Work Text:
Just because we share an apartment doesn’t mean he can throw his shit all over the place, Edward thought grumpily as he descended the basement stairs, the tapping of his cane on the concrete floor echoing through the room.
Jonathan’s chemistry equipment was everywhere. The counters lining the left wall were covered in papers with formulas and instructions written messily in Jonathan’s scratchy handwriting, as well as various burners, beakers, vials, and pipettes. Mugs with days-old coffee dried on the rims sat shoved in a corner to make room for empty toxin grenades and a prototype of his injection gauntlet. The shelves lining the walls were packed with more beakers, filled with concoctions of various colors and labeled haphazardly with masking tape and Sharpie, along with finished fear toxin grenades balanced precariously on top of each other. It made Edward’s hands itch just thinking about it.
But the mess wasn’t what Edward was here for. Jonathan had borrowed one of the notebooks Edward brainstormed schemes in to figure out what toxin of his he should bring, and forgotten to bring it back up.
Jonathan was out of the house today, getting a batch of hallucinogenic plants from Ivy, leaving Edward to go down and get it himself. It was pretty easy to spot, with its lime green cover covered in his signature question marks, so Edward walked over and grabbed it.
Just as he turned to leave, the ground started shaking. He had awful balance normally, and he was in the middle of a step so his cane was off the ground, and he tumbled to the floor. The glass on the shelves came crashing down around him, spilling their contents on the floor as some of the bright orange ones turned to gas. He scrambled away, trying not to inhale it, but his palms caught on the shattered glass and he recoiled.
He felt his pulse quickening. What was in those? Oh, shit, when was the last time we cleaned the floor down here? There’s probably stuff in my wounds and on my hands and—
Edward curled in on himself as he started panicking. What if the ceiling came crashing down? This was an old building after all. And he was inside. And couldn’t get up. He would get buried under the rubble and no one would ever find his body.
Jonathan. Jonathan would come down and check on his experiments. Jonathan would find his body. He sat up, slowly coming to the realization that he had glass in his arm.
Ah.
Edward reached up with his other hand to pull the shards out, but it was shaking so bad that he was certain he’d widen the cuts and bleed to death before he managed to remove any.
I… I could call Jonathan.
He pulled out his phone, relieved to see it intact, and hit Jonathan’s contact.
Unless he thought I did it on purpose. He would never believe me. Why would anyone—
“Ed? What’s going on?” Jonathan asked over the phone.
“Your stuff fell over, and I have glass in my arm, and my hand’s shaking too much to get it out, and, and I—” Edward stuttered. Jonathan cut him off.
“You inhaled some of it,”
“Yeah,”
His voice was shaking. Jonathan could hear it. Edward would never hear the end of it, and Jonathan would leave, just like everyone else.
“Alright. So it wasn’t a waste. I’ll be over in a few minutes. Remind me where you keep the first-aid kit?”
“Upper right-hand shelf under the bathroom cabinet,”
Jonathan hummed in acknowledgment and hung up. Edward needed to wash his hands. There was who-knows-what in the cuts, and on the floor, and he needed to get it off. He didn’t trust himself to get up at the moment. He started counting instead.
The aftershock came when he had gotten to twenty-nine. He didn’t cover his head, because there was probably stuff in his hair that he wasn’t touching, so he waited for the ceiling to bury him alive. It did not, and he heard footsteps from the stairs a few minutes later.
Jonathan. Edward scrambled for his cane, gripping it so hard his knuckles were white, and brandished it at the approaching figure. Jonathan wasn’t here to help. He was going to finish him off.
“Edward,” Jonathan said, sweeping some of the broken glass aside with his foot, “I’m here to get the glass out of your arm. You called me, remember?”
“Yeah. I did. I just…” Edward said, slowly lowering his cane and curling his knees into his chest. He came to the sudden realization that he’d just dug the glass into his hands further and winced.
“Can I see the arm?” Jonathan asked. He reached into the first aid kit he carried and pulled out a set of tweezers. “Actually, hold on. I’ll do your palms first.”
Edward held out his hands while Jonathan gently pulled the glass out.
“Can I have an alcohol pad?” Edward asked. Jonathan wordlessly opened a packet and handed him one. Edward used it to wash his hands until it dried, then held out his hand to ask for another one. Jonathan sighed.
“We’ve got a limited number and I need to bandage these first. If you’d like, I could grab a pencil so you have something to do with your hands,”
Oh, right. Edward still had the notebook. He nodded, and Jonathan stood to get a pencil from the counter and handed it to Edward, who wordlessly took it and started listing off multiples of three on a blank page while Jonathan plucked the glass from his arm, cleaned it, and placed bandages over each cut.
“So. What did you feel?” Jonathan asked finally. He had sat on the floor next to Edward after sweeping up the glass and wiping away the toxin.
“Enhanced paranoia and anxiety, mostly. Must have triggered my OCD,” Edward answered.
“No hallucinations?”
“No. Just made my head run at a million miles an hour,”
“Fascinating,” Jonathan said, and actually smiled. “I’ll have to find more test subjects, of course, to ensure the data is accurate.”
“Did you mean for that to happen?” “Not quite. I tried an entirely new compound mixture to see if I could replicate similar effects in case of immunities. The lack of hallucinations is certainly surprising,”
“How’d I do?”
“Just perfectly,”
Edward slid over to rest his head on Jonathan’s shoulder, and Jonathan reached up behind him to run a hand through Edward’s hair.
“I’d still like to wash my hands,”
“Once the toxin is out of your system,”
“…Fine,”