Work Text:
A beast people had called it.
A beast that targeted the Penguin’s men, ripping the lousy ones to shreds or plaguing them with nightmares they couldn’t escape even when awake. Being stuck in a never ending thrash and fight until exhaustion and death took hold. The few fraction of Oswald’s goons that remained stuck closer to the man than bats cling to caves. Edward had chalked it all up to rumors and exaggeration. Gotham truly loved a show, after all. But now that he had seen it and the tragic horror that clung underneath its stretched skin, Ed understood why .
It looked as if its body was at constant war with itself. Flesh simultaneously was stretched so thin holes and tears would appear for more toxin to leak from and would pile and fold onto itself with boils and disgusting lumps hanging off the body.
Its face was barely even recognizable as once human. With a jaw that always hung open to reveal too many jagged and uneven teeth that stuck out every which way from bleeding gums and a head that seemingly was always overcast in an unnatural shadow and was trying to run from itself, resulting in a horrifying tear into a secondary and not fully formed second head. But that was only the face, the body was the furthest from human.
Bones and dangly limbs that didn’t even bother to fit into sockets were pushed far from what should’ve been possible to use. The sheer amount of limbs should’ve been impossible for a person to have, even if it was the furthest depiction of humanity. Flesh seemingly melted into itself, molding multiple arms into one and a neck that twisted like a screw into a torn and thin chest.
It’s body was disproportionate.
Weight shifted unevenly against its entire form in a way that made both nature and physics weep. It shouldn’t even be able to crawl with the way its body appeared, and yet there was never a sight of it stumbling. It moved not like an animal nor man. Nothing that Edward could compare it to.
He couldn’t even believe that it used to be Jonathan. The barely visible torn rags of his costume clinging to the flesh amalgamation and straw growing out of skin and holes like bones trying to escape the prison Jonathan’s body had become were the only clues to its original identity.
Not even the snippets of voice the beast would occasionally spit sounded like Jon. The words maybe, but there was no hint of Jonathan that the Ridder could pick from. They were merely strings of words that lingered on the edge of coherency. Edward wasn’t sure if the beast was aware of anything, nonetheless what it was saying . Slurs of screams and fright would be spat from its twisted jaws, in a voice that sounded as if it was from an aged siren and deep enough to make Ed’s bones shift uncomfortably in his skin.
The only reason Ed knew that the monster that was currently retreating into the shadows, folding its body in a way that broke every rule of the world Ed had ever known, was once Jon was because he saw it.
He saw Jon’s fall onto concrete.
He saw the way his body twitched and trembled in painful spasms.
He had thought it was a seizure at first. A thought horrifying and that he prayed was the result of fear toxin at the time was now what he would’ve preferred.
Anything was better than this. Anything would've been better than having to hide from the Penguin’s beast gone loose. Anything would’ve been preferred than his friend becoming stuck in a body that wouldn’t bend to him and acting on its own.
Edward didn’t know if he wanted to tear at his hair and scream or if he wanted to curl up and weep.