'First Impressions'
By Indiana
Characters: Edward Nygma
Synopsis: You hope to never be in the same room with him again. Arkhamverse (pre-Arkham Knight)
He's late, but you'd been told to expect that.
Not by him. He'd said to be punctual, to show up at exactly the time specified but if you had to be early he would magnanimously overlook it. Why you decided to continue on after that email, you don't know. You'd asked around, asked if he was for real, and the consensus had been yes. Don't be late, and don't bring up that he was late. He was setting the stage, someone had said. To show you that you were barely worth any of the time he could coerce from his schedule. Sometimes he was truly busy, sometimes he was just making a point. But you didn't ask. You would understand when you got there.
You were skeptical, obviously. Who did this guy think he was? If he wasn't rumoured to pay so well you wouldn't have bothered. You may not have been a supervillain, but you still had self-respect. No nerd with an over-inflated ego was going to walk all over you.
Though the bizarre thing, you'd been told, was that he really was as good as he said he was.
You didn't expect him to be so big.
Contrary to popular belief, most civilians never met nor saw a supervillain. The city boasted a population of over six million; there were a lot of supervillains there, but still not enough to go around. You'd seen him in the paper, and on the news, and just as it was said the camera added ten pounds it also seemed to remove a handful of inches. But that wasn't even it, when you saw him; no, that wasn't just it.
To be in the henchman business, a guy has to be big. The height in this room averages about six feet, him included. And he isn't physically biggest. But there's something else that makes him feel like he is; maybe it's how he keeps his chin raised, or that he seems to be looking down his nose even at the guys taller than he is. Or maybe it's the fact that he really does have self-respect - like he's better than everyone else in the room, and he knows it, and he knows everyone else knows it, but moreso that it's an unshakeable belief he has. He's better, and he knows it, and it's just plain fact, like the fact he has arms or legs or a birthday. It's… humbling, almost. Like being in the same room as the President.
He's wearing a green suit, of course, and before you'd arrived here you'd wondered to yourself: who does that? Well, you have your answer. He does that, and he does it so well. It suddenly occurs to you you've never seen anything like it anywhere else. It takes so much self-assurance to put on something like that in the morning, to walk up to a tailor and tell them in all seriousness 'I want a green suit', and to actually wear it with your head held high, and you realise you're starting to get it.
He's crazy. That's a fact. But he doesn't seem to know he's crazy. Nobody would hold their head up like that, would dress like that, would act like that if they had any idea. Or maybe he does know, and he just doesn't care, and why should he care when he affords so much power and respect and prestige just as he is? You're here, reporting to him, after all, instead of the other way around. If he is indeed crazy, he seems to make it work for him in ways you don't think you'll ever understand.
When he addresses you, it's as a group; his eyes are sharp and they pause nowhere. There's something… off about them. You get the impression his pupils should be too small or his lids open too wide, but neither those nor any similar things are true. Someone interrupts and is silenced with a glance. You aren't sure there's really a man behind it, not anymore; his behaviour is so deliberate, so precise, it almost seems rehearsed. He's been putting on this show so long he forgot about the curtain call.
It takes conscious thought to keep up with what he's saying; it's almost as though he doesn't want you to understand. He says without saying that he doesn't want you there, he doesn't need you there, but he's allowing it because that's how it has to be. The supervillain needs the hired guns to hold him over until he can find something better. But even now he tells you there is nothing better, you're not good enough but you'll have to be good enough, and if the precise shapes of his mouth weren't digging into your gut you would have just left. You don't have to take this. You know you don't have to take this. But he's convincing you you do even as he spells out exactly how and why he hates you.
And that's power. That's something you will never have, never even touch. He has some intrinsic quality that you don't, and the person next to you doesn't, and nobody in this room or across the street or down the block has. Something that makes men follow when they don't want to. Something that makes men believe they owe their lives to a man who has painstakingly spent his own life orchestrating his own endless failure.
When he is finished he leaves a silence for questions, but no one dares question him now. His plan is self-professed perfection, his reasoning without intrinsic flaw, his assertions beyond the criticism of lesser men. You could question him. But he knows your name, and your address, knows everywhere you've been this week whether physical or virtual, and such behaviour would be pointless. He knew from the moment he entered you into his email address bar that you would come here, and you would listen, and you would leave under his employ, because he already knew you from the beginning. Of course you would doubt him, at first; everyone doubts these people. But he knew that, once he got you in a room with him and you saw what he was, it was over. You can't turn back once you've met a man like that. He lures you with a promise and sells you with his sinister song. You have to wonder if he'd even needed to utter a single word. You have the feeling if he'd just come in and looked at you, you would have followed without ever opening your mouth.
He dismisses you merely by exiting the room. It takes all of you a moment to realise that. To realise you are worth neither a greeting nor a farewell to this man, and you're going to work for him anyway. As you leave you try to convince yourself you had a choice. You never really did, even now as you question whether what you saw was real, and if you're going to treat it as though it was. But you know he has your entire self, bought and paid for, without any exchange having taken place other than that of his words and your silence. You owe him for the privilege of his five minutes of attention. It's a debt you will never pay off.
The next weekend someone you know from a similar employer contacts you. Says they've been asking around, asking if he's for real. There is no hesitation when you tell them they should expect him to be late.