11. The Writing on the Wall
He was supposed to be working.
He had so many emails to get through. He was no closer to tracking down the vigilante than he had been the day he'd decided to do it. But reading was getting difficult. After he had returned from last night's excursion he had tried for hours to sleep and achieved nothing. He had no idea what the current time was, given he had not checked his phone nor opened the blinds when he had given up on sleeping. He had instead gone into his suitcase in search of something he could no longer remember. Spread out on the light brown wood floor in front of him were the pages he and Alan and Ada had coloured in together what seemed like years ago at the Orphanage. They had blurred into incoherence a while ago when his eyes had gone out of focus and he had not bothered to do anything about it. That was the sort of thing he was supposed to have been doing all this time. It was the sort of thing he was supposed to be working toward. This wasn't who he had planned to be! He had planned to be the kind of father who was also his daughter's best friend! Who would always be there when nobody else was!
To show up your own father.
"Would that have mattered?"
It matters that you don't begin thinking of yourself as some noble hero, martyring yourself for the sake of others.
It was so distressingly easy to pretend that was the case. No small wonder only a small handful of the many hundreds he'd met over the years could stand to be around him for any length of time. But he couldn't fall down that bottomless pit either. He was already standing in a hole so deep the real-word equivalent would be spouting water or oil right about now. He rubbed at his eyes, knowing that would accomplish nothing, and covered his page with Ada's. Alan's he stared at with restored focus.
It was the only thing of Alan's he had.
Ada, if she decided he was worth her time, would undoubtedly go on to make multitudes of little projects. She was happiest with a handful of flowers or a fistful of crayons. But Alan… he had never sought happiness. Not for himself. When neither Edward nor Ada had needed him for something, he had merely waited for this to change with a book or by people-watching. He had spent all his time waiting for an opportunity to help somebody else. Had he been deliberately, intentionally kind, or had it been a consequence of his nature as a machine built to assist? Did it matter?
The papers weren't settling in the bottom of the envelope. He pulled them out and pushed them in again. They wouldn't fit inside. He knew they did because that was where he had taken them from. He sat there and stared at the papers in one hand and the envelope in the other and attempted to form a thought. He tilted the envelope towards him and felt a weight inside shift downward. He upended the contents into the recently vacated space in front of him. The culprit of his dull frustration was a collection of photographs. He turned the nearest one over. It was of his mother. She was arguing with his father while he hid beneath the kitchen table. Not in the photograph. It took him a moment to see that.
He'd meant to destroy these. The last thing he remembered doing with them was shoving them into the back of a desk drawer, never to see the artificial light of day again. Alan must have decided they were important and put them into the envelope.
He turned them over until the two with his father were revealed. Edward had looked eerily like that when he had been eighteen, but despite that it still didn't feel right to see a smile on his father's face. As though he really had been a different person before Edward was born.
Had he been this tired, back then? Edward had the ability to sit here on the floor and do absolutely nothing for the next week if that was what he wanted, but his father would have had to keep going. He would have had no choice.
… had his father ever asked his family for help?
Have you ever asked?
He was seventeen and –
"No," he said, gathering up the photos and stuffing them into the envelope. "I'm not going to think about that." He slotted the envelope back into the suitcase, more awake than he had been in days. It must have been adrenalin but he barely felt it. He had zipped the case most of the way closed when he realised the pictures of his father were niggling at him. He took them back out and carried them with him to the desk. They were part of something he hadn't finished thinking of yet. It would come to him. Probably.
All right. He needed to make some progress, some real progress. It was only a matter of time before Barbara inquired as to his preliminary conclusions. He snorted. Conclusions? He didn't even know where to begin! Sorting through the gargantuan amount of information Gotham generated day over day was simple enough when you kept up with it, but nigh insurmountable once you had let it get away from you. In fact, there probably wasn't enough time in a month's worth of days to sort through all of the messages he was currently scrolling through. The best solution, he decided, was to filter out everything except for what had been sent by his very best informants. He had a lot of terrible ones, too many mediocre ones, and a smattering of good ones, but only a handful of the greats. They had been in his employ for years and were well interred in some very beneficial places. And at the top of this much more manageable spate of messages was…
… were Query and Echo.
He put his glasses on and sat down. He was going to have to deal with them sooner or later and it seemed sooner had arrived. He opened the message, which simply read,
We're on strike.
and wasn't particularly helpful. At least they hadn't sworn him off. He had no doubt that when they did that, he would never hear from them again.
… when?
"If," he mumbled to the blinking cursor in the space provided for him to reply. "I meant if."
Of course you did.
He drummed his left hand on the desk five times. None of what he was doing could be disclosed to anyone. The impending trial for legal reasons and his pursuit of the vigilante for personal ones. He was going to have to make an appeal for them to trust him a few months longer. He hadn't really given them a reason not to that he could recall. Why was it even that big of a deal that he had told them he was fine instead of launching into would undoubtedly have been an hours-long summary of the last couple of years? They didn't even know about Alan! Was he simply supposed to have introduced him and outline his short life, death, and the effects thereof in a coffee shop at the ungodly hour of eight in the morning?
You were supposed to have told them about Alan when you made him. That's the kind of thing old friends do. Tell them when they have kids.
"How could I have told them?" He still had no inkling of what to reply. "They would have insisted I was crazy!"
Would they have been right?
"No!"
His inner voice's ensuing silence seemed suspicious. Somehow. He pushed his chair to the other end of the desk and retrieved his cigarette case from the jacket he'd left there. This was most likely a non-smoking apartment, but what did it matter at this point. He needed to work and to work he needed to think and to think he needed to smoke. It was about the only method he had left to get himself to focus.
The brevity of the message meant he couldn't discern which of them had sent it. Now that he was thinking it over, though, he realised answering it at all was not in his best interest. Not only was his charm much more effective verbally, even on them, if they received an email from him they would conspire over how to respond and likely convince each other to do something resoundingly not in his favour. Such as ignore him. The best thing to do was to go and meet Diedre someplace – Diedre because she had always been a little softer on him – but he was much too tired to leave the apartment and certainly much too tired to put on the makeup hiding it from the general public would have entailed. So the ideal course of action was to call her. Which he did. In doing so he finally learned what time it was: a little after seven pm. This immediately put him at ease and he was not even bothered that it shouldn't have.
"Make it quick, boss," Diedre said when she finally answered. Because she was at work he could confidently deduce the delay had been because she needed to excuse herself from some task and not because she had been sitting there watching the phone ring in order to give him time to think about how displeased she was with him.
"Absolutely," he said, though before he could begin he had to hold the phone away from his face as the sudden need to cough overtook him. He kept it as short as possible and then continued, "Your message was entirely justified."
"But?" guessed Diedre. A good guess, because she was correct.
"You must understand that I can't discuss anything relating to my impending trial," he began.
"I don't think I can," Diedre interrupted. She shouted an unintelligible instruction to someone in the background. "In fact, it's a little baffling that you don't understand how insulting it is that you don't trust us. At all."
"Of course I do," Edward said, his confusion edging out the soothing tone he had adopted. "Look. I have sort of…"
"You cut us off, boss," Diedre finished for him, though not in the way he would have. "We figured you were pissed we didn't do anything about Penguin banning you, but what were we supposed to do?"
"I wasn't – " All right, yes. Yes, he had been angry about that. It had been incredibly embarrassing to have been so publicly disallowed from the place. Though it hadn't been that much of a loss, given he didn't drink and received the important gossip whether he was there or not. And it would have compromised their placement if they'd made any sort of inquiries as to getting his ban revoked. But still! They should never have allowed Penguin to humiliate him like that in the first place!
"You're right, it wasn't. That shit started when you hauled Scarecrow's rotten carcass out of the bay and patched it back together again."
He was pressing the phone to his ear with too much force. "Because you two were always very vocal about your disapproval of him."
Diedre's voice was a little distant, as though she had turned her head and forgotten to adjust the phone accordingly. Her despondence was such that it came through loud and clear regardless. "You do a lot of stuff it's not easy to put up with, but… Eddie, he's evil. There's no other word for what he did on Halloween. It's pretty obvious to us you were the one who disappeared him from the GCPD. Who else would bother saving that sorry sack of shit?"
He hadn't anticipated having to explain this.
"It's a longer story than either of us have time for right now." He didn't have an ashtray here so he had to watch the cigarette smoulder inside the lid of the case. "But it doesn't matter. He's had enough of me too. It's been made very clear to me that I have very nearly dismantled every bridge I've ever built. If you really want nothing to do with me, fine. All I am asking is that you wait a few months before writing me off. It's not really that big of a request!" He was snapping at her now and they both knew how stupid that was of him at this particular moment, but there was no reason for her to be this difficult!
Diedre was silent for a long time. The bustle of the lounge in his ear nearly drowned out the tinnitus. She somehow managed to take an eternity to answer, "I'll have to talk to Nina."
"I would appreciate it." That probably wasn't going to be enough. She needed proof of her value to him. As a person. As a friend. And friends told friends things, apparently. So he said, "Dee Dee."
"Yeah."
"The night I ran out of the casino." If this was what she wanted, he would give it to her. Whatever it took to change her mind. "I saw my father on the floor. I…" It still felt stupid to try to explain even all these years later. "He used to beat me. After the last time I left home to get away from him."
He was seventeen and –
"When I saw him that day it seemed there was no place on Earth far enough I could go," he said, forcing the thought back, "but the border was at least a line it would take time for him to cross. So I ran for it."
He heard the chink of wine glasses and the upbeat cadence of a waitress making artful conversation. The dulcet crooning of a distant saxophone reminded him of many years ago when he used to go to the Iceberg on jazz nights to listen and make trouble with the girls. He missed it suddenly. It seemed there were a lot of things that being the Riddler had made him miss.
This silence was going on for too long. Did she know what his aim was in telling her that? He shouldn't have. That kind of knowledge was too easy to use as a weapon. That was why he'd always kept so much of it to himself. He should have evaluated what she could do with the information before he had told her. Even if she did nothing, it had to have shifted her entire perception of him. It made him look so utterly pathetic! What would his father even have been able to do if he'd seen Edward? Nothing! Running away had been weak and infantile and he should have –
"We would have protected you," Diedre said.
His abrupt disconnect from the call was definitely going to work against him in her talk with Nina. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair, crossing his free arm over his chest. Was that… all he had really had to do? Just tell Nina the truth when she had asked? Simply say 'my abusive father is downstairs and I don't want to be anywhere near him?' and allow the two of them to deal with it?
No. No, that meant she did think his reaction had been one of helplessness. She saw him as needing protection. He didn't! He hadn't needed it in the same house as his father and he certainly didn't need it now.
You're spinning this all wrong.
"I am not," he muttered, taking a drag from the cigarette.
They would have helped you as your friends and that's all it would have been.
"Their ultimate goal being?"
Since when have Nina and Diedre ever wanted anything out of you?
He didn't have an answer for that. There wasn't one. They didn't even need to work for him; they simply did so because once upon a time they had found him fun to be around.
Same as Selina. Remember?
He reached over and crushed the end of the cigarette into the top of the case.
Have you ever thought about the fact you met all of these people who haven't given up on you before you made it as the Riddler?
He moved forward to rest his forearms on the desktop in front of him. The argument there was that shedding the Riddler was no great loss. The people who mattered didn't like him anyway.
"They don't know how much things have changed."
Because you choose over and over again not to tell them.
He looked up at his monitor. The email was still being displayed. He couldn't do anything about it until they made their decision. And that would be made solely on their evaluation of whether or not it was worth it to continue a friendship with someone like him.
He couldn't think of a single reason why it would be.
/
He had made it to day six with the sertraline before failing to take it. He couldn't tell if this counted as an accomplishment or not. Seven had been right there!
It didn't matter. There wasn't anything he could do about it today. Today he was trying to figure out what this particular portion of text he'd written on the wall in the last few days was supposed to mean. He did, of course, recall everything about writing it, but there was some sort of disconnect between that day and this one which was causing him to be unsure about where he had been going with it at the time. That wasn't uncommon. Differing states of mind often resulted in differing results. He had the emails from which he had made the connections clustered together on one monitor for reference, but it wasn't really helping. He removed his glasses and massaged his eyes with one hand. Despite having made it to day six, the medication still did not seem to be doing anything other than attempting to direct him into a nervous breakdown. He had been taking the stuff on-and-off, that was true, but –
This is probably part of the reason you're supposed to take it under medical supervision.
He leaned back in his chair and shielded his aching eyes from the glare of the monitors. He only had two on right now. He was going to keep track of how much sleep he had lost and when this was over he was going to remain in bed for that number of hours and not get up for absolutely anything.
Barbara had been nattering on for hours to her bush league as to the whereabouts of Firefly. He had about three emails from which he had ascertained the details her brain was too inadequate to put together. Actually, she was performing below her baseline. Her associated numbskulls, who occupied their nights committing aggravated assault, were dragging her down, and if there was one thing he could not stand it was – well, no. There were a great deal of things he couldn't stand. This was merely the current one. He turned his microphone on and interrupted, "Miss Gordon."
"… is that…?" was the extent of Nightwing's insight. He rolled his eyes and said,
"I've made a career change. I'm calling about her extended warranty. That is, if you'd deign me a moment of her time."
Barbara sighed unnecessarily loudly. "Riddler, I'm busy."
"Then I take it you don't want to know where Firefly is."
The expected pause to parse his words, and then: "You know?"
He reached over and turned on the appropriate monitor. "This city camera footage is quite compelling."
"Are you going to give me the ID?"
He read it out to her and turned the monitor back off again. In a few minutes Nightwing would be on the scene and he had no desire to witness that kind of behaviour. Though out of all of them, he disliked Grayson the least.
"Let me guess. You were bored of bearing witness to our combined utter incompetence."
"Something like that." An unrelated thought occurred to him and he made a note in the appropriate place on the desktop. "I'll never understand why you hitched yourself to Drake. Grayson has a much better sense of humor."
"Are you going to tell me to call you for child-rearing advice next?"
"You could." Sort of. It was uncertain how much of his limited experience would be applicable.
"Someone had kids with you?" Her tone was so coated in disbelief he decided not to clarify.
"I'm very attractive and I have a great deal of money. That's all some women are after." And some men, theoretically, though he had never met one. "There are also, in fact, many places throughout the Internet where people spend their time swooning over me." That had been flattering many years ago, when he had first encountered it, but over the years it had become increasingly… disturbing.
"I'm guessing you're not big on child support."
Edward laughed. All these years and she didn't know him at all! "Don't be ridiculous. Not a minute less than full custody would do."
"You wanted to have kids?"
He put one foot up on the chair so that his bent leg was wedged up against the desk. "I do not, contrary to popular belief, spend all of my time in a basement conjuring up villainous thoughts. I have one of each. I saw my daughter the other day." Nikola always occurred to him late, but he had barely been a thinking being to begin with.
"Where is your son?"
He dropped his leg back down. Why was she asking this? Why was she asking any of… was this a trick? Was she gathering intelligence on him? "He's dead." Surely that would end the conversation. He had his finger on the switch to shut off the mic when she said, quietly,
"I'm sorry."
He stared at a diagram he had drawn on the wall. This made no sense. "Why?"
"I can have sympathy for you without liking you," Barbara said. "Losing a child is hard. I wouldn't wish that on even you."
She didn't know what a horrible father he was. She didn't know he deserved every minute of it. He noticed his pant leg wasn't lying flat and took pains to fix it. "He was a good boy," he said without meaning to. "Nothing like me. So there's no need to wonder and worry about the little monsters I've unleashed on the world."
"What happened to him?"
"The GCPD killed him." Why was he still talking? He should have hung up when originally planned. The things she would be able to do with the knowledge he'd foolishly, thoughtlessly given her!
"The GCPD hasn't killed any kids." He couldn't tell if she were confused or indignant. "There would have been – hold on. The last time you were seen by the GCPD you were at the precinct. There was a robot there, but –"
Something burned inside of his chest. He couldn't tell what it was. Anger was good enough, he decided, and he stood up, thrusting the chair away with the back of his legs. "He was not a robot!" he shouted at her, slamming his hands on the desk so hard the monitors shook and several pens clattered onto the floor. "He was my son!" What an impudent little twit. How dare she. How dare she! "I don't have to take this from you," he ground out from between his teeth, every muscle in his body seeming impossibly tense. "I don't have to take this from anybody."
"Whoa," Barbara said, her patronising, maternal tone only serving to fuel his rage. "Okay. He was your son. I just –"
"Don't!" he interrupted, snapping one index finger up in front of him as though she were physically there. "I know what you think. You think I'm a delusional moron who just pretends a machine could ever be equivalent to a breathing child! You think I'm so far removed from the ability to engage in meaningful human contact that I conjured up a robot who would think and feel and behave exactly as my diseased mind compelled them to. Well, you're wrong. He was real. He was real and the brain-dead trigger-happy buffoons you're so quick to defend shot him in the head four times right in front of me."
"Oh my God," Barbara said, and to her credit she was at least pretending to sound horrified. "Edward, I –"
"Oh, shut up," he snarled. "Pretending you care earns you no points with me." And he tossed the earpiece onto the desk and stormed into the next room. He threw one of the kitchen chairs aside with such force that it collided with the leg of the desk and knocked the computer next to it askew. He wanted to send the other two after it so badly it took all of his willpower merely to stand behind the next one and not move. His hands were gripped so firmly upon the back of the chair that they ached. His breathing had become laboured. He needed to sit down. He needed to calm down. The former took another minute or so. He pressed his fingers to either side of his nose and tried to focus on the air coming in and out of it. His shaking arms and the tightness in his chest proved too distracting. She'd been lying. She'd been lying to probe him for weakness. And he had given it to her. Why had he given it to her? She probably wasn't even going to uphold their deal. He was going to do all the work of catching the vigilante for her and she was going to wheel into court with proof that he was the Riddler and then he was going to have to deal with all of this in a prison cell where nobody really gave a damn whether he drowned in it or not. And he was. He was drowning in it and he had refused every rope and life preserver and lifeboat rowed out to him. Alan was gone. Selina was gone. Ada was gone. Nina and Diedre were gone. Sabrina was one mistake away from gone and Jonathan would soon abandon this sinking ship when he realised just how much water was coming in.
When he was able to take a full breath he stood up and retrieved the chair, returning it to his proper place. His need to adjust it seven times made him decide not to fix the computer right now and instead just sit down in the desk chair with a bottle of water and focus on drinking it. It was hard to get the lid off and he had to pin the bottle gently between his legs. It would have to wait until his hands had stilled.
He looked up at the wall as a means of distraction. It was difficult to read, lit as it was by the monitors set to their lowest levels of brightness, but the patterns he needed to find and confront the vigilante were up there somewhere. Barbara probably didn't even truly believe he could do it. She just wanted him out of her hair while she struggled to rescue a city not worth saving.
He had been picking his way through the abandoned wing of the Asylum for the better portion of an hour. It was, of course, scarcely lit, the rooms and hallways shadowed beneath the perpetual twilight of struggling years-old emergency lights. He had not managed to find any fresh batteries for this flashlight, either, and keeping him from twisting his ankle on some buckled area of the concrete floor or tripping on some ancient piece of medical equipment was about the extent of what the cheap thing could do. He wasn't certain how much time he had left before he needed to be back in his cell. He had thought he was going to be able to keep count – he had done so before, many times – but at some point during the necessary crawling through narrow openings he had lost it. He had decided against starting over again. If he couldn't be accurate, what was the point?
The air was some state far beyond stale and the beam of the flashlight revealed it was thick with dust of all kinds. Probably some asbestos too, if he were lucky. He had pulled the neck of the tshirt below his jumpsuit up over his nose when he'd first noticed it. He had to walk much more slowly and carefully than he would have preferred because all he had for footgear were these thin Asylum slippers that just barely managed to not resemble tissue paper. It was certainly something to be able to feel the details of every insect he stepped on. This building had a massive, unchecked cockroach infestation and he was definitely calling in anonymously about it during his next escape. There were plenty of house centipedes and giant spiders duking it out as well, but those he'd be able to get rid of if he happened to be so unlucky as to transport any into his next hideout.
The closer he got to each as-yet unseen set of cells, the worse the smell got. The water, settled in the pipes since before he was born, had transformed into a black-brown sludge that dripped from the ceiling in some very inconvenient places and pooled on the floor into a mouldering slime that glistened wetly even in the sparse orange light. The stench came back up through the toilets, and one did not have to be the owner of an active imagination to come up with a reason for why that was. He furrowed his brows and tried not to breathe too hard. He'd known before he'd come down here what utter filth and disrepair he would be walking into, but he'd found the book. He'd finished reading it. He had to see how it had ended. The first cell he waved the flashlight towards appeared to have been emptied and used for storage and he did not inspect it further. The one next to it was shrouded entirely in shadow but the weak beam of light he directed inside it perfectly encircled the rings of words etched into the wall. His heart leapt. He'd found it! Of course he'd found it. He would take a few minutes to memorise the contents and then away himself back upstairs. No one would ever know the wiser, but he would be the wiser. He would be one of a very select few who knew the truth of the Asylum. He stepped inside of the cell, so small he could nearly have touched his fingertips to each wall simultaneously, and cast the weakening beam of the flashlight over the contents. One corner was piled with books and papers, but a cursory look told him they were too consumed with damp and black mold to be either useful or legible. A rust-flecked wheelchair, the dark fabric torn and discoloured, lay upended in the opposite corner. He noted that all of the writings upon the walls and floor appeared to be repetitions of each other, so he stepped closer to the one directly in front of him and squinted into the rings, attempting to locate where the message began. Amadeus Arkham had detailed his chosen language within the journal Edward had found some months ago. He had been waiting for an opportunity to search for the absent ending and now it had come. He traced the characters lightly with the pad of his index finger, just enough for the texture of the concrete to register against his skin. It seemed… supernaturally cold. The room entire did, suddenly. His shirt had slipped back down to its proper place against his chest against his notice but it didn't actually matter since the air in here was still and empty. The obscene stench from the hallway had been replaced with the acrid tang of sweat, but… not his. He moved his hand away from the wall, his fingers curling as through drawn to his palm. The circle the flashlight cast in front of him had become very bright and somehow thrown the remainder of the room into an equal darkness. His mouth was dry and blinking was, for some reason, impossible. His eyes were fixed upon the etching in front of him. He needed to back up and turn around and walk away, but he couldn't. He needed to read it. He needed to know.
The beginning of it stood out to him then as though he had written it himself, and he slowly followed the characters around in their man-sized circle. About halfway through he realised he had made a mistake, but he could not keep himself from reading the rest. He had not needed to know this. No one needed to know this. This side of the Asylum should be walled off and condemned and razed to the ground so that no one would ever know this again. He'd known it! He'd known it all along! The Asylum seethed with the memories of souls everyone else had forgotten, boiled over with madness the city had been feeding it for years upon years upon years, and he had known! Arkham had known! And what had he done, what had his solution been?
He had bound the bat here!
It explained everything. Everything. The bat had smothered Arkham Mansion beneath its oppressive wings for one hundred years and that doddering old fool Arkham had turned his own house into a buffet line stocked with the kinds of people no one would ever believe if they discovered the truth. Who could he tell? Who would listen? Nobody would. Nobody.
He could hear it again. The house. Breathing. The foundations below him stretched into the Island like the roots of some ancient tree, spreading a multitude of tendrils in search of more. More poor souls to entice and entrap and enslave unto itself to feed the ravenous Bat that fluttered uninhibited through the walls. No, no longer only the walls: the Asylum had once been contained to one portion of the grounds but it now sprawled across the Island like the web of a spider spun in reverse. Stretching out for the mainland. Amadeus had contained the Bat but the Bat would not be contained.
He was standing in the dark and the Asylum was speaking to him. It was telling him he wasn't real. He raised his hands to put to his ears, to shut it out, and as he did so the flashlight sputtered to life. The shadow of the Bat towered above him, the whites of its eyes sharp and glassy like marbles. He would never escape its attention. He was never going to get away from it. Arkham had bound it to this house and he had been deemed the fodder to keep it there. He backed away from it and away from it but it never seemed to get any smaller. There was no way to get out without taking his eyes off of it, and as he turned in an attempt to sprint far enough into the relative safety of upstairs he slipped on the wet concrete and crashed to the ground. A searing pain froze his elbow and he gritted his teeth so that he would not make a sound. His nose, mashed up against the floor, was abruptly filled with the scent of… varnish.
Varnish?
He opened his eyes to find his vision was almost entirely obscured by the blurry wheel of a desk chair. Both of his legs, but especially the left one, were soaking wet. The ache in his elbow was unfortunately very real, as was the one in the matching shoulder, but after a few moments he raised himself enough to see that the bottle of water he'd had between his legs had fallen on the floor below the desk and almost the entire contents had poured out. He turned so that he was sitting, braced by his hands, in the direction of the desk, and the colour of the wall had been so strikingly transformed by the sunrise coming in through the kitchen window that his attention was drawn towards it. The green notes he had left across it had been given an eerie orange cast and he narrowed his eyes so it would be easier to see.
He was starting to imagine the numbers formed some sort of ward, a magic spell to keep something out and him in. He wasn't sure what he was trying to keep out. Was he safe on the inside or had he trapped himself further?
"No," he whispered. He had not drunk anything in so long his voice barely resonated inside of his throat. "No, I'm not like him."
You believe in what he believed in.
"I'm not crazy."
Who else do you know who writes on the walls like that?
Nobody. Nobody did. "There are no numbers up there!" he protested.
There are no numbers up there yet.
He took as deep a breath as he could. He didn't manage to avoid the tingle in his throat which made him want to cough to get rid of it, but he did manage to ignore it. "I'm not crazy." The words lacked something. He didn't know what. He did know what, but if he said it that would make it real.
You are very sick, his inner voice said. For once it was gentle. Not admonishing him. You know that. You've known that for a long time.
"I can't be!" he argued. "How could I be –"
Eddie, came the interruption, you have two choices: admit it now or run yourself into the ground denying it.
He lay down on the floor. It was cool against his back. His elbow still hurt. It probably would for a few days. He couldn't walk off injuries like he once had.
You can't walk any of it off. Not anymore.
He closed his eyes and covered them with his palms.
You were able to manage all of this once upon a time. What was different back then?
"Everything," he answered dully, knowing that answer was a cop-out. "No. I had… a job. A schedule."
Structure.
Yes. Having a job meant you had to have structure. You had to portion out time every day for everything. Eating, sleeping, exercising. They all needed to be scheduled.
You were in excellent shape back then, by the way.
"I was," he agreed.
So make a schedule. Write it down. Follow it. No more of this doing stuff when it occurs to you. You've been trying that for years and it clearly isn't working out.
He sat up again. His eyes ached. The plan he needed make was already forming in his mind, but if he truly meant to follow such a thing it was much too early in the morning. "If I had one it would say I would be in bed until ten, so I suppose I should start there."
You should start with changing your pants.
He rolled his eyes and stood up. So as not to leave a wet trail into the other room he just removed them and his socks right there and slung them on the back of the chair. He pulled back the sheet on the bed and lay down on the side he had not fallen on. He stared at the empty space between himself and the wall and for some reason wished Ada were in it.
Does that mean I miss her?
Here's something more important to ponder: imagine, if you could, that perhaps you really were just a little bit crazy. And imagine, if you would, the effects that ignoring it would have on someone you know. Your daughter, for example.
He unfortunately did not need to imagine that.
How much more of it are you going to force her to endure? How much more of it will she be able to endure once she's stuck somewhere she can't get away from it?
He gathered the sheet a little in one hand. "Assuming she's even coming."
Stop victimising yourself. That would be a good start.
Right. The point of this was to get him to think about his effect on her. That was, the effect of allowing his… illness to rage, unchecked, while he refused to take responsibility for the interpersonal carnage which ensued. While he convinced himself that everyone else was the problem.
People don't want to quit believing in you. You force them to.
He was seventeen and –
He moved onto his back and fixed his eyes on the ceiling.
"I need to reward their faith," he said.
If you enjoy having friends, yes.
He had enjoyed having friends, once. He'd enjoyed being a father, too.
Then show them. Show them they were right about you.
"I will," he said with conviction, and that seemed to placate his inner thoughts because he heard no more out of them. He closed his eyes and saw with perfect clarity the dark walls of Amadeus Arkham's cell and the concentric circles carved within. The ritual which had bound the Bat not just to the Asylum, but Gotham itself.
Or maybe it was all a coincidence and Amadeus Arkham had simply been a sick old man, forgotten and swallowed up by his own madness, trying to make sense of it in the only avenue he'd had left. Making sense of the senseless. Just as he himself had been doing every day and every time the numbers demanded his attention.
"But I don't want to be crazy."
Then do something about it.
Author's note
The jump right from his train of thought into a dream was intentional. Think the scene in Inception where Ariadne has to be told she's in a dream. I always try to avoid having characters know they're dreaming, at least at the beginning of it. I'm pretty sure you can't smell in dreams but whatever lol.
I much prefer the image of the spell as shown in the book (which is an illustration of Amadeus on his knees carving a giant circle of tiny tiny letters into the floor with his fingernails) but given the connection I was making here I decided to go with the version from the game. I did change it a little for atmosphere but let's chalk this up to it being a dream and his mixing when he actually did it with the last time he was in the Asylum.
Also I love the name Amadeus a lot.