Arkhamverse 24: Something the Riddler Would Never Do

By Indiana

Characters: Edward Nygma, Barbara Gordon, Jonathan Crane, Ada (Riddlerbot OC), Sabrina (OC)

Synopsis: Edward made a promise to leave Gotham behind, but after Jonathan has recovered enough to travel he realises doing so would be a mistake. After setting himself the task of catching Gotham's new, fear-toxin-wielding vigilante, Edward is forced to face whether he has what it takes to move on and leave the Riddler behind forever.

Part the First

Pre-note: There is some French in this chapter, but don't worry about trying to read it. I basically repeat it again in English. Also, my written French is middling so if people want to correct me I don't mind. If you haven't read any of the other fics in the series, I'll try to catch you up briefly in the A/N but you're also free to ask if context hasn't provided enough info for you.

"You've been avoiding me," Jonathan said.

Edward ignored him.

"I'm willing to put up with some degree of childishness from you," Jonathan continued, "but you're approaching the point of too much."

Edward did not answer. If he did he would lose the count and have to start over, and Jonathan would not understand why that was important. Even if he would, explaining it would be… difficult.

"If it were resentment about having to take care of me," Jonathan went on, "that would be understandable. A bit petty and unfair, seeing as you knew what you were getting into when you whisked me from the GCPD, but –"

"I liked you better when you stared at me silently," Edward snapped, throwing down the lug wrench with a satisfying clatter. He'd been trying to put new tires on Jonathan's damn truck, but the nuts had to be turned seven times each exactly which was more difficult than it sounded. This one had gone six and a half times, which was wrong. He needed to do it again.

"My observations are concluded," Jonathan said. Edward looked up at him in exasperation. The light from outside barely made it through the smudged and clouded windows of the abandoned automotive garage he'd taken custody of two weeks ago, so not much of Jonathan's upper half was visible. The lower was taken care of by the halogens Edward had set up on the ground around the truck. For what must have been the twentieth time he was resoundingly disgusted by the sight of Jonathan's bare ankles inside of his scuffed sneakers. They had once been white but were now about the colour of underwear a year or two past replacement. Everything about that thought made his skin crawl and he looked back down at the tire in front of him.

"Observations?"

Jonathan was leaning against the side of the truck's front end, barely not in the way of the tire Edward was working on. "You've been at that one nut for a while now."

"I like doing things right. Does that offend you?"

"Right is relative."

"So you want the tire to fall off while you're driving." He stared at the offending nut and reached into his back pocket for his cigarette case. Seven. He lit one and put it in his mouth, hoping it would make six and a half seem less important.

"I don't have any reason to believe it will." He could feel Jonathan's expectant stare. "Not like you do."

"Do you have a point?"

"I'd like to know just why you're so hell-bent on doing… this to my truck," Jonathan said. His shadowed brows came together it what had better not have been annoyance. "If it is my truck."

"Of course it's yours," Edward snapped. "Do you think I restore forty-year-old pickup trucks for my own entertainment?"

Jonathan shrugged. "It would explain how you know how to do it."

"Vehicles are just puzzles, Jonathan. They only go together one way."

"And if you'd said we were going to Alaska, I'd be able to understand why you've done all this work on it," Jonathan said. "You've spent almost every moment since…" He paused and looked up, as though some invisible sign above him held the answer. "… since we got here, I imagine, taking my truck apart and putting it back together again as though it were essential you return it to brand-new condition."

"It would probably kill you to be appreciative, for once, wouldn't it." He tossed the end of the cigarette out of sight.

"I didn't ask for you to do this," Jonathan said evenly.

Edward scowled up at him.

"Don't pretend you're doing me a favour when it was always a personal distraction."

Edward stood up. "Since you know all of that what, pray tell, was it a distraction for?"

Jonathan's gaze was level. "It would be remiss of me to guess. A lot must have happened while I was ill."

Oh, things had happened all right. But Jonathan didn't care about any of it. He just wanted to finish his analysis and move on with his day. Like Edward couldn't. "I'll be done tomorrow," he said, standing up. "Then we can leave."

"No," said Jonathan. Edward paused in his removal of his work gloves.

"No?"

"No," he repeated. "I'm not going anywhere with you."

Edward threw the gloves into the truck bed, exasperated. "You couldn't have told me this two weeks ago when first you started staring at me all day? Or were you merely waiting for me to finish so you could drive off into the sunset with a truck that I so graciously restored for you?"

"I couldn't have," said Jonathan, "because I had not decided until now. You've changed, Edward. And your refusal to so much as think about it is indicative of a deeper problem that you don't seem willing to solve."

Edward snorted. "So my behaviour was fine when it benefited you and your plans, but now it isn't because it doesn't? Tell me, Jonathan, are you truly concerned for my well-being or have you just recently discovered I may not be quite so under your thumb where we're going?"

Jonathan, surprisingly quickly and with unexpected strength for a man of his frailty, snatched Edward's left arm and held his hand up between them. Edward looked at it, but Jonathan was watching his face.

"Neither," Jonathan said. "It's this which troubles me."

Edward wrenched his arm back and stuffed his hand into his typing glove. "It's nothing," he snapped.

"That is most definitely not nothing." Jonathan crossed his arms. "And I know it's not eczema, either, so don't try that one."

"I didn't realise you had a minor in dermatology, Jonathan. At least you have something to go into now that your psychiatric reputation is shot."

Jonathan was staring across the garage in the general direction of the wall hidden in the darkness. "Do you know what the most frustrating thing about my short-lived stint as a therapist was?"

"People expecting you to have empathy for their pathetic, easily solvable problems?"

"Oh yes," said Jonathan, "but alongside that there was the expectation that, by seeing me once a week, it would somehow magically fix all of those problems. No work, no effort." He rubbed one side of his jaw. "You see, Edward… you cannot help a person who is not prepared to accept that help. You can tell them what the problem is and how to fix it and you can do this in incredibly minute detail… but if they are not ready, it's all pointless." He was staring at Edward somewhat pointedly as he said this. He ignored that and ensured the seams of the gloves were in the right places.

"Until you are ready to do something about your disorder," Jonathan went on, "I don't think you should be going anywhere."

Edward looked up from his hands.

"What are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about."

Jonathan, of all people, should know he didn't have… that. "You're mistaken."

"Didn't your lawyer argue in court that you did have it and subsequently get you moved from Blackgate to the Asylum on the grounds it was illegal to hold you in solitary based upon your condition?"

"What she chooses to present in my defense has nothing to do with me. She probably delights in irritating me with contrived diagnoses, much like everybody else. Including you."

Jonathan took a long breath.

"It's time to face it, Edward."

"There's nothing to face!" Edward spat, every muscle tense. His hands were clenched, though he didn't know why. It wasn't as though Jonathan were able to fight him. "It's nothing! But you're insisting on making something out of it regardless!"

"Edward," Jonathan said, "you have –"

No conscious thought drove Edward to press Jonathan into the cab of the truck. "Don't say it," he said in a low voice, Jonathan's orange plaid collar bunched into his fist. Jonathan, to his ire, did not look threatened at all.

"Why? Because if I do you might actually have to think about it?"

"No, because I'm sick of being analysed by every bozo who stumbled into a psych degree." His breaths were heavy. "You still haven't mastered spelling, have you."

"I'll let that slide this one time," Jonathan said, mostly emotionlessly, but Edward could not identify what the rest of it was with the adrenalin erasing his thoughts. "Now I'm asking you nicely to let go of me."

"Why? Does it bother you to know you've lost your power over me?"

"You know," Jonathan said, glancing to his right, "I daresay if you looked in that mirror you would almost think it were your father standing here instead of you. The similarities between the two of you are uncanny, aren't they?"

He couldn't have released Jonathan just then even if he'd wanted to, and he had no intentions of wanting to anytime soon. "Take it back!"

Jonathan shook his head. "You see, Edward? You have too many truths left to face. Admit it. You're a wreck. And in case you were unaware, alcoholism is thought to be genetic. So. Tthere's no doubt you'll be taking that last step soon enough."

A heady strength had him pressing Jonathan into the driver's side window so hard Jonathan actually winced, which was… oddly satisfying. With Edward's other arm crushing his ribcage, he soon wouldn't have the breath to continue speaking the disrespectful words he was taking so much pleasure in poisoning Edward's ears with. "Shut up!" he shouted.

Jonathan was holding something up between them, pressed inside of his right index and middle fingers. Edward glanced at it. It looked like straw. His mind was racing too much to identify it, though he was sure he knew what it was. He'd seen it before.

"Let go," Jonathan said, his voice quiet but firm. His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose. Edward looked down at the… it was a toxin ampule. He shook his head.

"You won't. Not this close to yourself."

Jonathan spoke nearly in a murmur. "You know that I will."

Everything in him told him that Jonathan was lying and that Edward should keep him here until he had taken back his disrespectful slander, but there was the niggling thought that Jonathan had never lied to him. Worse, it wasn't just a thought. It was the truth. But if this was the truth, then everything else was the truth also, and that –

He threw Jonathan to the ground and stormed some distance away. Jonathan always told him the truth, but he couldn't be this time because what he had said was wrong. It was all wrong, all of it! So Jonathan was lying, but why? Why would he lie now when he had always made a point of telling the truth?

There was an acrid burning in the back of his throat, and he coughed. It didn't help at all; in fact, it made breathing even more difficult. He fell to his knees, his bronchitis turning up in full force as the burning wended its way into his lungs, and he was dimly aware of the fact that his hands, too, were pressed to the ground. It was hard to think over the realisation he was choking on something, somehow, and when he opened his tearing eyes to the telltale orange mist he knew immediately what it was.

Jonathan had broken the ampule.

What little breath he had was seemingly threatened by the pounding pulse in his throat, and even though he knew intellectually that was an illusion some irritatingly primal part of his brain insisted there was something inside of his trachea and that he was going to choke to death. He could not stop coughing. He laid on his left side on the ground, eyes pressed closed and started counting.

When he had regained enough of himself that he could think again, he sat up, retrieving his glasses from where they'd fallen off in front of him. His breathing was not quite normal, but it would be soon. Wait. He recognised this floor. Frowning, he looked up. What he saw was… unexpected.

It was the living room in the house he had lived in between the ages of eight and sixteen. It looked exactly as he remembered: a desk fitting neatly into the lefthand corner, an L-shaped purple couch tucked into the right. The triangular wooden coffee table, folded closed, with the stacks of magazines underneath it was pressed into the usual spot at the angle of the couch. Behind him was the television set ensconced in a large wooden stand, which held also an assortment of video cassettes and audiovisual equipment, and the upright piano that was always draped in a sheet. To complete the scene was his father, sitting in the couch's attached recliner, reading… he squinted at the title. A French aerospace science journal.

None of this made any sense.

Well, no. It all did – though he didn't recall seeing his father ever pick up any reading material whatsoever – but what didn't was that this scene inspired no fear in him at all. Was the toxin merely too old to work properly? Jonathan hadn't used ampules in the last twenty years. If he'd gotten it from the collection of garbage Edward had removed from the truck –

"Bonsoir, Édouard," said his father. It had been so long since he'd heard his name pronounced that way he almost didn't process it as being his.

"Bonsoir," he said finally, getting to his feet. His father closed the journal over one hand and looked at him. He still could not stand the fact they had the same face and looked away.

"Je veux te demander quelque chose," his father said. Edward frowned. His father had never been one for conversation, much less had he ever been inclined to ask for his input like he was now.

"Qu'est que c'est?"

"Pourquoi tu mens toujours sur moi?"

Lie about him? Edward barely ever brought him up at all, and when he did it was to recount the honest truth about his father being a brutish, violent moron. "Je ne mens pas."

His father gestured to the coffee table. "Regarde sous la table."

So Edward looked more closely at the stack of magazines under the coffee table, all of which seemed to be… more engineering journals, mostly relating to aerospace. "Ils ne devraient pas être là." He had to be hallucinating. On top of the hallucination he was already having, that was. He did remember there always being magazines under that table, but surely they hadn't been what he was looking at now.

"Non, Édouard," said his father, "ils étaient toujours là. Tout ça vient de ta mémoire."

That was true. Edward's hallucinations under fear toxin were always pulled from his memory, and they were always accurate. So there had always been engineering journals under the table, and he had just…

Now wasn't time to figure that out. "D'accord, oùveux-tu en venir? Une pile de journaux ne fait pas de moi un menteur. Tu es toujours un cretin brutal." There had to be some point to this. His father was not absolved from being a violent idiot just because he had some technical magazines stuffed into a coffee table. Edward was not unwilling to lie about some things, but that he had always told the truth about.

"Ta vérité," his father said, "n'est pas toujours juste."

His truth wasn't always right? What sort of absurdity was that? His memory was flawless. His father was merely attempting to make him doubt himself, as usual. "Tu te trompes," he said through gritted teeth. "Tu l'as toujours été."

"Non," said his father, opening the journal again, "c'est là que tu as tort."

Of course he would say that. He always thought Edward was wrong, but he wasn't! He was always right! He put a considerable amount of effort into being so! And he was especially not wrong about the kind of man his father was. How could he be? His father had taken the time to literally beat it into him. He opened his mouth to refute him, but the vision had gone and he was standing again in the garage next to the pickup truck. Jonathan was staring at him with an odd expression on his face. As though something had happened that he had not been expecting. "What?" Edward snarled.

"You were speaking French," Jonathan said. Edward rolled his eyes and realised he could taste blood. He pressed his fingers under his nose. The toxin had made it bleed. He sighed in exasperation and pulled out his handkerchief.

"Yes, Jonathan," he snapped in irritation. "My parents are French."

"You've never mentioned that."

According to the view of himself in the truck's lefthand mirror, he'd gotten as much of the blood off his face as he was going to with this dry cloth. "What relevance does it have?"

"It must be extremely relevant," said Jonathan, "else the toxin wouldn't have made you speak French."

He folded the handkerchief three times, but it felt wrong so he shook it out to do it again.

"What did you see?" Jonathan asked, in a gentle but eerie voice. This distracted Edward from the count, which only made him even more frustrated. Crushing the handkerchief into his fist, he snapped,

"You no longer have the privilege of asking me those kinds of questions." And he turned around so he could finally get this damn kerchief folded and into his pocket.

"What?" Jonathan asked from behind him.

"We're through." Why were his hands shaking so much? "You don't get to dose me with toxin and then psychoanalyse me and pretend it never happened."

"Edward, you were threatening me with violence!" Jonathan protested. "What did you expect me to do?"

Truthfully, he hadn't thought that through at all, but it didn't matter. Jonathan should have known better. "I let go of you, didn't I?"

"You don't want to hear it," Jonathan said, "but there is something very wrong with you."

He turned around, handkerchief still not folded. "There is not!"

"Your behaviour is incredibly disproportionate to the situation at hand," said Jonathan. His eyes were serious, but not yet cold. "Which tells me that something happened at the GCPD. There was a complication. An event. But you won't tell me what it was."

"Because you don't care," Edward snapped. "What's the point in telling you when it doesn't matter to you anyway?"

"You are aware that you have become impossible to talk to."

"You want to know what happened, Jonathan?" he asked, extending one finger towards him. "Think about what's missing."

"Missing?" Jonathan asked, frowning a little. "I don't believe anything to be – "

"Really," Edward interrupted. "So you haven't noticed that my children aren't here."

Jonathan looked in the direction of the other side of the truck as though he expected one of them to appear from behind it. Edward shook his head.

"That's why I didn't tell you. Because it doesn't matter. You don't care."

"Edward, I –"

"Shut up," Edward said, crouching down to pack his tools back into the bag so he could get the hell out of there. "You don't care. You've never cared. It doesn't matter to you where they are or what happened at the GCPD. You don't even remember their names, do you."

"I do," said Jonathan. Silence, and then: "Where is Alan?"

Edward dropped the wrench he was holding. His heart was suddenly pounding against his ribs. "He's dead."

"I'm sorry," Jonathan said, and Edward hated that he had gone to the effort of trying to pretend he meant it.

"No you're not," he muttered, picking the tool back up and shoving it into the bag. "You're glad he's dead. I know you are. You hated him."

"That doesn't mean I wished him to be dead," argued Jonathan.

"Of course you did." Articles collected, he pulled the strap of the bag over his shoulder and stood up. "That's the kind of person you are." He stormed past him towards the entrance of the garage.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm not telling you that."

"Edward, this is not a good idea."

"Why?" he asked over his shoulder. "Because you know you won't last much longer without me? Because you were hoping I forgot that you need me far, far more than I've ever needed you?"

"No," said Jonathan quietly. "Because you seem on the verge of a breakdown and you will not get out of it on your own."

"I am not," Edward snapped, "and even if I did have one, which I can assure you I would never do, I am far more capable of handling myself than you seem to think."

"If this is what you want, I will respect it," Jonathan said. "I just want you to be aware it is a bad idea."

"You think it's a bad idea."

"We can talk about why I think that."

"Why? So you can manipulate me into sticking around?"

"No," said Jonathan. "So you have a chance to think about the decision you're making."

"I have," Edward said. "Goodbye."

Author's note

For those of you who don't know, Edward has three Riddlerbots he sees as his children: Nikola Tesla, who was destroyed when Catwoman blew up the Riddlerbot factory, Alan Turing, who was killed rescuing Jonathan from the GCPD, and Ada Lovelace, whom he sent away temporarily.

My Jonathan's backstory includes him struggling in school his whole life, and he was late in learning to read so his spelling is not always great. My Edward is Canadian, half Québécois and half Acadien.

Because I was asked the last time this happened, this time I do not plan to drop LaaC. The updates will be a little slower but it is not going on hiatus. I just wanted to write this while I know what the tone is. LaaC doesn't have a through tone so I'm not concerned about losing it.