Work Text:
Centripetal Force
By Indiana
Characters: Jonathan Crane, Edward Nygma [Scriddler]
Synopsis: Jonathan had never been one to think too hard about what he hadn’t done yet nor what the future held.
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Today they were doing a few things Jonathan had never done before.
He had never been to the drive-in, nor had he ever seen a film all the way through, nor had he ever sat in the back of his pickup truck with another person with the plan to do both of those things. They had come here separately because their being seen together was risky, and because Jonathan often got lost on his way to his destination he had left earlier than he normally would have. He hadn’t gotten out yet. He was squinting into the sideview mirror in search of the person he was meeting here, but he was either far too early or he was meandering in on his own time as he was wont to do. After about ten minutes of this, irritation began creeping up his spine. Jonathan had gone to the effort of getting here in a timely fashion, he could have at least –
“Do you have something against air conditioning?”
Jonathan’s head snapped around to the right side of the truck to see that Edward was already there, and had possibly been for a while, judging by the smug lilt to his lips. He had his arms laid across the outside of the passenger side window, his head resting upon his layered hands. Jonathan was a bit rankled by the fact he’d arrived unnoticed, but now would be a terrible time to get annoyed with Edward. He’d said it was a double feature. “It’s broken.”
Edward raised his brows a little, eyeing the console. “Did getting it repaired occur to you?”
Uncharacteristically, yes, it had, solely because that was one of the things that had gotten Jonathan into this truck in the first place all those years ago. But he couldn’t admit to that, so he said, “I got used to it.”
“Of course,” Edward said, standing straight. “I, too, get used to having my legs burnt by my front seat because I don’t value my own comfort.”
Jonathan pushed open his door and got out. “My legs are fine.”
“Maybe if you keep pretending, they will be someday.” They both walked around the side of the truck to stand in front of the tailgate. “Did you bring it?”
Jonathan directed his attention towards folding the gate down. “I may have forgotten.”
“Oh,” said Edward, his audible disappointment so amusing it was a good thing Jonathan was facing away from him. When he was finished, he looked behind him to see that Edward really did look bothered and he had to laugh.
“I didn’t,” he said, gesturing towards the storage box bolted to the back of the bed. “It’s in there.”
Edward’s indignant frown was equally amusing.
“I don’t have cupholders,” he said, climbing into the bed and opening the box.
“I’m shocked you have seatbelts.”
Jonathan removed two thermoses and the wool blanket that had been in the truck since before he’d had it. “You seem to want me to pour this out.”
“No!” Edward exclaimed, jumping into the bed and snatching the thermos out of Jonathan’s hand. He laughed. It had come up in conversation at some point that Edward liked hot chocolate made from scratch and it just so happened that Jonathan knew how to do it. It was one of the things he’d once had to do as errand-boy of his childhood boarding house, most of which he refused to do now that he no longer had to. The hot chocolate, however, had proven to be an exception. Edward did not ask him for it often so it wasn’t that much of a hassle.
Edward sat down on the left side of the bed and removed the lid of the thermos. Jonathan joined him and did the same, though of course his contained bourbon. “So how does this work,” Jonathan asked once they were settled. Edward reached up and retrieved a small stereo he’d put on top of the cab against Jonathan’s notice.
“We tune this to a specific radio frequency,” he said. Once he had done so he put it on the storage box behind them and Jonathan listened to what seemed to be a commercial for concessions. The screen the film was to be projected on was still shrouded by the cast from the setting sun. He wondered for a moment if they should have parked closer, then remembered this was safer on the off chance they were recognised. Or that Edward was, anyway; the general public was not well versed with Jonathan’s face.
“What do you miss about Georgia?” Edward asked after a few minutes, and Jonathan frowned at him.
“What?”
“You heard me correctly.”
“Why would you believe I miss it there?”
Edward shrugged. “You know very well we’re the sum of our youth. That what we were exposed to then influences what we are now. What do you wish you had here that can only be found there?”
Jonathan took a long drink of his bourbon and considered telling Edward to get out and go home. Edward knew very well he did not want to talk about Georgia, nor so much as think about it ever again. Yet here he was, asking after it.
Actually… if Jonathan answered, then Edward would have to reciprocate. He did not want to talk about Toronto and Jonathan convinced him to only rarely. Of all the intrusive things he could have asked, this was not really one of them.
He stared down at the screen, not really seeing it, as he thought. Finally, he said, “The nature of it.”
“The nature?”
He may have used the wrong word, but the only alternative which had come to mind was ‘realness’ and it did not quite have the gravity he sought. “Where I am from,” he answered, “there was a great deal less artifice. In the city, everything is fake. Flash-frozen meals are shipped to every corner of the street. The women change their hair and faces to resemble someone they aren’t, and the men waste money on status symbols in order pretend they’re more important than they are. Everyone struggles towards an ideal they want because they’ve been told to want it.
“Even the silence is false. It’s always being broken by sirens and sliding tires and peoples’ headphones turned up too loud. The boarding house was cacophonous at the best of times, but it was all real . And when I tired of that, I could go out into any one of the fields and the only sound there would be that of the cicadas and the grain as it grew.”
Edward seemed… troubled, by this explanation. He understood why. To someone who had never left the city, to be in a place so far removed from everything that going to the grocery store meant taking an hour just to make it into town must have struck him as insane.
“And the lights,” Jonathan said softly. “You can go nowhere in the city not flooded with it, save for the places no one would dare go. I’ve seen more stars than you ever will. I’ve seen lightning spread across the horizon with nary a building in view to impede me. The place I am from no longer is and I would not be surprised to be told that any like it have faded out of existence. But if you needed me to sum it up, the thing I miss about Georgia is that it welcomed a person to simply be.
“Not so here. Here always wants you to be doing something. To fill all of your time with work and entertainment and whatever else you can find to squeeze into the cracks between. To spend your day working towards a destination you can never reach, because if you did it would all have to end. And it can’t, because that is not what the city wants. If you simply are… it tells you to go someplace else.”
Edward did not say anything, or really react at all, which was the biggest indication he’d been listening in a fashion he often didn’t. To make sure, Jonathan asked, gently, “Did that answer your question?”
He nodded a few times, eyes still fixed in the direction of the distant screen. Jonathan still could not really tell what was happening on it. He must have needed a new prescription. Oh well. He would just listen to the audio coming from behind him and make do with that. Jonathan had never been much for television anyway. Not ever being able to choose what was on it tended to have that sort of result. One learned other ways to entertain themselves.
//
He felt as though he were lying against something solid and warm, which was strange because it had never happened before. He became dimly aware of the fact there was an arm behind him, and the end of it lay… around his waist. His eyes jolted open.
He had fallen asleep on Edward .
Jonathan falling asleep anywhere, including his bed, was most often a struggle and a half. But he’d done this without even trying. Without even wanting to.
Well. He did want to. Not here, though. Not where they could be seen together.
Edward was putting something into his hand. It was… an earbud? He realised he could no longer hear anything from behind him and surmised that Edward had at some point started listening to the film privately. If he wanted to use these, that was his business, but Jonathan had heard too much about headphone-induced hearing loss to trust it. “I don’t want this,” Jonathan protested, unsure of where to put it now that it was in his hand.
“That’s unfortunate,” said Edward, “since if you did you wouldn’t have to move.”
Jonathan looked up at him, but Edward’s eyes were still on the faraway screen. At least, he thought they were. The glare from the moon overhead obscured the lenses of his glasses. That was an… interesting proposition. Edward had given him an excuse to stay here, pressed against his strong body under this blanket in the back of Jonathan’s pickup truck, because he’d realised Jonathan needed one.
He wondered if Edward could see the screen.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was what he wanted to matter, and he wasn’t sure what that was. If he chose to get up, Edward would go back to his car and head elsewhere while Jonathan returned to his rented basement and did… what he always did. Read or work through equations or write up his experiments. Things he’d started doing when he was nineteen and had done mostly nonstop since. Sitting at the drive-in with a… boyfriend… was not something he’d ever done, nor had he ever considered doing. But Edward probably had. He’d probably done plenty of things in a car at the drive-in and fantasised about them extensively beforehand. He would probably be willing to do them all with Jonathan if Jonathan had in fact wanted to. But he didn’t, because he had never thought this far ahead.
He slowly pulled the bud underneath the blanket and lowered his head back onto Edward’s shoulder. His hand never made it back to where it had been resting on his thigh because Edward took it before it got there and put his overtop of it, his fingers sliding in between Jonathan’s. No hesitation. As though he’d been waiting to do it. As though he’d done it before and he’d do it again because he already knew that he liked it.
Usually when people wore earbuds, all the sound leaked out of them. But Jonathan couldn’t hear anything, so Edward must have turned it down very low. Probably so Jonathan could go back to sleep. He was going to. Maybe. He would try to. It had been nice. Being awake like this was equally nice.
Or perhaps he had taken what Jonathan had said about the aimless noise of the city more seriously than he’d expected. He may have meant for Jonathan to sleep again, but he may also simply have been providing him as much quiet as he could. This place was as close to it as Jonathan had come in a long time.
“What do you miss about Toronto?” Jonathan asked after a minute. He felt rather than saw Edward glance down at him. He took a long breath, as though he didn’t want to answer but was going to because Jonathan had.
“Ice skating,” he said. Briefly. He must have been waiting for Jonathan to ask. He might even have prepared this answer before he’d asked the original question.
“Ice skating?” How was that something he couldn’t do here?
“Outdoors,” said Edward. “It’s too dangerous to do in Gotham because you never know what might happen in a crowded public space. In Toronto that’s not as much of a problem. Sometimes I went to a rink and sometimes I went to an ice trail. Usually a rink because there were more of them.”
“You went there to think?” Jonathan prodded gently. Edward shook his head.
“I went there so I wouldn’t have to.”
Jonathan waited for him to continue.
“On a rink you just skate in a circle around the edge of it,” Edward said. “So I would…”
Jonathan hadn’t realised this would be painful. In a way, it only made him more curious.
“I would just think about the way the skates sounded on the ice,” he said after a minute. “At first mine, then the person next to me at the time, and then as many of them as I could hear. If I concentrated on that, then the sound of all the people talking around me would… fade. As though someone had blurred them all together and then turned the collective volume down. And then I would think about…”
“Think about what?” Jonathan asked after he was silent for a minute or so.
“Centripetal force,” he answered.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s the force that keeps an object moving in a curved path, directed towards the centre of rotation,” Edward said. “More simply: it’s what causes the Earth to rotate around the sun. The mechanic behind planetary orbit. The heavens are defined by things spinning around other things spinning around other things. So also is life.”
Jonathan was going to need to sit up for this. Edward seemed taken aback when he did so, but Jonathan just said, “Go on.”
“Well,” Edward said, “everyone’s life revolves around something. Family, work, school. And to maintain the orbit around this central motivation, everyone is beholden to some internal centripetal force. If you’re lucky, it’s passion. For the average joe, it’s money. It makes people hopeless to think about how, perhaps, that’s all their life is going to be. They get up, they go to the office, they go home, they have dinner with their family, and then they go to bed to do it over again the next day. To keep themselves sane, they mark on their calendar when next they’ll be able to see Venus, or Mars – by which I mean attend an event or take a vacation. And that provides the illusion of breaking orbit, at least for a day or two. But they don’t. They’re just… facing away from the sun. But facing away doesn’t mean it’s not there.
“This orbit can be broken, but only for a new one. That is, you can stop orbiting the sun, but you’re going to end up being drawn in and attached to something else. That’s the price of stability. It’s boring but it’s consistent. You can depend on it. Until you can’t.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t know,” Edward answered. “Once I graduated, I would have no new orbit to move into. I wasn’t going to university and the only careers that interested me seemed out of reach.”
“And then?”
“Shortly after that, I left.” He bunched his shoulders for a moment. “And then I realised the reason I never found an orbit.”
“Why?” Jonathan could not resist asking. Edward’s smile was… he’d been waiting to tell someone this.
“Someone has to be the sun, Jon.”
It was so obvious he should have thought of it himself.
“It wasn’t centripetal force I should have been thinking about when I was skating,” said Edward. “I should have been thinking about rotation . What you have to do to complete a full cycle in your life. And that can be anything. A year, a project, a goal. Because while the centripetal force holding you in orbit is mundane, what happens during the rotation is not. The world rotates one singular time and in doing so spurs an incalculable number of changes. And these changes are not totally at the behest of the sun, but that which revolves around it. The sun transforms the Earth, but the Earth also transforms itself. The mundane brings forth the extraordinary.”
Jonathan clasped his hands together and brought them in front of his mouth as he looked down at the dim outline of the blanket. Edward’s explanation was remarkably clear, but he was going to need some time to appreciate it fully. This was a rare occasion where he wished he had been born a little more intelligent. Having been able to specialise in one thing had seen him very fortunate indeed, but… the breadth of what Edward must have known!
“I’ve mentioned that before I came to Gotham, I stopped in New York,” Edward was saying. “I was going to stay there. I thought it was just going to be Toronto, but more. It wasn’t. It was like… the sun trying to force other suns to rotate around it. And when everyone is the sun, no one is. So I kept going. I ended up here, which is someplace in between the two. It’s more, but not too much. Most of the time.”
“Even the sun burns out eventually,” guessed Jonathan, and Edward nodded.
“I have more to think about now than I did then.” He fingered his end of the earbuds with his left hand, which Jonathan had not noticed he had removed. “Sometimes…”
Sometimes it was both more and too much.
Jonathan looked down at the parking lot to see that the cars below were beginning to form a line towards the exit. He thought about whether or not his basement was in any state for company and decided he didn’t care. “Are you coming back with me?”
“If we go to the grocery store on the way,” Edward answered. “You never have anything to eat.”
“If you don’t take an hour.”
“I will take fifty-nine minutes and not a second less.”
Jonathan didn’t mean to laugh at that, but he did. Edward just sat there and looked at him as he untangled the blanket from his legs, and when he turned to ask him why Edward pulled his head down and kissed him. It was gentle and yet hungry, and all the intention went out of Jonathan’s limbs. Edward demonstrated his full control of his by pressing his free hand into Jonathan’s thigh.
“You know this isn’t a good time,” Jonathan somehow managed to say as Edward’s lips made their way across his jawline and down to his throat. It was probably a good thing he had found himself unable to do anything other than that. Edward’s body was so close and Jonathan had not touched it in such a long time.
“Hm,” said Edward, the slow way he was sucking on Jonathan’s neck bringing a temporary arrest to his breathing. Jonathan’s hand jerked up to push at his right shoulder and Edward looked at him a bit petulantly.
“You enjoy the thrill of nearly being caught,” Jonathan said. “I don’t.”
“A compromise, then,” said Edward, and he got that mischievous glint in his eye that Jonathan was rarely of the mind to resist even when Edward’s thumb wasn’t gently and suggestively pressing into his crotch. “Take off your pants and I’ll be quick.”
Jonathan glanced down at the parking lot. About a quarter of the cars had left and there were a few stragglers who hadn’t so much as turned their engines on. Whatever they were doing would probably be addressed first. And… he’d never done this before.
Oh, what the hell.
//
Edward had, surprisingly, only taken twenty or so minutes in the grocery store, which Jonathan spent thinking about what Edward had done in the back of the pickup truck and how the potential they could be caught actually had been incredibly exciting. He couldn’t tell Edward that, though, or he would never do anything like it again. He knew Edward well enough to be aware that his spontaneity was actually usually quite planned, and if Jonathan mentioned wanting him to do such a thing he would absolutely abandon doing it in favour of scheming up something else, which Jonathan may or may not end up being partial to. Being close with Edward meant a lot of back-and-forth manipulation and calculations, but Jonathan did not mind it. He was usually able to stay just ahead of him, which was good for both of them: Edward so that his ego did not get out of hand, and Jonathan so that he was encouraged to keep sharp. Edward was, as the saying went, simple to learn but difficult to master. If Jonathan could handle him, he could handle anyone.
Once back at Jonathan’s basement Edward had produced the ingredients necessary for soft-shell tacos, which Jonathan had never had before but mostly enjoyed, and Edward talked the entire time between then and when they got into Jonathan’s bed. Jonathan did not interject much, though he usually didn’t. Edward knew more than he ever would and much of it about things he would never understand. It was something he had had to accept about being with an extremely intelligent man. Edward was not usually looking for insight, anyway; most of the time Jonathan was merely his mildly attentive sounding board. Jonathan knew when he was looking for a response by the tonal shift in his voice which indicated Jonathan needed to listen with effort. There hadn’t been one today, so he hadn’t bothered. He had instead moved on to thinking over what Edward had said in the truck, and once they were lying in bed he thought he understood most of it. Edward had what was both an annoying and endearing propensity to blanket half of what he was talking about beneath the topics of physics and computer science and engineering, every single one of which Jonathan knew nothing about. He was aware that Edward’s ability to overlook the fact that Jonathan specialised in only one thing, which took him a tremendous quantity of time and effort, was a sign of respect… but it did not at all keep deciphering his thoughts from being exhausting. He was quiet now, though, draped over Jonathan’s right side. His right hand was in the vicinity of Jonathan’s lower ribs, but Jonathan’s was as low on his waist as he dared go. Edward was wearing his underclothes and had not said anything or moved at all when Jonathan had worked his hand beneath the hem of his shirt so that it laid on top of his bare skin. It wasn’t quite where he wanted it, but it was better than nothing.
“If you are the sun,” Jonathan said after he was absolutely certain Edward did not plan to talk, “then what am I?”
The sound of the sharp inhale through his nose told Jonathan Edward had nearly been asleep, which hopefully meant he would provide the simplest answer. “A comet,” he said.
Damn.
“What does that mean.”
“It’s a…” To Jonathan’s surprise he reached behind him and moved Jonathan’s hand down onto his ass, in a manner that suggested he thought it had been there at one point but had slipped when he wasn’t paying attention. “A dirty snowball in space. Their orbits are so large most of them are only seen once and then never again.”
“Which means their centripetal force is…” Damn. He’d lost sight of the concept already.
“Very weak,” Edward said. “Some of them get caught in a planet’s gravity and are directed into deep space.”
Which meant that Edward thought the driving force behind his life was tenuous and would be redirected when the right obstacle presented itself. If that were so, it was a fascinating insight. He would have to think on that. “And what does the sun orbit?”
“The centre of the galaxy.”
“What’s in it?”
“An immense black hole.”
Which meant that, in a way, it didn’t orbit anything. Just pure gravity which would destroy everything that neared it, if Jonathan understood correctly.
“But don’t worry,” Edward said, pressing his cheek more securely into Jonathan’s shirt, “the sun will burn out long before it gets anywhere near it.”
Jonathan hadn’t been, but now he was definitely more intrigued. The sun essentially had two options: destroy itself, or be itself destroyed. While the comet he apparently was simply went about its solitary business and then disappeared, off to do God knew what someplace else.
“What happens when a comet nears the sun?”
“It’s a snowball, Jonathan,” Edward snapped, which indicated he was tired of all the questions when sleep was so near at hand. “It starts to melt .”
“Thank you,” Jonathan said, pressing his lips to the top of Edward’s head, and his brow furrowed in annoyance momentarily but that was all.
Now that they had fallen silent, the more distant noise began to creep in. The upstairs tenants, watching their television obnoxiously loudly. The wail of a fire truck rushing down the road. One of the other tenants, for some reason taking a shower in the middle of the night and dropping everything they had in the bathroom. He sighed through his nose. Perhaps that was why his insomnia was so bad. He was used to… no. No, he hadn’t slept that well in the boarding house, either. Some nights, when some drunken idiot ended up snoring across his bed, he hadn’t had anywhere to sleep. Not until he’d…
His brow furrowed. He’d always been able to sleep in the truck. On the hottest afternoons after he’d found it, he had turned on the air conditioner and slept until the sun was not quite so high. And whenever he had pulled over for sleep on his way up from Georgia, it had come to him.
He should have known why. He should have been able to figure out what that meant, should have been able to file through his life and deduce why the truck was so important. But it wasn’t coming to him. The knowledge didn’t seem to be just out of reach, either; it simply was not there at all. “Eddie,” he said, more urgently than he meant to.
“Mm.”
“Do you know how to repair vehicles?”
“You want your air conditioning back?”
“Yes.”
He reached behind him without looking and pulled Jonathan’s arm around his waist. “I’ll figure it out.”
Jonathan looked at the dim outline of their arms next to each other in the dark and then slid his fingers in between Edward’s. He didn’t know if such a thing were actually possible, but he could have sworn he could feel Edward smiling in the kiss he pressed to the edge of Jonathan’s jaw. Maybe he had. It was a nice thought, if unimportant. What was was figuring out if it were the truck which had allowed Jonathan sleep that evening or Edward.
Or perhaps it was both. How was he to know? He’d never done it before. To work it out he was probably going to have to do it again. Or something new that Edward had done and wanted to do again and wanted to do again with him .
Edward’s right leg was now tangled in both of his, which should have annoyed him, but it didn’t. It rarely did, with the notable exception being that time Edward’s knee had suddenly jerked upward in his sleep to connect with Jonathan’s crotch. He had thrown Edward on the floor that time… which had not woken him up. It was a lot funnier now than it had been then.
“Do I orbit a separate sun, Edward?” he murmured into his hair, “Or were you suggesting that I start to melt when I near you?”
He obviously did not provide an answer. He would have liked the second one, though. And it was true, anyway. A little sad, and disgustingly sentimental, but… true. He rubbed his thumb over Edward’s and smiled when he pulled Jonathan’s arm down a little tighter in his sleep.
If ever that obstacle arose and Jonathan’s path was flung off into some other facet of the galaxy, there was no doubt at all that he would have new things to miss.