Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

This is a dream.

Oswald knows it because he can see with both eyes, unaided. The pain in his leg is still there -- unlike his impaired vision which is still relatively new, his chronic leg pain has colored his past as well as his present; his dreams and nightmares as well as his waking life. It sits at his side like a vicious, faithful friend, ready to clamp down at any moment.

The house he's in has two floors, which probably makes this a nightmare rather than a dream. He’s in the vestibule, sitting room to the left, staircase to the second floor just ahead. Scratched hardwood, peeling wallpaper, bland beige on sickly buttercup yellows that were probably once picked for their "homey" decor but have since curdled under the film of nicotine staining the overhead lamps.

This is not his home. This is not any home he has ever known. The furnishings in the sitting room are stained with coffee rings and piled high with discarded newspapers; house flies circle around stacks of dirty dishes. The dirt brown shag carpeting reminds him of a forest floor, matted and stained almost dark red in several large spots; one of them encircling the sharp, splintered corner of a large coffee table. A cuckoo clock mounted on the back wall chimes seven times, slightly off-key and almost sinister. Familiar and not.

It's wrong. This house is wrong in a way that makes his heart preemptively sick.

The family who lives here have presumably gone for the night, perhaps for the week, perhaps for good… A few cursory lamps left on to deter prowlers: one here in the sitting room with the beige plaid sofa and the flickering television. One in the hallway, covered with a tatted lace shade, once pink and now a faded salmon that reminds him of dried, dead roses pressed in books. The kitchen beyond the next archway is unlit, emanating a fathomless dark without guiding shapes that reminds Oswald of a charnel pit or the dark waters of a river he nearly drowned in twice.

The ceiling above him creeks, sending down a small scattering of dust and Oswald finds himself moving toward the stairs, knee aching with each hollow step.

The air on the second floor is thin and stale, the walls covered with uneven primer paint instead of wallpaper and the floor warped slightly from the house settling, giving the length of the narrow hallway a disorienting, “funhouse” effect.

Oswald takes in the hall, the bare nails and shadowed outlines where pictures once hung. Counts the unpainted, particle wood doors, each fitted with a brass, keyed-lock door knob. His eyes widen as he takes in each twist button mechanism facing the hall.

All from the outside, his mind races. Why do all of the doors lock from the outside?

Tap tap.

His thoughts are interrupted by a tapping on one of the doors: second from the end on the left, smaller than the others, facing the length of the hallway. Not a bedroom. Closet.

The door rattles.

Tap tap.

TAP TAP.

His hand passes through the door knob when he tries to grab it, same when he tries turning the lock, heart beating wildly in his throat. His gaze darts from one part of the hall to the other, in search of a bludgeon, a heavy object, something he might be able to grab that would be enough to break the door knob off completely.

There’s nothing.

The tapping is quickly replaced by what sounds like scratching on the floor -- lighter than he remembers his bulldog’s nails being, faster, too; digging in a more urgent cadence. He looks at the floor, scanning the scratched planks for anything he might be alerted to.

Finally, lined up with a crack in the floorboards, he spots a large bobby pin, mouth stretched wide from previous manipulation. Oswald grazes it with the toe of his shoe, gratified when it actually moves, gasping with relief as he edges it along the hardwood and under the closet door.

The scratching on the floor ceases, replaced by the doorknob rattling. He watches, rapt, as the lock wavers, shakily turning after several minutes.

The door swings open and a young boy of ten clumsily tumbles out. Striped shirt, corduroy pants, sandy brown hair trimmed to a bowl cut. Oswald holds his breath as a pair of familiar brown eyes blink sleepily up at him through thick frames.

“Hi, Edward.”

--

The air in Oswald’s lungs is cold as he bolts awake, chest heaving. Already reaching for the pen and pad on his makeshift desk. Arkham’s staff won’t pay attention to any mail that’s not a parcel and the cluttered paragraph has just enough filler to fool Blackgate’s most observant inspectors:

I will bring you home.

Chapter Text

Human brains are meticulous at pattern recognition and applying a narrative where there is none. It's how déjà vu works. It's how love at first sight works. Ed knows this and he recognizes that the tug he feels in his chest when he thinks of fate and contrived coincidence is irrational; that cause and effect exists independent of design or intent. There are no predetermined actions, no knowledge that is innate.

Similarly, dreams are merely a collection of impressions, minutiae, and anomalies the dreamer has observed in their waking life. Medication can make them more vivid, more "real." The wrong medication can make them a little too real.

So, rationally, Ed knows the concrete cell block he finds himself in is a place he's seen before -- if not through his own eyes than someone else's; knows the open space of the large, long hallway is something that was either described to him verbally or laid out in a police report.

The cells have barred doors, unlike Arkham. Chipped lead paint, tiled floor, cinder block walls, everything gray on gray.

Ironic color scheme, he thinks, for a place with ‘BLACK’ in its name.

Panic seizes him and he takes off running. Hurried footfalls rebound off the walls and ceiling, cluttered with loud hollering, the distant organic sound of a baton hitting flesh and bone, the clang of more cages springing shut.

There’s darkness when he turns the corner -- black on gray now. He skids to a stop, feels the cold bite of the wall on the right side of his body, shoulder and ribs aching. There’s a staircase ahead, lit from the lower floors and he dashes for it, heart pounding as he clambers down the steps.

This floor is warmer than the last, quieter. He slows his pace and hears nothing. No beatings, no screams of the pursued or pursuers. Just him, struggling to catch his breath. The doors here are (mercifully) door-shaped, heavier, no bars to reach through, just a single 9” x 9” window at eye level. Ed's gaze is drawn to movement in each cell, vague blurry shapes in his peripherary. He stops dead when he reaches the last door, a familiar figure in a grey uniform shirt and pants already standing up to face him.

Oswald has featured heavily in his dreams since the arrest. This is the first time he’s been wearing his glasses -- not the makeshift bandage, nor the monocle he last saw him wearing. The extended fit frames Ed first modified to rest over the eye patch, then fitted with the correct lenses to accommodate his friend’s resulting eyestrain and anisocoria. He restrained himself from telling the king of Gotham he now had eyes like Ziggy Stardust.

Those eyes lock with his as Oswald moves to stand on the other side of the door, chin tilted up to meet his gaze.

There's a shadow of overlapping memories here: Oswald alive and reaching through the cage to grab him in the Court of Owls, but also that first stay in Arkham; the heavy aversion treatment that erased his beautiful, devious friend and left a smiling, broken bird in his place, beyond Ed's reach.

Before that person had shown up at his door, there had been a hasty, ill-conceived visit to the asylum, under the guise of professional courtesy and his credentials as a forensic investigator; slipping away from his uniformed escort to whisper to his friend, cloistered in a tiny padded cell. A light tap on a similar window. Wide sea glass eyes gazing up at him in recognition, wonder, disbelief. Their hands had brushed through the food slot just for a second... And then Oswald had withdrawn as if burned, voice choked with tears.

"I'm not supposed to..."

He’s never asked what that meant. He doubts Oswald remembers or, if he does, realizes that Ed was actually there and not a hallucination induced by Strange's therapy. But that memory remains; a knife twisted between his floating ribs, forcing the air out of his lungs every time he thinks of it. Jim Gordon doesn’t know -- will likely never know -- how lucky he is to be alive (until one of them is released and solves that problem for him).

There’s no slot to reach through here. He touches the glass instead, eyes stinging as pale fingers silently mirror his own.

This is the image frozen in his mind when the door to his own cell flies open, abruptly dragging him from one nightmare to another.

—

“Ed. A Blackgate inmate by the name of Malcolm Nashton was killed Sunday morning.”

The name of the inmate surprises him and, given Lucius Fox’s grim delivery, it’s meant to. He hasn’t spoken with Malcolm since he was emancipated, hasn’t even seen his old surname in writing since he was nineteen and a disbursement cheque arrived in the mail; delivering the news that his mother had died and the door on his past had slammed shut for good.

Or so he had thought.

“...what was he in Blackgate for?”

“Manslaughter, aggravated battery, two counts,” Lucius pauses. “And child endangerment. One count.”

Repetition compulsion. Exacting. History is cyclical and full of waking nightmares as well as dreams.

“No survivors, I take it...” Ed says. Not Malcolm, nor his victims. Just him. “H-how did he die?”

“Due to the nature of his conviction, he was in protective custody, separated from the general population for the majority of his sentence. Until this week. A fight broke out in the commissary his first morning there. Another inmate beat him to death with a metal tray.”

Messy. Indeed, the photo he grabs from the file before Lucius can stop him shows the lower half of his father’s face reduced to a red and yellowish stain with protruding bones and broken teeth, tongue nearly pulled out and lying in a slack heap over what had once been his jaw; eyes frozen in a confused and frightened stare. The grotesque death mask of a man who used to lock his only son in a closet.

“He never did like people who played with their food.”

He suspects the laughter that bubbles up at the thought is not appreciated. Not by Lucius and definitely not by the guards who turn up to escort him back to his cell.

—

Memories are permeable and as prone to shape-shifting as dreams, signals jammed in the brain; the wrong dose of the wrong medication clouding things further and making the few tangible fixed points even harder to hold on to.          

So if Ed can’t immediately recall telling Oswald about Malcolm or the house on Waterbury Lane, that doesn’t mean anything.

And if he does recall later, in still another dream, the person dearest to him in the whole world holding him as tremors rack his entire body, smoothing damp hair from his forehead and replacing it with his lips, the soft scratch of gauze... well, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything either.

But the last letter that arrives for a while — one of his own envelopes  RTS ’ed from Blackgate, with Oswald’s handwriting newly scrawled on the back of the last page — is pretty damning:

Happy Birthday, Edward.

Do you believe in fate?

Chapter Text

April 1

Happy Birthday, Edward.

Do you believe in fate? My accommodations were recently moved to the protective custody wing and I find myself ruminating on it constantly, with only myself and the ceiling for company 23 hours a day. Communications with the other prisoners is limited -- no doubt our esteemed GCPD’s means of restricting my operations and breaking my spirit (“credible threat to my life,” indeed). Still I rise, day in and day out – my neighbors, familiar and few; our interactions minimal and regimented. Reach out to me as you have before – our correspondence may be slowed for some time, however my lawyer, Jean, has voiced her willingness to relay any messages between us. You would probably like her (very smart, suffers no fools; a word-perfect knowledge of human rights law that has kept me out of solitary for almost nine years).

Your last few letters have been a great comfort, though both the type and the amount of medication you said that they have you on is troubling to me. Father spoke to me often of our family melancholy and I do feel that in myself, as well as other, more extreme emotions at the fore. Is that enough to consider me an expert? Here, as in Arkham, probably not. But Not in a manner that is helpful (to myself or to you, given the distance between us), though I want you to know that I’m interested. For the future, for our future. Long as we can make it, for as long as you’ll have me.

I’m still quite lost without you – that has not changed; defiant but bereft. Not without sunnier moments or small comforts – my last birthday netted me a little tin of caviar, a bar of Belgian chocolate, a well-worn, much-loved collection of poetry – but I find myself missing you more each day. Dreaming about the day when we’re both free from this darkness. This connection between us has held for so long and for that I’m so grateful. Time is on our side, my friend.

Yours,
Oswald

[Enclosed: a page torn from a paperback book, containing “ Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom” by Dorothy Parker, a page from a previous letter, several words underlined in red ink, the first passage reads “ Your face...picked a lock on everything that ever frightened me... you have never been like Malcolm, Oswald... You set me free.” ]

Chapter Text

The safe house in Midtown is accessible from an alley on 5th street. The storefront and office levels are both locked down with the lights off when the two of them duck inside the emergency door. They have the choice of a keyed service elevator or three flights of stairs. Edward's heart clenches when Oswald produces a short brass key from his pocket and the industrial steel doors slide shut. Sense memories abound with the creak of ancient cables and the smell of rust and textile dyes.

"Did your kidnappers give you a phone by chance?" Oswald asks him when the overhead fluorescents hum to life, flickering a little and making the glitter on both their jackets strobe off the walls of the elevator. (His desire to shine like a disco ball is not recent, but like so many other things, recently acknowledged and fiercely embraced.)

He pats down his coat pockets, fishing out the ancient WayneTech brick and passing it to his partner. 

"This won't set off a detonator will it?"

"If it does, the GCPD's evidence locker is about to go up."

"No great loss there," Oswald chuckles darkly and the grin on Edward’s face broadens even further. It’s been so long since he’s heard his best friend’s laugh. His best friend, his favorite person. The King of Gotham. Currently typing furiously.

"What are you texting?"

"Just a quick message to Selina,” he replies, hitting the green button with a still-gloved thumb before passing the phone back. “Informing her that we're even."

"Even?"

"A little birdy told me about a very expensive diamond that would be in exhibition the week before the Wayne Tower opening. A quick power failure at the first venue ensured that it was moved to a location with a security system she was more familiar with."

"And for that she gave you..."

"Which exit the police would be using."

“Nice.”

“Thirteen months in protective custody. I had ample time for creative reorganization.” 

Ed isn’t surprised. Oswald has always been adaptive. And it likely helped to have a cohort with extensive experience breaking in to prison.

The elevator shudders to a stop at the top floor. Oswald leads him down a narrow, dark hallway, a red haze of emergency bulbs lighting their way. One more door, one more key in Oswald’s pocket, the lock turns, the door swings inward and he’s ushered inside with a hand at the small of his back.

Everything in Arkham was cramped and dark or bright and sterile, penned in or stripped and spread for prying eyes. The prying eyes were bad enough, the long silences were worse. Hours into days into weeks of no one talking to him, no one engaging him directly, his intellect rotting. He’d palmed a pen after one particularly brutal examination before being thrown back into solitary. Wiling away the minutes and hours drawing and writing in the light folds of his uniform: question marks, the scientific formula for strychnine, a line from Dorothy Parker. All the things he wanted to say face to face, denied in another lost year of a lost decade in smeared, bleeding ink:

I was carried into a dark room and set on fire. I wept until there was nothing left of me but smoke. What am I?

I am free yet priceless, you can't own me but you can use me. You can't keep me but you can spend me. Once you have lost me you can never have me back. What am I?

“Ed?”

He blinks and his breath catches in his throat as he takes in his surroundings.

The safehouse is a loft space, twice the size of his old apartment at 805 Grundy. One room, exposed brick walls with a tin moulded ceiling and a dark hardwood floor. Ed spends a long moment scanning and cataloguing everything he sees: here a plush chaise in dark velvet, there a walnut coffee table. A cobbler’s bench next to a standing Tiffany lamp. A kitchenette with cabinets full of stainless steel dishware and a fridge with a glass door. A king size bed is draped with his quilt. There’s an en suite with a shower, but in one corner he also spots a claw footed bathtub behind a decorative standing screen. Ed is abruptly aware that this place has been painstakingly arranged on Oswald’s orders from inside Blackgate. All of the things he loves from every place he’s ever lived.

Home away from home.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s incredible,” Ed says, blinks back tears before he can see. “I love it.”

Oswald beams.

“I’m glad. We’re going to be here for a few days at least. Until Jean can get your release from Arkham sorted.”

“How?”

“Well, the original plan was to get you transferred to the hospital. Some ‘grievous injury’ that those halfwits clearly missed in the aftermath of the riot. Followed by a conditional release once you were deemed fit to return home,” he says, with a dramatic vigor that makes Ed smile. 

Setting aside his own tendency toward paranoia, the spate of chaos was, in retrospect, a clear construction of someone’s design. The riots, hunger strikes, and recent staff upheavals had caused basic services to be delayed as resources were continuously re-routed. Therapy hours had been “temporarily” suspended for more than three weeks -- both individual and group sessions. Inmates were released from their rooms for meals and socialization in the commissary area with no consistency to the schedule. If anyone remembered to pull certain patients to issue their medication, it was just as easily forgotten for the others. 

Ed’s last dose of thorazine was nine days ago. He recalls the drowsy edges replaced by a manic intensity and touch sensitivity that made even light on his skin too much to bear. He’s very happy that had worn off before he’d seen Oswald (and before the two of them had been roped to the top of a lampost). 

He is prepared to dwell on the thought for a while longer. Until Oswald removes his top hat, setting it and his pilfered umbrella on a cushioned bench. Ed’s eyes track his partner’s movements, elegance restored as he settles in to his new domain.

“However,” he continues, reclining on the chaise, “given what you told me, I’m thinking at this point we should leverage your abduction -- and your abductors’ vicious attempt to frame you -- along with the deplorable conditions at a notorious asylum that allowed itself to crumble under infiltration and patient unrest.” 

“I love the way your mind works. Have I told you that?”

“Once or twice. You’re staring.”

“Am I?”

He is. Has been, apart from the hours they were roped and cuffed back to back. He can’t help it, hasn’t been able to since that cop shoved him into the back of the limousine. His friend is fulsome and gorgeous and appears to have thrived in Blackgate as he never did in Arkham. It’s a relief. 

It’s intoxicating. 

Ed shrugs, reaching over to brush his fingers along his shoulder.

“I told you this would look good.” 

“This” meaning the jacket; the purple glitter as a main piece instead of an accent, made to shimmer in low lighting, specifically the dim setting of Gotham’s rebuilt opera house. In a rare moment of renewed trust, Oswald had given Ed the responsibility of handling their order with the tailors; a pair of outfits befitting a first “frivolous” evening out in the ascendant, joyous days after reunification. They had dressed separately, planning to meet up before the show. Before the GCPD and Jim Gordon had swooped in, routing them both through separate arrests, arraignments, and transport, ensuring that one never caught sight of the other. Until three hours ago.

“Yes you did,” Oswald smiles, eyes sparkling as he sits forward. “Although, I am going to take it off now. I’ve been wearing it all day and it’s a bit more... close-fitting than it was ten years ago.”

“Do you want some help?” He asks, kicking away any remaining hesitation, relieved when Oswald nods. 

“Please.”

He kneels on the floor in front of the chaise, peeling Oswald out of his leather gloves first and then the jacket. Ed lays them neatly on the cushioned bench, fingers instinctively moving on to the too-tight waist coat. Oswald’s fingers rake through his hair, making him fumble with the chain briefly.

“Your fringe is a bit long on this side,” he smiles. “Did you cut it yourself?”

“Whoever absconded with me left me a shaving kit with my clothes,” he says, scalp tingling and voice thick as he switches to the grey silk-covered buttons. “I guess I rushed the job a bit.”

“It looks like you rushed it a lot .” The smirk in Oswald’s own voice chokes off as the last button slips free, replaced by a relieved exhale. 

“I was anxious to see you.” The soft swell of belly is lovely and Ed finds himself leaning in. Gratified when Oswald’s arm slides across his back, trapping him between pillowy warmth and skilled, delicate hands pushing at his own tailcoat until it slides from his shoulders and onto the floor.

People often shake me or slap me. I can get dirty, I can get clean. Hold me for safety, hold me in fear, hold me when your heart is at its most tender. What am I?

“They signed your name... but the letter was typed. I should have known.” A soft thigh and Oswald’s good knee brackets his rib cage and it feels like a brace keeping him vertical as his head swims.

Every other communication had been handwritten, with Oswald’s coded language and appalling penmanship. But it had been more than a year since that last letter, and he had been so desperate to believe.

Oswald’s other hand comes up to cup the side of his neck, forcing Ed to meet his eyes.

“I’m right here.” Not a lie. Not a hallucination or a memory. 

“I dreamt about you,” he says, voice rough, breathing shallow at the revelation and the way Oswald tugs him close in reaction. 

They haven’t done this. Have never discussed this, not overtly. 

Things had shifted in the year after the blown bridges, and again in the months after the submarine and the barricade. Regrouping. Altering course. A return to form and not quite -- it was a different time. They were different. They were always at their best working towards a shared goal. From escape, they moved on to recovering the contents of the sub, rehousing the manor, working on developments in the Diamond District, always together without question.

They had been fast friends, fierce enemies overnight. Everything else had kept to its own gentle (nay, glacial) pace.

A quiet evening in and one conversation would have put all their mutual cards on the table. Ed, for his part, had been having too much fun pulling them out one at a time with simple gestures and shared looks. He’d held Oswald’s hand during a critical medical appointment. Oswald had made tea and comforted him after a particularly brutal nightmare, letting him cry himself to sleep pillowed on his left shoulder. They had grown up quite a lot, both together and apart. Both of their romantic inclinations tended toward long courtship and they had earned the right to take their time. 

He doesn’t want to take his time now. There’s a heat low in his belly that’s been building since Oswald interrupted his arrest, filling every part of him now as his partner‘s meticulous hands continue to divest him of his own clothing (ahead of him, as usual; though Ed makes an effort to catch up quickly). Fingers slip the knots loose on their ties, undoing shirt buttons. He pushes at Oswald’s undershirt, progress stalled as his own busy hands prevent him from tugging it off over his head. The skin at Oswald’s sternum is warm on Ed’s face, but the fingers pulling his shirt from his trousers are ice cold. He shimmies out of the black button-up and moves even closer, wrapping his arms around his friend’s thickset waist, reveling in his solidity and strength. 

“Locked up inside you and yet they can steal it. Hurts when broken, stops when you’re dead... You smell amazing.” 

Oswald laughs, his usual distaste for Ed’s riddles missing.

“I’m pretty sure I smell like the docks and the back of a police van, but thank you,” he leans down, resting his forehead against Ed’s brow, voice dropped to a near whisper. “My heart. Is that the answer?” 

“Better than me. I smell like a filthy warehouse.” He’d been lucky to grab a shower in the sink at the Wayne Tower facilities, little more than a quick rub down with cold water and sterile hand soap. The trace notes of Oswald’s cologne have at least lingered under his sweat and pheromones, lemongrass and sandalwood sharp under the salt and grit. He slides a hand between them, covering his partner’s chest below the rucked up tank top. “My heart.”

“Can I kiss you?” Oswald asks, still whispering, eyes misty.

“Please,” Ed replies, his own eyes abruptly watery. “If you don’t, I might die.”

Oswald does.

Chapter Text

The bath tub is large enough to fit both of them. 

Oswald washes Ed’s newly trimmed hair, blunt fingernails lightly scratching his scalp, careful to navigate around the sensitive area left by Selina’s blow. The water is warm, fragrant with a trace of calendula, chamomile flowers, Epsom salts, blissful. 

It’s a reversal of sorts for them (and not), a mirror of Ed’s doting in the months after that last injury. Edward always wanted to care for those he idolized and, for as long as he’d known him, Oswald had wanted nothing more to be shelter and shroud for this man, to repay his kindness and affection without even thinking he could be cared for himself. They‘d mastered the pattern eventually. 

His tall partner leans back into his shoulder, eyes closed, a contented sigh on his lips.

“I like this.”

“I can tell. We should probably go right to bed after this, I think,” he says, wincing at an aching muscle in his shoulder. Early morning daylight is starting to peek in through the windows, overcast and cozy, skyline cloaked in soothing grays and blues. He’s been awake for almost 24 hours and he’s acutely aware that Edward has been up for at least that long, if not longer. 

“No,” Ed says, contrary as a toddler, like he’s not cradled against Oswald’s chest in a swoon. “I know the answer to this… one.”

“You just lost the word for ‘riddle .’ Far from your best argument for not going to bed.”

“If I go to bed, I’ll sleep.“

“That’s rather the point.“

“If I go to sleep, I could wake up somewhere else.”

There's a somber note in there than makes Oswald lean down, pressing his face in the curve of neck and shoulder (his favorite place).

“Not a chance. There’s a security team, three locked doors and a very tenacious attorney between us and anyone who would come for you. You’re not going anywhere.”

Ed giggles. “Is that a threat, Mr. Penguin?”

“It’s a promise. Unless you want it to be a threat, then we can probably make an arrange--”

Ed kisses him and he promptly loses his train of thought. 

His partner has more experience in this area but is generous with his time and subtle direction. They've only been together for four hours, making up for lost minutes and hours, months and years. Ed’s eyes are open when he pulls away, warm and dark, fixed on Oswald with a tenderness that makes him shudder.

“I like this birthday a lot better.”

“I‘m glad,” he says, brushing his lips against Ed’s temple, across on a sharp cheekbone, the hand at his waist sliding down to a sharp hip. 

A decade of inhibitions have been swept aside; if he’s overly tactile… grabby… at least he’s not alone. After ten years of being denied simple touch, who could blame either one of them? Consent has been established (enthusiastically). Boundaries will need to be negotiated soon enough.  

“I’m sorry it was so late.”

“It’s okay. The only thing I got on the actual day was a riot.” It feels good to laugh. “That… probably wasn’t a mistake.”

“Most likely not. Are you sore at all?”

“From the riot? Or..?” a hint of a smirk.

Oswald blushes.

On this matter, he could tally his experience in five-year benchmarks: ten years since he was sent to Blackgate. Thirty years since puberty told him looking at men might be a predilection of his but sleeping with them might not be. Fifteen years since he’d met Edward and learned his first assumption had been more complex than he could have guessed at the time. A lifetime to read up and cultivate a rich fantasy life to be cherished in solitude. Still, the reality of Ed had managed to surprise him: long and elegant, pupils dilated and gasping as he let himself be maneuvered here and there, hands on his hips, under his knees, mouth hot and wet… 

“Either. Both.”

“Nothing lasting from the riot,” Ed replies. “My arms still aren’t crazy about getting tied to the lamppost or taking that tumble from the van. But everything else is… good.”

“Good?”

“Better than good. ” he smiles, broad and devastating. The bob at his throat, which Oswald learned a long time ago means Ed’s feelings have sneaked up on him— too large for his body to contain; wants to say more but can’t, the words stuck somewhere between his head and his mouth.

Oswald leans in to brush a peck across his lips, soft and lingering.

“Me too.”

Getting fully naked is as nerve wracking for him as it ever was. Always awkward physically, now hyperware of injuries and scars and the steep slope of belly he had watched swell exponentially in prison; particularly in the last year when his major physical activity was limited to an hour a day. Worry for the latter evaporates quickly each time Ed’s hands grope and stroke his skin, visibly delighted, even reverent. He smiles as Ed shifts up in the bath, arranging limbs so he’s perched in his lap. Touching and grabbing and clinging to him like he’s worth something, everything . A fulcrum made to shift the weight of the world as their combined weight displaces some of the water onto the floor.

“Okay,” Ed breathes against his ear, “I’m going to need a lot more of this.”

“You can have it,” Oswald says, equally breathless. As ever, anything Ed wants, he can have. “It’s yours.”

“I wrote to you. Did they stop your mail in protective custody?”

“They didn’t -- that was the troubling part. I had meetings with Jean and she was able to send any outgoing mail I didn’t want them getting their filthy paws on. When I didn’t hear back from you, I started to worry. She said she went to Arkham half a dozen times in the last year but couldn’t get clearance to see you.”

“Intercepted.”

He nods. “Probably by whoever grabbed you yesterday.”

“Rude.”

“Extremely.”

“It’s probably just as well. I don’t know how coherent many of them were. Those cretins had me on seven different medications at one point. They couldn’t decide if I was bipolar, dissociative, or had PTSD.”

“Idiots.“

“I know,” he laughs, strokes damp hair off Ed‘s forehead, leaning in until their brows are touching.

“In my last letter, I told you that your next birthday present was going to be a few weeks late.”

He pauses; remembering the letter, the handoff to Jean, the happy coincidence of the prison’s tiny protective custody wing. Most significantly, he remembers an antsy warden who decided delivering a list of potential candidates he would be “happy” to swap out for the king of Blackgate was less dangerous than the surprise move that Harvey Dent and the GCPD had planned for maximum disruption later in the week. 

Oswald had recognized the name Malcolm Nashton halfway down the list: a shadow of a dream, memories and fears and night terrors both his and not his. He had remembered soft lips, blood smeared into a sorrowful frown, rasping against purple and black wool:

“I used my first lock pick to scratch my name into the wall.”

He had waited two days, one phone call, and an emergency visit from Barbara before making his decision .

The suburbs of Gotham had slipped the noose of post-reunification disaster capitalism, the great expense and limited return leaving the majority of the poorer neighborhoods fallow, including Waterbury Lane. At his behest, the rising queen of real estate used her considerable resources to locate the correct house. The polaroids she returned with mirrored enough familiar details to give him pause (the worst being the interior of the second-floor closet; a broken light bulb revealing four too-close walls laden with numerous scratches, crude drawings, and several early iterations and spellings of his beloved’s name); anguish, heartsick. A decade of waking nightmares. Memories that were not his but were as much a part of him as his skin. 

“I take it we’re buying a house?” Barbara asked, laying a delicate hand on his wrist. 

“Buy it. Burn it down.”

“I can do the first one.” 

For the second, she commissioned a demolitions crew (Selina would later deliver a second set of polaroids three weeks into his tenure in protective custody, showing him the remains; the half acre little more than a smoldering crater between two boarded-up mid-century bungalows). Decision made, he’d circled the name on the warden’s list in red ink and made sure word got out that a wife beater and child murderer was being gift-wrapped and delivered to the general population; ensuring that he would receive an appropriate welcome.

“I… loved my present. And I am in awe of you, still.”

“I can’t take credit for all of it,” he replies, pulling Ed impossibly closer, “but I did make sure to thank our old friend, Jim, for his timing.”

The thanks had been non-verbal, no admissions made: just a smirk in the direction of a two-way mirror in a prison interrogation room. Commissioner Gordon stuck with a dead body in a maximum security facility and the only suspect in a cell where he had had him locked away. A minor scandal for the notoriously short memories of the citizenry, but he knew it chafed at their old mutual colleague to lose and lose so transparently. As much a present to himself as to Edward. 

“When I say I dreamt about you, it was before that happened.”

“I dreamt about you, too. I wondered at times how much of it was things you actually told me and how much might have... been you. Or how much was me losing my mind.”

“Your mind is too magnificent to lose. And telepathy isn’t real.”

“Are we so sure?” he replies, cheekily. “What am I thinking right now?“

Ed’s eyes flash mischievously. He mimes as though he’s concentrating, fingers laid at his temple before moving to cover his lover’s mouth. 

“Unrepeatable.”

Oswald splashes him and Ed, laughing, chases his hand with his lips. Together for four hours and kissing already has a way of escalating quickly. Oswald smirks, pushing at the giggling man in his lap, splashing still more water on to the floor.

“Bed. Now.”

“Yes sir.”

—

This is a dream. 

He knows because he opens his eyes and he's at 805 Grundy; the green neon sign flashing like a beacon through the dingy skylight. All of his mornings in hiding were like night, but cozy underneath his rescuer's quilt. When his father made his suit for him later, Oswald had told him that green was a lucky color and hoped, one day, he might be able to tell him why. 

The turntable's on; an old jazz record playing over what sounds like rainfall but is far too loud and steady. Ed's shower. He follows the sound, noting his suddenly nude body, the lack of pain in his leg, and throbbing in his once-bandaged shoulder. The door to the tiny en suite swings open, revealing Ed’s lean, equally nude form already facing him under a spray of water.

“No lock on the bathroom door,” he says, marveling at the cloud of steam that warms his face, every part of him.

“It never had one. There’s no closets in the new place,” he says, lips quirked at the dual meaning.

“Quite unnecessary,” Oswald smiles. “You said there was no such thing as telepathy.”

“There isn’t. This is clearly an elaborate fiction of my brain.” 

“Oh really?” A glance down; he follows the path of Ed’s eyes gazing somewhere in the lower mid-section of his waist and flanks, then lower. The blush on his face lost in the warmth of the shower.

“Created from pattern recognition and erratic neurotransmitters.”

“Uh huh,” he says, feeling long, curious fingers replacing dark eyes on his skin.

“I didn’t say we couldn’t enjoy it.”

Laughter is as easy as breathing, even in a dream. He clings to Ed under the spray as they take full advantage of the warmth and shared space in this familiar place. Sweet and strong. 

“Is this what you dreamt about before?”

Ed hesitates, certainty of joyous fiction suddenly lost.

“We were…”

“What, Ed?”

“What did ‘I’m not supposed to’ mean? In Arkham?”

Oswald’s heart stops, abruptly cold even in such a warm embrace. Further proof that this is both a dream and not. 

He hadn’t remembered Ed’s appearance in Arkham. Not Ed the convicted murderer or serial killer on the run, hiding in plain sight. Ed Nygma, the forensic tech, who used his police credentials to bluff his way inside a place he would later do anything to escape. A friendly face reaching across a physical barrier to give him a bit of hope… only for Strange’s therapy to swamp it with impending doom. When he did recall it at the edges of his consciousness, it seemed more like a hallucination than a memory, borne of ancient fears as well as more recent ones. 

“...‘Not supposed to touch.’” The reasons were myriad, but mostly because he was dirty and his sweetest friend needed to reclaim his light, away from where Oswald could contaminate him. Such was the madness he had endured in a place meant to cure him of his alleged ills and make him fit for civilized society. 

Ed reaches out, pulling him closer under the spray, physically placing his hands on his hips as if to say ‘you can’ and  ‘please do.’ 

Oswald pulls him close, bathed in relief as Ed’s chin rests on his head, fingers in his hair. Worth something, worth everything.

“What did you dream?” he asks, chest light as he breathes into his neck. “About me?”

”Not this, unfortunately,” Ed replies, throat bobbing. “I could see you but I couldn’t… feel you. Couldn’t touch. You were alone and trapped and I couldn’t get you out.”

“You did though.” Ed had picked the lock on both their cuffs and freed them from a moving police van, had plucked the daggers from his heart, one by one. And after the fallout of everything else, had seen something in him loving and forgiving. He remembers their letters, Ed’s words, how he used borrowed expressions to mirror similar feelings and loosen the constriction around his throat. “You... set me free.”

Ed’s smile -- and knowing he will wake up to see it tomorrow -- is worth the wait.