Who: Riddler and Catwoman (Part 2) Where: Wonder City When: Christmas Night What: Opening a door to a pit. This can only end badly. Warnings: Violence. Eddie has one mental swear.
A former residential alley of Wonder City was split open with rushing cold water below. Entire living rooms were ripped open like a dollhouse in a trash compactor with furniture smashed in stacks against the wall. Riddler stopped in front of an ancient picture of some aristocratic family with a fresh, bright question mark painted across their faces. He scanned the picture with his cane, making it snap open so he could enter a passcode into the keypad so little walkways made of chain and steel slid out from under floorboards. Maybe the cat could bound tall buildings, but Riddler preferred making his own paths. “The door is in the next chamber. Right at the end of the main street.”
She was watching the burning pyre by the time he stood up straight. Her goggles were down, but that didn't hide her expression as she stood there, the fire reflecting in the yellow surface that shuttered her eyes. The kitty cat had seen that he didn't care, and she'd seen that smirk. But she didn't comment. Instead, her gaze just went back to the burning Talon, and she was quiet for a minute before turning and stepping over her very alive, if unconscious one. It was as bad to look sympathetic as it was to look unsympathetic, at least in this company. He could tell all the little villains in Gotham that the kitty cat had gone soft. She could tell Stephanie that her knight in shining question marks was cruel. She knew they'd only keep their silences until it suited them. But even then, who was going to believe the likes of them? That was the problem with straddling a fence in Gotham - no one trusted you on either side.
"I like a different kind of dancing," she said easily; a few seconds to collect herself and that kitty confidence back in spades. "The kind that comes with diamonds and killer heels, Eddie." She walked past him toward the end of that tunnel, and she stared down at the water below. Kitty cats didn't like water, and she didn't have any intention of drowning. She turned in time to see him stop in front of that picture, and she followed suit. "Who are they?" she asked, dislike in her voice. She might have sympathy for the Talons, and she might have a soft spot for Gotham's monsters, but the uppercrust was a different story entirely.
When he scanned the photograph to make it open, she quirked an inky eyebrow. "I wonder," she said, pausing before continuing, "why you've turned this place into a little question mark filled maze? How long did this all take? Weeks? Months? Why does a Riddler come down here to hide?" she asked. Because all this effort, it wasn't for one little door. She wouldn't be surprised if there was a little Riddler-shaped lovenest in the middle of it all. Or, more likely, a little Riddler-shaped fallout shelter. Somewhere to hide once Gotham came calling.
She glanced at the little walkway, but she ignored it. Instead, she scaled the torn asunder dollhouse of a home, and she swung across the watery pit her own way. After all, the walkway meant she had to walk in front of him, or she had to walk behind him, and the kitty cat didn't trust him enough for either. By the time he crossed, she was wrapping the whip around her waist again, and she was standing in front of his problematic little door. She ran the flat of her gloved hand over it, and she tested the corners and the edges. It had no hinges, no way to break it by force but, like every good door that was intended to keep people out, it had some way of letting the right person in. "Does it worry you that Ra's might come down here and walk right into your little refuge?" she asked, already rifling through her utility belt.
“Cobblepot’s ancestors. Before the family was shamed into poverty, I assume.” Riddler felt the adrenaline seep out of his skin. He was an excitable little man, even if he didn’t think it showed very often, and even the smallest scuffle could get his heart racing. The feeling was always fleeting though and soon he was back to dismissively knowing everything about everyone. “Ever tangle with the Penguin, meow face? From what I remember you two don’t really get along. Don’t blame you. I was never a big fan of that blowhard myself.” As was evident by the defacing he did of their family painting. In fact, Riddler was known for defacing most of Gotham. There were very few landmarks he didn’t want to scribble his little question mark on.
He laughed at her next question, strolling easily across the walkways that clicked back under the floorboards after he crossed. “Oh please. I know you don’t have much experience with me, but I could turn this place into a giant maze of my own in a matter of weeks if I cared to. You profit from slinking around in the shadows, while I find more opportunities arise if people know I’m watching.” Riddler lifted his cane up to point at the various and seemingly random question marks scribbled on the walls. “Do you think I put all of those up on the walls myself? Or constructed these walkways? Hardly.”
The Riddler stopped in front of the door, knocking on it as if someone would answer and frowned when they didn’t. His voice lowered at the mention of Ra’s. “Everything in this town is temporary. Changing. I have ten different bunkers, five different control centers and a refuge so droll no one will find it. They could take away all of this from me. The toys, the traps, the technology and I could build it back up in less time than it took them to steal it.” He ran his fingers over the ornate and unmovable grooved and designs of the door. Riddler had spent plenty of time researching each swirl of brass or shine of precious jewel and found nothing that could bring him closer to opening this door. “Ra’s hasn’t contacted me yet, which means he doesn’t find me useful. He’ll see my graffiti and assume I’m just another rambling madman.”
"I helped saved him from a Talon once, even though he didn't deserve it," she said of Penguin. "The kitty cat was on his payroll on occasion back in her world. He had a fondness for Talon knives, and it came back to bite him in the ass." But her voice said she didn't like the man, and she didn't bother to hide it. Gwen had liked him and, as her fence and handler, she went where Gwen had sent her... most of the time. "It's good to know older me saw through him too." Personally, Penguin made her skin crawl, and not in the way Joe did. Joe was just crazy; Penguin was too power hungry for her liking.
As for his laugh, she didn't even grin. "I didn't say you couldn't turn it into a maze, Eddie. I was just wondering why you'd go to the trouble. But alright, say the kitty cat buys your little version of events. Is she supposed to think the timing is a coincidence?" Because there was no way the little man in green didn't know about Jaybird's dip into the goop. Stephanie thought he was the only person who understood her, which meant the kitten was likely telling him everything, and that would have even happened before the little blonde crawled between the sheets with him. "I think you're smart enough not to claim too much of what someone else did, Eddie. There's weakness in that kind of predictability, even if you do change the codes and the locks." She was willing to give him that compliment. After all, she spent her time to trying to crawl into places she didn't belong, and hadn't he done just that by crawling his way into the Batfamily without anyone even trying to stop him?
"Ra's is different," she said of al Ghul, even as she continued her inspection of the door. She ran her claws over the grooves and designs, and she proceeded to tap all the surfaces with tuner, looking for changes in density or sound, which the tuner could pick up, no matter how miniscule. She was down near the leftmost corner when her lips tipped up into a lush smile, all pleasure at the almost imperceptible variance in tone. "Aren't you clever?" All those swirls and jewels to catch the eye, and something different way down in the corner, where there was nothing at all. She pulled a borescope and drill out of her belt, and she set to work, getting ready to scope. "He's more unpredictable than he normally is. The kitty cat likes predictable men, as long as she isn't sleeping with them. If she's sleeping with them, predictability is boring," she explained. It wasn't an admission that Ra's had been in contact with her, and it wasn't an admission that she'd recently brought something back for him. But then, she was starting to get the picture that Eddie knew everything that everyone was doing, and he was just waiting to see who lied about what, so that he could figure out the riddle of why.
“Go through the trouble?” He whispered. She momentarily lost him somewhere between timing and coincidence. The Riddler had his web spun all over Gotham in little strands similar to Wonder City. This was like an artist’s self expression; a declaration of who he was. He had intended this particular underground world to be a nice trap for birds and bats that snooped too much, but now he just needed to- oh. Yes of course. Suddenly he wanted to open a door that likely had something green and nasty behind it. Suddenly, after Stephanie told him about using the Pit and he worried Ra’s might go after her the same way they went after him.
The kitty cat could see the gears ticking, the silent reasoning of her practical streetwise logic that was not how his mind worked in the slightest. Still, she was right about him in a way even he didn’t let himself see clearly. “No, of course not.” He said, snapping out of the long look of someone figuring out a complicated arithmetic problem. “When I used the Pit, Ra’s..” Riddler looked up at her and then back down to his cane with a hollow laugh. “Went after me. When he realizes that Stephanie helped bring Jason back, he’s going to try and teach her a lesson. So, why not point some obvious clues to me instead and serve as a nice distraction?” He smirked at his cleverness and moved aside so she could look at the door without his hands all over it. A gesture that showed a little respect, something the Riddler wasn’t known for.
He crossed his arms, leaning on the wall next to the door and dropped his chin down in thought. “I like unpredictable in most cases.” Eddie murmured. “Makes the game more interesting. The clown and crow, for example, are so easy to figure out it’s getting tiresome.” He guessed what the clown wanted with only a simple hint and the crow behaved like he always had without variation to the rules. “Ra’s is a theorem I already know the answer to, but I don’t know exactly how to work the proof out. He wants Gotham destroyed, the Dark Knight humiliated and the rest of us burned in his zealot fire. How he plans to arrive at the conclusion is difficult to say. If I had nothing to lose, I’d go play nice just to find out what he’s cooking up.” A quick, polite smile in her direction.
She did watch his little gears turn, but the kitty cat had never had the patience to figure someone out. She was a leap first, ask questions second kind of girl, which would always leave her at a disadvantage with Eddie here. Bruce might be considered a Master Detective, but he didn't keep her on her toes like the little question mark in green did. She didn't even try to wrap her tail around him like she did all the little birds, which was telling. She knew he'd tangled with Ivy's stems, and she knew he was corrupting a little bat, but she never even considered it. Selina had always wielded her sexuality as easily as her whip, and it was worth considering why she didn't think it a useful weapon just then. But it was worth thinking about some other time; not just then.
"You want in the door to protect the little blonde bat?" she asked incredulously, actually stopping her fondling of the door to ask the question. She'd drilled the tiny hole, and she had the borescope in, and she turned her face up to him, her face all feline curiosity. "The kitty cat is supposed to believe you're being heroic? Eddie, Ra's is never going to find out about Stephanie, because the baby bird would die before selling her out. Even Jaybird, with all his righteous anger, isn't going to chirp to Ra's." There was confusion in the bright green eyes behind the yellow. Before she'd talked to Dickie, she probably would have just believed him without question. But now she kept wondering if her judgement was sound. After all, it seemed like the older version of her fell into his traps time and again.
"Start pushing, touching, caressing," she purred about the swirls and gems on the door, even as she turned her attention back to the borescope, wanting to see what affected the change key hole. She was concentrating on that entirely, or so it seemed, until she spoke again a moment later. "This Ra's talks in riddles more often than you do," she confided, though she had no idea why she was doing it. Maybe history was destined to repeat itself, even with all the warnings in the world at the kitty cat's disposal. "He won't risk Crane. He has Crane safely tucked into a box this time. He won't risk Joe. He thinks Joe's insane - go figure. Ivy's unpredictable, and he likes to watch things burn, so he won't do it himself. He's fishing for birds. For Jaybird and Feathers." She raised a hand, a stop, and a gesture of her claws to indicate he should do whatever he'd just done before, press whatever he'd pressed. "He'd love for the Bat to do it for him, but I think he lost that opportunity." And then, she stood. "He sent me to Egypt, if that clues you in," she added, believing what Damian had told her, that it was just a way to get to him.
“That’s the thing about secrets, fuzzy.” Eddie leaned his cane against the wall and ran his fingers up and down the sides of the door, across the various jewels and under swirls of old brass. “The good ones, the really sexy secrets, always get out.” He didn’t trust the birds as far as he could throw them and not just because they had poor judgement and reasoning skills. No, he didn’t trust them because they were fools who treated Stephanie like an outsider. Another couple of months running around with him and they might even put a target on her back, no matter how much family meant to her. The important part was always having a little insurance in Gotham. If Eddie was right about the Pit in there, he could do anything from blow it up to lace it with surveillance and security turrets. All Ra’s had to do was give Eddie a reason and he could twist the knife. Or play hero. Wouldn’t be the first time.
He moved to push one of the gleaming emeralds and looked down at her. “Oh, really.” Surprise in the Riddler’s voice? Well, everyone got to hear it once. “Next thing you know he’s going to give you a nice sharp blade to cut wings with. I heard his ninja crash courses are worth the money.” Eddie’s eyes focused on the door and lit with at least a dozen different patterns that all indicated different things. He had tried them all before, but with the cat there it was worth giving them another once over. “Reminds me of a story I heard about a cannibal king in the Amazon. He sat on a pile of gold and everyone thought they could last just one night in his village so they could take a little piece of the shiny stuff.” He linked the emerald and an imprint of a lion together with his thumb and index finger. “But, the king was so hospitable and had everything each thief could ever want on a silver platter. Needless to say, the cannibal king never went hungry and didn’t lose a single gold coin.” A pause and then, “You want the bat family to demonize you. If somehow you’re linked to Ra’s and his zealot fire, they may not forgive you.” His voice lifted up into a whisper. “Now why, why would a kitty cat do that.”
"You don't know the little Batfamily as well as you think you do, if you believe they'd ever tell, Eddie," she told him. The kitty cat could be stubborn about things, and this was one of them. Oh, she knew Stephanie was unhappy, and that she felt excluded; that they didn't understand. She believed they didn't coddle the little blonde kitten, because these bats and birds, they didn't coddle anyone. Maybe back in another Gotham they were all tight knit, maybe with another bat to wrap his wings around them and keep them in the nest. But not with this Bat, and she was pretty sure it was as easy to feel lost for tiny little bat as it was for a kitty cat. For little birds too. Didn't they all keep flying away from home as fast as their little wings could carry them? But sell the kitten out to Ra's? That would involve someone talking to Ra's. Sure, Feathers was dancing around him, but Feathers wasn't that featherbrained, was he? Jaybird might cry to daddy about it, but that's as far as Jaybird's chirping ever went. And Damian? She expected better from Damian than from any of the others, and maybe that her own shortcoming, the amount of faith she had in a boy that was only still a boy.
"Cutting wings isn't what I do," she said, surprised at his surprise. "Let me guess, older, softer me never clawed around the al Ghuls?" she asked, not that she was expecting an affirmative answer. She was starting to realize that older, softer her got into even more trouble than young, survivalist her; caring made kitty cats careless. "As for his crash courses, he didn't impress me very much. Who said he has anything to teach?" Because in her interactions with Ra's, he had come across as being too mad to take seriously; she wasn't a prophecy and metaphor kind of girl.
Her attention returned to the work at hand, while he told the story of the cannibal king. Halfway through, she raised a hand to stop him, indicating he should stay right there, fingers precisely where they were. And then it was just a matter of tucking a modified stethoscope in one ear, and finding the remaining click. Which came from high, high in the door's corner. High enough that she'd had to jump up on the frame's relief and perch there, in a crouch, to reach it. A smooth, unmarred piece of the frame, and there was no way anyone could have opened this door alone. Click, and the jewels all depressed and the swirls all swirled, and the kitty cat looked down from her perch and waited. As for his question? "He had a job. I steal whatever people pay me to steal, Eddie. I steal for Penguin, and I open doors for you, and I go to Egypt for Ra's. I know your cat plays Robin Hood, but this cat doesn't."
“Mrrow.” He rumbled up to her with a smile, noting the swaying attitude that even the older kitty had in spades. Riddler might have had the time, patience and creativity to build intricate death traps, but admittedly the relationships between people were the kind of mysteries he just could not bother giving his attention to. This explained why it took him so long to figure out who Batman was. And, he likely got along with Stephanie so well because she didn’t play around with any of her intentions. The Cat might have preferred shacking up with unpredictable men, but Riddler couldn’t be with a woman who wasn’t honest about well- everything (though it was important to note the differences between what Riddler wanted from Stephanie and what the Cat wanted from the Bat). He didn’t want the blonde bat to be a mystery because he knew full well that it could loop into something treacherous. A hermit like him with the social skills of a stunted teenage boy on an anonymous message board could only poke at people he didn’t understand. Pull out little information until he got bored. Which happened more than he liked to admit.
Riddler held his fingers in place until the door spun gears and pieces open like a flat clamshell. He grabbed his cane and scanned the thing, taking pictures to put on one of his computers for data and analysis later. “Intriguing.” Eddie pressed his lips together, stepping through the door as he tried to understand the point of having it be a multiple person combination. If this was a Ra’s door, who did he trust enough to open it with him? Did his ninjas work in pairs back then? How old was his daughter? Riddler’s eyes lit up in questions as his cane flicked on a green tinted flashlight. The inside of the chamber was dark, though corners of it glowed a familiar liquid green that made the Riddler’s skin crawl. It had been a long time since he took a dip in the stuff, but he could still feel it claw at him through the air.
The flashlight at the end of Eddie’s cane was a good indicator of how fast his mind worked. It flashed across the floor, zig zagged against the walls and then up a set of stone stairway. With a click the light went off and his violet glasses glowed as he bounced up the steps like a little kid who just had to know what was at the end of a book. The smell of salt and ancient chemicals hit him hard as he reached the main chamber that was ablaze in the green glow of a Lazarus Pit. Despite the love Ra’s had for ancient artifacts, this pool was actually surrounded by what looked like Tesla towers and sparking electricity like some midnight black and white horror movie. Eddie slowed his pace, carefully stepping across the floor that glistened in glass tiles shaped in a sprawling art deco sun.
“Hello old friend.” Riddler said to the Pit. “What’s he got hooked up to you...” He poked his head closer to the outdated technology with the appreciation of a man who liked mechanical museums. “This is how he powered the city. But, the green stuff eventually made everyone wacko and this whole utopia had to be shut down. Cannibal king, Selina.” The green man’s face flashed with a certain joy that came with new information, new pieces to a puzzle he was putting together.
Selina rolled her eyes at him. "Eddie, we both know I'm not your kind of kitten," she purred, but she didn't sound hurt or offended, even underneath it all. She had enough confidence not to need approbation from the little man with the fetish for green. Unlike him, she had no deeper understanding of her own wants. Even back in her Gotham, all she'd known was that she wanted a bat, and that, that bat had wanted her. No explanations, no deep thoughts, no thinking it through until it became a boring little thing. Oh, she knew that the Bat couldn't stand the fact that he wanted her, that he thought wanting a corrupt thing like her changed his heroic nature somehow, that it whispered about something else, something sinister beneath his cowl. But she knew that instinctively and, instinctively, she'd made it easy for him, made it all about sex and nothing more. It didn't matter, in the end, because that Bat always came back to her. This one never did.
She wasn't as intrigued by Ra's reasoning as he was. Maybe Ra's was fast enough to get both triggers at once. Maybe it was a ninja trick, or maybe he just trusted his little League without question. It didn't matter to her. What mattered was beyond the door.
Even from where she crouched, she could smell the goop. Once, she'd had no idea what the Pit even was, and now she could sniff it out from across a room. It was just another example of how this Gotham was different. Reading those books, the ones about them, it was pointless now. They'd made every last one obsolete simply by existing. That was another truth the kitty cat knew, and it was another truth she didn't think about any more than she absolutely had to.
She dropped from her crouch, and she watched him as he approached the pool of green. She noticed the towers and and electricity, but she didn't think anything of it. After all, the only Pit she'd seen before this one belonged to the baby bird, and it had been created somewhere dark and dank. Maybe all the other ones were like this, hooked up to powerful things and hiding behind intricate locks. "In the nursery rhymes, they said something evil powered this place," she told him, even as she crouched at the edge of the pool, elbows on her knees and no reflection whatsoever as she looked down into thick green. "Most nursery rhymes in Gotham are true, Eddie." But he knew that too; she was just meowing to take the edge off at this point.
“It pays to be superstitious in this town.” Eddie walked over to her and knelt down, cane in hand like a wary traveler at the edge of his destination. “I bet you this stuff makes you crazier than a typical pit.” He said, glancing up at the electricity being snapped into it. “One glass full of and I’d be back to normal.” Of course, Eddie’s normal was something special, something reserved for the high security levels of Arkham and their doctors who had all but given up on healing anyone. Crazy was just another word for better in Gotham and this pit surely had what it took to kill all the snapped gears and messy wires that had changed him.
His dark eyes didn’t dazzle. His expression didn’t curl into a cruel smile. The Riddler could feel static in the back of his head, a steady beat of blood up his throat that made every breath heavy and rattled. And, if she looked over to see that this was really why he wanted the door open. He had to give himself the option to set the dial back to zero. He didn’t know how long the Pit would keep all his lines of code in the right places, but he could keep feeding on it until the chemicals killed whatever it was that he had turned into now. This was a test. He had to know what it felt like again and either reject the poison or cling to it. “Selina. Count to ten and then hit me as hard as you can.” His grip on the cane tightened and he dipped a pinkie finger into the green liquid and licked it off like frosting off of a cake.
The Riddler stumbled back to his feet, eyes alight with numbers and cryptology that only he could see. Oh, the wondrous things he could do with a city like this. Rig it to explode when Ra’s tried to use the pit? Lead little birds down here and drive them mad with the same green goop they used on each other? Trap Batman’s weakest loved ones in here and force him to take a dip to get them back? Turn this into his own murder maze where only the cleverest Gothamites could get away with their own lives as the prize? The possibilities were endless and they stacked on top of each other in the form a giant green kingdom with him sitting pretty at the top with his crown, television sets and question marks.
His laugh echoed in a frantic bounce around the chamber, his dark eyes alight with the sweet overload that the Pit could provide. He thought that he’d feel good, but the part of him that loved Stephanie and saved Batman was clawing at his insides in a fight against the Lazarus sample. Riddler dropped his cane with a loud CLANG and looked wide eyed at his hands as bright, hot tears streamed down his face. “Makeitstopmakeitstopstopsss-” he stuttered like a broken machine, shaking in the wake of his growing shadow on the ground.
The fact that his very first comment was one about how this Pit would likely make people crazier, that set the kitty cat's hackles standing on end. The mention about a glassful just made her turn her head, and she regarded him with eyes gone intensely green in the reflection of the goop. She didn't even know anyone could drink the stuff, and she was starting to get that feeling she always got when she misjudged a job. It was a familiar feeling, one that had landed her in the catsuit in the first place, and one that had caused her to always have a fence keeping her away from the biggest mistakes. "And here I thought you were normal. Want to clue me in?" she asked, but then she saw. In his eyes, she could see the reason for all this, and it was all she could do not to pop in the comm she'd gotten for Christmas, the one she had every intention of returning come morning, and calling for help. Dickie, she decided. She could call Dickie. He could slip away from BatChristmas without anyone batting an eyelash or, at least, he could manage it more easily than the younger birds and bat.
She started to caution him, to tell him to stop talking crazy, but his order that she hit him as hard as she could left her baffled. Why would a scrawny little question mark want her to do that? She managed to extend a clawed glove and begin to meow, and then he'd sucked the goop off his pinkie like it was a confection.
"Stupid, stupid cat," she muttered, standing and backing away from him as he stumbled to his feet. She couldn't tell what he was seeing, but she could tell it wasn't good, whatever it was. And it was a good thing she couldn't tell what he was thinking, the madness that was flickering behind his eyes just then, because she'd meow to the Batfamily within seconds, recent relocation to the darkside or not. But then his laughter was turning into something else, something different, and she wondered if she would have to explain to the little blonde kitten how her lover had died in Wonder City on Christmas, while she'd been feasting with her little family.
It was the cane falling to the ground that brought her back to the moment. She kicked it away, watching for a second as it rolled away from the Pit and toward the door. Those tears were streaming down his face by the time she looked back, and she was at a loss. The kitty cat had no idea how to make it stop. Despite a lifetime of pretending to be older and pretending to have more experience than she actually had, sometimes she came up short. And this was one of those times. In the end, she did the only thing she knew how to do. She gave him a sharp, roundhouse kick to the temple, one that connected sharply enough to fill the air with a sickening snap. It wasn't low enough to kill him, but she was counting on it taking him down. She wasn't even thinking about his request from seconds ago, that cryptic request that she hit him as hard as she could. It was, frankly, the only thing she could think to do.
She dropped beside him when he fell, and she rifled through her utility belt for a zip to bind him. "Now how am I supposed to explain this to the kitten, Eddie?" she asked, anger and worry in the purred question. Because once he was secure? The kitty cat was running. No way was she staying here for this fallout.
Like she hit the restart button, Eddie crashed onto the floor and his laughing turned a quiet kind of sob that sounded unnatural from a man who seemed so removed from society. His eyes rolled open with the dazed look, wide and right up at her as his legs slid over the glass tile and fingers pulsed at his sides. Getting smacked around was the only way he knew how to come to his senses. It was a crude, but efficient way to combat the temporary insanity of the Pit. And, Selina. Sweet meow face Selina was the only one he could bring down there to do it for him. “It’s-” He gasped at her, a sigh of pain escaping his throat as his eyes nearly rolled back into his skull. “It’s okay. I did it for her. It’s okay kitty cat.”
If he had been the same Riddler who constructed the Hush plot, the same Riddler who kidnapped cops and swung them over spike pits, the same Riddler who broke Stephanie’s nose, the Pit would have felt good. He would have thrown himself in the Pit just to drink up all that electrifying genius set at warp speed. But, something changed and here he was squirming on the ground trying not to have a panic attack in front of the kitty cat. He pushed away from her, struggling against her attempt to bind him. His shoes squeaked across the floor and he tried to get up, but slid back down into a crumpled mess. His hands shook in front of him, eyes barely open as he tried to balance out the pain and adrenaline. “I’m all right.” Eddie whispered, crooked glasses sliding off his face to break completely on the floor next to him.
She held onto the ties, not using them on him yet, and her expression was complete confusion as she crouched beside him. "You did it for her? Now, why should I believe that. It doesn't make any sense, Eddie," she said, trying to figure it out as she crouched there, all feline head tilt and the distinct feeling that she'd lost her footing somewhere along the line.
She raised her hands when he pushed away, the ties visible against her palm, the gesture a universal one of "peace," even from the kitty cat with the metal claws. She watched him try to get up, and she watched him crumple, but she didn't crawl closer. She knew a panic attack when she saw it, and she wasn't going to get within arm's reach. No way was she going to let herself get grabbed by the Riddler, even if he did look small and pathetic just now - well, more small and pathetic than normal. "You're not alright. You're a mess," she said blatantly, elbows back on her knees and hands down once more. But she had pocketed the ties, and she was hoping that wouldn't turn out to be a very bad decision on her part. "Do you want to tell me what you thought you were doing, or should we move onto who you want me to call?" she asked, because he could barely move, and even she could see that.
She stretched forward, and she picked up the broken glasses before brushing away the shattered glass with her gloved-hands, not wanting to end up with a bleeding Eddie on her hands, not on top of everything else. She held out the glassless frames then, worry suffusing her young features. "What does it do if you drink it?" she asked, curiosity getting the best of her in the end.
He found the edge of the room from all his backpedaling, leaning against it as he rubbed his face with his shaking fingers. Eddie breathed and then looked through his hands at the glasses frames she was holding and smiled a little. The wide-eyed fear that was in him before quieted to a whimper flame in the back of his gaze and he reached to pluck the broken frames from her. “It’s supposed to make me want more.” Eddie inhaled and exhaled deeply, shoulders shaking as he gave a fleeting glance over her shoulder at the pit. “I needed to know if I wanted to go back. To how things were.” He wasn’t making sense, shining light on just pieces of the puzzle without explaining what it was all for.
Eddie’s expression cleared, shaking off the panic attack and the chattering last bit of the Lazarus pit on his tongue. “It makes you insane. But, what if you’re already crazy?” Riddler ran his hand through his hair and pulled his tie loose. “Instead of turning me into a mindless, killing brute, it makes me a human computer. Capable of proces-processing anything from Batman’s identity to how many inches the Earth is away from the Moon. If you threw Crane in there he’d be ten times more sadistic than you can even imagine.” He slowly tilted his neck, making a pop pop crack noise in his joints. “With everything that happened this year, I wanted to give myself the chance to have my identity back. I needed to see if I could be seduced by the Pit, because if I- if I could that means I haven’t changed at all.”
Another smile, this one an echo of his cleverness. “I saw everything I needed to turn this city into my kingdom. All of it. And, I didn’t want it.” Eddie choked out a relieved laugh and wiped his eyes. “I don’t want any of it.”
Selina thought it all sounded crazy. It sounded crazy in a way that made even the kitty cat uncomfortable, and she'd spent most of her time in foster homes and whorehouses; it took a lot to make her uncomfortable. But she didn't interrupt. Even though he was talking crazy, saying disjointed things, she didn't interrupt. She let him finish, and then she stood and looked down at him.
She knew what she saw in the Bat. She might not admit it readily, not even to herself, but she knew. Standing there, she had no idea what the blonde kitten saw in this man. "What if you ended up wanting more, Eddie? What if that one lick off your fingertip was like letting the kitty cat loose in a jewelry store? What if you wanted nothing more than to be covered in the green goop, like the kitty cat would want to be covered in diamonds?" she asked. Because wasn't it obvious that he must have felt that he was lacking something if he wanted to risk it? No one risked losing what they wanted most, and sucking on that bit of green could have cost him Stephanie in a blink. She didn't add the rest, that all change wasn't necessarily good, because he knew that. Let him have his moment of euphoria, his dissatisfaction with whatever he'd seen that would make him king. It didn't make her feel better. No, if anything, the kitty cat felt worse. She preferred people whose obsessions she already knew, thanks. And if the Riddler had lost his love of riddles and power, then what was next? Because she would still bet her tails that Stephanie quickened him, that she unbored the bored man in green.
Love? Please. Love was for infants. Maybe she'd felt it before. Maybe she still felt it. But it didn't make her any stronger. No, it made her weaker. It gave her value as a pawn, and it made her forget her own survival instinct. The same could be said of Stephanie, of him. The kitty cat didn't think this was the end of the story and, for once, she very much wanted to be wrong about something.
"What happens now?" she asked.
The Riddler didn’t expect her to understand, not really. They took different risks, opened doors with their own style. But, more importantly, she never would fit in at Arkham. “What if I woke up one morning and decided I wanted to drop her in a death trap just because I could? This is the only way I can know for certain that won’t happen.” He crawled away from her and stumbled to his feet. “Meow face, you don’t know what it feels like to fight your own mind. To be a machine pumping out riddles and puzzles just to get the recognition. That’s why Crane will always get the jump on you. Why you and Ivy are never going to see eye to eye. Why the clown will never, ever stop.” He straightened his tie, put his broken frames in his coat jacket and smoothed his hand over the spot where he kept Stephanie’s ring. “I’m a different species than you. Than all of you. And, there’s only one person in this city who doesn’t make me feel that way.” Riddler bent to sweep up his cane and gave it a couple lazy twirls until he could make it spin in a perfect circle backwards and forwards. It became immediately obvious that Riddler was used to being physically abused. A blow to the head wasn’t nearly as bad as what he what Hush or Batman or his father could do.
“I’m leaving the Pit as is. We’re closing that door the way we found it and I’ll throw some hush money your way if you’re feeling cheated.” Eddie rolled his shoulders, closed his eyes and then strolled past the Lazarus Pit with a wave.
No, Selina couldn't ever imagine doing that. "There wouldn't be anything to gain," she insisted, trying to understand. Sometimes gain wasn't monetary, true. She had gotten just as much pleasure from the Bat showing up every single time she misstepped, as she had from her very best takes. But there was always a gain, in the kitty cat's mind. Sometimes it was emotional, sometimes physical, and sometimes monetary. But there was always something. There would be nothing to gain with dropping Stephanie in a death trap, and she wasn't sure that his new experience in the Pit meant he still wouldn't do that, assuming he'd had it in him to do it in the first place. She gave him a surprised look when he said the riddles and puzzles were for recognition. "And the one person who doesn't make you feel that way is Stephanie." It was a statement, and not a question. She hoped he was right, despite the fact that it was a big weight for such tiny blonde shoulders. But, in the end, she hoped he was right about all of it. That he'd changed, that the kitten made him a better person. She could understand that. The Bat had always seen things in her that she couldn't see in herself, and he'd always thought her a better person than she actually was. Her Bat, not this one; this one wasn't so sure. But then, it sounded like Eddie's Bat hadn't been either. Maybe they all ended up the same down the line. As for physical abuse and a tolerance to it, she was pretty sure that came hand-in-hand with living in Gotham.
But the mention of hush money, that got her thinking. She was going to have a hard time playing on her new side of the fence if she went running to the bats and birds with every little thing. The baby bird would find this Pit on his little hunt with Jaybird. And maybe she'd meow in his ear if he didn't find it on his own. She very much hoped that she didn't need to meow. Selling Eddie out seemed like a very bad beginning. "Get me a pretty stone, and your secret's safe with me," she promised. And if she went back on her word? Well, everyone knew the kitty cat was terrible at keeping promises.
Like the Riddler had told her before: good secrets always got out. And, this Pit was a good secret. If she went meowing to the birds and the birds told Stephanie, well it’d make him look like a saint who walked through hellfire. In fact, he intended to tell the little blonde bat about all of this. He had to. Secrets weren’t a thing worth keeping from her. Surprises were kind of a different story. But, women liked their men unpredictable right, kitty cat? “Deal.” Eddie said, running the cane along his shoulder blades, mind caught up in something else that wasn’t the Pit or the cat.
He shut the door behind them, watching the little jewels and curves click back in place and Riddler made a sound like eh, good enough. “Now, if you don’t mind. I have some head trauma to treat. Nice kick by the way. Good gravy.” He beamed at her, all smarmy charm that really wasn’t all that charming to begin with.