Chapter Text
When Ed took his lunch break, he went outside—unusual for him, since his habit was to eat in his lab—and walked a block away from the GCPD building, out of the hearing of any cops standing around having a smoke, and called his home phone. Oswald (Ed had stopped thinking of him as ‘Mr. Penguin’ after he’d started eating all his food and destroying his plumbing) picked up with a petulant “Now you want to talk to me?”
“I needed to go somewhere I wouldn’t be overheard,” Ed said shortly. “Doctor Thompkins—that’s the M.E., and Detective Gordon’s—”
“I know who Lee Thompkins is,” Oswald cut in, waspish.
“She heard me talking to you about the toilet and asked if it was Kristen, because it sounded like I was talking to someone at my apartment.”
“She thought I was your girlfriend?” Oswald’s irritation was dissipating, replaced by amusement, which only exacerbated Ed’s own irritation.
“Well, I’m glad you think it’s funny, but I really don’t want anyone asking any more questions about Kristen, or about who might be staying in my apartment. So I want you to stop calling me at work unless it’s an absolute life-or-death emergency. However,” he continued, cutting Oswald off as he heard him taking a breath to protest, “on my way home I will buy you a cheap cellphone with a text-only prepaid plan so that you can send me a text message if you need to ask me a non-urgent question about the location of a condiment. Now, is the toilet still not flushing?”
“Yes. I mean, no, it’s not working.”
“All right. I will send a plumber over. What you need to do is get a surgical mask out of the box under the kitchen sink and put it on before you open the door. Tell him you have the flu and you don’t want to infect him, and then stay out of his way as much as possible—we can’t have you risk being recognized. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Oswald replied. His tone was mocking now, adding fuel to Ed’s growing annoyance, but he made himself tamp it down. “And how am I supposed to pay the plumber?”
“I’ll tell him to bill me. You can pay me back once you’re back in power.”
“Pay you back? It’s your crappy toilet!”
“And you broke it.”
Oswald scoffed but didn’t argue further, which was a mercy.
“All right, then, I will see you this evening,” Ed pronounced conclusively. “Do not call me before then unless you’re dying, or about to be found out.” Then he hung up before Oswald could say anything else.
Ed came home with the prepaid cellphone as promised (Oswald’s own cellphone had been misplaced somewhere amid his desperate flight from the mayor’s election party and his struggle to survive in the woods with extensive blood loss and infection setting in). He opened the door to his apartment and found Oswald lounging on his sofa, watching something on TV—some nature documentary about migrating birds, it looked like. Over the pajamas Ed had given him, he was wearing one of Ed’s favorite sweaters: fifty percent cashmere (he couldn’t afford full), in a soft forest green. Ed suddenly found himself with an uncomfortable hot and itchy feeling he couldn’t immediately explain.
“You’re wearing my sweater,” Ed remarked, by way of greeting.
Way to state the obvious, the voice of Ed’s darker half drawled in his head. Very clever, that.
Oswald had looked up toward the door with a small startle when he’d heard it open; now he looked down at the sweater as if he’d forgotten he was wearing it. “Yeah, I am. Your pajamas are too big and my bandages show between the edges of the collar, so I needed something with a higher neck to cover them up.”
“That’s… sensible,” Ed had to admit, but recognizing it didn’t completely alleviate the hot, itchy discomfort.
Oswald rolled his eyes. “I know this might come as a surprise to you, but I’m not an idiot.”
“Obviously, I know that,” Ed huffed. “But you don’t still need to be wearing it, do you?”
“Why, does it bother you?” Oswald asked him with a smirk, in which Ed could see more of the same mocking amusement he’d heard on the phone earlier.
“I just don’t want you getting mustard on it—or blood,” he retorted. “It’s one of my nicer ones.”
Oswald gave a put-upon sigh. “Fine,” he said, and made a show of taking the sweater off ever so carefully. Curiously, this seemed to intensify Ed’s discomfiture; it only started to subside once Oswald had handed him the sweater over the arm of the sofa. It wasn’t Oswald wearing his clothes as such that bothered him; he had been wearing Ed’s pajamas and even his underwear for days. But Ed had given him those to wear—directly put them on him, even, in the case of the first set. The sweater, on the other hand, he’d helped himself to, and he would have had to go rifling through Ed’s dresser drawers to find it. It felt like some sort of invasion of Ed’s privacy.
Really?, said the deep sardonic voice inside his head. After we kidnapped him, took off all his clothes, bathed him, drugged him, and operated on him without his consent, he’s invading our privacy by going through our dresser? Ed had no good reply to that.
“If I did get blood on it, it would be because your stitches weren’t holding,” Oswald needled him as he examined the sweater for stains.
“My stitches will hold unless you do something stupid again.” Like announce an intention to leave while still weak from blood loss, fever, and dehydration and promptly collapse on the floor… or get a little too enthusiastic while venting his frustrated vengefulness on his enemy’s servant (though Ed forgave him that one because the performance was so spectacular).
The sweater, fortunately, was unstained, so Ed wouldn’t need to attack it with detergent immediately, and Oswald didn’t appear to have pulled any threads, either. Ed went into the ‘bedroom’ portion of his apartment (not properly a bedroom, since it wasn’t divided by a real wall) and dropped the sweater into his laundry hamper to deal with later.
“See, I didn’t do anything to your precious— why are you putting it in the wash?” Oswald demanded indignantly from behind him—he had gotten up and followed him to continue the argument. “I was only wearing it for a couple of hours, over your pajama shirt; it can’t possibly have gotten sweaty. Are you afraid I got my cooties on it or something?”
“Even if it isn’t sweaty, it still has your smell on it. I don’t like my clothes smelling like other people.”
Oswald made an unimpressed psshh noise. “What—not even your cherished Miss Kringle, ‘the love of your life’?”
“She was different,” Ed snapped defensively. After each date with her—including their last—he had delayed washing the clothes he’d been wearing when she pressed her body close against his to kiss him, leaving traces of her perfume (jasmine and bergamot, with a subtle woody undertone) and the harder-to-describe, infinitely more intoxicating fragrance of her complex body chemistry, announcing its compatibility with his; only weeks later, when the scent was no longer detectable, was he finally willing to wash out his own stale sweat.
“Anyway, I wouldn’t want anyone to notice that my clothes smell like someone else. Doctor Thompkins already suspects there’s another person living here; if anyone found out that it’s you…”
Oswald snorted incredulously. “You think someone’s going to identify me by my smell on your clothes?”
“That wasn’t what I meant, but now that you mention it, Jim Gordon is probably familiar enough with it,” Ed shot back. Oswald shouldn’t have taken aim at Ed’s doomed relationship with Miss Kringle with his own flank so exposed.
Oswald folded his arms and glared like an offended teenage girl. “What exactly are you implying?”
“Just that you’ve been awfully close in the past, is all.”
Oswald’s air of false innocence turned on a dime from wounded to coy. “Is it my fault that he insists on grabbing me by the collar and pushing me against walls to issue gruff, manly threats?”
That instantly conjured a horribly vivid image in Ed’s mind, which brought its own itchy discomfort with it, accompanied by a mild nausea. He supposed it served him right for bringing up Gordon.
“Whether it’s your fault or not, I’m taking no chances and washing the sweater.”
“Fine, then,” Oswald said, raising his hands in mock surrender with deliberate nonchalance. “They’re your quarters to waste—and no, I’m not paying you back for laundry.”