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The first shot in his war came off without one hitch. Or call it a slice, maybe, the first in his vengeance of a thousand cuts. His malleable new accomplice had made for a convincingly spooky Papa Van Dahl. Tarquin, without the slightest dumb inkling of any greater plan at work, had still played his part exactly as Ed knew he would. As he helped hoist the body into the trunk of a stolen car, Ed sneered to himself that people could be so predictable, lurching along in their paths like clockwork dolls. Tarquin, Barbara, Tabitha, her shaved ape of a boyfriend...
Not Oswald. Not entirely. Credit where it was due, he’d blindsided Ed with his betrayal, and now he continued to be just a little off-book. Five minutes after caving the late, unlamented Tarquin’s skull in with a golf trophy he’d managed to almost look composed on that television interview. Something about the sheer ruthlessness of that had been beautiful, and Ed had hesitated at the edge of the crowd, remembering why he’d so revered this vicious, cunning man. He’d had to think hard about Isabella, about the lilt of her voice and the pain of her loss, to force himself back on course. Good thing he’d thought to bring along Oswald’s ‘father’ to give him a last shove over the edge.
In the middle of all this scheming and planning, he’d picked up pieces of underworld chatter about Jim Gordon killing his ex’s new husband on her wedding day. That gave him a few minutes of schadenfreude, because false former friends were very much on his mind and he’d never forgotten Jim turning on him, or Lee slapping him across the face. But orchestrating the downfall of Oswald Cobblepot – not to mention the eventual double-cross of Barbara and co – was a full-time job, so Gordon’s romantic woes slipped out of his mind. He was far too preoccupied with plotting out paths for all his predictable little clockwork people.
Except, one crucial thing he’d forgotten, an unforgivable slip for a scientist: no such thing as perfect order in a system. Chaos would always arise. A butterfly flapped its wings in Costa Rica and those imperceptible changes in air pressure and wind currents all multiplied together and amplified, and a month later and half a world away, Gotham had April blizzards.
Or Jim Gordon shot the son of Carmine Falcone, and a grieving old man decided to channel his grief and anger into lumbering out of retirement to take his city back.
Which was how, just as he was getting ready to fool Oswald into thinking he’d been kidnapped by a rival mobster, Ed found himself kidnapped by a rival mobster.
**
The car had stopped a long time ago. Hours? Had to be. Maybe half a day. He couldn’t hear anyone outside, no matter how hard he strained to listen over his heartbeat and his rapid, shallow breathing.
He wasn’t panicking. He wasn’t panicking. They’d hurt him, but not badly: no breaks, just bruises, so not even the worst beating he’d had as an adult, let alone... yes, that was it, he was an adult, that’s what he had to concentrate on. Grown men, even ones far less brilliant and less dangerous than he was, weren’t afraid of the dark. And yes, it was cramped, the lid of the trunk invisible in the darkness but within reach if he struggled, but that shouldn’t faze him. He’d crawled through endless vents at Arkham barely wider than his body and felt nothing but glee at his cleverness in finding an escape route.
But it was the combination, hurting and confined and in the dark, all together. It was too much like some of the memories that he always imagined stuffed away in deep vaults in the recesses of his brain, with steel shutters across the entranceways and lethal traps on every side. He’d spent years shoring up those barricades, so things hardly ever slipped out nowadays. He almost never thought about that suffocating darkness, and the very first time he’d heard his own voice whispering mocking insults in his ear.
Back in the day he’d taught himself tricks, repetition and word games, things to occupy his mind and keep him from fixating on how much air was left. He came up with a half dozen ways his current predicament could be described in a riddle, and then he recited the periodic table under his breath, forward and backwards by atomic number and then alphabetically. He was making anagrams from the lanthanides when he heard something outside, footsteps on loose stones.
He was ready when they opened the trunk. Oh, not ready to do anything – his knees were pressed to his chest and his hands were behind his back, zip-ties and the weight of his body cutting off the circulation – but at least he was braced for the flood of light, eyes narrowed to slits and what he hoped was a defiant look on his face.
“Here, you can hear it from the horse’s mouth.” The shadow looming over him resolved itself, as his eyes adjusted to both the light and the skew of his crooked glasses, into Carmine Falcone. “Our mutual feathered friend is concerned for your safety, Mr Nygma. Please assure him you’re alive and, for now, relatively well.” He reached down to press a phone to Ed’s ear.
“Oswald,” Ed blurted out. His mouth was bone dry. “Oswald, I’m here.”
He strained against the back of the trunk, arching his neck painfully up to get closer to the phone, but seconds crawled by with nothing from the other end. For a moment, as he’d said his friend’s name, fear and hope had wiped the last couple of weeks from his mind, as if there’d been no revenge, no war, he’d only stepped out of the mansion to run some innocuous Chief of Staff’s errand and Falcone’s goons had grabbed him off the street.
His life depended on Oswald thinking that that was what had happened, and as that struck him a terrifying thought sank icy hooks into his brain: maybe Oswald knew. Maybe he was in this with Falcone. They were old friends, weren’t they, from before his retirement? Oswald knew things about Ed that he’d never told anyone else, about his childhood, his father – not everything, not even close, but enough. This could be some plan to break him before Oswald killed him.
On some level, he could respect that. It was what he would do.
“Oswald?” he whispered.
“Ed?”
It was distant and quiet, the reception poor, but it was there. He twisted his face towards the tinny voice. “Yes! Yes, I’m here.”
“Ed, it is... you don’t know how it feels to hear your voice.”
He swallowed down a sob of relief. Crying would be so humiliating, and from experience it could only make things worse for him.
“Ed,” Oswald was saying, “Falcone and I are talking terms, but I’ll be with you as soon as I can. Trust me, I’ve made it very clear what I’ll do if he hurts you. Just hold on.”
“Roger that,” he croaked, and felt an idiot for saying it, but Falcone was taking the phone away so he couldn’t hear if Oswald said anything else. He sucked in a breath of clean air before the trunk slammed closed again, and back in the darkness he repeated that imprecise lifeline of a word to himself: soon, soon.
**
It was still light out when one of Falcone’s men dragged him out of the trunk and set him on his feet. Ed blinked up at the overcast sky, surprised that this whole ordeal must have taken eight hours, nine at most. A pair of clippers that felt dangerously close to his fingers freed him of the zip-ties, and he stumbled at the change in his balance, his own arms feeling like dead weights dragging him down. Falcone’s henchman grabbed him by the elbow, keeping him upright.
They were in a clearing, an unpaved parking lot with white patches of melting snow on the rough ground. There were tall trees around the rough perimeter, and signposts pointing left and right with names of trails. It was the forest on the edge of the city, he realized. He’d buried Kristen somewhere in these woods. He’d found Oswald here, dazed and hurt, when he’d still been an impossibly exciting ideal and neither Ed’s best friend or his greatest enemy.
There was only one other car in sight, over on the other side of the lot. Oswald was braced against it with his palms spread wide on the roof, Falcone’s other man patting him down for weapons. Ed sagged in relief, not caring that he earned a jab in the ribs with the butt of a pistol for it. Soon had been an eternity, every minute that passed another sixty seconds where Barbara could be spilling any number of damning secrets to Oswald in the hopes of preventing whatever truce he was negotiating with Falcone. He’d come up with several escape plans in the event of Oswald not coming for him, but even the best of them seemed destined to end with a bullet between his eyes.
The man frisking Oswald nodded to his boss, who motioned to Ed’s surly companion. “Move,” he said, and Ed went with him to where Falcone was waiting, biting back a sarcastic comment on the redundancy of barking orders while also manhandling him at gunpoint.
“You can turn around, Penguin,” Falcone said.
Oswald did, bringing his hands slowly to his sides. His gaze fixed on Ed’s right away. His hair was flattened messily to his head, the collar and cuffs of his suit not quite straight, his face pale, no eye makeup. He didn’t smile – of course not – but his taut expression relaxed a little, and he gave a curt nod.
“As I said,” Falcone told him, easily, as if they were two old colleagues catching up over beers, “your friend’s undamaged. Take him and go and he’ll stay that way.”
It took Ed a second, because it didn’t make any sense; terms, Oswald had said, but just letting them go? Falcone gained nothing by that, and he was too smart to make an empty power play.
Oswald lifted his chin, talking to Falcone but his eyes still on Ed’s face. “We’ll be two states away by morning.”
“Floor it,” Falcone suggested amiably. “I think you can make it three.”
Ed stared at them both. “You can’t,” he said.
“We can,” Oswald said, and this time he almost cracked a tiny smile. “I stopped for gas.”
“Oswald, you can’t. Leave Gotham, leave your city...”
“We have a deal,” Falcone said, and Oswald quickly added, “And it’s more than fair, Carmine. Don Falcone, I should say. My friend is a tad emotional, but he’s going to be fine, aren’t you, Ed?”
Nothing about this was fine. Oswald was standing there alone and unarmed, and seriously suggesting leaving Gotham forever, just handing it over to this washed-up relic, when he was a thousand times smarter and more capable of making it work, when Ed had taken this chaos of a city and remade it for him, finding all the ways those thousands of little individual cogs worked together in one intricate, terrible machine. He was walking away without a fight and of his own volition, because someone had whispered in Falcone’s ear that the Penguin had a weakness.
Ed had been reduced to a mere instrument of Falcone’s revenge. Not even that, and it was a realization that sent a jolt of fury right through him; Falcone only cared that Oswald was a roadblock on his way back to power. It wasn’t personal. Oswald could have been anybody, which meant he was nobody to this man. How dare he?
His own war would have been perfect. He’d die right here on this spot before he’d consent to be a pawn in someone else’s.
“It was me,” he said. Oswald’s eyes widened, but Ed didn’t give him the chance to speak. He said, louder, “Oswald, it was all me. Your father. The TV interview. You killing my replacement, the body disappearing. I’ve been working behind your back with Barbara and those other imbeciles to weaken you, to hurt you.”
This was the moment he’d imagined over and over, picturing how Oswald would look when it all sank in. He’d seen his friend raging and grieving, so he knew what those did to his face and eyes and voice, and he had first-hand experience of Oswald with a knife to his throat or a gun to his head. All the ways this could go, every first-this-then-that, he’d constructed for himself in perfect detail in his mind.
And here, in the moment, Oswald just looked tired. Nothing else. “Well, all that aside,” he said, as if he was prompting a child, “like I said, you’re all right, aren’t you?”
It was so unexpected, so incongruous, so But otherwise, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play? that Ed’s first thought was that one of them had gone mad.
“So since you’re obviously fine,” Oswald was saying, “Don Falcone’s kept his side of the agreement, and now we need to keep ours, so get in the car.”
Ed tried: “Apologies, I think I must have only said some of that inside my head, let me start again...”
“Get in the damn car, Ed!”
Falcone was looking back and forth between them, the confusion on his face clearing up something Ed had wondered in that endless time to think in the trunk of the car – it must have been Barbara who’d tipped him off about Oswald believing himself to be in love with Ed, but had she told him all of it, Ed’s plans for Oswald, too? He could see now that she’d kept those particular cards close to her chest. Falcone hadn’t known.
But Oswald had.
Ed’s head was spinning. That was funny, wasn’t it, that he’d been desperate to get out of that trunk when there was even less air out here?
Falcone said, a few steps behind Ed’s own racing train of thought, “You knew he was a traitor.”
He bristled at the word, on reflex, before he had time to think about it and concede it was an accurate descriptor, albeit one that missed a lot of the nuance of their complicated situation.
“Of course. I’m surprised Barbara didn’t clue you into that part. She couldn’t wait to tell me.” Oswald’s voice was light, but something Ed couldn’t name flickered across his expression. “Such an eager little gossip.”
“She didn’t tell me this,” Falcone confirmed. “And I’m afraid this new information makes me question your sincerity in agreeing to my conditions.”
He nodded to his men and Ed stumbled as the grip on his arm released, the gun that had been pressed to his side now trained on Oswald, who looked unruffled despite two guns on him and three enemies around him – or was that four? Ed had no idea how to count himself anymore, because Oswald had known, and he had still come for him.
“His life for the city,” Oswald said mildly. “Your conditions are just fine. I knew all of this before you even called me. I wasn’t to know Barbara hadn’t told you everything.”
“Still...”
“Or go ahead and kill us both.” Oswald spat out the words, moving forward into Falcone’s space, as if his limp and their difference in size and the guns on him didn’t matter. “Question my sincerity all you want. But I have already killed a lot of people today to find this man and I’m not leaving here without him, and I think if you wanted me dead I wouldn’t have made it out of the car. A bloodless coup looks so much better for you, doesn’t it? What a display of your power, Godfather, that you didn’t even have to kill me, because you only had to show up and I turned tail and ran, and shut up, Ed, I am talking.”
Ed’s mouth snapped closed. He wasn’t even sure what he had been about to say. Maybe Oswald did, since he’d known he was about to speak without even looking at him. His eyes were locked on Falcone’s, bright and fierce.
“So,” Oswald said, “are my friend and I leaving this city? Or are your men going to pull those triggers?”
Ed didn’t know if this was some bluff or plan, or if Oswald was truly, insanely willing to die here beside him. Was he supposed to be ready to fight? To run? He didn’t have enough information, he didn’t have enough time, and Oswald had called him my friend...
Falcone lifted his hand, and his men half-lowered their weapons.
Oswald nodded, once, and turned to extend his arm to Ed. It was an effort to just move in his direction and not collapse onto him, as Oswald steered them both slowly towards the car. “You can go in the back,” he said quietly, and that was far more terrifying than any threat of being shot, until Oswald reached for the handle of the rear door and Ed realized he only meant for him to lie down, not that he was putting him back in the dark. He sat down, his legs suddenly losing all power to hold him up.
“Penguin,” Falcone said, and Oswald turned to him. “My condolences. I do know what it is to be where you’re standing.” The old man gave Ed a last, considering look. It went all the way down to the bone. “Not to tell you your business, but you’d find you can love him just as easily dead. Easier, even. I’ve never forgotten Liza, but I’ve never once regretted killing her.”
“Liza!” Oswald snapped his fingers. It echoed off the trees like a gunshot. “That was that girl’s name. Thank you. Do you know, that has been bothering me all day.”
**
There was a pillow in the back seat, and a paper bag on the passenger’s side with bottled water and Tylenol. Ed ran his fingertip slowly along the edge of it, like having something tangible in front of him would cause any of this to start making sense.
Oswald kept glancing at him in the mirror. He hadn’t said a word yet, just let the car eat up the miles. They must be far outside the city limits by now, getting further from Gotham every minute. Ed wondered if his leg was hurting, and if he should offer to take a turn behind the wheel.
It was such a ridiculous thought, as if they were only on some spur-of-the-moment road trip, that a laugh bubbled up inside his chest before he could stop it, and trying to hold it back just made it worse, and by the time he could collect himself the car had stopped moving, and Oswald was turned around, reaching through the space between the seats to hold onto Ed’s shoulder. He was blurry; Ed thought for a second that he’d lost his glasses, but there they were, still in position. There was something in his hand, a vivid splash of purple, and he squinted foolishly down at it. Oswald’s pocket square, crushed and damp.
“Oh,” he muttered, surprised, and pulled himself upright, trying to flatten it out across his knee.
“It doesn’t matter,” Oswald said.
“But you like this one, it was your father’s...”
Oswald inhaled, sharply, but his voice stayed soft. “Ed, we need to keep moving.”
“In a minute,” he insisted. “Just give me one minute, Oswald, I can fix this.”
“It’s only a handkerchief.”
“I mean all of it, I can fix all of it, I can...”
“I can’t fix Isabella.”
Ed froze.
When he finally looked up, Oswald was watching him carefully. “Barbara told me you knew,” he said. “But I don’t know if that was another one of her lies. Either way. I killed Isabella. Had her killed. That seems like a technicality.”
“I know,” he said, then felt he should clarify that to, “I knew.” What had Oswald thought this was even about, if not that?
“Well,” Oswald said. “Good to have all those cards on the table. Is it done, now? We’re going to need to stop for the night somewhere, and if you’re planning on smothering me in my sleep we should probably get two rooms.”
“I was never going to kill you.” He couldn’t tell himself with absolutely certainty that that had always been true, but at least it was true now. “And yes. It’s done. We’re even.” Oswald had saved him, again, and that seemed fair, a life for a life.
Oswald searched his face, and whatever he saw there made him offer Ed a tentative smile. “Good,” he said. “Because I do actually need you to help me get my city back. Falcone will live to regret not killing us.” He squeezed Ed’s shoulder and turned back in his seat, gunning the ignition. “It’s snowing again,” he observed.
They were quiet for a while, the sky outside turning dark and thin flakes settling on the windshield. Oswald drove, and Ed lay back in the seat. He was aching, and he was exhausted, and he couldn’t take his eyes off Oswald and he couldn’t stop an old riddle of his rolling dizzily round in his head: I can start a war. I can start a war, or end one.
The words were so noisy inside his skull that he almost said them out loud, but probably Oswald wasn’t in the mood to hear it, and he wouldn’t risk this new, fragile truce between them for the world; so, for now, he kept it to himself.