It's not really about the pain, although heaven knows it would have been easier had that been the case. It's about the fear.
The rain falls into his wide, wild eyes, his gaping mouth (why is it always raining here? It's a wonder the whole city doesn't have trench foot) but it tastes good, even through the blood from his split lip.
It's his rain. This is his city. This rain might as well run in his veins instead of blood. He makes an involuntary gasping sound as the nearest goon swipes his feet out from under him with a scything kick, dropping him to the tarmac and scraping the knees out of his trousers.
He liked these trousers. They'd been expensive, and they'd made him look like the man he was supposed to be, the man who owned the city. Now they were dirty with refuse and as battered as his hide.
Well, this whole city was dirty with stupidity. It would be his job to wash it clean with genius. Even as the bat slams into his lower back, making his whole thin body lurch forward in a spasmodic, tetanic arch, he feels light-headed with validation.
It would be so much better if someone were here to witness this. Sometimes one needs that metaphorical (or not so metaphorical) shoulder pat.
The knife tears into him just below his collarbone and the air rushes out of him in a high-pitched scream.
He dimly hears the laughter, and the words squeal piggy and snitch and moron being traded back and forth among his attackers, and even this only promotes a lurking, capering pleasure behind the physical pain
Because they're dismissing him with their fists, their feet, their blades: they're dismissing him in the language they'd use for one of their own. They're not using that word, that name, that -
- bird. The ultimate dismissal they save only for him, the freak, the gopher.
He's one of them. At last.
He would giggle with joy at this breakthrough, but he doesn't, because after all he is not quite that crazy and everything in his body does hurt a great deal. A great deal.
Instead the sound coming out of his mouth is whining, a wounded-animal keening which he really needs to remember how to make because it sounds absolutely pathetic and that is bound to come in handy at some point. He knows how scared he sounds, screw that, how scared he is, and that's perhaps his best and shiniest secret.
Because it's not about the pain. It's about the fear.
He used to think that being scared was crippling him. That his cowardice would hold him back, and he hated himself for it. But then one day, after getting his ass handed to him for the umpteenth time, he was given the secret, and his life changed.
It didn't matter if you were a coward. It didn't matter how scared you got, and heaven knows he's been scared so many times.
Because everybody, absolutely everybody, is scared. Maybe not all the time and maybe not always in that clenching, sick way that turns Oswald's gut, but everybody is scared. Even the tough guys. Even Fish Mooney. Even Falcone and Maroni. All scared, and weaker for it.
The glorious, shiny trick of it was to know that you were scared, and go through with it anyway. That was real strength, real bravery. That was much stronger than having big muscles or enough testosterone to drown a bull. A coward who's doing what he knows is the right thing even though he's scared half to death has untold advantages over a man who believes that he is brave right up until the moment he finds out he is not.
The stab wound is starting to burn like fire, the pain creeping down his nerves and describing curlicues around his skinny ribs. His jaw locks, his muscles shuddering with the strain as he tries to rise.
"Stay down, idiot."
The foot comes down in the middle of his spine. The voice gets closer as the man crouches, other foot coming down on Oswald's hand with a crunch of bone. Blood fills Oswald's mouth as he bites down on his lip.
"Ain't you got the sense you were born with?" asks the goon, in a clumsy facsimile of kindness. "Crazy mook."
If he's lucky, they won't break his jaw. A big hand grips his sodden, lank black hair, drags his head back, then slams it down into the sidewalk. He turns his head just enough to take the brunt on his cheekbone, feeling it split.
Luck is with him. He really, really wishes someone was here to see this. He feels triumphant.
"Stupid penguin," says one of the other foot soldiers, and all the joy, all the triumph is gone all in one cold rush. The rain goes back to being just rain. The city is a stranger. He's alone and he's just that thing, that toy of Mooney's. That freak.
And Oswald goes crazy.
He pushes up from the ground so hard that he topples the man resting a foot on his back, and he goes for the man who called him - that name - by the throat. He's a biting, scratching horror, gangling limbs flailing, and the man who stabbed him is finding his knife is suddenly not where it should be and instead it's in Oswald's hand and there's a long, hung moment when he almost takes the man's head off -
The blow to the back of the head drops him in a sickening rush. Dizzy, soaked and almost senseless with frustration, he falls.
The words flung back and forth around him make very little sense and seem to be coming at him through a fog of cotton. Distant.
little SHIT
get him if you
my goddamn knife, did you even
The fog would have claimed him then, except for the gunshot. The sound is like the word of God, loud, demanding, final. The sounds of feet running as the goons flee the scene, and then more feet as a new man approaches.
Someone was watching after all. His shoes don't sound expensive, but they do sound well-used. That someone slips hands under Oswald's body, exhales a hiss of revulsion and horror as Oswald yelps, the invading fingers having pressed unawares into the slice of the knife wound.
The newcomer turns him over, so the rain is once more falling onto Oswald's pallid face like a benediction, sliding from the sharp angle of his nose and collecting in his shadowed eye sockets.
James Gordon's expression is caught between complete fury and deep concern. He can see the blood on his hands, knows whose it must be. His voice is raised to almost a coloratura in shock.
"Jesus, Oswald."
Oswald blinks up through the rain and feels that ebbing triumph begin to build once more. He reaches down into his memory, makes that keening wounded-animal sound, and then, only then, permits himself to relapse into semi-consciousness.
And Gordon, who often likes to believe that he is not afraid of anything, cradles the battered body of the man he should have killed and doesn't have the first idea what he should do.
It frightens him.