Batman: Deleted, Unread
Indiana
Characters: The Riddler
Synopsis: He, like everyone else, received a lot of emails. There's only one sender he does his best to ignore.
He, like everyone else, received a lot of emails.
Most of them were ordinary junk emails from websites he didn't remember signing up for, or weekly flyers from stores that had asked for his address that he had provided to be polite. He would skim over those on occasion if he was bored, but they never held anything he either wanted or needed to see. Some of them were political emails from several different parties asking for him to sign this petition or donate to that cause, which he looked at because the subject lines and the contents themselves were mildly amusing. There were a lot of those come election season, and usually he ended up marking them as junk because there were just so damn many.
Another good chunk of them were from his informants, of course, and they were always pored over slowly as he searched for connections and looked to use it for his various ends. They were always, always committed to memory, more carefully than anything else ever was. Which was of course everything, because anything could be of import, but these were always vital. No exceptions.
Sometimes he got messages from his compatriots, you could call them. Those emails were also important, not the least of which because some of them were vaguely threatening. There were the ones from the Tailor asking him to pay the balance when he picked up his order, the ones from the Broker with new properties or improvements to buildings he already owned. Sometimes there were alliance proposals or attempts at blackmail. All of these emails were also of great import and given the attention they deserved.
Now and again he even got fan mail, or hate mail, adversely, from people who managed to figure out what his email address was, not that it was really that hard to do so. Whether the message was good or bad, it was always appreciated, and those ones were moved to their respective folders to be read again at his leisure. Most of the time he would open the nicer emails, but even he had days where he hated himself so much making himself feel worse was the only thing he felt he deserved to do.
There was one sender, however, he did his best to ignore.
He got an email from him once every six months or so, on average; he had read the first one, skimmed the second, and done his best to ignore the third and subsequent ones after that. They were all the same, more or less. The contents would summarise in varying detail what a disappointment he was, what a failure he had always been, how he was never going to amount to anything because he was just that lacking. They would bring up some variety of happenings related to him that had been in the media, usually his arrests and subsequent hospitalisations, but sometimes bringing his intelligence into question or suggesting nothing that he did had any worth at all. He'd even been told to both call and to never attempt contact again in the space of one message. He knew that variations on these were what those emails contained, what they would always contain, so he did his best not to ever give them any thought. But now and again he would stare at the sender and the subject line, tension gripping his stomach, wondering what he'd done this time that had inspired his father to send him yet another derisive email. When would his father just accept that they were different people, and that Edward was never going to be what he wanted him to be? Maybe his life was a little on the... unconventional side, but did it really matter? If it was what Edward wanted and if it was what made him happy, then what was the use in trying to get him to change? If anything, it made him want to diverge farther away out of spite! In the future, perhaps he would move away from this life. Perhaps. Who knew, and who cared? If this was what he wanted right now, then it was what he was going to have, and no amount of judgmental emails was going to change that! As if his father even really cared what he did with himself. He never had. Nothing had ever pleased him and nothing ever would, and he'd long had enough of trying. And he wished he could make it fade, he really did, but there was still one part of him that wanted to try though it would never be of any use. There was still one part that was convinced he could fix everything, that he could be the son his father wanted him to be, and he strove to quash it, to no avail. It was a stupid thought that nagged at him for days every time he saw one of those subject lines from that sender, and he didn't know why he didn't just blacklist the man and get it over with. Maybe he hoped that one day it would be different. Maybe one day there would be something else in the message, something that didn't set his hands to shaking or his heart a-stutter. Maybe. As the years went by he doubted it more and more, but that damnable hope never died and there wasn't much he could do about it. There was only one thing he could do. It wasn't enough, because even without reading the emails they still bothered him on a level he hated and couldn't explain. But as with everything else he couldn't control he did his best to let the racing thoughts run themselves out and wait until he could forget about it, until the next time one of them arrived in his inbox.
And when they did, regardless of his reaction upon seeing them, the eventual outcome was always the same:
They were deleted, unread.