capeandcowl2020 | Open Post 002

Eridan grabbed a handful of Eddie's bicep, tossing a glance back at the bar. Nobody had come out just yet, but they essentially had about three seconds to disappear.

"Haul ass."

Dusk wasn't an ideal time to stage a daring getaway, but you had to work with what you were given. Eridan began to sprint, and if Eddie wasn't quick to join him, he was going to get dragged through the remainder of the parking lot and into the heart of their shared urban jungle.

"You got a hideout somewhere? 'Cos, ah," he broke off, listening to the noises of horror and shouts already picking up behind them, "I don't think we're gonna be able to lay low at my place."

"Apt," he replied. Running was an option ever foremost in his itinerary of choice, but rarely did a day pass when he enjoyed such slim if nimble options.

Eridan's grip on his arm felt familiar, yet so strange. The pressure, he realized, was much more than he anticipated. How the years filled flesh and sinew.

"I don't -- ah." Edward only had his Resistance-allowed warm spots, the places they would spare. The places he couldn't contaminate if he was caught again.

He didn't want to get caught again.

"You're with the Establishment, aren't you?" Eddie hissed it out, the syllables hitting in beat with his fleeing feet. Voices roared behind them, yes, but the din grew softer. Vaguer. A bad memory fading.

They had precious seconds.

"Well," Eridan began, "considerin' that little flair of yours back there basically shot my entire fuckin' career down the tubes, I'd —"

A breath. He tore them down an alley, scaled a chain link fence with terrifying ease. Backstreet after winding backstreet, fading into a grimy blur of brick and their own fleeting baroque.

"— I'd say I'm probably fired."

Finally, he pulled them to a stop once his paranoid mind felt even a shade at ease. Wheezing, took the opportunity to strip off his scarf and shirt, burning the former and turning the latter inside out. The spray of blood had been light, sure, but it was safer to burn the scarf outright and hope nobody noticed his shirt was inside out. Not that he thought anybody would.

Shirt off, the evidence of his introduction into the Establishment was made clear. Burn marks, light and faded scars — they hadn't just let him in, after all, not with how quickly he'd exchanged loyalties. They'd brought him into the fold and then brought out the brands, so to speak. A month, maybe two comprised of nothing but blurred pain and propaganda. And one more thing.

His gills still bore the marks of government scalpels. Surgical removal. And by then, it was too late to slip out of the net.

Eridan hastily pulled the shirt back over himself, soon after in human form. Six years had dulled the humiliation and venom, six years of playing along or dying, six years of growing up and dealing with it, but it was nonetheless still a sore subject.

"You gonna save our asses or not, Nygma?"

Eyes fell over the wounds, counting them. Anticipating which blade did what, where the electrocution came into play, where was essential to stitch. And finally, the gills. Stealing the sea from the dweller, they had reduced Eridan to an outcast again: neither born of land nor known anymore by the ocean. He was in limbo, and only deigning to bend his back more and more and more.

"I'm not a fool, Eridan." Eddie wiped the dark black mark of drying blood from his shoe. "I'm aware of your options. You're aware of my -- my legacy."

Chosen specifically, that word.

"Who I was, why I was -- ah -- was taken." The voices behind them. Edward walked, calmly, guiding Eridan along the cement strip. The debilitated building on their left, crumbling mortar and cracked paint perhaps once purple.

"And what I am now." A glance to Eridan's features -- if he knew, if he knew who was really leading the Establishment, if he knew it was his own imPort once-brother via Eddie, then it was already too late. This was a bluff.

"You could turn me in. You could stand to benefit."

It was a test.

Eridan shadowed Eddie's steps, altogether grateful for the lack of comment on his pound of flesh. The voices loomed at their backs, but if Eddie was calm, then so would be Eridan. He knew what the other man had suffered, at the hands of his employers.

He knew how quietly desperate a man could be to never go back to pale latex hands and stainless steel. He knew that fear.

"I could." No particular inflection, on those two short words. An acknowledgment. "I could give you all sorts of reasons why I wouldn't, but you don't want that. You can't trust that, can you? Platitudes. You know damn well how I could benefit from sellin' you out."

He reached out, fingertips finding that leftmost building. They'd left him his blood, at least, explained away by a vague medical condition on the rare occasions it was asked about; royal purple still thrummed in his veins, though the true sign of his lineage had long since been castrated. It helped, sometimes. To see his blood.

"I'm sick of the game, Eddie. Spendin' my Saturdays torturin' the shoulders I used to cry on." Two fingers lit up in tandem, low burning lights, and he traced the sharp angles of his glyph in the chipping paint. "I can't do this anymore. Guess you could say I grew a conscience."

Wryly spoken, almost a joke. Purple eyes found the spot between Edward's shoulder blades and bore into him, there.

"Kind of like you."

Edward whipped around at those last words, his eyes deadened and staring. He pulled Eridan close, his fingers sudden and shaking still, by grabbing the other man's chin. Fingernails dug into jawline skin. Eridan hadn't rang false, of course, but Eddie hadn't been equipped to use his own power for months now, and that spoke grains of salt to him.

"Is that what you want? What you aspire to?" Fingernails clenched into that skin. "Kind of like me."

He held it for a moment more, his eyes darting over Eridan's face, his thoughts thinking of what happened to the last face he had just touched. He dropped his hold, shoulders hunched, turning away. He had a place he figured to be empty now, one that they could stay.

His place. Not a bunker. Single studio, hiding in plain sight.

"You could always say no," he said after a minute of walking and hunching around corners. "Always say no to them."

A sly glance over.

"Like I did."

Eridan didn't flinch, at Eddie's hands on his face; stilled, narrowed his eyes a touch, but didn't pull away. Fingernails points of heat into cool purple skin.

He waited.

And after Eddie let him go, he began to follow again, comfortable — at home, even, in those long minutes of silence. At least until his companion spoke again, and then his laughter rumbled out dark in all the empty spaces surrounding and between them. Subsonic, almost; like the way he expected mountains would sound, if they could chuckle.

"I'd prefer avoidin' that, honestly. They don't like bein' told no. They call people like your darlin' hatecrush in when people tell 'em no." And people like me, he didn't say, but didn't bother not implying. He exhaled; continued nonchalantly. "We can't all be nice enough to nail ourselves to the cross, Nygma."

The years had made him smarter, more cunning, more... well, a lot of things. They hadn't made him the least bit more nice. And he imagined Eddie had weathered worse in his years than rude commentary.

"But I suppose I wouldn't mind havin' the opportunity to tell Osborn to fuck himself in the socket." A thoughtful cluck of tongue. "If it honestly came down to it."

And the torture, pain, and death that would come after it — either a physical or spiritual death, it really depended on how useful they found his powers — all of that, he would gladly do, take, suffer. All of that for the opportunity to tell the Establishment that there was something they couldn't make him hand over.

But that would come off so sentimental, wouldn't it just? He'd shed sentimentality like a second skin years ago.

His fingers ran over the novelty lighter trigger he had taken back from Eridan, his index stroking the metal almost lovingly. Norman's name cut into his spine, slicing down his nerves. He didn't react to it, not visibly -- the years past had also made him smarter, subtler. Giving Eridan that meaty sliver wouldn't help either of them; reactions could be bullets in delivery.

"You've interacted with Norman often," he said. It was a statement, a few tones short of an accusation. Stern, but without obvious judgment. He took a sharp turn around the corner, heedless now of watching eyes. Eddie was thinking in two places, the here and the prior, and both narratives ran reels in his neurons.

"Partnered?" It was a simple question, cutting to the marrow of their skeletal conversation. Partnered with Norman Osborn on what, recapturing? Interrogation? Torture? Pleasure?

Eddie, of all people, knew the depths of sadism Eridan could sink into.

"Home sweet home," he said, taking the key out to his shoddy Queens brick building. Smoke stacks sung to the sky, adding clouds of gray.

"Never officially," Eridan replied, unashamed of the vagueness in his answer. He could estimate what Eddie was really asking, could give him what he wanted easily, and had absolutely no intention to do so without a proper struggle.

And, wwell. Making Eddie sweat was an indulgence the once prince hadn't had the pleasure of in a number of long, long years.

Eridan leaned around the other man at the opened door, scanning over the apartment's contents with a nonjudgmental flicker of eyes. He couldn't sneer at the modest accommodations, really. Just this morning he'd been content enough in his own cozy little hole in the wall.

"Nice place," he commented blandly. Could be worse. Could be concrete and full of government thugs.

"Freedom has its price," he said with a flick of a smile. A shadowed smugness hung in the air. "Make yourself comfortable. I wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable."

He gestured to the mainroom. A bed, a stack of newspapers and books. A laptop and a scattering of flashdrives to the side. A pile of corrupted motherboards in a corner. The kitchen was a closet to the left, but equipped with a humble water heater and sink. Eddie made the motions for tea.

"So what unofficial business did you partake with our mutual acquaintance?" It was a question spoken with a light air.

As the water whistled to a boil, Edward removed his actual revolver from under the sink.

And in possibly the first brief whiff of awkwardness thus far, Eridan simply stood in the corner as Eddie made his motions. Glanced over the flash drives, read the covers of the newspapers.

It was only when he glanced back to answer Eddie that he became aware of the revolver, and felt a sudden pang of longing for the weight of his magnum. He wasn't entirely sure if it was to defend himself from his pursuers — or from Eddie.

"Fixated as ever, I take it?" He dragged fingertips along the nearest surface, examined dust that wasn't there. "Not surprised. Not after what he did to you. Helped do, really, but I'm sure he gives himself plenty a credit."

He rolled purple tongue against dull human teeth, thoughtfully. What were his odds of survival if Eddie turned that revolver against him, for whatever reason? He couldn't use his ranged powers again without tipping off every government man within a hundred foot radius, and crawling off to a hospital oozing purple was not an option.

Bad odds.

"In fact, I know he does." The soft shuffle of a mostly empty pack of cigarettes. He let one hang out of his teeth, patting himself down fruitlessly for a lighter. "You're the one that got away, right? He must obsess."

A soft huff of laughter. Eridan glanced back over, making a gun motion towards the end of his cigarette. And fired.

"Got a light?"

"In fact," he said after a pause. "I do."

Talk of Norman swelled in his ears, swum in his head. A swarm of locusts plaguing his very thoughts. He imagined Norman's face, that smug sneer. That black hole of an eye socket covered by a simple patch. Edward (and perhaps Edward alone) understood how the Establishment's rabid dog had lost that eye: it was a punishment for losing Eddie the first time. When he slithered right through the enforcer's fingers. It only vulcanized Norman's hate for him, but even a miniscule part of Eddie believed it all worthy.

He smiled at Eridan. Warmly.

The kettle hissed again, a siren for attention.

Eddie drew a step closer, his eyes on Eridan. The other man had flourished under the regime -- not without his own sacrifice, of course, but comparatively, he had done more than simply survive. He had exploited. People suffered, people died because of Eridan Ampora and his survival instinct. A lesser man would have already tried to strangle that gill-lacking lackey, but Edward understood the depth to the situation. Here was Eridan Ampora, a prince reduced, an heir apparent -- his heir apparent -- suffocated. He was desperate and dire. He was alone.

Edward held the revolver to Eridan's cigarette, his free hand shadowing the back of the Alternian's head.

The blood would never dry from Eridan Ampora's hands.

Eddie shoved the gun against the other man's teeth, speaking in a measured, soft voice.

"Why shouldn't I? Tell me, Eridan, why I should not."

The clink of steel on teeth was not altogether unexpected; that didn't make it any less painful.

"Ah." Just ah, barely a breath, just a casual glance down the barrel of the gun before murky brown eyes matched Eddie's once again. A flat glare. Pupils blown wide with fear.

"Because you need me." Soft, measured. "I know better than anybody else that you rebel wannabes have jack shit that can actually do damage. You got trouble makers with homemade bombs. Psychic or two. You got angry college kids writin' letter campaigns to their local governors. But you've got nothin' else. Nobody who's been on the inside and come out normal, no offense."

Sharp, on that last syllable.

"But you could have me. Somebody," he breathed, imagining he could smell gunpowder, "who's got nothin' left to lose. A turncoat. A snake. And you could really use a snake right about now, couldn't you?" His heart pounded against his ribcage. "And you — you could use a friend. A pal. Somebody you can trust."

Eridan narrowed his eyes.

"A right hand man."

Another breath held. And then his voice came booming, confident; he just hoped, in his delicate condition, that Eddie wouldn't trip his trigger and blow Eridan's purple matter all over the kitchen tile.

"But if you want to just kill me, just throw away the last person who really gives a shit about you besides whose side of this war you can win for 'em, be my guest. And have fun scrubbin' purple outta the carpet."

And in a move recalling the brashness of his youth — not an accidental turn — Eridan leaned in just far enough to let the muzzle of Eddie's revolver slide cool onto the bed of his dry tongue, teeth closing around steel with an audible clink. He matched eyes with Eddie and, not for the first time within the past week, gambled it all.

He hoped the lack of gag reflex was suitably distracting.

Edward displayed little beyond narrowed eyes and a skeptical sneer throughout Eridan's entire defense. His trigger finger stroked over the mechanism, taunting, but never pulling. Before Eridan was even midway through his argument, Eddie had been dissuaded from cold murder.

He wasn't in a mood to clean the carpet, anyway.

As Eridan took the gun into his mouth, Edward watched with his now default impassive expression.

"Practice that much? Given who you work for, I mean, isn't a real surprise is it?" His familiar tone equipped the quip. Slowly, gently, he pulled the gun out from Eridan's mouth. And wiped it down Eridan's shirt. There was a quirk of judgment in the movement, a flicker of disdain along with the mercy: Eridan was still a G-man, far as Eddie was concerned. A turncoat could always turn again, yes, but the problem wasn't the direction -- it was the fact there were far too many coat racks.

He needed Eridan. But he couldn't trust him.

"A friend, you said." Eddie cleared his throat. "What could a friend do for me? Thought those were more useful to normal individuals."

A biting echo of Eridan's own barb.

Eridan quirked his eyebrows at the quip, hummed down the metal. Licked his lightly throbbing teeth as Eddie wiped.

"Besides the obvious?" A quirk of his smile, not quite a sneer but hovering around the genus. "Not that you'd get the pleasure. I've got standards, and they sure don't bend for guys who live in shitty one bedrooms in Queens."

Cavalier in the face of his (probably briefly) prolonged existence, Eridan retrieved his fallen cigarette and made a show of brushing it off before returning it to his mouth. Dingy carpet from shitty one bedrooms in Queens, and whatnot.

"Hey, maybe you need someone to talk to besides yourself." A lean inwards. "What do I know. You gonna light me up or not?"

Eddie smiled all the while, his smirk deepening at the insults and insinuations. And still, through all those silent lip quirks, he refused to offer Eridan a light.

He was done playing the Prometheus role.

"I already have friends," he said. Edward was still a manipulator, and he had always known Eridan to embody envy. "I had the most effective Intelligence network, before -- before my capture. Don't you think I took pains to ensure it would continue without me?" Two fingers extended, lifting up Eridan's chin. "No writhing snake without it's head."

The bait cast.

"I'm involved with them. My Network."

Not to the extent he had been, when Eddie built his espionage group from the grass. But he was involved, defiantly, even if under the vigilant eye of Max Gibson.

"They haven't forsaken me."

Eridan hadn't given Eddie the pleasure of visual displeasure when he'd been grasped before, but now — well, now he couldn't help it. Narrowing eyes, locking jaw on a cigarette yet to be lit.

That's what irritated him most, out of the whole thing. Friends he could go without, but he'd gotten so used to people doing what they were told.

"You think they love you? Eddie." Chiding, almost scornful. He moved to brush past the man in favor of his stove, the nicotine craving after that mild brush with death suddenly pressing. He flipped a burner on, waited impatiently for it to heat up. "They only give a shit about you because you can win the war for 'em. You're a tool. A, ah —" inspiration striking, pulling the kettle off its burner and kissing the unlit end of his smoke to the hot metal. "— bottle of someone else's Xanax stashed away in the back of the medicine cabinet."

He clicked the burner off, drug in deep. Finally looked back to Eddie again over his shoulder, words smoky.

"You're nice to have on the rough days, but they don't need you. Not really." A quirk of his lips. "Once you're all used up, they're gonna move on to the next best thing. Maybe something even better."

"Maybe," he followed up. Cool, aloof eyes drifted over Eridan's body, collecting around Eridan's mouth when he turned over and around. "Maybe. But at least I can look at myself in the mirror, each morning."

Now cam his turn to gamble, with different stakes. He crossed his arms, leaning against the kitchen threshold.

"Better to be a useful tool than a disposable pawn, wouldn't you think?" A low chuckle, from the back of his throat. "Better a bottle of pills than, ah, a bottle of lubrication."

Lewd as the insinuation was, Eddie held no qualms at clarification.

"Your superiors slick you around their dicks and thrust, Eridan, there's no mincing words. In and out, and never their focus. Have I taught you nothing?" Now came the theatrics, now came the note of disappointment. Of unadulterated sadness.

"Have you already forgotten our first lesson? Never let them define who and what you are."

"If I was their lube, then I used to be your glove." Idly, he made a jerking motion with his right hand. "Means to an end, smooth glide, stylish as hell, and kept you from gettin' yourself dirty."

Nonchalance aside, Eddie's words prickled down his spine and stuck there, like a knife. He'd always had the ability to do that with little more than twisting phrases and tone of voice, something Eridan had never been able to accomplish with such off the cuff efficiency. Yet another thing, a quirk that Eridan hadn't quite been able to duplicate.

Yet.

"Besides, those lessons of yours don't mean much when one of us made out in the end and the other probably hasn't made out with anythin' other than his hand in, what, a year?" He leaned heavy against the stove and blew smoke rings around Eddie's face from his point of view, more than content with the distance between them, this hostility. He liked it. And he was more than happy to further it. "I mean, I'm not the one twitchin' and tweakin' here, Winston."

Another drag. He'd barely blinked since taking up position at the stove.

"You're gonna regret not blowin' my brains out, Nygma." He brought his cigarette up to his lips again, dangled in delicate fashion between the knuckles of his first and middle fingers. "I'd suggest not tryin' tonight, by the by. Light sleeper. Forgot to grab my Xanax on the way out this mornin'."

Eddie froze in his muscles for half a minute, staring at Eridan with that plastic smile of his. It was a facial feature well practiced and worn so often before the Establishment's company. That static, buzzing smile. Twitching only in the corners.

Winston Smith, he had alluded.

The next half of that minute was spent violently, Eddie's hands seeking to tear at Eridan's once-gill scars. Thumbs pressing into larynx. His body pressing against Eridan's, pulling them both down, using the advantage of surprise to angle a pinning.

He took pains not to bash Eridan's skull against the stovetop. He wondered if the Alternian had noticed.

"It must be s-so hard," Eddie whispered against and ear. "So hard for you. Still desperately hating someone you admire -- hate to admire. Afraid to invest lest I d-disappear again. Afraid that I judge you for choosing the easy route."

Lips touching aural cartilage.

"So hard for you."

It shouldn't have been an unexpected reaction — or, in other words, it shouldn't have caught Eridan by so much surprise. He knew that. Should've known that. Shouldn't have ended up pinned under Eddie, dull and long since manicured nails biting desperately at the soft parts of his assailant's face, hands, tearing at brunet hair.

He took pains not to burn Eddie with the cigarette still clenched between his fingers. He wondered if the Riddler had noticed.

"Is that puh-puh-pity I hear, Nygma?" Eridan hissed back, free hand scrabbling across the linoleum for purchase. Arched back, estimating his own weight versus Eddie's, how much of a difference they had between them. "Not really your style."

Thin. Hard to breathe, with Eddie's weight on his chest.

"Not our style. Not us."

"Is it not?" Edward poised the question on his tongue, before that tongue licked over his teeth. He held onto Eridan. Tightly. No more scratching, no choking, just pinning. Eddie relied on the force of his motions, his intensity -- he had yet to gain back the weight lost during his captivity. He took his pressure on Eridan as a good sign, that he still held that entrancing power.

"You don't think that empathy can be learned? Fff-forced into your skull by wires and steel blades?" He couldn't help the stutter. This was an emotional topic.

One hand slid up Eridan's shoulder, pushing it back down.

"I can't say I don't hold, at least, s-some sympathy for you. It was a hard choice to make. They can be so persuasive."

Eridan's shoulder didn't fight the push. Still taut as a wire underneath Eddie, the whole of him, but he had stilled.

"Feels like forever on the inside, don't it?" He muttered with a stiff jaw, eyes constantly moving. Eddie. the wall. The stove. The door. The stove again. "They don't keep clocks in there. They don't handle you at the same time everyday. That's on purpose. Feels like a lifetime of gettin' the bile beat out of you."

His tone quaked, almost imperceptibly. He hadn't thought about those hazy months in years. Hadn't wanted to.

"You learn to like it, huh? Because it's better than sittin' in the dark."

"What else did they do to you, Eridan?"

Purposeful use of the other man's real name. His birth name. His legacy name. Gentle fingers stroked stray wisps back with its twin hand kept that shoulder still.

"What else did they take from you?"

Eddie knew how his features drew softer. It was an authentic reaction: few, very few, deathly few individuals lived to see the sun outside again. Even fewer were still capable of coherent speech. Eddie was a brother in trauma to Eridan, a veteran of the same blanching horror. They both knew the scorch of their own screams upon their ears.

"You can tell me."

"Nothin' important."

Was that a lie? Eridan had no idea, honestly. He'd closed that entire section of himself down just as he closed back down now, the hand not bearing his rumpled cigarette once again pulling taught in Eddie's hair. Pulling, as he began his efforts to escape once again. He turned his head to the side and stared at the far wall.

"Nothin' I feel like bondin' over, either."

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