees.

“Alpha,” he breathed and stopped at the bottom of the secondary keep’s stairs. “My lady. May I be so bold as to inquire if you are… attached?”

A blood red brow lifted and amusement scented the air. “Why do you ask…?”

He collected her fingers from his arm and bowed over her hand. “Viscerion. Viscerion Jarvis. My mother called me Vis while my father preferred Vision. And it is Sir though I hold to no title but Majordomo for the Starks.”

She tilted her head and stepped closer. “Why Vision?”

“I can see very great distances and pick up minute changes in the space around me.”

“Such… beautiful eyes.” Her free hand lifted to his face.

He did not look away from her eyes when her grip on his hand changed, and she brought it to her nose. He extended his wrist, aware of what she was about, and exposed the gland hidden by his sleeve cuff and glove. The rumbled purr she produced upon finding his scent tightened his loins substantially.

Jarvis curled his wings around them, unwilling to share a moment more with what staff bustle about to bailey. “Lady Maximoff… I am but a humble servant in the Stark household, yet I find... that is to say, I am most… overcome by your presence. It appears I… I hold a high esteem for you upon this, our first meeting, and I-”

“Vis,” Wanda purred. “You will stay with me.”

His face flushed. “I must stay near Miss Stark. Her father is my alpha, no matter my feelings for you.”

Red seeped into the white of her eyes. “Then is good I have rooms in both keeps, da? Is very bad for me to be in main house during the Colonel’s rut, and I like the company of the women. I will stay here. With you.”

His heart skipped and pounded in his chest. “I would… I would be most… most pleased for your company.”

She chuckled and patted his cheek. “You are so shy, English, but never worry. I won’t break my beta.”

Jarvis swallowed thickly. “I am Lord Stark’s sworn beta.”

“Da.” She shrugged and tugged on his cravat. “Is not a second I look for, Vision.”

“What… what…”

She pulled a little harder until his neck was fully bent, and he felt drunk on the scent of her. Everything inside him screamed for him to grab and seize and claim the woman standing before him, but he hesitated, uncertainty swimming inside him. Her face came incrementally closer until it bypassed his, and her nose skimmed the edge of his jaw. It tucked into the space just above his cravat and below his ear sending shivers of desire streaking through him.

“You smell like… dinner.”

“Gods save me,” Jarvis groaned.

“My head swims with your scent. My heart pounds. The bloodlust in me surges with my desire. I wish for no second. I will have no weyr save this one. The Colonel is the alpha I look to, but my heart, my soul, my nature cries... mate.”

Jarvis snarled and sought her mouth, unable to maintain his composure when she stood there before him, a gift and an offering. The first taste of her was exquisite. Sugar and spice and the barest hint of the copper tang of blood. It made her all the more addicting until she pulled her mouth from his and panted against his lips.

“It seems the Colonel is not the only one to find his mate,” Natasha said as she passed them, her feet nearly silent in the gravel. “I take it you will be staying with us, Wanda?”

“Da. Spasibo tebe, sestra.”

The smug smile Natasha sported was more approving than teasing. “Pozdravleniya, sestrenka. Come, Sir Jarvis. Be welcome in our home. There will be time for you to enchant our fire dragon when Miss Stark is settled and returned to calm.”

“Your understanding is appreciated, Lady Barton.”

Natasha froze on the steps; her eyes narrowed his direction. “Natasha or Natalia is perfectly acceptable, seeing as how it appears you will be joining our weyr.”

“I remain ever loyal to Lord Stark.”

“As you should. That does not mean you will not have a home here. Do come in. While my mate is a fine man, he lacks social graces.”

“I heard that!” shouted the man in question from within the keep.

“See?” Natasha smiled and swept through the open door.

“Is she always like that?” Jarvis asked Wanda.

“Da, as long as I’ve known her. She has the mannerisms of a grand lady but refuses the title.” Wanda returned her hand to his arm. “Introduce me to your Miss Stark. I wish to be very good friends with her.”

He smiled down at her with such appreciation, Jarvis knew he must look utterly foolish but could not find the will to care. “I would be in your debt if you helped soothe her poor heart. She has been my charge from her earliest days in the nest. This upset.” He shook his head. “I want nothing but to see her smile again.”

Wanda nodded thoughtfully. “I understand the pain of heartbreak, perhaps better than most. It was like that when Pietro, my brother, was killed. Let me see what I can do.”

“You are a great lady.” He stole her free hand and brought her knuckles to his lips. The happiness in her eyes and pleasure in her smile were all the reward he could ever hope for.

***

Lizzy was speechless, her gaze upon the grand hall and ornate ceiling above her. It would rival that of some churches: soaring stone arches and grand buttresses mixed with colourful glass. Ornate columns held it all aloft, great stone pillars upon which more great arches rested. At the height of one of the magnificent windows, she caught the glimmer of rainbow wings and realized the boy, Peter, had hidden away in the buttresses.

What an incredible home for a fledgling to spread their wings. The idea of it, of seeing a variety of young ones spread their wings to flit among the arches made her smile. “Steven, this is splendid!”

He relaxed and smiled for her as he divested himself of his hat and gloves, handing both off to a waiting servant before assisting her with her coat and handing it off as well. “Father had… ostentatious tastes.”

“No, no!” Elizabeth took his offered arm. “It’s very grand but not at all pretentious. It makes a most wonderful first impression.”

“I’m pleased you think so.” He gently clasped his hand over hers. “Darling, this,” he nodded to the man standing stiffly with Steve’s coat over his arm, “Is Everett Ross. He is the butler of this house. Ross, my lady, Miss Heartright, soon to be Lady Denton.”

The man was quite short with bright blonde hair. He stood very tall and held his wings most tightly. The same pale blond, the colour reminded Lizzy of a palomino mare her mother had once owned. The smaller size proclaimed him beta, as did his scent, and though he stood as if his spine were made of steel, he smiled brightly. “I am honoured to meet your lady, my lord Earl. Lady Heartright.” He bowed deeply to her.

Lizzy tilted her head. “A pleasure, Mister Ross.”

“Ross, see Miss Heartright’s things placed in the Rose Room.”

Ross’s eyes grew round, but his smile spread all the wider. “At once, my lord Earl.” He bowed again and hurried off, barking orders to the waiting servants. Most, to Lizzy’s surprise, were Landeds.

Steve led her down the gleaming parkay floors, motioning to the set of narrow arched windows at the far end of the keep. “Through the doors there you’ll find a courtyard of cobblestones and a small fountain. It is quite narrow, separating the main house from the servants quarters, but tis a nice place to spend time outside without leaving the safety of the keep’s walls.”

“It sounds lovely.”

A wide stairway led up to the East wing and another to the West. He led her into the West wing where a third broad flight of stairs ascended to the second story. Like the grand entrance hall, it was made of stone, and she marvelled at the mastery of masonry which would have gone into its creation. Even the balustrade and stair railing was of carved and polished stone.

Steven’s smile was indulgent when she paused to pass her fingers over the curled newel post. “Come, darling. There is much to see.”

Vast halls and high ceilings led to keeping rooms and parlours, sitting rooms and studies. One salon led into another, and Lizzy gasped a little with each newly revealed room. The ceilings were painted with beautiful medallions, each the work of a master artist. The colours flowed and complimented, changing from pale minty greens into soft peach, lightening into the calming blue of a summer sky before sliding into a deeper sunny yellow.

Though a touch out of date, the furniture was lovingly polished and great care had clearly been taken to keep up the house. All the clocks ran on time. The windows shone streak free. There wasn’t even a hint of dust to be found on any flat surface or mantle.

Lizzy flicked her fingers over the edge of a heartily fluffed pillow. “Your housekeeper must be a quite the taskmaster.”

“Mrs. Danvish is strict but efficient. Since her enrolment in this house, I have had no qualms about leaving it in her capable hands when I’ve been away. Between her and Ross, there have been no complaints.”

“You seem to have an abundance of Landeds in-house.”

He looked at her with an arched brow. “I did not think that would bother you.”

“It doesn’t. Not at all. I find it… progressive.” Lizzy beamed up at him. “You’re a kind man, Steven.”

“I own a large estate. It is not always possible to employ one of winged kind. The Landeds are hardworking and grateful for the opportunity. I show them my trust, and they, in turn, give me their loyalty.”

Lizzy only smiled, her face a touch tender from how wide her cheeks had spread. The entire home was a marvel — a wonder to behold. She found so much about it she adored. “What’s next?”

Steve took her hand and drew her out the door of their current parlour toward another stairwell. This one was as wide as the stone one of before, but of wood and carpet, it appeared a touch shabbier, as if well used.

“You are welcome to make whatever changes you wish, darling,” Steve said as if he could read her mind.

“It truly is so grand. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Possibly with refurbishing the stairwell?” He chuckled softly as he led her up it.

“Well.” Lizzy blushed and bit her lip.

“It is the closest stairs to my suite and studio. They are well used.”

She looked up at that, excitement humming inside her. “May I see it? Your studio? I would love to see your artwork.”

“You already have, sweet dove. Many of the paintings throughout the house are mine.”

“And you didn’t point them out?” She tsked, disappointed to have missed them.

“Let me remedy my error?” Steve led her to a door on the south side of the keep and motioned for her to open it.

A trickle of nerves ran through her, but Lizzy did not think she would dislike his work. In truth, she hadn’t seen a piece of art she hadn’t admired. Still, he’d been so kind about her talent, she wanted to feel the same about his and pushed the door inward with some hesitancy.

Light beamed across the honey-toned hardwood floors from the wall of windows. Shadows cast themselves over canvases and easels set between the bright white light pouring into the room. It caused Lizzy to squint momentarily as her eyes adjusted. The smell of paint and canvas, cleaners and a hint of dust tickled her nose.

Then her eyes adjusted and Lizzy could only stare in amazement. Her slippers made no sound as she padded across the floor to stare in awe at the work on the canvases. Many were portraits, some of the risque variety, but others were of animals, landscapes, and ships at sea. The one upon the easel, a storm swept vista of billowing, angry clouds in blacks and greys rolled against the writhing sea where a boat, small and fragile, was tossed amongst the waves. Greens and deep dark blues curled into white foam where it frothed against the hull, while the creamy white sail rippled in the wind, torn from its mast. A man of indeterminable age fought a battle with nature, with sea and sky, and left Lizzy breathless in wonder and a strange sense of foreboding. Did he win? Did he fight the battle and outlast the storm? Did he make it home to his family and weyr? Or did the storm triumph, taking boat and sailor to the bottom of the sea?

“Oh… oh, Steven. Faith… I’ve never seen such skill.”

Relief rolled off him when he stepped into her spine. “It’s unfinished.”

“You could leave it unfinished, and it would still fetch a fortune if you wished to sell it. But I pray you keep it. I feel…” She pressed her hand to her chest. “I feel real fear for the man, but a sense of hope too. No matter the storm that rages, those who fight, who never give up, those are the people who live on and succeed. Oh, Steven.” She wanted to touch it but could smell the day's old paint and knew the canvas would still be tacky.

“Then when it is finished, it will be yours to do with as you please.”

“It must hang in the parlour. Somewhere where all who visit can see it.”

“Perhaps we’ll need to redecorate. Change one of the rooms to suit a nautical theme, for if mine must hanging in the parlour, then so too must yours, my love.”

A deep blush burned through her cheeks. “I have not this skill.”

“You have. You simply do not see it.”

Lizzy tucked her chin and moved deeper into the room. More paintings stood finished against the far wall, setting her shaking her head in wonder. “How are you not the talk of the Ton? How is it people are not clamouring for an Earl of Denton painting to hang in their home?”

“It is a hobby, nothing more. A way to relieve stress and calm my mind, Elizabeth.”

She shook her head at his humility, then gasped at the portrait of Natasha. “Does your beta know you have this?”

Pink caressed the alpha’s cheeks. “The sketches. She knew of the sketches.”

Lizzy shifted three paintings out of the way to bring the one of Natasha forward. She appeared as a phantom crouched upon a boulder. Dressed in all black leathers, the buckles of her clothing reflected the silver of the moon’s glow. It appeared to kiss the arch of her wings and absorb into the midnight black of her feathers. A hood hid the vibrant red of her hair, but small curls escaped around her face and across her forehead. Her green eyes were ethereal against her milk-pale skin; her lips the red of Lizzy’s favourite rose, but though she appeared beautiful, the gleam in Natasha's eyes bespoke danger. She was a woman not to be trifled with. A fact driven home by the sword, daggers, and guns strapped to her body.

“You capture her likeness and her personality in an image that astounds one’s eye.” Lizzy turned from the portrait and slowly shook her head. “Your talent… it is a blessing from the gods, for surely only they could create such works of wonder.”

He stared at her for a long moment before his gaze drifted from her face to her wings. “I wish to try with you, Elizabeth. To paint your likeness on a portrait to hang in my room. One only I will ever see.”

“You and the servants,” Lizzy teased.

A smile tugged his lips. “Would you agree to sit for me?”

“You know I would.”

The smile grew. “Not now, but soon. I know precisely how I want you.”

Lizzy glided toward him. “And how is that… alpha?”

Steve growled and took her by the waist. “You will see. Come. There is more yet.”

“I find I desire to see my suite. Though, in truth, I would rather share yours… alpha.”

“Elizabeth.” The word purred from his lips and trembled through her body. “The Rose Room is the suite which adjoins my own. It was my mother’s, as my father’s is now mine. The linens and bedding have all been replaced, but the furnishings have not changed. It is yours to do with as you wish.”

“Oh…” Lizzy frowned. “I had thought… I mean…”

He seemed to know what she was thinking again and cupped her chin to lift her face. “You will nest in my room, omega. I simply offer you a space free of me should you need a quiet place to retreat to.”

“Why would I ever want that?”

“I have it on good authority mates of the male persuasion can be exasperating. Natasha and Hope have informed me thusly many times when they have requested I take Barton and Lang hunting.”

She giggled, couldn’t help herself, and dropped a small curtsey. “Then I thank you, kind sir, for considering my future need to be rid of you.”

Something dangerous flashed in his eyes. “Let us pray that day is not soon in the offing.”

Heat licked at her womb as Lizzy licked at her lips. “I certainly hope not.”

“‘Mega.” More growl than word, it was her only warning before Steve’s mouth was on hers, seeking access, sweeping inside, and caressing the sharp tip of her swiftly lengthening fang with his tongue.

The brush of his wings against the edge of hers made Lizzy moan with the intimate embrace. Steve’s arms were tight bands, keeping her close while she clutched ardently at his clothing. He broke the kiss to lean his forehead against hers and breathe slowly, noses brushing as they clung to each other.

“Steven.”

“I find my passions are boiling over, Elizabeth. I long to take you to my suite, lock the door, and keep you there till morning.”

“Why do I feel there is a but coming?”

“Dinner. We must make it through dinner. If I were to start now, we would not be seen until breakfast. But by the gods, Elizabeth! I want you.”

A quiet cry escaped her when his teeth closed on her throat. “How long till dinner?”

“Too long.” His tongue swept over her skin.

She tugged his cravat, pulling until it came loose in her hand. “I find food is not what I yearn for.”

“Dammit, Elizabeth,” Steve growled against her shoulder, grabbed her hand and pulled her from the room. “We will finish the tour.”

The ache in her womb made her legs shake. Frustration and urgency scented the air around Steve when he drew her down the hall. He led her through the doors not far from his studio into a room with pale ivory walls and stunning floral rugs. The cornice mouldings around the ceiling were quite ornate and beautifully carved. It was a lady’s study with the decor of pinks and creams, mirrors in gilt frames, porcelain figurines, and elegant furnishings.

“This was my mother’s study. It was her favourite room. Now it is yours.”

He looked at her expectantly, but the fire of desire continued to hum in Lizzy’s blood, taking a moment to clear enough for her to smile up at him. “It’s a lovely room. I’m certain I can fit a good amount of my books in here.”

A predatory sharpness gleamed in his eyes before he took her hand without a word and walked across the hall. “You will not need to house your collection in your study, darling.”

The door opened, and Lizzy gasped.

“Welcome�� to my hoard.”

She rushed forward to stand at the iron railing and gape at the room before her. It spread over two floors, opening into the one below them, a library the likes of which she had never seen before. Dark wood panelled the walls. Chairs and couches, even a lounging divan waited in cozy groupings around rugs of beautifully worked dark colours. A massive fireplace stood at the far end with a tapestry hanging above it. But it was the ceiling she gaped at. A sky full of winged folk flew against the cloud covered blue background.

Tears pricked her eyes as Lizzy brought her hands to her mouth, overcome with emotion. If she’d had any lingering doubts they were meant for each other, seeing this, his hoard, would have wiped those thoughts from her mind. The tender brush of his hand between her wings had the sob she’d been fighting breaking free.

“It’s yours, ‘mega. Every book, every scroll, every written word. All of it is yours.”

Lizzy turned and threw her arms around him. “Oh, Steven! How am I ever to read them all?”

“You have a lifetime with me to try.”

She framed his face with her hands and pressed kiss after kiss to his lips. “Thank you, alpha. Thank you so much!”

Before he could do more than chuckle, Lizzy spun away and darted down the second-floor balcony, her fingers walking the spines of all the books. There were so many, and it seemed they were in no sort of order as she found Shakespeare mixed with Blake and tomes on botany. One particular book bound in old leather and embossed with gold leaf along the spine had her inhaling sharply.

“The Iliad?” She pulled it from the shelf and opened the cover. “And in the original Greek dialect!”

Steve leaned against the railing with another indulgent smile. “It’s fascinating.”

“You’ve read it?” Lizzy skimmed her fingers over the page in wonder.

“Not in Greek, but yes.”

She smiled at the first page and touched the words written there with gentle fingers. “O muse! Sing the accursed wrath of the son of Peleus Achilles, which caused countless woes for the Achaeans and hurled many valiant souls of warriors to Hades, and made their bodies a booty for dogs and a feast for vultures, and the will of Zeus was being accomplished.”

“Impressive.”

“My father. He read those words to me when I was but a hatchling. Afterward, I couldn’t put them down. Books became a window into a world I knew nothing about. Then they became an escape and a way to remember him.” She pulled the book to her chest and held it there, eyes closed. The scent of the dusty tome reminded her of the hours she’d spent listening to him read to her.

“Everyday you find another way to impress me, my dove.”

She opened her eyes to find Steve standing close, the soft affection and adoration in his eyes making her blush. “You do the same, Steven. So it is only fair.”

He plucked the book gently from her arms. “While I hate to drag you away from what is clearly your first love, I think it best I show you to your room. I imagine Ross and Mrs. Danvish have gotten you sorted by now, and I am certain you would like to change after our ride. Perhaps rest before dinner?”

Lizzy headed for the door but glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Would you be joining me for this rest, Colonel?”

“I think, Elizabeth, it is perhaps best if I check to see if I have any pressing messages.”

“Spoilsport.” Lizzy pouted.

Steve chuckled but held out his hand and led her down the hall to the far end of the West wing. A host of servants were bustling about, mostly female but for the few men who were packing trunks into the room.

“That’s the last of them,” Ross said, patting the first of the two men on the shoulder before noticing Steve and Lizzy. “My lord Earl. Lady Heartright. We will be but a moment longer.”

“It’s fine, Mister Ross.” Lizzy didn’t want anyone to feel rushed in their duties.

“Ma’am, if I may be so bold.” Ross shot a glance at Steve and bowed deeply. “Just Ross is perfectly acceptable. I am evermore your humble servant.”

Lizzy smiled sweetly. “Thank you, Ross.”

“May I introduce you to Mrs. Danvish?” Again he glanced at Steve.

“I’m perfectly capable of introducing myself, you daft man.”

The woman who bustled from the room should have looked severe in her black dress, but no one could appear strict with such pretty wings. Iridescent blue tipped in black, they fluttered out behind her, rounded like a sparrow's. Her scent read as omega, but the old silver scar on her throat showed she’d been mated for quite some time.

She wiped her hands on her apron as she bustled closer, then descended into a deep curtsey once she arrived at the door. “Lady Heartright, it’s an extreme pleasure to meet the Lady who tamed this overgrown alpha.”

“Mrs. Danvish!” Ross scolded, though Steve only smiled, clearly used to her plain way speaking and not at all offended.

She ruffled her wings and ignored Ross’ stern glare. “You must be exhausted, riding all the way here from Iron Hall. Come, come. I’ve had the maids strip the excess bedding, knowing there will be a trunk amongst all these with your preferred nesting things. I’ve Mary and Jane unpacking and pressing your dresses, and Sarah should be back any moment with- ah! There she is. Put the tray by the window, girl!”

Mrs. Danvish shooed Ross out of the way as the girl, a Landed, bobbed a quick curtsey without upsetting the tea service, before hurrying toward the table set before the window seat.

“I shall leave you to settle in, darling,” Steve said, leaning down to place a kiss on her cheek. “My study is on the first floor off your library if you need to find me, or send one of the maids to collect me and I will return to you.”

Lizzy wanted to pout and ask him to stay with her but knew all too well how busy he must be. He was an Earl and a Colonel. It was likely he had many missives to answer after being away these last few days. “Will you come collect me for dinner?”

He smiled gratefully down at her. “Of course, sweet dove. I look forward to it.” Steve shifted his focus to Mrs. Danvish. “See the door between the suites is unlocked. Elizabeth is to have whatever access she wishes to my rooms.”

“Of course, my lord Earl.” Mrs. Danvish beamed and curtsied. “I promise to take excellent care of your lady.”

“I know you will, Mrs. Danvish.” Steve collected Lizzy’s hand and brought her knuckles to his lips. “She’s my queen.”

A host of giggles and sighs erupted around the room, but Lizzy could no more look away from Steve than he could from her. “Alpha. Until later.”

“Until later,” he purred, turned her hand and inhaled at her wrist before stepping back. “Ross. With me.”

“My lady.” Ross offered her a bow and scurried after Steve.

“I’ve been a mate thirty years, but I never tire of seeing an alpha find his omega,” Mrs. Danvish murmured, then smiled at Lizzy. “Come, Lady Heartright. Let us get you settled on the window seat, and I will introduce you to your maids.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Danvish. I find I am rather tired of a sudden.” And hungry now that the scent of tea and small sandwiches adorned the air.

“Of course you are, my lady.” She shooed Lizzy toward the wind. “You rest yourself there a spell, and if you don’t mind the bustle of the rest of us, we will see your things settled while you take in the view.”

Lizzy sat and glanced out the window, only to gasp softly at the wonderful vista. “And here he said his garden needed help.”

Across the lake which surrounded the castle sat a wooded area where hedges had been cut to create mazes lined with gravel pathways, and in the distance, she could just make out a stone rotunda set at the edge of the water, a white bridge connecting the structure to the land. Beyond it, peaking through the canopy of foliage, a roof of shining glass glinted back at her.

“Is that an orangery?” Lizzy asked, taking the cup of tea offered by the Landed girl, Jane.

“It is, my lady.” Mrs. Danvish bustled toward a pair of doors to the left of the white-mantled fireplace and began sorting through her keys. “It’s a travesty of overgrowth, as is the rest of the garden. His lordship’s attention has been focused on the war, and it has slipped his notice. Not that I’m in anyway casting blame. Though, if I were, t'would be on that Napoleon fellow. Too big for his britches he is. Tis just a shame. The Earl often speaks of the garden parties his lady mother held with such fondness.”

Lizzy squinted a little. “It doesn’t look so bad from here.”

“I assure you, my lady. It is quite worse than it looks from here.” Mrs. Danvish approached Lizzy’s dark blue trunk and reached for the latches.

“Oh! No! I’ll take care of that one.” A blush filled Lizzy’s cheeks when the older woman straightened and smiled knowingly. “They’re…”

“I know, dear. I may be past the blush of my youth, but I am still omega, even if I was born of humble roots.”

Lizzy nodded slowly, relieved in a way to have someone in the house who understood her. There were a lot of betas and alphas, but what omegas claimed a home in this weyr seemed few and far between. “Thank you, Mrs. Danvish, for your kindness.”

“Of course, my lady. Of course. I will see the girls are properly instructed when it comes to seeing to your nest.”

Again Lizzy felt some of the tension flow out of her. “It appears you are sent by the gods, Mrs. Danvish.”

The woman smiled and nodded her thanks before bustling into the dressing room to hurry the other maids along.

“Can I get you anything else, milady?” Jane asked.

Lizzy glanced up but shook her head. “Thank you, Jane. I am content for the moment.”

She bobbed a quick curtsey and went to assist the others, leaving Lizzy to her thoughts as she gazed out the window at the garden.

Next Chapter

[iv-kplpt]

catch me like a cold II/II

ding. 14k words rated t

Next few weeks were pretty busy for Charlie – she had a social life to build and a house to buy. Her decision to settle down seemed to be final; she felt like Gotham is a place where she belongs.

Also, Gotham had Oswald Cobblepot and his wicked, wicked tongue – and as much as she valued his company and skills, she wasn't sure if she values them enough to take him with her, assuming she'd drop everything and hit the road again. She had to stay if she wanted to keep Oswald around.

And she wanted that. Oh, she definitely did; after their sudden hookup in her hotel room they met up a few more times, always at her apartment; he claimed the thrill of sneaking out of his cage and stealing his friend's car keeps him going. And who was she to deny him what he needed?

(It was always him who was doing the denying anyway.)

His presence felt... Nice. That word wasn't doing him full justice, but it had to do – she wasn't the overly eloquent one. His presence felt comforting and she was almost sad every time he had to get up and leave.

(She almost asked him to stay during the day once, but ultimately bit her tongue and said nothing, watching him put on his coat and blow her a goodbye kiss.)

Oswald was a very pleasant distraction, keeping her mind away from the intrusive thoughts, rewarding her struggles with staying in place. Also he seemed honest in his enthusiasm – and she knew he's a master manipulator, oh, she knew it damn well. He manipulated the extremely calm and collected Bruce Wayne into punching him in his face, while Bruce's last ally at the board was watching. He could easily manipulate her into feeling safe – so she did her best to not allow herself to feel safe, to feel at home with him around. She felt desired, yes – but she did her best to keep it impersonal. To never call their relationship „friends with benefits” - they were simply a series of one night stands, with some very thin strings attached.

(But she enjoyed those moments when they weren't having sex. She enjoyed simply having his eyes on her, she enjoyed the simple feeling of his warm, relaxed body next to hers, she enjoyed the way his eyes would light up when he made her laugh at one of his terrible jokes. She liked the way he spoke her name, the fact he seemed to be interesting in small things she had to say, the fact he seemed to genuinely want her to settle down. Maybe he wanted her money, maybe he wanted to get her on his side and to use her to get away from Maroni, maybe she was simply a distraction for him as well, maybe he genuinely liked something about her – all were valid options.)

Only once they hooked up in a place other than her hotel apartment and it was Peperoncino. It happened after another dinner party; this time she was invited as her own person, rather than someone's plus one. She heard Maroni's old friend returned to Gotham and that he wanted to greet her properly, as well as introduce her to the new blood among his people. Charlie didn't know a lot about Fish – the mysterious friend – as she seemed to avoid the public eye; she was running a popular nightclub that was closed for the time being, as nobody could be trusted with running it during her absence.

The evening seemed to be interesting, as everybody was going to be there – even including people Charlie hadn't met yet. She already received her state-of-the-art phone from Maroni's tech guy – Edward Nygma – and it was working like a charm; she was curious what kind of person spends their free time tinkering with phones and operating systems for the sake of a beloved loner. She was also curious about the personalities of Maroni's two men on the force – street cop Wilson and detective Bullock.

When she got to Peperoncino's well-hidden patio, only Crane and Jacques were there. As she entered, Crane got up to greet her – Jacques didn't, instead only nodding in her general direction.

(She prefered bartender's way of greeting her, actually. Felt more natural. Felt more like something she was used to.)

„Since you're not sitting anyway, can you go and fetch Cobblepot for us?” Jacques asked her carelessly and Crane shot him a scandalized look. „He's taking forever to get ready. Fucking narcissus.”

„Sure.” she said shortly, turned around and walked away, her heels clicking rhythmically on marble – and then wooden – floor.

Oswald was trying to decide between two ties in similar shades of yellow, when she entered the room without knocking.

„Always a pleasure.” he said, still staring at his reflection in Jacques's giant mirror. „Which one is better?”

„Both are equally terrible. The right one looks like a good quality silk though.”

She winked at him and in response he smirked and turned around. He still looked good in a suit, and this thing looked custom made – perfectly tailored, in a deep, nearly black shade of blue.

„Care to help me out with it?” he asked, coming closer.

„Yellow tie with a dark blue suit, Oswald? You are a disaster.” she sighed, tying it for him, his eyes on her face.

„But a beautiful one.”

She finally looked up and her eyes met his. There it was – this mischievous spark, a sign of trouble, a promise.

„True.” she admitted, finally stepping back and watching as he slightly loosens the knot, his eyes still on her. „Now come on. I don't want Jacques and Crane to get any funny ideas.”

„They wouldn't be wrong though.” he said, putting his arm around her waist, just like he did when they first met and he was pretending she's his good friend. „Plus I'm sure Jacques noticed I've been borrowing his car.”

„Maybe he thinks you're having fishing trips.”

„Darlin', the only thing I'd fish out of the Gotham River are corpses. No, he knows about our little thing. Speaking of which... Don't drink too much wine tonight.” he suddenly whispered, brushing her temple with his lips. „Alright?”

„Fine.” she muttered back, not sure how to interpret this sudden, quiet act of tenderness. Sure, he was trying to tell her to not get drunk, because he wanted to have some fun – but the rest was a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

When they returned – his arm still around her – other people had arrived. Maroni and his mysterious lady friend were nowhere to be seen, but she still could see some new faces. Both men were chatting with Esme and Misty; eventually the former noticed Charlie and Oswald and smiled at them.

„Charlie!” she called out in her slightly raspy voice. „Have you met my brother?”

„Not yet, no.” Charlie replied, approaching them, Oswald following few steps behind. „But the night's still young.”

Esme's brother was named Rocco, Rocco Wilson. He was a calm, young man of Pakistani descent; he and Esme were adoptive siblings and were close friends before they even got adopted.

„We told them we come as a joint package.” Rocco said with a smile, gently squeezing his sister's hand as she looked at him with her gorgeous, almond-shaped eyes the color of the full moon. „They were meaning to take us both anyway, but we wanted to be absolutely sure. And here we are!”

„Here you are indeed, waiting for Sal, who's running late to his own damn party.” a man standing next to them agreed, cocking his head. „Cobblepot.”

„Bullock.” Oswald greeted him reservedly. „Long time no see, detective.”

„Damn, Oswald, cut me some slack, wouldn't ya? Unlike some, I have a job to keep.”

He lit up a cigarette and looked at Charlie.

„And you must be Charlotte.”

„No, I'm Charlie.” she corrected him. „Sal's the only one to call me that. Let's keep it that way.”

„Noted. I'm Bullock. Harvey Bullock. Also... Hungry.”

„You're always hungry, Bullock.” Jacques claimed, approaching them with a glass of wine. „But same. Do you think Sal and Fish will be mad if we start without them?”

„Yes. And that's a damn great argument to do it.”

„Well, count me out. I've peeked into the kitchen. Fish. Lots and lots of fish.” Oswald said, looking disgusted. „Someone's trying to kill me.”

„Oh, but I thought penguins love fish!” Charlie said, gently nudging him with her elbow and he grimaced and shuddered.

„Not this penguin. I despise fish.”

„Oh, but I'm sure there's at least one fish you love, isn't there, pretty boy?”

The voice coming from the patio door didn't belong to anyone Charlie knew; it was sultry and smooth like silk.

When she turned around to see who said that she saw the elusive Fish Mooney herself – and it felt a bit like a revelation, the way her intensively purple fringe played with her dark skin and the way her expensive cocktail dress hugged her hips and the way her heels made the marble tiles sing. It felt a bit like a revelation and a bit like falling in love – it was something in her aura, something in her step.

Or maybe it was something in the way Oswald's face lit up when he saw her and spread his arms and pulled her into a tight embrace as she kissed his cheeks.

„Fish bloody Mooney, I'll be damned.” he said, visibly overjoyed. „Finally!”

„Ah, I knew you'll be happy to see me, boy.” she said with a sly grin, ignoring everyone else, her eyes on Oswald and his eyes on her.

(For a brief moment Charlie felt an odd sting somewhere near her heart.)

„Have you been bad?”

„I've been absolutely despicable, Fish.”

„Good. That's my Oswald.”

She affectionately patted his cheek and he grinned. Finally, Fish turned her attention to Charlie.

„So, you're Charlie. You're shorter than I thought.”

„People always underestimate the ankle-biters. It never ends well.”

Fish only laughed in response, turned around and walked up to Bullock, who was watching her quietly, attentively and-

He's in love with her, she realized suddenly. He looks at her the same way Esme looks at Misty, the same way I looked at Harry on our wedding photo. He's in love. He probably feels at peace now. He looks at her like she's a sunset, turning the sky into something even more beautiful.

„The worst woman in Gotham.” Oswald said quietly, putting his hand on Charlie's shoulder; she shuddered from the sudden touch of his cold fingers. „Or the best one. Depends on how you look at it.”

„She seems... Interesting.”

„Oh, I was hoping you'd say nice.” Fish replied, with her back turned to Charlie and Oswald. „I'll take it as a compliment, sweetheart.”

After the dinner – Maroni showed up late, no sign of his elusive tech guy – people started to leave, one by one. Esme and Misty wanted to give Charlie a ride home – but she politely refused, glancing at Oswald, who was playing with Bullock's pocket knife, while listening attentively to detective's tired rant. He was quickly moving the blade, flicking it with his long fingers and she wondered if it's a hint for the things to come.

(She hoped not; she liked her lingerie. She'd rather not have it cut to pieces, even by Oswald.)

„I'm not going home tonight.” she finally said, her attention back to the couple. „I have... Things to do.”

„And is any of the things you're going to do named Oswald by any chance?” Esme asked, her eyes glimmering playfully behind her elegant glasses.

Charlie rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, feeling – and looking – flustered.

„Who else knows?” she asked and Misty – who was checking her email on her phone – looked up, glanced at her wife and finally turned her attention to Charlie.

„Everyone.” she said shortly. „We all knew it's going to happen eventually. It's no big deal though, we're all adults here.”

„And... Sal..?”

„He doesn't care, as long as you don't rat Oswald out. Your sex life's your own... Which basically translates into „please don't give me any details, ever”. Deal?”

„I'm kinda curious though.” Esme admitted. „How does it happen between the two of you? How do you come if there's a man involved? You know. Those things.”

„I know you want to treat me as your token heterosexual friend, but please, Esme, I'm bi. We both are. And as for orgasms... We're getting bi.”

Esme and Misty both groaned and Charlie grinned with satisfaction.

Finally, she and Oswald were left alone, with Jacques holed up in his own guest room. She almost felt sorry for him – almost. Oswald's hand creeping up her thigh was very effective at keeping her mind away from Jacques and his problems.

„Jacques will hear us...” Charlie muttered, as he kissed her neck, his other hand searching for the zipper of her dress.

„Not if you'll keep quiet.” he said in response, tenderly brushing her arm with his lips. „Can you do that?”

„You know damn well I can't.” she said and gasped as his teeth found her neck. „See?”

„Whoops. My bad.” he said and even though she couldn't see his face she knew he's smirking in that infuriating way that always made her want to either punch or kiss him.

Her hands were free this time, free to roam his body and free to cover her mouth to muffle the sounds he was making her body sing.

She stayed the night, after they were done. As she was lying in his bed, her hair ruffled and her body relaxed he turned his head to look at her; and as they were both lying on their stomachs he reached out and – gently, softly, tenderly – stroked her face with his scarred hand and asked her to stay.

„Alright.” she muttered, feeling more and more sleepy. „I can do that. I'll be here when you wake up.”

For a brief moment, he looked like he wanted to say something – and maybe he did, but she didn't hear it. She dozed off as his eyes were on her face and his hand on her freckled cheek. It felt nice – to fall asleep feeling someone's tender touch. She could get used to it; again.

***

When she woke up the next day Oswald was still asleep next to her; it felt a lot like a deja vu, except this time there wasn't any blood smudged on his face.

He looked peaceful, even despite the scars. Seeing him like this – peaceful, vulnerable, quiet – made her feel something. Something she'd rather not feel. Something she remembered feeling, long time ago, in another life.

(His quiet, warm presence felt like home. His arms wrapped around her felt like home.)

As she was lying still, her thoughts a racing mess, horrifying realization slowly dawning upon her Oswald opened one eye and glanced at her sleepily.

„You're still here.” he stated and yawned, his eye closing again. „That's nice.”

„You wouldn't let me go.” she said jokingly and in response he sighed and untangled his limbs, letting her go.

„Can you make me a cup of coffee?” he muttered, his eyes still closed.

„Only if you say pretty please.”

„Don't use my own tools against me.” he muttered. „You might regret it.”

„Is that a promise?”

„It might be. But please. Coffee.”

She wrapped herself in a nearby blanket and went to kitchen, trying to not overthink anything. It was nothing, she was sure of it; all of it meant absolutely nothing.

Someone was in the kitchen, someone she hadn't seen before, someone tall, dark skinned and suspiciously energetic.

„Good morning!” the person said after seeing Charlie stand awkwardly just outside the kitchen. „Do you need something?”

„Uh... Coffee?” she said with uncertainty, trying to figure out who is she looking at. That person seemed friendly and harmless and their messy, messy hair and slightly scratched arms implied a fun night. „I'm sorry, but who are you?” she finally asked, as the person turned around in search of a clean mug.

„I'm Eddie. Eddie Nygma.” he said cheerfully and she cocked her head, wondering when did he sneak into Peperoncino. „And you, I assume, are Charlie. Is that coffee for Oswald?”

„Uh... Yeah. You're the tech guy, right?”

„Mmmhm. Is everything alright with your phone?”

„Yeah, it works fi- Wait, how did you know the coffee is for Oswald?”

„I know him pretty well.” he said cheerfully, handing her a cup of coffee. „There you go. Did you have a fun night?”

His eyes for a moment rested on her bare shoulders and a place where Oswald bit her a bit too hard last night.

„Did you have a fun night?” she asked in return, staring at his own scratch marks.

They both shrugged and smiled; she then turned around and returned to Oswald.

„I just met Nygma.” she informed him as he was slowly waking up.

„Oh yeah?” he muttered sipping the black liquid. „He's alright.”

„Seems like I wasn't the only one being mistreated this night.” she said with a faint smile and he winked at her.

She left him shortly after – she needed some time to herself. She needed to collect herself and maybe figure out what was going on in her head.

Being with Oswald... Made her feel something. Something not entirely physical. She was content with just spending time with him, with just talking. She let her guard down for a moment, for a night; she let her guard down for a night and it made her feel something she didn't want to feel.

Charlie knew about Oswald far more than he knew about her. She knew his life story – and it seemed like he still hadn't find out about her story. She knew everything in excruciating detail; while he only knew she was, at some point, married.

(The fact he didn't seem to mind her social status as a rich heiress was still rubbing her the wrong way. It was the main reason she put her guard up in the first place; he hated the rich, and yet he seemed to crave her company. Maybe he craved her money. Maybe he wanted to seduce her into folly. But she wasn't going to let him to, not anytime soon.)

But his company still felt comforting. Like she could finally open up – which she never did. Everyone she met – except for Maroni, as she suspected he somehow knows the full story – only got bits and pieces. She was sure Louise is on her way to digging out the truth, now that Bullock and Rocco entered the picture; and she was damn sure at some point Oswald will get impatient and start digging as well.

But that problem could wait – she had more important matters to take care of, such as buying a house. She wanted something elegant, modern and relatively secluded; a place where she'd be able to hide from the outside world on a bad day, when the weight of her husband's body would feel like an iron ball chained to her ankle, dragging her down.

(She also wanted a place where Oswald would be able to visit her, to take her mind off her problems, to take her breath away. A place he wouldn't have to leave before the dawn.)

There was a house for sale few kilometers from the Wayne Manor – in Crest Hill, a prestigious suburb. It had three bedrooms, an enormous living room, three bathrooms, a library and the best-lit kitchen Charlie had ever seen; it looked nothing like her family home. It looked perfect.

The process of buying the home went smoothly, thanks to Maroni's subtle influence – in fact he offered he can simply buy it for her as a welcome gift, but she declined. She was sure it would somehow become public – and she really didn't want people to get any funny ideas about her and Salvatore Maroni. She preferred being his relatively mysterious, recently widowed friend for the time being.

(Being perceived as his lover could come in handy, just... Not yet.)

She was glad for his help though – she started to have weird problems focusing, some time after her night at Peperoncino. She simply couldn't focus on anything – her body wasn't letting her to. Her eyes were burning, she had troubles breathing and swallowing, her head felt like it's filled with cotton wool and her fingers felt like they're shivering, despite not moving – it was a weird feeling, happening somewhere deep beneath the surface.

„Are you alright?” Louise asked her one day, during brunch. „You look pale.”

It was Friday and Charlie was just finishing picking furniture for her new home. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than it seemed – since her casual arrangement with Oswald seemed to be fairly stable, she wanted to buy some pieces of furniture he'd deem suitable for their needs. And he turned out to be extremely picky.

„Oz is driving me insane.” she muttered back, furiously typing a reply to Oswald's text that was a long criticism of a bed frame.

do you want me to just order a custom thing? i know a guy working for leathercave, you grump.

Actually...

...no, oswald, that was a joke. forget it

„Yeah, he does that.” Louise said, stirring her iced coffee. „Is everything alright between you two?”

„Why do you ask?”

„And why are you avoiding answering the question?”

Charlie sighed and rubbed her forehead with the back of her palm. She kept forgetting that Louise is – after all – a lawyer; she could be relentless. And was good at asking questions.

Was everything alright between her and Oswald? She didn't know; it's been a while since their last rendez-vous, but they kept in touch; and she often found herself thinking about him, about the way he looked just after waking up, the way he brushed her face with his hand, the way he laughed, the way waking up in his warm embrace felt like home. He was often on her mind and it was concerning.

„I think we're doing good.” she said finally, reaching for her iced tea. „As two separate people, that is. There is no we to speak of.”

„Are you sure?” Louise asked, raising her eyebrow. „You know you don't have to lie to me. I'm not on Maroni's side, I'm on songbird's side.”

Songbird was another of many nicknames Louise was using when talking about Oswald Cobblepot in public places – she sometimes referred to him as Tommy, or beautiful idiot, or her cousin Chester.

„What are you getting at, Louise?”

„You two aren't dating, are you?”

Charlie laughed and shook her head at this ridiculous idea.

„It's not like that. We're friends with benefits – a series of one night stands, platonic strings attached. It's nothing deep, nothing romantic.” she assured Louise; it felt heavy on her tongue, like the most blatant lie – and it left her feeling like someone was choking her, squeezing her neck with strong, slender fingers.

And something in Louise's face, something in her eyes told her her friend isn't believing in anything she said.

***

Finally the grand day arrived – the day she was saying goodbye to her hotel apartment and hello to her new home, just outside Gotham. Her belongings she was keeping in a rented warehouse in NYC arrived few days ago – all her clothes and books and other things she collected over the years of her life devoid of any problems and doubts.

Harvey Bullock helped her unpack – other people offered their help as well, but she decided to settle on Harvey. He seemed capable and was making her feel at ease – he wasn't talkative and his presence was calming.

(He reminded her of her father, with his calm eyes, jokes both dry and jovial at the same time and welcoming, attentive demeanor. Also she figured this might be a good occasion to find out some stuff about Fish Mooney, who seemed to be extremely close with Oswald.)

„How's work?” she asked, as they were putting her old comics on a shelf.

„I'm helping out friendly ADA with making Gotham believe Penguin is long gone. It's harder than it sounds, because... He's an idiot.”

„Oh?”

„About three weeks ago we got a call from some worked up clerk who was doing some late night grocery shopping. He claimed to have seen Cobblepot on the street.”

„...right.” she said slowly, avoiding looking at Harvey's face. Three weeks ago Oswald visited her in the hotel. Her skin still tingled at the memory of ice cubes.

„This has to end, Charlie.” Harvey said suddenly, shaking his head and she looked at him in surprise. „I know he was there because of you, but this has to end. Months of work, almost... Almost gone. All because Cobblepot couldn't jerk off like a normal person.”

(She didn't have the right words to explain the true nature of their arrangement to Harvey Bullock. She didn't have the right words to explain who gets the most out of their evenings.)

„What do you want me to do?” she instead asked defensively. „It's not my fault.”

„If you're so hellbent on... Doing whatever the fuck you're doing with him, then have him move in with you.” Bullock said, sounding surprisingly nervous. „Maybe it'll work out for you two.”

It didn't sound like the worst possible idea, Charlie concluded; „having Oswald move in” did have a nice ring to it. To have him around when she wakes up and when she falls asleep, to not have to limit their time together.

„You know, Charlie, you and Oswald... You kinda remind me of me and Fish.”

Hearing this Charlie instantly furrowed her brows, wondering what the hell does he mean by this. It was not a secret Harvey and Fish were a thing – Oswald told her that the same evening she met them. They've been together for years now, and they met when Bullock was investigating Falcone's crime empire. Back then, Fish Mooney was a double agent of sorts – everybody knew her night club and everybody knew it's one of Falcone's shady business hubs. What people didn't know was the fact Fish was constantly feeding information to Maroni, who was Falcone's golf partner.

Bullock met her years ago, and they've been seeing each other regularly since then; they somehow made it work, despite one of them being a notorious criminal and the other one being a cop. One was a respected citizen, while the other one was... Less respected – but they managed to keep their thing going, to keep it hidden from the public eye.

„What do you mean by this?” Charlie asked anyway, despite knowing of all that and Harvey shot her an amused look.

„Acting dumb? Fine, your game, your rules. But the similarities are there, girl.”

He paused for a moment, looking for the right words.

„And there might be more of 'em than you suspect.” he finished, turned around and left the room to get another box, leaving her puzzled.

Once the boxes were unpacked – most of them, at least; she decided she's not going to make Bullock help her with her clothes – she was left alone, just her and her thoughts. She was tempted to message Oswald, to get him to come, to keep her company – the house was obviously bigger than her hotel apartment at The Peak and all this blank space was further amplifying the overwhelming sense of loneliness. She wished she had a pet.

(She never wanted one before everything went to shit.)

Her first night in her new home in Gotham was mostly sleepless, as her thoughts eventually drifted towards Harry, towards his eyes, his smile, the way they said „I do”, the way he was making her feel beautiful and loved, even on worst days. And yet when she was lying in her new bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about her – dead cold gone – husband all she wanted was not to hear his voice again or to be kissed by him again; no, all she wanted was for Oswald Cobblepot to be there.

***

It took her about a week to face the cold, hard truth – she was in love. And when the realization truly came, it didn't even come from her – it came from Louise and Misty and Harvey.

It all made sense, when they spelled it out for her. It all made sense – the way she felt around him, the way she felt when she woke up in his arms and looked at his face, the way she felt like his company might somehow fill the emptiness in her heart, this place where Harry used to be.

And Harry – despite being dead and gone and buried – was the biggest obstacle standing between her and admitting her feelings in the first place. What he did to her, what he made her do, what they did to each other – it was unforgivable. Unforgettable. It was something she had to work through – and she had no idea how to start. She wasn't even sure if she wants to work through it.

The perspective of sitting down with a shrink and telling them everything was too much to bear. It would probably be Jonathan Crane – who was, after all, a psychiatrist, and a damn good one – but she couldn't bear imagining his face after hearing how she one day grabbed an ice pick and drew it through Harry's neck, after making him beg for his life.

(Killing Harry felt... It was one of the things she didn't want to admit, one of those things she wanted to repress, to hide, to forget; it felt good. Vengeance felt good. His blood on her hands felt good – for a moment. Then it felt like nothing, like ash, like shame.)

She decided to pay her parents a visit, to maybe clean up their graves. She missed them – she missed her father's kind eyes and she missed her mother's warm hands. She missed how much they loved her – but the shame kept her from ever visiting, kept her away from New York.

She left Gotham one morning, when the city was still asleep. She locked her house and set up an alarm and left, like she already did once; but this time she didn't leave a message for anyone, even though this time there were people who might've been concerned about her house being empty, about her not being in her bed.

Her visit in NYC was short, as she only visited her parents. The graveyard where they were buried was mostly empty and quiet when she walked in; and her parents' grave was surprisingly clean and well-kept, as if someone was taking care of it during her absence.

(She felt a sting of remorse, of shame, of sadness. Crispin Schiller-Aberdeen. Eleanor Schiller-Aberdeen née Moran. It sounded so impersonal, like names of strangers, not people who raised her, who loved her, who died because of her.)

„Hi.” she said eventually, sitting on a small bench in front of their grave. „It's me. I'm... Sorry. I should have come sooner.”

The grave didn't respond, because after all, it was just a mass of stone, under which the corpses of her parents were hidden, lifeless, rotten, dead.

„I'm sorry.” she finally said, deciding to let it all out. „I am sorry... But it's your fault too, you know? It was my mistake and I never asked you to pay the price for it. I never asked you to take your own lives. It wasn't needed... But you did it anyway. You left me with my mistake. You left me... Alone.”

Her voice cracked and she paused for a moment, looking around to make sure no one's listening.

„But I'm fine now!” she said, her every word dripping with fake optimism. „I'm doing better. I... I got everything back. He paid the same price you did. And... I met someone. Oh, you'd absolutely hate him. Remember how you loved Harry? You'd hate Oswald. He has nothing to his name, nothing but old shame and spilled blood. I think I feel something for him... For his eyes and the way he makes me laugh and the way he makes me want to come back to Gotham. He makes me feel... Like I actually have something to come back to. Like I should try and start again.”

She paused again, trying to fight off the tears in her eyes, trying to stop herself from crying.

„And even if he doesn't feel the same, even if he's just another Harry, even if he's only after my money... At least I know I still remember how to love. I still know what love feels like. Maybe this one will leave me devastated – but I got tough. I can take another heartbreak. This one won't destroy me."

„Charlotte?” she heard a voice coming from behind her; she shivered slightly and turned around.

It was father Cassidy – her family's favorite priest, who was present during her baptism, during her wedding and during her parents's funeral. He looked older than she remembered him; more wrinkles and gray hair. But his eyes were exactly the way she remembered them – intelligent, filled with a compassionate spark, dark like a fertile soil.

„Hello, father.” she said, looking at his slightly agitated face. „Long time no see. Care to join me?”

„Where have you been, Charlotte?” he asked, sitting down next to her, firmly gripping his walking stick with trembling hands.

„Here and there, father. I was looking for something.”

„Did you find it?”

„Yes.” she said, returning her gaze to the silent grave. „I did.”

„Does it mean you're back? In New York?”

„No, father. I'm settling down in Gotham. Have you ever been to Gotham?”

„I have a family there. A brother and his wife and their four children.”

„Do you think it's a good place to start a family?”

„It's a place like any other. A place can't be good or bad. It depends on the people.”

„Well, do you think people in Gotham are good?”

„Nobody is fully and truly good or bad, Charlotte.” father Cassidy said, also looking at the grave. „Nobody is just one thing. We're all multifaceted.”

„Even Harry Spencer?”

She turned her head to look at Cassidy's somber profile.

„Was he multifaceted, father?” she repeated her question and father Cassidy sighed and shook his head.

„I can't give you the answer you want to hear, Charlotte. I am... Terribly sorry about what happened. To you, to your family... It was a tragedy.”

„Was this tragedy multifaceted, father?” she asked, her voice cracking again. „Was it not truly and fully bad?”

„I'm not going to argue with you, child. Neither of us can win.”

„No, you're not going to win. I know the truth.”

She got up from the bench, smoothed down her black coat and looked at father Cassidy – an old man who knew her since she was an infant and who wed her to Harry fucking Spencer – one last time, trying to see him as an anchor, as something leading her to her old life, something which might prompt her to abandon Gotham and Oswald and Maroni.

But she didn't see anything like this in father Cassidy; so she simply bid him farewell, turned around and walked away, leaving him on that small bench in front of her parents's final resting place.

She was back in Gotham two days later and her phone was blowing up. People had been worried sick – Bullock almost organized an official search party. People she left behind expected the worst – and their relief when she came back was something she couldn't fully comprehend. She couldn't tell if it's genuine. She hoped it's genuine.

Oswald showed up on her doorstep after she returned. He didn't text, he didn't call; she just heard the doorbell ring and there he was, towering over her, his hands crossed on his chest, look of pure determination on his face.

„Allo.” he said to her, staring her down, along with her bathrobe and her pajamas. „Can I come in?”

„What do you want, Oswald?” she asked, closing the door behind him.

„You.” he said simply and her heart skipped a beat.

She was thinking about him that afternoon. Slowly, carefully she considered her feelings. She put them all together and took a long and good look at them and finally put a label on them – and the label said „love”. She was in love and she was damn sure it's one sided and is going to end with a heartbreak. She was sure there are no real feelings coming from his side – he was only after the money. He was only after the freedom her money could get him. He was a master manipulator and he was manipulating her by singing her body electric, by giving her what she wanted.

She decided to not give in to his manipulations. She knew she can take another heartbreak – but she didn't want to endure it so quickly, so soon after burying her husband, her first love.

They didn't look at each other that night; she absentmindedly wondered who is Oswald thinking about when her lips are on him, if there's someone who truly matters to him, if there's someone making his heart skip a beat. She wondered if there's a special someone, serving as an inspiration for him constantly giving her everything she wanted – attention, sex, a fragile sense of safety.

She wondered.

***

Being in love didn't feel good. It felt stifling, suffocating; like still air on a hot day just before the storm. It felt dangerous – she's been in love once and it didn't end well. It felt like a trap. Like a recipe for another disaster.

(His arms felt like home. His fingers on her face felt like home.)

She tried to escape this ridiculous, humid stiffness, this choking feeling in her throat. She tried to escape it by drowning herself in cold water.

Well, not literally. She wasn't trying to commit suicide, she was simply taking a lot of cold baths. One too many it seems, considering one morning she woke up with a headache and a cold.

(She dreamt about Oswald a lot ever since her return from the New York, ever since he showed up on her doorstep with that awful Cockney rolling out of his mouth, with that oddly determined look on his face. She dreamt about him a lot since realizing she actually, genuinely loves him; almost as if it unlocked some secret part of her brain, called „dreams to make you sad”. She'd often wake up with her face pressed into a pillow.)

„Fuck.” she muttered to herself, feeling weak. „That's just great.”

It's been about two weeks since her last night with Oswald. She started to actively avoid him – pleasure wasn't worth the pain of trying to figure out who's really in his heart.

Also, she was sure she might crack and say something she'd regret. He was good at making her crack. She didn't want to know how he'd react if one day she said she loves him.

She mostly spent those two weeks tightening her bonds with other people. She went to another party with Salvatore and spent the evening gossiping with Louise. She helped Esme and Misty hide their anniversary gifts from each other. She went to one of Crane's lectures. She even tried to befriend Jacques, but it was difficult; it was difficult to be at Peperoncino and to not head upstairs, to spend the day in a certain criminal's company.

(He was often on her mind, way too fucking often. It was maddening.)

It didn't mean she was ignoring him; she'd reply to his texts. She'd pick up the phone on those rare occasions when he decided to call; but her replies would be short and the conversations would be as concise as humanly possible.

And not even once he asked her what is going on, if they're done, if he maybe did something. Not even once.

(It hurt more than she wanted to admit.)

So, one day – after a long streak of ice cold baths – she woke up sick. She had the third worst headache of her life, she was coughing her lungs out and her whole body felt hot and cold at the same time. She felt like she's dying – she was also out of cold medicine and was definitely not in the right shape to go out and get some; so she called Crane, who was – after all – a doctor. Sure, he was a psychiatrist, but it was no secret he's capable and experienced in other areas of human health as well. He did patch Oswald up after his last run-down with the Batman – and he did it beautifully. If she didn't know, she wouldn't have guessed.

„Gosh, I'm so sorry!” Crane said in the most apologetic way possible, after she described her symptoms through the phone. „I have my hands full today... But I can send someone else to take care of you.”

„As long as they're competent, doc.”

„Oh, I assure you, they're incredibly competent. Please take care.”

„Thanks, doc. You too.”

About an hour later her doorbell rang and she dragged herself to the front door, shivering and sniffling, doing her best to stand straight.

She wasn't sure who was she expecting, but it sure as hell wasn't Oswald.

„Top of the morning to you, beautiful stranger!” he said, shooting her a quick grin. „Even though it's afternoon.”

„You can't be here.” she muttered in response, avoiding looking at his face. „I'm expecting someone.”

„Yes. Me. Crane called me.”

„He promised me someone competent.” Charlie fired back without thinking.

„I'm very competent when it comes to taking care of you. I thought we already established that.” he said, seemingly completely unconcerned.

She sighed, turned around and shuffled off, returning to her living room; Oswald followed.

„Did you steal someone's car again?” she asked, wrapping herself in her biggest blanket.

„No, I borrowed it. And this time... I asked.”

„And did Jacques agree?”

„Of course he didn't.”

„You were this close to losing your bad boy charm, you know.” she muttered, closing her eyes, trying to focus. „So. What now?”

„Now I'm going to treat you to the best damn cold medicine in history. Also I'm going to stick around for a while. To... Make sure you're alright.”

What was that in his voice? Concern? Uncertainty? She didn't know and she didn't care.

„What are you going to put in me?” she asked instead and he snickered in response.

„Not myself, I'm afraid.” he said and she groaned. She'd hit him with a pillow, if she wasn't so weak. „It's a polish thing. Ever been to Poland?”

„Didn't have the pleasure.”

„Me neither. But there's a lot of Poles where I grew up. They took me in. Apparently by polish standards I'm an absolute delight.”

(Not just by their standards, she almost said, but bit her tongue and only groaned instead.)

„I need to use your stove first.”

„Kitchen's behind us.” she muttered, her eyes still closed. „What else do you need?”

„A pot. And a glass. I think I'll manage. You just... Stay here. Try to not die.”

He returned a few minutes later, with a tiny glass filled with a suspiciously smelling liquid. The smell was strong enough to get through her stuffy nose; but she couldn't for the life of her figure out what might actually be in there.

„What am I about to drink?” she asked cautiously, glaring at the steam rising from the surface. „If I die I'm going to haunt you, you know.”

„I'll get an Ouija board just to talk with you.” he promised nonchalantly. „But this isn't going to kill you, I promise.”

The substance did taste like something that might kill her; but she somehow drank it all. Her throat was burning and the weird, intense flavor almost instantly brought tears to her eyes.

„Vodka, honey and some cloves.” Oswald announced cheerfully, as she struggled to swallow the last gulp. „Works every time!”

„You fucking monster.” she whimpered, her throat on fire. „I'm going to die!”

He only laughed in response, sank onto her couch and put his feet up on her coffee table.

(He looked relaxed. He looked peaceful. He looked beautiful. Even sick and miserable she wanted to kiss him; but she knew he wouldn't give in. She felt disgusting, all sweat and stickiness. Also she hadn't brushed her teeth that day.)

They talked – mostly about nothing. About other people. He told her some stories about Fish and Bullock and their initial struggles and about how Misty used to be in relationship with Crane and about how Nygma apparently somehow gets along with literally everyone.

Eventually he offhandedly mentioned Lady Arkham – and the way he spoke her name, the sudden weird glimmer in his eyes... Suddenly everything made sense.

Oh, Charlie thought, not quite listening. Well then. Silly, silly me.

Of course it was all about her. They almost destroyed the city together. They almost brought Batman down together. He was her second in command and she was the devil on his shoulder. Of course it was all about her; it was all about her and what they shared and what they almost accomplished together.

(One more time Charlie pondered how weird it is to sit on a couch with a wanted criminal and chat about his failed plans. Oswald had a lot of blood on his hands, a lot of pent up anger inside of him, and now there it was – her proof she ultimately means nothing to him. Of course.)

„Do you miss her?” she asked, her masochistic side taking the better of her.

Oswald sighed and nodded.

„Every day.” he confessed. „She was a little shit, and an even worse person than me, but... She understood. And that's more than can be said about almost everyone in this bloody city.”

„What do you think happened to her?”

Why in hell was she dwelling on that subject? Did she really want to put some more salt on her open wound?

„Heavens know.” Oswald said, his voice almost cracking. „Part of me hopes she's alive, but... She's most likely not. She's probably buried in Arkham. Ironic, innit?”

„Mostly just sad. Were her parents really... You know?”

„Oh, absolutely. But do you want to know the worst part?”

„Try me.”

„Sometimes I'd wish we could switch places.” he said quietly, in a strange, solemn tone of voice. „Sometimes... Sometimes I'd think this is still better than what I had. Still better than... Nothing.”

Her heart felt heavy in her chest and she looked away. Right.

That was part of a reason she didn't really tell him anything about her life before Gotham – when she lost everything, she was old enough to manage. To work through it.

(Or maybe she was just damn good at repressing it.)

What happened to Oswald, to his family – it happened when he was a kid. And he never got any closure; he tried and it didn't end well.

She felt more sorry for him than she probably should. That man sitting right next to her; he was still a remorseless criminal. Some people called him a monster. She was sure there is at least one mother in Gotham who uses Oswald as a boogeyman – and for a good reason.

And yet, all she felt was positive.

(Part of her was attracted to what he did. She could hear father Cassidy's words in her head, crystal clear; no one is truly and fully good or bad. People are multifaceted. Maybe the evil in him was attracting the evil in her. Maybe it was her own naivete she never really outgrew.)

She hesitantly put a hand on his shoulder; he sighed, closed his eyes and covered her hand with his own, pleasantly warm.

„World's a fucked up place.” she said eventually. „And what happened to you, what the Waynes did... You didn't deserve any of it.”

„I kept telling myself that ever since I found out what really happened.” he muttered in response, his eyes still closed. „And look at me now.”

There was a lot of things she wanted to tell him.

I wouldn't have you any other way.

I still love you.

There's still some good left in you. Not a lot of it, but still.

I wish we met before the world destroyed us.

I wish we've met before they convinced you life is war.

„I can think of worse things to look at.” she said instead and he smiled faintly.

„How are you feeling?” he asked. „Better?”

„Yeah, I think this... Thing actually helped. A bit.”

„Then I guess one more glass should do the trick. And then you should get some sleep.”

„And a bath.”

„Can you even walk straight?”

„...maybe.”

„Well, I can help. And I promise... I'll be good.”

He smirked at her and she shook her head in disapproval.

(She was glad for his offer though. She was feeling exhausted; and the alcohol didn't help with her sense of balance.)

It felt a bit weird – it was the first time his hands on her naked body didn't mean fun. He was gentle and it felt so, so relaxing; a welcome change.

It didn't stop her body from reacting to his hands though – with her hair still wet, she put his hand on her breast.

„Oh, doctor.” she said, half jokingly. „I want you.”

He let out a quiet laugh and took his hand away, shaking his head.

„This isn't covered by your insurance. Now come on. Get up.”

Once she was mostly dry and in her warmest pajamas, he actually carried her to her bedroom – she insisted she can walk, he insisted she shouldn't.

(He won. Of course he did – he was stronger. Plus she enjoyed the feeling; his arms felt safe. His arms felt like home.)

Finally, he forced her to drink one more glass of his hellish slavic concoction – it still tasted and burned like hell, but she knew he's relentless.

(The thought of prolonging this odd episode of caring was tempting and she almost simulated a hissy fit.)

„Now, try to get some sleep. You'll feel better once you wake up.”

„Will you be here when I wake up?” she muttered, her eyelids heavy like her heart.

„It can be arranged, love.” he said softly. „I'm free like a bird.”

(She fell asleep thinking about his anecdote about how he and Vicki Vale once put on a show, shortly before he shot Hamilton Hill; she had to act like a terrified civilian and he had to act like she's not his boss. He called her love in the most menacing, derogatory way possible; and everybody ate it up. She wondered if he sometimes called her that in a way meant for this word.)

He wasn't there when she woke up. Sure, she woke up feeling ten times better, her cold completely gone – but it would feel so nice to wake up with him somewhere nearby.

Instead, he left a note. She smiled faintly at this sight – naturally. It was his turn to sneak out.

The note was an apology; he said something unexpected had turned out, that he was needed elsewhere.

„Well fuck, I need you as well.” she muttered, putting the note in the drawer of her nightstand.

(Did she need him? Or did she simply want him? She couldn't tell the difference anymore.)

***

She had plans for the next day - Fish Mooney was finally reopening her night club and was hosting an exclusive, invitation-only party to celebrate it. Only her friends and actual VIPs received elegant invitations to Waterfront's launch night – and Charlie was actually more than a bit surprised when she received hers.

She only met Fish a few times; and sure, she liked that woman. She was dominant, elegant, direct. She knew what she wants and how to get it and Charlie caught herself pondering on how it feels to be the object of Fish's desire more than once. But still, they only met a few times and never really talked about anything important – and yet there it was.

„Should I be worried?” she asked Misty during a phone call.

„About what?”

„About Fish. Wanna hear my paranoia talk?”

„Oh god, I think I know where this is going...” Misty sighed and Charlie could hear a faint knocking in the background. „Shit. Gotta go, my assistant brought me documents I asked for.”

„You have an assistant?!”

„Yeah, what's so shocking about it?”

„I never heard about a journalist with an assistant.”

„Well, I'm one of a kind.” Misty said nonchalantly. „I wrote the best articles on Cobblepot, I can do whatever I want. Plus, Theo really needed a job and I really have to go. But don't worry about Fish. She's... Well, not exactly harmless. But she's on our side. Yes, Theo, come in!”

Misty ended the call and Charlie was left with her doubts. They came seemingly out of nowhere – absolutely nothing was suggesting Fish wants her on her side to use her deep pockets to get away from Maroni and build her own empire. Hell, if that was the case Charlie would gladly help if only Fish asked outright – but the minimal probability of being used again was enough of a spark to ignite the flames of her paranoia.

She locked it away – for now; same way she did with her doubts and fears related to Oswald. The best way to solve a problem was to ignore it.

(Now she understood why her sudden breakdown the other way was so intense. In hindsight, it all made sense, every little thing.)

She had a dress to pick. Her doubts could wait.

***

The Waterfront was hidden even better than Peperoncino – it was, after all, an exclusive place. It used to be one of Falcone's crown jewels; after his death and hastily cutting all ties with him Fish could in theory make it more open to general public, but she decided on keeping the exclusive tag on.

Louise was waiting for her near the entrance and she didn't look happy.

„Fucking Wayne is here.” Lou said to her before Charlie even had the time to say hi. „I want to die.”

„And good evening to you as well.” Charlie replied and winked at her and Louise shrugged angrily. „Oh come on, cheer up. It's not like you absolutely have to talk to him.”

„No, but you do. He's interested in you.”

„What?!”

„Oh, for fuck's... Don't act so shocked. It's a well known fact he's a bachelor and you're a rich, attractive, young woman who recently moved here. Of course he's interested.”

„I don't like the sound of it.” Charlie stated firmly. „And I don't like him.”

„You barely know him. I mean, I know why I hate him, but you... Talked to him once.”

„Yeah, well, maybe I got some of this disdain from your cousin. Can I ask you something?”

„Shoot.”

„Why are you calling him Chester?”

Louise smirked.

„Well, the short answer is... His middle name is Chesterfield. Yes. I know. His parents named him like this.”

(Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot. What a mouthful!

Suddenly she remembered their first conversation; she asked him if there's a shorter version of his name and he called himself a mouthful. And yet – for some reason – she couldn't bear herself to call him Oz again.

Also she wondered if he considers her a hypocrite for calling his name „a mouthful”, all while being named Charlotte Beatrice Elizabeth Schiller-Aberdeen.)

The place was crowded – apparently Fish's list of friends and VIPs was very long. She was surprised to see Bullock in the crowd – he looked almost comfortable, wearing a suit instead of his usual tired coat. He shaved.

„Did he frock up just for her?”

„She has him wrapped around her finger. I'm pretty sure he'd take a bullet for her.” Louise replied, without even looking in Bullock's general direction. „Oh, I found our girls.”

Misty and Esme found them a booth in the corner of the room, with a good view on everyone. Soon after Charlie and Louise sat down Fish approached them; she was wearing a crimson dress and Charlie found herself a bit lost in the crevice between her breasts.

(And judging from expressions on her companions faces, she wasn't the only one.)

„I'm glad you all made it.” Fish then said, her eyes focused on Charlie. „Especially you. How's Gotham treating you?”

„I've got nothing to complain about... For now.”

„Oh, trust me, you will find something.” Fish said with a knowing smile. „Or someone.”

„Maybe I already found someone to complain about.” she said without thinking.

„And who might it be?”

(Louise who was texting someone under the table paused her typing for a moment; out of the corner of her eye, Charlie saw her becoming oddly tense.)

„I'd rather keep it to myself for now.”

When Fish left – followed by Harvey, who seemed both desperate for her attention and like he'd rather die than say it out loud – after a brief period of silence, the girls loosened up and started talking, politely ignoring everything Charlie just said.

(She felt like this is going to bite her in the ass, sooner or later. Probably sooner.)

It was a pleasant night – eventually Harvey joined them for some time, as he felt the urge to lovingly complain about Fish to someone.

(Apparently she was driving him mad, but the spark in his eyes was saying something completely different.)

She somehow managed to avoid Bruce Wayne altogether that night – he was there, she saw him and he courteously nodded in her direction, but didn't approach; she sensed it might be because of her company. She knew Louise is shooting him menacing looks and she was glad.

(Even though she was kind of curious. Bruce and Oz – Oswald – grew up together and for years he knew her criminal heart-throb better than anyone else. What kind of person Cobblepot used to be before Thomas robbed him of his innocence? But there was no good way to ask this question; she couldn't just walk up to Bruce Wayne and ask him about him childhood friend, who might or might not be the source of her emotional anguish.)

„You're staring at Wayne.” Esme asked her eventually, glancing at her. „Why?”

„I'm wondering how to ask him about Oswald.” she replied, taking her eyes off Wayne's back. „They grew up together.”

„Well, Wayne does live for attention, so I'd say... Just pat him on a shoulder and be blunt.”

„Why are you suddenly interested in Oswald's childhood?” Misty asked, before Charlie could say anything. „You can just ask him, you know.”

„I'm interested in an outside perspective.”

„Well, Wayne did do an interview or two about his friendship with Oswald... I can dig them out for you.”

„Or maybe let's let her talk to him.” Esme suddenly said with a pensive expression on her face. „We could use someone who knows what's up in his life.”

„Treating me like a pawn, Midnight?” Charlie asked jokingly, shaking her head.

„Not a pawn. An asset. Knowing what is Wayne up to might be vital in our little... Enterprise.”

„Isn't Salvatore friends with him already though?”

„Sal is friends with everyone, meaning he's friends with virtually no one. No, we need a personal touch here... And here's where you enter the picture.”

„Alright, I'm in.” Charlie said, against her better judgement. „What do you want me to do?”

„We can start with a conversation... Without Louise behind your back, trying to turn him into stone.” Esme finished with a wink and Louise nonchalantly flipped her off.

„Oh, and be somewhere near. I need a picture.” Misty added with a grin. „It'll be a beautiful article.”

„Better don't make it front page though. I don't want to spend rest of my life in a public spotlight.”

„Your dirty little secrets are safe with us.” Misty assured her and Charlie furrowed her brows.

„Secrets? I don't have any secrets... Well, I have one.”

„Don't act dumb.” the journalist pressed on; judging by her eyes, she was slightly tipsy. „We ran a very thorough background check on you when Sal said he's interested. We know what happened in Perth.”

„Well done, Haze.” Louise said calmly, setting her glass down. „That was that one thing we agreed to not talk about.”

For some reason, the realization her secret was no longer a secret didn't make her feel anything. The other shoe had dropped; the truth was uncovered.

But it didn't bother her. After the initial shock had passed, she realized she's actually feeling... Glad. Like a great weight was lifted off her shoulders.

„Who else knows?” she simply asked. „And what... Exactly do you know?”

„We know your husband stole your fortune after the wedding.” Esme said hesitantly. „We know your parents... Are gone because of it. We also know you spent a long time trying to get everything back. We don't know exactly what happened between losing it and getting it back – you covered your tracks well – but we got the police reports. We know there was an... Accident when you finally tracked Harry down.”

(harry staring at her in shock pure fear in his eyes he was on his knees and he begged her forgiveness and she only shook her head and drove the cold sharp metal through his neck his blood on her hands his short scream ringing in her ears her love dead)

„There was no accident.” she finally admitted, for the first time. „I killed him. In cold blood.”

„Well.” Esme said after a long pause. „Now I kind of feel bad for asking you to be our mole in Wayne's life.”

„You are not using me though. You asked. I just... I'd rather avoid being used ever again, you know? Didn't feel great.”

(For a moment, her mind wandered off. For a moment, she thought about Oswald, about his failed attempt at getting his fortune back, about every time he offhandedly mentioned being determined to eventually get back what's his. About him being a great manipulator.)

„I'll be right back.” she said, getting up. „Time to befriend Bruce Wayne. How do I look?”

„Bomb.” Louise said, without looking up from her phone. „Do give him my regards.”

„Won't do.”

She approached Bruce Wayne, who looked bored. He was doing something on his phone; he briefly looked up and turned it off as soon as he recognized her.

„Miss Schiller-Aberdeen! Always a pleasure.” he said, smiling in the most blandly pleasant way possible.

(„Always a pleasure” Oswald once said as she entered the room where he was trying to choose between two nearly identical ties.)

„I figured it might be a good occasion to get to know the face of Gotham.” she said with a smile, wondering if Misty is already taking photos. „Last time we didn't have time to chat.”

„Last time you had some truly... Intimidating company.” he said with a nervous chuckle.

„You and Louise... You don't see eye to eye, do you?”

„We don't.” he admitted. „But it's an old thing. We don't have to like each other personally to appreciate our efforts in making Gotham better.”

She shot him another smile and the conversation – somehow – went on.

She didn't ask him about Oswald Cobblepot, his childhood friend who then beaten him to the pulp on live tv; it was a polite conversation about nothing and everything. She asked him about his butler. He asked her about her plans. She asked if he ever thought about running for mayor.

„Goodness, no!” he said, shaking his head and laughing. „Maybe I thought about it once or twice, but after what happened to our previous two mayors... I don't think it's a good idea. Penguin's still at large, after all.”

(Her neck suddenly itched in a place where Oswald once left her a bite mark she had to cover up with makeup.)

He doesn't sound like a bad person, she decided, watching him. He didn't sound like a bad person, and he wasn't to blame for what his father did – but she understood what Oswald felt.

(Something in Bruce Wayne reminded her of Harry Spencer.)

He eventually had to leave; but before doing so he asked if she can perhaps give him her phone number as he'd love to get to know her a little better, to chat away from prying eyes.

Smiling lightly and giving the prying eyes and viewfinders everything they wanted she wrote her number down on a paper napkin, turned around and returned to where her friends were sitting.

„Any good shots?” she asked visibly more sober Misty, who nodded.

„The gossip column will love me for what I'm about to send them. You don't mind them publishing your name, do you?”

„No, they can publish it, as long as they don't imply me and Wayne fucked.”

Louise's phone was buzzing constantly, informing her of a constant influx of new texts.

„Aren't you going to at least read them?” Charlie asked and Lou shook her head with indifference.

„Nah.”

Her own phone buzzed and she glanced at a screen; Oswald. Of course.

Busy?

kind of. fish says hi

Can I see you later?

She closed her eyes for a moment. Did he know? Was he the one running her background check? Was it all a part of his giant manipulative plan?

„Hooking up with our boy?” Esme asked, shooting her a devilish grin and her wife groaned.

„He's been acting really weird lately, you know.” Misty eventually said. „I think something's eating him.”

(Or maybe it was a lack of certain someone. Maybe it was simply the necessity of using a replacement that was eating him.)

„Maybe he's just tired of Peperoncino.” she said instead, texting him back, saying to meet her at her place in a few hours. „He's kind of... Caged there.”

„Well, for him it's either Peperoncino or Blackgate.” Louise said, finishing her drink. „And I'd choose Peperoncino as well. Nygma's ginger boyfriend has a Netflix subscription.”

Just as she was getting ready to leave, Harvey Bullock appeared by their booth.

„Charlie? A word?” he asked and he seemed and sounded incredibly tense; she wondered if maybe he was in charge of getting all the dirty details of her past.

„I'm sorry, Harvey, but I have a date.” she said, shaking her head with genuine remorse. „Can we talk tomorrow?”

„Yeah, I suppose it can wait a bit...” he sighed, scratching his head. „Wait. Did you say date?”

„Chill out, old man, it's just... Our friend.” Esme said mockingly, patting him lightly on the shoulder.

„That's true.” Charlie added, slipping her phone into her purse. „So don't worry. I promise I'll be home by ten.” she added with a smile; it was midnight.

Bullock scoffed, shook his head and left; turned around he really looked like her father.

Oswald was already there when she got home.

„Are you mad?!” she asked him, frantically looking for keys in her purse. „Someone will see you!”

„It's middle of the night and your nearest neigbour would have to use a spyglass to see anything in your garden.” he calmly pointed out, still leaning against her front door, his arms crossed. „I have an idea.”

„Yeah?”

„Give me a set of keys, so next time I won't have to wait outside.” he said with a grin and she fought off the urge to hit him with her purse.

„Step aside.” she said instead. „I found my keys.”

„Or maybe remind me to start carrying my lockpicks with me.” he went on as she opened the door, turned the lights on and stepped inside. „I love breaking and entering. I could visit you unexpected, you know.” he added, lowering his voice seductively. „How would you like this? A thief, not after your wallet, but after your sleep...”

„Are you done?” she asked, taking her heels off and wincing slightly at the sensation of cold wood under her feet.

„Oh I'm never done.” he assured her. „Also, you look beautiful tonight.”

„Flatterer.” she muttered, still turned around, hiding the sudden redness on her cheeks.

She went to the kitchen and he followed.

„Are you feeling better?” he asked, as she was pouring herself a glass of juice which he then took without even asking.

„I know, I know.” he said and winked. „The list. I remember.”

„I'm much better, thanks.” she asked, giving up. „Whatever you gave me actually helped.”

„See? Told you I'm competent.” he said with a smug grin. „How was your night?”

„Is this why you're here?” she asked, sitting on the table, as he leaned against her fridge. „You could've just called me.”

„Oh, but I told you already. Having you in person... Is much better.”

Months of work, almost... Almost gone. All because Cobblepot couldn't jerk off like a normal person.

(She saw pictures of Vicki Vale and she could see certain similarities between herself and the journalist turned tragic villain. The general softness of features, eye shapes, noses; it wasn't much, but it was there. And maybe it was just enough.)

When he came closer and leaned in to steal a kiss from her, she closed her eyes and gave in, deciding to give him what he needs – for once. She decided she's fine with being a replacement, a proxy, a substitute if it means being anything at all.

She did shed a tear or two that time – but he didn't notice, or maybe he didn't care. She let him do whatever he wanted, to not see her as herself; with his hand between his thighs and his lips on her breast she'd let him do anything.

(She didn't crack. She didn't tell him she loves him. She only pulled his hair and scratched his skin and kissed his jawline.)

She pretended to be falling asleep as he was dressing up and leaving, planting a goodbye kiss on her shoulder. Only after she heard the front door closing she finally let herself cry.

***

Next few days were relatively unpleasant.

She never found out what Harvey wanted to talk about the other night, at the Waterfront – first he wasn't picking up his phone, and then, when she finally got him, he said it's not important and that it resolved itself. He did a piss poor job at calming her down about that mysterious matter, but fine – his game, his rules.

Gotham Gazette gossip column did publish a – slightly blurry – photo of her writing down her number for Bruce Wayne. They namedropped her, and alluded she might soon be seen somewhere around the Wayne Manor; seemingly the person responsible for that one wasn't aware she's practically Bruce's neighbor.

(They talked about it over brunch once; a casual, absolutely non-committal thing; he laughed it off and said this is probably the eleventh time Gotham Gazette alone appointed some unfortunate young woman a future mrs Wayne. The way he said it made her think there probably already is someone he actually sees in this role – someone who doesn't want it.

Is Gotham filled with people looking for replacements for people they care about? Is this what this city is about? Replacements and sadness?)

Oswald probably had seen the tidbit as well – but he never mentioned it. In fact, their encounter after her night at the Waterfront was the last time she saw or heard him before everything went to hell and back.

After first few days of no contact, she decided maybe it's for the best – maybe he grew bored of her. Maybe he decided she's not worth the hassle.

For a short while, she considered following into his footsteps and finding herself a suitable replacement; but ultimately ended up abandoning the idea. She didn't feel like inviting anyone new into her life, into her bed, into her body; plus there was no one like Oswald Cobblepot, who seemed to instinctively know just how to play her body to make it sing the loveliest songs.

One morning Louise called her, to ask if she'd be up for getting some drinks with her and Fish. She agreed – it's not like she had any plans at all.

(She wondered how and when exactly Louise – a relatively well known attorney – became friends with Fish Mooney, a crook with some ties to mafia and obvious fondness for Gotham's most wanted criminal.)

They met at the Waterfront, which was flourishing, as Fish proudly announced, leading them to their table.

„People had missed this place, it turns out. Now they'd do anything to get in... Meaning it's probably time to invest in a slightly better bartender. Do you think Jacques would be up for this gig?”

„It seems like he'd rather die than abandon Peperoncino.” Charlie replied, sitting down. „And I don't think he can be in two places at the same time.”

„Oh, but maybe a change of surroundings would lift his spirits a bit.” Fish said jauntily. „He's perpetually in a bad mood, thanks to our mutual friend.”

Silence fell. Fish glanced on Louise, who avoided her eyes. Fish cleared her throat. Louise didn't react.

„What?” Charlie asked finally, feeling uneasy. „What?”

„For the record...” Louise muttered, nervously playing with her hair. „It was... Not my idea.”

„What?!” Charlie repeated her question. „What is going on?”

„We want to talk about you and Oswald.” Fish said finally, giving up on trying to get Louise to start the conversation.

„There is nothing to talk about.” Charlie protested faintly. „Really.”

„Is that so?” Fish asked, raising her eyebrows skeptically.

Her piercing gaze touched her skin and something in her cracked.

„Fine. I have feelings for him.” she admitted angrily.

„What feelings?” Fish asked, relentlessly pursuing the topic. „Feelings is an umbrella term. I have a lot of feelings for the Ventriloquist and none of them good. I also have a lot of feelings for detective Bullock – most of them good.”

„I think I love him.” she said slowly, her thoughts a racing mess. „Alright? I think I love him. He makes me want to stay. When I was visiting New York recently, I... I met someone who knew me damn well. Someone who encompassed all that I used to be. An embodiment of a second chance waiting for me in New York. And... I'm here. You know why.”

Fish and Louise remained silent, so she only sighed and went on.

„I know he's... Terrible. I know. I'm not blind. He's a murderer and a thief and a con-artist and god knows what else, but I think... We're just compatible. I feel safe around him. I feel like... Fuck, I don't know. But I know it's one sided.” she said with a forced, nonchalant shrug. Louise furrowed her brows.

„What?”

„It's one sided. I know it. I think... I think he's either after my money – I'm rich enough to get him away from Maroni and Peperoncino and buy him a new life – or uses me as a... Replacement. I think he and Vicki Vale... I think they had a thing.”

Fish Mooney turned her head and covered her mouth, visibly trying to hide laughter building up inside of her. Louise covered her face with her hands and sighed deeply.

„You dense motherfucker.” Louise said finally, her voice muffled by her skin. „Fish, where do I start?”

„Let's start with Vicki.” Fish replied, still avoiding looking at them, her shoulders trembling slightly.

„Vicki Vale is a lesbian.” Louise said finally, moving her hands away from her face and sternly staring at confused Charlie. „I would know. We used to date, before... Before all that bullshit happened. Vicki Vale is a stone cold lesbian and would never have anything going on with Oswald. Which brings us to-”

„Have you noticed how quiet he is recently?” Fish interrupted Louise, calm and collected once again. „No texts, no calls, dead silence... Have you noticed?”

„Of course I noticed.” Charlie said slowly. „I was sure he... Got bored. Had something better to do.”

„He tried to rob a bank.” Louise said shortly and Charlie's heart skipped a beat; hell, several beats. „We got to him before anyone noticed him, and we've been keeping an eye on him ever since.”

„What do you mean he tried to rob a bank?!”

„Well, he figured out he knows why you got so distant all of sudden and was determined to prove you that he's not like your dead husband.” Louise said quietly. „Of course he knew about Harry. He found out on accident and after everyone else – but he did. He knew for quite some time.”

„What are you trying to say?” Charlie asked, feeling like she's about to pass out.

„You really can't figure it out, can you?” Fish asked with genuine curiosity and Louise laughed quietly.

„God, she's so blind. I almost don't want to tell her.”

„Please stop fucking with me, I'm about to have a heart attack!”

„He's in love with you, you idiot!” Louise finally blurted out. „Ever since he met you in Peperoncino before the storm. Do you even remember?”

„Of course I remember.” she muttered, wondering if this is what heart attack feels like. „I was looking for someone and I somehow ended up there... And then he showed up.”

(She thought about their night together many times during following weeks. The way he asked her if she's alright, the way he looked at her, the way she almost felt bad for sneaking out in the morning.)

„He told me about it.” Louise continued. „Well, he did skip the spicy details, but what matters is that... You sneaked out of that bedroom with his heart in your pocket – but he only noticed it's missing when he found out you're back.”

„That's so fucking pretentious.” Fish muttered, looking to the side. „Are you quoting him right now?”

„Of course I am. Don't ruin the mood.”

„What do you mean he's in love with me?” Charlie finally asked, her brain playing the words on repeat. „What... What do you mean?”

„Charlie, can I ask you a question?” Louise asked in response and Charlie slowly nodded, still not fully comprehending what was going on.

„You were... Married. How the fuck did you not notice Oswald being in love?”

„I just assumed he's manipulating me!”

„This is the saddest thing I've heard this month.” Fish said, her face expressing pure joy.

„He's not manipulating you, you ginger idiot, for once in his life he was being honest!” Louise lashed out, waving her hands frantically. „You two truly are a match made in heaven, for fuck's sake.”

„Can I see him?” Charlie asked finally, wondering if this is all a very strange dream. „I think... I think I should talk to him.”

„We can deliver him straight to your doorstep to give you two some privacy.” Louise said, calming down again. „And for all I care, we can leave him there. I don't want to see or hear him ever again. He's been insufferable.”

Her insides were burning and she had troubles swallowing and breathing. She couldn't see straight; she was so shocked her body almost gave up on functioning.

And then she started crying. There was no sobbing – just tears streaming down her face.

„Oh come on!” Louise groaned, handing her tissues. „I know he's an obnoxious ass, but he's not so bad!”

„I'm sorry!” Charlie stammered in response, shaking her head. „I don't know what's going on!”

„Your emotions are finally letting go, that's what's going on.” Fish said calmly, putting her warm hand on Charlie's shoulder. „Cry all you want. I'll get you some water.”

Once she calmed down, Louise and Fish sent her home in a cab – and shortly after her driver took off, leaving her alone with her racing thoughts, rapidly beating heart and shaking hands Oswald showed up. Eddie Nygma dropped him off – he was the only person with a license who was free during the day and wouldn't arouse suspicions if spotted.

„Charlie?” Oswald Cobblepot asked hesitantly, entering her home, closing the door behind him and looking as beautiful as he did when they first met.

„I'm here!” she called out from the living room, where she was curled up on the couch. He noticed her and came closer, furrowing his brows angrily at the sight of her tear-stained face.

„Why were you crying?” he asked sharply. „Did something happen?”

„I talked with Fish and Louise.” she said, for the first time in weeks finally looking him in the eye. „Oswald...”

His anger at whoever potentially caused her tears disappeared without a trace and he smiled nonchalantly.

„Did they tell you about what I almost did?”

„They also told me why you almost did.”

„...fuck.” he muttered, suddenly looking unnerved again. „Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

„Tell me it's true.” she asked, her heart beating rapidly. „Please.”

„But I already told you.” he said after a brief pause. „Multiple times.”

„What do you mean?”

„I thought it's obvious. I thought you know and just don't care.”

Her mind suddenly filled itself with memories; of him asking her to be there when he wakes up, of him calling her love, of him saying something as she was falling asleep at Peperoncino, of him constantly giving her what she wanted and of his tense, anxious posture when she first met him after returning to Gotham.

„I'm an idiot.” she finally said. „An idiot. There is no other word to describe it.”

She covered her face with her hands and didn't budge as he slowly sat down next to her.

„Charlie.” he said softly. „Look at me.”

„No.” she muttered in response. „I'm never looking at anyone ever again.”

„Then uncover your face, at least.”

„I'm red!”

„And if I close my eyes?”

„...fine.” she sighed, giving up.

He was sitting with his eyes closed and a dumbfounded grin on his face.

She hesitantly planted a kiss on his cheek. He didn't react.

She planted another kiss near the corner of his mouth – and he opened his eye.

„You're red.” he stated. „I can barely see your freckles.”

„Help me calm down then.” she muttered, closing her eyes.

„Only if you'll say those magical words, love.”

„Pretty please?”

„As much as I love hearing you say that... That's not what I meant.”

This time they confessed using actual words, instead of half-truths and understatements. As he was helping her calm down – slowly and gently, so slowly and gently she almost forgot about blood on their hands – she kept gazing at him from under her lashes, following his movements.

He made her sing, like only he was able to. And this time it felt different – this time it felt honest, with no one's spirit between them. It seemed like finally they put their dead loved ones to rest, at least for some time; and as he was helping her calm down, as they were tangled together in her living room, as her forgotten phone was quietly buzzing under the couch Gotham just kept on living. Someone was receiving the best news of their life. Bruce Wayne was joking around with his butler. Harvey Dent was wondering if anyone even remembers him.

As they were caressing each other, the seemingly cursed city kept on living, blissfully unaware of an affair between a young socialite and a wanted criminals. They were together and they were in love and all was good in Gotham City and not a thing was out of place.

[nancygduarteus]

The Penance of Doc O

Well past seven one evening in 1988, after the nurses and the office manager had gone home, as he prepared to see the last of his patients and return some phone calls, Dr. Lou Ortenzio stopped by the cupboard where the drug samples were kept.

Ortenzio, a 35-year-old family practitioner in Clarksburg, West Virginia, reached for a box of extra-strength Vicodin. The box contained 20 pills, wrapped in foil. Each pill combined 750 milligrams of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, with 7.5 milligrams of hydrocodone, an opioid painkiller.

Ortenzio routinely saw patients long after normal office hours ended. Attempting to keep up with the workload on this day, he had grown weary and was suffering from a tension headache; he needed something to keep him going. He unwrapped a pill, a sample left by a drug-company sales rep, certain that no one would ever know he’d taken it. Ortenzio popped the pill in his mouth.

“It was a feeling like I’d never felt before,” he told me recently. “I’m tense and nervous, and that anxiety is crippling.” The pill took the anxiety away. The sense of well-being lasted for four hours, carrying him through the rest of the night’s work.

Back then, Ortenzio was one of Clarksburg’s most beloved physicians, the kind of doctor other doctors sent their own families to see. His patients called him “Doc O.” He made time to listen to them as they poured out the details of their lives. “To me, he wasn’t like a doctor; he was more like a big brother, somebody I could talk to when I couldn’t talk to anybody else,” says Phyllis Mills, whose family was among Ortenzio’s first patients. When Mills’s son was born with a viral brain infection and transferred to a hospital in Morgantown, 40 miles away, Ortenzio called often to check on the infant. Mills never forgot that.

As a physician in a small community with limited resources, Ortenzio did a bit of everything: He made rounds in a hospital intensive-care unit and made house calls; he provided obstetric and hospice care. Ortenzio loved his work. But it never seemed to end. He started missing dinners with his wife and children. The long hours and high stress taxed his own health. He had trouble sleeping, and gained weight. It took many years, but what began with that one Vicodin eventually grew into a crippling addiction that cost Ortenzio everything he held dear: his family, his practice, his reputation.

The United States is in the midst of the deadliest, most widespread drug epidemic in its history. Unlike epidemics of the past, this one did not start with mafias or street dealers. Some people have blamed quack doctors—profiteers running pill mills—but rogue physicians wrote no more than a fraction of the opioid prescriptions in America over the past two decades. In fact, the epidemic began because hundreds of thousands of well-meaning doctors overprescribed narcotic painkillers, thinking they were doing the right thing for suffering patients. They had been influenced by pain specialists who said it was the humane thing to do, encouraged by insurance companies that said it was the most cost-effective thing to do, and cajoled by drug companies that said it was a safe thing to do.

Opioid painkillers were promoted as a boon for doctors, a quick fix for a complicated problem. By the end of the 1990s, Ortenzio was one of his region’s leading prescribers of pain pills. It was a sign of the times that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.

Clarksburg sits atop rolling hills in northern West Virginia, halfway between Pittsburgh and Charleston. Lou Ortenzio came here in 1978, a recently married young resident out of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Small-town living seemed so much better than suburban life,” he told me as we drove around town one afternoon. “In Clarksburg, every block had something going. We had mom-and-pop grocery stores in every neighborhood. All these houses were occupied by teachers, downtown business owners, and people who worked in glass factories.”

Coal mining was the state’s dominant industry, but in Clarksburg, the glass business boomed. Glass manufacturing had arrived at the turn of the 20th century, drawn by the state’s high-quality river sand and rich fields of natural gas. Pittsburgh Plate Glass opened a factory in Clarksburg in 1915 and for years was one of the world’s leading plate-glass producers. Anchor Hocking employed 800 people making tumblers, bottles, fruit bowls. The city had family-owned factories too: Rolland Glass, Harvey Glass, and others.

Unlike simple resource extraction, glassmaking required sustained technological investment to meet new demands from the marketplace. The mass production of plate glass made skyscrapers possible. Picture windows and sliding-glass doors made small homes look bigger and more luxurious. The industry forged a middle class in Clarksburg and even gave the city a cosmopolitan air. The glass factories attracted artisans from France and Belgium; French was commonly heard on the streets for years.

Glass manufacturing helped forge a middle class in Clarksburg, but by the mid-1980s the industry, and the city, was in decline. Clockwise from top left: Lou Ortenzio; the abandoned Anchor Hocking glass factory; glass collected from the city’s streets; downtown Clarksburg. (Jason Fulford)

Each neighborhood was a self-contained world, with its own churches, grocery stores, and school; many had a swimming pool. High-school sports rivalries were fierce, and football games drew large crowds. When Victory played Roosevelt-Wilson, or Washington Irving went up against Notre Dame, people knew to arrive early to find a seat.

By the late 1970s, Clarksburg’s older physicians were retiring. Like many small towns at the time, it had trouble attracting young professionals. Ortenzio was among the few physicians who moved there to fill the void. He and two other young doctors opened a practice in 1982. Almost immediately, Ortenzio was seeing 40 to 50 patients a day.

The people who came to see him were mostly older; many had served in World War II. They had the aches and pains to show for a lifetime of hard work in the glass factories or at the gas company, but they had retired with something approaching financial security. They owned homes and cars, had pensions and good health insurance.

Ortenzio’s patients suffered from the ailments of the old—arthritis, diabetes, hypertension—and most of them did so stoically. This was partly generational and partly an Appalachian inheritance. One man, Ortenzio remembered, came to him thin and wasted away from cancer. “The disease was advanced, but he put up with it. I said, ‘Why didn’t you come in earlier?’ He said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want you to think I was complainy.’ That was the Appalachian line—‘I wouldn’t want you to think I was complainy.’ ”

Ortenzio grew into his adopted city. In 1992, he established a free clinic where Clarksburg’s uninsured could get medical care. The county chamber of commerce named him Citizen of the Year for that. He had been trained to treat patients holistically. Most of what a doctor needs to know to make a diagnosis, his professors had taught him, could be learned from taking time to listen to the patient. X-rays and lab tests were mostly to confirm what you gleaned from asking questions and paying attention to the answers. He’d also been trained to help his patients help themselves. Part of his job was to teach them how to take care of their bodies. Pills were a last resort. This careful approach endeared him to his patients, but it lengthened his day. “He would have office hours until 11:30 at night,” says Jim Harris, a friend and the director of the free clinic. “People waited until then because he was worth the wait.”

Drug salesmen visited him weekly. It was a stodgy profession back then. Ortenzio remembers the reps as older men who had grown up and lived locally and who cultivated long-term relationships with doctors. One of the reps for Eli Lilly was a deacon in a local Catholic church. Once a week, he would visit Ortenzio’s office in a business suit, with information about the drugs Lilly produced. Like many in his profession in those years, he avoided hard-sell tactics. Ortenzio grew to rely on the salesman’s counsel when it came to pharmaceuticals. Once, when the Food and Drug Administration removed a Lilly drug from the market, the rep dropped by Ortenzio’s office, embarrassed and apologetic.

Before long, Ortenzio and his wife saw Clarksburg as home. They found a two-story, three-bedroom house in the Stealey neighborhood, southwest of downtown and at the foot of a hill. They set off to the bank for a 30-year loan. To their surprise, they were denied. “The house won’t keep its value that long,” the banker told them. “The best we can give you is a 15-year loan.”

The banker was right. It wasn’t yet clear, amid the bustle of Main Street and Friday-night football, but the city’s prospects were fading. Newer glass technologies required large factories, which meant stretches of flat land rare in West Virginia. Mexico and Japan emerged as competition in glass manufacturing, and plastic and aluminum emerged as alternatives to glass. Pittsburgh Plate Glass had closed in 1974. Anchor Hocking left in 1987. Its hulking concrete plant is slated for demolition, but for now it remains, just off Highway 50.

By the mid-1980s, the city was in decline. Glasswork was replaced by telemarketing. Downtown, locally owned stores began to disappear. Homeowners yielded to renters, many relying on Section 8 assistance from the government. The city eventually had to destroy dozens of abandoned homes, leaving streets with toothless gaps. The swimming pools, too, slowly closed; resident associations lacked the money to maintain them.

Ortenzio drove me by the massive Robert C. Byrd High School, home of the Eagles. It was built in 1995 to consolidate two smaller high schools in Clarksburg, whose population had receded. Replacing neighborhood schools with one centralized school allowed for better course offerings. But Byrd is far from any student’s home. School consolidation extinguished the sports rivalries that had brought people together each week. Without local schools, neighborhoods lost their social centers.

When glassmaking departed Clarksburg, locally owned stores began to disappear as well. The city eventually had to destroy dozens of abandoned homes, leaving streets with toothless gaps. (Jason Fulford)

Lou Ortenzio began to see people in economic as well as physical pain. Many were depressed, worn out by work or the fruitless search for it. Obesity became a more common problem. Some patients began to ask whether he could get them on workers’ compensation or disability. Others left to seek job opportunities in New York, North Carolina, Florida. “I was always calling people out of state telling them how sick their parents or grandparents were,” he said.

When Ortenzio had opened his practice, he’d tended to see young people only for pregnancies or the occasional broken leg. By the mid-1980s, younger people were showing up in larger numbers. They were coming in with ailments that their parents and grandparents had borne in silence—headaches, backaches, the common cold. “The new generation that came in the 1980s, those kids began to have the expectation that life should be pain-free,” Ortenzio said. “If you went to your physician and you didn’t come away with a prescription, you did not have a successful visit.”

The shift was not peculiar to Clarksburg. Americans young and old were becoming accustomed to medical miracles that allowed them to avoid the consequences of unhealthy behavior—statins for high cholesterol, beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors for hypertension and heart failure, a variety of new treatments for diabetes. Fewer patients showed up for annual physicals or wanted to hear what they could do to improve their wellness. They wanted to be cured of whatever was ailing them and sent on their way. Usually that involved pills.

The medical establishment, to a large degree, abetted this shift. In the 1980s, a new cadre of pain specialists began to argue that narcotic pain pills, derived from the opium poppy, ought to be used more aggressively. Many had watched terminal cancer patients die in agony because doctors feared giving them regular doses of addictive narcotics. To them, it was inhumane not to use opioid painkillers.

The specialists began to push the idea that the pills were nonaddictive when used to treat pain. Opioids, they said, could be prescribed in large quantities for long periods—not just to terminal patients, but to almost anyone in pain. This idea had no scientific support. One author of an influential paper later acknowledged that the literature pain advocates relied on to make their case lacked real evidence. “Because the primary goal was to destigmatize, we often left evidence behind,” he said.

Nevertheless, an alliance of specialists who saw their medical mission as eradicating pain was soon joined by the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured opioids. Medical institutions—the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, hospitals and medical schools across the country—bought into this approach as well.

By the late 1990s, medical schools, when they taught pain management at all, focused on narcotics. By the early 2000s, doctors were being urged to prescribe the drugs after almost any routine surgery: appendectomy, ACL repair, wisdom-tooth extraction. They also prescribed them for chronic conditions such as arthritis and back pain. Chronic pain had once been treated with a combination of strategies that only sometimes involved narcotics; now it was treated using opioids almost exclusively, as insurance companies cut back on reimbursing patients for long-term pain therapies that did not call on the drugs.

The U.S. drug industry, meanwhile, was investing heavily in marketing, hiring legions of young salespeople to convince doctors of their drugs’ various miracles. Nationwide, the number of pharmaceutical sales reps ballooned from 38,000 in 1995 to 100,000 a decade later. The old style of drug rep, grounded in medicine or pharmacy, largely passed from the scene.

“It went from a dozen [salesmen] a week to a dozen a day,” Ortenzio remembered. “If you wrote a lot of scrips, you were high on their call list. You would be marketed to several times a day by the same company with different reps.”

Most drug companies in America adopted the new sales approach. Among them was Purdue Pharma, which came out with a timed-release opioid painkiller, OxyContin, in 1996. Purdue paid legendary bonuses—up to $100,000 a quarter, eight times what other companies were paying. To improve their sales numbers, drug reps offered doctors mugs, fishing hats, luggage tags, all-expenses-paid junkets at desirable resorts. They brought lunch for doctors’ staff, knowing that with the staff on their side, the doctors were easier to influence. Once they had the doctor’s ear, reps relied on specious and misinterpreted data to sell their product. Purdue salespeople promoted the claim that their pill was effectively nonaddictive because it gradually released an opioid, oxycodone, into the body and thus did not create the extreme highs and lows that led to addiction.

[From April 2006: The drug pushers]

The reps were selling more than pills. They were selling time-saving solutions for harried doctors who had been told that an epidemic of pain was afoot but who had little time, or training, to address it. For a while, Ortenzio still suggested exercise, a balanced diet, and quitting smoking, all of which can alleviate chronic pain. But his patients, by and large, didn’t want to hear any of this, and he was busy. So he, too, gradually embraced pain pills. Nothing ended an appointment quicker than pulling out a prescription pad.

The number of people on pain pills grew from a tiny fraction of Ortenzio’s practice to well over half of his patients by the end of the 1990s. The shift was gradual enough at first that he didn’t recognize what was happening. Patients with medical problems unrelated to pain migrated to other doctors. Still, Ortenzio was working 16-hour days, seeing patients who had been scheduled for the afternoon at 9 p.m.

The more drugs Ortenzio prescribed, the more he was sought out by patients. Many would use up a month’s supply before the month was out; in need of more pills, they were insistent, wheedling, aggressive. Many lied. Some would curse and scream when Ortenzio told them that he couldn’t write them a new prescription yet, or that he wanted to lower their dosage.

The pills were soon on the streets of Clarksburg as well. They replaced beer and pot at many high-school parties. Phyllis Mills, Ortenzio’s longtime patient, had two daughters who abused the pills. Theirs did not come from Ortenzio, at least not directly, but the supply of pills was exploding, due in large part to doctors like him who were overprescribing them.

Ortenzio should have noticed what the pills were doing, to his patients and his community, but he was less and less himself. After his late-night encounter with Vicodin in 1988, he had begun his own slide into addiction. By the late 1990s, he was using 20 to 30 pills a day, depleting even the plentiful supply of free samples from the ubiquitous sales reps.

Desperate to get his hands on more pills, he found a friend he could trust, a middle-aged accountant and a patient of his. “I’m in some trouble,” Ortenzio told him. “If I write you this prescription, can I ask you to fill it and bring it back to me?”

“Sure thing,” the man said, without asking for an explanation. “If you gotta have it, you gotta have it. You’re the doc.”

Soon a dozen or so trusted patients were helping Ortenzio. He knew he was out of control and needed help—even the amount of acetaminophen he was consuming was toxic—but he feared that seeking treatment for his addiction might cost him his medical license. Around 1999, he found a new way to get his fix. He began writing prescriptions in his children’s names.

Ortenzio could plainly see that the claim that these pills were nonaddictive was untrue. He would try to quit and feel the symptoms of withdrawal. “I couldn’t be away from my supply,” he said. His patients, too, were terrified of going without. One, a nurse at a local hospital suffering from chronic pain as well as depression and anxiety, would approach him in his office parking lot, often bearing gifts of quilts or canned goods, insisting that she needed her pills that morning, that she couldn’t wait for her monthly appointment.

Ortenzio saw no way to break the cycle the pills had created for the people in his care. He never found a way to get his patients down to lower doses of narcotics. They rebelled when he suggested tapering; just cutting people off made them sick. The area didn’t have enough pain clinics or addiction specialists to refer them to, and insurance companies wouldn’t reimburse for many pain treatments that did not involve pills. Without good alternatives for his patients, he kept on writing prescriptions.

Top: A resident of the Mission, a shelter that opened in 1969 with a few beds, for alcoholics and homeless veterans. Today, many of its 120 beds are occupied by opiate addicts. Bottom: A set of house rules. (Jason Fulford)

Addiction and overwork had estranged Ortenzio from his wife and children. As Clarksburg declined, his wife moved the kids to Pittsburgh to find better schools. In 2004, after more than a decade of living in different cities, they divorced. Raised Catholic but without much feeling for the Church, Ortenzio joined a Protestant congregation. Ultimately, he found Jesus in his exam room. During an appointment one day, he and a patient, a Baptist, talked of his search for redemption. The patient knelt with Ortenzio on the linoleum floor and prayed for the doctor. Ortenzio marks that moment as his new beginning. He had advantages many addicts don’t have: a home and a car, financial resources, generous friends and colleagues, and, later, the support of a second wife. He managed to taper off the drugs. A couple of months later, he was baptized in a deep section of Elk Creek, where baptisms have taken place since the early 1800s.

Not long after that, federal agents raided his office. They interrogated his staff and confiscated hundreds of patient records. The investigation dragged on for nearly two years. His children had to testify before a grand jury that they knew nothing about the prescriptions their father had written in their names.

In October 2005, prosecutors charged Ortenzio with health-care fraud and fraudulent prescribing. That year, 314 West Virginians died from opioid overdoses, more than double the number of people five years earlier. By 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, physicians were writing 130 opioid prescriptions for every 100 West Virginians.

In March 2006, Ortenzio pleaded guilty. His sentencing occurred shortly after a 2005 Supreme Court decision made federal sentencing guidelines nonmandatory and individual sentences up to judges’ discretion. Despite what he’d done, Ortenzio was still beloved in Clarksburg. More than 100 people wrote to the judge on his behalf. He received five years of supervised release plus 1,000 hours of community service, and was ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution. He would serve no prison time, but he did lose his medical license.

At 53, Ortenzio was unemployed. A temp agency offered him a landscaping job at the Stonewall Resort, where, as a doctor, he had taken his family for Sunday brunch. He’d never worked outdoors in his life, but he took the job. It paid $6.50 an hour.

He worked at the resort for a couple of months, then as the janitor at a local community center before returning to Stonewall as a full-time groundskeeper. He also found a night job.

Tom Dyer is one of northern West Virginia’s leading defense attorneys; Ortenzio had been his client. One night in 2006, Dyer ordered a pizza from Fox’s Pizza Den in Bridgeport, a town near Clarksburg. When the doorbell rang, he opened the door and there stood Lou Ortenzio, holding a pie. It took a minute before Dyer realized: Doc O was now a pizza-delivery guy. “I was just speechless,” Dyer told me.

“I made pizza deliveries where I used to make house calls,” Ortenzio said. “I delivered pizzas to people who were former patients. They felt very uncomfortable, felt sorry for me.” But, he said, “it didn’t bother me. I was in a much better place.”

Ortenzio eventually left pizza delivery. But the way he told me the story, the job was an important step in his recovery: Every pie he delivered liberated him. He was free of the lies he’d told his colleagues, his family, and himself to hide his addiction. He liked hearing kids screaming “The pizza guy’s here!” when he knocked on the door. “You make people happy,” he said. “That was what I liked about being a doctor.”

Today, Ortenzio spends his days trying to atone. He does this through constant work. There are places in and around Clarksburg where addicts can get help, and Ortenzio can be found at most of them.

The Mission opened in 1969, in Clarksburg’s Glen Elk neighborhood, at the time a small red-light district with bars and backroom gambling. The shelter started with a few beds, intended for alcoholics and homeless veterans. A neon-blue jesus saves sign outside has remained illuminated for all the years since, as the shelter has expanded. Today, many of its 120 beds are occupied by opioid addicts.

One afternoon, I met Ortenzio in a small, windowless office at the Mission. Now 66, he is thin, gray-haired, and bespectacled; he dresses in a hoodie, blue jeans, and sneakers. He does a bit of everything at the Mission, from helping the addicted find treatment to helping them find a coat, or shoes for their children, or a ride to the probation department. He is a volunteer adviser there, too, and at the county’s drug court, where he guides addicts through the criminal-justice system.

Ortenzio is also involved with two newer initiatives, which suggest the challenges of repairing the damage done by opioids. A wood-beamed downtown church is home to Celebrate Recovery, a Christian ministry founded in Orange County, California. Celebrate Recovery has grown nationwide due in large part to the opioid epidemic. On the cold Tuesday night I visited, the service featured an electric band singing the kind of fervid new gospel music that is common to nondenominational Christianity: “You are perfect in all of your ways …”

Ortenzio is Celebrate Recovery’s lay pastor in Clarksburg, running its weekly services. The flock is about 100 or so strong. One evening, a young mother named Sarah stood before the congregation to give her testimony. Sarah’s story started with parents who married too young and divorced before she was 3. It featured father figures who were coal miners and truck drivers and a stepfather who molested her repeatedly, beginning when she was 8. Then a life of illicit drugs, marriage, divorce, and addiction to prescription pain pills.

Clarksburg’s traditional congregations have dwindled along with the city’s population; many rely on support from former residents who commute in from elsewhere on Sundays. The place these churches once held in this community has been taken by new churches proclaiming a gospel of prosperity, insisting that God wants us all to be rich. And by ministries such as Celebrate Recovery.

A regular devotional service held in the Mission’s cafeteria (Jason Fulford)

Ortenzio coordinates the training of recovery coaches at the church, people who can help addicts as they try to wean themselves from narcotics. Addiction, however, seems as present as ever in Clarksburg. At the Mission one day, I met a group of recovering young drug users. Several of them had started out on heroin but then turned to meth. In Clarksburg and many other parts of the country, meth is coming on strong, poised to be the fourth stage in an epidemic that began with prescribed pills, then moved to heroin, and then to fentanyl. Meth seems to reduce the symptoms of withdrawal from opioids, or maybe it’s just a way to get high when anything will do. Whatever the case, like the various forms of opioids before it, meth is now in plentiful supply in Clarksburg.

A couple of years ago, Ortenzio decided to open a sober-living house downtown, where recovering addicts could spend six months or more stabilizing their lives. He said God had instructed him to undertake the project, and had told him, in fact, where to do it—in a house right around the corner from the duplex where Clarksburg’s first resident overdosed on fentanyl. In 2017, more than two West Virginians a day were being claimed by opioids. Recovering addicts needed places where they could maintain sobriety. “We thought, This is going to be great. They’ll throw a parade for us,” says Ben Randolph, a businessman whom Ortenzio helped recover from pill addiction.

Instead, the idea of a sober-living house outraged many in town. The principals of two local schools were concerned that the house was too close to their campuses. Owners of local businesses worried that the house might further tarnish the city’s image. “The property value of the homes around it are going to plummet. You’re going to have both drug dealers and recovering addicts in one area, so they’ll have a captive market,” one resident told The Exponent Telegram.

But Ortenzio persisted, and a bank eventually granted him a mortgage. Since July 2017, he has run a six-bed home for men, with daily supervision and no problems—no spike in crime nearby, no complaints of loitering—reported so far. A similar home for women opened last May. Nevertheless, the episode showed where the city, perhaps even the country, was when it came to addiction: afflicted mightily and wanting it to go away, but not knowing how to make that happen.

Lou Ortenzio was the first Clarksburg doctor prosecuted for improperly prescribing pain pills. He was the first person most residents I talked with recall as putting a different face on addiction. He was the first to show that this was a new kind of drug plague, and the first to puncture the idea that the supply came from street dealers. He was also the first to publicly work at his own recovery without shame.

He was not, however, alone. In 2005, another local doctor, Brad Hall, gathered with members of the West Virginia State Medical Association concerned about addiction among physicians in a state that cannot afford to lose them. They started the Physician Health Program, which has helped some 230 West Virginia doctors with substance-abuse problems get confidential treatment and retain their license to practice. Many are overworked, as Ortenzio had been. Some were self-treating emotional and physical problems. About a quarter abused opioids.

Left: Lou Ortenzio beside one of Clarksburg’s abandoned neighborhood pools. Ortenzio managed to overcome his own addiction to narcotic painkillers and today spends his time helping other addicts recover, at the Mission (right) and elsewhere. (Jason Fulford)

Ortenzio managed to escape drugs, but he’s still living with the effects of his addiction. He is working to repair his relationship with his youngest son; Ortenzio didn’t attend his wedding and has yet to meet a young grandson. He leans on his faith to keep him going. Many of his encounters with addicts prompt sudden, public prayers, Ortenzio bowing his head as he clasps the person’s shoulder. His faith has humbled him, relieving him of a sense of hubris that got him into trouble as a doctor: the idea that he could heal an entire community, if he just kept the office open a few hours longer.

Doc O will never practice medicine again. Yet his work at the Mission doesn’t seem so different from his routine as a family physician, tending to the needs of one person after another. One morning, he took a resident to a clinic, then talked on the phone with an addicted doctor living in a halfway house. A pastor from the coalfields of southern West Virginia called to ask how to set up a Celebrate Recovery ministry in his large but dying church. A 24-year-old mother of four from a West Virginia mountain town was looking for $225 to pay the utilities for an apartment she was trying to rent. Ortenzio promised to reach out to the Mission’s supporters for a donation.

As the morning wore on, a gaunt 26-year-old man from North Carolina, a construction worker addicted to heroin and meth, showed up to report that he’d had five of his teeth pulled. The dentist had prescribed a dozen hydrocodone pills. The construction worker couldn’t fill the scrip without proper ID, which he didn’t possess. Ortenzio sat and listened as the young man, slumped beneath a baseball cap, stared at the floor and insisted on his need for the painkiller.

The dentist had probably figured that the fellow had lost a lot of teeth, that a dozen pills weren’t many. If that were the case, it would mark a change. Not that long ago, the dentist might have prescribed 20 to 40 pills.

Ortenzio offered the construction worker a prayer. The man clearly still wanted the drugs. Ortenzio, who as a doctor had prescribed pills by the hundreds each day, could only give him packets of ibuprofen.

“You want to stay away from hydrocodone,” he said.

This article appears in the May 2019 print edition with the headline “The Penance of Doc O.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/opioid-epidemic-west-virginia-doctor/586036/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

The Penance of Doc O

Well past seven one evening in 1988, after the nurses and the office manager had gone home, as he prepared to see the last of his patients and return some phone calls, Dr. Lou Ortenzio stopped by the cupboard where the drug samples were kept.

Ortenzio, a 35-year-old family practitioner in Clarksburg, West Virginia, reached for a box of extra-strength Vicodin. The box contained 20 pills, wrapped in foil. Each pill combined 750 milligrams of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, with 7.5 milligrams of hydrocodone, an opioid painkiller.

Ortenzio routinely saw patients long after normal office hours ended. Attempting to keep up with the workload on this day, he had grown weary and was suffering from a tension headache; he needed something to keep him going. He unwrapped a pill, a sample left by a drug-company sales rep, certain that no one would ever know he’d taken it. Ortenzio popped the pill in his mouth.

“It was a feeling like I’d never felt before,” he told me recently. “I’m tense and nervous, and that anxiety is crippling.” The pill took the anxiety away. The sense of well-being lasted for four hours, carrying him through the rest of the night’s work.

Back then, Ortenzio was one of Clarksburg’s most beloved physicians, the kind of doctor other doctors sent their own families to see. His patients called him “Doc O.” He made time to listen to them as they poured out the details of their lives. “To me, he wasn’t like a doctor; he was more like a big brother, somebody I could talk to when I couldn’t talk to anybody else,” says Phyllis Mills, whose family was among Ortenzio’s first patients. When Mills’s son was born with a viral brain infection and transferred to a hospital in Morgantown, 40 miles away, Ortenzio called often to check on the infant. Mills never forgot that.

As a physician in a small community with limited resources, Ortenzio did a bit of everything: He made rounds in a hospital intensive-care unit and made house calls; he provided obstetric and hospice care. Ortenzio loved his work. But it never seemed to end. He started missing dinners with his wife and children. The long hours and high stress taxed his own health. He had trouble sleeping, and gained weight. It took many years, but what began with that one Vicodin eventually grew into a crippling addiction that cost Ortenzio everything he held dear: his family, his practice, his reputation.

The United States is in the midst of the deadliest, most widespread drug epidemic in its history. Unlike epidemics of the past, this one did not start with mafias or street dealers. Some people have blamed quack doctors—profiteers running pill mills—but rogue physicians wrote no more than a fraction of the opioid prescriptions in America over the past two decades. In fact, the epidemic began because hundreds of thousands of well-meaning doctors overprescribed narcotic painkillers, thinking they were doing the right thing for suffering patients. They had been influenced by pain specialists who said it was the humane thing to do, encouraged by insurance companies that said it was the most cost-effective thing to do, and cajoled by drug companies that said it was a safe thing to do.

Opioid painkillers were promoted as a boon for doctors, a quick fix for a complicated problem. By the end of the 1990s, Ortenzio was one of his region’s leading prescribers of pain pills. It was a sign of the times that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.

Clarksburg sits atop rolling hills in northern West Virginia, halfway between Pittsburgh and Charleston. Lou Ortenzio came here in 1978, a recently married young resident out of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Small-town living seemed so much better than suburban life,” he told me as we drove around town one afternoon. “In Clarksburg, every block had something going. We had mom-and-pop grocery stores in every neighborhood. All these houses were occupied by teachers, downtown business owners, and people who worked in glass factories.”

Coal mining was the state’s dominant industry, but in Clarksburg, the glass business boomed. Glass manufacturing had arrived at the turn of the 20th century, drawn by the state’s high-quality river sand and rich fields of natural gas. Pittsburgh Plate Glass opened a factory in Clarksburg in 1915 and for years was one of the world’s leading plate-glass producers. Anchor Hocking employed 800 people making tumblers, bottles, fruit bowls. The city had family-owned factories too: Rolland Glass, Harvey Glass, and others.

Unlike simple resource extraction, glassmaking required sustained technological investment to meet new demands from the marketplace. The mass production of plate glass made skyscrapers possible. Picture windows and sliding-glass doors made small homes look bigger and more luxurious. The industry forged a middle class in Clarksburg and even gave the city a cosmopolitan air. The glass factories attracted artisans from France and Belgium; French was commonly heard on the streets for years.

Glass manufacturing helped forge a middle class in Clarksburg, but by the mid-1980s the industry, and the city, was in decline. Clockwise from top left: Lou Ortenzio; the abandoned Anchor Hocking glass factory; glass collected from the city’s streets; downtown Clarksburg. (Jason Fulford)

Each neighborhood was a self-contained world, with its own churches, grocery stores, and school; many had a swimming pool. High-school sports rivalries were fierce, and football games drew large crowds. When Victory played Roosevelt-Wilson, or Washington Irving went up against Notre Dame, people knew to arrive early to find a seat.

By the late 1970s, Clarksburg’s older physicians were retiring. Like many small towns at the time, it had trouble attracting young professionals. Ortenzio was among the few physicians who moved there to fill the void. He and two other young doctors opened a practice in 1982. Almost immediately, Ortenzio was seeing 40 to 50 patients a day.

The people who came to see him were mostly older; many had served in World War II. They had the aches and pains to show for a lifetime of hard work in the glass factories or at the gas company, but they had retired with something approaching financial security. They owned homes and cars, had pensions and good health insurance.

Ortenzio’s patients suffered from the ailments of the old—arthritis, diabetes, hypertension—and most of them did so stoically. This was partly generational and partly an Appalachian inheritance. One man, Ortenzio remembered, came to him thin and wasted away from cancer. “The disease was advanced, but he put up with it. I said, ‘Why didn’t you come in earlier?’ He said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want you to think I was complainy.’ That was the Appalachian line—‘I wouldn’t want you to think I was complainy.’ ”

Ortenzio grew into his adopted city. In 1992, he established a free clinic where Clarksburg’s uninsured could get medical care. The county chamber of commerce named him Citizen of the Year for that. He had been trained to treat patients holistically. Most of what a doctor needs to know to make a diagnosis, his professors had taught him, could be learned from taking time to listen to the patient. X-rays and lab tests were mostly to confirm what you gleaned from asking questions and paying attention to the answers. He’d also been trained to help his patients help themselves. Part of his job was to teach them how to take care of their bodies. Pills were a last resort. This careful approach endeared him to his patients, but it lengthened his day. “He would have office hours until 11:30 at night,” says Jim Harris, a friend and the director of the free clinic. “People waited until then because he was worth the wait.”

Drug salesmen visited him weekly. It was a stodgy profession back then. Ortenzio remembers the reps as older men who had grown up and lived locally and who cultivated long-term relationships with doctors. One of the reps for Eli Lilly was a deacon in a local Catholic church. Once a week, he would visit Ortenzio’s office in a business suit, with information about the drugs Lilly produced. Like many in his profession in those years, he avoided hard-sell tactics. Ortenzio grew to rely on the salesman’s counsel when it came to pharmaceuticals. Once, when the Food and Drug Administration removed a Lilly drug from the market, the rep dropped by Ortenzio’s office, embarrassed and apologetic.

Before long, Ortenzio and his wife saw Clarksburg as home. They found a two-story, three-bedroom house in the Stealey neighborhood, southwest of downtown and at the foot of a hill. They set off to the bank for a 30-year loan. To their surprise, they were denied. “The house won’t keep its value that long,” the banker told them. “The best we can give you is a 15-year loan.”

The banker was right. It wasn’t yet clear, amid the bustle of Main Street and Friday-night football, but the city’s prospects were fading. Newer glass technologies required large factories, which meant stretches of flat land rare in West Virginia. Mexico and Japan emerged as competition in glass manufacturing, and plastic and aluminum emerged as alternatives to glass. Pittsburgh Plate Glass had closed in 1974. Anchor Hocking left in 1987. Its hulking concrete plant is slated for demolition, but for now it remains, just off Highway 50.

By the mid-1980s, the city was in decline. Glasswork was replaced by telemarketing. Downtown, locally owned stores began to disappear. Homeowners yielded to renters, many relying on Section 8 assistance from the government. The city eventually had to destroy dozens of abandoned homes, leaving streets with toothless gaps. The swimming pools, too, slowly closed; resident associations lacked the money to maintain them.

Ortenzio drove me by the massive Robert C. Byrd High School, home of the Eagles. It was built in 1995 to consolidate two smaller high schools in Clarksburg, whose population had receded. Replacing neighborhood schools with one centralized school allowed for better course offerings. But Byrd is far from any student’s home. School consolidation extinguished the sports rivalries that had brought people together each week. Without local schools, neighborhoods lost their social centers.

When glassmaking departed Clarksburg, locally owned stores began to disappear as well. The city eventually had to destroy dozens of abandoned homes, leaving streets with toothless gaps. (Jason Fulford)

Lou Ortenzio began to see people in economic as well as physical pain. Many were depressed, worn out by work or the fruitless search for it. Obesity became a more common problem. Some patients began to ask whether he could get them on workers’ compensation or disability. Others left to seek job opportunities in New York, North Carolina, Florida. “I was always calling people out of state telling them how sick their parents or grandparents were,” he said.

When Ortenzio had opened his practice, he’d tended to see young people only for pregnancies or the occasional broken leg. By the mid-1980s, younger people were showing up in larger numbers. They were coming in with ailments that their parents and grandparents had borne in silence—headaches, backaches, the common cold. “The new generation that came in the 1980s, those kids began to have the expectation that life should be pain-free,” Ortenzio said. “If you went to your physician and you didn’t come away with a prescription, you did not have a successful visit.”

The shift was not peculiar to Clarksburg. Americans young and old were becoming accustomed to medical miracles that allowed them to avoid the consequences of unhealthy behavior—statins for high cholesterol, beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors for hypertension and heart failure, a variety of new treatments for diabetes. Fewer patients showed up for annual physicals or wanted to hear what they could do to improve their wellness. They wanted to be cured of whatever was ailing them and sent on their way. Usually that involved pills.

The medical establishment, to a large degree, abetted this shift. In the 1980s, a new cadre of pain specialists began to argue that narcotic pain pills, derived from the opium poppy, ought to be used more aggressively. Many had watched terminal cancer patients die in agony because doctors feared giving them regular doses of addictive narcotics. To them, it was inhumane not to use opioid painkillers.

The specialists began to push the idea that the pills were nonaddictive when used to treat pain. Opioids, they said, could be prescribed in large quantities for long periods—not just to terminal patients, but to almost anyone in pain. This idea had no scientific support. One author of an influential paper later acknowledged that the literature pain advocates relied on to make their case lacked real evidence. “Because the primary goal was to destigmatize, we often left evidence behind,” he said.

Nevertheless, an alliance of specialists who saw their medical mission as eradicating pain was soon joined by the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured opioids. Medical institutions—the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, hospitals and medical schools across the country—bought into this approach as well.

By the late 1990s, medical schools, when they taught pain management at all, focused on narcotics. By the early 2000s, doctors were being urged to prescribe the drugs after almost any routine surgery: appendectomy, ACL repair, wisdom-tooth extraction. They also prescribed them for chronic conditions such as arthritis and back pain. Chronic pain had once been treated with a combination of strategies that only sometimes involved narcotics; now it was treated using opioids almost exclusively, as insurance companies cut back on reimbursing patients for long-term pain therapies that did not call on the drugs.

The U.S. drug industry, meanwhile, was investing heavily in marketing, hiring legions of young salespeople to convince doctors of their drugs’ various miracles. Nationwide, the number of pharmaceutical sales reps ballooned from 38,000 in 1995 to 100,000 a decade later. The old style of drug rep, grounded in medicine or pharmacy, largely passed from the scene.

“It went from a dozen [salesmen] a week to a dozen a day,” Ortenzio remembered. “If you wrote a lot of scrips, you were high on their call list. You would be marketed to several times a day by the same company with different reps.”

Most drug companies in America adopted the new sales approach. Among them was Purdue Pharma, which came out with a timed-release opioid painkiller, OxyContin, in 1996. Purdue paid legendary bonuses—up to $100,000 a quarter, eight times what other companies were paying. To improve their sales numbers, drug reps offered doctors mugs, fishing hats, luggage tags, all-expenses-paid junkets at desirable resorts. They brought lunch for doctors’ staff, knowing that with the staff on their side, the doctors were easier to influence. Once they had the doctor’s ear, reps relied on specious and misinterpreted data to sell their product. Purdue salespeople promoted the claim that their pill was effectively nonaddictive because it gradually released an opioid, oxycodone, into the body and thus did not create the extreme highs and lows that led to addiction.

[From April 2006: The drug pushers]

The reps were selling more than pills. They were selling time-saving solutions for harried doctors who had been told that an epidemic of pain was afoot but who had little time, or training, to address it. For a while, Ortenzio still suggested exercise, a balanced diet, and quitting smoking, all of which can alleviate chronic pain. But his patients, by and large, didn’t want to hear any of this, and he was busy. So he, too, gradually embraced pain pills. Nothing ended an appointment quicker than pulling out a prescription pad.

The number of people on pain pills grew from a tiny fraction of Ortenzio’s practice to well over half of his patients by the end of the 1990s. The shift was gradual enough at first that he didn’t recognize what was happening. Patients with medical problems unrelated to pain migrated to other doctors. Still, Ortenzio was working 16-hour days, seeing patients who had been scheduled for the afternoon at 9 p.m.

The more drugs Ortenzio prescribed, the more he was sought out by patients. Many would use up a month’s supply before the month was out; in need of more pills, they were insistent, wheedling, aggressive. Many lied. Some would curse and scream when Ortenzio told them that he couldn’t write them a new prescription yet, or that he wanted to lower their dosage.

The pills were soon on the streets of Clarksburg as well. They replaced beer and pot at many high-school parties. Phyllis Mills, Ortenzio’s longtime patient, had two daughters who abused the pills. Theirs did not come from Ortenzio, at least not directly, but the supply of pills was exploding, due in large part to doctors like him who were overprescribing them.

Ortenzio should have noticed what the pills were doing, to his patients and his community, but he was less and less himself. After his late-night encounter with Vicodin in 1988, he had begun his own slide into addiction. By the late 1990s, he was using 20 to 30 pills a day, depleting even the plentiful supply of free samples from the ubiquitous sales reps.

Desperate to get his hands on more pills, he found a friend he could trust, a middle-aged accountant and a patient of his. “I’m in some trouble,” Ortenzio told him. “If I write you this prescription, can I ask you to fill it and bring it back to me?”

“Sure thing,” the man said, without asking for an explanation. “If you gotta have it, you gotta have it. You’re the doc.”

Soon a dozen or so trusted patients were helping Ortenzio. He knew he was out of control and needed help—even the amount of acetaminophen he was consuming was toxic—but he feared that seeking treatment for his addiction might cost him his medical license. Around 1999, he found a new way to get his fix. He began writing prescriptions in his children’s names.

Ortenzio could plainly see that the claim that these pills were nonaddictive was untrue. He would try to quit and feel the symptoms of withdrawal. “I couldn’t be away from my supply,” he said. His patients, too, were terrified of going without. One, a nurse at a local hospital suffering from chronic pain as well as depression and anxiety, would approach him in his office parking lot, often bearing gifts of quilts or canned goods, insisting that she needed her pills that morning, that she couldn’t wait for her monthly appointment.

Ortenzio saw no way to break the cycle the pills had created for the people in his care. He never found a way to get his patients down to lower doses of narcotics. They rebelled when he suggested tapering; just cutting people off made them sick. The area didn’t have enough pain clinics or addiction specialists to refer them to, and insurance companies wouldn’t reimburse for many pain treatments that did not involve pills. Without good alternatives for his patients, he kept on writing prescriptions.

Top: A resident of the Mission, a shelter that opened in 1969 with a few beds, for alcoholics and homeless veterans. Today, many of its 120 beds are occupied by opiate addicts. Bottom: A set of house rules. (Jason Fulford)

Addiction and overwork had estranged Ortenzio from his wife and children. As Clarksburg declined, his wife moved the kids to Pittsburgh to find better schools. In 2004, after more than a decade of living in different cities, they divorced. Raised Catholic but without much feeling for the Church, Ortenzio joined a Protestant congregation. Ultimately, he found Jesus in his exam room. During an appointment one day, he and a patient, a Baptist, talked of his search for redemption. The patient knelt with Ortenzio on the linoleum floor and prayed for the doctor. Ortenzio marks that moment as his new beginning. He had advantages many addicts don’t have: a home and a car, financial resources, generous friends and colleagues, and, later, the support of a second wife. He managed to taper off the drugs. A couple of months later, he was baptized in a deep section of Elk Creek, where baptisms have taken place since the early 1800s.

Not long after that, federal agents raided his office. They interrogated his staff and confiscated hundreds of patient records. The investigation dragged on for nearly two years. His children had to testify before a grand jury that they knew nothing about the prescriptions their father had written in their names.

In October 2005, prosecutors charged Ortenzio with health-care fraud and fraudulent prescribing. That year, 314 West Virginians died from opioid overdoses, more than double the number of people five years earlier. By 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, physicians were writing 130 opioid prescriptions for every 100 West Virginians.

In March 2006, Ortenzio pleaded guilty. His sentencing occurred shortly after a 2005 Supreme Court decision made federal sentencing guidelines nonmandatory and individual sentences up to judges’ discretion. Despite what he’d done, Ortenzio was still beloved in Clarksburg. More than 100 people wrote to the judge on his behalf. He received five years of supervised release plus 1,000 hours of community service, and was ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution. He would serve no prison time, but he did lose his medical license.

At 53, Ortenzio was unemployed. A temp agency offered him a landscaping job at the Stonewall Resort, where, as a doctor, he had taken his family for Sunday brunch. He’d never worked outdoors in his life, but he took the job. It paid $6.50 an hour.

He worked at the resort for a couple of months, then as the janitor at a local community center before returning to Stonewall as a full-time groundskeeper. He also found a night job.

Tom Dyer is one of northern West Virginia’s leading defense attorneys; Ortenzio had been his client. One night in 2006, Dyer ordered a pizza from Fox’s Pizza Den in Bridgeport, a town near Clarksburg. When the doorbell rang, he opened the door and there stood Lou Ortenzio, holding a pie. It took a minute before Dyer realized: Doc O was now a pizza-delivery guy. “I was just speechless,” Dyer told me.

“I made pizza deliveries where I used to make house calls,” Ortenzio said. “I delivered pizzas to people who were former patients. They felt very uncomfortable, felt sorry for me.” But, he said, “it didn’t bother me. I was in a much better place.”

Ortenzio eventually left pizza delivery. But the way he told me the story, the job was an important step in his recovery: Every pie he delivered liberated him. He was free of the lies he’d told his colleagues, his family, and himself to hide his addiction. He liked hearing kids screaming “The pizza guy’s here!” when he knocked on the door. “You make people happy,” he said. “That was what I liked about being a doctor.”

Today, Ortenzio spends his days trying to atone. He does this through constant work. There are places in and around Clarksburg where addicts can get help, and Ortenzio can be found at most of them.

The Mission opened in 1969, in Clarksburg’s Glen Elk neighborhood, at the time a small red-light district with bars and backroom gambling. The shelter started with a few beds, intended for alcoholics and homeless veterans. A neon-blue jesus saves sign outside has remained illuminated for all the years since, as the shelter has expanded. Today, many of its 120 beds are occupied by opioid addicts.

One afternoon, I met Ortenzio in a small, windowless office at the Mission. Now 66, he is thin, gray-haired, and bespectacled; he dresses in a hoodie, blue jeans, and sneakers. He does a bit of everything at the Mission, from helping the addicted find treatment to helping them find a coat, or shoes for their children, or a ride to the probation department. He is a volunteer adviser there, too, and at the county’s drug court, where he guides addicts through the criminal-justice system.

Ortenzio is also involved with two newer initiatives, which suggest the challenges of repairing the damage done by opioids. A wood-beamed downtown church is home to Celebrate Recovery, a Christian ministry founded in Orange County, California. Celebrate Recovery has grown nationwide due in large part to the opioid epidemic. On the cold Tuesday night I visited, the service featured an electric band singing the kind of fervid new gospel music that is common to nondenominational Christianity: “You are perfect in all of your ways …”

Ortenzio is Celebrate Recovery’s lay pastor in Clarksburg, running its weekly services. The flock is about 100 or so strong. One evening, a young mother named Sarah stood before the congregation to give her testimony. Sarah’s story started with parents who married too young and divorced before she was 3. It featured father figures who were coal miners and truck drivers and a stepfather who molested her repeatedly, beginning when she was 8. Then a life of illicit drugs, marriage, divorce, and addiction to prescription pain pills.

Clarksburg’s traditional congregations have dwindled along with the city’s population; many rely on support from former residents who commute in from elsewhere on Sundays. The place these churches once held in this community has been taken by new churches proclaiming a gospel of prosperity, insisting that God wants us all to be rich. And by ministries such as Celebrate Recovery.

A regular devotional service held in the Mission’s cafeteria (Jason Fulford)

Ortenzio coordinates the training of recovery coaches at the church, people who can help addicts as they try to wean themselves from narcotics. Addiction, however, seems as present as ever in Clarksburg. At the Mission one day, I met a group of recovering young drug users. Several of them had started out on heroin but then turned to meth. In Clarksburg and many other parts of the country, meth is coming on strong, poised to be the fourth stage in an epidemic that began with prescribed pills, then moved to heroin, and then to fentanyl. Meth seems to reduce the symptoms of withdrawal from opioids, or maybe it’s just a way to get high when anything will do. Whatever the case, like the various forms of opioids before it, meth is now in plentiful supply in Clarksburg.

A couple of years ago, Ortenzio decided to open a sober-living house downtown, where recovering addicts could spend six months or more stabilizing their lives. He said God had instructed him to undertake the project, and had told him, in fact, where to do it—in a house right around the corner from the duplex where Clarksburg’s first resident overdosed on fentanyl. In 2017, more than two West Virginians a day were being claimed by opioids. Recovering addicts needed places where they could maintain sobriety. “We thought, This is going to be great. They’ll throw a parade for us,” says Ben Randolph, a businessman whom Ortenzio helped recover from pill addiction.

Instead, the idea of a sober-living house outraged many in town. The principals of two local schools were concerned that the house was too close to their campuses. Owners of local businesses worried that the house might further tarnish the city’s image. “The property value of the homes around it are going to plummet. You’re going to have both drug dealers and recovering addicts in one area, so they’ll have a captive market,” one resident told The Exponent Telegram.

But Ortenzio persisted, and a bank eventually granted him a mortgage. Since July 2017, he has run a six-bed home for men, with daily supervision and no problems—no spike in crime nearby, no complaints of loitering—reported so far. A similar home for women opened last May. Nevertheless, the episode showed where the city, perhaps even the country, was when it came to addiction: afflicted mightily and wanting it to go away, but not knowing how to make that happen.

Lou Ortenzio was the first Clarksburg doctor prosecuted for improperly prescribing pain pills. He was the first person most residents I talked with recall as putting a different face on addiction. He was the first to show that this was a new kind of drug plague, and the first to puncture the idea that the supply came from street dealers. He was also the first to publicly work at his own recovery without shame.

He was not, however, alone. In 2005, another local doctor, Brad Hall, gathered with members of the West Virginia State Medical Association concerned about addiction among physicians in a state that cannot afford to lose them. They started the Physician Health Program, which has helped some 230 West Virginia doctors with substance-abuse problems get confidential treatment and retain their license to practice. Many are overworked, as Ortenzio had been. Some were self-treating emotional and physical problems. About a quarter abused opioids.

Left: Lou Ortenzio beside one of Clarksburg’s abandoned neighborhood pools. Ortenzio managed to overcome his own addiction to narcotic painkillers and today spends his time helping other addicts recover, at the Mission (right) and elsewhere. (Jason Fulford)

Ortenzio managed to escape drugs, but he’s still living with the effects of his addiction. He is working to repair his relationship with his youngest son; Ortenzio didn’t attend his wedding and has yet to meet a young grandson. He leans on his faith to keep him going. Many of his encounters with addicts prompt sudden, public prayers, Ortenzio bowing his head as he clasps the person’s shoulder. His faith has humbled him, relieving him of a sense of hubris that got him into trouble as a doctor: the idea that he could heal an entire community, if he just kept the office open a few hours longer.

Doc O will never practice medicine again. Yet his work at the Mission doesn’t seem so different from his routine as a family physician, tending to the needs of one person after another. One morning, he took a resident to a clinic, then talked on the phone with an addicted doctor living in a halfway house. A pastor from the coalfields of southern West Virginia called to ask how to set up a Celebrate Recovery ministry in his large but dying church. A 24-year-old mother of four from a West Virginia mountain town was looking for $225 to pay the utilities for an apartment she was trying to rent. Ortenzio promised to reach out to the Mission’s supporters for a donation.

As the morning wore on, a gaunt 26-year-old man from North Carolina, a construction worker addicted to heroin and meth, showed up to report that he’d had five of his teeth pulled. The dentist had prescribed a dozen hydrocodone pills. The construction worker couldn’t fill the scrip without proper ID, which he didn’t possess. Ortenzio sat and listened as the young man, slumped beneath a baseball cap, stared at the floor and insisted on his need for the painkiller.

The dentist had probably figured that the fellow had lost a lot of teeth, that a dozen pills weren’t many. If that were the case, it would mark a change. Not that long ago, the dentist might have prescribed 20 to 40 pills.

Ortenzio offered the construction worker a prayer. The man clearly still wanted the drugs. Ortenzio, who as a doctor had prescribed pills by the hundreds each day, could only give him packets of ibuprofen.

“You want to stay away from hydrocodone,” he said.

This article appears in the May 2019 print edition with the headline “The Penance of Doc O.”

Article source here:The Atlantic