Way backdated log: Gotham Who: Eddie N and Zatanna Z What: Commiserating post Louis-breakout When: Waaay backdated, to post-Valentine's. Warnings: Nada. These two play nice.
Eddie needed to clear his head from the Valentine madness spreading across the Gotham streets, so he went below. The tunnels and sewers under his city had always served as a tree house for him, a hidden fort that belonged to no one. He could install security doors, turrets, cameras, anything and it would get mysteriously torn down within weeks. Men with black, beady eyes who had been driven mad by the maze of tunnels, the dirty animals, the unexplained accidents. It made him feel wild and roguish, it made him remember how Arkham used to smell.
His mind wandered to the time he had almost died down here, in some underground apartment. A monstrous man with yellow teeth and red eyes held him high to break his neck like a chicken wing. Eddie accepted his fate, death was something that came so quickly in Gotham and there wasn’t anything you could do about it. But, there was Muerte, dropping the monster dead for him and Eddie wondered if that’s where it all really started.
The thought was pushed out his mind, he came down here to escape thinking about her and all those no’s he knew she wanted to say. He put on his violet glasses that glowed in the dark tunnel he was carefully walking through and silently asked his drone how close he was. Zat’s mansion was nearly right above, so he kept moving until he saw the hole. Luckily it wasn’t too high. Hopefully she had a ladder.
“ZAAAT!” Eddie called from the hole, hands cupped around his mouth to make his voice real loud. When she looked down the hole, she’d see him in his gritty green. Blazer littered in question marks rolled up to his elbows, a loose tie, boots, sturdy pants, fingerless purple gloves and that funny little bowler hat. He leaned on his cane and smiled up at the hole, as if this was exactly how you knocked on someone’s door.
The work-room was large. It was cocooned in the very lowest part of Shadowcrest, where daylight did not stretch warm, forgiving fingers in; it was lit by an ever-burning flicker of green flame in the corner, in a brass holder, and by candles. The work-table was a mess of books, stacked haphazardly, and the circle was still on the floor, the maw of the hole bitten out of its center. The runes were scattered and the chalk markings were smeared through and Zatanna was a loose-limbed mass upon the low, velvet chaise-longue shoved toward the back of the room, cheek pillowed on her arm. She slept, with the books drawn up over her lap like a blanket and the workings moving in and out of her mind as she slept, like shadows leaning long against the floor.
She came to, startled at the bellow from below and she scrambled, hands pushed up off thighs, toward the broken circle and the ripped-out heart of the house’s foundations. It would need repair, as did her ego, but she saw not Louis, thin and blue-shadowed with fatigue, but Eddie beneath. Eddie, the way she remembered him, and the fronds of her dark hair fell over her shoulders as she leaned over the hole, and it was a tired smile, but a smile all the same.
“Edward,” she acknowledged formally, with an incline of her chin, as if they were at a gathering or a teaparty, instead of herself, sleep-crumpled in a robe tied loosely over fishnets and bared runes and he at the bottom of a new hole. “Did you wish to come in?”
He grinned up at her, taking his bowler hat off and sweeping it with a bow. “May I?” Eddie asked, all charm. Eddie didn’t need a good look at her to know that her ego was tarnished, scuffed a bit. The conversation on the journals pointed to as much. Eddie, who thought of himself as a veteran of the hotel, found that blaming himself for every little thing was a recipe for disaster. Somethings were simply bigger than him, simply unexplainable. Still, telling Zat as much wouldn’t make this any easier. She probably wanted some kind of solution, some answer and Eddie was very good at finding those.
“I’ve searched the tunnels and found no trace of your magic man.” Eddie shouted up and popped his hat back on his head. “Have you had better luck?” He asked and then waited for her to drop a ladder down or magic him up. He was secretly hoping for the latter.
Her ego was bruised and her hands stung from the slide of the blade against her palm: she had looked for answers in the books that drew on blood and salt, substances that endured but her palms were criss-crossed and Zatanna had found nothing and she was weary and her self-belief was fragmented, fissured with cracks. It would survive. She didn’t need to think herself indomitable, and the man who stood with his head tipped back to grin at her, he didn’t see her as omnipowerful.
She reached, soundless magic, with no curl of her fingers and he rose, feet off the floor and through the hole Louis had left behind in his haste and his power, stood within a circle that had not contained what it had been made to do. “I have had no luck,” she said, her mouth flattened without any of the gameful mischief of its usual curl upward, “But whatever gave him strength, I can’t find it.”
Eddie honestly missed the smell of magic. He missed studying in other doors where people wielded anything from thunderbolts to rings of fire. Zatanna’s power was ancient and endless. It reminded him of a dusty wine cellar in the Wayne Manor. Filled with richness and spiders in equal measures. With a look down at his feet, he made an oop! noise as he lifted through the hole the mysterious magic man made. His feet gracefully hit the edge of the broken floor and he took his hat off, running his fingers through his hair as he peered around the room.
“To be honest, I don’t know a thing about this man.” Eddie had a lot of things on his plate, so a look through the journals for any clues about what kind of person Louis was felt more tedious than anything else. He had hoped Zat knew something. “Does he seem like a good man with very bad luck?” To the riddled man, that would be the best scenario.
She knew the bruises he wore beneath his eyes, as if sleep was elusive, water through the fingers. She knew he had family who loved him as simply and completely as if uprooting themselves, putting faith in strangers was just another step dictated by blood bonds. “He does,” she agreed, as she wrapped the robe more tightly around herself and turned long enough to begin clearing up some of the remnants of ritual that littered the workbench. Zee moved like a performer even in her own home, liquid grace and Eddie, Eddie was an onlooker who knew which curtain to look behind to see the strings.
“He feels like an ordinary man. Flawed, but worthy of his family, of their love, of their care. He did not wish to cause hurt, to cause harm, but what is inside of him is at war with who he is.” And she had spent long, poring over journals and reading back to find evidence of who it was she was trying to find, who had been hollowed out for a vessel. “So just an ordinary man. But worth trying to save.”
Eddie decided to look around the room; his mind worked better when it had a few things to focus on at once. He wanted to read some of the books she had stacked around, even if they likely wouldn’t be any use to him in the future. He liked to learn and the unknown, the occult, that was the last great frontier for him. The riddled man walked to her desk and tapped his fingers on top of a book as if to ask her permission if he could pick it up. “A man with a good heart matched with strange power can be unpredictable.” Eddie’s words floated without much weight. This was something Zat knew herself. He just liked to paint a picture for himself, he liked to be able to see every side.
“If he doesn’t come back, I can hunt him down. Though, perhaps we should ask his family. Even if they are protective over him, they did ask for your help in the first place.” This was a little like trying to befriend a wild animal (which Eddie admittedly knew nothing about in the most literal sense even if the analogy made sense in his head). Scaring the family off or actively trying to hunt the magic man down would result in more complications. That was what made this whole thing frustrating.
She could read the traces left on books, if she tried. It was a trick her father had taught her, with tea-leaves in abandoned cups in cafes in Paris. The dregs of coffee, the ghost of a lipstick stain left on porcelain. ’Look closely, little one’ and his fingers curled around its edges as delicately as if he might break the fingerprint-mark of magic, like a thin bubble of viscous tension stretched over water. It didn’t need tea-leaves, of course. There were no patterns to read, nothing but human traces of human lives, the viscera left behind: saliva, tears on a crumpled tissue, blood. Blood was strongest. Blood was best.
She waved her hand, an arc of airy permission given and granted, but Zatanna’s world was full of things that could catch those that disturbed them in their webs. The books, the occult, they spanned walls, they stretched feet. She had not read every one: she couldn’t. She thought her father had collected them, like some men did pipes, or artwork. Each was beautiful, each dangerous, like a blade honed to silvery thinness.
“I think we leave the hunt until last,” she said, and the blue in her eyes was untroubled as summer-skies, but the way Zatanna held her mouth gave away what few secrets she held in her hands, cards to read. There was a firmness in her chin, a stubbornness: the man had run away, he would return, the threads of her magic had broken but she had not unfixed them from him. He would come back. “His family didn’t know where to begin.” She liked them. Rough, and uncertain but they loved without question, stepping into an abyss without thinking of the next step. To be loved like that was whole, complete. Zee smiled: it was steady flame, no waver. “Even if he is unpredictable, I think we let him come back first.” Her fingers moved, the air thinned above one of the sigils on the floor, burned with renewed warmth. Fire. Recast, they were stronger. Magnetic as lodestones.
Eddie picked the book up. It was red, soft leather and thick paper. The first chapter was about the sea. He wondered why a book in red would start with the water as an opening and if it was taking a long walk to something more fiery. Still, he read a few sentences. The first two: The sea lays below me with open jaws. I see the bones no one else cares to acknowledge in this fishing town. He skipped a few pages. She sang, scales pressed to the back of her hands like lace. I stopped to examine them and she pulled away. The red didn’t stand for fire. Eddie decided that this book chose him.
He looked up, closing the pages with careful, almost affectionate fingers. He was a snappy man, a sharp one that wounded everyone at least once. But, when he loved something, he was gentle. Kind. Even the riddled man had the capacity to be kind despite all the reasons this Gotham gave him not to. The book was tucked under his arm and he continued to wander around the room to examine its oddities.
Eddie didn’t know the bond of a true family. The only one he had been part of had shattered into pieces. He wondered what it was like being part of something bigger than he was. “Well, good. Do you need anything from me?” His tone said I came to check on you in the way friends do when the other was having a rotten day. He turned to look at her, to look at the crispy spark of magic and took a moment to appreciate it.
She smiled. It was luminescent, stage and knowing-bright. She heard the tone, she understood what it meant, she was warmed by it. It was a good and honest truth in amongst so much fractious uncertainty, and with a hole in the floor of the room, Zee welcomed bonds that embraced rather than broke. The magic dissipated with the strong smell of salt and burned metal and she felt, if not comforted then at least moderately more at peace. Eddie understood the way magic could sharpen teeth against you a moment after holding you close enough to drown.
“No,” she said and she shone that smile at him. A back-row grin, a private spotlight. But it was a gift, the offer, and she took it the way a little girl might treasure ribbons. “But you could go looking. Find out if there are others like him. I know there are others like him,” she corrected herself. Distant words on a page, and she didn’t know enough to hunt them down.
“I can do that.” Eddie tapped the book with idle fingers, mind like clockwork as he went through his memories of the cult, of the magic that had plagued Gotham years ago. Yes, there was plenty of places to start looking. Instead of quickly saying his goodbyes, he stood there to enjoy the ocean spray of vanished magic. Eyes closed because he truthfully missed it. “My magic used to be such a comfort for me.” He said without any particular aim and then opened his eyes to flash her a carnie grin like someone turning on a light. Eddie pretended he hadn’t said anything at all and tipped his hat at her.
In the next moment one of his drones (a black circular thing with the circumference of a tea table and a messy green question mark on the top) raised out of the hole. “Helllloo my darling. Oh, well you don’t say.” Eddie spoke directly to the drone that did nothing except hover there in front of him. “D-X says there’s something funny over by Wonder City. I should go check it out. Have a good day, Zat.” The riddled man tipped his hat at her and grabbed onto the side of the drone before it lowered him back down into the sewers.