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Bruce doesn't often lose things. It's a side effect of having a very dangerous secret identity: he checks, and double checks, and triple checks that he has everything he came in with. But he's been abnormally busy lately. Or at least that's his excuse for losing his phone, which is in the running for the most important device he owns.
It's not his only phone, but it's his main one, and it had a lot of information on it that he would rather not misplace - or let fall into the wrong hands. Alfred and Barbara have been helping him search for it all day, but he can't remember for the life of him where he left it and it seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.
So it's not a surprise when he gets a call on his backup phone, not even in the middle of the night. (It's not a work night, but somehow this doesn't mean he's getting any more sleep.)
Bruce checks the number and realizes with a start that it's his own phone calling him. He pauses for a moment - wouldn't Barbara have called him from her own phone if she'd found it? - but curiosity drives him to answer before the second ring ends.
"Hello?" he asks, and he knows immediately that something is wrong. There's no voice on the other end, just a ragged intake of breath that sounds almost like a sob.
It's followed by more breaths, shallower and more rapid, and a cut-off syllable that Bruce can't identify. It reminds him of minutes spent curled up on bathroom floors as a teenager, feeling like his heart was going to burst out of his chest. He's surprised at how much it unsettles him, after all this time.
He takes a deep breath, tries to steady himself. "Who is this?" he asks, and despite himself his voice is still a bit shaky.
The breaths pause. "Bruce?" The voice is familiar, but the tone is entirely new - frightened, confused, vulnerable in a way this particular voice never is.
"Eddie?" Bruce asks, disbelieving. "How did you get - oh." He remembers his last visit to Arkham, setting his phone on the table, inches away from one Edward Nygma. In his defense, he was distracted at the time.
This issue having been resolved, Bruce moves on to what seems to be a more important question at the moment. "Are you... okay?" he asks hesitantly.
"I - no," says Eddie. "I don't know, I can't think." Something in Bruce's chest twists at the desperation in his voice. "I shouldn't have - I should never have called you."
"Where are you?" Bruce asks. He can't hear any background noise other than Eddie's breathing, but he would think someone would have noticed if one of the high-security inmates was in this sort of state in Arkham.
"Please don't take me back there," Eddie pleads. "I can't - not right now."
"I can't promise that," says Bruce. "But I'll do my best to delay it if you just tell me where you are."
There's a rustling sound from the other end of the phone. "I'm not sure," says Eddie, and that admission of uncertainty, without riddles or snark to offset it, is one of the most frightening things Bruce has ever heard from the Riddler. "I think... I think I'm not far from Arkham. I'm... behind something. A dumpster or something."
"Hold on, don't hang up." Bruce pauses for a moment, trying to track the call. He places his phone, and therefore Eddie, a few blocks away from Arkham Asylum, behind a derelict apartment building.
"Okay, I have your location," he says, forcing his voice to stay calm and level. "Just stay there until I come get you."
He hears Eddie inhale sharply. "Great." It's hard to tell if he's being sarcastic or not.
Eddie ends the call, and Bruce briefly considers getting the batsuit before deciding that driving would be faster at this time of night. Besides, his better first aid kit is in the car (he doesn't know what sort of trouble Eddie's in, but knowing him it's not unlikely that he got himself scraped up in the process). Without a clear idea of what he's heading into, he just grabs a jacket and heads out.
It takes him fifteen minutes to find the alley the call had been coming from, and a couple minutes more to find Eddie. He is, indeed, behind a dumpster, almost completely hidden with his arms around his knees and his head resting against the crumbled brick wall. There's probably brick dust in his hair, but it's too dark for Bruce to tell.
Eddie flinches away when Bruce first pokes his head around the side of the dumpster. "It's me," says Bruce, unsure how much comfort that will provide. He considers asking for his phone back, but Eddie seems... not entirely stable at the moment. Bruce can't hear his breathing as well as he could over the phone, but it still sounds too shallow. He's rocking slightly, and the fingers of his right hand are tapping his leg frenetically. He's not looking at Bruce; his face is tilted away, and in the faint light from a faraway streetlight Bruce thinks he can see tear tracks. It feels wrong on an inherent level, for him to see the Riddler cry.
"Are you hurt?" he asks, almost hoping that Eddie is so that he has something he knows how to fix.
"I," says Eddie, then takes a shuddering breath. Yes, he's definitely been crying. "No, I don't think so."
"Do you need, um," says Bruce. "I know some breathing exercises? From when I was a kid and had a lot of panic attacks." He doesn't talk about this as a general rule, not out of any particular embarrassment but because it's something else that makes him tangibly, painfully, human. But it seems like the right thing to say.
Eddie tilts his head - he's definitely getting bits of the wall in his hair now - and then nods.
Bruce sits down against the wall and does his best to slide behind the dumpster as well. This doesn't work as well as he'd hoped, but by turning his legs at an awkward angle he's able to sit next to Eddie, with a sensible foot or so of space between them.
He talks Eddie through the simplest breathing exercise he knows, counting the seconds of each inhale, held breath, and exhale. He keeps his voice low and steady as he demonstrates the breaths, and Eddie follows along pretty well. Bruce has lost count of the repetitions by the time Eddie starts crying in earnest. His head is still turned away, and he's so quiet that Bruce wouldn't have noticed if Eddie's breaths hadn't fallen out of sync.
Eddie's shivering now, and Bruce wishes he'd remembered how cold the weather was for prison clothes sooner. He pauses in his counting to very carefully extricate himself from his jacket and drape it over Eddie's shoulders. Eddie looks up at him for the first time, his eyes almost black in the dimness of somewhere-past-midnight. Instead of putting his arms through the sleeves, he just pulls the jacket around his shoulders to wear it like a cape. Bruce can't tell if he's still crying or not.
Eddie looks away after a moment, moving a bit further behind the dumpster - a minute movement, but one that serves to increase the gap between their shoulders, and between their eyes. "No cowl tonight, huh?" he says, and he sounds like Eddie. "I expected you to swoop in in the full Batman getup."
"Batman is for crime," says Bruce. "I thought this situation would be... different. Than that."
Eddie gasps in exaggerated surprise. "Does that mean you're planning on keeping that promise after all?" His tone is light, but Bruce remembers how he sounded when he said Please don't take me back there.
"I said I'd do my best," says Bruce, "and I will." He isn't sure how he'll justify it, but this is a promise he will keep.
Eddie gives him a crooked smile. "And how do you expect to do that, genius? I'm a dangerous criminal! You can't possibly let me run free."
Bruce had in fact considered that exact option - not that he's going to admit it to Eddie. "I can bring you to the manor," he suggests, providing the slightly more reasonable option.
Eddie laughs. "You want to take me home with you?"
"Want is a strong word," says Bruce. "But I think that would be the safest, for you."
Eddie raises an eyebrow. "For me? Or for everyone else?"
The question is a challenge, as most things are with Eddie. But Bruce suspects that this move is more defensive than anything else.
"I hope it will prove to be both," he says diplomatically.
Eddie shrugs. "It's better than Arkham."
They sit in awkward silence for a moment before Bruce remembers that he's currently blocking Eddie's way out from behind the dumpster. Eddie offers him the jacket when they're both standing in the alley again, but Bruce shakes his head.
"Keep it," he says. "At least for now."
Eddie's uncharacteristically silent on the drive back to the manor, keeping the jacket tight around his shoulders and his gaze focused straight ahead. He comes back to life a little when Bruce leads him into the house, if only to say "This is where you bring the women in," in the tone of one commenting on the weather.
Bruce frowns at him. "How do you know that?"
"Barbara brought me in here when you were... indisposed a couple months ago," says Eddie.
Bruce winces at the reminder of the particular circumstances around Eddie's last visit to the manor. "It's not just for... that," he says.
Eddie nods wisely. "It's a multipurpose super-secret gate, my mistake."
It's past three AM when they enter the house, but Alfred seems to have a sixth sense specifically for detecting when Bruce is up to something when he's supposed to be asleep.
"Master Bruce," he says, managing to put so much disapproval into his voice that Bruce almost evaporates on the spot. "What on earth have you been doing at this hour? With... him. "
Eddie grins broadly at Alfred, presumably for the sole purpose of irritating him. (If so, it's certainly working.) "He had an important date, of course! I think we really bonded."
Bruce pinches the bridge of his nose. "He escaped Arkham and called me from my own phone."
"Oh, right, that," says Eddie, opening the jacket and taking Bruce's phone from one of the many inside pockets.
Alfred looks very, very tired. "Did you have to bring him here?"
Bruce looks at Eddie. Eddie grins and tosses the phone to him, which leads to a very harrowing fraction of a second before he manages to catch it. "Well, we're here now," he observes, pocketing his phone in the hope that it's safely out of reach of any Arkham inmates who may or may not happen to be in his house.
"He can sleep in one of the guest bedrooms," says Alfred. "If he steals anything, I will consider it your responsibility."
"Don't worry," says Eddie gleefully. "I'll be on my best behavior." Surprisingly enough, this doesn't seem to calm Alfred.
Bruce decides to take Eddie to the guest bedroom that's closest to Bruce's own. It's not the weirdest sleepover Bruce has ever hosted, but it's up there. The sight of Eddie, still in his prison uniform, sitting on a bed in Bruce's house and slipping his shoes off to line them up neatly next to the nightstand, gives Bruce a feeling of disorientation. He saw Eddie at his most vulnerable half an hour ago, yet he's the one who feels exposed.
Eddie notices his glance and arches an eyebrow at him. "If you want the jacket back, you could just ask."
"Oh," says Bruce, for lack of anything better to say. "You can keep the jacket."
Eddie smirks a little. "Won't you be cold?" His tone is light, teasing.
"I live in a mansion," Bruce points out.
Eddie's smile widens. Bruce suspects he asked the question just to see what Bruce would say, but he can't begrudge Eddie such an insignificant victory.
"Well," says Bruce. He's been lingering here longer than he should already. "If you need anything, just let me know. If you're still here when I wake up I'll have Alfred make you breakfast." He leaves it open, if you're still here - it's not like he can keep Eddie here if Eddie decides to go.
Eddie flops down on the bed and glances up at Bruce. "Sure thing."
Bruce pauses with his hand on the door frame, then returns to his own bedroom. He trusts Eddie not to murder him in his sleep, at least (he wonders when that happened), and it's almost four in the morning. He needs rest.
When Bruce wakes up, the room Eddie slept in is empty. Bruce also finds a set of clothes and a few valuables missing, which he doesn't look forward to explaining to Alfred later. The only things Eddie left behind were his prison uniform and a letter.
It's not a long letter. There's a riddle in it, and it's signed simply E. Nygma. Bruce folds the letter back up and puts it in his pocket. Eddie took the jacket, he notes. He's not sure how to feel about that.
When he comes downstairs, Alfred is already making breakfast. He's wearing a disgusted expression, which Bruce assumes is a sign that Alfred already discovered Eddie's absence.
"Well?" says Alfred without turning his head, confirming the assumption.
Bruce sits down and tries to remember how to think. "It was a risk I was willing to take."
"I hope you've learned something from this experience," Alfred says, pouring a mug of tea and placing it in front of him.
Bruce stirs the tea and watches the steam rise. His warped reflection mists over, and he sets the spoon to the side.
"Honestly?" he says. "I don't know if I have."