Disclaimer of doom: I do not own any of the characters except the ones I do. Make sense? Good. For everyone else, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.
(In other words, CAT are here with the permission of whichever one of us decides to get "idea rights." All other characters are just here because I kidnapped them, and if they do what I tell them to, no one has to get hurt...well, almost no one.)
To view the timeline of this series, please visit www. freewebs. com/ bitemetechie/ catverse. html (and this time the secret is to remove the spaces, guys.)
Surprise!
Christmas Eve was not necessarily the best night to pull a massive heist—sure, most of the cops had the night off, but Batman never took a break, and people tended to take it personally when they were called away from their roast goose and present opening to stop a criminal genius from cleaning out a mint.
Eddie wasn't one to be thwarted by such mundane concerns. The clues came so very easily to his mind, there was really no way he could stop himself from going through with it. Besides, it wasn't as if he was going to be killing anyone, at least not on purpose. Last Christmas Eve, the Joker had gassed an entire hospital, hoping to start a new holiday tradition—Euthanasia Day. Rumor had it he almost hadn't made it back to Arkham alive; apparently, one of the cops who arrested him had a mother there recovering from minor surgery. Like all the others, she'd required a closed casket.
Eddie wasn't perfect, but he knew better than to kill indiscriminately on Christmas Eve.
If he was being perfectly honest with himself, he had to admit that he was only pulling a job that day because he was bored. Bored…and lonely.
He didn't have a family anymore, if he'd ever really had one in the first place, and he wasn't in a position to make friends, even if he had been so inclined. He had colleagues, and he had Quiz and Query, sometimes. Those two were gone more often than not, though; he hadn't heard from them for months until they suddenly popped back into his life in late November, and he suffered under no illusion that they kept coming back to him for any other reason but the money.
There were only three people he would have counted as real friends, and they were all quite dead. And Christmas reminded him of them like no other time of the year.
It had all started one December evening when a strange young woman had shown up outside his cell in Arkham, introduced herself as "Nova, your biggest fan," and invited him to Christmas dinner. He had been intrigued by the thought of a Riddler fan club, and when she had blithely demolished the entire wing they were in, he had decided it would only be polite to go along with whatever else she had planned.
And when those plans had included giving him to her friend, Al, as a Christmas present…well, that had turned out less kinky than he had imagined, but it was still quite the most entertaining way he had ever spent his winter holidays.
All that was before Techie had joined the group. It had been five more years of intermittent contact before he had met her—again, at Christmas. That meeting had been very brief, and not under the most favorable circumstances. He wouldn't have expected anything else.
And all three of them had been dead and gone for more than a year. Part of him was surprised that they hadn't been killed much sooner. Another part of him was even more surprised that…he still missed them. He couldn't say that they were the greatest criminals he had ever known. He couldn't say they were the bravest, or the brightest, or even the most insane.
But he couldn't name three other people who had called him their friend, not because it served them to say so, but because they actually cared for him. And he had liked them more than he liked practically anyone.
And thinking about them wasn't going to help him get his Christmas lights up.
Now, these weren't just any old Christmas lights. They were all green, for one thing, the thousands of tiny bulbs each hand painted with a black question mark. And they were set to flash a message in Morse code.
The message itself was unimportant, a mere diversion. The real point was the code itself.
MORSE. As in, mathematics, operations research, statistics and economics.
It was all so very simple. But, except in the case of a major screw-up, no one was going to solve the puzzle but Batman. And with luck, he would solve it too late…since the math building of Gotham State University was, in actuality, just another diversion.
(Cohde Hall? It was so obvious, how could he not make it a decoy?)
This was all going to go very well, he reminded himself, if he got around to finishing it rather than thinking about it and congratulating himself on his cleverness. It was going to take at least an hour to get them strung up properly downtown without being seen. If they were going to overload and explode at the proper time, he was going to have to get a move on.
Just as soon as he tested them. It would spoil the effect to put them all up only to realize that a fuse had blown and a single bulb—or, worse, the entire string!—was refusing to blink its misleading message.
He heard footsteps in the doorway and, assuming it was Quiz and Query, didn't look up from his work.
Then they knocked.
Quiz and Query didn't knock.
Still in the act of plugging in the lights, he looked over his shoulder and saw—
Saw—
--them—
"Surprise!" yelled the three dead women in the doorway.
The part of his brain that was in charge of self-preservation decided this was a dream.
The part that was in charge of interpreting reality shortly decided that the self-preservation center of his brain was in denial and needed a brief paid vacation.
He fell over, which was only to be expected when a ghostly trio popped out from nowhere and yelled anything. His left hand slipped and fell on the metal prongs sticking half out of the socket.
Normally, that would have given him quite a shock, but he would have gotten over it in a few minutes.
But these were no ordinary Christmas lights. He had fiddled with the wiring to make the things glow brighter than they were ever intended to do, and in fact, they were supposed to overload and blow up spectacularly right around midnight. Normal Christmas lights didn't handle a fraction of the amount of electricity currently coursing through his body.
He felt himself scream, and not much else. That was probably best for his continued mental health, for however much longer that kind of thing would be important. The last thing he heard was a female voice in his memory or in his ear, speaking the phrase, "sign of the bloody Grim Reaper."
--
There was a long, interminable nothingness. Surely there were worse ways to spend forever than floating dreamless in the nothing and nowhere. It wasn't relaxing, because there was nothing to relax. It wasn't frightening, because there was nothing to frighten. It wasn't painful, because there was nothing to hurt.
Nothing.
The nothing was supposed to be something. Somewhere was calling, pulling so strongly that a far more persistent nowhere would have given up.
Nothing resisted.
Something insisted.
And Edward gasped.
For a moment, that was all that happened. Hey lay there, wondering why he hurt. Then he blinked, and came to some vague conclusion about light being not all it was cracked up to be. He decided to leave his eyes closed until further notice.
Something was wrong. Things were hurting that shouldn't be. There were things that should be hurting, he knew that much. Old fractures that hadn't quite completely healed, which he only noticed on occasions when he hit the floor with a greater impact than was generally healthy, anyway. A knot on the side of his head from where he'd hit the refrigerator door when one of the girls had startled him. Other things…his mind dawdled over that last thought, and refused to supply him with any "other" things.
Why was his heart racing? That didn't seem right. And why did he feel like he'd swapped his skin for a smaller one that didn't quite fit?
His mind continued to dawdle. Refrigerator. Startled.
What was that noise?
Startled. Girls. Girls…girls? Girls!
He reached a point where he could have opened his eyes, but decided not to.
It's just another head injury, he told himself. From the refrigerator. The rest of this day has been a dream. He tried very hard not to remember anything about Christmas lights, electricity, or the ghosts of Christmas past.
That noise, though…it was the sound of crying. Quiz and Query wouldn't be crying over him. They might rush to his rescue if they saw him lying on the floor with his hair standing on end, if they didn't have anything better to do. They might even let him recover with his head in one of their laps, but…
But…
Was he lying in someone's lap? He shifted position just enough to determine that, yes, that was a woman's leg under his head. But not a bare leg. She was wearing pants. Quiz and Query didn't wear pants.
They also didn't hold his hand so tightly it hurt, or stroke his hair as feverishly as a nuclear safety technician pressed buttons, or whisper things in foreign languages that sounded like threats, or…or call him Eddums…
And they especially didn't cry.
He was dead, wasn't he?
He let his eyes stay closed until the anticipation was too much to withstand. He was on his way to a heart attack, putting himself under this kind of stress…assuming his heart was still beating, and not just some illusion conjured up by whoever was in charge of the afterlife.
He cracked his eyes open ever so slightly.
Well, the good news was, he didn't seem to be floating over his own body.
The bad news was, Al, Techie, and the Captain were on their knees around him, feeling perfectly solid and looking like their best friend had just died.
Al was gripping his right hand in both of hers, staring intently at nothing in particular and not moving at all. Her knuckles were the oddest shade of white. The Captain, on whose lap his head was currently resting, was the one stroking his hair in such an obsessive manner. Her eyes were the oddest shade of red. And Techie was leaning over him, one hand resting gently on his chest, whispering those things that could have been threats in a language his mind wasn't nearly sharp enough to recognize, even if she hadn't been babbling at just slightly below the speed of sound.
He couldn't find an odd color to apply to her. That seemed disappointing, somehow. Something told him the occasion called for symmetry.
"I've done something stupid, haven't I?" His voice came out sounding hoarse, and his throat felt raw. Well, that had felt like one hell of a scream. But shouldn't the afterlife be absent from all those little bodily aches and pains?
Like, for example, the way his right hand felt crushed when Al inexplicably tightened her grip and looked down at him. Shouldn't his hand have felt…well, not so much like a real hand?
Techie fell silent and froze completely for a second before her hand clenched around a fistful of his shirt. He had the impression that she was going to pick him up with one hand and shake him back and forth like a rag doll, but she just stared at him, looking furious but oddly shaken.
The Captain burst into fresh tears and contorted herself spectacularly to hug his head.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
Al's grip tightened further. If there were bones there, they were definitely going to snap soon.
"Eddie…do you remember what happened?" asked Techie. In spite of the way she looked, her voice was trembling with an emotion he had never seen her display before.
"Of course. Lights. Zap. But why are you upset?"
Impossibly, Al's grip tightened further. After a brief pause, the Captain said something unintelligible. Techie looked at her friends and evidently decided that she was the only one still capable of explanations.
"Eddie…Eddie…" She was still gripping his shirt like she wanted to pick him up and shake him, but her voice was almost supernaturally gentle. If he had felt like investing in any real emotions, it would have been disturbing. "You have to learn to be more careful. We're not going to be here every time you forget to wear your rubber gloves."
"Hmm," he said. Rubber gloves would have been a good idea. But it was a bit late for thoughts like that.
Techie looked pissed off.
"Eddums, don't you get it? Your heart stopped!"
"I know," he said. "What are you mad about? Thought you missed me."
Al let go of his hand—it hit the floor with a thud he heard, but didn't feel—and she and Techie dived at him.
It was a nice hug, though it made breathing a bit difficult. Should he still need to breathe?
"You idiot!" Techie snapped. "You still don't get it after all this time! You're not dead! We're not dead! It was all a big scam! Just like Elvis! Understand?"
He let that process for a minute, along with the fact that she seemed to be crying. So did Al. And the Captain was definitely blubbering.
Because they had been afraid they might have lost him?
Huh.
"I'm not dead?"
"Of course not, didn't I just say that?"
"I'm not dead," he repeated, trying it out. "And you're not dead?"
"We're not dead. It wasn't fair to let you think we were, but we were…scared. We couldn't let anyone know the truth. I'm…I'm sorry."
He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds, mulling it over.
"So you were never dead?"
They all hesitated, anticipating questions about their "appropriate time" remark that had clearly gotten out of hand.
"Never," Al said finally.
He stared at the ceiling some more.
"Good." He closed his eyes. "Thought I might be going crazy."
His body decided to shut down again until someone started making sense.
--
The next time Eddie woke up, he was in a much clearer state of mind, and therefore considerably more upset about his recent experience.
It did help that the girls were still there, nursing conspicuous injuries from their brief battle with Quiz and Query, who, on seeing three strangers doing something unspecified to their unconscious boss, had shown themselves to be far more protective than he had given them credit for.
Once the misunderstanding had been cleared up, the two sets of henchgirls had agreed to sit down to coffee and ice cream together until Eddie woke up and was able to definitively vouch for both sides.
A pint and two pots later, he sat up on the sofa, startled by the unfamiliar smell of nail polish.
They were giving each other lime green pedicures.
He almost decided to lie back down. Then he decided that shouting at them would be a much more productive use of his time, and far less likely to give him time to focus on all the many things that were wrong with this situation.
By the time they got him calmed down enough to begin to explain things, he had decided that whichever one of them had decided to have ice cream, it was the best idea she'd ever had. Nothing, therefore, could move forward until six bowls of Homemade Vanilla were melting on the table.
By the time it occurred to him to actually eat—or rather, by now, drink—the ice cream, he was fully caught up.
They were back.
They had never really been gone in the first place. Gone away, sure, but not gone gone. Not gone forever.
Not dead.
He wanted to be furious at them for their deception, but he just couldn't be. It was just too much like when he was six, and his mother had told him his kitten had run away. He had assumed she was lying to him, the way parents did, and that Sphinxy had been run over by a car while he was at school. He had been shocked and overjoyed a month later when Sphinxy had simply appeared in his bedroom, pregnant and missing part of an ear, but delighted to renew her acquaintance with his ankles.
Looking carefully at the girls, he made sure that, while they must have been through something interesting, their adventures hadn't paralleled Sphinxy's.
They promised to tell him all about it later. They also said something to the effect of, "You don't know what you're in for," and, "You're going to need to rest up for this."
A chance remark about the Scarecrow had led to the revelation that Jonathan didn't even know they were back. They had come to him first. There was something touching about that, even after they admitted that they'd been hoping he'd break the news for them, gently, over Christmas dinner, making their grand reveal a bit less of a shock. (Techie mentioned something about popping out of a cake. The others shushed her, and then spent a good deal of time glancing at each other's chests and giggling.)
Apparently, of the two of them, Jonathan was the one they had expected to die of fright if they didn't handle this just so.
He told them he hated to disappoint them. They looked like they wanted to cry again, and hugged him.
He suddenly remembered that Sphinxy had gone missing again two weeks after her reappearance, an actual road pancake that no one had bothered to lie about, and her kittens had disappeared into the closest thing to a river his father could find at short notice. He hugged them back.
Since all six of them had made plans for the evening that were now shot all to hell anyway, he invited them to stay for dinner, hoping, but not saying aloud, that they could stay a few days longer than that. They agreed, but only on the condition that they cooked.
"We'll just have to think of some other way to surprise Jonathan." They were doing an admirable job of avoiding embarrassing pet names in front of Quiz and Query. "We can show up on New Year's instead. It's a perfectly good holiday, sadly neglected in situations like this. Besides, how much trouble could he get into in a week?"
Author's note: Aw! The lurve and misfortune continues in BiteMeTechie's "Year of the Snake."