sunaddicted:

It wasn’t the fact that he was paralysed that scared Edward: his mind was lucid enough to point out that after months of being trapped in ice, unable to even twitch a finger, his muscles would have at least lost their strength – if not atrophied.

No, what scared Edward was the realisation that he was in the hands of an obsessed fangirl who had tied him to the bed.

He didn’t think his heart had ever beaten that fast – hadn’t Edward had a better knowledge of anatomy, he would have been terrified of his ribcage being smashed open from the inside.

Maybe the gory scene would scare Myrtle away.

Sure, he had wished for recognition as the Riddler – especially from Oswald but he couldn’t afford thinking about him in that moment, his thoughts would get all jumbled and he needed to stay focused – but he had never stopped to think about the possibility that admiration could be twisted into obsession.

Edward watched Myrtle happily move around the room-turned-shrine, her pace almost dizzying after months of absolute and pure stillness; he didn’t remember her – not at all, not even after she gave him such specific coordinates to find her in his memories – but he obviously wasn’t going to tell her that.

Edward smiled around a half-grimace, nodding slowly; the stilted movement caused a shower of pinpricks to crawl under his skin – a sensation he would have normally found rather unpleasant, but that he welcomed with relief in that moment: his body was waking up.

He’d never been one to stay still – it meant being vulnerable, posing the perfect target for the bullies and his father alike. So, Edward forced himself to move.

God, but it hurt.

And his mind conveniently decided that passing out in the middle of an attemot at curling his pinky was the best course of action.

When he woke up, it was only to almost immediately faint again at the sight of the obscenely long needles protruding from his skin.

Acupuncture.

This time, giving a name to what was happening to him didn’t help much to calm down: Edward’s every single brain cell was horrified that someone would violate his body in such a way while he was unconscious.

It was the last straw.

Edward faked to agree with Myrtle’s idea, absentmindedly vomiting facts about acupuncture and its medical properties while his eyes frantically scanned the room in search of something…

The phone.

Edward was reasonably convinced that he could operate it, that wasn’t what made hesitation settle in his bones – the real problem was: who would he call?

Not the GCPD, he’d end up in another prison – Arkham, probably. And if there was a place Edward never wanted to visit again, it was Gotham’s prison for the criminally insane.

He couldn’t call Barbara either: she had wanted him out of the way as much as Oswald – the only difference being that he had been momentarily useful to her and they had shamelessly exploited each other.

Edward didn’t have friends or allies.

He only had enemies and one in particular shone amidst them: Oswald.

The Penguin would definitely come to his rescue – if only to reclaim his prisoner and show the whole city that nobody escaped from the Penguin’s revenge.

It would also put Edward in a tight and risky spot, reduced to begging his former captor to escape the madwoman currently holding hin hostage.

Still, if Oswald still had feelings for him – and he must have because Edward couldn’t be the only one still reeling at the thought of him – he could play them in his favour to avoid being put on ice again.

He didn’t like the less than favourable odds but he definitely hated being tortured in his sleep.

Edward didn’t have to do much except stay awake and await a moment of distraction: despite the fuzziness of his thoughts, Oswald’s phone numbers were easy to retrieve.

“Who’s this?”

Edward licked his dry lips, hands trembling as if an earthquake was happening in his marrow with the effort of holding the phone up to his ear “Help me” he whispered.

“What?”

He should have expected the other man to not understand. Edward cleared his throat and pressed the phone closer to his ear “Oswald, it’s Edward. Help me. A woman.. Myrtle Jenkins.. she’s holding me captive”

“Where are you?”

So business like – it was something about Oswald he had always admired, the way he could shut down his feelings when he needed to be lucid: Edward wouldn’t have been able to do the same, that’s why he tried to avoid wasting his time with them “I don’t know” he answered “I can’t move. Can you find her?”

A long second of silence – a full one, his mind had been counting the milliseconds as they passed: one, two, three, four.. twenty.. thirty-one, thirty-two.. fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine..

Sixty milliseconds.

“I can. See you soon, Ed”

He was so relived that he couldn’t even find it in himself the strength to be angry because Oswald wasn’t calling him the Riddler.

Since coming back to life again, Edward laughed for the first time and his muscles moved: maybe he wasn’t as lost anymore.