(no subject)
[For justprompts / deception / 300 words]
He's working out of a McDonald's, at two o'clock in the afternoon, in broad daylight, munching a greasy burger and pecking at a handful of soggy fries. He's working in the Gotham Library, in the children's section, organizing books with one hand. The other hand is deftly working a laptop, and he’s wriggling his way into the GCPD police files. Tolkien, Carroll, Jacques. Peter Pan, Harry Potter, and Twilight. Falcone, Maroni, Zsasz. Victim statement transcripts, evidence tags, and circulating memos.
Eddie had long ago decided that the best place to hide was where everyone could see you. Plain sight. He, that is Eddie Nashton, was a person. He was twenty-three years old, and 5'11. He wore glasses, and black and white Vans with laces that didn't match. And that didn’t matter a bit.
The one thing Eddie had to rely on, the one thing Nygma had going for him, was the anonymity. He never met people face to face. You needed to talk to people who knew, who’d heard of him from somebody else. He was a series of pixels on a screen, signals from a wire, beams from a satellite. Nygma had no voice, no face.
Eddie’d once seen a couple of guys in a restaurant, couple of greasy Italians. Mobsters. They walked in like they owned the place and, in all likelihood, they did. They probably were making their living, only just able to escape jail, from information Nygma had sold to them. But Eddie still shrunk down in his seat when they approached him, still skittered away saying nothing when they shooed him from his table, never looking twice at him, like he was nobody. He was nobody.
Hiding in plain sight. A series of ones and zeroes, a scrap of coding. Just another kind of mask.
He's working out of a McDonald's, at two o'clock in the afternoon, in broad daylight, munching a greasy burger and pecking at a handful of soggy fries. He's working in the Gotham Library, in the children's section, organizing books with one hand. The other hand is deftly working a laptop, and he’s wriggling his way into the GCPD police files. Tolkien, Carroll, Jacques. Peter Pan, Harry Potter, and Twilight. Falcone, Maroni, Zsasz. Victim statement transcripts, evidence tags, and circulating memos.
Eddie had long ago decided that the best place to hide was where everyone could see you. Plain sight. He, that is Eddie Nashton, was a person. He was twenty-three years old, and 5'11. He wore glasses, and black and white Vans with laces that didn't match. And that didn’t matter a bit.
The one thing Eddie had to rely on, the one thing Nygma had going for him, was the anonymity. He never met people face to face. You needed to talk to people who knew, who’d heard of him from somebody else. He was a series of pixels on a screen, signals from a wire, beams from a satellite. Nygma had no voice, no face.
Eddie’d once seen a couple of guys in a restaurant, couple of greasy Italians. Mobsters. They walked in like they owned the place and, in all likelihood, they did. They probably were making their living, only just able to escape jail, from information Nygma had sold to them. But Eddie still shrunk down in his seat when they approached him, still skittered away saying nothing when they shooed him from his table, never looking twice at him, like he was nobody. He was nobody.
Hiding in plain sight. A series of ones and zeroes, a scrap of coding. Just another kind of mask.