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In all honesty, Ed hadn’t been looking where he was going; he was, admittedly, running on an emotional high, having forced the Bat into a cat-and-mouse game that spanned the entirety of the city.
It had taken him weeks to get this idea up and running, leaving little hints here and there, a couple of riddles sewn into the guts of some conveniently placed corpses found in just the right locations to lead the Bat to Ed's location.
It was the most fun he'd had in a long time; he had been going through a bit of a slump, and so now that he was running joyously across an apartment rooftop and glancing over his shoulder at the enraged figure chasing him, it slipped his mind to watch his footing, and suddenly he found that his heels were perched just on the edge of the building and his centre of gravity was tilted far too far forward to catch himself in time before he tumbled down.
His elbow caught his fall, scraping his suit sleeves, the fabric too slick to allow purchase against the colourless brick, feet dangling as he hung far above the Gotham streets. He saw a large gloved hand coming into his vision and he flinched hard, trying to stabilise himself from his precarious place and scrambling to regain his purchase on the brick with his fingers, harshly scraping against the rough surface. He saw too late that the Bat’s hand was only reaching out to pull him up. The initial fear had already caused him to lose his grip—
And then he was falling, the world a colourful blur of city lights streaming in vivid lines along his periphery.
He fell for a long time, but landed early, painfully slamming into a metallic railing of a balcony and tumbling onto its deck. He wished he had lost consciousness, but instead the pain wracked his body, spreading across his side and back. His breath was punched out of him, and it never returned. His wheezes grew more rapid and thin as he desperately reached to regain his breath.
Time passed like that, air alluding him, and he found he had begun to drift. The sky looked very beautiful, pitch black and light-polluted, and he liked that simple darkness above his head, making the desperate thinning stream of oxygen all the more bearable—to have something to look at, unmoving and flat. He could hear a wretched, thick, wet noise, weak but impossibly loud. His entire body ached. Along the side of his chest, something deep and penetrating burned inside of him. A pained noise drew out, accompanied by a gurgle. The oxygen deprivation must have rid him of his deductive reasoning, as he realised far too slowly that the awful noise he couldn’t escape was coming from him.
For a moment, he was struck by the realisation that there’d been a fifty-fifty chance of him plummeting in the other direction to the car-filled street below. Instead, he’d smashed into some Gothamite’s flower pots, terracotta shards scattered around his body and crushed petunias flattened against his suit.
He took inventory of the locations where his pain was most intense. Ribs four through nine had fractured, perhaps, from when he'd hit his side on the balcony railings. Their now-jagged edges were most likely angled inwards, right through the intercostals. From the drowning burn in his chest at every breath, their sharp points had penetrated his visceral pleura and his left lung was filling with blood.
Something heavy slammed onto the metal railing, cloaking Edward's vision black. His eyelids twitched. Against the shadow of the sky, he caught the shift of an inky cloak.
Ed was only on the second day of his hospital stay, and his room was already filled with flowers.
Oswald blustered through the hospital doors. There was a henchman trotting at his heels, their face obscured by the floral arrangement of the hour as they carried it through the lobby.
Surprisingly, when Oswald entered the hallway to Edward's room, he saw a familiar figure. Bruce Wayne was standing there, staring through the window into Edward's hospital room with folded arms. Something about his expression was unsettling; Oswald couldn't quite put his finger on it. Oswald stopped beside Bruce, facing the window—Oswald and Bruce were, in that moment, on fairly good terms.
"That reckless bat never knows when to quit!" Oswald said, glad to have someone to rant at. "He ran Ed off the side of a building this time. I'll have him sued, I swear. I don't care what anyone says, there will be consequences!"
And if the GCPD thought they could lock Ed up for any of this, they had another thing coming, he decided. He had already ordered the cops under his pay to destroy any evidence linking criminal activity to Edward. Anyone with a brain could tell what had really happened, but without concrete evidence, there was nothing they could do.
"But he'll recover?" asked Bruce.
"Once they get the blood out of his lung." Oswald glowered.
He gestured his head to the goon at his elbow holding Ed's newest array of flowers. They obediently entered the room, placing the colourful arrangement by Ed's bed, careful to give the pleurovac a wide berth. Oswald had chosen a heliotrope arrangement this time, eager for Ed to translate the flower language over the cranberry muffins Oswald had had delivered to his room that morning.
The muffins were still untouched, he noticed—Ed must not have woken yet. Oswald's grip tightened on his cane. Ed was on his side to allow for the chest tube to drain his lung into the drainage container below. Oswald struggled not to look at the blood filling the container—it made him a bit queasy to think about the thing, no matter how many gory sights he'd seen in his life.
Oswald opened his mouth to continue his rant, but Edward stirred behind the window. Oswald perked up. Bruce tensed.
"He's awake," Oswald sang, more to Edward than anyone else.
He rounded the doorway, pecked a little kiss to Edward's forehead, and settled into the plush seat he'd arranged for himself on Ed's first day there—he was hardly going to endure the plastic monstrosities the hospital dared to call chairs. The well-trained goon disappeared into the hallway for the sake of their privacy. Oswald threaded his fingers through Ed's where his hand lay on the sheets.
"Are you going to be joining us?" Oswald glanced back into the hallway, startling at the sight of empty air where Bruce Wayne had once stood. "… Apparently not."
"More flowers," Edward noted groggily, with almost enough energy to sound annoyed.
"And there'll be more to look forward to tomorrow, dear!" Oswald grinned.
"Goody."
Oswald snickered at Ed's act—he knew Ed liked the attention, and he'd caught him admiring the flowers when he thought Oswald wasn't looking. Now, however, Ed was clearly too out of it to pretend. He still looked mostly asleep, his cheek pressed into his pillow, and he was openly staring at the heliotropes by his bedside.
"You like them?" Oswald asked.
"They're like little stars," Ed replied, eyes glazed.
Oswald snickered. "How are those painkillers treating you?"
"Mm."
"You're a bit of an airhead when you're high, I've noticed."
Ed grumbled. “‘M’not high.”
“I don’t suppose you would be capable of muddling through a few riddles for me, now, then?” Oswald could barely contain his smirk.
“… Umbrella.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, wait, no, no—that’s the answer. What goes up…?” He trailed off, looking dazed.
“… When rain comes down?”
“An umbrella!” Edward answered proudly.
“Very impressive, Edward. You might just have a handle on this riddle thing, yet.”
“Thank you.” Ed smiled, pushing his head further into the plush white pillow.
Oswald gave the back of Ed’s hand two gentle pats, allowing himself a laugh at Ed’s expense. Despite the man’s excellent memory, Oswald doubted he’d remember much of this exchange. He was eager to make the most of it, for the sake of his own entertainment.
"You have nothing to apologise for," Ed mumbled.
"What?" Oswald's brow furrowed, leaning closer to Ed as though it could make his words make more sense. "What do you mean?"
Ed weakly twitched a hand in the direction of one of the floral arrangements, mouth tense.
"Purple hyacinths. 'I'm sorry.'"
"Those aren't mine, dearest," Oswald replied, standing to examine the flowers.
There was nothing suspicious about them, nothing that particularly stood out—though they were, notably, purchased from one of the more expensive florists in the city. There was no message on the enclosure card, just the florist's signature logo. Oswald turned the card in his hand. Nothing on the back.
"Huh." He braced himself for Ed's flaring curiosity, turning to face his partner, card brandished at an angle. "No name."
To his surprise, no rush of energy came. Ed's eyes had slid closed, and he was gently snoring into his partially drooled-on pillow. Oswald chuckled and returned to his seat, returning his hand to Ed's and stretching out his weaker leg beneath the bed frame—but his gaze kept drifting to that one curious outcrop of hyacinths, sitting plain and unassuming amongst the rest.