To many members of Gotham's criminal element, life is nothing but a game. When the normal world of taxes and red tape is no longer a concern, what's left but the desire to enjoy life to the fullest? To these few, the heists and homicides all boiled down to one simple thing: winning the game.
Part of the game, of course, was playing with the right people. Oh, certainly it was entertaining to poke at the police, just as it was entertaining to boot up Simetropolis 3 in God Mode and blow your virtual world to bits with a simple click of a button. But for the real fun, the challenge and the joy of the chase, it was necessary to tease the Batman out into the open.
This posed certain problems to the criminal craving Bat-interactions. Ignoring the fact that Batman had an overbooked dayplanner - with around twenty A-list villains, a growing number of B-list villains, and a never-ending list of gangsters, drug dealers, muggers, arsonists, thieves and killers to thwart, it was almost guaranteed that Batman had work every night of the week - the other major difficulty lay in the irritating period between the escape from Arkham and the start of the next big plan. What good was it to have the perfect idea for the perfect plot if Joe Nobody recognized you at the diner down the street and ratted you out to the cops?
Edward Nygma dealt with it the way few other rogues of his class could: with a simple change of wardrobe and maybe a fake mustache. In his time, he'd hidden from the cops in a variety of cunning disguises that let him blend in with the average downtown denizen. Of course, hiding from the cops was a lot easier than hiding from his fellow rogues. The cops generally didn't have his address, for one, and he'd never spent enough time unmasked around the forces of justice for his face to make an impression on them. (In fact, normally it was them making an impression on his face.) It was easy to hide in a crowd. It was less easy to hide in your own home, where you couldn't easily be dismissed as 'just some guy in a trenchcoat'.
Eddie scowled blackly at the closet door. The little coat closet rattled and rung with the sound of frantic searching as Jackie ripped through boxes. "This plan is ridiculous," he groused as a shoe clacked into the wall. "It's never going to work!"
Jackie leaned out of the closet. A smear of dust, clinging to the sweat on her skin, left a fuzzy grey streak on her forehead. "Do you want to die?" she demanded.
"Well, no, but - "
"And do you want to go back to Arkham?"
"No! But - "
"Then shut up and put these socks in your bra!" A pair of kelly-green socks whizzed out of the dusty closet and smacked him in the face. With a look of utter distaste, he pulled the neck of his long green ballgown out and tucked the socks into place.
There were no faults in the plan per se. After all, if the trio had no problem with Jackie, they surely wouldn't mind another henchgirl lurking in the background...right? It was, as the saying went, just crazy enough to work.
Eddie fidgeted with his long, purple satin gloves and began seriously reconsidering the drawbacks of being shot. The cops would aim for the legs, wouldn't they? It took a long time to die from a leg wound, and well before then he'd be tucked into a nice, safe ambulance. Bullets didn't hurt that much...
Jackie stuck her head out of the closet, raking Eddie over with a critical eye. "More socks," she decreed, tossing a balled-up pair in his direction. "And put these on." She brandished a pair of grape-colored tights in his direction.
Eddie folded his arms firmly over his socks. "No."
"You have to wear tights," Jackie said, exasperated.
"I do not! Quiz never wore tights with this dress!" he protested.
"Quiz probably didn't have hobbit feet," she pointed out. They examined the light dusting of hair on Eddie's bare feet and ankles. "Unless you're trying to look like Gotham's Manliest Henchgirl, you're wearing the tights."
"This is ludicrous!" he snapped.
"Well, we could always just shave your legs," she suggested brightly. "I'll go get the razor."
"I'll wear the tights," he grumbled, snatching them out of her hand and stalking haughtily into the bathroom.
"What's the problem, anyway?" Jackie called through the closed door. "Didn't you always wear that green pair to heists?"
"That was a unitard," he grumbled, hiking his flouncy skirt up and stuffing one foot into the purple tights. "They're completely different."
"How?" Jackie demanded.
His satiny fingers slipped on the tights. With a grunt of impatience, he bit the fingertips of the gloves and yanked them off before attacking the tights barehanded. How were tights different from his unitard? Well, for a start, he'd never worn a skirt over his unitard, and...there had to be other differences that he wasn't thinking of. "Oh, never - mind," he squeaked as he yanked the tights up. They were at least a size too small. He wrestled the billowy skirt back down into place and retrieved his gloves from the floor, glaring at himself in the mirror as he shoved them back on.
The dress had looked gorgeous on Quiz. It looked somewhat less gorgeous on Eddie, who had a build reminiscent of a radiator. Socks could only do so much, after all. The bands of elbow elastic on the satin gloves were cutting off the circulation to his hands, while the purple tights were quickly cutting off the circulation to other, more vital bits of him. A thick layer of foundation had been pancaked onto his face, and light touches of eyeshadow, lipstick and mascara had done (in his opinion) absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that he was clearly a man in a dress. With a sigh, Eddie stuffed the new socks into place and shrugged at his humiliated reflection. Why hadn't he thought to stockpile weapons in this lair? A gunfight would have been much more palatable than this monstrosity of an idea.
He flung the door open and waddled awkwardly back out to the closet. "Aren't there any bigger tights?"
"Nope." Jackie hurried out of the closet. In one hand, she held a bright red, curly wig. In the other was a pair of emerald green high heels, with a single question mark stamped in shiny black leather on the toes. Eddie took the shoes and winced as Jackie rammed the wig down onto his head, tucking his stray hair under it with quick fingers.
"Well?" he asked tentatively as she gave him a final looking-over.
"This honestly might work," she said, a touch of amazement in her voice. The little clock in the living room let out a cheery electronic Beep! Beep!
"It's two!" she yelped, snatching up a dress for herself from the closet and scurrying into the bathroom.
Eddie perched unsteadily on the arm of the couch and crammed his feet into the too-small shoes. Slowly, like a newborn giraffe, he wobbled to his feet and tottered toward the kitchen. "How do you walk in these things?" he called, stumbling over a broken floorboard.
"Heel, toe, heel, toe," Jackie called back.
Heel, toe, heel, toooooh shit - Eddie tumbled gracelessly to the ground and scowled at his uncooperative footwear. With one hand on the countertop, he levered himself up to a somewhat knock-kneed standing position again. Maybe he'd just go sit in the bedroom until they were gone.
Jackie wrenched her dress into place and did a mad dance as she fought to zip it up. A quick swipe with a washcloth took the dust off of her face, and a hurried finger-combing would have to do for her hair...
Knock-knock-knock. "Coming!" Jackie yelled. She hurried into the living room, black heels clacking on the floorboards, and rested a hand on the doorknob. Eddie scuttled into the back bedroom like an oversized green crab. The doorknob turned easily under her hand. "Hi," she said uncertainly to the quartet of beaming young women in street clothes outside her door.
"Hi!" Question shoved past Jackie and examined the empty living room. "Is he here?" she demanded as her three friends slipped in behind her.
"No," Jackie said firmly. From the back bedroom, there was a clatter of heels on floorboards, followed by the skreek of someone landing on ancient bedsprings. "It's just me and the new girl," she explained quickly.
"New girl?" Question's eyes narrowed. "He's got a new girl already?"
She was worried about one new girl, when she'd clearly made three new friends of her own? Jackie shrugged. "Yeah. She's kind of..." Jackie made the time-honored little rotating motions by her head that indicated the lack of anything competent about the new girl. "Forget about her. What did you want to tell me?"
"Well, we didn't want to tell you, we wanted to show you," Question said. "Get 'em!"
Jackie squealed with shock as Question and one of her companions seized her by the arms and dragged her out the door. "What are you doing? You said you wanted to talk-"
Thud. Jackie landed heavily in the back of a big, windowless van. "You don't have to do this!"
"We kinda do," the friend admitted, shoving her deeper into the van.
Wham. "Ow!" she protested as a billowing cloud of green fabric landed directly on top of her.
"Sorry," a falsetto voice fluted directly into her ear. Jackie winced as Eddie's satin-covered elbow burrowed into her ribs. The door slammed behind them. Seconds later, the van roared into life and screeched around a corner.
Skirts fluffed wildly as Eddie tumbled to the side. It was difficult to see in the tiny, enclosed space, but the badly-sealed door let enough light through to show them that they were in the back of a custom-outfitted van. A wall of steel mesh was thoroughly welded into place about three feet from the door, leaving them with nothing but a small padded area of floor to ride on. Clearly, this van had been used as a kidnapper's favorite toy in the recent past.
The girls up front cranked up the radio. Eddie and Jackie gave each other a hopeless look of defeat as the van lurched around another corner. They didn't dare say anything, but the message was brutally clear: They were going to die. No one ever invited someone out for ice cream by shoving them into the back of a van.
They rode in agitated silence for what seemed like an hour, bouncing into one another like forgotten toys as the van slammed around corners. And then, with another painful screech of the brakes, the van stopped. "We're here!" Question sang from the front seat. In perfectly synchronized motions, the girls darted out of the van and collected Eddie and Jackie from the back. With hands clamped firmly over their eyes, the pair stumbled obediently along into a damp, musty-smelling room. The girls shoved them forward as they heard a door slamming directly behind them. Locks clicked closed like a row of guns being cocked.
The room they'd been escorted into was small and unfinished. A bare concrete floor, freshly swept, stretched blankly from wall to concrete wall. Pipes and wires stretched overhead, just out of reach beyond a rattly piece of chain link fence that sprawled atop the little room like the screened cover for an aquarium.
Jackie slumped miserably in the corner. Without turning her head, she was able to see the mountain of green satin that was Eddie settling himself in a similar position.
So this was it. They were going to die. They'd fallen for the girls' trap - though really, what else could they have done? - and now they were in a closet in a basement halfway across Gotham, waiting for the inevitable well-armed visitor to open their heavily locked door.
It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. Jackie stared numbly at her feet in their shiny black shoes. What had she ever done to deserve this? She'd never hurt anyone in her life!...well, Robin, but that had been an accident. She hadn't known about the death-trap, after all.
She couldn't believe that this was happening. In all her short time on this planet, she'd never intentionally done more than occasionally park on the yellow curbs. She'd never...
She'd never really done anything, though, had she? The shoes blurred as hot little tears of self-pity boiled up in her eyes. She'd never bought a house, or planted a garden, or done any of the hundreds of little things she'd always meant to get around to doing one day. She'd never gotten married. She'd never even had a real boyfriend -
Or had she? After surreptitiously wiping the tears out of her eyes, she glanced over at Eddie. He was sitting crosslegged under his enormous pouf of a skirt, staring at the wall with that out-to-lunch look that always meant he was planning something. She'd never met anyone with a mind like his. There probably wasn't anyone else with a mind like his. In the three months that they'd spent together, she'd watched him come up with plans to acquire nearly everything that caught his eye. When he hadn't been plotting, he'd been hard at work making his plans happen, whether that meant rewiring deathtraps or carefully lettering his riddles onto bright green squares of paper. He was creative, and brilliant, and he never ran out of things to talk about.
And he'd kept her around - this man who was notorious for dropping henchgirls at the first sight of trouble. He had let her badger him into acting like a normal, law-abiding citizen for a full week! When Nightwing had tracked them down at that hotel, he'd been the one to stay behind and make the trip to Arkham, a place that he obviously loathed. It didn't make sense!
Unless...unless he wasn't thinking of her as just another henchgirl. Her first instinct was to dismiss that thought - why would he ever like her that way? - but more and more memories crowded up to prove her right. When the girls had threatened her life previously, he'd found them a perfect place to hide. When he'd broken out of his cell just a few days ago, he'd gone from lair to lair, running in the dark wearing his instantly recognizable Arkham jumpsuit just to find her and get her to a safe place.
Under normal circumstances, her shyness might have kept her in the corner mulling the issue over for a few more centuries. But now, with the boldness of those who know they have nothing to lose, Jackie slid across the floor and settled down next to Eddie. He didn't appear to notice.
She prodded him lightly on the leg. "Hmm?" he asked, still half-trapped in the land of plans.
"Any bright ideas?" she asked, brittle cheerfulness wrapped around her words.
"Not being here seems like a pretty good idea to me," he sighed. Curiosity raised his eyebrow as he noticed what had to be an odd expression on Jackie's face. "What? What is it?"
"I..." Jackie muttered, twisting the hem of her dress. "I wanted...I thought maybe..." A door slammed on the floor above them. They might not have much time left. Abruptly, trying to outrace the thought that this might not be such a good idea, Jackie leaned closer to Eddie and tentatively kissed him. He didn't move a muscle. "I'm sorry," she muttered, turning away.
"No!" A gloved hand slipped under her chin and gently turned her face back toward his. "You're not allowed to be sorry for that." When she dared to look at his face, she saw an unexpected expression of happiness mixed with...love? Before she could answer, he tilted his head and returned her kiss.
It was not a kiss that lit the world on fire. It certainly wasn't an overblown, end-of-the-movie style encounter where the two participants endeavor to swallow each other's skulls. In the end, it was nothing more than a lovely, soft little kiss that set Jackie's skin tingling.
She shivered, partly from delight, but mostly from the fact that humans were not meant to sit on icy concrete floors in tiny green dresses. Eddie draped a fold of his dress over Jackie's bare, goosebumped legs. With a ridiculously goofy smile on her face, Jackie scooted a little closer and dared to lay her head on his satiny shoulder. In turn, he rested his own fluffily bewigged head on top of hers.
At least if they were going to die, they'd die happy.
They sat together as the endless minutes ticked by, listening to heavy footsteps creaking on the floor above them. A rapid pounding of boots on wood indicated that someone was coming downstairs. They jumped up, brushing dirt from their dresses and facing the unknown perils that lay beyond their door.
The locks, one by one, clacked open. With a slight, protesting squeak, the door swung inward. "Come on," Question invited, beckoning at the uncertain pair of prisoners. "It's time."
(to be continued)
Author's Note: Apparently I hang around with too many cross-dressers. Or not enough. Regardless, I'll dedicate this chapter to everyone who hits on cute young ladies and is then flabbergasted that they're actually dudes. It's amazing what a couple of socks and a wig can do!
