Chapter Text
With Richard Nashton refusing to admit to the murder, the group reluctantly made their way to the Nashton house. They were tired, irritated at their lack of progress, and all bar one, keenly aware that if they did find Edward Nashton, he would most certainly be dead, and if they didn’t find him, then Ed and Lee will have had no reason to come all this way, given that they were only here to analyse evidence and dead bodies.
Still, they made their way to the house, with each member becoming more and more aware, now that the case seemed to be going nowhere especially productive, of how nervous Ed seemed to be. At several points both Jim and Lee had noticed that his hands were shaking, and everyone had noticed that he had espoused far fewer riddles than he usually did, though Harvey specifically didn’t mind and in fact was rather enjoying the peace and quiet. He was twitchy too, they found, constantly zoning out and jolting suddenly back into reality whenever one of them spoke to him. It had gotten to the point where they had all gathered to discuss the issue when they entered the house, while Ed was off looking through the rooms upstairs for any indication of where Edward Nashton may have gone.
“So, something’s up with freak,” Harvey began with his trademark sensitivity. Lee glared at him, and Jim followed her example. “Something’s up with Ed, yes.”
“Maybe it’s caffeine withdrawal – it’d explain the twitching.” Harvey posited.
“Nah,” Lee dismissed it, “he drinks maybe one cup of coffee a day.”
“It could just be the case getting to him. It is pretty bleak stuff.”
“We’re talking about Nygma – at any given time he’s no more than a foot away from a corpse – No way he’s creeped out.”
As the trio thought on what could possibly be the issue with Ed, Ed was getting to the heart of the issue at the door of his childhood bedroom. He knew they would have to check every room, but this was his room, even if he had left it behind, and he didn’t want them going through it and dissecting every little thing in there. It was too personal, and he still harboured the fear that whatever he had left in there would clue them in to his real identity. After all, he may be far smarter than any of the officers at the precinct, but Jim was still a good detective, and Lee was incredibly observant. Even Bullock had occasional moments of clarity. Hopefully, if he went in, he could assess what the damage was (he assumed his father had thrown away most of what he had left in there; he'd never had any respect for him or his belongings when he lived there, so it hardly seemed as though he’d have any more respect for them when he was gone), hide anything too incriminating and perhaps even convince them that they didn’t need to go into the room at all, after all, he had gone through it thoroughly and he was well-versed in collecting evidence.
He took a deep breath, opened the door, and gasped.
Impossible. It was utterly impossible.
His room was exactly as it had been when he had left it, perfectly preserved like an insect in amber. He had been certain that his father would have gone through his things the moment he was declared missing, and thrown away practically everything: the towering lego structures he had painstakingly crafted; the shelves of books on physics, chemistry, biology, and all manner of other subjects; the stack of notebooks at the foot of his bed, filled with riddles and logic puzzles and pi to four hundred digits; his set of colouring pencils, with all of the green ones worn down to little stubs, alongside his set of permanent markers, with the green ones again having almost entirely run out of ink. It was entirely disconcerting, and he couldn’t think of what to try and hide – it all seemed so eminently him that he didn’t know where to begin and the thought distressed him greatly. He would only have so long before the others were going to come upstairs, and his old room would be the first place they chose to look.
He moved to pace across the room, trying to get his thoughts in line quickly, but as he did so his foot caught on a snag in the carpet (a portion of the floor where the carpet had come detached from the floorboard after a bored eight-year-old Edward had expertly pried it away, and subsequently had learned how to avoid that particular spot so that he wouldn’t trip over it), and he fell gracelessly to the floor with a loud bang. Immediately he was on his feet again, fear sharpening all of his senses as he heard the sounds of three sets of feet making their way up the stairs at pace.
Quickly he stepped out of the room (his room, a small part of his mind reminded him), and shut the door behind him, just in time for Jim, Lee and Harvey to have reached him, and take in his frazzled demeanour.
Jim was first to speak, “What happened?” Ed could tell that Harvey and Lee had their own questions they wanted to ask but for whatever reason they were staying quiet. He opened his mouth, and didn’t have the wherewithal to stop the words from pouring out.
“Nothing. Nothing happened – I was just looking through m- Edward Nashton’s room and I found nothing, absolutely nothing. I just tripped as I was on my way out to tell you that I found nothing, so you should just go on with your search and not waste your time here. Because there’s nothing of note through here whatsoever.”
There was a pause, one in which Ed internally berated himself for the inane drivel he had just spouted. Even a child could have seen through what he had just said.
Harvey was the one to break the silence, “Yeah, I’m not buying it – move it Nygma, we’ve gotta see what’s in there.”
“I just told you what’s in there.”
“Ed…” Jim intoned, giving him a look that told him to cut it out and to let them through. He had no idea what to do – there seemed no possible way to keep them out of the room that didn’t make it insanely obvious that he was far more invested in keeping them out than he had any right to be. He was just working on a plan, a more plausible one than his last appeal, when Harvey shoved him out of the way and pulled the door open, ignoring his panicked cry, and waltzed in.
Ed couldn’t stay; he couldn’t stand it. He knew that they could figure it out – he didn’t hold them in that low regard, and he refused to be there before they did. He couldn’t handle watching them sift through his old belongings that he had loved so dearly, speculating on the life of poor little Edward Nashton. He refused to watch the puzzle pieces click in their minds as they finally understood what had really happened all those years ago, and to see the pity he knew would appear in their eyes, and perhaps the anger too, at his having kept such a secret from them, allowing them to go on a wild goose chase around his hometown in search of a boy who had been within reach all along.
It was all utterly unbearable.
And so, Ed did what he did best and ran away.
He ran past Jim and Lee, ignoring their startled exclamations as he barrelled down the staircase, out onto the front lawn, where nothing ever grew, and he sat on the dry grass, and tried to breathe, reconciling with whatever was going to happen next.
Jim watched with bewildered surprise as Ed bolted past him and Lee towards the stairs. He called out after him, but Ed didn’t even react. He turned to Harvey, “What was that about?”
“I have a feeling we’re about to find out” Harvey called from inside the room, and Jim, curious, followed him in, Lee close behind.
“Wow…”
“Wow, indeed, my friend.” The room, though small, was packed with belongings in almost every available space, and the trio split off to each tackle one part. Jim took the stack of notebooks at the foot of the bed, reasoning that one of them might have acted as a sort of diary for the kid, which could explain what had happened. If he ran away, there might be some sort of plan within them, and if he was killed, an abrupt stop would probably signal that.
Harvey headed for the bookcase, arguing that the more they knew of the kid’s interest the more likely they would have been to know where he would be drawn to in leaving home.
With the detectives taking up most of the space in the little room, Lee focused on the closet, arguing that, as it was around winter when he went missing, the presence of a winter coat would indicate that he hadn’t left of his own volition, or that if he had, he hadn’t gotten very far. What instead caught her eye was the inner walls of the closet, which were covered in drawings and words done in green ink. She tried to track what any one phrase said, but they all seemed to lead into one another, and were borderline nonsensical. The drawings were more obvious: they were clearly family portraits done in the crude hand of a small child – unsmiling stick figures and great severe houses that dwarfed them. At the floor of the closet were a pile of blankets and pillows and it was clear that this had been Edward Nashton’s safe space as a small child. She felt herself get a little choked as she relayed her findings to the other two.
Harvey responded with his own findings: almost every book on the shelf was something to do with some form of science, “above my paygrade” Harvey had claimed, with the exceptions being a few books such as Catch-22 and Catcher in the Rye. He had also found an odd box about the size of a shoebox but made from metal, lego, and wires; it appeared to be some sort of safe, though how to open it was anyone’s guess. Lee had him bring it to her, and, though it took considerable effort and exertion of mental energy, she was just about able to open it. Inside was a green jacket that practically glowed with sequins, and two polaroids. The first was one of Edward Nashton and Antoine Moray as teenagers, their heads pressed together, sporting identically joyful smiles. She looked a little closer at the photo. The framing cut off near the top of the boys’ foreheads and suddenly, Edward Nashton seemed a whole lot more familiar. Tabling that idea for later discussion, she moved on to the second portrait.
In this one, a young Edward Nashton was on stage being presented with an award. It was a book of some kind, with a blue cover and yellow lettering. She wondered if one of his parents had taken the photo, but then, looking closer, she saw them in the audience ahead of the camera holder, recognizing Richard Nashton by his hair alone. It was just such a distinctive shade, one which was visible in his son as well.
“How’re the notebooks coming along Jim?”
“Nothing helpful yet – just a lot of numbers and equations so far. Turns out he really did know pi to the four hundredth digit. Theres a few logic puzzles as well, but nothing’s jumping out so far,”
“Well, keep at it, you’ve only got, what, fifteen more to go through.”
Jim flipped him off and they chuckled slightly, but Lee was still thinking of the polaroid, and the book that little boy was holding. Her gut told her it was important.
“Hey, Harvey, you see any books up there with a blue cover and yellow lettering?”
Harvey parsed through the books once more, and he was just about to say that there weren’t when his eyes caught on the last book on the shelf with the spine so absolutely cracked that it rendered it only half intelligible. He could make out some blue and yellow though and he was just about to pull it out when Jim spoke up.
“Uh, guys?”
“Not now partner, Lee’s got a hunch.” Saying this, he tossed the book to Lee and watched her facial expression morph into mild confusion, then understanding.
“Guys?” Jim called out, and both Harvey and Lee turned to him, with Lee’s own revelation on the tip of her tongue. The pair looked at one another, with Lee holding the book, which was entitled 1001 Riddles to Tell Your Friends, and Jim holding up the fourth notebook in the pile where every line was filled with riddle after riddle.
The looked at one another and simultaneously cursed.
Harvey looked between them, taking a second to understand what was going on, before he spoke.
“Oh my god…”
They paused, as the information sunk in. It seemed so obvious now that they thought about it. It explained everything: Ed’s cagey attitude this whole case, the way he had steadily become more and more twitchy as time passed, the way he had been far more blunt and off-putting here than back at the precinct, it even explained the lack of riddles.
Even the name Edward Nygma now seemed totally ridiculous.
Together the trio raced down the stairs, almost tripping over each other in their haste to get down to Ed. They ran out through the opened front door and found Ed sat in the grass, his head hung and his hands picking at the grass.
He didn’t look up as they came out in front of him.
“You know, then?”
“Yeah, Ed, we know.” Jim told him.
“So, what happens now?”
“Well,” Jim supposed, “we go back to Gotham I think, and we put this case back in the cold case pile.”
Ed looked up at him then, with those baleful brown eyes, those same eyes that had taken a good hard look at his life and known that the only option he had was to leave. Jim extended his hand for Edward to take, and after a moment of hesitation he did, with long thin arms that could no longer quite be described as scrawny, but rather slender, the bruises and scabs now having healed to aches and scars.
Ed looked to Jim as they walked and said, “Can I just ask one thing?”
Jim nodded, not trusting himself to say anything sensible.
“Can I have my photo from the file back?”
Jim smirked and handed him the file. Ed, not sparing a glance at any of the words, plucked the photo from its paperclipped place, and just looked at it, at the image of himself at his happiest, through the lens of someone who had cared for him even when he was Edward Nashton, professional punching bag. He had never had many photos of himself, what with his parentage being what it was and his spending a large portion of his life friendless. In fact, to his knowledge, this was the last one out there (minus the terrible chess club photo), this, the only photo anyone had ever taken of him simply because they wanted to, and holding it now made up for every photograph that he had ever missed.
He tucked the photo gently into his breast pocket as though it were the most precious jewel in the world, and, as he left his old world for the final time, he felt assured, for the first time in his life, that he was not alone.