A story high above the low, recorded by few, disputed by later.

[enigmaestro]

WHO: EDWARD NYGMA and POSSIBLY YOU.
WHERE: NOHoPE.
WHEN: August 8th - August 14th.
WARNINGS: Sweep you all up on a corner and pay for my bread.
SUMMARY: You know that I cannot believe my own truth.
FORMAT: To show what a truth, it's got nothing to lose.

Comments

[afeatherpillow]

The last month had broken something inside Katurian. Small cuts and tears grew inside of him, flourished, built. It happened the day he returned to the City, bruised and scraped, whittling out memories that no one close to him seemed to remember. It happened the moment he realized he had been tortured and abused, and then the moment DeConnick told him I hope you're not squeamish. It happened when he met Fugue, when his idyllic home (the most comfortable place he had been in months, years maybe) was torn apart by anonymous bones and flesh. It happened when the woman he didn't really love who had given him trust he didn't really deserve died against him.

He brought Edward a gift. Not a book, because he knew how many he had in his house, but a collection of logic puzzles and word games. Unscramble words and then place them in a crossword puzzle. Scramble faces, learn which nose belonged to which person. And so on. He came in after his usual Thursday meeting with his psychiatrist, where for the first time, he refused to answer her questions. How did you get those stitches, just above your temple? she had asked. What is the bruise? Have you stopped sleeping again? He tried to steer the conversation away from himself and then, after a time, he told her that she may as well lock him up again if she was expecting him to talk, because he had nothing to say.

In many ways, Katurian was done playing games, too.

[enigmaestro]

He was watching his hands, when Katurian was let in. His back was to the door, his arms extended and fractionally obscuring one of his fourteen riddles. Palms faced his wall, and Eddie was staring at the backs.

"Their Latin name, of course, is manus." Eddie spoke to the footsteps he heard, refusing to turn around. "Man -- us. This curious mutation, this very unnatural shape, the hand. A name in one language, broken and morphed by another to obtain an entirely new insight. Man. Us."

He turns at that, pulling away from his riddles and greeting his guest with open hands. And lacerated, bleeding palms.

"Are we defined by our mutation, Katurian?"

[afeatherpillow]

His eyes darted to the hands, and Katurian pictured himself during his first stint in a hospital, his hands crushed and mutilated beyond recognition. He had tried to write with them, again and again, until his bones cracked anew and bled through their bandages. Watching Eddie, he shuddered. Unmistakably.

Then he started looking for sharp objects.

"What did you do?" It was practically a whisper. His body was tight all over, and while he was sure that Edward wanted him to answer the question, to continue despite this turn, even in his lowest of lows, Katuiran could not unwind himself completely

[enigmaestro]

"Oh dear. Caught me red-handed." Eddie winked, as if expecting Katurian to play along. It was likely a vain hope, he knew, but that notion didn't make any imprint on his callous smile. Glancing down at his hands again, he gave pause. Then instead of wiping his palms against his pants, or some cloth, Eddie smeared his blood across a riddle.

"They took away my pens. I had to improvise."

Eddie's eyes followed Katurian's in the latter's search for sharp objects. He was amused by the effort, curious to see what Katurian might unearth. Carefully, he edged his way towards his company, his cleaner hand idly scratching pink marks around his neck.

"Now you're here, with me."

[afeatherpillow]

Now you're here with me. The way Edward said it made Katurian feel like an insect caught in a spiderweb, limbs dangling, the beginning of his final, paralyzed moments in life. His instinct was to step back, but he held his ground. There wasn't any point in visiting, if he ran so soon.

His eyes trailed to Edward's neck. Nails. Teeth?

"That's cruel of them." He meant it. Katurian couldn't always understand Edward, but he understood that. Even his second time institutionalized, he would have gone mad without something to write with. He would have cut open his own hands. He would have bled for it. "What else would they have you do?"

He chanced a glance at the walls, the riddles that had yet to be cleared away.

[enigmaestro]

Eddie gave pause, looking down at his own hands again.

"What else? What else? Any controlled scenario is likely pleasant to their minds. Anything quiet and stagnate, pleasant to their thoughts. But not to mine." Throwing his hands up again, watching them in some semi-hypnotic stance, he turned abruptly and circled around Katurian. There was something both fluid and unhinged in his movements -- they were expressive, but disconnected. Loud but shouted in the opposing direction.

"Was it unholy, returning to here? Unnatural? Or did something ring with familiarity?" He asked this casually, as if speaking about variant flavors of tea. There was nothing particularly menacing in his tone -- just unrestrained curiosity.

Eddie walked to another riddle, staring at it with a posture innate to viewers of art galleries.

[afeatherpillow]

He could feel a tightness within his chest, but he doubted it was because of the hospital. Katurian had entered NOHoPE sick and left it well. The pain of his first month was eclipsed by the success of the musical and his defeat of Doctor Einsturzen in the last. Within these walls, he had been thankful for the quiet. He had met Andy. If he were back in the other hospital, the one that took him while Desire tore his head apart and ruined everything he loved about himself, well. It would have been another story.

Or if he were in prison again.

It had to be about Edward. That feeling. Worry and panic and fear, illness at watching him suffer like this. He had imagined Edward as indestructible, more of an idea than a person, a volatile mass of promises and barely restrained violence that pressed from under his skin like spikes. Under Katurian's skin. And this was--

He didn't know how he really felt about Edward. Maybe like Sylph, he was just in love with the idea of someone saving him.

"Familiar," he said, honestly. He tightened his grip on the plastic bag in his hand, the one that contained the book of word games. He still had a bandage on the side of his head, just above his left temple. "Like I never left. Almost."

[enigmaestro]

Eddie wrinkled his nose.

"Well then. How unpleasant," he said. And then chuckled, after watching Katurian for half a minute. The giggling pitched, until he finally broke it with words.

"Really now, you look like you've just stepped out of a war zone. I hope that's not the case, but I haven't seen bandages used as accessories for quite some time." Eddie stepped closer to Katurian, ice crumbling away between them, warmly greeting. "And yet, what else could it be? Unless you -- "

Widening eyes shattered the sentence. He froze his step towards Katurian. Something was written on his face, something like mistrust and cautious suspicion.

"Noo. You really went, didn't you?"

[afeatherpillow]

He didn't need to ask Edward for clarification to know what he meant. His mouth tasted sour, acidic. His tongue was thick and heavy and foreign in his mouth.

(Like a pillow.)

"I went."

He didn't cast his eyes downward. He maintained contact, breathing in that mistrust and suspicion, showing himself unwavering in that admission. He had gone, it had happened, and that wasn't going to change. He wouldn't insult Edward by trying to lie. He wouldn't insult himself, either.

[enigmaestro]

"Then it happened there. The catalyst that has rendered you so moody. Moodier, rather." Eddie took a step back, whether it was subconsciously motivated or not wasn't clear. His gaze upon his company was sharper, more critical. Eddie expressed a frown, rubbing his cheek in thought.

Blood smeared over his skin.

"Heroism has its personal price, Katurian. I think we both figured that out recently."

[afeatherpillow]

"I've known that for some time." Since the day he dragged his dead parents down the stairs, one by one, and heard their bones crack against the hardwood surface. Since he struggled to find work at age fifteen, to feed and care for someone he barely knew but who had been with him all his life.

"Since I was a boy."

He paused, then rubbed at his calf with his foot, feeling at the bruises. He was losing his momentum.

"I tried to forget. I tried to forget, because one of the things about the therapy is that they're trying to make me more optimistic. One of the symptoms, they told me--" (Bolder because Edward was here, because Edward felt it too, because they suffered together) "--is believing that your future is limited. That everything you do will somehow end up rotten."

[enigmaestro]

"Well some of us tried the villain route first, you know," he said villain with palpable irony. "And let me tell you, it's the more rewarding path."

As Katurian spoke and fidgeted, Eddie quietly examined him. How he revealed his physical damage unknowingly, how his exhaustion seeped into his tone. His actions. His expression. Eddie watched this silently, waiting for his cue. Waiting for his chance to guide Katurian once more.

And then it came.

"But that just isn't true, that line of reasoning. I know you have to believe that -- Our futures are limitless, Katurian. Yours and mine. And our glory is within reach -- do you think I haven't been using my time, even now? Does he think, does he honestly think I'll be here for long?" Trapped in his own theatrics, Eddie's voice doubled in volume, each syllable stained with a growing fury.

"We, you and I, we were never meant to just take it. Whoever hurt you is going to regret it. And that's the best part, forcing remorse. That's the inevitable."

[afeatherpillow]

The we would usually fill him with exhilaration (and for a brief time this year, apprehension) but now his face cracked with uncertainty, with the disagreement he couldn't stand to voice. Katurian could storm forward, never lying down, never giving in, but he could see no glory or greatness ahead of him. He saw a chasm of suffering that he could, if he were lucky, emerge from time and again, if only to do a modicum of goodness that might not even be recognized in the end. Or recognized as goodness.

In the hall of the children's hospital where he worked, he wondered if he should be providing exits.

(The he, he chose to file away for later.)

He glanced over Edward towards the sink. His voice, still tired, softened just slightly. "We should wash your hands."

[enigmaestro]

"Mm. Red really isn't my color, is it?" Eddie had stuffed his hands in his cotton thread pockets, keeping them hidden from Katurian. "I've always tried to distance myself from it. Red doesn't bode well in Gotham, you know -- Robins die."

Eddie turned heel out of Katurian's immediate presence, keeping a few feet away, as if out-stepping the threat of being mothered. He looked over his shoulder, offering a grin meant to charm.

"You don't want to talk about what happened? When you went, I mean. To Greenland." He kept his voice soft, even.

[afeatherpillow]

For Katurian, Robins die was such an inanity that he was almost afraid to ask what he meant. He pictured dead birds littering city streets, their red bellies face up towards the sky. Was that a riddle? Could he pick out some deeper meaning if he tried hard enough?

And then Edward was asking about Greenland, and he touched a hand to his bandage. Automatic.

"Someone tried to take my head off." It wasn't the main thing by any means, and he was sure Edward could glean that. Still, he couldn't help but say it, a brief, sickened smile flashing across his lips. "It would've been the third time."

[enigmaestro]

"You've never skirted harm before," mused Edward. "Like your sense of self-preservation was never really fully clocked in. Never fully ticking. But we know that's not the case, don't we?" Eddie withdrew his hands again, suddenly and rapidly slashing his nails against a palm, coaxing fresh blood. All the while keeping his curious eyes measured on Katurian's face.

"Most of us fear death. You, however, halfheartedly embrace it." Eddie took a long look at his wall, slamming his palm against OBLIGATION and smearing red across it. The black ink wasn't quite obscured. "So let's not waltz around the reality, agreed? What really fractured you?"