Throw the Whole Book in the Fire

by Rainbow_Convection, YourMinecraftBoyfriend

Summary:

“What am I doing, Eddie?” Back to sweet in just a second. His hands and feet felt a mile away from his body. Oswald was close, too close. And much too far away.

“You’re trying to kill me.”

“I’m trying to help you,” Oswald crooned. “Poor, lost little thing. This is what you need. Do you even comprehend how deeply it wounds me to see you in such a state?”
____

After Ed succeeds in killing his only friend, he finds himself caught in a downward spiral. The medication he takes to bring Oswald back from the dead helps, but is Oswald's help hiding more sinister intentions?

Chapter 1

Notes:

rc- Id say Im sorry but my subscribers should be used to me by now. For everyone else, hi hello nice to meet you

j- if sexy suicide aint ur thing id recommend clicking away lmaoooo. nyways this is a collab fic and it was super fun to make! wahoo! <3

There was a chattering of indistinct noises teasing at Ed’s ear again.

The haze was thick tonight, too much psilocybin and not enough cocaine made him more floaty than energized, but he craved a bit more euphoria than usual. Two dead supposed geniuses laid in his wake. Not one of them capable of solving one simple riddle. Riddles that were easy. Basic. 

His goal to scour the earth for the scrap of genius that must be out there somewhere was a worthy one. There was no doubt in his mind that he alone was equipped to uncover it. His frayed nerves and aching muscles were testament to that. Wherever it was nestled away, he would pluck it out, make it shine, and that would—

Before the thought that it may not exist at all (at least not anymore) could fully formulate, another pill was crushed between his molars and he foolishly hoped that this one would let him feel the ghost of breath on the shell of his ear. 

It was bothering him. He wasn’t so arrogant as to deny that the extent of the task he’d set before himself bothered him. Of course it would be difficult to ascertain where genius actually lay, it would not be worth doing if it were easy. But there was little sense letting those anxieties and questions uselessly swirl until they reached a fever pitch. 

Far more expedient to bounce ideas, and for that, only one mind would actually suffice. He swallowed.

Nothing. Still intangible but close enough that Ed should be feeling the warmth of his body, or lack thereof considering his soggy clothes and soaked-through skin. His head was beginning to swim (Hah, swim! Fancy a dip in the harbor?), he was losing track of how many he'd taken tonight. 

“Not enough, I don't think.” Oswald raised a dripping finger to just below Ed’s chin. Filthy seawater didn’t splatter onto Ed’s clothes. As Oswald moved his finger (blue tinted, black veins, not a hint of flushed pink in the crescents of his nails), Ed moved his head with it, like he was being guided. 

He scowled. He wasn’t keeping track of how many he was taking. He didn’t need to. 

For no reason, he wrapped his arms around himself and gasped. He hadn’t noticed his tingling skin crying out for comfort. Such things were irrational. He also hadn’t noticed the ache in his chest, the severe emptiness that took hold of his stomach. The way that those eyes seared into him only made the dark sensations worse . 

He wasn’t thinking of the trace-memories of a pulse beating in tandem with his own. The fascination of skin-on-skin. The rush of serotonin. The way that it had all been ripped away from him, cast him into this void where he felt nothing. Felt it, and conceived that nothing was an entity, that it suffocated and reached inside and then pulled, taking with it every scrap of blood and breath. Wasn’t thinking of any of it. Hadn’t given himself a moment to think of it. He'd been far too busy.

Finding a genius would fix this—this whatever it was. He knew it would. 

He could feel that disembodied voice lapping at his ear now. “You want to feel me, don't you? The next dose might get you there.”

He didn’t want to feel him . He hated him. He simply wanted his advice, and he was pragmatic enough to recognise that you didn’t need to like somebody to appreciate good advice when it was given. 

Oswald’s hands were as liable to scourge and scrape as they were to caress and—

He wasn’t thinking about this. He wasn’t craving touch, he was craving advice. Advice on his scheme. His scheme that would show Gotham who he truly was, stun them with his grandeur, finally get them to all see . 

Ed coughed. Pressed at his glasses. “I truly thought that last one would be the one,” he said, clasping and unclasping his fingers. “I’m missing something. It’s right in front of me — I just can’t.” He sighed. “What am I missing, Oswald?”

Oswald smiled a menacing smile that sent a shudder through Ed’s spine. His teeth were sharp. Pointed. His eyes gleamed with something unknowable. “Me?” Oswald said.

Ed scoffed, turned away. “I most certainly am not . You were part of my journey. I’m in a transitional phase, moving onto the next one. I just have to get there.”

“I see,” Oswald said, a shrug resounding up through his chest as his eyes drifted, and he bunched his head against his hand. “Well! Thus far, I have been very little help.”

“You’ve been,” Ed said, marching to his board, assessing the points of data he had collated. “Somewhat helpful. I know that if we put our heads together, we can crack this.”

“Ah,” Oswald said. “Well, there I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage.” He swathed a hand through the couch, let it sweep straight into the fabric. “Dead, remember?”

“I don’t see why that means you can’t help me with my problem,” Ed replied.

“It very much means that,” Oswald said. “I am no longer of the world. I cannot interact with it. You dolt, how am I to advise on a world that I cannot touch? Imagine that I had always been in such a state — unable to throw Fish off of a building, unable to jam my umbrella down Galavan’s throat? It shifts one's perspective, you get that, right?”

“So this is my fault?”

“Did anyone else shoot me and throw me off a pier?”

“That was your fault!” Ed roared. He’d raised his hands. With a light chuckle, he shook his head. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. This is not what I wanted to talk about.”

“Perhaps there is a way,” Oswald said. “One pill brought you my visage. Who’s to say—?”

“What?” Ed’s head spun to meet him.

“Were I more tangible,” Oswald said. “Perhaps I would give more practical advice.”

He shook his head, but he wasn’t disagreeing. Oswald could be right, the pills had brought him back to this degree, who's to say they couldn't bring back all of him? If anyone could resurrect the dead it was Edward Nygma — maybe everyone else who tried just didn’t want it like he did. There wouldn’t be this yearning if it was truly impossible. That would make no sense.

With shaking hands, he bit down on another. Turned to Oswald. “That help?” he asked.

Oswald’s lip pursed. He rolled his jaw, eyes glistening “Try another?” 

“Can’t,” he said while flipping the Altoid tin closed, then open, then closed, open, closed, open. “Could overdose.” His speech was becoming more stilted and slurred, less intelligible, but Oswald knew what he meant, he always had. “‘s not tested.”

“Hmm.” Oswald stepped back from the couch, Ed slipped off trying to follow him. On his knees, his head was level with Oswald’s navel, the point of his nose would press into Ed’s bullet hole if Oswald shed the top few layers. And was tangible. 

His hands hovered over Ed’s hair, petting the empty space between them. 

“Has that ever stopped you before? It’s unlike you,” Oswald crooned, fingers wisping against Ed’s scalp. “To be fearful of bold and innovative action.”

“M’not scared!” Ed yelped petulantly. His gaze rose to meet the phantasm’s eyes, and a spike of something hot and piercing surged through him as the sneering mockery that he was anticipating failed to materialize. 

Instead there was compassion? Gentleness? Those eyes radiated understanding. It stung. To be ripped from that understanding was nothing. One grew accustomed to clambering through a barbed forest that gnashed and tore at the flesh. It was a white noise after a while, a nuisance. A nagging ache that could very easily be lived with, but to have the wound splashed with sugar, glass granules prying open the barely scabbed wound, exposing it to air, making it fresh, was a much more exquisite torture. 

He swatted aimlessly at the figure, hand passing through.

The surreality of the motion sent a shudder echoing throughout him. His fingers ought to be engorged in viscera, soaked through with blood, darting up against muscle, prising through to the skeleton. Instead there was nothing. Just that hollow, taunting air that carried lies and emptiness and— 

Nothing.

What’s nowhere but everywhere, except where something is?

Even his intellect had failed to truly grasp how much nothing existed in this world. 

“Come on, Eddie.” There was that name again. Eddie, Eddie, something the tangible Oswald would never call him, had never gotten the chance to. Phosphates were beginning to swirl around his ghost’s head, his heart was thumping in his temples as his ears rang. When he’d started doing this, there’d been lines he wasn’t supposed to cross — one pill a day, one pill every few hours, one pill when he was alone again. The lines didn’t seem to matter anymore, it was getting hard to remember why they were there in the first place. Everything was getting blurry, unfocused. He’d call himself aimless if he didn’t have a clear goal. “One more, prove it to me.” 

He did have something to prove, didn’t he? No, he did. The ‘X’s on his board were proof that the ignorant simpletons that this city churned out weren’t weren’t deserving of Ed’s time, his patience, his attention. 

“Else, you could abandon this entire endeavor,” Oswald said. “If you aren’t serious about it. There’s no one to tell you otherwise.”

His hands were planted against the floor. He hadn’t noticed himself sinking to it. Now he did. “There’s you,” he whined.

“ Eddie ,” that voice lapped tantalizingly at his mind. He could feel the admonishment implicit in that tone. His fingers twitched, ached to grasp at touch, and it was all so very foolish and the one thing that Ed could not tolerate was foolishness. 

His eyes roved back to the Altoid box. The lines and angles gleamed, the contents called out to him with a siren’s song. It was such a small thing. Basic. Easy to press a little further, to commit to this course of action. To know . 

He clasped his hands to his face. Yanked himself upright on unsteady feet. He took slow, deliberate strides. Behind him was that voice, cooing soothingly with soft reassurances. 

Each note of it guiding his footsteps. The world had fallen away, now there was only him, the voice and the tin. That promise. The lingering remembrances of skin brushing against his own, still teasing infernally at his flesh, that imprint delving deep, past organs and viscera, probing into something far more incomprehensible. The quiet, insistent roar in his very depths that unceasingly nagged at him to reclaim it.

He touched the tin. The coolness of the metal was shocking, prickling like needles. The weave of his expensive suits felt like burlap, nerves coming alight in itchy flashes. 

 Out of his focus, the greens and blues and blacks began dripping from the wallpaper to form intricate bruises. 

He pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes and the swirling only got worse. His stomach was rolling, a pressure building in his throat. Nausea wouldn’t drown out that sweet voice urging him towards the tin.

“That’s it. I’d tell you it was easy, but I know that you expect better of yourself. I expect better of you.” Oswald was still goading him. Through the haze, he was beginning to suspect something wasn’t right, a blind moment of clean and clear coherency. “Take another, Ed.” Not Eddie. Did he do something wrong? Oswald was growing impatient. “I’m waiting. Take it.”

He held the pill in his palm. He couldn’t remember opening the tin, maybe Oswald put it there. Just as he touched it to his lips, he turned around, trying to find those pretty jacks-and-marbles eyes. 

Oswald was grinning, wide and sharklike. Where had that sweet and sympathetic face gone? He hadn’t imagined it. (Wrong, Edward. You’re imagining all of this.)

His legs were shaking. The light from the few unshattered lamps in the room wobbled, giving off delayed solar flares. 

“You—” His tongue was swelling, words tripping from him without a shred of wit or elegance. This wasn’t him. “I know—know what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing, Eddie?” Back to sweet in just a second. His hands and feet felt a mile away from his body. Oswald was close, too close . And much too far away.

“You’re trying to kill me.”

“I’m trying to help you,” Oswald crooned. “Poor, lost little thing. This is what you need. Do you even comprehend how deeply it wounds me to see you in such a state?”

Ed moaned despairingly as his legs began to give out. His grip on the table was unsteady. He wavered. His specter’s face was pressed against his own, so close, and he could not feel it. “No,” he gasped, the timbre of his voice failing to persuade even him. “That’s not—I come when you call, and vanish thereafter. What am I?”

“I know,” Oswald said soothingly, hands stroking at the air around his face. “I know. And I am helping you. It’s there, Eddie. You need only to reach out and take it.” 

His vision was a tear-streaked blur as he reached in. His fingers stroked at those cool, enticing, promises of relief. His breath became heady, difficult. There was a siren blaring in his mind bidding him, pleading with him to step back, but it was drowned out by desperation, and the notes of that voice. And the dripping. The sudden knowledge that Oswald was right , of course he was, he was so often right and for this tiny action, maybe, just maybe the world could make sense again. He was so desperate for sense, for logic. For something to hold onto. He just needed it to make sense.

He met that gaze. Jacks-and-marbles again, reflective like a glass bottle. In those little mirrors he saw his own body end up on the ground once more. Sniveling. Pathetic. That’s how Oswald saw him. “M’scared,” he stumbled through the words hurriedly, begrudgingly, as though he could throw them away and they’d dissipate. Oswald’s expression alighted, a spark of relish resounding through every pore as he drank it in. 

Ed didn’t want Oswald to see him in such a state. 

Oswald’s mouth was twisted into a caricature of a smile. Lips, soft and shining. And deadly. “I’m here,” he said. Hands wisped against his arm, that ghostly not-touch burning into him. “I’ll stay with you. I won’t leave.”

A protest began to register within Ed’s mind that Oswald had left, that that was the entire issue, but it was gone before he could absorb it. His fingers closed around the pill. He could almost feel Oswald’s fingers lacing against his own as he brought it to his lip. He paused. Wondered for a moment whether he should do something to commemorate the moment. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Oswald said. “No one will hear.”

He bit down.

Bitterness flooded his taste buds, lingering in his mouth as he tried to swallow. Face down it was difficult to get his throat to work, a small trickle of saliva trailed out of his lips, spilling half of the liquid capsule. 

He forced himself up on his forearms, swallowing down the rest quickly. As he tilted his head back, he could see only Oswald’s disappointment. He was flickering like a stop-motion film, or maybe Ed was flickering, right on the border. 

He crawled towards him on four unsteady limbs, first his knee buckled, then his arm. His body was heavy, weighed down like anchors had been driven through his skin. He was so close to drowning, his clothes were nearly as damp as Oswald’s though he felt fever-hot. 

His fingers hovered over Oswald’s seaweed-covered shoe. He could feel the cool, clammy air that came off of him. With Ed running so hot, they could reach an equilibrium, a brief thermo-reaction that would result in something stable. 

He hadn’t felt stable in a long time. 

Oswald crouched down to meet him. Vaguely, he recalled that he shouldn’t be able to, not without pain shooting through his busted knee. He was blighted by a hideous memory of before, before all of this, just an image, of that face creased with genuine pain, his own hands scrabbling to take it away, and then it was gone again. Whether locked away in his mind, or crouched before him, Oswald was beyond pain now. He knew he should protest at the facsimile, deride it for the shoddy imitation that it was but it didn’t matter. The pain Ed was feeling in his body would leave him soon too, wouldn’t it?

“It will.” Oswald was sweet, oh so sweet. Honey coating Ed’s every pore, dripping onto his face, into his eyes. A film was washing over them, edges darkening as he mind slogged through the slurry.

He couldn’t move his jaw anymore. How was he supposed to speak if his tongue was too heavy to move? He couldn’t tell any riddles like this.

Oswald chuckled. “Always with the riddles with you. I’m talking, aren’t I?”

He supposed he was. In an instant, his body gave out, collapsing onto the hardwood. He didn’t have the strength to move his neck, but Oswald laid down beside him, the only image still in sharp focus. 

He’d promised he would stay. It was the last thought Ed had as a thick black canvas enveloped his eyes and mind. He would stay. He was here. 

____

Pain. Ed was conscious of nothing but pain as he wrenched his eyes open, and was blighted by the stale air of this infuriatingly empty house. 

Face still pressed into floor. Arms splayed. He waited for Oswald’s feet to stumble past his eyeline, for that cruelly melodious voice to taunt him. Perhaps the cane would smash against his palm. Perhaps that blade would finally sever his windpipe. Prising cheekbone from wood — his entire body was coated in a film of dried sweat and he shuddered to think of the filth. He slumped back into the floor, body wrung out, emptied. 

He needed to be getting up. 

Stupid. Oswald wasn’t coming. He didn’t exist anymore.

Moreover, last night’s events had demonstrated, unmistakably, the true depths of Oswald’s depravity. As though it had required any further demonstration. The reminder was stark however. A mind such as Ed’s was a rare gift, and wasn’t it just so fitting that Oswald’s voracious greed had demanded that he lay claim to that too . Even in death, even when no Oswald actually existed to claim it, the vacant space of Oswald’s shape continued to crave, to want. To need. He wasn’t going to get it. 

Ed had beaten him. He’d won. Though each breath scraped against sore ribs, and his head throbbed, and his everything throbbed, he was here. He’d survived. He’d survived, and Oswald had convulsed, and thrashed uselessly and panicked and died, because of course he had. Because that was how this worked.

Ed had won and then ascended to the next challenge. Striven to be better and better and better. Did not permit himself to allow blue-black hands to breach through the surface, dig into his heels and drag him down into that inky expanse of water. 

The childishness of it. 

“M’throwing the pills out!” he yelled into nothingness. “Y’hear that?”

Blank, unremitting silence was the only reply.

“Yeah!” Ed trilled, dragging himself to his knees, the resistance in his nerves and his tendons sinking into a dull hum at the back of his mind as he felt his sense of self reestablish itself. “You heard me! I assert control, but I exist only when resisted. What am I?”

The silence was so loud now. Oppressive. Thick. Bearing upon him, surely contributing to the difficulty of his breathing and the aching in his limbs. 

Teeth gnashed into teeth. Fists bunched at the floor. Ed pushed himself to his feet. Caught himself as he almost swooned back down again. He took in the caverns and arches that made up this house, how its imposing mightiness constricted, impressed upon one one’s own smallness.

He was not small. He was Edward Nygma. 

“The answer!” he belted, triumphant, victorious, hands swooping theatrically through the air. “Is powerlessness! And You. Are. Powerless!” He capped it off with a mirthful hail of laughter.

The house did not reply. 

“You’re powerless,” he muttered to himself. 

And that was unsatisfying.

Was there any victory to be had versus an opponent who didn’t actually know that they’d been defeated? Ed was a killer, but he was fair . It had been decisive. Once. Standing in the rain, hand vibrating against the gun, blood pooling, eyes pained and desperate, tongue drained of all of its wicked lies. That had been decisive. Possibly. Maybe.

Now Oswald had thrown a wrench into things. Altered the rules. So like him, to consider those rules to be merely advice, to be ignored at his leisure. Refusing to confront him felt like running away. Like confessing to possessing a fear of him, a fear that did not exist. That was why he still felt empty, broken and scarred through. That had to be why. He could not fathom what else this ache in his senses could possibly mean. 

He needed Oswald to see it. To see that despite his unrelenting mental cruelty, Ed had survived the attempt on his life. That he would hold no further sway over him. It was important. Oswald had to see it.  He needed to. He definitely did.

Only one way to make that happen. 

The haphazard little scene on the table painted quite the picture. It brought the refrain of nausea to even look at those pills. His throat burned with the memory. Eyes watered. Just one. The last one. He would take one more. Confront that monster. Inform him in no uncertain terms that he had failed. Then this would be completed. A line drawn neatly underneath it. Only one.

He bit, and that hideous specter seeped in. 

“Hello, Ed.” He didn’t consider the name Oswald chose, not for a second. “Back already? Or did you just miss me that much.”

“No! That's—” Oswald was trying to goad him again, trying to work him up into another frenzy so he could try to defeat him while he had the advantage. It wouldn’t work, Ed was wise to his underhanded trickery now. “I’m alive — you failed again! Honestly that attempt was rather pathetic. Did you really think I'd succumb to such cheap tactics? The King of Gotham,” he chuckled. “The you that you once were would’ve seen that and wept.”

“Oh, Edward ,” Oswald murmured, whipping behind him, a ghostly hand lacing above his shoulder, the sound of a puff of breath at his ear that did not warm the shell with its heated moisture. “You’re hurt.”

Ed spun, and made a show of stepping back. He jabbed a finger. “Now you’re just mocking me.” Gloved fingers reached out to grasp at Ed’s and he decisively yanked it back. Oswald’s hands remained outstretched. Those eyes brimmed with faked sincerity. “If you honestly believe that that’s going to rile me—”  

“Muscle pain. Impacted heart rate. Paranoia.” Oswald’s chest thrummed with a hiss that was done purely for the theatrics as those hands drifted downwards. “I feel everything that you feel. Although let's be honest. That started long before—”

“No!” Ed barked, clamping hands to his ears. “I said what I had to say. You lose! Ta-ta.”

“And you’re right,” Oswald said. “About all of it.” 

Victory! An admittance! He stood taller even as his pulse erratically thumped in his chest and his vision swam with over-saturated colors. 

“I am a shell of the man I was,” he continued, aching grace in his sure movements. “You know why that is, Ed? Because you killed me. Put a bolt to my stomach and bled me like a pig.”

”I beat you,” Ed said triumphantly. He could move on, throw the pills out like yesterday’s news now that Oswald knew. 

“You beat yourself, congratulations.” Oswald began to clap slowly, mockingly. Each slap of skin against skin felt like an iron rod being driven through his skull. “Oh wait, did you forget? I’m not actually here, I’m you. You tried to kill yourself, and you couldn’t even do that right.”

”No.” Ed shook his head and pointed his finger at the apparition. “No! That’s not what happened! This is your fault! You! You’re a projection of him, so Oswald’s the one who tried to—”

”But I’m already dead, remember? All those drugs you’re taking can’t be good for your brain. Did you know psychotropics can cause memory loss? They can alter emotional and motor control, cause personality deficiencies, impact short and long-term memory storage and—”

”And nothing!” Oswald was wrong, he was perfectly fine, adjusting as well—no, better than anyone else would be. 

The specter wasn’t behaving the way he was supposed to. He was supposed to be screaming, shrieking his little feathered head off because Ed once again emerged victorious. Perhaps he didn’t understand the magnitude of his loss — his unfair vantage point from inside Ed’s skull made him think that Ed’s triumph felt like a splitting headache and tasted like bile in the back of his throat. He had to see Ed would inevitably leave him behind, evolved and perfect once again. 

He dragged himself to his board, another bland, placid face for him to test. 

“You'll see.” He stabbed one finger into the eye of one of Gotham’s most notable authors. Wordcraft was such a noble pursuit, and while his publicly consumed mystery novels never held a candle to Ed’s intellect, he was hopeful that this man was hiding something more in that skull. “One of them is going to get it right and then I won't need you anymore.”

“I’m sure.” Oswald’s apparition appeared right at his elbow and he forced down a flinch. Already he was trying to unsettle him, shake his foundations as soon as he’d solidified them once again, but it wouldn’t work. He understood the path he had to follow, clear and scientific. 

Oswald laughed once, just a huff of breath. 

“What,” Ed seethed. 

“It's just nice to hear you admit that you need me.” 

Notes:

j- can yall believe this was gonna b a oneshot? turns out we had more ed killing 2 do hehe

rc- Killing Ed has been a most rewarding venture. I've not only killed Ed, Ive made a friend. Who shares my passion for Ed killing

Chapter 2

Notes:

j- if u wanna play a fun game, look at the tags and try to guess what way eddie's gonna try to kill himself this time

rc- oh phooey

Ed was bristling with exuberance as he watched the hapless fool dab at his brow, peer at the typewriter he clacked away at as he watched through the ventilation shaft. Said fool had no idea of what Ed had prepared for him. 

That would soon all change. This was the one. He could taste it. Though the man’s appearance was not as pleasing as one might hope. That was hardly the point. He didn’t even know why such a thought had oozed its way across his mind. But now the thought was done. He was on the brink of locating his equal. 

The man, he would be worthy of more intimate nomenclature once he had proven himself, peered upwards as though disturbed. Ed chuckled. Soon he would be more disturbed than he ever could have imagined. Especially should he prove unworthy.

He yanked the grate aside, leapt through it, a frenzy of anticipation and jubilation buzzing in his nerves. “Ta-da!” he cried, as he crashed into the ground, his intended resulting stance stymied by one ankle landing at a slightly wrong angle. Before he knew it, he was tumbling. “Oh, phooey,” he spoke into the ground. Hands pressed into the floor. Before righting himself. He looked up to meet the man’s gaze. Smiled. Sprung to his feet.

The man stood before him, eyes widened. “Oh,” he said, trembling. “Oh.”

And the embarrassment was washed away as he drank in the fear radiating from his victim. Now, this was what was missing. Respect. “Yeah,” he rasped, retrieving a needle that thankfully hadn’t been damaged in the fall. “ Oh .” The needle sank into the stranger’s throat.

 

“Wakey-wakey, bud!” He enunciated each syllable, relishing the sheer thrill of being in this moment. He clapped his hands, a hail of laughter erupting from his chest. His victim was bound by thick ropes, and Ed delighted in watching him struggle. He strode to the bomb. Gestured towards it. “Now sir,” he said, lip tugged into a grin at the bewilderment on display. “Your works have indeed been. Disarming.” He accompanied the word with an outstretch of his arm, fingers twiddling furiously as they completed a circle in the air, “But how well can you disarm… a bomb!”

“What are you—” the man said, but Ed jutted a palm in his face, a motion that he had not copied from anybody and simply continued his introduction.

“Three riddles,” he said, hips swaying as he paced and spun. “Three riddles. Answer correctly. And this little sucker doesn’t blow you sky-high? Kapeesh? But first things first!” He spun. Retrieved the box from his pocket. The last. Oswald would be here to witness himself being replaced. His final moment would be comprehending just how redundant he’d become. “In the blue corner!” he thundered, finger pointing as his teeth bit down. “We have contestant numero none! That’s right folks, he’s not playing, but he’s here tonight!”

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” Oswald said. 

“Quiet,” Ed barked, advancing on him, closing the distance, his teeth emitting spittle, his breath hot and threatening. “You’re here so that you can witness my final victory over you! See how little you matter. I want you to stand, helpless, and see. That is the only reason you’re here.”

“Excuse me, sir?” the man said. “Who are you-”

“Oswald Cobblepot,” Oswald beamed, extending a hand to the man who could not see him, easily dodging around Ed’s presence. “And you are-”

“Don’t talk to him!” Ed squealed, batting the ghostly hand away. “You are here to watch. He is here to play. That was very clearly established.”

“Hello?” the man said, his dundering mind somehow picking up on Oswald’s presence. “Are you friends with—”

“And don’t you talk to him !” Ed shrieked, hands clawing at his hair. 

“So grumpy,” Oswald chuckled. “Don’t concern yourself, friend,” he said to the wide-eyed victim. “He gets a little testy sometimes. Doesn’t mean it.”

Ed stomped his foot and cleared his throat. The nerve of some people, it should be common knowledge to not speak during a performance. 

“I can fill a room, or just one heart.” His cadence was perfect, jaunty and with that showman’s flair. “Others can have me, but I can’t be shared. What am I?” He moved his leather-clad hand in time with his tune, performing for his audience of two. 

“Feeling lonely?” The man hadn’t responded yet, still scouring that mind of his, but Oswald was quick to chime in. “You think he can give you what I did?”

“Shut up and pay attention,” he snapped. 

“But I—”

“Not you! Answer the question!”

“Lonely little Eddie!” Oswald sing-songed. “Misses his best friend so much that he goes out trying to make another, fruitless really. You brought me all the way back from the dead just to give you a little company.”

He gritted his teeth and mentally ticked. Five more seconds on the clock before the timer runs out. Ed spread his fingers and lowered them one by one.

“Fine, fine! Its—its uh, um rhythm! L-like a beating heart!”

“No! You moron, its loneliness! As in can’t be shared. I suppose they just give Pulitzer's to anyone these days. Next riddle!” He clapped his hands. The last answer was disappointing, but he was running a forgiving game, it allowed three chances. The first was more a warm-up really, to let his new acquaintance here grasp the rules. “I can be a member of a group, but never blend in. What am I?”

“Is this one about you or me this time?” Oswald clearly wasn’t grasping the fact that he was invited along as an observer. Witnesses didn’t get to comment, offer their little snide, unwanted opinions. “For me it's flattering, blending in wouldn’t have gotten me far now would it? For you, well I suppose you’re not attempting to fit in anywhere, are you? Not that you ever did.”

“Stop it, Oswald!” Ed threw his arm out, banishing the frightful specter. 

He just reappeared on his other side.

“You’re trying to turn your individuality into a boon rather than a curse, but you still don’t want it! Distinct, unique, separate — last of your species! Truly a rarity. At this rate, they won’t bother to throw you back in Arkham, they’ll just put you on display! The kids can pay to throw a riddle into your enclosure as they squint at the plaque that reads ‘Edward Nygma, the loneliest little psychopath there ever was’.”

“That’s enough! Answer, now!”

“I-I don’t—uh, a-a star?”

“Like the ones you used to doodle in your school notebooks?” Oswald chimed in. “Perfect 72 degree angles and two-inch lines, you never needed a protractor or ruler. Remember what you used to think of the other kids’ stars? How they were imperfect and lopsided, careless and sloppy, but those kids didn’t sit alone at the lunch table.” Oswald cackled louder this time as he swished his finger in the air, drawing the five lines in a familiar pattern. “Remember how you tried to make yours so perfectly imperfect? Little Eddie N. in fifth grade, untucking his shirt and messing up his hair and trying to practice how to smile right with his mother’s stolen compact mirror. Did you ever grow past him? I think you just stretched out.”

“Last riddle!” Ed declared, drowning out Oswald’s voice. “I know your every move, I feel your every thought. I’m with you from birth, and I’ll see you rot!”

“What do you see when you look in the mirror, Ed?” Oswald mused. “That other you? The smart, confident, respectable you. The one that you delude yourself that you can snap a finger, transform yourself into? Or merely the ghosts of those who were once there and are no longer? Those absences. Those absences that you most certainly are not affected by.”

“That wasn’t directed at you,” Ed seethed. “Cheating,” he grumbled under his breath. 

“Your family?” the man said.

“Your family?” Ed shouted in disbelief. “Family! Feels your every thought!?”’

“Touched a nerve,” Oswald chuckled. “For most, it would’ve been an acceptable answer.”

“The answer is a reflection!”

“Reflections see you rot?” the man said. 

“Rot and peel and fester,” Oswald said. “Am I yours, Ed? Have I taken that role now that even your other half seems to have abandoned you?”

Ed trained his eyes on his victim. This hadn’t gone entirely to plan, but he could salvage it. It was so obvious. Ignore Oswald. Simply let him chatter away in the background, in fact, that would help, that would establish all the more clearly how irrelevant he was. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you live in some reality whereby corpses no longer have a reflection or something?”

Oswald’s chattering only grew more insistent. “I’d love to watch you decay, I admit it’d be nice to be on even footing again. What am I thinking?” he added, clasping a hand to his own cheek in feigned surprise. “I do get to see that! I’m seeing it right now!”

Ed’s hands were bunching at his own face. “Doesn’t matter!” he spluttered. “You. Have. Failed. And that means—”

“Poor little Eddie, dragging his carcass through the streets,” Oswald began to circle around Ed, a threatening motion, a predator stalking its prey, closing in, the circumference decreasing with each stride. “Draping a cacophony of lies and pretense over the gleaming bones and desiccated muscle. Pushing the miserable result through this utter farce of a criminal career. Deluding himself that no one can see it. Lying to himself. Always lying. I may be in the harbor, but I see only one corpse.”

“Will you just button it for criminey’s sake!” Ed shrieked with a soul-wrenched roar. His own enraged breaths pounded through him. His hands grasped at his hair as he bent. Fancied for a moment that he could crawl in, drag himself inside himself and vanish. Then he was back in the room. A grin worked its way onto his lips as he dropped his arms. He could see fresh alarm on his victim’s face. “Bad news buddy,” he said. “You lose!”

“He loses?” Oswald said, stilling in his movements. A laugh reverberating through him as he turned away. “He isn’t the one forced to be party to this utter circus.”

“Please!” the man said. “Give me another chance! One more! I didn’t understand—I understand how it works much better now.”

“Yes, Ed,” Oswald said, a ghostly hand lathing at his back, and never quite making contact . “Give him another chance. You are after all so forgiving.”

“Nope!” Ed said breezily, as he activated the timer. “Sorry pal. Three chances.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” Oswald said, with a jovial roll of his shoulders as he turned his attention to the man. “Look at it this way. This means that Ed is no longer interested in you. Trust me, I’m jealous.”

“Oh no,” the man began to jabber. “Oh. Please.” Even his begging wasn’t as good as Oswald’s. His fear didn’t hold that satisfying edge, that perfect tune of desperation. When he’d backed Oswald step by final step off the pier, his watery eyes never wavered, stood at soldier’s attention where they were supposed to stay. This man — now intentionally nameless — was disrespectful right up until his last moment. His gaze darted to his bound wrists, the bomb tick-tick-ticking behind them, the unlocked door to his office. “Help! Help me please!” he began to uselessly shout. 

Some people had no manners. 

“You’re a fool,” Ed growled. “I will find the one! This ignoramus so clearly wasn’t who I was searching for. That is nothing for you to be smug about!” His pitch reached a crescendo as his hands flailed furiously. “So one idiot turned out to be an idiot. So what?”

“So,” Oswald tittered against his cheek, sweeping a hand down his own body. “Not quite so replaceable. Am I?”

“I’ll just find another—”

“What did you imagine that this little stunt was going to achieve?” Oswald said, eyes glittering with malice and glee. 

“You know what I’m doing. Gotham has to have at least one other genius, if I find them—” They can help me. “When I find them, we’ll be untouchable!”

“We already were.”

Oswald stood in front of the glowing countdown, blocking his view and overtaking the blubbering fool behind them. 

“You and I stood at Gotham’s apex,” he continued, tick by tick encroaching into his space. “Both above the law and far beneath it. Unquestioned, uncontested. Your help was minimal at best, but I deemed you worthy enough to let you ride my coattails. Do you even know what’s happened to the empire we built? You don’t, not a lick, because you’re too busy chasing the rush you felt at my side to know what to do with power!”

“Wrong! You needed me, Oswald! You wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without me!” 

“By the time we met, I’d already taken Gotham once, do you truly think I couldn’t again? Without me, you’d still be in Arkham. Forgotten, rotting away — ironic, isn’t it? With this new stint you’ll be back before you know it! Are you ready for that stitched number to go back over your heart? You might as well get it tattooed, inmate D-131.”

“I’m not going to Arkham again! I would’ve gotten out eventually, I didn’t need you!”

“I should never have had them release you,” Oswald said. “Allowing a deranged, wild animal out onto the streets. It was bound to end in disaster. Have you taken the time to imagine that world? You, rotted away where you belong? Everyone else carrying on. And I’d be—” He appeared in front of Ed’s face, nose almost pressing against nose. “But for that act of charity on your behalf, I'd still be alive.”

“No!” Ed yelped. “No, I have not considered it! And I don’t need to! I’m sane.”

“Or would that be worse for you?” Oswald mused, striding forth, his voice lowering to a threatening timbre. “If I were alive and happy. Without you. Perhaps it’s easier to simply file people away. Leave them in a grave, render them static, predictable. So that you can make sense of them, so they never have to surprise you. Of course that does leave them somewhat. Dead.”

“You’d never be happy without me! You’re incapable!”

“Certainly not since you saw to that,” Oswald hissed into Ed’s neck, behind him now. “You’ve no idea how to connect with anyone at all. Not even me. The one thing you know how to do is take. Peel away every aspect of a person’s life until there is nothing left but you. Do you truly believe yourself to be so fascinating? Or did you like it? Knowing that I was dependent on you, that you’d made me that way? Did that excite you?”

“That was not—” Ed jabbered, turning so that he could confront the specter. “You’re twisting things! Of course you are, that’s what you do. Butch was a liability. That was a service .”

“Butch was loyal, something you never learned.”

“ You betrayed me first!”

“Can’t I write that off as an act of service too? No, wait, that just applies to you! Ed’s the only one who gets betrayed, Ed’s the only one allowed to get revenge!”

“But—”

“You said you’d do anything for me! And you left me to go play paper dolls in that gingerbread house with a cookie-cutter girl! Where’s the betrayal now? Who was I supposed to go to when you only left me with you!”

“I—that’s not—”

“What was the point, Ed? Was it just the thrill of the chase? You just wanted to see how twisted up you could get the most powerful man in Gotham, who cares if you leave him high and dry, it’ll be his fault if he ever hurts you!”

“Everything’s your fault! It’s not me, you’re the selfish one! You’re a spoiled child, just because you don’t want to be alone you think you can make everyone around you miserable! You’ve never truly loved anything or anyone, you wouldn’t know how to make that sacrifice!

“Then what was that little test of yours about? You heard what I said.” The angry set of his brows softened, pitched upwards. His eyes turned wide and wet as he mimed his own past self. “‘I won’t call Ed! I won’t let you hurt him!’ Just because you didn’t want to hear it doesn’t mean I didn’t say it.”

“No that’s—you—” There was an explanation somewhere in there, something hidden between the lines. Oswald had been manipulating him, he’d known Ed was there, somehow. He rubbed at his temples, trying to gain a modicum of control back in the temporary cease of Oswald’s onslaught. 

“Conjured my father and threw him in a dumpster,” Oswald’s hypnotic voice ceaselessly droned into the nape of his neck. “Revenge of course. Or were you threatened that there was a man in my mind who was not you? Could you not even let me have my father’s memory for companionship? Were you so jealous?”

“That’s just sick,” Ed squeaked. “It wasn’t — there wasn’t time — that was after we fell out! You can’t use that against me!”

“He wasn’t like us, you and I,” Oswald sneered. “He never hurt a soul. Of course, how could I expect you to understand? How could I expect you to comprehend real love when it is offered, much less receive it?”

“Isabella never hurt a soul either,” Ed yelped, jabbing a finger. “So maybe that’s what happens when you and I come together. Innocent people get hurt. That’s why I need to move on. And—”

“Well, of course,” Oswald said, a tone of mock impatience written across his features. He leaned back, crossed his arms. “We are killers, Ed. All we know is death.”

“And that’s why I’m not sorry,” Ed snapped through gnashed teeth. “I coulda been — I didn’t have to be on this path. You kept me on it. You wanted me on it so bad. Then that’s what you get.”

“And you’re good at it,” Oswald said. His tone changed, became soothing. Enticing. Sparked something in Ed that he himself could not describe. “One of the best I’ve ever seen. With every step you take, the corpses will follow. You can run from it, for a time, but death will catch you. In the end, it catches everyone.”

When he looked up, the frightened, determined expression from the past had given way to something smug, evil. Goading.

The incessant jabbering of the writer and the ticking had become a dull hum scoring the scene. The man had ceased to use actual words, and now it was just a despairing wail. A flicker of the sound lapped at Ed’s senses. An ice-bolt washed over him. How much time now? Barely a minute. His eyes roved to that triumphant gleam as his pulse pounded in his ears, his legs almost gave out beneath him. 

“You—” he whimpered. “You were just trying to keep me talking.”

Oswald creased in mocking laughter. “Now I deserve an Academy Award for that, I think! Imagine keeping a straight face while you feign your innocence. All the while—” He gestured to the struggling man bound by the ropes, pleading pitifully for his life. “But no,” he said, darting his fingers. “I get credit for this too, don’t I? Because this entire spree is your tragic tribute act. To me! Is that what it’s going to be? You best think quick. You have moments before you are literally a stain.”

“That’s a cheap trick,” Ed mumbled, feeling floaty, wavery. Unreal.

“Never were very good at keeping track, were you?” Oswald gloated, as he began checking a black fingernail for dirt, a clear gesture of disinterest. “Very well. Make the attempt. I could watch that. I’m not busy.”

Ed snapped around. His legs were in motion before the reality had registered. Feet pounded into the floor. He was running. Running, straining to suck in enough air, to recall the winding passageways of this suddenly far-too-big seeming house. He could feel the rhythm of the ticking now burning into him. A pricking at his eyes blurred his vision.

“Else you could stay,” Oswald screeched mockingly after him. “Come along, Ed. Why not go out with a bang? It’s very you.”

He wasn’t going to make it. Clearing the blast radius alone would be—

No. That was Oswald teasing into his mind. Twisting it. Taking hold of synapses and neurons, and bending them to his will. Changing his very thoughts. And he was clean of that. Clear. He would make it. He was Edward Nygma. He would not be defeated by such petty tactics. Just a little longer and he would be free.

His limbs cried out desperately for respite. He’d yanked his glasses from his face and slotted them into a pocket, darn things would come off otherwise. Adrenaline thundered, scorched through his ailing muscles, and he could viscerally feel the impact of anaerobic respiration tearing chunks from those muscles. Heaving for breath that wasn’t coming, he pushed himself along another stride. 

The front door swayed as he ripped his way through it. He’d calculated that he needed to be further away before he no longer ran the risk of being swallowed up by that blaze (‘You’ve been swallowed up, you already were’) and time was infuriatingly scant. Mustn't turn back, mustn't look, and there was something victorious in it too as that specter was left locked in that doomed building and he would have to push on, simply keep pushing on as he had been doing. As he would continue to do so. 

He looked back, he couldn’t help it. He had to see Oswald’s burning, melting face as his body rushed away from the oncoming inferno. For an instant, he caught him waving from the window, lingering delighted as Ed’s mental timer ticked its way to zero. 

The ground quaked violently and a crashing sound raced up his ankles, licked up his thighs, took hold of him and flung him violently against the tarmac. His face was smashed into drive, the pain registered moments after impact. A crushing ache that pressed him hard enough to crack, and then pinpricks of endorphins sparkling against it. A wave of heat swarmed at him, white-hot heat, piercing his skin. He heard himself cry out, weakly, pitifully. 

His head was swimming. His shaky, insolently disobedient hand wafted awkwardly to his pocket. If he grit his teeth and concentrated very hard, he could just about bid his limb to obey him. He teased it awkwardly into the garment. Fumbled for his glasses.

The side of his face that wasn’t kissing the gravel was cold, no wet? He raised trembling fingers to his temple and they came back streaked in blood. He couldn’t make out much with the spidering cracks in his glasses, but at least he was still conscious. The rogue machinations of his hallucination wouldn’t be the reason he landed back in Arkham, no matter what he proclaimed. 

Ed tried to stand with his burning legs and gravel-caked arms, but fell back to the ground before he could even push himself to his knees. His wrist, the one that’d been trapped under his chest, screamed with a shooting pain, unable to hold even a fraction of his weight. 

He wouldn’t be able to examine it until he could see again, but from a few preliminary prods it was likely broken, though he didn’t feel any jutting or misaligned bones. A hairline fracture if he was lucky. 

Struggling with his one good hand, he limped to his feet. His side was burning, he could feel the singed edges of his suit, but he was alive. 

“Heh.” He laughed even as it made his chest ache. A wrecking cough interrupted him before he could let out full peels. “You see that, Oswald! I’m still alive!”

The silence of the night was only interrupted by the crackling fire that engulfed the house behind him. Sirens wailed in the distance, but his siren was still trapped inside, watching him from that crumbling, burning window. 

Time to go. He’d beat Oswald again, that was all that mattered. The emptiness in his chest was solely attributed to the disappointing failure of Mr. No-Name. He’d try again tomorrow.

Notes:

j- my favorite part was when he fell on his face trying to climb down. get rekted cartoon man

Chapter 3

Notes:

j- id say tw but yall know wut ur getting into already

He felt like…well, honestly he felt like he'd survived an explosion. 

His body ached, his entire front was littered with dark bruises, his thigh, cheek, and upper arm were pink and wet with fresh burn tissue, and his wrist was unusable. He should be grateful he'd survived at all — the bomb he'd built was enough to decimate the suburban two-story he'd invaded — but he wasn’t supposed to be that close to the blast. It was all Oswald’s fault. Again. 

Twice. Twice now Oswald had taken advantage of his distraction, caught him in a vulnerable moment, but Ed had also bested him both times. Inevitable really that even when Oswald was blessed with access to Ed’s mind, he would still fall short. He never truly stood a chance. 

Still, he should exert some caution. Better to not give Oswald’s ghost any more advantages. 

He pulled himself upright from where he’d collapsed on the sofa. One of his ankles throbbed but it didn’t appear to be swollen, so he was able to drag himself to the kitchen with minimal issue. 

For a moment, he debated eating. He couldn’t remember the last time he had an entire meal, but his stomach roiled at the thought. Instead he wetted a small dishrag and held it to the burns on his face, easing at least one of the many aches in his body. The other burns throbbed too, shiny and vulnerable under the thin wrappings he’d dressed them with. He’d been too exhausted the night before to properly treat them, so he had to see to them now before they became infected, if they hadn’t already. 

Two canisters of pills had been left on the kitchen counter. One was a medical-grade pain reliever and the other would summon the man who’d put him in this state. He swallowed down the pain pills and tucked the Altoid tin into his makeshift sling. 

The room Oswald had given him weeks ago was on the second floor. He hadn’t used it much since he cast off his ex-best friend — there was simply far too much to do to waste time sleeping — and he was disinclined to use it now that he also had a busted ankle. Oswald’s bedroom on the first floor was much easier to limp too, which was more than likely why he claimed it for himself in the first place. 

In the few times he did sleep — often his body simply collapsed from exhaustion once the effects of the stimulants he was taking wore off — it was either on the couch, upright at one of the various temporary desks he’d taken over, or in here. It was simply because the sheets and mattress in Oswald’s room were the highest quality in the entire house, and if he was trying to squeeze a week’s rest into two and a half hours, this was the most efficient place to do it. 

His goal now was the attached master bath. Oswald had kept a myriad of medical supplies in here — a few different ankle braces (that Ed was considering using), antibacterial ointment, large bandages, an entire rainbow of pain medications, splints, butterfly tape, a variety of creams, bath salts, and even a suture needle and thread. Oswald wasn’t a man known for his foresight, but he’d learned how to deal with his own injuries, and considering his chosen profession, he’d tended to acquire more than a few. The scars that had littered his body in the times Ed had seen him in a state of undress were proof of that. He would’ve made a decent nurse if he had the temperament for it. 

There was a thought — Oswald as a nurse! As if he could care enough about another person to be effective at the profession. The only reason he had the necessary knowledge in the first place was because he selfishly refused to succumb to any sort of injury. 

Well, almost any sort. Ed had always been exceptional. 

Ed huffed to himself as he undressed and stepped into the bath, carefully cradling his injured wrist to his chest (He was still unclear if it was a true fracture or just a bruise that penetrated to the bone, and couldn’t convince himself to go have it x-rayed. At least there was no swelling). 

A sigh emerged from his chest as the water hit the array of scrapes and bruises mapped across his body. It was a mild form of pain relief, he supposed, basking in the sudden sting as the bacteria was burned away. He lapped a hand idly through the water. Closed his eyes. Leaned back. 

Finally. An oasis of silence and calm. An opportunity to think. 

He gasped sharply through his teeth as he was flung backwards. A muscle had given out, and now he was descending. His head banged on the edge of the tub, new pain rushing over the old, alighting fresh tendrils of ache. Gushing water closed over his face. 

He could feel it. He could feel a ghostly hand entwined in his hair, that pressure slamming his shoulder against the enamel. Holding his head underneath. A bubble emerged from his lips that wafted agonizingly slowly up through the vast expanse. No escape. With his eyes resolutely closed, he could nonetheless visualize the picture so clearly.

The cold stare of icy eyes glared down at him, the cruel twist of the lip sneered. His scalp burned as he struggled for the surface. As he gurgled and spluttered, Oswald was holding him down, was cooly observing his terror and desperation dispassionately. The myriad words he strained to form simply vanished. Malice blazed behind that statuesque gesture as the panic drowned out all other considerations. He was thrashing uselessly against the maniacal specter. His every nerve, pleading, begging, screaming for respite. 

Then he felt himself being released. 

He flung himself upright, barely minding the throbbing pain in his arms and chest. His heart was crashing in his ribs. Breath was difficult. “Oh dear,” he stammered. “Oh dear.” A useless hand batted awkwardly at his cheek before descending. He could feel the prick of tears at his eyes, which he supposed was merely a physiological response to the sudden peril he’d found himself in. 

The taster of drowning had gripped him with a shaking that was refusing to abate. He could not bring his limbs back under his control. There was a thick fog clinging to the inside of his ribs, laced with cold. His own heaving breaths were growing more erratic. No matter how vigorously he shook, it only led him to shake more furiously.

It was senseless. The danger was past. Clearly nothing had happened. No harm done. But there was this white-noise signal blaring in his mind, crowding out everything else and he couldn’t think, couldn’t simply move on.

Oswald . 

The ghost was now tormenting him even absent the pills. That was it. The last few days, the man had completely swallowed up every action Ed had tried to take, every maneuver, every thought. And now he’d taken on a life of his own, was trying to squeeze himself into yet more spaces, to leave not a scrap of air for Ed to breathe. Ed was not going to be party to his silly little guilt trip. 

Yes. Ed knew in intimate detail the process of drowning. Constricting ribs, the helplessness, the sheer terror. But drowning had simply been the most economical option for dispatching his friend. His friend ? His—

His enemy. He hated Oswald. He hated him. Those words echoed in his mind, and he held on to them. Clung to them. Besides, throwing him off the pier was a metaphor of casting off the past, and Oswald ought to have appreciated the theatricality of that. Of course he didn’t. It was hardly like him to give anyone else credit. 

Ed was straining out of the water and grasping the pills he'd left tucked into the shirt he'd tied into a sling before he made the conscious decision. That was fine, his subconscious knew that he had to warn Oswald off, that he wasn’t about to let him try to integrate his measly little self back into Ed’s life, not after he'd drawn that curtain. 

He blinked into existence only seconds after Ed crushed the pill, far too close, poised right on the lip of the tub. He would've been close enough to push Ed under, easy with his advantage of invisibility.

“You slipped, Eddie. You know I can't touch you.”

“You're lying! I felt you—”

“Panic-induced nerve response. Really, you should know better by now. A touch of hysteria isn't exactly uncommon for you.” Despite his words, his voice was oddly soft, undercutting the offense, like he thought he could get away with teasing. None of the vile, pointed vitriol from the night before was present, which only set him even more on edge. 

“I'm not hysterical, you're trying to misdirect me. You can't! I'm through with you, Oswald, I'm moving on so you can't keep trying to worm your way in.”

“Is that why you summoned me here now? While you're bathing?”

Ed felt his face heat, but that was simply because of the hot water. He felt more exposed than he did a minute ago.

“That—” he cleared his throat. “That has nothing to do with this.”

Oswald hummed, but didn’t outright disagree. “You just got scared—”

“I did not!”

“You got scared and you wanted an explanation. Well here it is — you started drowning in eighteen inches of water.” 

For once, Ed didn’t have anything to say. He pulled his limbs close to his body, despite the ache, and sank back down into the water, only to the depth of his shoulders. He probably should have taken a shower, but his ankle would have suffered for it. 

“Look at that — the limping, the drowning — you're turning into me! Keep your eye out for any handsome young men with a propensity for accosting you with trivia. They can be surprisingly lethal.” 

At least Oswald was acknowledging his lethality, other descriptors aside. His head felt hazy, he'd guess from the oxygen deprivation, though he wouldn't put it past the pills either.

He looked down at his bruised and burnt legs in the murky water. Oswald’s reflection didn’t show up. Briefly he wondered how much bath water he accidentally swallowed. Clearly not enough to impact his lungs. 

It left a bad taste in his mouth. 

It probably didn’t taste half as bad as the water in Gotham’s harbor.

“I wasn't really focused on the taste. Mostly the suffocating, the pop-popping of the flooded air sacs in my lungs. You can't imagine it, this force holding your throat closed but you can't push it off, you can't feel anything but that pressing weight.”

“I didn’t ask.” 

“You didn’t have to.” The tip of Oswald’s finger began tracing tiny designs in the bath water near Ed’s shin. “Remember in third grade, when you found that one library book. You hid it under your shirt so you could take it home and pore over all the illustrations and diagrams inside. In between descriptions of hypothermia and sun sickness, you read exactly what happened to me. You knew what I'd feel, how long it would take, how painful every second would be.”

“I—that wasn’t—” He shook his head, trying to dispel the images he’d been so fascinated by when he was young. At the time, the scientific drawings of soaked lungs and bloating corpses were nothing more than a morbid curiosity, but he couldn’t help but to see them in his mind’s eye as Oswald’s nonfunctional lungs, his rotting body. The waxy, dripping figure next to him seemed lively in comparison. “You deserved it. You only suffered for a few minutes. It can’t compare to the weeks of agony I went through.”

“I’m not arguing with you,” Oswald said with a shrug, finger continuing to trace. He didn’t even do Ed the courtesy of meeting his eyes. “A simple statement of fact. You wanted to know. I told you. Now what?”

“Now,” Ed ground his teeth. He was incensed. How dare Oswald just dismiss his grief. The torment that had been so unfairly visited upon him, the utter destruction of his happiness. “Now. You. Stop being a coward. And admit-” And the sentence ended there. He couldn’t rustle up the words that would complete it. He just knew that he needed to hear it. He needed Oswald to say those words. He did. 

“What would that achieve?” Oswald said. “Why do you need me to say anything at all? I said the words to you so many times. You didn’t hear it back then. What would it change?”

“I know what you’re doing!” Ed yelled. “Denying me so you can make me upset! Doing your utmost to drive me mad. Trying to kill me!”

“And I am sorry for that,” Oswald said. Ed saw his eyes moistening, his lips pursed — the mask of feigned sincerity. He scoffed. Oswald was a master of manipulation. His face could turn on a dime. And that had been just fine, impressive even. Until that talent had been turned on him. “Not my doing, I am bound by your mind. We both are, in fact.”

“Sorry,” Ed spat. “No. This is another tactic. It’s not gonna work! I am done with this. I’m done. It’s finished.”

Oswald finally looked up at him. He was ready for the rebuttal, the spitting and snarling, more rounds for Oswald to shoot, trying to hit somewhere vital, but it never came. He grinned, all soft and malleable; his ghostly fingers hovered over Ed’s knee, a hairsbreadth away. “Fine, but I might as well keep you company until that last dose wears off.” He shifted on the lip of the tub and dipped his clothed legs in, not that it mattered as they were already wet. From their positioning, Ed should’ve felt them brush against his own, but of course he didn’t. “I’ll miss you when you move on.”

“I’m sometimes white, and always wrong,” Ed crossed his arms, felt a wave of petulance take hold of him. “I can break a heart and hurt the strong. What am I? You detest me.”

“Now we both know that that was never true,” Oswald said. “And it's no lie. Even now.” He splashed playfully at the water. “Have you imagined the reception you’d receive on the other side? From him?”

Immediately, Ed was on guard again. Oswald was going to try to push him down, reduce him to nothing once again. He couldn’t forget this was the same person that tried to get him to stay in the room with a bomb. 

The concept of an afterlife was a pleasant falsehood that human beings told themselves so that they didn’t drive themselves mad knowing that oblivion was inevitably coming. That much he had been certain of. People died, and they were dead. It had been like that with his parents. Kristen even. Isabella. Death brought about nonexistence. Unpleasant but that was that.

Then Oswald had died, and he couldn’t honestly say where Oswald was now. He knew that he had to be somewhere . He knew it. He had to be.

He blinked deeply. Here. Oswald was here . Tangible. Bathwater followed along with his motions, and Ed could barely calculate how that worked. Perhaps Oswald had him trapped in a pocket dimension where everything was tangible but Ed.

He’d thrown Oswald’s fear of hell back in his face, he’d confirmed that fear confessed in secret just to twist the knife, just to — But Oswald would have understood that that was his intention, he must have and was it worth even thinking about this because Oswald was dead and didn’t know anything anymore? A bloated corpse floating in the harbor would hardly be possessed of such things as opinions. And if not a bloated corpse, then a snarling screeching demon racing at him with glinting claws and snarling teeth ready to tear chunks from his throat.

“No,” Oswald said, a hint of fondness in his voice. “I know that you imagine that he’d claw at your eyes, perhaps bite your ear off, that type of thing. Have you even considered that he might wish to rekindle? Did that possibility never wind its way across that considerable mind of yours?”

“About as much as I’ve considered pigs flying,” Ed snapped. “What would be the purpose of wasting my time imagining that? Why don’t I also consider whipping up a perpetual motion machine in my spare time? Devising a time-travel contraption? Pointless.”

“I don’t know,” Oswald said, bunching a fist to his lip. “ I still care for you, Ed.”

Ed had not expected those words to come so sour, to bite so deeply. He felt his eyes sting once more. He pushed a finger into them. “You don’t get to say that,” he whimpered. Ghostly hands closed around his shoulders, and he wanted to shake it off but he didn’t have the strength.

“You cannot know how fervently,” Oswald cooed in his ear, leaning in, taking the space. He stilled and sighed. Ed detected the faintest crack of exhaustion in his voice, as spectral fingers teased at his hair. “You were angry. I understand.”

“No, no you’re not him, you don’t get to decide. And you can’t—” Ed found himself flailing at the ghost, fingers itching to rip it into tiny pieces, rip the pieces into dust, and let them scatter because how dare he . And then a sob immediately raced through him, and he rested his brow on the edge of the tub. 

It was that tinge in Oswald’s voice now that brought about this reaction. It had the tone of a truth that had been repeated so often it scarcely bore repeating. And what if -

Behind that, lay a tangled web of tumbling possibilities, each too rich and too powerful for any one of them to be even comprehensible.

“He knew you better than anyone,” Oswald murmured, fingers teasing touchlessly at the nape of Ed’s neck. “Knew how angry you’d be. Knew that it was but a matter of time before you solved it. And that in your anger, you would most likely destroy him. He accepted that. His choice was to be destroyed by you, or else lose you entirely. He made that choice gladly.”

“Stop it!” Ed blurted, face buried in his hands. “Just stop it. What good does this do? Now ?”

“And you know him, Eddie. Just as intimately. He forgave you even as you shot him and left him to drown. You saw. He was reaching for you. In a way, he still is. He’s here. He’s me .” 

That face was nestled against his scalp, if he blinked very deeply and imagined very hard, he could almost feel it and it was completely irrational. But he wanted to. So eagerly. He could sense the way that Oswald’s fingers brushing against his arms would send tendrils of warmth and safety shooting through his veins, the way his breath would part the hairs on his head, would cocoon him. The way the hand trailing to his back sent a sturdiness seeping in. There was none of that now. There was simply the image and that would have to be enough. 

“Don’t weep,” Oswald said, spectral fingers lifting his face and trailing to Ed’s cheekbone, flicking a tear away. “You are simply injured. Injured and in a vulnerable state. That is why you’re feeling this intense emotion. It is simply the body’s manner of compensating.”

Ed nodded. Finally, something that made sense. From the rest of the world, an admonishment not to weep would have felt shameful. Humiliating. Would have insinuated weakness. From Oswald, it was compassionate. Logical. Sound advice. With a press at his eyes, he found himself obeying. His quaking shoulders stilled. The vibrating panic ebbed to a dull hum. And then to nothing at all. He breathed deep, and for the first time in however long, the breath actually refreshed him.

Oswald’s fingers began to trail down his chest, hovering over a particularly dark bruise. It didn’t hurt. It was hard to imagine Oswald touching him without trying to hurt him, but it had been like that for the majority of the time Ed had known him. Not that he was being touched now. The thin, insurmountable barrier stung worse than any punch, stab, or bite. 

“Clean yourself up. I wouldn’t want you to catch anything. I’d make you tea but—” He waved his hand through the porcelain edge of the tub. 

“You could find a way,” and despite himself, Ed felt a grin tugging at his lips. “You always were impossible.”

Notes:

j- *starts doing the jerma fear beatboxing*
rc - Wow cute I'm happy for them

Chapter 4

Notes:

j- ;^3

The afternoon light filtering into Oswald’s room added a pinkish, more human tone to Oswald’s gray skin. Seated on his bed (Ed’s bed for the time being, but it didn’t matter much since neither of them were sleeping), he almost looked like he did a few weeks ago. He acted like he did months ago — easy smiles, brutally arrogant stories about his rise to power, semi-eager questions to the fascinating pieces of trivia Ed would regale him with. 

A part of Ed was raging, quaking, telling him not to trust this Oswald that wasn’t bearing his claws, but the Ed that was in charge was reveling in the brief return of his best friend. He was on his guard, it would be fine, and he hadn’t had a real conversation with someone in weeks. 

Not that any of this was real. A third (second?) party stepping in would only see him smiling at empty air. 

A third party would be a blithering dunderhead whose opinion wasn’t welcome. 

At some point, Oswald’s form began to waver. He didn’t hesitate a second before taking another pill. The last one. He just needed a little more time. 

“Thank you, old friend,” Oswald said, hands batting at Ed’s shoulder, almost making contact. “Such incursions are most uncomfortable.”

“Guess we’ve both been in the wars,” Ed shrugged. A flicker approached his mind, it was he who had been most grievously injured, but he realized that it didn’t much matter. It was pleasant commiserating with his friend again. He’d missed that. Oswald’s shadow was about as good at playing nursemaid as he’d suspected Oswald would always have been. He was never going to physically bathe wounds or wipe up bodily fluids, but his conversation was restorative. His voice reached into Ed’s pores and that breath washed away the writhing heap of bacterium and grime roiling beneath the surface. 

“I would’ve expected no different,” Oswald said, leaning back on his hands, turning to Ed, a glimmer of a smile on his lips. “Such folk as you and I were never destined for mediocrity, and one cannot be exceptional without attaining a few scrapes along the way.”

“More than a few scrapes,” Ed chuckled. “Have you ever trapped yourself inside your own explosion?”

“Metaphorically speaking, perhaps,” Oswald shrugged. “This damn leg of mine wouldn’t have come about without my own machinations.”

The warm, settled air was fostering a familiar atmosphere, like the nights back at Ed’s apartment where they’d watch quiz shows and argue over sleeping arrangements and debate proper ways to hide a body. They hadn’t had many nights that were just for them after moving into the manor, not before Oswald soured it.

“Huh,” Ed said. “Never have I ever turned my biggest disaster into my biggest win.”

“Are you suggesting a game?” Oswald chirped, a glass of whiskey materializing in his hand. Ed stumbled to his feet. He suspected that should he check one of the cabinets, he’d find some wine sequestered away, and yes, he’d found it. 

“You ought to watch your drinking,” he said, gripping onto the bottle. “Could result in serious liver damage.”

“I’ll take that under consideration,” Oswald said, pressing the sifter to his lip. Ed watched as the glass pressed against skin, the trickle of liquid poured down his throat, the bobbing of his Adam’s apple. He coughed, reseated himself on the bed. 

Ed’s hands were caressing the still-closed bottle. He imagined Oswald storing this away, in preparation for some bout of melancholy, or some spike of rage. He couldn’t have anticipated the circumstances in which the bottle would actually have been reached for. Oswald’s hands had gripped the nozzle, once. His prints were still carved into the bottle top and now Ed’s fingers were chasing the memory of that touch. His chest seized, and he plonked the bottle onto the floor. Holding it suddenly felt distinctly wrong, though he could not fathom why. 

“How about we play the non-drinking version?” he said. “Keep a clearer head, sharper wits. Would make for a more interesting game.” The words felt false in his mouth, but if Oswald noticed, he didn’t remark on it. 

“You are no fun,” Oswald said, pursing his lip, the phantasmal glass he’d been holding wisping into nothing. “But very well. If we must. You must take a point off also,” an elbow nudging at Ed’s sides that did not make contact. “Biggest disaster. Biggest win. That woman? Kringle? That was—”

“That wasn’t my biggest disaster,” Ed said curtly, racing though the words as though doing so would prevent them registering. “Anyhow! I win that round! 

Ed held up his good hand, spreading his fingers wide; Oswald mirrored his movements. “We can start off simple,” Oswald started. “Never have I ever introduced myself with a riddle before my own name.”

“Not fair!” Ed put down a finger anyway. “It’s against the spirit of the game if you make it so targeted.”

“Fine,” Oswald said, with a deft roll of his eyes, sinking back into the mattress. “Why don’t you show me how it's done, since you’re such an expert.”

“Of course! Never have I ever killed someone for a pair of shoes.”

“That’s just as targeted!”

“You have access to my brain! I’m just trying to make it even.”

Obligingly, Oswald lowered one of his fingers as well — back on even footing. Winning this would be simplicity itself. He’d made a study of Oswald, made it his business to uncover every fact there was to know about the man. He didn’t suppose Oswald would have acted in kind. 

‘It’s not really Oswald’. ‘But it’s a facsimile, and if the facsimile is doing a plausible job. Ba-da-bing’.

In a sense, it was almost unfair. He watched the cogs turn in Oswald’s mind, brow creased in thought. “Never have I ever been kissed,” he said, his eyes briefly betraying a glint of pain before his face righted itself and he fixed Ed with a victorious gaze. “I daresay I won that round.”

“Wait,” Ed said, forgetting to even lower his finger. “Never? Not even by your mom?”

Oswald rolled his eyes. “That hardly counts,” he said. “You know what I mean.” He leaned back, his stance rigid. More guarded. As though he were revealing something that he’d rather not. Ed tried very hard not to concentrate on his lips as he spoke. The spackle of saliva that made them shine. “Those fits of passion they tell of in stories — how I would dream.” A breath echoed through his chest. His back arched, as though his mind was reeling through some fantasy that Ed could not reach inside his mind and scrabble for. Then he shrugged. “But that was never intended for me.”

A flicker of mistrust spiked through Ed’s mind. “Oswald,” he said. “If this is about—”

“I believe we are past that,” Oswald said, with a casual wave of his hand. “No, it most certainly is not. It is about the game only. Your turn.”

Ed’s tongue grazed against his teeth. “But we should talk about—”

“Play the game, Ed!” Oswald screamed, his stance growing more frenzied, hands quaking as though he were about to take hold of some implement and smash Ed’s skull with it. A shiver raced through Ed’s body. If only. If only he were able to—but. He supposed that if Oswald had intended to manipulate him, he wouldn’t be radiating embarrassment right now. 

Oswald was prone to these maudlin bouts. His ferocity belied a chasm of vulnerability that Ed alone had the privilege to witness, and when his moods took him, even his ambitions ceased to matter to him. A glow surged within Ed’s chest. That was his Oswald. A facsimile recreating the details of Oswald’s being without those contradictory cracks wouldn’t have made that mistake. His Oswald would have.

He almost didn’t want to continue with the game. He was suddenly overtaken by a savage ache that radiated within his very depths. He’d been that guy, and not too long ago either. He could remember the yearning, that desire to be wanted. He’d been the guy doomed to exist as an observer. Witnessing those casual touches, how simple it seemed for others, and how impossible for him. In his reverence for Oswald, first as a deity and then as a demon, it had completely passed him by that such a man could still be lost in the same mire that he himself had escaped. 

In a way, it was faintly gratifying. Here was an entire area of human experience that Ed could map out intimately that Oswald had no knowledge of. One option was to tactfully avoid the issue. The far more enticing one was to prod at it further. 

“Never have I masturbated to something embarrassing,” he trilled with a wicked smirk. Oswald’s face remained resolutely blank. He was not taking a point off of himself.

“Never have I—” Oswald began, mouth yawning, eyes innocent.

“No, wait a moment,” Ed snapped. “Really? Oswald?”

Oswald’s face was creased in irritation. “I do believe that it’s my turn,” he said. “I didn’t talk over yours.”

“Of course,” Ed sulked. “I suppose you jack off to fine sculptures and exquisite paintings. Gotta keep it classy!”

“Who would—” Oswald said, blinking deeply. “In any case, it's my turn. Never have I ever been in a shipwreck.”

“Never have I ever masturbated to something not embarrassing!” Ed roared. Oswald still wasn’t taking a point off. “Seriously?” he said. “I’m not even going to play the game anymore if you’re just gonna cheat!”

“It isn’t cheating,” Oswald said, scrunching his nose. “I simply don’t. Think about it — we know everything about one another. Did I ever mention such a thing?” His tongue clicked against his teeth. “Honestly, Eddie, we shared a bed! Did I once excuse myself for that purpose?”

Ed scurried through the caverns of his mind for every datapoint he had about Oswald. Before he’d ever met the man, he had expected him to be a far more sexual person than he’d actually turned out to be; at least the police reports and bullpen gossip had indicated so. But he supposed those photos of Oswald and the men on his arms were nothing more than business matters. 

“So you were just never interested?” Ed burbled, needing to dig into this, needing to probe further. “Y’know, the aphid is quite successful—”

“Yes, thank you,” Oswald said. “It’s hardly the same thing. I’m no aphid. I have drives, but none I was willing to make myself vulnerable for. Self-gratification was just…beneath me. So no, I haven’t.”

He still had four fingers up while Ed was stuck at two. That wouldn’t do, everything in him was telling him to wipe that competitive smirk of Oswald’s face. Unfortunately, this line of questioning had given him a clear advantage, one Ed was having a hard time recovering from considering the fresh slew of images that assaulted his mind. 

Oswald had never been touched by another person. He hadn’t given it much consideration, but it made a fair amount of sense. He claimed that the love he felt for Ed was singular, unique in his life. He must’ve known that no one else would’ve been able to compare, even before he knew of Ed’s existence. 

“Never have I ever made love.”

Ed lowered his finger as he glowered. “That’s a given, considering you’ve never kissed anyone.” Perhaps he could turn this around — he grinned wide and sure.

“Never have I ever been naked in front of another man.”

“I haven’t! I just told you—”

“In my apartment. Your clothes were ruined and I had to undress you, so yes you have.” At the time, his hands had been clinical, perfunctory, but the imagery was still vivid. He could clearly recall the smattering of freckles and scars — some aligning just so that they looked like tiny trailing comets. Aside from the mangled mess of his shoulder and ankle (and oh, how interesting that firm knot of twisted bone and discolored tissue had been), his skin had been soft and delicate, though he was sure Oswald would resent the description. 

It just made him more keen to use it. 

All that violence, so much resistance and power wrapped up in such a lovely package. No wonder he’d never laid with anyone — they’d lose any ounce of fear they had of him once they saw how sweetly a flush carved its way down his sternum. 

Oswald lowered a finger, finally. Two to three was a much more respectable showing. 

“Never have I been a poor sport,” Oswald huffed. “I hardly see how it’s fair if I was unconscious at the time I did it.

Was Oswald impugning his sportsmanship now? That was unacceptable — if anything Oswald was the type to never play fair. Once again, it was left to Ed to give the shining example of how a model competitor should behave. 

“And,” Oswald continued. “I never got the chance to return the favor. It seems you’ve seen me laid bare both physically and metaphorically, and not given the chance to reciprocate.”

“ I know better than to let my guard down. And I resent what you're implying—it wasn’t sexual. You were filthy. I had to clean you up!” He blinked. Shrugged. “Besides. You ain’t missing nothing .”

“That can’t be true,” Oswald said, eyes now visibly scanning over Ed’s chest and shoulders in a motion that made him shrink back, made him feel exposed. He scowled to himself, turned his head. “You look rather dashing in a suit, I fail to see how you’d be any less so out of one.” Ed chuckled to himself. Bunched a hand to the back of his throat. Shook his head.

“Trust me,” he said. “It’s all weird angles and well—” His lip quivered as the bid to describe his own body fell apart as soon as he’d started to make the attempt. “I was never gonna be featured in a mens’ magazine, was I?”

Oswald shifted closer, his fingers coquettishly trailing from Ed’s kneecap to shin. He could almost feel the shift in the displaced air as he moved, though there was no actual pressure on the fabric of his pants. “I have to disagree. The parts I’ve gotten to see are rather fetching. If you’d only asked, I’d have told you that you cut a fine figure.” Those pale fingers crawled towards his temple, whispering down Ed’s cheek. “Curious eyes, a handsome jaw, talented hands. I’ve been nothing but impressed so far.”

His suit was beginning to feel too warm. It was as if the stale air in the room had suddenly grown heavier, an invisible fog drifting in from the closed windows. He had the urge to remove his jacket, unwind his tie, and let down a few buttons from his dress shirt. Oswald’s eyes stubbornly stayed on the strip of flesh near his collarbone that would be revealed if he did. 

Privately — and how more private could he get? He was already alone (debatable) in a secluded manor on the outskirts of the city. There were no staff or guards around, just him and what remained of Oswald Cobblepot, and the insistence in his skull that if he showed more, his ghostly companion would have more to praise. 

“Show me, Eddie. You’d grant me this last request, wouldn’t you?” Last request, yes he’d almost forgotten he’d be done with the pills after this. Oswald hadn’t asked for one at the pier, he hadn’t thought Ed would pull the trigger, but it was only fair. A man’s last wishes, even if they came late, should be abided. 

It all fell into place. The torment of the past few days had been because, somehow, his subconscious had known that this was what was needed — Oswald’s silver tongue, being given its opportunity to lavish its praises upon those parts of himself he’d thoughtlessly kept hidden away. It was his parting gift to his best friend. It was only right. He was unspooling the tie, having barely noticed himself beginning to take it off. He yanked his glasses from his face and placed them on the nightstand.

Stealing a glance at Oswald, he searched the face for the press of lip against tongue, tinge of blush on the cheeks, those signals that would give away his arousal. Saw only concentration and interest, and that stirred him to go further. His fingers should have been shaking, he was conscious that this was a deeply auspicious moment but he found only a surge of confidence. 

He pushed himself off of the bed, spun, and took in the sight of Oswald leaning in repose against the sheets, his elbows propping him up as his eyes gleamed with interest. Ed’s jacket slithered to the floor, and his fingers picked at the buttons of his collar. Oswald hummed as he peeled the shirt down, revealed his collarbone, bunched the fabric in his hand as he showed himself off. 

It was adorable. He’d shown so little, and yet Oswald’s excitement was palpable. A stirring of affection rushed through his stomach as a breath raced through that body, and he inched himself closer. Ed strode forth, closed the gap, as those eyes bristling with anticipation and challenge met him in a fixed stare. He saw tongue graze lip, and he wordlessly understood the instruction.

‘Keep going’.

And why shouldn’t he? This was intoxicating, beyond delicious. He was doused in a heady warmth that went beyond logic. Simply locked in a devouring gaze, and he was only too eager to succumb to it. He was less careful as his fingers descended, felt an animal instinct roar its way to the surface, and then he was tearing and ripping at clothing and drinking in that stare that radiated hunger. 

By the time he was bare, stripped down to his briefs, Oswald was all but salivating. His eyes darted to the wide expanse of his chest, his naked thighs and shoulders, the thin skin coating his ribcage. 

For a single, distracted moment, he remembered how Kristen had startled upon first seeing him — worried, pinched brows as she fixated on the jut of his bony hips (so unlike the thick, muscular men that had surrounded him at the precinct), and the array of hidden scars that criss-crossed his chest and back. 

Oswald didn’t startle, he vibrated, like a swarm of honeybees trying to kill their queen. It was so easy to see the layers of praise he was internally laying onto Ed’s unremarkable body, he could almost hear the words as if they were spoken. 

Almost. It wasn’t the same though.

“Oswald…” He wasn’t able to ask for it, he couldn’t make himself form the sentence, but Oswald had always been adept at picking up what he wasn’t saying. 

“Lovely thing, you have to know that you’re breathtaking.”

It was Ed’s breath that was stolen. 

“The Vitruvian man was eight heads tall. I believe you’re eight and a quarter, perhaps eight and a half, and all the more enchanting for it, stretched to encompass the perfect breadth of your hands, your feet. I wish I was better at arithmetic so I could understand why the linear curve of your spine draws me so.” He surged up, his hovering fingers tracing a path down from Ed’s shoulders, bordering his spine, down to the swell of his flanks. “There’s a Golden Spiral here, right below your tailbone.”

Ed shivered, even as he didn’t feel Oswald trace over the only piece of still-covered flesh. Obligingly, he shucked down his briefs, now entirely exposed for perusal. 

Oswald smiled, kind and vicious and dripping with unprecedented amounts of satisfaction. Like just witnessing Ed bare would fuel him just as thoroughly as regaining his iron-flippered control over their festering city. “Perfection.”

“Y—” Ed swallowed, forcing down the stutter that tried to bubble up. “You too. You have to…”

He trailed off again, but Oswald’s dripping suit still melted away. On his hands and knees, trapping Oswald under him, he had the perfect vantage to see the blue flush of gray skin as it crawled down his cheeks, to his neck, to his collarbone. Ed’s tongue felt heavy in his mouth and suddenly the stale water of Gotham’s river that clung to Oswald’s skin didn’t seem like it’d taste so foul. 

His eyes raked down Oswald’s body — small in stature, entirely encompassed by his own. He’d noticed back when Oswald was living with him. At the time, the observation had seemed important, ground-breaking even that a man he admired so much could fit beneath him so easily. Fate, he thought; it was fate, down to their individual genetics, that Ed would be perfectly able to slot himself into and around Oswald’s soft pieces. 

The one part of him that wasn’t tinted in shades of blue (blue-green eyes, blue-black hair, blue-gray skin) was the bright red bullet hole puncturing his abdomen. Blood leaked out of it, down and around his hip, and off onto the bed forming a blooming stain on the light-colored sheets. Ed knew that — should he strain hard enough — the metallic scent would almost touch his nostrils.

Something ached in Ed’s chest. It was the singular point where all the vitality, the rouge of anger that was Oswald’s signature, leaked out of him, leaving this statuesque version behind. Even as he wanted it, even as he could read clear desire in Oswald’s jacks and marbles eyes, he wouldn’t flush, couldn’t. All the red was draining out of him. 

Ed pressed his finger into the wound, trying to plug it up. Blood was still leaking out of it, so that meant there was still blood left inside him. He wasn’t too late. For some reason his throat felt clogged and his under eyes felt heavy. His vision was getting blurrier by the second — no doubt due to the removal of his glasses. He still couldn’t feel anything, blood kept trickling out at a relentlessly even pace, uncaring of his efforts. 

“—ddie. Ed. Eddie!” 

He startled, pulling his finger back from where it had been pushing deeper into the wound. It was clean, uncoated in warm viscera, he couldn’t feel the tight passage his bullet ( Ed’s bullet) had carved through him. 

“You can’t,” Oswald said simply. 

That glimmer of challenge did not go unnoticed. It took hold of Ed’s senses, and he found himself mashing his hands up against the wound, bidding himself to press inside, to probe. He caught the hitch in Oswald’s breath as he layered all of his attention onto it, and he was suddenly aware of a pooling sensation in his thighs as his fingers stroked and kneaded at the still gushing viscera. He sank down, pressed his face up against it, basked in the image of bathing himself in gunge, letting it spackle and coat his mouth, filling his nose. 

He could hear his own aroused breaths in his ears as it hit him. Drown in it. He must. But now the image wasn’t bitter, it had the ring of destiny to it. He unstuck a hand from the sticky patch, and swiped it over his cock. Let the beads of precum glistening on the head lubricate his glide as he stroked at himself. 

Shivering, he visualized that sanguine grime, gritted with chunks coating his cock. He exhaled, as the image percolated, the picture of fucking Oswald, lubing himself with Oswald’s blood and innards, slathering himself in every secret that that body still clutched onto. He understood that it wouldn’t work, the viscosity would hardly allow for an adequately fluid motion. But then, there were options.

He pushed himself upright on shaky, unsteady feet and took in the sight of Oswald arching on the bed, his teeth bared, his eyes glowering. Ed’s fingers tensed on the mattress, entwined themselves in the duvet. That was his wound. His work of art that he’d wrought upon that body, and it sent that surge of power racing through him. He knew what he wanted, it was there on his tongue. 

Oswald’s lips parted, his chin bobbed in a haze-induced nod. “Make me whole again, Eddie.”

Ed pumped his cock, guided it to the gaping gash at the stomach and drove it in.

Nothing. It felt like nothing. He snapped his hips into that body, waiting on the gurgle of pooling blood around his cock, the nestling of himself up against tendon. The squelching that should be echoing in the room. The sharp inhale and breathy cries Oswald should be making. And he felt nothing . 

He slammed all the harder. As though taking a cue, Oswald writhed into the mattress. Ghostly fingers swathed up, an approximation of gripping at elbows. He watched Oswald’s eyes roll back, his chest spasm, an obscene moan echo through it. He whined and called out Ed’s name, lips huffing with arousal, reddening and swelling. Oswald’s legs climbed around him.

Could Oswald feel this?

Ed inhaled sharply. Tried to ground himself. It was so close, the picture was laid out before him. Glinting blood coating his cock, and the cries of melded pain and pleasure. Were it not for his cock sliding out totally clean, the creeping suspicion that his thrusting was inflicting no pain at all, he could bask in this, in this could cap off the entire thing. It was incomplete without the stench of copper. 

Oswald was performing his part admirably. His knees bent, his chest bucked against Ed’s body, hands clawing at Ed’s back without the scrape of pain that should accompany it. Oswald was wracked with breathy gasps, as Ed’s thrusting grew more erratic, more desperate. It itched at him to suspect that he was being duped, that those whispered curses and the wanton display was but the leadup to some reveal. His cock delved into nothing, he could feel only the sting of fresh air, his thighs pressing against the mattress. 

He lifted a hand, pressed it against Oswald’s throat. He remembered that red stripe that had decorated it that day, that stripe that someone else had made, and he was overtaken by fury and the insistence to paint over it with his own. 

His hand graced through the air, almost sending him stumbling. He rescued it with a quick slam of his palm against the mattress. With another snap of his hips, he placed his hand above Oswald’s throat, tightened it, forced his cock back into nothing and watched as Oswald inhaled sharply, tilted his head — granting access and a moan resounded throughout him.

That was it. He knew that he wasn’t making contact. Oswald was simply giving him what he wanted and he didn’t want it to be simply handed to him. He needed to earn it because it needed to be rightfully his. Incontestably his. So that it could never be torn away from him again. He ripped his dick out of the gaping wound that it had never actually impaled and clambered off of the bed.

Oswald gasped loudly, pretending that he could feel it, that Ed had been able to affect him in any way. Ed had to admit, he gave a good performance, and the picture of him seizing in pleasure-pain was one that would be seared into his mind as long as he lived, but it wasn’t enough, not if Ed couldn’t feel it, couldn’t prove that he was boring as deeply into Oswald as Oswald had gotten into him. 

He made a loud, frustrated noise and pulled at his hair. His cock was still stiff and leaking, but with Oswald’s presence so close and so taunting, his hand made a poor substitute. 

“Why’d you stop?” Oswald called from the bed, sounding far too put together than Ed’s reckoning should have left him. 

Ed almost cracked a tooth. “You can’t feel it!”

Immediately, Oswald’s labored breaths stopped. His body was no longer shaking, looking on the verge of trembling to pieces. He was as put together as he’d been since Ed popped the first pill. “I can’t feel anything. You know that.”

Ed froze, shock-still. The burning in his gut was an on-going, demanding ache, but was beginning to wither as his swirling thoughts circled the drain. Oswald wasn’t here, Oswald couldn’t feel him. The most he could have was this corpse-approximation. 

“You’re thinking too much.” How could he not? His brain was all he had, that and this mass of festering impulses that wouldn’t be realized. Would they just stay within him? Percolating and conglomerating as they grew like a cancerous cell. “Don’t be so overdramatic, Eddie. I’m not done with you yet.”

Oswald slunk from the bed as well, his hallucination making sure to exaggerate his stagger-step. 

“But it won’t—”

“I thought I was supposed to be taking care of you. Do not worry if I feel anything right now. Your pleasure would please me. That is the only thing that I want. We can concern ourselves with what I feel later.”

Even with his awkward gait, Ed was entranced by the way he moved, more incensed by it even. Freckled and scarred flesh was molded on top of stores of muscle and fat, and it shifted as he walked, adjusted his weight with each step. He ached to feel it once more, he’d all but forgotten the feeling of Oswald’s flesh under his palms, and he knew the memory would fade even further the longer he went without. 

“None of that now. Grab one of my suits,” he demanded. Ed went to the closet but Oswald stopped him and pointed towards the corner of the room. He followed without question. 

In the hamper he was directed to, he found a black suit jacket with gray detailing, a dark maroon vest and matching brocade tie, and a white undershirt with little umbrellas stitched into the cuffs. He’d seen Oswald in this very outfit before, two days before he’d lashed him up to the front of Isabella’s wrecked car.

It’d been sitting here for a few weeks, but as he raised the garments to his nose, he could still detect the scent of Oswald’s heady, old-world cologne and the salt of his sweat. The trailing tail ends of the suit jacket brushed against his hips and he couldn’t help but to buck into them. He felt the expensive, exquisitely threaded fabric of one sleeve as his fingers trailed down, reaching for where Oswald’s wrist would fit into it. 

He raised the cuff to his cheek, almost a caress. As close to a caress as he could get. He turned into it, and pressed his lips to the tiny umbrella. 

“That’s better, isn’t it?”

He nodded, still breathing in the worn clothing. His head was swimming. For some reason, this was the most grounded he’d felt in weeks, more so than scribbling infiltration plans or building makeshift bombs or compiling a thoroughly-researched list of candidates. He found himself smiling, a laugh that for once wasn’t cruel bubbling up from his throat as he rubbed his face in Oswald’s clothes. 

The heat in his gut that had begun to diminish returned two-fold, leaving him just as eager as he was before. The inner lining of the fabric would still be coated with Oswald’s skin-cells. Stray hairs caught in the seams. It wasn’t a huge stretch to picture those swelling, becoming engorged until the outline was filled out by Oswald’s form, it was so close, there were so many microscopic fragments of him here that with that, and Oswald’s voice lapping at his ear it became true. 

He flung the clothes onto the mattress, pressed his nose into soft velvet. He groped at the feathery texture, blinking and being gifted with the sight of draping it over skin in his mind. His hands smoothing at Oswald’s chest, clutching them to his shoulders. That hot pulsing in his groin throbbed insistently as he felt himself emit a noise that was between a gasp and a groan. 

He had no control of himself as his cock drove against a trouser leg. His touches were frenetic, fuelled by desperation. He was driven by the dire urgency of sinking into that fabric, layering it over himself, making a second skin of it so that Oswald’s imprint would seep in and he could carry it with him forever. 

A hand dabbed at the air over the small of his back. That voice reached into his alighted nerves and tugged at them. He was vaguely aware of Oswald leaning down. Hair that should have been tickling his cheek, breath that should have been wetting his ear.

“Drape them over a pillow, Eddie. It'll be like you're really fucking me.”

The suggestion sent a thrill teasing at Ed’s aching hardon. Oswald, losing that proper and poised speech of his just for him, it sent a thrill shooting through him. He groaned as he struggled to prop himself up on lumbering limbs and crawl up the bed. Grabbing and piling the pillows was a hurried, clumsy affair, he slammed them down in a heap and then grabbed at the rumpled clothing. Arranging it and smoothing it, he straddled the pile and ground his hips into it. 

It was better than his earlier dalliance. Tangible. He was grazed by a maelstrom of heady bliss. Oswald’s voice was behind him, a hum of encouragement as he was overtaken by need and desperation and hunger. He glanced up, through tear-streaked eyes, saw those lips pulse with the murmur. Oswald’s visage wasn’t blurry. Absent his glasses, the man was painted behind his eyes.

Oswald encroached. “That’s good,” he purred, in a syrupy-soft voice. “It pleases me to see you enjoy yourself. But, Eddie,” his voice descending to a low vibration. “To truly enjoy yourself, sometimes it is best to hold off a little. Would you try that for me?”

This new command struck Ed as more sinfully cruel than any he had been given, but his head was already assenting in a nod, and he found himself lifting his hips, tearing them away from the pleasure and simply existing in the tones that still vibrated and sang in his senses. He couldn’t hear himself whining, the noise had faded into the background. He shivered, hips grinding at nothing as he could think of nothing but chasing his satisfaction. Still, he obeyed. 

His eyes were pricked. His limbs were barely able to support his weight.

“Now?” he whimpered. 

“I want our first coupling to be special,” Oswald said. “I want it to be memorable. And it simply would not be, were it to conclude now. Do you not agree?”

He supposed that made sense. He gave no verbal reply, could barely muster the strength to formulate one. But Oswald had always known what he was thinking better than he did himself. He supposed he ought to hear him out.

“I know what you needed,” Oswald gestured down the bed where a thin, leather belt laid. Ed hadn’t noticed it before, but it must've been tucked into the pile of Oswald’s clothing. “I needed it too.” Oswald’s hands reached up to clutch at his own throat. His body shivered as his fingers dug in. He swooned, eyes rolling back in an approximation of pleasure. “On the car. My tie. But you held back.”

Ed’s tongue rolled to the roof of his dry mouth. A strangled shout emerged from his mouth. 

“So sweet,” Oswald panted, his chest and arms twitching, head lolling back as his hands tightened at his own cartilage. The sight of Oswald choking himself was entrancing. Lips parted, that voice gasping for air, those soft moans. Stomach curving in as he arched. “My poor, dear Eddie, denying himself. There’s no need. You can only imagine the euphoria. But why imagine? We are great men. We don’t imagine — we take. Feel how good I felt Eddie, I beg of you. Let me share this with you.”

Ed knew the feeling of hands around his neck. When Butch had thrown him back, almost taken his life, he’d done that for Oswald. But they’d still been the wrong hands. They hadn’t brought him to bliss the way the right hands might.

“As with that stripe that itches at you,” Oswald said, lowering his hands, the red welt on his throat now thick and gleaming. Taunting Ed. “Others have the temerity to touch us. As for replacing that touch. You can. And you must. Amend it, my love. Pick up the belt.”

Oswald was right. He knew that. This experience that had been shared with others ought to be carried out between them. Only them, as it should always have been. And it was only right that he gave his breath, considering that Oswald had already sacrificed every scrap of his. This would make it even. Right. Oswald was taking care of him, like he said. It had been so foolish to have ever doubted him.

He wound the belt around his neck and fed it through the buckle. The leather was soft and supple nestled under his jaw, fitted like a tie. Or a collar. Experimentally he tugged on the end, his back arching as he gasped, the sensation of his air being robbed from him sending a shock pulsing through his system. 

“That's it, Eddie. You're being so good.” Oswald patted the pile of pillows and his clothes, zeroing his focus again. “Come back here, let me watch you.”

He scrambled to comply, clumsily throwing himself back on top of Oswald’s stand-in. Immediately he began pressing his hips down as he breathed in Oswald’s scent. He felt a wet spot on his cheek where he'd been mouthing the fabric before. He was faintly aware that his lip was sore.

“Now pull.”

He yanked on the belt, air stuttering out of him mid-breath. His body felt like a live wire, his brain couldn’t function correctly which should have been terrifying, but his every nerve ending was lit up and eager. His free hand swathed over his cock, a yelp pulsing through him as the sensation worked together in tandem. Scanning over to Oswald, he felt the glimmer of approval, radiating thick and hot from the man, and that sent a moan shuddering through him. He tugged a little tighter. Let his spine arch. Felt the need to put on a show. 

Oswald could always bring that out of him.

His toes clenched, and he lifted himself with a roll of his hips. His eyes were fixed on Oswald. He was drinking in his hums of appreciation, the glazed arousal in his eyes. The way his body moved in tandem with every twitch that Ed’s body was subjected to. His eyes wafted to Oswald’s hips, and Ed’s mouth salivated as he saw his shimmering arousal. Oswald’s hands were splayed over his thigh, Ed could tell that he was eager to touch himself. But he was shy. Even now, he was shy.

He was so happy that he could do this for Oswald. He wanted to make sure that it was indeed as memorable as Oswald had hoped.

That first flush of arousal, the first descent into bliss. All at Ed’s behest. It was intoxicating, entrancing. He gave another tug to the belt. He was swaying, his limbs threatening to melt into the mattress, his entire body heady and floating. 

“Just a little more,” Oswald cooed, leaning in, tongue grazing his lip, eyes burning with hunger. “Just a little tighter.

Ed obeyed. He didn’t think he knew how to do anything else at the moment. Black spots began to invade his vision, prickling like he'd just looked away from a bunch of tiny bright lights. 

“That's it.” Oswald’s voice was low, right at the shell of his ear, Ed swore he could feel his warm breath. He couldn't moan with his airway being blocked, but he tried to anyway, while he writhed in an attempt to grind his hips. “Don't you want to feel me, Eddie? You can, just a little more.” 

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a faint alarm bell sounded, but it was drowned out by Oswald’s voice and the blood pumping in his ears. The black spots coalesced into an encroaching vignette, creeping in from the edges of his vision. 

Oswald was crouched over him, arms draped around his shoulders. Hands brushed the air above Ed’s cheek.

“We can be together. I know that you want that. I'm so close, and I'm waiting for you. Be good for me, let me touch you.”

A croon raced through his aching, oversensitive nerves. His ailing limbs yanked, leather sharply cut into his windpipe, and a warmth raced through him as the last of his oxygen was gone. He could barely feel it, could barely grasp what it meant. He could only see a gloved hand reaching for him through the mists of the otherworld, understood that this action was him holding onto it. 

Oswald’s face was hovering over his shoulder. His mesmerizing voice continued to lick at Ed’s skin. “So close. So soon. You’ll be touching me in moments, dearest one. In mere moments.”

A gurgle sputtered as his body tensed. His hands gripped at the leather around his throat, then moved to grip onto Oswald’s back though they slammed into his own chest. A shock of pleasure overtook him. His vision blacked out. He wavered, senseless for but a moment. 

Then it was dark.

Notes:

j- does it still count as woundfucking when ur trying to fuck a hallucinations wound
rc - This is the most romantic thing ever I'm swooning

Chapter 5

A flutter of birdsong tittered at Ed’s ear. He prised his eyes open. Then gasped, a searing sting echoing across his throat. His hand snapped to the belt, still tightened around the cartilage. Fingers dug in at the sliver of a gap that must have saved his life. The buckle was looser than he had perceived the night before. Else he must have fallen in such a way as to dislodge it. Divine providence must have stepped in, or would have if such things were real. Or if he were actually happy to be waking up.

Maybe Oswald had put in a word somewhere on the other side. Ensured that Ed would not be joining him. Not now, and possibly not ever. It was possible that life was his punishment. That he would spend that life ambling his way through day after bleak day, until time itself collapsed.

Everything had been another lie. Again. 

Oswald had seen Ed beginning to breach death and used whatever powers he had to force him back to this stinking rock. That simply seemed like the most plausible explanation. He shifted awkwardly on the bed. Snapped the leather from his throat, and flung it across the room with a snarl. The welts groaned anew as he did so. 

His hand trailed to his stomach, feeling the crust of dried cum. 

All those sweet words, the soft smiles and almost-caresses had just been a farce. Of course they were, how could he have let himself be drawn in again so easily? Not-Oswald had tried to kill him one-two-three times already, that wasn’t something he should have been able to forget. 

What he actually couldn’t forget was the way Oswald looked beneath him, bared and arching. Even now, with his neck sore, head aching, bruised and burnt arms and legs throbbing with every movement, he couldn’t let that tantalizing picture go. Like a wine stain on a white dress shirt, it stayed stubbornly, making his gut reluctantly twist. 

With a sulk, he flung himself onto his front and buried his head in the duvet. The duvet that smelled of Oswald less and less with each passing day. That faint scent-memory was now fetid and rank, crowding his nostrils, burning him from within. 

He hoisted himself upright and then sank back down. There was only so much that the human body could take. And he’d taken more than his share the past few days. Yet here he was still. 

Trapped.

Imprisoned in life. 

Those honeyed sighs promising that relief was but a whisper away replayed themselves in his mind. Another sweet lie, another promise dripping with insincerity. Relief wasn’t coming. It was never coming. He dabbed at a dry eye. He was wrung out. Yearning to simply allow exhaustion to claim him. To sink into those sheets, drain the sloppy musculature still clinging to his skeleton into the linen and cease consciousness. 

He flung one arm out, searching for that relief. Instead his hand found itself wrapped around the pill tin.

Was this it? In the entire expanse of his brilliant mind, had he been able to come up with nothing better than weathering the insults of his dead best (only) friend? He shook the magic eight ball in his skull and ‘all signs point to yes’. 

With a clumsy swat of his hand, he sent the tin clattering to the floor. A shower of tablets splayed themselves over the carpet. He idly considered crushing them with his foot. He didn’t. Whether he was simply too tired, or there was some line in his mind preventing it, he could barely say anymore. 

Confusion and lapses in judgment were known complications that frequently resulted from strangulation. 

Strangulation. Such a vicious method. So nasty to throw that back in his face. And right when he’d thought—

Did it matter what he’d thought? He’d been duped again. That was all there was to it. No sense in indulging in ‘what-if’s, or ‘if-only’s, or the dreaded ‘I wish’. Even now, his hands were tingling, his nerves screaming out. He could see himself locking hands with Oswald, pressing his brow to his, grazing a hand down the small of that back, feeling Oswald’s breath puff at his chin, and all of that was for naught because it was a fantasy. Naive. Worthless to think about. 

Was there any purpose in continuing to argue with him? Was there any purpose in continuing at all?

He was still naked, shivering and covered in layers of evidence detailing how he’d been tortured the last week. He should go to the bathroom and clean himself up, but that place was tainted. The bedroom was tainted. The living room was tainted, his replacements were tainted. Oswald had touched everything, just like Ed thought he would, and the man wasn’t even around to boast about it. 

A drop of water hit his big toe. Was the roof leaking? It wasn’t raining outside. He was too cold to be sweating. 

Ah. He was crying. That explained the pressure under his eyes and in his nose. What would that accomplish? What would that fix? He resolved to clean himself up in the kitchen sink as he grabbed the nearest set of clothes, pointedly not looking at the pile of pillows on the disheveled bedspread. He should deal with his sore throat, the best remedy was—

Well, maybe Oswald had some cough drops in the cabinet. 

____

Listless. 

Frustratingly, enragingly, maddeningly, listless. It was all he could muster. None of these people would measure up, and how could he express this to the empty corners of Oswald’s home. The last person he spoke to was thrice wrong once again — he didn’t even bother to learn that philosopher’s name. 

Why did he even bother? Yes, yes, the rules, the game, the follow-through. If there was anything that Edward Nygma wasn’t it was a quitter, but the allure — the desperate intrigue that fueled all of his plans — had vanished. And who was he without his drive? 

He looked around, seeing the overturned furniture and scattered papers and empty wine bottles. No one had checked up on him, not since he screamed at that orderly from the mayor's office. When had that been again? He never used to have this much of a problem keeping track of the days.

Alone once more; all Oswald’s fault of course. He'd killed Ed’s second chance at love (just like you killed the first?) and all but forced Ed’s finger to the trigger. It wasn’t him, why would he want to kill his best friend? The broken glass on the floor, the wine and blood stains browning Ed’s suit, the draft that leaked in through a shattered window — they were all his fault.

Did it matter though? Oswald couldn’t make up for it. He was dead. He couldn't wave his hand and release him from this prison Ed had stumbled into once more. Not this time. 

In the hours after he regained consciousness, he’d figured he was in a period of renewal. His life could more accurately be measured not in years, but in evolutions, each time coming closer to that stronger, surer, smarter Ed that he knew lived in his core. He’d had enough self-awareness to realize that this particular metamorphosis hadn’t been as clear-cut as the ones in the past. He’d been in more danger this time, the risk was to his life , not just his freedom, but it was supposed to be worth it. He was supposed to come out the other side above it all, ready to wreak havoc upon Gotham, to inspire fear and respect in the hearts of the cruel citizens that had ever dared to look down on him. 

Instead, his mind was packed with cotton balls. For days he tried to plot and plan, build and break, but instead he kept coming back to this empty, haunted manor. Before, with only one other occupant (two, if he counted the maid), this house had never felt empty to him, but Oswald’s presence had always been large enough to monopolize whatever room he was in. Now he felt like he was being swallowed whole. 

There was that thought again, a dead carcass in shark-infested waters. It always came back to Oswald, every bruise, every action he took. He wouldn’t be rid of that man, couldn’t, and the rest of the world didn’t care in the slightest. 

He didn’t watch the news much, mostly just looking for mentions of his own crimes, but he did see that Aubrey James was already reinstated. Like Gotham could just move on, like it wasn’t floundering trying to figure out what to do with itself without that force of a man to either rally behind or against. 

Maybe that was just Ed. Maybe he was the only one who had felt the desperate need to hold onto him. Maybe the rest of Gotham had the right idea, because he couldn’t deny that this was killing him. 

But…

Even without Oswald here, not a scrap of danger present, he still felt like he was dying. 

“‘s not fair,” he mumbled into his own fist. There was a half-finished quick-release gas canister on the desk in front of him — he hadn’t even decided if it would be filled with a sleeping agent or an eye irritant — that he couldn’t bring himself to finish constructing. What was the point? It's not like the next person or the next-next person or the next-next-next person would be able to banish this empty feeling that sat in his chest. They’d all be wrong, at best a puzzle piece torn and bent until it fit right into the hole. 

Oswald was right, and that stung to admit. He was the only one — he’d told him so. 

Ed retreated to Oswald’s room. He hadn’t been back there since the last incident, so everything was just as he left it, including the scattering of pills across the floor. He crawled around on his hands and knees until he could find where they’d all flown and scooped them back into their tin. 

He had half a thought that he was running low, that he’d need to contact his dealer soon, but with the way things were progressing, part of him doubted he’d make it until his stash ran dry. Oswald would get what he wanted before long. 

Instead of returning to his desk, he spent a few minutes tending to the fireplace, trying to inject a shred of warmth into the cold house. He was sure that the heating had turned off at some point, but couldn’t be bothered to figure out why. At least this kept his hands busy for a couple minutes. 

He pulled his robe tighter around his shoulders, though it didn’t help much, especially considering he was already wearing most of his typical suit. 

His hand moved instinctually, bringing his attention to the Altoid tin placed in it, rattling against the pocket pistol Oswald tended to tuck into most of his clothes. Another dose couldn’t hurt (it absolutely could), he knew how to handle Oswald’s manipulations (he absolutely didn’t), this was just to help Ed get over him (who was he kidding? He was never getting over him, he was just done pretending that he cared more about his safety than getting to see Oswald’s face again). 

How fervently he wished that there was a choice . There was no such thing. His mind vaguely reached for a reality where he wasn’t biting down on the next pill. Where he stood before the two doors, in which one was marked ‘Survive’, the other marked ‘See Oswald one last time’ and he even glanced at the first door. (One of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies.) That image was immediately sliced away because it was never going to exist. As such, it was pointless to imagine it.

“You know,” Oswald mused, casually leaning against the wall, hand slicing the air. “As my life flashed before my eyes, I saw a great many things.” He was jovial. Animate. Perfectly coiffed, but then wasn’t he always.

“And hello to you too,” Ed groaned, sinking into the couch. The plushness of it was not welcoming. But then again, nothing was anymore.

“Dirty dealings, all of the unpleasantness that was needed to survive,” Oswald blithely continued, ignoring him. “The feel of a knife sticking into gut, the thrill that comes with it. Your needle piercing my skin.”

“That was for your own benefit,” Ed snapped. “You know that.”

“All of those sweet, honeyed lies that you poured into my ear. ‘You can always count on me.’ Remember that?”

“I wasn’t lying!” Ed bleated. “I never lied to you. I couldn’t have.” 

“‘I’ve had the desire to become more than friends?’” Oswald said. “And let's not mention ‘I’ve been kidnapped .’”

“Lies by omission. Tests. When I had a good reason!” Ed breathed deeply. “So what if I did? You taught me everything I know. Remember?” he seethed, echoing Oswald’s own words and feeling the pang of childishness that came with it. 

“And such a good teacher I was too,” Oswald hissed. 

Ed brandished the pistol from his pocket, intent to ward off something — the ghost, his feelings about the ghost, the headache-inducing memories the ghost kept trying to drag to the surface. His makeshift shield didn’t work in the slightest, why would it against Oswald's incorporeal self when the real man had barely flinched when one was waved in his face?

“What do you want, Oswald?” Ed could hear the pitch of his voice reaching a squeal, as he waved the gun in an erratic, sloppy motion. “You’ve beaten me. Happy? I concede. Not like it matters any more.”

“It was smart, I’ll give you that much,” Oswald said, sidling up, seating himself on the couch. Slinging his legs up, locking them over Ed’s lap in a threatening clutch that was eerily reminiscent of that easy intimacy that had long since been lost. “Mimicking the way my mother died? Putting yourself in her position, in some pitiful, desperate hope that those emotions would transfer to you? You watched me struggle in vain to somehow save her this time, then put yourself at the center of it.” He chuckled. “Are you honestly gratified by gestures that are not truly for you?”

“It was for me,” Ed mumbled. His hands, the gun wavered over the ghostly limbs perched over him. He couldn’t feel them. Wouldn’t feel them and didn’t feel like lowering his hands to confirm that. Sank back, and spread them instead.

“I suppose you were making me an unwitting player in some performance,” Oswald said, slamming those legs down. “Some performance that would make me understand swapping out one loved one with another.”

A protest rested on his tongue. About how it had merely been the most expedient option. But why bother? Oswald’s tongue was a scalpel. Responding would only give him more places to cut into.

“But other people don’t think like that, Ed,” Oswald said through a glower, as he finally, mercifully unhooked himself and sat upright. The sigh of relief was brief before his chin was at Ed’s shoulder. “People are not pawns to be shuffled at will.”

“First time I ever met you, you dismissed me.” Ed could feel his voice cracking, his eyes stinging. “Like I was nothing, like you saw me like those dolts at the GCPD saw me. So what if I needed to calculate a little so that you could look past that and see me ? You liked what you saw once you could actually see it. You loved me.”

“As I was dying, I saw every second that we ever shared together, saw it for what it was . And then it was simply gone. Perhaps I told a lie of omission of my own.”

“Whaddya mean?” Ed mumbled

“He’s not seething with rage at you on the other side,” Oswald glowed triumphantly, a hand clasping Ed’s arm. “He’s not waiting for you either. He’s over you. That type of thing tends to happen when your best moments are collated in an instant, and all of those moments are—” an echo raced through him as though he were drinking these words in. ”Are as they are. He saw it all, Ed. He truly understood it, how little you meant to him. Doesn’t that just fill you with dread?”

“Well,” Ed said, leaning away, not wanting to face those watery eyes spitting hatred, and those lips that were still too soft. “No, it's—Good! This. Whatever it is—it isn’t love. Love isn’t supposed to—” He turned and roared, finally processing what the ghost said. “He did too love me!”

“You did it to yourself!” Oswald preened, his face now burrowed into Ed’s chest. “Talk about a scheme backfiring! His mother was with him in the end, you know. Her spirit was. As he was with her at her end. Your sad little plan to insert yourself into what they had may have worked for a time, but it failed to take!”

Ed wanted to retort. He wanted to bite back, but no words were coming.

Oswald’s phantasmal hand closed over his own that was still clutching the gun. “Who will come for you in your final moments, I wonder,” he said. Ghostly fingers pressed at Ed’s wrist. “Is it still worth it? Is the faint hope that what I have told isn’t true worth your very life?”

Ed lifted the gun to his temple.

“Isn’t as though your life is worth all that much,” Oswald said, fingers closing in. He guided Ed’s hand away, and even without direct force, Ed found himself following. “Do you imagine that it would be a suitable price? What will giving it away accomplish?”

He still had hold of the gun. His head sank miserably forth as Oswald went on whispering in his ear.

“I don’t think you deserve this,” he said, and his voice lacked that searing bite, the venom. It also lacked any warmth or comfort, it wasn’t a loving ‘Don't do this’ it was a ‘Who do you think you are?’ A frosty statement of fact. “Oblivion? Nothingness? What’s everything except where something is, Eddie?”

Ed wasn’t reasoning his way through it as he snapped the chamber out of the gun. Dislodged the bullets with a clumsy, ill-thought through maneuver. One remained. Seemed right that this should be a game. Everything was, after all.

An array of words rested on his tongue. He wanted to plead with the specter, show that he’d taken his life out of his own hands, and now it wasn’t arrogant or selfish, or any of those things. One glance into that face, and he knew not to bother.

“But it is a game,” Oswald said, crossing his arms leaning back in repose, as though he were speaking to himself, as though he’d forgotten that Ed was even in the room. “All of it. An interlocking system of chance and consequences. Some you win. Some you lose. There’s no meaning to any of it. It simply is for us to pick ourselves up and try again tomorrow. All of this time you’ve spent trying to understand? What was the purpose? There isn’t anything to understand.”

Ed’s eyes strayed to the disorder layered about the room. Those words bit, even as he knew that the graze was unintentional. He’d wanted this to be ostentatious. A grand ‘Goodbye!’ that would leave the universe reeling. A statement, though what about he could not say. But Oswald was right, It was all meaningless. His scrabble to find some narrative in the tangled threads that had been his life to this point had brought him here. To this. 

He’d rifled through his own past with every ounce of strength, teased and tore at it, delved in and voraciously searched and uncovered one fact. Oswald was still dead. That was the one thing that he had managed to learn. That was the yield that his intellect had managed to bestow. 

Quaking, he pressed the gun to his temple. He could hear his own breaths. He blinked, not tears, there were none left. Dust. Dry, desiccated dust, puffing from his eyelashes and melding into the air. One click. One and it would be done.

Oswald was now in the corner of the door and the array of paintings dotting the walls. Wasn’t even looking at him. He swallowed. Wasn’t sure whether to ask him to come back. But then who was checking. “Could you just—” he said, feeling the dryness of his tongue scrape against the roof of his mouth. The tinge of pain that followed the words. That had after all been his whole purpose in summoning him, so that Ed wouldn’t have to go out alone, that he’d have comfort. A little comfort. Some.

But comfort was merely an animal instinct. The result of hormones bidding the sapien to return to the herd, lest it meet some terrible fate for being caught out alone, and he was rejecting the herd. Or returning to the one herd that had ever actually meant anything. Receiving comfort would serve no purpose in changing the facts of what was going to happen. Oswald was right about that. Oswald was so often right.

He pulled the trigger.

Click.

“Are you quite finished?” Oswald tutted. He spun, his eyes were wild as he struck Ed with a piercing gaze. He spat his words out. Hair stuck to his forehead as he snarled. “Oh, poor Ed. Pitiful Ed. Dejected Ed.” Now he was behind the couch, hands gripping the fabric so tight his fists were white. Then those hands unclenched, moved to Ed’s shoulders, stroked at them. His face leaned in. “What do you suppose that this will solve?”

Existence. It would solve existence. Ed didn’t bother replying verbally. There was no need. Oswald would know his answer. Oswald always knew.

He pressed the gun into the soft patch of skin just behind the jut of his chin. 

“You oughtn't,” Oswald said. He stood in front of the fire, moving shadows blurring his edges. For one hysterical second, all Ed could think was how dashing he looked in the low light. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to give into nothingness if this was the last sight he saw. “Your brilliant mind splashed against the carpet? The world would suffer if that came to pass.”

Wasn’t it already going to waste? Look around, look at what this ‘brilliant’ mind of his had accomplished. A big, empty house, a lonely man staring at a conjured phantasma. How long would it be until the police showed up, put him back in Arkham where he’d fail to get out on his own power again?

It was just like Oswald to change his tune right at the last moment. He pulled the trigger.

Click. 

With a steady hand, he pulled the gun away from his chin and aimed it in between his teeth. 

Oswald had draped himself over the armrest, hair tantalizingly close to tickling at Ed’s nose. “You could be a terror, a true villain—no one to love you, hold you down. If you revealed yourself as the mastermind behind all the recent deaths, Gotham would be terrified of you, they’d respect you.”

If, if, if. As if that ship hadn’t already sailed. Those people he tested were nothing, meaningless, just like the rest of the people in this miserable city. The gratification he felt at their terror had only been momentary, a bare scrap of cloth to cover an open, pus-filled wound. Where was the sense of victory if he had no audience, no one to appreciate the way it all played out?

He should correct — where was the victory when his audience was solely filled with mindless drones, not one person who could understand what it all truly meant. No legacy, no adversary, no mentor, mentee, lover, or friend. He pulled the trigger.

Click. 

He lowered it to his heart. It would blow a hole clean through the perfect weave of the gold robe, but Oswald wasn’t here to care. He wasn’t here at all. 

“Please, Eddie.” Now seated beside him again, a spectral thumb caressing his cheekbone. Leaving no imprint. Ed grit his teeth. Oswald had the gall to sound sincere, like he wasn’t the one who'd tried so hard to get him here. Ed was just evening the score, winning this game. Sometimes it was okay to stack the deck in your favor when your opponent wasn’t playing fair. “You don't deserve it, you saved my life.” 

Ed smiled, wide and serene. He liked this Oswald, not as much as the original who'd get up in his face, grab his lapels and press a knife to his neck, but he couldn't help to find — not comfort exactly, no. Comfort was something that baser beings than he required. Something far more completing than that. In the presence of the one person who'd seen him — seen him entirely and decided that he was more than what everyone else said. Seen him at his best and very worse and thought (even if it was in part, a lie) that there was something in Edward Nygma worth loving. 

His hands shook. “I killed you, Oswald.” His sweaty palm trembled on the grip of the gun. “I think I loved you too, and I killed you.” He somehow had it in him to convulse in something approximating laughter. The last descent in hysteria that he would ever taste. “From the moment I found you, you were on this trajectory. We both were doomed. The three sisters am I — weaving is my vocation. You’ve been in my web since birth, but you will never perceive it. What am I?”

“Fate,” Oswald said, that hand touching the air above his face. It pulled his chin along. One last moment of eye contact. One last look . Thick, long lashes surrounding oceanic eyes that had lost every ounce of spite. Now there was simply interest.

“Just so,” Ed sighed.

He pulled the trigger once more. 

The ear splitting shot echoed in the wide halls. Ed looked down, seeing blood bloom from his chest. Instant, body-wracking pain. Only seconds left.

Except, pain continued to spread, and the blood followed a path up his shoulder. The pain was too high, grazing the top of his pectoral, clipping his collarbone, and reaching up to his shoulder. Seconds stretched and his heart kept beating like it was any other day, like it wasn’t sending blood to the hand that tried to shut it down. 

He'd missed. His shaking hand slipped and the bullet only grazed through a few layers of skin and muscle. The gun wasn’t even in his hand anymore, he must've dropped it during the recoil. His hand was ice-cold, wet . He gasped, clasped his fingers to his face.

“Go ahead,” he said to the phantom, or to himself. Wasn’t as though it mattered. “Laugh. I’ll do it for you! ‘Clumsy Ed. Stupid Ed. Can’t even blow himself away right! Can’t do anything right!” His voice was approaching something akin to a scream. “Terrible shot! Couldn’t dispatch you so you wouldn’t suffer, can’t dispatch myself . I’m waiting, Oswald. Give it to me. Everything you’ve got! I deserve it, don’t I?”

He stumbled and crashed forward, off the couch, onto the floor in a clumsy heap. Hand dabbing at his wound. The collision brought yet more pain, but he’d existed inside of pain for so long now that he almost couldn’t feel it.

‘If Oswald were alive right now, that’d be something we’d have in common,’ he mused with another thrum of bitter laughter.

Oswald’s hand swathed to his own bullet wound. It too was seeping blood. His fingers were bright, like paint. Oswald’s eyes creased in pain, and his voice was low and laborious as though he could actually feel the shot to his gut. “You didn’t aim at my vital organs and miss, you were undecided. Mildly disassociated, I think. It was there in your eyes.” He laughed lightly, the stuttered shake forced more blood out. His head fell back, and even his shoulders arching back in laughter was a maddeningly seductive sight. “Perhaps you hoped that some whim of fate might still change it. With the right medical attention, a shot to the stomach is eminently treatable—”

“Don’t you dare do that!” Ed wailed, somehow finding the strength to jab a finger. “Don’t you be kind —I know it’s only so you can twist the knife—we’ve done this. We keep doing the same things over and over. I keep doing—Oswald, I’m tired . I just want—”

Oswald’s hand reached out as if to touch him, but then pulled away. He nodded. “Close your wound, Ed.”

“Why?” Ed spluttered. If he were in a better state of mind, the sight of every drop of his blood pooling and being absorbed by Oswald’s floor might have seemed right, but he was so wracked, so done that it barely registered. “No! You think you can order me to live and I’ll just obey you? I am brought about when functionality ceases. What am I?”

“Broken,” Oswald said. “And I know you are. You’ve not injured yourself badly enough to bring about death. It will merely become infected and cause you further pain. Close the wound.”

“I will not.” His vision was starting to go black. He was fading. The pain had dimmed. The scratch of the carpet didn’t irritate. Stuttering, heaving breaths assaulted him. “I’m staying here. Should I wake up, I will still stay. Right here! I’m defined by lack, an emptiness you feel, I am nothingness but your demise is very real. Haven’t tried starving myself yet!” he triumphantly roared.

Oswald’s shoes traipsed towards him. Ed yearned to turn his face heavenwards and see all of him, but the energy wasn’t there. Instead, Oswald stooped, his bright eyes darting in front of Ed’s vision, spackles of light making his hair glisten. His shiny lips contorted into a smile, those eyes were lined with crinkles. “Funny thing is, you needn’t actually be bound to kill each of your lovers. You put that idea into your own head. And I emboldened it. Blew on the embers of your self-doubt until they burned hot. Became an inferno that consumed us both. Out of greed, out of jealousy, out of hunger for you. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. If I had a heartbeat, of course.”

Ed only groaned in reply. Another lie. Another manipulation. For what purpose at this point, he couldn’t say. He was just drinking in the sound of Oswald’s voice. His meaning didn’t matter.

Oswald’s bloodsoaked hand leaned down. Ed strained to raise his own to meet it with wavering, twitching fingers. A bolt of pain rushed through him, and he idly delighted in how his fingers brushed through the wisping image. 

“How exquisitely you and I can break one another,” Oswald murmured in a tone that rested somewhere between lustfulness and lament. His chest, clad in purple with that exquisite detailing quivered. How Ed longed to pull him down, hold on to him, touch him. There were simply his fingers entwining themselves in mist. The wavering of dust in the air meeting his own aching need . “Perhaps neither of us shall ever close the wound.”

Ed's throat hummed in agreement.

“You must understand,” Oswald said, his voice doleful. Contemplative. His grey-blue face lined with something indescribable.  “I needed for us to be together. And driving you to this was the only way. You understand, yes?”

Ed somehow found the strength to tilt his chin, gasping as even that movement sent fresh pain crashing across him. He groaned. 

How unfortunate that the long gash on his shoulder would clot before everything seeped out of him. Perhaps if he tilted back, brought the wound below the level of his heart, then it could continuously pump into nonexistence. He rolled over onto his back, tilting his chin up so he could easily see Oswald standing over him. 

His clothes were entirely bloodstained now, having not made a move to follow Oswald’s advice. Why should he? Like this he could pretend the fluid — blood and stomach acid and seawater — from Oswald’s punctured gut was seeping into him. Maybe the combination would poison him, which was preferable. Ideally it would turn him into whatever undead creature was left of his frie—

He thumped the back of his head against the hardwood. 

Friend. Companion. Lover. Words used to mean so much to him — categories and strict definitions that couldn’t be broken, just twisted to fit whatever rhyming scheme he desired. Oswald was both above definitions and below them and Ed had only realized when he couldn’t do a damn thing to change it. 

“So overdramatic,” Oswald sighed. “Look at you, reduced to such a state. All but useless.” 

Cruel as he ever was, but Oswald was looking down at him so warmly — heated by the fire, Ed thought. He looked at him like he wanted to take him apart piece by piece but also never see him again. If Ed let him do both, what part would he keep? His brain, he wanted to imagine, though Oswald would most likely take his heart. 

Hadn’t he already? It was down there at the bottom of the harbor with him. 

“I think it's time we wrapped this little game up, wouldn’t you say?”

There was a note of finality in his tone that instantly set Ed on edge. He kept a possessive grip on the tin of pills. Oswald didn’t get to decide when they were done, when Ed was going to move on. He wasn’t going to move on, he abruptly decided. He was going to keep dragging Oswald’s corpse around forever and no one could stop him. He’d keep taking his necromancy pills and talking to this hallucination in an empty room and honestly who was there to give a thought? In a month, three months, six, who would care to check up on him? 

So what if they couldn’t touch? They could dance from only an inch away. Oswald could choose the record, chase their steps around with his trail of blood and water, turn the dancefloor into an abstract expressionist painting. 

“Kinda inconsiderate, don’tcha think? Killing yourself. Not even thinking to consult me about it. Don’t I get a say?”

Ed blinked. The cadence of his words was wavering. Some of that was in Oswald’s voice and some of it very distinctly was not. It must be the result of his mind breaking down entirely. Else, Oswald was so much a part of him that there didn’t need to be a distinction between the two. Maybe there never had been one to begin with. That was likely the more rational answer. 

Oswald’s right leg flickered. The tailored pinstripe gave way to shimmering green for a moment. Then back to sodden black. A leg lifted, spun the apparition in a motion too fluid. Ed’s head whipped to the side as a set of cufflinks were clumsily tossed onto the floor, landed with a clink and then melted away, as though they were never there

“But then again, it was always down to me to do everything.”. 

And that most certainly was not Oswald’s voice.

Oswald crouched, leaning over him. Before Ed could bite out another comment criticizing the vision’s realism, his tight-lipped grin began to spread, widen, showing straight teeth that he knew Oswald didn’t have. The wrong smile, the wrong teeth. All of it, wrong.

A black emptiness clawed at his gut. 

No.

His choppy hair neatened, his stance turned straighter — less lopsided. As Ed watched him from upside down, he saw how the bones of his jaw shifted to make a face that was far more familiar and far less welcome. 

Then, as though scraping a bandaid off of scarred, oozing flesh, Oswald was snapped away. That same space filled by him. His own eyes glared down at him fizzing with wild energy, that grin twisted and manic. He spread out his hands and then clapped. “Guess what, buddy?” he sneered.

“No,” he whimpered, wanting to shut his eyes, but completely unable to. “No! Bring him back!”

His other half laughed, loud and long and cruel as ever. “This mopey act’s getting a lil tiresome, don’t you think? Don’t get all—” he casually waved a hand. “Like you get. Chill out! He was never here! It was just you— us! He is at the bottom of the harbor where you left him, and he’s not coming back. Get over it.”

“You’re — you’re wrong,” Ed rasped. “Identity is just—objectivity is a falsehood, our memories are what forms a person. And so—If it talked like him, walked like him, then—”

“Save me,” his other half said, voice dripping with condescension. “Even you’re not convinced by whatever you were about to bore me with.”

“Then,” Ed’s face mashed back into the floor. A faint glimmer of triumph took hold of him. Maybe he had only this to cling onto, but he had it. That was undeniable. “All that stuff he said. Maybe he doesn’t hate me.”

“Oh, he definitely hated you, not that it matters. Hated, by the way. Hat ed. Past tense. He’s dead. Nevermind!” he added breezily. “I’m here to fix this… mess you’ve made of everything.” Ed felt his eyes getting heavier, his brain clouding over with fog. The other Ed might’ve been stronger than him, more equipped to handle the rapid fire descent his life had spiraled into, but he didn’t know what Oswald thought now or felt, he couldn’t. That was one mystery the greatest of humanity’s minds had never been able to crack. 

He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see when he finally slipped away. His other self’s voice rang in his ears, but it was Oswald’s face he saw behind his eyelids. 

 

Wrenching them open again, he grimaced. Took in the stale air of this desolate house. So like his other self to wallow in cheap sentiment. Pulling himself to a seated position, he pushed a hand into the scalding pain that the gunshot had left him with. He cursed under his breath. The irresponsibility , leaving his body, their body in such a pitiful state. Pathetic, really. 

The moping, the whining. It was all needless, all useless. Ed was so fragile. It was a miracle he’d been able to keep him alive this long. So frustrating , sharing his body with such a lame duck of a human being. Such a burden. 

At least Ed was locked away now. That shriek of grief, nothing more than a whisper, imprisoned behind layers of logic that surely would suffocate it until it dwindled away to nothing. For now, there was only to nurse himself. Of course it would have to be himself, nobody else would be capable. And then make plans.

The house would serve as a suitable fortress, he supposed. Pulling himself upright, he stumbled through the caverns of it. Until he came to that painting of the now ex-mayor with Ed looming behind him. Poor little Ed. Weak. Subservient. Everything he’d ever tried to save Ed from being. That absurd display of precisely where emotion got you. Penguin had had everything that a man could ever dream of — power, wealth, respect. He’d frittered it. Tossed it all aside for something so base and so meaningless as his pitiful desire to hear some sweet words and indulge in some senseless handholding. 

He had no idea why Ed was so caught up on such a small-minded, foolish, wasteful man. Whatever. Ed was back where he belonged, nestled away where he couldn’t spoil things. Couldn’t spoil his fun. They’d got what they needed out of Penguin. He simply could not fathom how Ed couldn’t see that. There was nothing more to be gained here. He turned away, went to patch himself up, fully prepared to never waste a single thought on that vain, selfish, rotting corpse ever again.

It was 3am, some weeks later when he found himself stumbling back in the middle of the night. Clutching a canister. Daubing over the image of Penguin and Ed with a neon question mark.

Notes:

j- oop 🥰🔫🔫

Chapter 6

Notes:

j- *drumrolls* wut uve all been waiting for

The dart he’d snagged was concealed neatly between the obituaries and the wedding announcements, huddled right next to the lockpick he’d painstakingly smuggled. It was only step five in the twenty-two step process that would begot his freedom, but at least this entire miserable experience had led him closer to the answer of who exactly was running this city. 

So far, the task had been worthwhile. The puzzle Barbara put him on was a welcome one — challenging (though of course not too challenging for a man of his talents), involved, he had no time or energy to spare on any other pursuits. It was just what he needed. 

But in his chase he’d ended up in a cage. Again. No matter, these imbeciles couldn’t keep him here long—certainly not for a third week after he’d been adjusting his strategies for the last two. 

All he had to do now was wait for his dinner to be delivered. There was typically a window when he heard no guard activity outside the cellar doors, so if he was to get anywhere in his escape (and not risk a clubbing in the process) he had to jimmy open the cell door during that one opportunity. 

Tonight, it seemed, dinner was coming sooner than usual as he heard the gathering of footsteps just outside the wooden door. And shouting, lots of shouting — shrill and demanding. That didn’t sound like a guard, but there were two other cages. 

Drat, that would make his escape all the more difficult, but maybe not if he could earn the assistance of the other prisoner, though going by their (his—he could hear that it was a man’s voice now, a voice that set his teeth on edge but made his stomach clench at the same time, for some reason) tone, they weren’t likely to be the most rational. 

The guards shoved him inside, a short man with dark hair in the same jumpsuit they’d forced Ed into, screaming to their insolence, how he could not be treated like this. 

The pitch, the gait, the alive way he moved, stumbled, threw himself at the bars, it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t, but he’d thrown those resurrection pills out as soon as he’d stitched his shoulder back together. 

“My name is Oswald Cobblepot!” The specter — but clearly not a specter since the guards were rolling their eyes as they locked the cage behind him. “You can not do this to me! I demand to speak to the person in charge!” 

The man’s name came out thick and hot on his tongue. He faintly resisted the way that his mouth relished rolling through the syllables that made it up. The sound reached back through his throat, clutched at his nerves — he hadn’t uttered it in weeks now. It had been hidden away somewhere, become a memory, a promise. Speaking it was like layering that old pain on new, but somehow doing it reignited him. It was pleasurable pain, intensely so. Made him tingle, sent him swimming. Vowels and consonants danced and writhed against one another to form an exquisite symphony.

“Oswald.” 

As he turned, finally showing those distinctive features — a sharp nose, pointed chin, and the prettiest pair of jacks and marbles eyes he’d ever seen — he realized everything that his hallucination had gotten wrong. It hadn’t captured the amount of freckles that dotted his nose and cheeks (Oswald always insisted on covering those up, and even as Ed resented this ridiculous behavior, he supposed that the specter had conceded that to him), the uneven redness that would bloom across his face when he yelled, the scars on his knobby knuckles that’d healed to a shiny white. “You’re alive?”

Stripped of his cosmetics, and his elegant clothes and all of those things he spent his life shielding himself behind, he was somehow more ethereally beautiful than he’d ever been.

Oswald’s grip on the bars had seemed tangible enough. The faint tinge of rage he exuded with every breath.  The trudge of his feet against the floor. If he wasn’t real, there was no indication. Then again. The ghost had been extremely persuasive in its performance. If he was real, then everything Ed did after killing him was meaningless. Either way, he had to touch him immediately. 

He didn’t even notice when the door he’d hidden himself behind had fallen away. Oswald was here, not on the other side, not rotting beneath the black, sewage-infested waves of Gotham’s harbor being preyed upon by opportunistic bottom-feeders. He was here , vibrant and angry and painted in so much vitally important red that wasn’t seeping from the wound in his gut. Ed wanted to jump through the bars and knock him to the ground and force him to bare his naked torso. He wanted to clamp his arm over his throat while he snarled as he thoroughly examined the brand new mess of fresh pink skin and scabs and scar tissue while Oswald clawed at him until he bled. 

What a relief, he thought, thrumming energy filling him up, starting in his toes as it zinged away the cold dampness of this basement. He was renewed, invigorated, and not in that half-zombied state that his stronger self had been piloting around. This was another chance! A real one that would fix the both of them, would cure Oswald of that signature hate in his eyes that he’d never had reason to turn on Ed before. 

One more chance, that was all he needed. And this time, he’d make it stick. 

____

Oswald lunged . As his eyes were blighted by the sight of that ingrate, that — person was far too pleasant a word for it — a heated ball of incandescent rage spewed up through his chest and out of his nostrils. He was scourged by the need to rip through the bars, yank one straight out of the ground and beat Ed to death with it. The crunch of metal biting into skull, the spray of blood and brain would be so satisfying. Not satisfying enough perhaps. Pity that he’d only get to kill him once. 

He could make it last but in his urgency to tear Ed to pieces, he was aware that that was one treat too sweet to ever rest on his tongue. Perhaps this cage he’d been stuck in might actually be useful, it certainly stopped him from immediately clawing for Ed’s throat. 

More enraging, more infuriating than the sight of his stupid, smug face, the feigned innocence in his eyes, the depressing air of vulnerability tainting the words that he spoke, was the way that those things still stirred — something. He wasn’t feeling only hatred and that made him hate all the stronger. The rush of warmth still clung to his chest, now twisted and laced with bile, bitter and mocking. 

He couldn't cut this feeling out of him — he'd never been any good at letting go — but he could cut into Ed until the feeling had worked itself out. He'd done it before, revenge was better than any bout of therapy (a belief that had only strengthened when that accursed asylum tried to torture it out of him), and once enacted he'd come out all the more powerful for it. 

In the face of his overwhelming desire for vindication, that tiny part of him that craved attention from Ed’s wide (curious, brown-bordering-on-black, like a prey animal’s despite being attached to another killer) eyes was easy to crush under his heel. He righted himself. 

Emerging from that river the first time had birthed the Penguin. The second time, he didn’t yet know, but something was brewing, something fiercer, stronger. Less liable to make the same mistake. He’d tried acceptance. It had been spit back in his face and part of him was glad for that. Whatever he would become after this, he would never again be a fool. 

It stung, more than he thought it would, to see Ed so high-spirited, jaunty even after his initial surprise. He even had the gall to smack him, like a child getting in one more taunt. In the past, he’d thought that juvenile streak in him had been endearing, unique to see in a man that’d just confessed to a triple homicide, but now Oswald just wanted to kick his teeth in until he couldn’t make another lopsided grin. 

Maybe cut out his tongue too, stop those incessant riddles that he’d taken as a new identity. How dare he think he could make a new self over Oswald’s corpse, no credit to Oswald whatsoever — he made him, and Ed would do well to remember that. For the time being, until Oswald inevitably killed him, of course. 

He purposely didn’t think about how that thought sent a stabbing pain straight through him. It was residual pain from the gunshot wound, that’s all he’d let it be. 

Unfortunately, he couldn’t accomplish much with the iron separating them. With a few minutes of reflection, he realized he couldn’t get the revenge he wanted in here — he needed Ed to suffer as he had, and that couldn’t be accomplished from within these cages. As he whetted a blade made of the spoon from his dinner tray against the rough cement floor (and relished his newfound way to get under Ed’s skin — who could imagine that all he had to do was say his name? ), he realized that the only way out, as it so often was, was through. 

He had to work with him, for the last time, in order to kill him. Half-wary but exuding every scrap of confidence he could muster, he handed over the blade to enact their scheme. He’d make Ed wish that he jammed it in Oswald’s throat while he had the chance. 

 

Killing with Ed once more was almost rapturous, an old dance long-since thought forgotten. He witnessed the man twisting the sharp edge of his crowbar, giving it a moment to linger and then sinking it into gut. There was something beautiful about it. He’d taught him that! That simply proved it. Ed’s sad little gestures at doing without him were simply that. Gestures. Oswald’s imprint was written into every step he took. Every breath.

For as long as Oswald would permit him to have that breath, at the very least. Just as he had taught Ed, Ed had taught him. Do away with sentiment. Let it rot and fester, take you over until the blankness stirred you to greater heights. How his fingers itched and his breath roared with the desire to do away with this ridiculous truce. But no. 

When Ed died at his hands, it would be in accordance with their agreement. He owed him that much. And that was nothing to do with how the smattering of gore illuminated his face, the ruby explosion decorating his clothes brought a strange luster to his figure. It was nothing to do with basking in a tiny oasis of time before Ed would have to die. 

Bursting out onto the street, finally mercifully tasting the sweet scent of real air, Oswald brandished the blade, chased away the straggling vagrants. Felt the heat of Ed’s gaze at the back of his head, and spun. Ed had proven himself untrustworthy. He was expecting a crack to the back of his head. 

Ed’s eyes were blazing with some indescribable madness. Oswald grit his teeth. He would not be intimidated by this pipsqueak. His fingers clenched around his own blade. The intensity of the man’s eyes on him burned. He only hoped that his own were burning back just as brightly. 

He’d seen where allowing Ed to perceive vulnerability had gotten him. 

“Our agreement still holds for five hours,” Ed said and Oswald bristled at that. As though it were he who needed reminding, as though it were he who was prone to backstabbery. He wanted to tear his throat out for that alone, but he held back. Mind vibrating, some instinct whispering against the motion, he nonetheless released his grip.

The weapons clattered to the ground. 

Ed extended his empty hand. “May the best man win.” 

Oswald could still feel that tinge of unease, something tingling in his spine that told him he was being lied to, but he supposed he was still reeling from the change in perspective. This used to be the only man he trusted, so now everything he did felt like a lie. 

He took his hand and clenched his grip, crushing Ed’s artist fingers. If he was forced to sink down to the level of one of Ed’s games, he’d win, break that whimsical spirit of his before he buried him for good. Maybe he could even make use of that grave that’d been erected for himself, though perhaps not. He’d hate for this traitor’s final resting place to be so close to his mother’s. 

He didn’t notice the quick upward jab of Ed’s free hand until it was too late. Oswald jerked back, stumbling as the sleeping agent from the dart trickled into his veins from his wrist, pumping up towards his brain. Try as he might to get away, it was only moments later that he was fading. 

“But— you…”

“Yeah,” Ed yawned his way through the words as Oswald sank to the floor, hands entwining themselves in Ed’s jumpsuit, whether to hold himself up or to drag Ed down to hell with him he was too far gone to tell. A strangled howl of frustration squeaked in his throat as he went slack, head pressed against Ed’s thighs. A hand threaded through his hair as darkness claimed him. “Don’t worry. It’ll all make sense.”

____

The dark was breached by tinges of dawn as he blinked his way back to consciousness. The purr of an engine reverberated. Motion. Oswald’s face was pressed into the back seat of a car, a sheen of sweat sticking to his chin. Wrists stinging, an ache in his joints where his hands were fastened in his lap. The tell-tale sensation of rope binding those wrists together. His legs also. He kicked regardless. Then emitted a piercing, soul-deep scream. 

“I almost forgot how sweet you look while you’re sleeping. How do I look?” Ed trilled, hands gripping the steering wheel tight enough that his knuckles turned white. He swiveled, and his face was bafflingly nonchalant. His shoulders puffed up, and the shimmer of green against his shoulders became horrifyingly apparent. 

Oswald didn’t want to scan his eyes over his own body, confirm what he very well knew. Gone was the jumpsuit, and instead he was now clad in one of his own suits. Ed may have been granted the liberty of dressing and undressing him before the attempted murder, but most people would have not needed it explained to them that such an action very much revoked that privilege. He was going to rip that idiotic green suit that Ed was now clad in to ribbons, and stuff those ribbons down Ed’s stupid prattling throat. Watch him gurgle and choke on it. 

“Eh?” Ed grinned, as though he were pleased with himself. “I knew you wouldn’t wanna go out in those rags. No need to thank me.”

“Thank you—” Oswald sputtered in disbelief. He opened his mouth to spew a stream of violent curses but Ed abruptly cut him off.

“As I said, no need! This is a very special occasion! It needs to be perfect!”

Of course. Ed could not help himself. The change of clothes was a taunt . Another of Ed’s ridiculous little schemes to drive him mad. As though being put through another of Ed’s games could make Oswald want to kill him more . Ed had wanted Oswald to know that Ed had had him stripped, helpless. And not even done him the courtesy of killing him while in that state. Did not perceive him as the threat that he so obviously was. Pushing down the humiliation, a blithe smile took hold of his face. Ed’s arrogance would be his own undoing. Oh, how deeply he was going to regret that.

“You seem annoyed,” Ed chuckled, with a nod of his head. “Okay. I know how this might look—”

“How it looks!?” Oswald shrieked, thrashing furiously, barely paying mind to how the motions dug the rope in, sent the hum of rope-burn through his skin. “It looks as though I am dealing with a cowardly, treasonous, swindler! This was your plan!? Barefaced lies? I retract everything I ever said, do not associate yourself with me ever again! This is beneath any depth I imagined even you’d stoop to!”

“Not lies,” Ed replied, a hand sweeping through the air, before quickly clutching the steering wheel. He actually had the nerve to sound irritated. “Demonstrably not lies! Item one! No sabotage.”

“How—!” Oswald strained every ounce of energy in his body into snapping through the ropes so that he might reach over to snap that ridiculous neck. His teeth were gnashing. The pressure in his head sent it threatening to explode. “On what planet, is this not—”

“Could you not interrupt?” Ed tsked. “Once I’ve explained it properly, you’ll see how this isn’t sabotage. Not really! Item two—”

“That doesn’t explain—”

“Item two. No murder on the premises. Well. As you can see. We are not on the premises. So. Check.”

Oswald actually stilled at that. The fury and disbelief was so severe that it had frozen him. His voice came out in a low hiss as his head dinged back against the seat. “I am going to skin you alive and feed it back to you. Then pull the mess from what remains of your stomach and smother you to death with it. Then —”

“Item three!” Ed continued, fingers drumming and gesticulating as they danced over the steering wheel. “Six hour window post escape. But there is no escape. There was never any escape!” He laughed, that manic drawl that bordered on a howl. “It was something that you said yourself, Oswald! You really can’t have one without the other! You and I are bound together! If we were flung to opposite ends of the universe, we’d still be bound. I can’t be bought—”

“Stop it!” Oswald yelled. Senseless how even now, those words threatened to bring a flush to his cheeks and a twinge to his eyes. He would not permit himself to be conned out of seeking his revenge. Especially not seeing as he was now clearly on a time limit. “Don’t. You. Dare .”

He was calculating a suitable angle to launch himself forward, and hopefully, collide with Ed's skull, let it burst in a shower of bone. But it was all too easy to see that action sending the car skidding into an explosion of metal and flesh and that was hardly a better alternative. He yanked at the restraints that weren't loosening.

“You’ll thank me,” Ed bleated. The car was still moving inexorably forward. “Destiny provided for us!” He was still giggling to himself, still wracked with that mocking, gleeful laughter. “A nightmare for some. For others, a savior I come! I never understood that one properly before! It has twin answers. Everyone knows the first answer — death. But the other—!”

Oswald smacked himself hard against the seat. He'd been tied up so many times in his life. Why was he not better at getting out of it at this point? “If you imagine that I am going to spend what may be my last moments on earth indulging you in your idiotic penchant for pointless—”

“The answer’s hope, Oswald,” Ed beamed. “Hope! And hope is what we have, right now!”

Oswald was almost so confused that he’d forgotten to be furious. “Ed. I don’t know what—”

“Don’t you see? Hope! We’re gonna die! Together! The way it’s meant to be. That’s the solution. It’s the only solution. Always was!”

Oswald winched himself to an awkward and painful crouched position. Began desperately bashing his shoulder against the window. Uselessly screaming to the few passing cars for help. 

“Yeah, good luck. As though any of the ignorami in this hellhole of a city would lift a finger for the likes of us,” Ed sulked. Then perked back up. “That’s another thing that proves it! You and I were always above the world. Beyond it. That’s why things never worked out for us. It all makes sense now!”

“If it is all the same to you, I am quite happy with my life and would rather keep it!” Oswald bellowed. “I know that that bitch sees me,” as he furiously demanded eye contact from a passing driver who was furiously avoiding it. “Yes, you! You vile harpy!”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Ed sighed as Oswald continued to flail. “You think you’d be happy. Like sweet honey I come to twist that which was real. Look at me twice, and I’m not what you feel. What am I?”

“If you don’t stop this car, this instant —”

“Delusion! It’s pure delusion to think that we could live peaceably for an extended period of time. And it’s more deluded than that to think that either of us could ever be happy apart. I understand now. See, Oswald? Not sabotage.” 

“What can you possibly— No, I don’t care. Stop this car!” Oswald tried very hard to breathe. He lowered his face, his body temporarily wrung out from the exertion it had been through, not to mention the aftereffects of the drug which he’d been studiously ignoring but which nonetheless were clawing their way to the surface. A haze of nausea, dizziness and ache. He closed his eyes. Shuffled, and with a bound hand grabbed at the door handle. “Ed. I don’t understand. You’re throwing a lot of things at me — Untie me! If your — babbling is so evident. Why the restraint?”

“You’re not sounding all that convinced. Which is fine! You haven’t been through what I’ve been through. You don’t wanna! Just trust me. This is the best way.”

“Haven’t been through— You shot me and threw me in the river!”

Ed groaned. “Really? This again? Change the record, Oswald. That one’s getting a tad played out.”

“Yes, this again!” How could he have let his guard down? He knew Ed was a rotten snake, more than willing to lie and break promises as long as he could twist them around to fit that incomprehensible image he held in his incomprehensible mind. “Maroni, Fish, Galavan — you’re not anything special! I lived through them and I’ll live through you — I already did once! You’re the only broken record here.”

Ed’s hands tightened on the wheel and the car sped just a little faster. “You’ll understand,” he repeated like a mantra. “I promise you’ll understand.” Then he smiled wide enough for Oswald to catch it in the rearview mirror. “The fact that you’re here proves it! When someone loves you, they’ll come back no matter what you do — you see, you see Kristen came back! But she didn’t love me enough, so she couldn’t stay. But you—”

“Ed, listen to me—” 

“No, you listen! This is important!” This wasn’t good, he should have paid attention to his gut feeling, reacted to that manic tinge in Ed’s eyes. This wasn’t the same man who shot him, but he was just as stubborn, just as resistant to Oswald’s words. He couldn’t talk himself out of the last murder attempt, and it was starting to look like he wouldn’t be able to now. “You’re different! Always have been, Oswald, that’s why we’re connected, you see? You do love me enough, I realize that now — so that’s why I have to do this!”

The buildings were becoming more sparse, less populated as they sped away from downtown. Empty warehouses and condemned apartments dotted the familiar stretch of road and he already knew where they were going to end up. 

He had to change tactics, quickly now before they arrived. “Alright, alright— I’m listening now! Tell me what happened while I was gone, maybe I’ll understand?”

“You tried to kill me.” His voice was oddly chipper despite the contents. “Or he tried to kill me, it's a bit muddy, but it's okay now because you showed me the way forward! It’s just us — you get it? It was perfect when all we had was each other, trapped in our own little box, but-but that’s not so bad! See — you have to see, you’re the only one that sees me — if we end like this then we don’t have to get out! You don’t have to come back to me because I’m going with you!”

The buildings cleared and the wide expanse of Gotham’s river appeared at the end of the straight stretch of road. The car wasn’t slowing. 

“It’ll be romantic,” Ed sighed. “We can outperform every great tragedy, because it won’t be a tragedy! We get to go out together which means we’ll come back together — that’s what was missing, but I get it now!”

“Stop the car, Ed,” Oswald tried again. “You have to stop the car!”

Ed pretended he didn’t hear him.

“Love, right?” The word still felt like poison passing through his lips, but he had to meet Ed’s mind where it was apparently stuck. “You’re doing this for love? For m—there’s nothing after! Just a void — it's just an ending, if you do this there’s no coming back for either of us!”

“Then we’ll go out together, not a half bad consolation prize.” 

His wrists were red-raw, which didn’t dissuade his continuous efforts to cut into them. A hoarse wail came from his chest as he twitched and struggled. “Ed, please . If what you are telling me is true — I don’t want to die. It’s not— What of sacrifice, Ed? You have to sacrifice whatever delusion—”

“It’s fine to be scared, Oswald.” Ed’s voice was alarmingly soft. Gentle. That was worse than the mania. “We can help each other through it.”

The tires hit the wood of the boardwalk, the river only seconds away. At the speed they were going, Ed couldn't stop the car even if he wanted to. 

Oswald lurched forward as much as he could in his bound state, trying to dislodge Ed’s hands, do anything, but it was all for naught as the vehicle sailed off the edge, hitting the water with a hard thud, slamming him first against the seat in front of him, then the car door. 

It began to sink more quickly than he expected, water already pouring in through the door panels. By the time he was able to right himself enough to get his fingers around the handle, the pressure had already sealed the door shut. 

He knew he was screaming, an uninterrupted slew of curses, ‘no’s, and ‘not again!’s. He was sick of drowning, feeling the pressure as his ears popped and he sank too quickly. Steadfast and stubborn determination had saved him the last two times he was thrown into these fetid waters, he could manage a third. 

If he had to die, it wouldn't be here, no matter how many times he was thrown back in.

Notes:

rc - ngl, this is my favourite chapter oooooooh look at me im rc and ed is my faaaavorite character ever i love him sooooo much were gonna get marrieddddd

Chapter 7

“Don't bother,” Ed said breezily. “Even a partial submersion is enough to keep us in — the force being exerted on the outside of the vehicle would need to be countered by a greater force exerted from inside, and with every second the force of the water becomes exponentially greater.” He turned around in his seat, grinning widely. “We're trapped. Just like we've always been.”

Oswald finally stopped throwing himself at the door, realizing it wasn’t budging an inch. Water was pouring into the footholds, rising with every second that passed. 

He wanted to scream, but his throat was already aching. His heart was pounding in his ears, rabbit-quick. No matter what anyone said, near-death experiences never got any easier to deal with. 

Ed twisted in his seat, eyes shining. He slicked a hand through his hair, and then vaulted from the front seat, fingers bunching into the cushions. The back was cramped, barely enough room for Oswald to stretch out, definitely not enough space to keep them from touching. Oswald bared his teeth, slunk back as best he could while still restrained. 

“Don’t even think about it,” he hissed. He was still scrabbling and straining, the best that he could achieve was sharper rope-burn. But he would not back down, he would not show weakness, and he certainly wouldn’t beg.

“Oswald,” Ed murmured huskily, as he clumsily clambered forward. That blaze of hunger still shone in his eyes, completely undeterred. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited—” His hands roved up Oswald’s legs, took a moment to dance against the ropes that he’d tied, stopped to squeeze at his thigh. Moved under his shirt, the motion bringing with it that teasing sensation that crept down his stomach and pooled hot. And then his breath was on Oswald’s face, and his chin was descending.

Oswald had wanted this, but not in these circumstances, and certainly not now . With the world careening evermore out of reach, with the gloom beating at the windows. With the man who had twice now tried to kill him. Was currently in the process of killing him.

Oswald launched himself upright with what energy he had. Cracked his head against the fiend and temporarily succeeded in dislodging him. Ed went flying back. A hand swathed to his nose as a trickle of blood spewed. Ed grinned, a shark-like, maddening grin and shook his head. “Come now,” he said, spreading himself out like a predator that had been starved for months. “We’ve only got minutes. I know you want this, you love me! There’s nothing else to be done! Let's not spend whatever time we’ve got left bickering. Our story deserves it.” 

Furious, betrayed tears pricked at Oswald’s eyes. He was exhausted, he was terrified, he was bewildered and now Ed was wiping one of those tears away with a thumb, and he still found himself melting into the touch. Despite everything, Ed’s hands remained both comforter and destroyer. Ed was shushing him, a soothing, melodic sound that brought the memory of that old affection roaring to the surface. Though he screamed with the urgency of pushing the affection down, it bested him. He scoffed despairingly to himself. How was he to win out when his own body was betraying him?

He opened his eyes, gazed up through a bleary, tear-streaked expression. Ed’s eyes were as he remembered them back when. Worshipful. Loving. Deeply, deeply brown. 

He was pushed back roughly as Ed clambered over him. He could feel Ed’s hardon jabbing at his thigh. He grimaced, as his bound wrists were crushed into Ed’s chest, and his feet were awkwardly jammed into the foothold that was slowly but surely filling with water. An ache rushed through his arms as the pressure mashed the rope into the grazes. He yelped. Narrowed his own gaze seeing that Ed had either not noticed or not cared, and let a puff of indignant air escape his nostrils. Ed clamped his knees to his sides. Straddled him. Placed his palms spread out against Oswald’s shoulders, and a sigh raced through him as he stared down to admire his handiwork. 

“There isn’t anything that I can say to convince you to stop, is there?” Oswald said, almost more to himself than to Ed. Reasoning with Ed was clearly pointless. That much was obvious. He could attack him a thousand times, and Ed would persist. It was a waste of energy that he’d need if he was going to have the wherewithal to scheme some route out of this.

Ed’s hands drifted from the leather to his chest. Stroked at him on their way to his face, where they cupped his chin. Forced eye contact. He could have bitten, raged, sworn, threatened, but Ed’s thumb would still be pressing at his lip, teasing it open, and Ed’s eyes would still be devouring him with a look that stripped him bare. And he would still be ravaged by flushes of heat that drowned out the indignity. 

“You really do have the most beautiful eyes,” Ed hummed, as his thumb stroked at his cheek, smearing a trail of saliva across his face. “Wide. Innocent. But I know what they’re hiding.” Almost softly, too softly, he pressed his lips to Oswald’s mouth. 

A defeated, strangled plea rested in Oswald’s throat as Ed’s tongue delved in. His bound hands flexed uselessly into his sternum. His bound legs thrashed. 

He could tear at Ed’s tongue with his teeth. He could bite down, right now, yank it from the root, let the stream of blood paint his face. He could drink in the pain and confusion in Ed’s expression as he bled out. Spit the thing to one side, make it clear in no uncertain terms just what this kiss meant to him. But that tongue swiped inside his mouth so insistently, so needily, and the caresses of Ed’s fingers were so enticing that his teeth simply grazed and did no more. 

He heard murmurs in his own voice. A spike bolt through him that took hold of him, and he found himself kissing back. Arching into it despite the restraints. Responding to Ed’s feather-light touches that burned and brought bliss. He felt himself sob.

The water was still rising. More of him was submerged with each moment — it was up to his shins now. Before too long, the entire car would be drowned. 

Ed’s weight pressing down onto his front kept him almost entirely immobile. All he could do was widen his knees and move his neck. His ankle was screaming in pain, though it was dulled as adrenaline and reluctant arousal raced through his core. 

As much as he hated it, he couldn’t help that traitorous part of his mind that reveled in having Ed writhe and sigh on top of him, his wet lips and tongue eagerly tracing the veins of his neck. Even as he turned his head to the side, trying to avoid this fantasy of his plastered on top of him, he couldn’t avoid hearing those soft, furiously desperate sighs. 

If only he could just free his hands. He heard from one of the older guys in Maroni’s crew that he’d survived his car going off a bridge by waiting until it was fully submerged. With full use of his limbs, he could swim to the surface easily. 

Ed wasn’t letting up though, if anything he was getting more frantic, pawing at him with that eleventh-hour desperation. A few months ago, he would’ve given anything to feel him like this — tearing at his clothes, mewling pleas and praises into his ear while grinding down — but unlike him, Oswald actually had a functional survival instinct. This man wouldn’t be the second death of him. 

“Ed—”

“Eddie,” he corrected in between panted breaths. “You’re not allowed to be mad at me right now.”

If he wasn’t allowed to be mad at him when he was literally about to kill the both of them, and now was subjecting him to this, he didn’t know when would be appropriate, but still he held his tongue. Screaming would only incense him, urge him to hold Oswald down even further and keep taking what he wanted. 

“Eddie.” He pinched back the venom in his tone by the skin of his teeth. Years climbing the ladder had taught him just how to disguise his anger with sweetness, and he was drawing fervently on those old talents with every scrap of energy he had left. “You’re quite incorrect. I am very much allowed to be angry with you.” He noted the flash in Ed’s eyes, the darkness that took hold of them. But he held his nerve. This would work. It would have to work. He tugged uselessly at his restraints. Gestured at them with a roll of his shoulders. “You can touch me, but I cannot touch you back? This is our moment, isn’t it? Eddie. Like you said. Please. Let me touch you.”

There was a still as Ed visibly processed the words. He watched his brow crease, his eyelids narrow. Was biting very hard into his own lip in a desperate bid to prevent himself from screaming at the dolt to simply hurry up, make a decision, but he somehow managed to hold himself back. 

Ed’s eyes brightened. His face relaxed. He clicked his teeth, and the grin wending its way across his features would almost have been adorable were it not for the very real fact that he was about to kill the both of them. “I knew it,” he giggled as he leaned back into the front of the car, apparently uncaring about the water that was now coming up to their knees. “You do still love me, I knew it! You’re right of course. Quite thoughtless of me.”

He found the prize he was looking for — a folding knife he’d stashed in the drop-down compartment — and quickly wrapped his gangly arms around Oswald’s torso. In a few quick motions, he severed the tie on his wrist. 

His first instinct was to go for the knife, to rip it out of Ed’s hands and hold it to his neck, but despite his freed hands, he was still in relatively the same situation. Ed’s larger body was still pressed on top of him, and the pressure on the door wouldn’t equalize until the car had filled with water entirely. 

Despite his better instincts, he grabbed Ed by his hair and forced their mouths together once again, this time without that vindictive hesitance holding him back. Ed moaned into him, overeager and sloppy. His hips bucking into Oswald’s stomach, making him twinge in pain as the still-healing bullet wound throbbed. 

When he pulled him back, Ed looked dazed, high on some combination of euphoria-inducing drugs that had his ear-to-ear smile going wobbly. He looked like he’d do anything Oswald asked, which was a heady thought to have even so close to death’s door. 

“My ankles too, Eddie.” That blissful expression was dented by a flicker of uncertainty. That wasn’t good. Oswald clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He wasn’t going to forgive himself for this, but. Needs must. He leaned forth, blew a puff of air against Ed’s ear. “I need to get my legs around you.”

Immediately he shuffled off and yanked Oswald’s drenched feet from the nearly-full foothold onto the seat and sawed at the ropes. As soon as they were off, he pounced again, retaking his new favorite spot with his knees bordering Oswald’s hips. Oswald shuffled, strained to swipe his good leg up against Ed’s sides as promised. He needed to keep him as much on side as possible for now. He tangled his fingers in Ed’s shirt, dragged him down into another kiss. His hands grazing at Ed’s collarbone, still keeping hold of the fabric, his tongue that guided the rhythm. 

“Oh my, oh dear — Oswald, Os—” he hiccuped between kisses and rolls of his hips. “So much better than last time!”

Last time? If Ed was comparing this tryst — that he started — to his affair with that idiotic little doppelganger Oswald really was going to kill him. Twice. 

He bit down on Ed’s babbling lip until he tasted blood. That should shut him up, remind him who he was here with, but he didn’t seem deterred in the slightest — Ed only gasped and kissed him harder. 

Water had spilled over onto the seat now, soaking through even more of his clothes. It had to be about halfway filled now. Looking over Ed’s head, he could see that the windows were entirely covered and everything was darkening with every foot they descended. Blaring warning sounds from the car were stuttering out one by one that Ed was paying absolutely no attention to. 

“Oswald!” Ed snapped, fisting his lapels tight. “You’re not touching me!”

Attention-seeking right until his very last moment, what more could he expect?

Oswald shoved him off, pushing him back until Ed’s shoulders hit the opposite door. Before he could complain further, Oswald was on him, kissing him breathless and tearing at his suit until more skin was bared. He’d had one coherent thought that he couldn’t let Ed still be on top of him when the car finally filled up with water, but, for a few moments at least, he could indulge in this dream he’d had for so long. 

Ed tore his lips away, gasped and leaned back into the seat. A hum of contentment surged through his chest as though he were a smitten youth in the midst of his first fumble and not a dangerous wild thing of a very mature, marginally experienced serial killer. “You were so right,” he sighed. “It is so much better when you can touch me.”

Oswald scoffed and stilled in his own movements. He glowered. His lip twitched. He pressed a thumb to Ed’s windpipe in warning. “Next time, don’t restrain me. Or at the very least, ask.”

A hand shot up, gripped at his wrist, a grip tight enough to crack bone. Ed’s eyes were wide. Brimming with some emotion that even he could not read. “No, but. Before,” he whimpered. “When you were — it was all you wanted.”

Oswald blinked. Even in such a dire situation, this man retained the ability to deeply irk and confuse him. “Not all I wanted,” Oswald huffed. Did Ed seriously think that all he’d wanted from him was sex? He couldn’t have misunderstood him that badly, even if it was a particular talent of his. 

“You’re not getting it! I meant — I meant when you weren’t you!” He frantically grabbed at the sides of Oswald’s face, forcing intense eye contact. Water was up to their waists now. “Your ghost — in me, he—you—he kept saying that it would be better if I could touch you, and he was right!” He surged forward to kiss him once more, but it was just one peck, almost chaste, teasing , like he just couldn’t contain himself. “We get to die like this—together, just like you promised we would.”

Try as he might to hold it in, he couldn’t. That unhinged, grateful look on Ed’s face was tearing at him, even as he still wanted to rip him apart. “I never promised you that.”

“But you did! You—not you—were all that I had. I needed you, Oswald, even as you tried to hurt me, kill me, but I get what you were doing now, you were just preparing me for this!”

It hit him like another shot to the stomach. He should have realized it sooner — Ed wasn’t exactly being subtle — but between the sinking car and Ed intent on ravishing him in their final moments, he hadn’t had much time to think. 

“You were seeing me,” Oswald breathed. “After you shot me. For how long?”

“I took the first pill seven hours later.”

“Pill? You were inducing hallucinations?”

“I missed you.” He said simply, like it was an obvious, indisputable fact. His tone was the same as when he was trying to teach Oswald rudimentary thermodynamics, like it was ridiculous that someone couldn’t follow the quick path of his jumping thoughts. 

“And I was—” he remembered what Ed was babbling about earlier. “I was trying to kill you?”

A swarm of contradictory emotions blazed within him as this information sank in. There were too many possibilities to process, too much to wrestle the tangled pieces into any sort of shape. And the water was still rising. Now their chests were submerged. 

At the very least, Ed’s hallucination was accurate. All he’d thought about since coming back to consciousness (aside from the rare bout of side-gripping regret) was killing him. 

“I was trying to kill you. And you still chose to summon — whatever it was?”

“As I said, I missed you.”

Not to mention, he’d been inducing these visions? Deliberately. A part of that rankled. He’d known that Ed was tormented by manifestations of past regrets, he’d shared that with him. Ed didn’t consider himself to be one of these regrets? Not naturally, not as an expression of his heart but instead as a rationalization of his mind? An intellectual problem and not an emotional truth? 

He’d had to force it? But then. He'd chosen to force it? He had no idea what to do with that . There were very few precedents that would even begin to approach explaining what precisely he should be doing with that revelation.

So he chose, as he so often did, to follow his own instincts. 

Oswald’s hand moved to the back of Ed’s head. He pressed his own forehead against the man’s brow. “Oh, Ed. You truly are a blithering idiot.” He was soaked through, teeth chattering, movements sodden through the deluge as that spark of connection raced through him. It was infuriating but he’d never have gotten anywhere were he accustomed to denying stark reality. The pang of love still flickered within him. He found himself unable to extinguish it. His thighs pressed around Ed’s sides no longer felt as though they were restraining a dangerous beast. Now they were basking in closeness. 

Ed’s arms wrapped around him tightly and he buried his face in Oswald’s neck — no longer hungry, or at least not in the way he was before. Without his conscious consent, one of his hands found its way into Ed’s hair, running through the strands and petting it down as he clung to him. 

He could almost forget that Ed trapped them down here, that forcing this closeness was his intention all along. Any other life-and-death scenario, one single outside force, and Oswald would feel no remorse, and certainly wouldn’t be comforting him like this, even after the first murder attempt. 

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving against Ed’s nose. He’d never been any good at holding a grudge against family. There were so few people he’d ever considered family, and this utter moron of a man, ready to take them both down to their watery graves — who claimed to love Oswald but still subjected him to the threat of drowning for the third time in his life (as if he didn’t know Oswald still had nightmares about the first) — had forced Oswald’s small heart to make room for one more. 

It wasn’t fair that he still loved him, but seeing the way Ed clung to him, needed him, he was helpless to do anything but. Not that it would save him. 

They both had to sit up straight for the water to not flood their mouths. Oswald felt the thump as the car finally hit the bottom of the bay, he had no way of knowing how far down they were. He’d say they had a minute now, if even, before he had to take a final lungful of air and attempt to swim to the surface. 

He had to hold himself back from laughing as the ridiculousness of his regret truly hit him. Ed would remain here as a keepsake. A piece of his history left forever in the depths. Maybe he’d visit him on occasion. His fingers pressed against Ed’s, a squeeze of encouragement, that thundering pulse beating against his own for the final time.

As the water crept to the roof of the car, he took a deep inhale, and tightened his grip on Ed. The water was heaving to tear them apart, but he lingered for one moment too long. How he longed for one last gesture, one last moment to cap things off, to complete things, but the risk of spilling any of that precious oxygen was simply too high. If he sank back into the man, he might very well never extricate himself. He couldn’t. He’d told himself that he wasn’t going to make the mistake of dying for love again. One time was plenty.

It was regrettable. But he had to survive. 

He pushed Ed away from him once more, rocketing himself back in the water, aiming for the opposite door. The safety locks had disengaged, and with the pressure now equalized, it was easy enough to push the door open. His lungs weren’t even straining yet. 

He looked back, squinting through the saltwater (how could he resist?) and heard Ed’s muffled shout through the liquid muffle — his mouth forming a clear ‘No!’ that released more precious air. 

He couldn’t let himself care if Ed wasted his last few seconds in a desperate plea to not leave him. Life was worth more, he wouldn’t stay down here in this coffin Ed had created for the two of them. 

He turned back and swam out, already looking towards the bright water at the surface. 

A moment later he felt a sharp tug, threatening to startle a rush of valuable oxygen out of his throat. Fingers were pitifully curling around his ankle. The shadowy figure of Ed attached somehow to the car — he must have been holding onto the vehicle with one hand and holding onto Oswald with the other. Oswald almost wasted his remaining air with a shout of his own. He was struggling to beat back the panic that was threatening to claw at his fingertips. What little he could make out of Ed’s body language was desperate. Ed was trying to pull him down, drag him back down with him, see through his nonsensical plan of dying together. 

Oswald swiped his other foot and clumsily dug it into where he could feel Ed’s fingers gripping his leg. He felt the tremor race through the man as he was released. Then onwards towards the surface. 

With wide strokes and kicks that started all the way in his hips, he swam to the surface — each pull another meter as the white light of the sun raced towards him. His head spun and his ankle was throbbing, but he knew he had enough air — more than. All the practice he had made the ascent easy, more mentally taxing than anything else. He had to keep convincing himself not to look back down, not to hope that Ed was right on his heels, that he’d changed his mind seeing Oswald swim off. 

Thoughts like that would get him killed. As soon as he hit the surface, he’d head for the docks, it was all he could do. 

His ears popped as his head breached, relishing the polluted air as he took in greedy lungfuls. He wasn’t far from the docks, only a few body lengths. There were still bubbles all around him from the car-sized disturbance that had sunk into the bay. 

Counter to what he promised himself, he looked around. Lingered for a few seconds. The bubbles stopped. No Ed. 

Surely, his face would burst through the surface. 

One moment. He wasn’t there. If he didn't come up soon he would drown.

Another moment. Oswald felt his eyes glaze over, he knew it wasn’t from the saltwater. 

Ed was going to die. 

Notes:

j- god i hope he stays dead this time -_-
rc - PRAYER CIRCLE FOR HIM STAYING DEAD, EVERYONE JOIN HANDS

Chapter 8

He took another large lungful of air and dived beneath the surface. 

He kicked and pulled harder than before, having to let out half his air to counteract the buoyancy of his lungs. It would only help on the way down though; ascending again, this time with a second body in tow, would be even more difficult, but he had to reach him as quickly as possible. 

His head hurt with the rapid descent, feeling the pressure as he swam down. It was hard to see in the murky water, but at least the shiny rims of the car were easy enough to pinpoint through the stinging salt, upset sand, and dark crush of water. 

The air in his lungs was dwindling, his body begging him to race back up by the time he made it to the car. Ed’s limp body was hanging halfway out, one arm still reaching up where Oswald had kicked him off. He was suspended like a marionette, not floating and not sinking, not yet — that meant there was still some air in his lungs. 

Oswald yanked him into his arms, but he didn’t move far, his body caught on something. He had to fight off the instinct to gulp in a breath that wasn’t there, but the urge remained, pressing in, becoming more demanding the longer he was forced to stay down here. 

Ed’s shirt was caught on the door. He didn't have time to figure out how to unattach it, so he just gave one swift yank until the fabric ripped. His body became untethered, and easy enough to maneuver out from the open door.  

He looped one arm under Ed’s armpit and pushed off from the roof of the car, giving himself a small boost to try to get them to the surface. His breath was aching in his chest, holding it felt like he was caving in on himself. Progress was much too slow, exponentially hindered by the dense weight threatening to drag him back down. 

Even unconscious (dear God , please let him be unconscious) Ed was trying to stick to his plan, but he’d already survived him once (twice? Three times? Who could even keep track now), he’d survive this too. 

His body was starting to feel cold and his vision was tunneling. Just another meter, another stroke, another kick. His wet clothing had been threatening to pull him under the first time (second, third now) he’d swam to the surface, but it was nothing in comparison to Ed’s bulk — despite how scrawny the man was. 

The sun was getting brighter, begging him forward, and as Ed’s head flopped back onto his shoulder, he realized his limbs weren’t quite as weak as he thought. 

When he crested the small, choppy waves, he feared for a moment that he was in danger of passing out. Oxygen flooded back though his suffocating system, making his head rush but body burn in comparison to the choking cold. 

He hadn’t let go of Ed. After this ordeal he feared he may never let go of him again. 

He wasn’t breathing, didn’t gasp for air as soon as he hit the surface. Not good — he'd been down there longer than Oswald had. Quickly, he dragged them both to the ladder that connected to the raised platform, gripping Ed’s wrist tight enough to bruise but not wanting to risk him slipping back under. 

Hoisting himself, all six feet of Edward’s body, along with both their soaked clothes onto solid ground wasn’t an easy feat, but in his haste he barely noticed the strain of his overworked muscles. As soon as he was on flat ground, Oswald checked for his pulse — finding it weak but there. 

He tilted Ed’s head back, opening his airway, and sealed his mouth over his. A breath, a count of one-two-three-four-five as he exhaled, watching to make sure Ed’s chest rose as his lungs were forcibly inflated. Another on the same count — his body was cold but not deathly cold. As long as his heart was still beating, Oswald would keep him breathing. 

One more breath, one more, one more. Even if his heart stopped beating, Oswald would just switch to compressions as well. He kept his fingers on Ed’s chest, hoping for a stuttered rise of its own, dreading for the fluttering pulse to stop. 

One more forced rise of his chest and a hacking, wet cough wrecked his body. Ed pitched to his side and seawater poured out of his throat. He heaved — finally under his own power — and a bright flush blotchily covered his wet skin. 

Ed pulled himself upright, fingers clawing at the air. He turned, soaked hair clinging to his face as the coughing gradually abated. His lips pursed. He was about to speak. 

Instead, Oswald’s palm flew at his face. It landed with a harsh crack, the sensation of hand crunching into bone barely adequate compensation. Ed fell backwards under the force of it. Placed a hand to his cheek as he landed on his back. His face contorted as the pain visibly washed over him. 

“Ow,” he gasped. “That should not have hurt!”

“Should not—” Oswald blurted. He gripped Ed’s shoulder. Gazed into that wide-eyed innocent stare. And with a huff of air, cracked a hand at his cheek a second time and then flung him to the ground. Harshly. Clamored awkwardly to an upright position.

“Wait.” Ed’s voice was wavering. “If my face hurts. How can this be heaven?”

“Because it isn’t, oh brilliant one. You’re alive. Just barely!”

“Alive?” Ed was clearly still processing. “But. You look like—”

“A corpse?” Oswald scoffed. “You’ll forgive me. I’ve had rather a difficult morning.”

“An angel,” Ed murmured, in a faint whisper. 

Oswald tittered bitterly. Soaked through with water, body on the verge of collapse, pulse singing through him at an alarming rate, and with the filth that swarmed in that horrible water clinging to him he’d never felt less desirable. This was ridiculous. A handful of words, and the rush of love was threatening to drown out any will to be angry at all. He wanted to retain a little anger. Best punctuate with a joke instead. “Entirely unrelated, I’m afraid. That’s just me.”

Ed’s eyes turned heavenwards to the sky that was now deep blue. He blinked, and turned his gaze back to Oswald. “It seems like—”

“Look around you,” Oswald spun, arms raised theatrically. His heels dug into the boardwalk. Rotting weeds clung to the wood, the stench of brine with an undertone of piss in the air. The landscape was dotted with grimy industrial units. “If your idea of heaven is this stinking hellhole, then you truly have a poor imagination indeed.”

Ed’s voice was confused, dazed. “So why am I here?”

Oswald blinked deeply. Clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I fished you out.”

“No.” Ed bunched a fist, pounded it against the pier. “No, but—it’ll all go wrong again! It was gonna be perfect. We were gonna both go, together, and. It would’ve been perfect.” There was a heave of breath. “You ruined it!” he cried.

Charming, that this was the thanks he got for saving the man’s life, at great risk to his own. “Ed! For what it’s worth. I, for one, didn’t enjoy any of that. That was what one would call a rather terrible time.”

“None of it? Not even— it’s not too late,” he continued, desperate now. His eyes were wide, more obvious with his glasses gone — probably lost somewhere down in the bay’s depths. He inched forward on his knees, flung his arms around Oswald’s legs, which almost severely threw off his balance and pressed his face up against Oswald’s waist. His touch was cloying, desperate. His hands strayed to catch Oswald’s hands. He pressed them against his cheeks. “Please, Oswald. It’ll only hurt for a few moments, we can still make it right!”

“I don’t want to die, Ed!” The bubbling, roiling anger that he’d had since he regained consciousness finally bubbled to the surface, unable to stay repressed any further. He ripped his hands back. Ed went tumbling, palms barely propping him up before he sank into a crouched position. “And I don’t want you to die either! How hard is that to understand?”

“It isn’t worth it,” Ed murmured, his voice trailing as though he were only speaking to himself now. Eyes still fixed on the water.  “Living. Without you. I tried to spare you the grief. But-”

“But I’m not dead!,” Oswald said. “I never was! Look!” he said as he ran a hand up his own side. The motion briefly recaptured Ed’s attention. “You set about on a course of action to bring about your own demise because you were aggrieved over my death? A death at your hands, lest we forget. And upon finding that I am not in fact dead, you set about killing the both of us so that your suicide for my death would be justified? I need a drink.” 

“It was the only way,” Ed mumbled. “We have to be together. In life. Or in death. And that first one wasn’t ever gonna happen.”

Oswald’s hand tensed, the desire to slap him a third time taking hold of it. “And why not?” 

“We hate each other,” Ed said. “We hurt each other. But we still—we need each other, and it doesn’t make sense. That’s why it can’t work.”

Admitting felt like nails clawing at the inside of his throat. He didn’t want Ed pitching himself over the side of the pier once more and he especially didn’t want him to take them both down. With his limbs still wet and weak, he didn’t think he had the strength to save them both again. 

“I don’t hate you,” he said quietly, just above the wind whistling through the nearby narrow alleys. “I should. I should hate you more than I’ve hated any other person, but I don’t, and it kills me, Ed, but I’m not letting this weakness of mine — and yours — take us to our graves.” He straightened his shoulders, portraying a confidence he didn’t actually feel, but had been faking for long enough that it didn’t matter. “Is this it?” he gestured around to the wet, rotting wood, the gray buildings bordering their lonely pier. “Is this how you want to die? It’d mean nothing — you already know what the report would say: ‘an act of passion’. Who would remember you? Who would care?”

For once, Ed didn’t have an answer. From his knees, he looked up at Oswald like he had the power to end him with a single word — if he just pulled away. As smart as it would be, he couldn’t bring himself to. 

“Just—” The red, frenetic energy he’d built up left him all at once. Those wide, watery eyes pulled him in like a whirlpool, and he found himself kneeling too — bum leg protesting all the while. “Just don’t make me watch another person I love die.”

A sob visibly raced through Ed’s body as the words washed over him. He leaned his head against Oswald’s shoulder, and Oswald found himself holding on tighter. Ed’s hands gripped at his back, and he found his own pressing gently. It wasn’t abating, the wailing was growing louder, he could feel the convulsing breaths beat against him. It was as though Ed was letting something go, what he couldn’t exactly say. But he’d prop him upright as he went through it. He thumbed at a tear, pressed the thumb to his lip.

The salt was bitter, flavorsome. The taste pulsed through him, and he heard himself sigh. He clutched Ed’s face, took in the reddened moaning mess, and was suddenly gripped by the desire to press his tongue to cheek, taste more of it. He pressed his lips to Ed’s cheek, delighted in the faint shiver that echoed from his skin. Rivulets ran down, and he was seized with the urge to drink all of that up, to take it down and lock it away.

Ed turned to meet his gaze. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, and to prevent that from happening, Oswald crashed his lips against it. Took him into an embrace.

Ed squealed into the kiss, took a moment to process before returning it. His hands were roving voraciously at Oswald’s back, traced down to cup his ass before lightly trawling back to squeeze at his shoulder blades. Oswald’s fingers were tight enough to bruise as he pressed at Ed’s tongue, tilted Ed backwards, claimed and took possession. 

His fingers drifted over the array of bruises dotted over the exposed area of Ed’s flesh. He tore his mouth away, and traced the shapes, feeling the clammy sheen of sweat clinging to his skin. Around Ed’s throat was the thin tendril of a scar. He watched Ed shiver as he stroked at it. He dug in. 

“Where’d you get this?”

He stopped moving his hands, just barely tracing the bruises with his tongue as Ed squirmed beneath him. 

“Y-you,” he panted, clutching tightly at Oswald’s back. 

“How?”

“Your belt—you said—you made me—” He quickly lost all coherence within the babble as Oswald began scraping his teeth down the purpled flesh. The taste of skin and saltwater wasn’t entirely pleasant, but the way it made Ed arch into him was among the sweetest sights he’d ever seen. 

In the back of his mind, he realized he should probably be more concerned about these attempted suicides that Ed had been casting him to be executioner in, but it was hard to focus with Ed becoming more and more frantic. When he spied more bruising along Ed’s side and shoulder and worked his mouth around them as well, Ed convulsed like he’d been electrocuted. 

He had to hold back a huff of a laugh. It was like he was fixing him — kissing a cut to make the pain go away — though Ed was clearly deriving much more than a distraction from pain. His gasps and groans were laced with arousal. Ed yanked clumsily at his hand and pushed it harder into one of the bruises.

Another buck of Ed’s hips and he felt his hard length brush against him. His bare torso was peppered with goose flesh, Gotham’s cold air and the even colder bay water still sticking to both their skin. 

“You like it,” Oswald breathed. Another thought occurred to him. “This is how the other me got to you, isn't it? He'd hurt you just the way you wanted him to.” 

Ed fixed him with a bleary gaze as the cogs visibly turned. He parted his lips, as if to speak, but only a gurgled cry came out. He nodded, slowly and deliberately. Oswald’s hand stroked against his clothed cock, and Ed yelped at the friction. Only Edward Nygma could merge arousal with thinking so noisily, and as Oswald continued to knead and stroke, the thinking only grew noisier. 

“You fished me out,” Ed stammered in between gurgles and cries. “I was gonna kill you. And you saved me. I just don’t — you baffle me. Why would you save me? You placed your own survival at risk to do so.” 

“Well perhaps you’ve saved me also,” Oswald murmured into Ed’s ear, punctuating it with an impulsive lick at the cartilage, as he twisted his hand, felt Ed squirm against the motion. 

Ed pulled away. Pushed Oswald off. “No,” he groaned. “No. Fixing a couple wounds counts for nothing if—”

Oswald could feel his own brow furrow. He was piecing the words together as he spoke them. With a grip to Ed’s neck, he pulled him back. “Not the wounds that you patched. Those that you gouged.” Heated hungry breaths merged, as Oswald’s chin slid down Ed’s face, and landed so that his lips rested against Ed’s. 

His hands pushed at the bruises once more, eliciting another hiss. “And now that I see how you are similarly afflicted—” Ed was melting underneath his touch, and sending that pooling heat to his own thighs. His tongue lapped inside Ed’s mouth, suckling and tasting. Ed’s moans and sighs set each of his nerves alight. His own arousal was drowning out his other senses. 

Lips parting with a smacking motion, he saw the confusion still written across Ed’s face. It was cute. No one did what Ed had done and lived. No one except Ed. The proof that Ed shared such sentiment, that in however circuitous a route it had been arrived at, he could tear flesh from Ed just as easily as Ed could tear it from him; that they both could, and still return together. That there was something within him still capable — now that the imminent threat of death was abating, he could even spy the sentiment in Ed’s complete descent into insanity without him. Just as he’d predicted would happen. 

He grabbed one of Ed’s hands — still roving aimlessly against his back, and pressed it into his stomach. His gut clenched with the rapid onset of shooting pain, rocketing up from the mess of still-knitting tissue, but the way Ed trembled in response was worth every alighted nerve. 

Ed’s fingers dug in, eliciting a pained gasp to emerge from his throat. Oswald didn’t know what it was in pain that Ed found so arousing — having lived in and around pain for so long, to him it was nothing more than a hindrance, something that would slow him when his enemies were aiming their weapons towards him. But, teased by the way Ed was tearing at his soaked-through shirt to get to the bare skin of his stomach, he thought he could understand in part what Ed had felt.

The scar tissue around the bullet hole was insensate, but the reverent way Ed traced it, moving in concentric circles until he touched the raw center felt almost as erotic as if he was touching him more intimately. In fact, he wasn’t sure that there was a touch that was more intimate, Ed all but worshiping the permanent mark he left on Oswald’s body. 

He pressed down on the center and Oswald clenched his hands around Ed’s throat on instinct, the drive to end anyone that was causing him pain taking hold of him. Survival, plain and simple. What was less simple was the fact that he let him go. As Ed might claim, it was ‘illogical,’ but logic had little to do with them, little to do with how they ended up here. And Oswald had never claimed to be a man who was guided by anything but his heart. 

“This hurts,” Ed whimpered. “You saving me hurts .” His brow was creased, face still locked in deep concentration and his tone was thick and sodden. “Why won’t you just—why can’t it just be easy!?”

“Hmm,” Oswald spluttered. He should take umbrage at Ed’s words, but he knew only too well how a kindness undeserved could get under the skin. Could kindle the flames of obsession. He knew only too well the desperation to earn it , to hold onto it, to perhaps tease out at least one more act of kindness. He chuckled to himself. He’d saved Ed’s life purely for his own purposes. Once again, his instincts had served him well. This particular pain might mean he now had him forever. Or for a time, at least. Nothing was forever. 

“I need you to—” Ed whispered. “Be cruel. I need this to be cruel.”

Ed dug his nail into a stitch that Oswald only just realized he’d popped. The pain that shot through him was lancing, like the bullet was tearing through him once again. He had to yank Ed's wrist, pulling him away, and the man whined like a spoiled dog, denied his serving of people food. 

For such a brilliant man, Ed still seemed capable of holding only one image of a person in his mind at once. He needed Oswald to be the angel granting absolution, who indeed saw no flaw in need of absolving. Or else the monster torn from his nightmares set upon him to obliterate him utterly. Oswald had no interest in being either of those. Frankly, he just wanted to get off. After the morning he’d had, he deserved that much, but there was a way to thread the needle. 

Oswald leaned forward, rested his lip against his own handprint and huffed the answer into Ed’s throat. He felt his own breath warm and moist against his skin, felt Ed’s pulse race against his teeth. “Too bad,” he hissed. “I won’t do it. I won’t be your punishment.”

Ed’s body fluttered at that, a wave rushing through him as a gasp escaped his lips. “Perfect,” he whined.

Abruptly, Oswald yanked at Ed’s slacks, stymied by the freezing water making it cling to his skin and the jut of Ed’s erection straining it further. He wasn’t gentle as he tugged them down, making Ed hiss, but he could bear it since he was all but fingering Oswald’s bullet wound only a moment ago. 

He didn’t bother to lower them further than Ed’s thighs; the second he was exposed to the whipping air, Oswald took him in hand, tightening his grip as he got used to the weight in his hands. He gave a slow, cursory stroke, similar to what he’d use for himself, imagining this happening in his bed, over his desk, in front of the fireplace, but they didn’t have the luxury of the slow and sweet scenarios he used to conjure for himself. 

Dimly, self-deprecatingly, he wondered what Ed was getting out of his cold hands, the hard wood beneath his spine. It certainly couldn’t be the best he’d had, and the Ed that used to live in his mind always crooned in his ear that only Oswald could take him apart like this, that all that came before him were ruined and he couldn’t even consider having anyone else again. 

In comparison, he was the best Oswald had — by miles. He couldn’t say, it would just go to the bastard’s head, but it was true. Yes, Ed’s hands were awkward and his movements uncoordinated and when they kissed their teeth clacked, but he pressed against him with an eager neediness that Oswald had never felt with any of the other men he’d slept with. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he slept with someone just because he wanted to. Sex was a tool, an easy means to get a powerful enemy to lower their defenses, to think that they were sharing something precious, or that they were ‘putting him in his place’; it was all about keeping his wits high and his ears alert for those undoing secrets that would be revealed in the moment of ‘passion’. 

The body underneath him (he so rarely got to play the domineering role) painted such a stark contrast that it was hard to realize the activity they were engaging in was comparable. There were no stained motel sheets (no matter how high-ranking, the men in the mob never brought him back to the main house, but there were perks to being the shameful secret), no excessive amounts of cologne and lotion to make him appear more like some soft, unambitious peon who wasn’t much more than an easy lay. 

Ed clutched him like he didn’t believe Oswald was real, like he wasn’t imagining someone else, like Oswald could ever be the apex — the person someone strived for and not just some drunken mistake. 

“O-Oswald, please—”

He hadn’t even realized he’d stopped moving. In his brief, critical stint, Ed had begun pumping his hips into Oswald’s hand, his fingers gripping even more harshly into Oswald’s back. Ed looked lovely, skin festooned with a kaleidoscope of color. Lost in arousal, face hazy and blissful. He swiped his hand up and down once more in a slow, deliberate stroke, taking in every microexpression as Ed’s lip trembled. Parted to form a noisy whine that echoed throughout him.

Ed’s clumsy hands slipped down Oswald’s hips, pawing at his zipper uselessly. Those tricky, clever fingers turned slow and incompetent when he was this far along, strung out and losing track of his words. It seemed the only things able to come out of those panting lips were stuttered pleas and fragments of Oswald’s name. 

As much as he tried to give off a modicum of control, he wasn’t in a much better state. Seeing Ed so affected, so much more than he ever let his thoughts stray to, was sending his mind and the pit of his stomach into a tumbling frenzy, unable to think about repercussions or splinters or who might see them out in the open. 

He took mercy on the poor fool, though it was purely for selfish reasons, and took himself out, shucking down his own clothes to match Ed’s barely-undressed state. He took in the way that Ed’s bleary eyes strayed over every feature and detail, feeling a flicker of exposure under the gaze. He hadn’t thought anything of it, Ed had seen him in a state of undress so many times before. Perhaps not in this context, however. Now it was as though Ed was seeing it anew. 

As if unable to hold back any longer, Ed surged into him, slamming their mouths together while forcing his hips up again. Oswald somehow retained the presence of mind to take them in hand together, and Ed all but screamed into his mouth as he stroked them in tandem. 

Vibrating, shivering up against one another, the thrum of shared pleasure raced through their conjoined bodies as hands continued to pump. Moans puffed from Ed’s lips, and Oswald swallowed them up. Ed’s hair was clinging to his clammy skin, his skin was shivering. It was an oasis of sensation, a fragment in time where there were no concerns but the spikes of bliss that surged with each graze of skin, each tremor of emotion. Cut-glass sense, wisping breath threatening to tear through the moment.

Ed wedged a hand between them, forcibly stilling Oswald’s as his strokes turned more rapid, more focused on driving the both of them over the edge. His chest was heaving against him, his mouth wide as he tried to gasp in between frantic kisses. Frustratingly, Ed turned his head to the side, dodging Oswald’s tongue trying to trace along the back of his teeth. 

“What?!” Oswald huffed, his cock jerking and stomach clenching as the orgasm that had been about to overtake him receded. 

“So you trust me then?” Ed asked, his eyes wide and voice trembling. Oswald could feel how Ed still pulled him down, was still grinding against him, but wouldn’t let them build that perfect rhythm they’d established until Oswald answered him. The bastard. He should get his hands around his neck again. 

“No.” He didn’t trust Ed not to hurt him, betray him, kill him even, but down in his terrible little core he wanted him anyway. The lesson Ed tried to teach him, way back before betrayals and murder attempts and near-suicides, just didn’t stick. It was never going to. “Do you trust me?”

Ed, the fool ( his fool, if only for the time being) actually smiled at him, all teeth that Oswald still wanted to lick. “Not at all.”

Ed slammed back into him, fingers clutching tightly into his skin as his groans became louder. Ed tensed, as his cock throbbed under the touch. He was close, and seeing him so affected, so desperate, threatened to push Oswald over too. Oswald’s breath hitched, his head lolled back as he maintained the rhythm. Hot tendrils of pleasure had hold of him, his nerves were singing with bliss and each gasp that spilled from his mouth laced through, heightened the intensity. Ed’s fingers splayed as he was overtaken. 

“Os—” the attempt at his name in Ed’s mouth as he came was thick, wavery. Ed flopped backwards, as his cock spurted, a wetness spilling onto Oswald’s hand, and his moan was something akin to a wail that had taken hold of his entire body. He bucked, worked through it, continuing to cling and loosening as though his hands had lost all sense of what to do. As the spasming subsided, he leaned backwards, melted and useless.

A huff of irritated air spewed from Oswald’s nostrils as his own arousal continued to throb and demand. Ed’s hand was snaking around the back of his neck, head burrowing into his shoulder. Oswald yanked at Ed’s hand, faintly noted the burbled whine on Ed’s lip, and then placed their entwined fingers back around his own cock. 

Tugging up and down the length, Oswald let his chin rest against Ed’s slack face. Ed sputtered at the contact, seemed barely aware of where he was. Oswald tried to focus on getting back into the rhythm. His old arousal began to glimmer anew, and he faintly buried the irritation. He huffed, felt himself falling back into it. Ed’s free hand crept to the small of his back.

Swiping his fingers against himself, he felt himself begin to tense too. His toes curled as the throbbing pleasure grew more insistent, swarmed out the rest of the world. Now there was only the stimulation, the burgeoning brink of bliss. The orgasm spilling to the surface. He clenched harder at himself, and then with a panting curse, felt himself fall into pleasure. As his own cum spilled, he released his hand, grabbed hold of Ed’s face and drove his tongue into his mouth.

“Oswald,” Ed moaned into him. It wasn’t followed up by any particular message. The man had been saying the name in fits and starts, it was simply a mantra resting on his tongue. An expression of something so fit to bursting within him that it had to come out. Oswald’s fingers were entwined in his hair. He pulled him forward so that his brow nestled at Oswald’s cheek. 

The gray fog of the dock remained thick and hazy. The water continued to lap. There was a still only punctuated by the heave of their breaths. 

Oswald bonelessly melted into Ed’s clutching arms, resigned himself to laying for a while in the mess they made as Ed rubbed at the side of his face. No one else was here to stop him from pressing small, indulgent pecks along the side of his nose, the hinge of his jaw, the bow of his upper lip, and Ed preened and hummed with every press of his lips. In the neat, chaotically calculating mess of Ed’s mind, he never expected to find that this hidden piece of him was so charmingly affectionate — blissed out and lazy, curling around him and keeping him close. He’d never let himself imagine the ‘after’ part, the thought of any intimacy with Ed already simultaneously stimulating and painful to consider. If he’d allowed himself to picture Ed sweet and soft and touching him without the justification of arousal, it would’ve made living without all the more sour. 

But, as he buried himself closer, feeling nothing but warmth despite their cold clothes and the whipping bay wind, he realized he couldn’t have pictured it correctly anyway. He wouldn’t have gotten the hazy look in Ed’s eyes or his wobbly smile right. 

“What I want, the poor have, the rich need, and if you eat it, you’ll die?” Ed spoke into his cheek.

Oswald sighed deeply. “Nothing.”

“Correct!” Ed beamed, a finger darting upwards, tapping against Oswald’s shoulder. “So maybe that’s the answer after all.”

Oswald blinked deeply. “I don’t really see—”

“We don’t trust each other, that’s been established. So maybe we just. Expect nothing.”

“Take it one day at a time,” Oswald said. “I suppose. I can’t promise I’ll never hurt you. I refuse to make promises to you that I may find myself unable to keep.”

“And I most definitely am not promising that either,” Ed replied. “I can promise I'll try?”

“That’s good enough, for now.” Oswald was having a hard time keeping his own answering smile from his face, and eventually found himself giving in. It was frustrating, he didn’t even feel like throwing Ed back into the water after that last ridiculous riddle. If he was smart, he’d at least consider severing this weakness, but he couldn’t even manage the thought before he discarded it. 

Not with the way Ed was looking at him. He wished he had the words to describe it. 

Ed’s hand clasped around his and squeezed. “Then let's just take things from here. See where they end up.”

Oswald placed a peck to his nose. “From here. Good to meet you, Mr. Nygma.”

Notes:

j- being a part-time lifeguard was surprisingly helpful writing this
rc - GCPD rolls up 3 minutes later "Reports of a murder-suicide still in progre- oh god fucking damnit it, it's those fucking guys. No No No No No" and then they just leave.