Chapter Text
Edward Nashton was seven years old when he first wanted to disappear.
His father had just hit him for the first time and, more shocked than actually pained, he had retreated silently to his room, pushing the little chair on his desk up to the door and hooking the back under the door handle to keep his father from opening it. He had sat on the floor, mouth hanging open slightly. He couldn’t believe it. His father had yelled often, that he knew already. He had yelled at his mother, and he had yelled at Edward, and though he had by now gotten used to it, he had not seen the blow coming.
He swallowed and tried to reconcile this new piece of information against everything he knew already. His cheek throbbed now, the initial shock wearing off now and leaving him with only pain and, he was pretty sure, a nasty bruise. He had no idea what he was supposed to do, so he just sat there, blinking uselessly in an attempt to stave off the tears he knew were coming; he tried to remind himself of how irritated his father became when he cried, but the thought only made the tears come faster and with greater force. In an attempt to stifle the sounds of his gulping sobs, he bit down on his fist and waited for what came next. He no longer had any idea of what to expect. His father had just shattered any sense of normalcy in his life, and he was left to pick up the shards and try to piece together what came after.
Alone in that room, surrounded by the books he had acquired from the library, and the towering structures he had built, and the notebooks he had filled with equations and word puzzles and stories, Edward Nashton wished he could disappear.
He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tucked his head between his legs and imagined that he could feel himself start to vanish. First, the tips of his fingers, tingling in that way they did when he fell asleep on his hands, then his hands would go fully, and it would travel slowly up his arms, until they became totally numb. Last to go would be his eyes, behind the thick rims of his glasses, but soon they would be gone, and so would he and he would finally be at peace.
He opened his eyes, and looked down at his body, still entirely there, and stretched out an arm, sweeping it outwards and knocking over his tallest structure.
It was just going to get ruined anyway.
Edward Nashton was sixteen when he finally succeeded in disappearing. He took one last look at the house he had spent his entire life in and clutched the bus ticket to Gotham City in his hand. His mother and father both thought he was on his way to school, but truthfully, Edward had skipped several grades without letting them know, forging their signatures and not thinking about what his father specifically would do if he found out, and had graduated early. Gotham University had been more than happy to accept him with a full ride scholarship.
Well, they had been happy to accept Edward Nygma with a full ride scholarship. Today, Edward Nashton was to disappear. The moment he stepped foot in Gotham, Edward Nashton was dead, and he was giddy with excitement. He had gone about his plan carefully: he had paid for the ticket in cash, his application to the university had been completed on the library computer, and for all appearances he looked as though he were off to school. His bag was not overly packed in a way that may draw suspicion. Indeed, he had brought only a change of clothes, his wallet, the latest book of riddles he’d been reading and all of the money he had saved from selling his services as an essay writer (because his classmates were willing to benefit from his work but unwilling to associate with him through a proper tutoring session – not that he cared, he didn’t want their company anyway), and his spare glasses.
He didn’t run from the house, nor did he do anything that could be considered strange or out of character. That was how you got caught, and he wanted to be gone before anyone even knew something was amiss. As of right now, he had until he was supposed to be home from school before his mother and father would suspect anything, but one wrong move and they could be on his tail far sooner.
So, he walked calmly away from the house, which he would never deign to call Home, towards the bus stop. Gotham was a good few hours away and was the bus’s penultimate stop, hopefully meaning it would be the last place anyone would look for him. He handed his ticket to the bus driver, and sat right at the back, turning his face away from the window in case anyone happened to walk by and spot him. His russet hair was too noticeable but there was nothing at present he could do about it. He resolved to dye it when he reached Gotham – perhaps a nice dark brown to match his eyes. He liked that idea, and he dwelled on it excessively as the bus pulled away and began its journey.
As it went, Edward felt himself finally, completely and utterly, leave Edward Nashton behind.
He was finally free.
His first day in Gotham had been less than optimal: the city was dense, foggy, and full of criminals, and he had almost gotten lost twice and mugged once before he found an apartment for rent. Here, he had more luck as, precisely because of the city’s prior listed faults, rent was incredibly cheap and, so long as he was frugal, and didn’t get mugged more than once a fortnight, he could afford it without needing a job. He could lose himself in his studies, just as he had always wanted to.
His new apartment was in a particularly bad part of town, with more shattered streetlights than intact ones, and there was a leak in the roof, and a large green neon sign just outside of his main window. He could learn to love that last point though, given his love of the colour, and the fact that he had tried the light switch and found it to be useless.
He shut the door behind him and dropped his backpack to the floor.
He had done it.
He had finally done it.
He had taken Edward Nashton, and he had killed him, and in his place stood Edward Nygma, triumphant.
He had spent two days in Gotham, in the city he was quickly beginning to view as home, with his flat slowly becoming furnished as he sifted through thrift stores, and his hair now dyed a rich brown, and a wardrobe comprised of soft green jumpers and grid-lined shirts, also thrifted, when he saw his face in the paper.
It was an old photo, from his days in the chess club at his high school. He had deliberately avoided any cameras for the past year for this precise reason. He did not want to be recognised. He was about fourteen years old in the photo, smiling awkwardly (his split lip had only just begun to heal, and he hadn’t wanted to reopen the wound), and the club member closest to him was clearly keeping their distance, their shoulder the only visible point of them.
He skimmed the article, a small part of him amused at having made the front page, even in Gotham. It said all the usual things, beloved teen (a lie) missing, parents worried sick (an even bigger lie) and pleading for anyone with information about the whereabouts of their son to come forward so they could be a happy family once more (the biggest lie yet). Edward had laughed and thrown the newspaper away.
He kept track of the headlines as the days passed and found that within another few days, his face disappeared from the headlines, and even from the body of the newspaper. He suspected that this was his father’s doing somehow, not wanting to waste any effort on a son he considered useless (He was correct in this assumption: his father had gone straight to the editor-in-chief of the newspaper and informed him that he wanted no more to be written about his son. The man had agreed, though he was somewhat bewildered by the request and would tell his friends for days about the first man ever to request that the newspaper stop writing about his missing child).
And so, Edward Nashton disappeared, his case file discarded, tossed to the pile of cold cases, never again to see the light of day.
And for ten years, this was true. Edward Nashton faded utterly into nothingness, as Edward Nygma made a new life in Gotham, graduating top of his class at the university, and going on to complete a dual masters in biology and forensic criminology, and secure himself a job at the GCPD, a testament to how sure he was that the case should never be reopened.
He failed to account for the actions of his father though, and, ten years to the day, the name of Nashton was plastered across the papers once more, when Richard Nashton, in a fit of rage, stabbed his wife sixteen times in the chest, killing her.
It would have been one thing if he had just killed her. Frankly, Ed had understood from a young age that, if nothing changed, the end result of his father’s abuse would have been the deaths of him and his mother, and he had accepted this. It may have seemed cold, but he held no particular sentiment towards his mother. She may not have hurt him as his father did, but neither did she protect him. In fact, he still remembered an instance in which she attempted to divert his father’s attention away from her and onto him. She had hugged him and stroked his hair after that particular beating, but he could not feel it. All he felt was the sharp sting of her betrayal, and an understanding had dawned clearly upon him, that so long as his father was around, it would always be every man for himself. So, he packed away any feelings he had for her, and if she ever left his father, or if his liver kicked it and he somehow died first, Ed resolved perhaps to send her a card.
Something that said, Well done for surviving our brute! or something to that effect.
Still, that would have been one thing, just killing her, but to kill her exactly ten years after the disappearance of Edward Nashton, that was another thing altogether. Because now, the public eye was drawn not just to his mother’s murder, but back again to his disappearance. It had become a hot topic of conversation everywhere. Theories abounded. He couldn’t go anywhere without hearing people speculate on whether his father had killed him and buried the body, or if his mother had killed him and his father killed her as retribution on finding out, or whether his father was secretly keeping him in a locked basement cell and his mother had finally heard his pitiful cries and tried to rescue him.
It was driving him crazy. The precinct was the only place he could find some peace, where hardly anyone cared about one gruesome case, when they had their own assigned ones to focus on, and where no-one cared about Edward Nygma. It was alright, he reasoned to himself as he pulled another double shift, public interest would die down as it did before, and even if it didn’t, no-one could possibly link him to Edward Nashton – all they had in common was a name, and it wasn’t exactly a unique one. He would be fine.
This line of reasoning ran through his mind all through the day, as he fretted and frowned on all the ways his secret could be revealed. He had built up so much, and to have it all come crashing down because of his ignorant brute of a father was unthinkable.
He was just wrapping up on a dissection of an exsanguinated corpse, a dissection he had not even been able to fully enjoy with how preoccupied he had been, when there came a knocking at the lab door. He removed his rubber gloves with practiced precision, ignoring the way his hands shook ever so slightly, and opened the door.
“Detective Gordon! What brings you here?”
Gordon looked awkward and slightly uncomfortable, eyes tracking somewhere behind Ed and refusing to look at him properly.
“I’ve got a case, and the Captain has asked me to bring you and some others with me.” Ed got a better pin on the emotion at this point – Gordon was embarrassed, perhaps at being required to bring others on the case with him – he had always struck Ed as a cool lone wolf type. More likely, though, was that he was embarrassed at having been ordered to stay away from any cases involving the Falcone and Maroni crime families, which in Gotham was practically every crime that occurred. Precinct gossip had passed that little tidbit of information along with incredible speed, and it had even reached Ed, which was a testament to how far it had spread. Ed had always been someone who was gossiped about rather than gossiped to.
Still, Ed was excited to see what case detective Gordon had found that was intricate enough to require others, and able to come to a satisfying conclusion, rather than just being attributed to one of the major crime families of Gotham and subsequently swept under the rug.
“Absolutely, that sounds interesting. What’s the case?” He was already desperate for the setup to the puzzle, the information he could chew on and set his mind to, the one thing that could take his mind off –
“The disappearance of Edward Nashton.”
He swallowed, “Oh, detective, I –
What could he possibly say? ‘I can’t’ – that would bring questions of why he couldn’t, questions with no good answers. ‘I won’t’ brought similar problems, plus the additional problems of being far too assertive. He couldn’t pretend to have other work to do, because he’d already expressed interest in the case. He was utterly screwed. His only option was to accept.
“I would be happy to assist on the case. May I inquire though why this case has suddenly come up; I thought that it had run cold pretty much immediately.”
“Yeah, well the father, Richard Nashton, killed Edward Nashton’s mother just yesterday, and the names flagged in the system. There’s ten years exactly between them, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. We’ve not got any leads yet though so its just some investigative work. The captain wants Me, Harvey, Lee, and you on it.”
“Then I suppose I can’t refuse.” Ed said, trying to execute a passable smile.
Jim laughed stiffly and told him that they’d be leaving to canvas the neighbourhood where the Nashton’s had lived in ten minutes. Ed okayed this and swiftly set to cleaning up and returning the corpse on the table to its proper place in the morgue, setting his notes on to Lee’s desk after he did so. Lee thanked him and then enquired after his health.
“Are you alright?” she asked, “you look a little pale.”
Ed’s breath caught in his throat, “Right as rain.” He declared, even giving her a thumbs up before speeding back to the lab and splashing water onto his face from the faucet and taking as many deep breaths as he could without making himself late. He just kept repeating the same mantra over and over in his head, that Edward Nashton was dead, that there was nothing connecting him with Edward Nygma, and that as long as he kept his cool, and didn’t let his emotions give him away, everything would be fine.
He was not Edward Nashton anymore.
He would never be Edward Nashton again.