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Day one. I’m awakened at five-thirty in the morning with a sharp push to my shoulder. The unsmiling orderly forces me into a straitjacket and hauls me off to a windowless room. I’m unclipped for five minutes to eat an unbuttered slice of toast, drink a glass of water, and use a bucket in the corner for a toilet.
I ask for a toothbrush, a washrag, a comb. I’m told if I speak out of turn again I’ll be punished.
I’m forced to tell my life story to a cold faced doctor who emotionlessly tells them a litany of drugs to give me. If I ask questions or try to reject the drugs, I am forcibly medicated.
I lie on my cot in my room, drifting, broken. I don’t know what they gave me. I don’t want to know.
This is my life now.
*
It takes Oswald six months to build up enough resources and prestige to start getting what he wants.
He refurbishes the Iceberg into something classy, a lounge for upstanding businessmen like Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen to come and do drinks with their clients. He pretends to be reformed. Pretends that he was just being pressured all those years to be Falcone’s right-hand man. Blackmailed. Desperate. People must buy it, though, because it’s not long before he’s getting invitations to social events just like the Golden Boys of Gotham.
He siphons and redirects just enough money from Falcone’s fortune and the now-defunct Renewal Fund to make it look like the Cobblepot money hasn’t run out. He knows it has, years ago; that’s how and why he worked for Falcone in the first place. But clearly, the rest of Gotham doesn’t know that.
He moves out of the downtown loft Falcone set up for him and back into the big, empty Cobblepot Manor. It’s filthy and cold and lonely. Hasn’t been lived in for years. There was some talk of Falcone selling it, setting it up as a luxury hotel, making it into another club. But he never did. So, empty it stands, and as Falcone is dead and Oswald is the last living Cobblepot, well…
He doesn’t rest for months. He works himself to exhaustion, restoring the mansion to its former beauty. He always hated this place growing up, but now, well, he’s got to live somewhere, and he can’t stand the thought of living in that filthy old rat’s apartment. So he cleans up the mansion and presents a good public image and tries, his absolute best, to be the upstanding citizen that so many Gothamites before him have pretended to be as well.
He thinks, almost constantly, about that little maniac who exposed Falcone. The Riddler. God, what he wouldn’t give for five minutes with the kid. Just to thank him, if nothing else. But honestly, what he’d really like is to have that kid on his side. He knows some lunatics can’t be bought off or reasoned with. But he’s had a lot of hope in the last few months and, well. If he can convince Bruce Wayne, the token hermit of Gotham, that he means well…maybe he can make this crazy little guy see things his way, too.
*
I wish I knew the days, still. But I lost count a long time ago.
Dr. Crane, that’s my psychiatrist’s name. He’s handsome and once upon a time I might have liked him. But it’s hard to like the man who refuses to give you sedatives before electroshock therapy, only to shoot you up with drugs that make you so weak you can barely lift your head later on when you’re back in your cell, right before a pathetically small dinner is served.
They take my tray away while I’m asleep. I can’t remember the last time I ate.
I’m used to going without. I’ve had periods with little food before. I know how to stay alive with few resources. But this is torture. It’s deliberate. They’re doing to me what they think I did to those corrupt cops. They shot me up with something potent and left me to lie in my own filth for what must’ve been a day when I said all cops are bastards, and that the only good cop is a dead one.
(I still say it’s true. Even the nice one, Jim Gordon, who sometimes comes and tries to visit me…if he were any kind of decent he’d know what goes on in this torture chamber masquerading as a state asylum.)
It’s been too long. Even the voice of my neighbor no longer gives me any comfort. What does comfort even mean? How can he still laugh, knowing that we will never breathe fresh air again? I haven’t laughed since that first night. Laughter seems so pointless now.
Because I’m done for. I’ll die in this place, my voice unheard, my riddles unsolved. No one will ever know. The stupid Bat will never understand that I was helping him. We could’ve left together. This city is so far beyond saving. It would’ve been so beautiful, to get out together after bringing it down from within.
I wish I could still make plans. I wish I could keep fighting back, but I can’t. Not anymore.
*
Oswald finds out from a third party that Dr. Crane, the resident psychiatrist at Arkham, will sell the inmates for the right price. He’s cold, the man. Cold and calculating and unfeeling. He only cares about his drugs. He only cares about his experiments.
Oswald doesn’t have millions of dollars’ worth of loose change to drop on this guy. But he does have something better.
He dresses up in his finest suit one day and goes to Arkham with the Gotham Gazette for a photoshoot, showing how he’s visiting the poor downtrodden mentally ill inmates of the state hospital. He makes a show of donating $100,000 to the asylum. He dismisses the newspaper when he’s “done.”
And then he demands to see Crane.
The man doesn’t care to speak with him at first. But when Oswald promises him a formula that Maroni was cooking up with a now-dead local chemist, a formula for new, more powerful, more addictive Drops, in exchange for the inmate of his choice? Crane is definitely willing to listen.
“One more thing.” Oswald waves a pocketbook in Crane’s face. “If you don’t tell no one about this…there’s plenty more where that came from, ya hear?”
“Absolutely understood,” Crane says, visibly licking his lips.
*
If I could move, I’d struggle when the beefy man lifts me off my cot. I’d spit in his face. Tell him to go fuck his own hand instead of me. I’d tell him I once brought a man his size to his knees, that I made rats eat the man alive before I killed him.
But I can’t say anything. I can’t even open my eyes.
The familiar straitjacket is applied. I’m tied to a stretcher. Something is shot into my arm.
Wherever I’m going, I won’t know until they want me to.
*
Oswald lays his prize down in a small room, strokes back the filthy hair with a hand that looks painfully huge next to Edward Nashton’s tiny head. The poor thing is absolutely broken. He looks like he’ll last a week, if that.
Not if Oswald has anything to say about. Oh, no. Not on his watch.
Oswald knows he ought to be furious. This is the criminal mastermind? This is the man who nearly took out the new mayor and brought Gotham to its knees? In another life he would’ve chewed out Crane for selling him damaged goods. He would’ve hired some nurses to care for his broken little toy until Ed was strong enough to terrorize Gotham for him.
But that’s not what Oswald wants. Not anymore. One look at the baby-faced little thing, filthy and emaciated but still alive, and he’s in love. He’s never seen Riddler’s face. Not until now. And he doesn’t know how anyone in their right mind could ever hurt this little sweetheart, dangerous serial killer or no.
He’s been doing Falcone’s dirty work for years, before now. And for the last six months, it’s felt good to do his own. He forgot how deeply satisfying it is, ever since his cat mysteriously went missing when he was twelve, to tend to another being, help a smaller, vulnerable creature flourish beneath his hands.
He’s a patient man, Oswald. It takes patience to spend your whole life under the thumb of a greedy mobster, waiting for the “chance to grow” you’ve been promised and never given. Now he spends hours sitting by the Riddler’s bedside, gently trickling spoonfuls of broth into a chapped mouth, giving bed-baths and back rubs, speaking to the catatonic man in the lowest, most soothing voice he can manage.
He’s a patient man.
But if he weren’t, he would go back to Arkham and not stop until, like the Batman, he’d ripped apart everyone who got in his way. Until he found Crane and anyone else responsible for Ed Nashton’s condition and tore them apart.
It’s perhaps a week before the younger man is strong enough to even wake up enough to talk, or enough to do anything other than swallow a few spoonfuls of broth. When his eyes finally focus on Oswald’s face, the words that come out of his throat, voice rusty from disuse, make the Penguin’s heart swell.
*
The feeling of a soft, proper bed underneath me shocks me even more than Crane’s electrodes. Even more so, the feeling of a hand stroking my forehead. I expected more abuse. Tenderness is disconcerting.
Still. It’s more kindness than I’ve been shown in months.
I swallow the spoonfuls of hot, salty broth that are put to my lips. I sip water through a straw while a thick arm holds me up by my shoulders. I don’t open my eyes, don’t fight back when I am stripped and bathed. I stay still and calm and luxuriate in the gentle massages.
Still I wait for the other shoe to drop. Still I put off the moment I open my eyes because I am sure when I do, I will only see the face of another tormenter.
But I can feel my body getting stronger, can feel my mind becoming sharp again as well. I keep still, keep silent, but I listen. I smell. I sense. I know I’m in someone’s home, know that it’s clean and that I’m tended by none other than the master. Because I do know the voice that whispers “you’re safe now” to me every night. I’ve always known who Oswald Cobblepot is.
Strange, then, that he would rescue me, the man who took out most of his friends. Unless…was he never truly a friend to them to begin with? It strikes me anew one day that perhaps he never knew. Perhaps he thought the drug bust was genuine. Perhaps he never knew he serviced a rat.
I open my eyes and see the face of my rescuer. It takes a moment for me to remember how to speak, but after a few coughs, the words come out with surprising ease. “I’m usually black and white but I’m not a newspaper. I have wings but I’m not an airplane, I lay eggs but I’m not a chicken. I eat fish but I’m not a whale.”
Oswald Cobblepot smiles. He takes my slim hand in both of his meaty ones. His fingers are rough, but his hold is gentle. “Penguin. I’m your Penguin,” he says, and for the first time in months, I laugh.