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Ed’s lungs were disappearing, shrinking away into nonexistence. There was no other possible explanation. They were squeezing tighter and tighter, getting smaller and smaller, and soon there would be no room left for air. The only sound in the room was the rapid and rhythmic clamour of his beating heart. Everything around him looked strange: it was as if there was a white border on his field of vision, growing larger and larger and blocking out the world, until it would inevitably swallow it whole. The all-encompassing mist was flooding his vision so quickly and thoroughly that Ed wasn’t sure of where he was anymore. And he couldn’t breathe.
✧✸✧
Oswald watched in a panic as Ed collapsed onto the museum floor. They were halfway through the robbery when it happened...although Oswald wasn’t entirely sure what it was. Edward had been so excited earlier, cheerfully spouting off fact after fact about the architect whose plans were being put on display at the museum; he was fascinated by the man’s ideas on how to use nature in the design of houses and excited by the implications that those ideas could be applied to hide a safehouse or a secret base of operations in plain sight. Oswald wasn’t quite as fascinated, but a simple museum robbery was a small price to pay to see the utter joy on Edward’s face when they procured the book of original notes and the blueprints. There had been a slight hiccup in the plan as they were making their escape, but it was nothing too abnormal or concerning. A janitor had seen them as they were approaching the balcony they planned to use for their exit. The solution to that problem had been a bullet between the eyes and then it should have been over...but it wasn’t. Ed had shot the man, and, as they passed his body, promptly started having what seemed to be a full-fledged physical or mental breakdown—possibly both.
Oswald stood frozen, staring at the man in front of him, completely at a loss as to how he could help him. Ed had dropped to his knees and was now clutching at his throat, desperately gasping for air with wide, terrified eyes as he mumbled broken and incoherent words.
“Ed? Eddie?” Oswald called out, taking a tentative step towards the shaking man.
That’s when he heard the sirens.
“Damn,” he muttered under his breath. “Come on, Ed. Can you hear me? We need to get out of here,” he coaxed in a soft voice, gently placing his hand on Ed’s arm, “The police are coming. We need to make sure they don’t see you. Can you come with me, Ed?...Ed? Damn it! We need to get out of here!”
◈
“Ed! Damn it! We need to get out of here! Now get your sorry ass off the floor and try to wake your mother,” his father growled as the sound of sirens in the distance broke the eerie calm of the balmy spring night.
Ed scrambled off the floor, tripping as he rushed up the tall stairs of the unfamiliar building. He carefully wove between stacks of garbage and various bodies—he honestly didn’t know if they were dead or alive—towards the back room his father had reappeared from only moments before. Ed watched the floor more than the room ahead of him after he passed the threshold; he knew from experience that in the dim lighting you could only truly focus on one thing at a time, and he didn’t want to step on glass or needles. He just barely avoided tripping over the bare feet of a man dressed in a winter coat, hat, and gloves. As he reached the center of the room, Ed squinted out into the darkness trying to pick out his mother’s slender frame in the spiritless heap of bodies collected around the room.
He picked out a shape towards the left corner of the room he thought to be most fitting of how he remembered his mother’s frame, if a bit more gaunt—though it had been nearly six weeks since he’d last seen her, so weight loss wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. His small feet pattered delicately across the floor towards the limp body on the mattress in the corner. The old wood squeaked beneath him as he squatted down and placed a hand on the sleeping woman’s shoulder.
“Lore Nashton?” he whispered.
“Hmm?” the woman groaned, not opening her eyes.
“Mom? It’s me. It’s Edward.”
With a groan the woman rolled over to face him, cracking her eyes open just enough to make out the shape in front of her. After what felt like hours of silence, but was likely only a few seconds, her eyes shot open and she inhaled sharply, surging into a sitting position and grabbing Edward’s arm with shaking hands.
“Eddie? Du bist hier?” Her weak voice was at odds with her alarmed expression and the vice-grip she had on her son’s arm.
“Yes, Mom. I’m here.”
“Warum bist du hier? Wo ist hier? Wann sind wir hergekommen?”
“That isn’t important right now,” Ed replied calmly, only to notice his mother’s pained expression. She was likely struggling to switch from her native-tongue to English. It was always hard for her to switch between languages when she was on the drugs, so he tried again, “Nichts davon ist im Moment wichtig. Können wir bitte Englisch sprechen?”
“Yes, yes. I’m sorry,” she slurred after a moment, her accent making the words almost indecipherable, as she looked up at Ed with bleary eyes, “You are going to tell me what is happening?”
“Later. I promise. Can you stand?” Ed offered his hand. Lore’s skeletal fingers laced through her son’s as she pulled herself up onto trembling legs. Despite nearly having to bend her body to a ninety degree angle to do so, she leaned on her son for support as they staggered from the room together. Despite his mother’s emaciated figure, Edward still had a hard time supporting the adult woman who was nearly twice his size while also guiding her out of the cramped room, making sure neither of them stepped on needles, beer bottles, or bodies.
“Let me help you,” a voice offered from somewhere in the corner of Ed’s mind. He accepted without a second thought, immediately finding his mother’s weight easier to bear.
◈
“Let me help you,” Oswald said as he hoisted Ed up, draping the taller man’s arm around his shoulder to provide some sort of support, “Can you hold the blueprints for me, dear?” he inquired, trying to put the blueprints in his incoherent companion’s limp hand. The papers slipped from Edward’s grasp—or lack thereof—almost instantaneously. The Penguin groaned as he bent over to retrieve the blueprints from the ground, opting to shove them, rather indelicately, in the waistband of his pants, instead of trying to get his delirious partner to keep them safe. Oswald began to narrate his actions aloud, hoping that it would rouse Ed from whatever stupor he was in, or at least be somewhat comforting if the man came to, “Alright, Eddie. We’re just going to go outside. Doesn’t that sound nice? Fresh air might be good for you.”
◈
“We’re just going to go outside. Fresh air will be good for you,” Ed promised his mother as he wheedled her out the door of the decrepit drug den. She nodded her assent, attempting to respond but getting no further than a weak hum of approval.
Edward tugged his mother’s arm, sitting her down on the edge of one of the steps leading up to the dilapidated house and taking a seat beside her as they waited for his father’s beat up truck to turn the corner and pick them up. The sirens Ed had heard in the distance several minutes earlier seemed to be getting closer, though still some distance away.
His mother pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of the threadbare denim jacket she had on and lit it. Lore puffed out the dreadful, stifling smoke from her lungs after taking a long drag of her cigarette. “What day is it?”
“Friday, May 3rd. Five weeks, six days, nine hours, and twenty-three minutes since I last saw you,” Edward replied dispassionately after a brief glance to his little pocket watch—a tiny treasure he had gotten for a dollar fifty at a thrift store he visited with his grandmother a few weeks prior. He kept his gaze straight ahead, staring out at the country field, illuminated only by the stars, moon, and the faint glow of porch light that reached a few feet into the tall grass.
“Ed?” Lore questioned, “Are you okay? You seem...Your mind is on other things, yes?”
Edward knew his mother was concerned. He could feel her discerning gaze boring through his skull without even looking over...And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to care. He felt so distant, like he wasn’t truly there with her. He was far away, letting his mouth and body run on auto-pilot. He didn’t need to control it; someone else was taking care of that. It was nice. Relaxing, even.
“Eddie?” Lore tried again.
“I’m tired. You understand,” Ed heard himself reply, but he was fairly certain he hadn’t actually said those words.
“I do.” They sat in silence for a few more moments, before Lore attempted to break the ice, “Your birthday is soon. Are you excited?”
Ed felt himself shrug.
“It is this week, correct?”
“It was last week. You missed it.” Edward definitely hadn’t said that. He looked around, trying to determine the source of the voice so eerily similar to his own. Ed wasn’t on the porch...He had to be on the porch. How could he not be on the porch? But as he looked around, it became clearer and clearer to Ed that he wasn’t on the porch. Instead, Ed found himself in a dark room, the walls gray or black—he couldn’t tell which. There were no windows, doors, or lights. The room was empty, aside from a strange device near the front of it. He wasn’t with his mother, either. He could see her, sure, but it was through a sort of screen—almost like watching a movie. As he walked closer to the contraption, which sat just below the screen, Ed could hear a distant conversation between his mother and some...imposter—
“I did? Edward I am so sorry. I did not mean to—”
“I know you didn’t, Mom. It’s fine.”
“No, it is not fine, Edward! I cannot believe I did this to you! I am so, so sorry. It will never happen again, I promise.”
—but he was too focused on solving the puzzle of where he was to pay much attention. Ed had just reached the apparatus below the screen—it appeared to be some sort of control panel—when he heard the imposter say something that was distinctly dissonant to the way Edward would typically respond to his mother in this type of situation, which, up until now, the fraud had not made the mistake of doing—
“Yes, it will.”
“What?” Lore asked. When Ed looked up at the screen he saw her face, hurt and confusion painted across it in vibrant colors.
“You can lie to me, lie to yourself, all you want, but we both know you won’t remember this conversation once you’ve sobered up. You’ll realize you missed it again tomorrow. You’ll feel bad for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and then you will forget about. And next year you will decide, again, that your time will be better spent getting your next fix than it will be spent celebrating your son’s birthday. We will spend my twelfth birthday apart, just as we did my tenth and eleventh, because I am not your priority. I understand that.” The imposter sounded so matter-of-fact, so completely and totally unaffected by stating the truth Ed knew he himself would never admit. Why had the imposter said that? Why would he hurt Ed, hurt Mom, like that?
Ed swiveled around, his eyes searching the room frantically for a way out, a way back to his mother. And then he saw something. At the far end of the control panel Ed could faintly make out a tall, thin shape. It was a person. He ran across the room—it felt so far; the room hadn’t seemed this large before. Why was it so large all of a sudden?
“Hey!” Ed shouted at the figure as he continued to close the distance between them. As Ed approached the person at the control panel, he saw a body on the floor beside it. The body looked just like Ed—specifically, it looked exactly like Ed had when he won first prize at the Hilltop Elementary Science Fair last year—and he seemed to be unconscious? Sleeping? It was terrifying to see, but Ed didn’t have time to be afraid right now. He needed to get back in control. Ed looked up to the person who must have been controlling him, only a few feet away now, calling out in as strong a voice as he could muster.
“Hey! Did you do this?” Edward pointed to his body on the floor, assuming as commanding a presence as he could muster.
The figure turned to face Ed, revealing his face and calculating expression. He seemed to be confused, but not shocked, a cold distraction blended into the mild surprise. Ed knew that look well: It was the look he himself got when something didn’t work the way he’d expected—in fact, it was the exact look Ed got when something didn’t work the way he’d expected, because, not only had this imposter seized control of Ed’s body, but he had stolen Ed’s face as well.
“What are you doing here?” the imposter inquired, vague amusement lacing his puzzled tone.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here?” Ed supposed that wasn’t his best comeback, but it would have to do.
The imposter just stared at Ed, seemingly working something out in his head. He looked so much like Ed, but he definitely wasn’t Ed. There were things, little things, that gave him away for the counterfeit he was. His eyes were dark and cold and calculating, unlike the warm expressiveness of Ed’s eyes. He carried himself differently than Ed did, a bit too confidently, and he was a little taller—though, that may have been due to the fact that he was standing up straight, not trying to curl into himself to reduce the size of the target that always seemed to be painted on Ed’s chest. He seemed to be slightly older than Ed, too, and had a more muscular, though still narrow, physique. Ed found it...strange, unsettling even, to look at the fraud in front of him. He wondered if his mother could tell the difference.
“She’s too high to notice,” the imposter muttered in response to Ed’s unvoiced question, clearly still distracted. How did he know what Ed was thinking?
“Ed?” a voice called up. It was Ed—Well, the other Ed, the one who had been passed out on the floor.
“...Yes?” Ed whispered. He felt so disoriented. What was happening?
“How are you here?” Other-Ed sounded bewildered.
“I—” Edward froze. He didn’t know how he was here. He didn’t even know where ‘here’ was.
“Ed?” his clone on the floor asked again.
“Ed?” Lore’s voice called from the distance.
“You shouldn’t be here,” the imposter declared with finality. Suddenly, Ed felt himself being shoved back, back, back.
◈
“You shouldn’t be here!” a man exclaimed when Oswald threw open the door to the upscale tailor shop. Oswald ignored him, turning to drag Ed’s limp frame into the store behind him and close and lock the door behind them. “We’re closed!” the employee protested.
“Well, that’s wonderful. This way we won’t be disturbed,” Oswald snapped, turning on the man with his gun drawn.
“I-I don’t want any trouble,” the man stammered, raising his trembling, gloved hands in a show of surrender.
“Nor do I,” Oswald replied with a smug smile.
“Oswald?” Ed’s groggy voice croaked.
“Ed?!” Oswald spun around, relief flooding through his body, though he quickly remembered to angle himself so he could keep his gun, and a fraction of his attention, trained on the employee.
“What’s going on, Oz?”
“I don’t know. I think you might have had a panic attack or something.”
“Oh.” Ed’s voice was so weak and quiet. It made Oswald want to pick him up and carry him away from everything that frightened him, everything that hurt him. But that is a hard thing to do when someone’s own mind is their greatest tormentor.
Out of the corner of his eye, Oswald saw the store clerk move, just a tad, in the direction of the counter...which was also likely to be the direction of the phone. Oswald glanced at Ed, then to the clerk inching closer to the desk, then his gun. He didn’t have a silencer on the gun, an oversight he was regretting at the moment. Sure a silencer didn’t make a gunshot quiet, but it would have been quieter—quiet enough to shoot inside the store without immediately drawing the attention of police or concerned citizens.
“My head hurts so much,” Ed whimpered, clutching at his head and squeezing his eyes tightly shut.
“I’m so sorry, Ed,” Oswald comforted, rubbing his arm soothingly with his free hand, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I don’t think so…” Ed replied, looking up at Oswald with a sad smile.
Oswald saw the clerk make a tiny move towards the desk again out of the corner of his eye. Damn. “Ed what happened to you back there? Do you know?”
“I saw...I—Ah!” Ed yelped, clutching his head once again. He began muttering under his breath, clearly frustrated, “No. No. I can handle this. I’m taking care of it. I don’t need you.”
“Ed?” Oswald had a feeling he knew what was happening.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Ed frantically mumbled, still not looking up.
“Is it…” Oswald looked over his shoulder at their unwanted company, who had managed to move slightly closer to the phone once again—Oswald would have to deal with him very soon—and tried to determine how to keep Ed’s privacy, “...him?”
Ed looked up, eyes darting to the store clerk in confusion, “The clerk?”
“No,” Oswald replied with a huff, giving Ed a meaningful look, “Him.”
Ed’s eyes widened as he picked up on Oswald’s meaning. His only response was a minute nod.
“What does he want?”
“He wants to take over.”
“Maybe you should let him…”
“What?!” Ed hissed, with only a brief pause before shouting, “Shut up!”
Oswald knew that wasn’t directed at him, though. He had a feeling Riddler had been quite receptive to Oswald’s suggestion, and he knew Ed hated that. “Ed, you know I would never suggest that if I didn’t think it was best. It’s just...You’re hurting. We’re in a bad situation. I think you need...a break.”
Ed clenched and unclenched his jaw, staring straight ahead, stubbornly silent. His steely demeanor was broken by a sound that could not be described by any word other than a screech of pain, as Ed ducked his head between his legs and curled into the fetal position. There was a series of muffled, irregular noises escaping Ed. It took Oswald a moment to realize he was crying.
“Oh, Ed. You shouldn’t be in this much pain. You don’t deserve this. You deserve so much better,” he whispered as he brushed his free hand up and down Ed’s back.
“Fine,” Ed murmured, barely audible.
“What?”
“I give up,” Ed’s head rose from where it was nestled—hidden—in the crook of his arm, eyes rimmed red with the bags beneath them so violently purple it looked as though he’d been in a fight. He looked utterly defeated.
“I promise you, Ed, we’re going to get you help after this. I’m going to find someone who can help this be less painful. Someone who can make it...better." Oswald pulled Ed's head into his chest, gently carding his fingers through the other man's hair as he gently rocked them back and forth.
Ed gave a weak smile and nod, before his face went blank. It only took a few seconds for his eyes to brighten, his back to straighten, and a wide grin to stretch across his face.
“Nice to see you, Ozzie,” came the sultry, mischievous purr of Riddler’s voice.
“Riddler,” Oswald greeted with a sly smile and nod.
Without warning, Riddler surged forward, grabbing the gun from Oswald’s hand and firing two shots in the direction of the desk.
Oswald slowly turned around, after recovering from the shock of having a gun fired beside his ear with no prior notice, and saw the lifeless body of the store clerk on the ground beside the desk, phone in hand, with blood beginning to pool around him.
Oswald spun back around to face Riddler, who was grinning deviously. Riddler took one, long step towards him, capturing Oswald in his arms before leaning down and kissing him vigorously. Riddler wasn't remotely shy in his kisses, immediately instigating a passionate kiss that left Oswald breathless. When he finally pulled back from Riddler’s lips, Oswald felt positively dizzy.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“I just wanted to thank you for helping me get out,” Riddler replied, the innocence in his tone belied by the suggestive smirk gracing his unfairly beautiful face, “That, and killing that gentleman made me feel positively...invigorated. So,” he clapped his hands together in conspiratorial delight, “Shall we get to work?”
“If by ‘work’ you mean getting out of here before the police show up, I think I can agree to that,” Oswald replied, tossing the blueprints to Riddler.
“‘Work’ can mean anything you want it to, little bird,” Riddler grinned as he sauntered past Oswald towards the exit, only pausing to place a brief kiss on the Penguin’s nose.