Chapter Text
“Yeah, that’s a dead body,” Jim confirms, looking at the de-boned, de-organned pile of flesh on the sidewalk. “Or it was, before someone or something… sucked it dry?”
“Oh my god,” one of the uniformed officers mutters, looking green around the gills. Jim doesn’t really blame them; he also wishes he’d opted for a different phrasing.
“Sorry,” Jim concedes. “Okay, Acosta, I want you to pull CCTV from every camera in a 10-block radius, and Martinez, you start asking around for witnesses. I know we’re close to Crime Alley, but this looks like the kind of trouble that’s bad news for everyone, so see if you can’t find someone who saw something, okay?”
“I’m going to stop you there,” a voice says from somewhere behind Jim. It’s not loud or quiet, not timid or imposing. It’s the blandest voice Jim has ever heard; so bland, in fact, that its lack of distinctiveness is almost a distinguishing feature in its own right. “SHIELD’s got it from here.”
When Jim turns around, he’s greeted with the sight of a man who goes so perfectly with his voice that Jim can’t help but stare at him like a particularly unintelligent goldfish, gawping at the glass walls of his tank in the futile hope that he will one day return to the sea. He’s average height, with medium-brown hair cut short and styled neatly. He’s clean-shaven, in a mid-range suit; his carefully-curated blandness could not scream G-man more loudly if he sewed a megaphone to the front.
The agent introduces himself as Phil Coulson, or rather he gives Jim a card with his name and number written in a boring font under SHIELD’s logo. He turns away, clearly considers their interaction to be finished; when Jim taps him on the shoulder, he turns back with a look of such polite disinterest that Jim has to draw on every iota of self-restraint gleaned throughout his career not to smack him in his smug, jurisdiction-stealing face.
“Gotham’s not like other places,” Jim tells him; he can see the second the words leave his mouth that they’re not going to make the slightest bit of difference.
Coulson humors him with a smile, kindly with a good dose of patronising. “Sure. Everywhere is unique, after all.”
“Gotham’s more unique than most.”
“I said I’ll take it from here,” Coulson says, and who’s Jim to argue with a government agent? He shrugs and wanders away to stand down his officers. If Coulson wants to operate in Gotham, it’s probably for the best that Jim lets him discover her quirks the hard way.
***
SHIELD gives up long before Batman does, but luckily their local hero is more determined (or possibly just has more resources to throw at the problem, especially when the problem is an Arkham escapee going by the incredibly clunky name of Chupacabracadabra, hellbent on sucking his victims dry like human Capri Sun pouches). Jim shows up to take over custody of the wild-eyed super-sucker and snaps a picture of the villain on his phone, which he later texts to Coulson with a single thumbs-up emoji.