eddie likes to (riddlethem) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-18 02:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | emma woodhouse, plot: switch, riddler |
Who: Eddie Nigma and Emma Woodhouse
When: Early Monday morning
Where: Passages
What: Eddie feels sorry for a complete stranger and doesn't know what to do. Meanwhile Emma shows grace even after a freak out.
Warnings: None!
Eddie was doing his very best to look like a man who didn’t have his ego deflated. The second he was kicked out of the Gotham door and he couldn’t remember the batting average of every player on the Gotham Knights since 1940, he knew something was wrong. And, it took a little wandering around the empty, dusted hotel before he really understood the extent to which his mind had regressed. It was like losing a novel in an unsaved word document, a freak fire in a family home, or having to suddenly leave with only a handful of things that were really important. So, what did Eddie leave his vanishing home with? He was still smart, he still loved Stephanie and he still had those fingerprints of being oh so eccentric. Here in Vegas he knew being a little off wasn’t enough to raise eyebrows and he wasn’t sure if that bothered him yet. For now he just had to settle. Settle and get used to the feeling of his mind being so comfortable and slow.
Dressed in a black suit with a blue tie that he would never have bought on his own, he winded his way back towards the exit. He didn’t plan on staying at Breeze’s tiny apartment, but he knew there wasn’t much choice until he got access to all the money Sadie had set aside for him back when he forced her to card shark. Yes, that would make him feel better. An access of cash to throw at anything shiny, expensive and distracting that Vegas had to offer. And, if the money ran out? If he was stuck here forever? Well, he’d worry about that later. Suddenly, he wasn’t really in the mood to start planning without obvious patterns. Stopping by a dirty mirror to fix his messy mop of black, curly hair that made him look like a crooner or a mobster from a different era entirely, he caught the figure of a girl small and shaking in the reflection. He watched his expression change to something surprisingly sympathetic and balked at it for a second before clearing his throat. The Riddler from Gotham walked, no strolled past plenty of shaking, scared and alone women without feeling even the smallest twinge in his ribcage for them.
This was different. This was bad. He spun around and carefully approached the girl, voice soft. Was he supposed to act non-threateningly? Did that help? Or did she want him to be some kind of expert or authority on whatever just happened? God he had no idea. In Gotham, he could never approach a problem like this so directly. So, he did it his way. “If they expected us to live here, the least they could do was clean all the spiders out of the pillowcases.” Eddie tried, already looking like he had just lost the make a girl feel better Olympics.
Emma Woodhouse was not a woman who shied from the new. A lending library came to town and half the women were all a-stir, talk of new ideas and the unseemliness of borrowed volumes and she had sailed forth in her Tuesday-best hat and smiled gratitude as she took her copy of Donne with bare fingers and not a word was said after that. Miss Taylor’s loss was a solemn one and felt deeply but there was something to be said for the arrangement, for the cleverness of how it fitted so neatly to the peoples involved and Hartfield might be the emptier but there had been the assumption of duties new and therefore pleasing. The realization that her mind was no longer solely hers had been a shock but one that was pleasanter as time passed. The Door - it loomed large in Mr Reed’s mind and thus it loomed greatly in Emma’s although she had no concept of where the Door might be - was an entertainment, a view of the world even if it was one through rain-dimmed glass and could be neither touched nor truly enjoyed other than an observer. Nor did Mr Reed permit her the full liberties of enjoyment; it was in truth, a touch outrageous but she enjoyed it the way she enjoyed a Gothic novel; guiltily but with no small amount of thrilling to the strangeness.
This was neither thrilling nor enjoyable. She had been in the parlor, an urge to find a book since her last had almost been finished with and the next she was in a filthy, dark hall where the light fluttered like a dying candle, sputtering artifice and no healthy daylight to see in sight. She had walked - taken a stride forward and her hands outstretched and been confronted by the strange lightness of movement, the gravitational drag of her own skirts (familiar since she had been six and ten and old enough to pile up her hair and wear long skirts) gone quite completely. She was wearing what was not enough to be the stuff of a good shift, a soft, slippery thing that did not fully cover her arms nor her legs, and she wore no stockings at all which was shocking in itself. Her hair was a soft, warm weight along her back rather than pinned up the way it ought be, and there had been quite five minutes of looking about for where her clothes had gone and the high color of humiliation burned on Emma’s cheekbones.
She had wandered through dirt and dust-streaked corridors until she had found the stair - what there was of it, and daylight limned over the doorway, achingly bright like high summer. She had stood for a minute in a doorway until her vision had rung itself clear of the blue-green spots of staring too closely at the sun and gazed upon a world that caught the breath at the back of her throat, a strangled scream climbing until her gasp was a ragged, high sort of sound that rang dizzyingly in her ears and her hands clutched for purchase. It was like having an attack of the vapors - humiliating, for a woman who prided herself on the new, on the innovations of the age - but the world beyond, carriages moving along the road with no horse to speak of and the sun stark above so much gray, the sky too bright to be England in February. Emma screamed, a hard little panicked sound and she backed into the filthy place and she sat, wrapping her arms around her knees and closing her eyes to so much bared skin on display and she held her miserable self in one spot. Surely, the world would rectify itself if she sat just long enough to permit it.
This then, the creature approached, the abjectness of dejection written across a delicate face that tilted up at Eddie’s approach. She was young, with clear blue eyes and some evidence of having been weeping, and a mass of soft blond hair tumbled around her face and quite down to her elbows. “Are there spiders?” her voice was clear, the rounded syllables of another continent, and there was no fear or apprehension, just the doleful assumption of yet another wrong thing lined up in a list. “I didn’t look.”
Eddie was a sucker for blond hair and blue eyes, his own expression faltering and voice nearly stuttering out what he thought would be comforting. Instead, his dark eyes just went wide for a moment as he considered running. The Riddler wasn’t afraid of being cowardly and neither was the un-question marked man, but he couldn’t just leave her. Not tear-stained and curled up in a corner like some woodland creature that wandered inside. This was the worst thing. He gave a glance over his shoulder, thinking about running off to find someone else anyone else to take care of this girl for him, but he had already made the approach. He had to stick this landing. “The biggest, nastiest spiders I’ve ever seen.” He said dramatically, voice thick with teasing as he lifted his hands up and made little spider legs with his delicate looking fingers. “And, they’re crafty. One of them invited me in for a nice chat and the next thing I know he’s trying to marry me off to his sister.” Eddie kept his distance, hands going into his pockets as he found a wall to lean on. Life without his cane was going to be difficult. He was so used to having something to prop him up. To point things at. To swing when he was thinking. Though, he suspected that his ability to handle the cane now would be sloppy and probably cause some self-inflicted injuries.
“I told him that I only marry things with up to six legs and no less than one.” He said with complete certainty, giving a disgusted expression up and away to where the spiders must have nested. Eddie tried to make some kind of offhanded comment on the anatomy of a spider, but he remembered quite suddenly that he didn’t even know what their phylum was called. All he could do was take solace in the fact that he knew the ranking order a scientific classification. That was something. He snapped his attention back to her, offering a trying smile and then asked, “Where are you from?”
Emma’s expression conveyed how very little she thought of spiders; her shudder was small and it was elegant but the man was ridiculous and she wasn’t certain whether he was a lunatic or simply a gentleman with a very poor line in conversation. Her cheeks were sticky-dried with her own tears and she had not a handkerchief about her, and there was dirt on the palm of her hand where she’d grasped the bannister-rail too tightly. No doubt she did not appear to be a well-mannered young lady at all and whilst she had no belief at all in the need for the tightly-laced refinement that those overly concerned with social positioning strove for, it was quite something else to appear half a dozen years younger than her own twenty.
“Hartfield,” she said, and some resolution crept back into her voice, a touch of pride at belonging to such a place. She offered him a smile as he had done, weak and wobbly though it was, and a little damp at its edges, and she held out her hand, her right, to shake - a neat little white hand with beautifully polished nails. “In Surrey, do you know the county well?” He did not speak as she did, a lilt to his words that was neither Ireland nor of the Scots, but it was clear and it was not ill-bred. His suit was not a manner of dress she recognized but neither, Emma supposed, did she resemble anyone she would have recognized at the present minute.
Eddie surmised two things: one that his jokes weren’t funny and there was a very good chance they had never been that funny in the first place, and two that she was from some time else. She dressed like any other girl her age, but the way she looked at him like he had crash landed from another planet suggested why she was here crying her eyes out. He tried to run through a filing cabinet in his mind that was marked boring old novels, but that too had been recently burned to a crisp. “I used to be familiar at least, I think.” He told her distantly, oddly and like everything unsaid was on the tip of his tongue. And, it was a little too late for him to realize that she had been holding her hand out for a shake. So, he scrambled for it, with a soft oh under his breath like he forgot his keys in the door and offered her a delicate little handshake of an entertainer.
His expression tensed and then he frowned childishly, exhaling as if he were an exasperated actor who forgot all his lines suddenly. “This is all overwhelming for me, too.” He admitted, turning a little like he really was going to run for it this time, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t. “We’re from different places. Times. Fictional oh-” Eddie stopped mid sentence, catching the dried glisten of tears on her cheeks and snapped his finger like at least this was one puzzle he could solve. He pulled a blue silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, made a face at the color and then handed it to her. “Keep it.” The last thing he needed was more god awful blue in his life. Eddie even considered pulling his tie off, but he didn’t want to alarm her any more than he already did. “Like I was saying. Different worlds. I’m from a book on a shelf that doesn’t have anything to do with yours.”
Emma did not startle at being told she was fictional, nor was it news. Mr Reed’s communication - his perception, that is to say, as he was very much not aware of her own observations, the liberty taken being very great - was such that she knew at least that he thought her a character from a book. She was very certain of her own reality, enough to disregard anyone’s assertion that they were realer than she, and she was gracious in her little nod to say she understood he was not from her time nor any place she might understand. That much she had already ascertained. She accepted the handkerchief with no small amount of gratitude and she delicately made use of it, each movement a pretty efficiency of economy.
Decidedly less tear-stained, she drew herself up a little and it was a little regal the way she took back her hand and she folded the handkerchief into neat squares, and then held it a little helplessly once she realized the reticule had gone along with her own dress and that there was not a pocket to be had in the soft, yellow thing she was wearing. “This isn’t at all like my time,” Emma was matter-of-fact about that, “Have you looked out there? It’s terrifying!” Her eyes were very wide and very blue and her indignation was very clear.
He inhaled, his tiny chest raising in a jagged motion like he was fighting back a small panic attack of his very own. A nervous magician who ruined his first three tricks and was losing his audience fast. It was so easy to get people to listen to him as The Riddler with his bright green suits and reputation that was dangerously mischievous. But, he thought that the way she carried herself after what was likely some old fashioned break down meant she was a lot tougher than what he originally thought. He resisted the instinct to treat her like a child, though honestly that was how he treated most people in Gotham. Still, her exclamation at how terrifying it was out there made him laugh loud and brightly. “I’m a bad judge of what’s terrible. Where I’m from grown men dress as bats and terrorize innocent people.” Well, that wasn’t quite how it went, but lying a little made Eddie feel like himself.
“Tell me what’s so bad about out there and I’ll convince you otherwise.” Eddie told her with certainty, his wave of nervous, dorky energy suddenly depleting in favor of being some kind of modern day expert. All Eddie needed in life was to know more than someone else. At least that compulsion never went away.
Emma blinked non-comprehension, “Was the poor man taken to Bedlam?” she inquired, for if he was going about dressed as a bat and terrorizing anyone (a sad reflection upon the ability of those to withstand a little costume) then quite clearly he ought to have been committed. She held her head high, and she regained a little of her own composure and she watched the way he assembled himself, gaining some of the stature she would expect of a gentleman. There was a mode of carrying oneself that he had lacked before and he had now, and Emma responded to it as any young woman in doubt might, with the relief this small piece of reassurance imbued her with.
“There are carriages quite without horses running impossibly fast, and the way people are walking about scarcely covered,” Emma’s tone conveyed exactly what she thought of that. Her own garments, such as they were, left her mercifully covered in the majority - those who walked beneath the bright sunshine beyond the lip of the hotel were not overly concerned with modesty. “And I have no idea at all where I am to go next, but this is not at all the sort of place one might stay in for any deal of time.”
Eddie nodded as if he had expected those very things to be her concern and looked out towards the entrance. “Humans naturally try to invent and improve. It makes sense that over time, a carriage wouldn’t need to be pulled by some poor beast and run much faster than it did before. Wouldn’t you agree? They’re actually very beautiful. I have one back home in green that drives so smoothly you don’t even know you’re moving.” Eddie gave a small sigh, missing his first true love: the Riddlermobile. “As long as you stay out of the roads and watch for traffic, they won’t hurt you. If they could, people would stop using them all together.” His shoulders went straight, expression turning thoughtful and calm. So much calmer than it had been before or even in Gotham.
“As for the lack of modesty, I agree it’s a little startling at first.” He grew up in the thirties after all, where women wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything that was fashionable now. But, the culture shock wasn’t anything compared to hers. “But, the women here are fiercely independent so they wear what they please.” There was some fondness with that. “And, it’s too hot in the desert for layers anyway.” Eddie leaned his head towards the door, a nonverbal way to ask her if she wanted to try and venture at least close enough to look outside. He liked describing this modern world as some strange culture with funny little rules and potential beauty that she hadn’t seen before. It made him feel like he was telling a story to make a point or constructing a Riddler trophy out of scrap metal and blinking lights.
“The person in your head, do they have a place to live? I’m sure they won’t mind if you take up residence.” He assured her, brow knitting a little as he was never sure of the dynamics between alters. “If not, there’s plenty of livable hotels in this town you can stay in temporarily.”
There was a delicacy with which Emma offered her hand - not the social offering and cordial overture of a handshake but the feminine expectation that it would be taken and placed on an arm as a gentleman guides a lady through unexpected or particularly trying waters. It was a stiff little gesture, one that gave away both that she had breeding and that she had decided to invest him with the qualities of a gentleman, even a decidedly odd one at that. She came to her feet with a dusting of her skirt and a dismal sort of look as she encountered the grime that had smeared there - she was hardly a fashion-plate but Emma did pride herself on looking smart, even if her clothes weren’t precisely ton. The skirt had no petticoat at all to it, and she smoothed it and her hair down until she looked as she was, a very young girl of twenty, all cream and pink cheeks and bright blue eyes that betrayed a shrewd interest in Eddie’s words.
“I’m afraid we haven’t been introduced,” and her manners were very crisp and implied a polite lacking that could be overcome with both parties agreeing to ignore the loss, “My name is Miss Emma Woodhouse. And I don’t know at all where Mr Reed stays, only that the hangings and the drapes are in sad need of repair and were never fashionable at all. He certainly does not keep a house of his own.” He had left her with nothing, of that she was sure; there had been a wallet, a heavy leather thing that had been outside the door as she had come through, but the notes in it were not issued from a bank Emma had ever heard of, and they were green, like a child’s drawing paper. “I don’t know where I am to go.” Her lip wobbled a very little, but she looked toward the door and the chink of light that fell across the gentleman’s shoulder and she held herself very straight as though good breeding did not permit a lady to fall to pieces twice in one day.
Eddie might have been trying to piece together what he knew and didn’t know, but that small little gesture of her hand was instantly recognizable and appreciated. It brought him back momentarily to a time when women wore fur coats and waited to be invited out onto a smudged mirrored dance floor by a man who could wear a suit well and maybe had his picture taken in the papers as Gotham’s newest bankrobber. So, the look that crossed his face might have been nostalgic if she was old enough to recognize that in other people. “Mister Edward Nigma.” He held his arm up for her to take and slowly walked her over to the door. “Pleasure to meet you, Emma.” Eddie told her with a certain amount of formality that he didn’t start their conversation with, but flowed naturally once he committed to it. He was, at the end of the day, a performer. All Gotham’s Rogues Gallery were to a certain extent and without his riddles, he simply wanted positive attention. He wanted to fix something when half of his usual tools were missing.
“This has happened before, you know.” Eddie told her, moving a little so she could peek outside of the door windows. “So, I had my old alter save money for me. A lot of it. Just in case I was kicked over here without regular means of earning money.” He gave her a look and then slowly opened the door so they could step out into the early morning light. The Vegas air was dry, cold and a little bitter. Nothing like the toxic snow that draped over Gotham. “I’ll make sure you get settled in somewhere comfortable. And, I know enough about this town that I can give you a tour.”
With the appearance of grace and confidence came a sort of maturity that never fully blossomed in Gotham. He was always older than everyone save Ivy and Death, but too wacky and insane to ever completely act like an eighty year old man trapped inside of a thirty something. But, was more alarming to him, what would haunt him later when he had the chance to be alone and introspective, was that he actually cared what happened to this girl. This wasn’t some ploy to show how sensitive he was to Stephanie or the bat family. This wasn’t a deal he made with a mob boss to get in his good graces. As the Riddler, he didn’t know Emma long enough to give a damn what happened to her. But, as Eddie, just the fact that he was a hapless, lost woman in a strange world was enough for him to care. To actually care.
The hand that slipped into the crook of his elbow was perfectly proper. It was small and it was warm and Emma put her slight weight against his in the manner that had a woman lengthen her stride just enough to keep pace with a man, that self-regulation that had its own small comfort in not walking alone. “I am very grateful to have met you, Mr Nigma,” she said politely, and her smile when it came was the vivid one of a woman well-used to smiling. She waited for the door to be opened for her, and she bobbed a slight curtsey of thanks, moderate even in this.
There was reassurance in someone, however strange, being ready enough to give guidance and to lead the way. It was not remotely proper for a young lady to go about with solely a gentleman for escort but Emma had cared very little for proper, too far into the country to need such formal manners. Nor was it proper for he to use her Christian name but she found she rather liked it, used to hearing it only from her father and Mr Knightley, who was permitted the freedom of familiarity. “I thank you, Mr Nigma for I feel I would be entirely lost without your help,” and Emma dimpled at him, all warm blue gratitude and soft blond belief in his good graces and generosity.
He smiled back at her, all bright charm of someone who liked being useful and important. Eddie saw the clear irony in her gratitude as he was the sort of man who used to enjoy watching other people get so turned around they couldn’t function, but even back in Gotham that part of him had fallen apart some time ago. And, here was a challenge . Fending for himself was easy enough, but taking care of her was going to be something else entirely. Teaching her about cars, modern fashion, movies, gambling and whatever else seemed to perplex her was a task he needed to feel like himself. This way he wouldn’t get lost in every drop of scotch Vegas had to offer or spend every day howling at Stephanie’s window for attention and love.
While his mind would never be as fast as it was back in Gotham, he could feel it start to shake alive. The cogs moved and gears ticked as he tried to put a list together of what they both needed to survive out here in Vegas. She was making him plan and for once that seemed like a healthy thing. “Happy to help.” He said politely, and then started explaining how a horseless carriage could run without something pulling it along the road.