[He can feel the weight of the look Alfred’s giving him. Can feel the weight of silence between those carefully chosen words just like the silence between the gunshot and Ed’s body dropping to the floor.
Oswald traces a fine, spidering crack at the corner of one of the lenses.
He nearly died for Ed, Alfred points out. But all he did was delay the inevitable. Death would come for them all – but taking Ed just as a new Gotham was dawning, just when they had found their way back to each other again, was most cruel. Even if Ed knew, even if he accepted it, the knowing and the acceptance could change nothing now. Worthless to one but priceless to two, the riddle echoes in his mind, over and over. Like a curse.
Worthless, worthless, worthless.
Oswald bites down on a strangled, angry sort of sound, his throat jerking, fighting back. He wipes his cheeks with the back of a hand.]
...Ed was the only person who still cared about me, [his voice cracks around the words] and now he’s gone!
[Gotham takes and takes. And every time it has, he made a promise to himself that he’d take the pain roiling inside him and make something useful of it. Weaponize it. Give it purpose. The night he staggered into the Wayne mansion, wrung-out and bloodied, the bitter smell of burnt flesh sticking to the back of his throat, there had been the hope that he’d feel a little better in the morning. That, somehow, after washing himself clean and collapsing into bed, he’d rest easier thinking Ed could, too. But all he had done was force himself to confront the reality that killing those men had not made him whole. And that he still can’t understand how he’s supposed to exist without Ed.
His face wrenches up.]
...I don’t know what to do. [It squeaks out of him, so rattly and thin and small.]
no subject
Oswald traces a fine, spidering crack at the corner of one of the lenses.
He nearly died for Ed, Alfred points out. But all he did was delay the inevitable. Death would come for them all – but taking Ed just as a new Gotham was dawning, just when they had found their way back to each other again, was most cruel. Even if Ed knew, even if he accepted it, the knowing and the acceptance could change nothing now. Worthless to one but priceless to two, the riddle echoes in his mind, over and over. Like a curse.
Worthless, worthless, worthless.
Oswald bites down on a strangled, angry sort of sound, his throat jerking, fighting back. He wipes his cheeks with the back of a hand.]
...Ed was the only person who still cared about me, [his voice cracks around the words] and now he’s gone!
[Gotham takes and takes. And every time it has, he made a promise to himself that he’d take the pain roiling inside him and make something useful of it. Weaponize it. Give it purpose. The night he staggered into the Wayne mansion, wrung-out and bloodied, the bitter smell of burnt flesh sticking to the back of his throat, there had been the hope that he’d feel a little better in the morning. That, somehow, after washing himself clean and collapsing into bed, he’d rest easier thinking Ed could, too. But all he had done was force himself to confront the reality that killing those men had not made him whole. And that he still can’t understand how he’s supposed to exist without Ed.
His face wrenches up.]
...I don’t know what to do. [It squeaks out of him, so rattly and thin and small.]