"You really should have Lee look at that – it might be infected," Jim Gordon says, indicating the flop of scalp that had been dangling on the back of Ed's head where Lucius had removed Professor Strange's chip.
"I'm good, thanks." Ed turns to leave Jim' office, but then – "OOOW!"
Ed's face contorts into a wide grimace. It looks like it's going to flip inside out, the back of his head threatening to come through at any minute.
"How does he do that?" Lucius muses.
"Ow! Ow! Ow!" Ed exclaims, clutching at his ribs, still covered by the ridiculously oversized yet somehow stifling Kevlar bomb suit that he's still wearing. Why hadn't he felt this before? It must be the adrenaline wearing off. "Gotta go."
"You probably broke something there," Jim quips.
Ed just gives him a look as Lucius tries to stifle a chuckle.
The boy's club here was really starting to get on Ed's last nerve.
Jim continues, puffing out his chest, "I know from experience that bullet proof doesn't mean –"
"I know," Ed interrupts him firmly. "I'll be fine. But just so you know, I got shot up so Lucius could have time to gas everyone in here. Because of my brilliant distraction, my sacrifice, we were able to send that signal AND clear this place of those vermin. But I have yet to hear a thank you. From anyone."
Through that big suit he feels her hands on his back, they run up to his neck before he hears her say, "Thank you, Ed."
The moment is bittersweet . . . and painful. Literally painful. His face twists into a grimace.
"Lee, glad you're here," Jim says. "You might want to take a look at Nygma."
"I'm fine," Ed insists with a growl. "Just fine."
Lee comes around to the front of him anyway and pokes and prods at him through the Kevlar. He makes more funny faces and noises with each jab.
"How do you DO that with your face, Nygma?" Lucius cracks up. Jim doesn't hesitate to join in.
Lee doesn't flinch. "I think it's cute."
"Thank you, Lee," Ed replies.
"I need to get you stitched up, I'm afraid," Lee says pragmatically, indicating his scalp.
"No, you really don't have to."
"Yes, I do," she says firmly, placing her hands gently on his shoulders. "Go down to the morgue and find a place to sit. I'll be down there in a minute."
Ed decides to take a seat on one of the autopsy tables. It had always been fun to break the rules when no one was looking. He swings his feet morosely and thinks about the body language he'd noticed between Jim and Lee – when he can bear to look at them that is. She's back together with him – or, if it's not official just yet, it will be soon. He can tell.
"How you holding up?" Lee asks when she comes in.
"Fine. Got a loose piece of flesh hanging off of the back of my noggin, and it's a bit hot in this suit, but otherwise I'm fine."
"Your ribs?" she asks him.
"Kevlar," he says and gives her the tiniest of shrugs. "It did what it was meant to do. When Stephanie Kwolek begin experimenting with new ways to produce stronger polymer fibers decades ago at DuPont –"
Lee interrupts him. "You're a walking encyclopedia, you know that, right?"
"Not keen on a history lesson I take it?"
"Not right now."
"It's a shame," Ed muses.
"What?"
"She never won the Nobel Prize. Do you know how many lives Kevlar has saved?"
"Well, it saved yours – and by extension all of ours for the near future. That's all that matters to me right now."
"Not my noggin?" Ed smiles.
"Okay, your noggin, too." She gives him a wry grin. "Can you get out of that suit so I can see what happened to you?"
"All the bullets went into the suit, not my body, so I should be good. My ribs are just a little sore."
"Not necessarily, buster. You were hit with a lot of bullets all at once. Who knows what could have happened beneath the surface?" Lee says sternly, "Take it off."
He sighs, gets off the table, and makes a weak attempt to get to out of the suit by himself, which should have been quite easy. But actually, it ends up actually being painful for him to move in almost any direction required to get it off.
"Hey, stop moving," Lee says. "Let me help you out of that."
Gingerly, she removes the Kevlar plate that is strapped to his chest and then peels the olive colored Kevlar fabric of his bomb suit down as he tries to not cry out from the pain. Then he places his hands on her bare shoulders to minimize his movement as he steps out of it.
The small intimacy of that touch doesn't feel awkward at all. It just feels . . . right.
It's the first time he's felt her skin since she's been back - he wonders if she realizes the same thing. When she hesitates for just a second after he's done and has removed his hands from her shoulders, he thinks she just might. The earlier pokes and prods she'd given him through his suit in Jim's office just weren't the same thing as skin to skin contact. Not at all.
She shakes her head, going back to doctor mode, "Okay, lets have a look at your chest."
Her fingertips deftly begin to undo the buttons of shit and his Adam's apple bobs as she works with the top one . . .
. . . and once she gets down to the lower ones, she spies the scar on his abdomen. And she hesitates again.
But then slowly she lifts up her soft grey tank to show him. "We really did a number on each other, huh?"
She does not stop him as he reaches out with his fingertips to touch the scar on her belly. He knows it runs deep. "Yeah, sorry about that."
"Me too," she says softly and returns her focus to the buttons of his shirt. Once she completes her task, she pushes his shirt back, out of the way. Her eyes don't just scan his chest, looking for injuries, she starts at the top of his head. "Oh Ed, what happened to you?"
"You did," he answers.
"I'm not talking about that," she says pointing a finger at the almost identical scar on his belly – the one she had given him. Her fingertip rests upon it for a bit, solemnly, before it finds its way up to his hair, and curves around a lock that droops limply behind his ear. "I'm talking about this."
"I only had a razor."
"What do you mean?"
"You know, for grooming. I only had a razor." He pursues his lips and blows upwards at the overgrown lock dangling on his forehead. "Even if I had come across a pair of scissors, I didn't have the time to learn how to give myself a haircut - I had more important things on my mind, like trying to find out what had been happening to me. Why I was continually waking up in strange places missing time."
Lee pulls one of her arms tightly into herself at the elbow and looks down. "I'm still not sure what has happened to me either – only that Jim thinks it's probably the same thing that happened to you."
"Well, I certainly had no clue what was going on until some dog loving bitch and her inbred human pups made an attempt to electrocute me with a car battery."
"A car battery?"
"Yup. That's what did it. A nice big zap freed me from the captor that had been holding my brain hostage," Ed says. "Unfortunately, once I tracked down Professor Strange – he's the monster who did this to us, you know – I suddenly found myself chasing down your ex. I had lost control of my brain yet once again."
He sighs.
"Jim was the one who shocked me. With a lamp cord of all things," she says. "I woke up in his arms."
"Lucky you," Ed says sarcastically, turning down his lips. "I woke up all over the city. Alone."
Lee turns away from him.
"So, I take it this means you're back together again." He mockingly looks at a watch he isn't wearing. "That was lightning fast."
"Let's get back to the exam."
"Okay, I don't think there's anything to worry about as far as broken ribs, but I can't take an X-ray right now, so I can't be sure. You probably just bruised them. Still, you may have sustained internal injuries, so let me know if you feel dizzy, lightheaded, like you can't breathe –"
"You used to give me all of those symptoms, Doctor," Ed interjects.
"Funny." She gives him a wry grin. "Now if you have any vomiting, pain, or changes in your vision, be sure to tell me as well."
"Aye aye, cap'n." He gives her a little salute.
She walks around the table to more closely examine the back of his head and the flop of skin Lucius had peeled away in his quest to find the chip and remove it. As she lifts it up with a gloved hand, she shivers and instinctively grabs the back of her own head.
"You, okay there, doc?" Ed asks her.
"I'm fine," she answers and then her hand returns to his head.
"Oh, what a mess," she says, getting her fingers caught up in the stickiness of the blood that continues to seep into his hair, matting it up. "Looks like Strange gave you staples, too."
"What?" Ed asks.
She comes back around the table and lifts a piece of her own hair.
"Put your hand . . ." She guides him with her own. "Right there. Good."
Ed feels the rounded bump of the staple and moves his fingers within her hair, finding another. "God, Lee, what did he do to us?"
"Made us assassins, apparently," Lee says.
"Me, maybe. But you?"
"I was programmed to kill Jim. That's why he shorted me."
"I wish I had had that excuse for trying to kill him. Then maybe you wouldn't hate me." Ed looks down and says in a softer tone, "And maybe things wouldn't have ended the way they did between us."
Lee lets out a long sigh and changes subjects. "We're going to have to clean out that wound before I can patch it up. "Do you think you can bend over a sink?"
He grimaces just thinking about it. "Probably not."
"Safety shower it is, then," Lee says matter-of-factly. "Okay, Ed. Get down, get undressed all the way, and come over here."
As he gingerly finds his way off the table, Lee walks over to the huge shower head and places her hand on the triangle hanging down from its side, ready to pull it for him.
"Uh. . ." Eds eyes dart back and forth. "That water isn't heated."
"Nope," Lee answers. "I'm sorry, Ed, but I'm afraid it's terribly cold. They don't keep the water for these things heated since they're only to be used in case of emergency. And when was the last time that happened?"
Ed looks over at the nearby eyewash station, the green caps over its dual faucets. The safety shower and the eyewash shared the same water line. And it was cold alright – once he had heard someone scream even louder once they dunked their eyes in there - after they had already been screaming from having a hazardous chemical splashed into them. Later, they had told Ed that the chemical hadn't hurt as much as the eyewash station and that afterwards it had taken hours for the bulging, pulsating, cold sensation in their eyes to go away. Ed shivers, glad that he had almost always remembered to wear goggles or side shields on his glasses when he had worked here. But there was that one time . . .
"Ed!" Lee snaps. "What on earth are you waiting for? Strip."
"It's cold."
"I think we've already established that."
"Lee, perhaps I could have some privacy? Can't I wash my own scalp?"
"You can barely lift your hands to your head right now because of how much it hurts you," Lee says reasonably. "Besides, it's nothing I haven't seen before."
As he walks over to her, he says, "True, but you haven't seen it cold."
And he hadn't seen her cold either, but he goes over to the shower and starts to undress anyway, realizing he's just going to have to give in to all this. And he ends up letting her help him get undressed because he finds he can't do it all himself without an inordinate amount of pain.
"Lee, what are you doing?" He asks as she pulls a stepstool with good grips on its feet over to the shower, where he's now standing completely naked. "You'll get wet."
"I know, Ed, but there's no other way." She walks over to the sink, puts on new gloves, and takes down a white and pink carton, shaking some powder from it into one of her cupped hands.
"Alconox? Lee, are you kidding me?"
"Gotta get all the grime and bits of blood out of your hair and Alconox is the only soap I see in here."
"I hate that stuff," he says. "Gross."
"Why?" She asks.
"Do you know where I started in here, Lee? Me with my 'big beautiful brain' as Barbara calls it?"
"No. You were already working here when I took over for . . . what was his name?"
"Doesn't matter. He was a dick. He deserved what he got." Ed remembers all of the severed hands he had stuffed in his locker in order to get him fired and smiles smugly before continuing. "But he wasn't the only one keeping me down. From the very beginning my brain went to waste here."
"What was your first job here?"
"Glassware. I washed glassware for the forensics lab, Lee."
She looks surprised. "I can't believe that."
"My talents were wasted here, squandered. Thank you for at least clearing the slate when you took over for that dick. Thank you for respecting my ideas and not following the rest of the herd who didn't think I was worth listening to because they all had misplaced superiority complexes."
"Not a problem, Ed. It was well deserved - you were the smartest one here."
"Really?"
"Smartest man in Gotham." She removes his glasses for him and places them out of the spray zone. "I'm nothing if not honest."
Ed smiles. As she steps up onto that stool, he says, "Lee, I told you, you're going to get wet."
"I know." She holds the hand with the Alconox back and pulls the triangle.
And the water is cold – and there's so much of it he can't even see through it. But that's kind of the point.
Lee releases the triangle and as he wipes the water away from his eyes, he has a chance to see her wet - wet and cold through the thin layer of her tank top – and it is nice.
"Wipe that leer off your face and turn around," She says.
"Yes, ma'am." Facing away from her is probably a good idea right now.
He feels her mush the Alconox into his hair. God, he hates that scent. It's the scent of what had seemed like a lifetime spent in the bowels of this place, scrubbing away the work that everyone else had done – work he could have done better.
"Ugh, Ed, there's so much blood back here. I've gotta wonder how often you must have kept tearing this open after the bleeding should have stopped."
"It's hard not to fuss. And don't forget, those pesky staples from Professor Strange are newly minted. There's going to be blood there, too."
She touches one. "Yes, you've got it crusted there, too. Good thing we're getting a chance to wash all of this out. We'll rub it all down with alcohol when we're done, too. I wouldn't want you to get septic."
The ministrations of her hands should hurt, but somehow, they don't. Maybe the pain from his ribs overshadow it. Or maybe his stupidly romantic heart is reading too much into it and enjoying her tender touch too much.
She pulls the handle and douses him once again.
Ed feels the tug and final clip of the scissors after the last stitch is in place. Once Lee's done patching up the wound in the back of his head, she swivels him around in the office chair that he's now sitting in. She had asked him to sit there once he was dried off and dressed again following that cold, cold shower because it was a better angle for her than the autopsy table that he had been on before. He was so tall and that table couldn't be adjusted.
She's still wet and he can see what the cold water has done to her through her virtually transparent tank. Maybe the cold water hadn't been such a bad idea after all.
"Hey, up here," Lee snaps.
"Sorry." Ed brings his eyes back up to her face.
And then suddenly an intense moment passes between them as they both just stare at each other, unmoving, like deer helplessly trapped in the gaze of deadly headlights. He hadn't realized just how much he'd missed her until that moment. He'd been too busy trying to navigate a terrifying world where he would wake up practically anywhere, not knowing what he'd done. But now, after receiving such care from her . . .
"What are we going to do with you?" she says softly, touching one of his overlong side burns. "Just what are we going to do?"
Before he can answer her, she holds up the pair of curved Mayo scissors she had just been using on his wound.
"Looks like this is all that's left. This place appears to have been raided for sharp instruments. Lucky I found these," she says, studying the long-handled shears with the blunt curving blades at its end, better suited for cutting flesh during an autopsy than cutting hair. "This should be interesting."
Then, silently she begins to cut his hair, starting in the back. Ed relaxes, remembering that historically barbers were also surgeons. She should know what she's doing.
He closes his eyes in something approximating ecstasy. He knows he shouldn't fantasize that somehow everything had all been a dream and they are still together ruling The Narrows, but her fingers are so gentle, delicate, loving . . . it's as if nothing had ever gone bad between them.
But then she speaks, bringing him back to the brutal reality of the present.
"We all did something we regret, didn't we?"
"What do you mean?"
"When you were under," Lee clarifies. "You blew up Haven. . . all those innocent people."
"Please don't remind me."
"And Jim got Barbara pregnant."
"What?" Ed spins around in the chair to face her.
"He did." Lee frowns. "And he feels just awful about it. So . . ."
"So . . ?"
"Ever since the bridges blew, we've all done something we regret," Lee says. "We have to learn to forgive each other. And ourselves."
"What did you do, Lee?"
"I wish I could remember what happened when I was under." Tears form in the corners of her eyes. "It's hell not remembering."
"Hey," Ed says softly, removing the scissors from her hands and taking them into his own. "I know, Lee. I understand."
"Cause it happened to you, too?"
"Yeah."
They just remain like that for a while, holding hands while she lets loose some tears. And then she lets him hold them just a little bit longer even after she stops.
He wonders what she regrets.
Once she's finished Ed's haircut, Lee lingers. Her fingers play with his newly shortened sideburns, occasionally finding their way down his face to his chin. But then she stops as a stray finger finds its way to his lips and she finds herself frozen, just staring at them.
His eyes go soft and his lips part.
"Lee," he says duskily.
She begins to close the minimal distance between them. He places a hand on her hip to guide her even closer. Now it's his turn to touch her hair. His fingers run through the silken fringe along the side of her face. His hand cups her cheek and she leans into it, sighing.
But then she closes her eyes and pushes away from him. This time her sigh is sadder, and laced with frustration.
"So, there's no chance for us, then?"
"Ed, you're a killer. You proved that to me in The Narrows when I caught you with Jim on that slab."
"So are you," he looks her straight in the eye. "Jim can't accept that. I can."
"Who said I'm going back to Jim?"
"You mean you're not?" Ed's heart leaps. Does he actually still have a chance with her?
She just shrugs, looking down.
"You know I'm right, Lee. He'll only hold you back. He'll never accept who you are now – what you've become." He looks at her intently. "He'll never be able to forgive you for whatever it is you regret."
She steps away from him, wordlessly cleaning up his hair clippings and putting the Mayo scissors away.
"Do you actually think you'll be content as nothing more than 'Jim's girl'?" Ed asks her bitterly.
"Well I'm certainly not yours."
He cracks a smile.
"Goodbye, Ed."
As Lee walks out the door, Ed remains in that office chair, remembering her touching his hair, his face, his lips . . .
He was certain that they had almost kissed. And she hadn't confirmed that she was going back to Jim, so . . .
"There's still hope." Ed spins around in the chair a bit, smiling to himself, the pain in his ribs be damned.
As Lee closes the door of the morgue behind herself, she finds the need to lean against a nearby wall for support as she steadies herself with some deep breaths.
Ed is wrong. Jim will easily forgive her what she regrets.
Because what she regrets is stabbing Ed.
And Jim had no problem with her doing that – heck, he'll probably even try to convince her that she did the right thing given the circumstances.
But it wouldn't be true.
She closes her eyes tightly and remembers the feel of her fingertip on his lips, his hand on her cheek.
She groans and pushes herself away from the wall.
Heavy feet make their way back to James Gordon, who's waiting for her in his office.
FIN
Apologies to my readers. I've been on medical leave for over a year and a half now and I really miss my job. Sometimes take it out on my fic (I even have one entitled Sodium Hydroxide).