eddie likes to (riddlethem) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-25 15:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: dc comics, riddler, stephanie brown |
Who: Eddie and Steph
Where: A bar in Gotham
When: Right after Muerte "died" and before she came back
What: Getting drunk and talkin
Warnings: drunk bbs
Gotham was moving again. People were making appointments, bars were boisterous, food trucks sat on the side of streets filling the air with grease and smoke. Eddie was starting to like this part of the city that slowly regenerated itself after a big fall. Gotham was a tough kid. When it scraped its knee it didn’t cry or make some big fuss. Gotham got back up, washed the blood off and got back into the game. Eddie was far from macho or tough, but he liked to think he fit this description, too. He could get thrown off a building, have all his bones broken, his plans ruined, his loot taken and he’d bounce right back. Failure and loss were supposed to be character builders in this city, they were supposed to teach them things and Eddie thought he knew that better than anyone else.
Eddie wasn’t bouncing back this time. He couldn’t see how finding Muerte dead made him stronger. He didn’t see how this could make him want to be a better person. He didn’t see what he could learn. Eddie knew Gotham pushed you if it saw a weakness, so he showered and put on a good suit that Stephanie liked to touch and tried to fill his brain with distracting riddles. He tried to hide it. But, Stephanie could tell the second she opened the door and saw his tie a little askew and big, brown eyes narrowed with a desperate need to be distracted. He was too familiar with her expressions and he tried to smile it away, charm and cheese to tell her that he was fine. He was going to pull himself together. A night on the town with Gotham air in his lungs would change all of this too human part of him.
And, for the most part, it worked. They went to karaoke, drank a little more than usual and wrapped themselves up in catchy pop songs and low, twinkling bar lights. After the an older woman with tattoos that had grown green and yellow over time and cigarettes stood up to sing “Black Velvet”, he started to feel like himself. Or as close to himself as he could get. He smiled, he whistled with two fingers in his mouth and he sang along. Eddie didn’t want the buzz to fade, so when they left the karaoke bar to go home or move onto somewhere else, he wrapped his arm around Stephanie’s waist and pulled her close to him. “How late is your curfew tonight?” He asked, eyes fluttering a little with intoxication and voice seemingly unsure if it wanted to be playful or suggestive which made the whole ensemble impossible to take seriously. “I say we hit another baaar-” Eddie’s voice trailed as he tried to pick one, unaware that Stephanie had navigated him towards a string of places that were a little more low-key and intimate as opposed to the rumpus karaoke they were just in.
What caught his eye (or what he was steered towards) happened to be an outdoor, casually sort of place called Grotto. The front was a typical bar, old and American, while the back was paved with cobblestone with chairs, tables, booths, firepits and dotting Christmas lights. The stage had a band playing and patrons dancing next to it in sparse pairs lost in their own various galaxies. Eddie thought it was perfect. The flickering light from the fire pit reminded him of Hawaii and so much of himself wanted to be there again right now even if he knew that wasn’t where he belonged.
He pulled her up to a loveseat near an all but empty fire pit and when he sat down the riddled man looked so much more than his small frame. In Hawaii he looked like a software engineer vacationing with his girlfriend. Here in Gotham, there was something about the city that made it obvious he was the green suited legend that had started leaving riddles for Batman all those decades ago.
The news of Muerte’s death hit Stephanie differently than she thought it would, or rather, what she wanted it to. She was still incredibly angry at the concept come to life, and she was pretty sure she would never forgive her for what happened in Wayne Manor during Bane and co’s reign over Gotham. All the subsequent issues and drama arose from those selfish choices tore through Stephanie and Eddie and could have destroyed them if they weren’t strong enough. (And, maybe Stephanie should take some of the blame, too, but it was easier to be angry with something else than with herself some days.) Muerte, for all her support of Eddie and his relationship with Stephanie too, had nearly burnt that precious thing to the ground. Even after everything with her father and their past, she had almost been the straw to break the camel’s back.
But, that didn’t mean Steph wanted something like this to happen. She didn’t want something like this at all. Maybe for Muerte to disappear from their lives, but dead? No, not at all. It hurt more than she cared to admit, the loss of someone so important to Eddie. At least her concern for him overshadowed anything else. She knew he could hear it in her voice over the comm call, and he could see it the second she strolled into his apartment to take him out. She knew he could read her like a book, and there was no point in trying to hide that away. And while she didn’t think that distractions and burying things away would help him (and there was some hypocrisy for you), she would indulge him for this night. Truthfully, she might need a moment to pretend everything was okay, too.
So, the night carried on, and the alcohol buzzed in her brain and electrified her skin, and she felt relieved when she finally saw Eddie relax a little. It would be okay, at least, if she could make him realize that there was still a Gotham without Muerte. A little cruel, maybe, but that was how Gothamites operated. Heartbreak ran rampant, but their city would always be there, would always be reborn and rejuvenate. Like it was now. The streets were pulsing with people ready to forget what happened over the past month and move on. And while Hawaii was the first step for Steph and Eddie, this was another notch in the belt. As she dragged him off to her favorite spot she stumbled upon one night with her college friends (if they could be called friends at all), she thought that maybe things would be okay again. They had to be right? Especially between the two of them. She let him find a spot he liked, that little loveseat in the backyard, and she curled up next to him, taking his hand in both of hers.
“I love this place,” she said, stretching to kiss that spot at the edge of his jaw before sitting back and squeezing his fingers. Hawaii suddenly felt like years away with Muerte’s death hovering over them and reality crashing back in. But, here was another snatch of peace and quiet they could revel in for a little while. “It doesn’t feel like Gotham at all.”
Eddie turned to look at her, happily caught in her two-handed hold on his fingers and sat back, mentally trying to guess how drunk he was and knowing he was too much of a lightweight to keep this up. In Vegas it was mostly for show and most of the time he pretended to be drunk since everyone else seemed to be in a worse state than he was. Sometimes between looking after Muerte and Emma, he could feel parts of his mind crawl back and click in place and he quietly savored those moments while playing the fool to everyone else. Stephanie caught on a lot quicker than he liked, but that tended to be the theme of their relationship. Knowing without the other person even meaning to show their cards. Then? It annoyed him just a little. Now? He loved it.
“It doesn’t feel like it on the surface.” Eddie agreed, slipping his fingers loose from hers and tugging the fabric of her dress closer to him. “But, if you look carefully. Over there are two ex-clown goons who owe me money. Idiots. They are trying to lay low because the clown outfit didn’t suit them.” He pointed to a pair of young, almost skater looking guys nursing beers and giving hawkish looks at girls. “There’s one of the last people to see our old mayor alive. An intern who made the mistake of helping out at a political dinner event.” He swept his hand over to point a girl around Stephanie’s age with dark, uneasy eyes. “Two of the waitresses here used to be runners for the Russians. The bartender used to give me information down at the Dusty Ram. That married couple dancing go to my church where they sell illegal firearms to disgruntled citizens.” He lifted his finger up, giving a drunken, “Aaaaaaannnnnnnnddd I’m the Riddler.” Eddie grinned brightly like he just solved the world’s hardest puzzle and leaned his head against the loveseat cushion. “That’s it. Those are the only Gotham things here.” His raised finger moved to bop her on the nose. “Hey, do you think they’d throw us out if I put my head in your lap? Just to rest it. Completely PG.”
Stephanie moved easily with the tug against her sundress, bare thighs slipping across the loveseat to graze against his suit-clad ones. She felt the booze settle in her stomach, in her limbs, in her brain. The smile across her lips looked partially sloppy, mostly stupidly in love with the question marked man melting into the cushions next to her. If he was a lightweight, she was probably a lighter-weight. Definitely a lighter-weight. She wasn’t stupidfaced drunk like Christmas Night, but she was fairly close. Close enough that the tips of her fingers and her toes tingled. It was a mixture of the heat, and wanting to get lost in the alcohol, and being close to him that made her feel more intoxicated than usual. Her fingers skated up and down his thigh, catching on fabric and subconsciously tugging against it as if wanting to just rid them both of the burden.
“Ruining it,” she teased warmly as he pointed out the nefarious backgrounds of so many of their fellow bar patrons. “You’re ruining it. Shusssh.” She tried to press a finger to his lips but missed miserably, landing on his chin before dropping away to tug at the collar of his shirt briefly. So, she followed his gaze anyway, regarding each person with a tilt of her head and curious blue eyes clouded by fruity cocktails. And it astounded her, in that moment, how many masks all the citizens of Gotham had. Not just she and the bats and birds with their dark cowls and quips to hide their identity or the colorful rogues who could slip through the city unnoticed if they wanted, but everyone. It made sense really that in a city that was constantly attacked people doubled up roles. A way to protect yourself or the ones you loved. Her nose wrinkled as he bopped it, face scrunched up in an adorably drunk sort of way, and she stretched herself away from him for a second. “There goes another Gotham oasis,” she needled him, smiling with that messy curve up the side of her face and her short hair falling just so into her eyes, and she waved her hand dismissively at the rest of the area at large. “They’ve seen PG-13 things,” she said in a whisper that meant to imply the entire thing was scandalous, but also failing miserably. Still, she smirked, drunk enough to be effortlessly suggestive in public, but still aware there were more appropriate things to do. “Just keep facing up and we’ll be almost G-rated.” After pressing another kiss to his cheek, her hand tugged at his collar to encourage him to lay down.
Eddie crawled after her when she stretched away, aiming for a kiss and landing it somewhere between her mouth and jaw. “There’s no such thing.” He murmured, knowing that there wasn’t a place in Gotham that was untouched by, well, Gotham. Everyone had a mask, everyone had to find a way to survive, to protect people they cared about or they’d be another casualty in collateral damage. “Do you want to move to Metropolis with me? I’m Justice League now, I can live wherever I want.” He teased, dropping his head in her lap on her silent command and nipped at her knees. “You could live in those clean Metropolis dorms. I could get some nice penthouse on the shiny side of town. We could make friends that like to do boring stuff like brunch and antique sh- well no antique shopping is fun, but you know what I mean.” He rambled, turning to look up at her, fingers grasping her hand and leading it to thread through his curly, black hair.
He always teased her about living somewhere else even though the both knew it couldn’t be done. And, at first he smiled along with his own familiar refrain. At first. Then, it occurred to him that if they were in Metropolis, Muerte wouldn’t be dead. There wouldn’t be a Lazarus Pit. No toxin to drive her and the rest of the city crazy. Maybe the Riddler had outgrown the city he had strung himself up in? “Maybe we should go.” He said, voice a little darker and serious. “Maybe we should move?” This time it was a question. Childlike, wide eyed and a little sad through the lingering smile.
A giggle burst out as he misfired his kiss, and she scrunched her face up again, blue eyes bright and drunk and nose wrinkling again. “Let me lie to myself,” she muttered, not really wanting ot lie to herself at all on most days. She was a Gotham girl through-and-through, and nothing would change that. She wouldn’t be Stephanie Brown -- daughter of Cluemaster, girlfriend to the Riddler, and Batgirl/Robin/Spoiler -- if she was born in some sleepy suburbia or Metropolis. Even Star City. There was no way a girl like Steph could come from anywhere else but Gotham City. And so, she rolled her eyes toward him like she always did. That affectionate tilt up to the sky and the sigh-scoff that actually spoke of her unbridled affection towards him. (Some men had girlfriends who showered them with compliments and desperate declarations of love and adoration; Eddie got a girlfriend who rolled her eyes and nipped at his jawline.) “Oh yeah, Metropolis.” She started to thread her fingers through his hair at her encouragement, looking out at the other couples swaying near the stage or draping themselves over the bar. “We can be one of those normal couples who go to pottery classes and end up at dog parks on the weekends to hang out with other normal couples. You can try to convince everyone you’re just a simple software engineer. I can work at some Starbucks equivalent for spending money.”
She tugged a little at his hair, going along completely with the joke because, well, this was a joke, right? But she glanced down just in time to see his dark brown eyes go serious, and she frowned down at him. Red cheeks flaming with eyebrows furrowed. “You wanna move to Metropolis?” she asked, voice not masking her incredulous confusion at all. She looked amused mostly, like this was still some sort of teasing. “Metropolis with Supers and Luthor and no dark corners to hide in?” She couldn’t imagine either of them in that shining city of near perfection (at least compared to Gotham), and the way she pursed her lips to hide a smile told him that. She tugged his thick black hair while her other hand hooked at the knot of his tie. “You don’t have to play g-man, Eddie. I see right through you.”
She could feel a sudden energy buzzing through him and he shook his head, pulling from her tug at his tie and hair like a child who didn’t want to be littered with kisses by an older woman. “No, no. I know we kid about it all the time, but wasn’t Hawaii perfect?” Eddie turned away from her, hand running over his face thoughtfully. And, she could see a flicker of something in his eyes that wasn’t there before. Something that looked a lot like a bank robber about to step into his get away car. Freedom at the price of cheating. Eddie couldn’t be more wrong in that moment of delusion since prolonged periods away from Gotham made him antsy and miserable. He didn’t see it though. All he saw was a glimmering city where he didn’t have to lose his friend or pour Lazarus Pit on his girlfriend.
Eddie grew restless laying there and sat back up, hands holding onto her elbows and shaking her a little. “You could team up with Kara. I could build you a power suit. We’d be free.” His dark eyes moved, frantically searching for a yes that he couldn’t find. “You’re always saying this Gotham is one thing after another. That you never get a break. So let’s just go.” His voice was cracking now, desperate and sad though if you asked him why he couldn’t quantify it. He knew it had that familiar, sharp pain that Muerte’s death caused him. He knew he’d keep feeling it as long as he was sober and in Gotham. And, he knew he didn’t want to feel like this anymore.
Her frown deepened, red lips turning down and eyebrows still knitting together in that drunken sort of confusion that surely would be endearing in some other situation (especially around those stupid bros in her age bracket), and she let him go when he wiggled out of her grasp, albeit regrettably and with the quietest whine. “Yeah, of course it was perfect, Eddie.” Hawaii was a dream of calm waters, warm nights, breezes blowing through their window, and simply them. The first time in a long time, if not ever, where they could be Stephanie and Eddie without having to face the problems Gotham loved to toss at them. Where they could be more than the simple sum of their parts and pasts that led them to don costumes. And there were moments of weakness where she kind of hoped they’d cancel their return flight to Bludhaven and stay in the tropical paradise for the rest of eternity. But Gotham’s siren call was too strong to ignore. Eddie’s itches for the city might be stronger, but Stephanie got them all the same.
“But it’s perfect because we don’t live it every day,” she continued, wrenching her elbows out of grip a little more violently than she intended, and she mouthed an apology for that. She didn’t get why Eddie suddenly thought they could function in Metropolis at all. They couldn’t work in Bludhaven, and she was sure they wouldn’t work in Superman’s shining city either. “I can team up with Kara anyway, and I don’t want a power suit, and I don’t want to live in Metropolis.” Sure, she complained about Gotham, but deep, deep down she liked the test. It was one of the reasons why she and Eddie worked so much. “What the hell is this about?” she asked, still drunk, still confused, still trying to understand, and after staring at him with clouded blue eyes for a moment, it clicked. “Gotham is still Gotham, Eddie.” She didn’t say her name, she hadn’t said her name in hours. She refused to say her name until he did. “Look around. It’s our city. We can’t stay away forever. We never could. We couldn’t function in Metropolis. You couldn’t function in Metropolis.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem. Gotham is still Gotham.” Eddie seemed to almost shove her back when she pulled from his grip and stood up to pace away from her and then trail back. Hands on his hips, blazer open and tie barely hanging around his neck. No one loved Gotham more than Eddie did and that had been true since this all started. That didn’t matter. Everything he loved got under his skin sometimes. He kept his back turned from her, shoe scraping into the cobblestone below as he looked over the quiet slice of purgatory they managed to carve out. He kept trying to imagine himself somewhere else. He kept trying to imagine the rest of the bar, including Stephanie, somewhere else. Maybe the dancing couple would open up a small electronics store in Star City. Maybe the two ex-clowns would work the docks of Metropolis. Maybe they all could escape, somehow.
“We have to stop telling ourselves that we’d be miserable anywhere else. That we’re only built for this city.” Eddie turned to look at her, drunkenly graceful in the way he stepped closer to her and held his hands out for her to hold. “People said I couldn’t function without trying to commit crime. People said I couldn’t change and I did. We could go. We could move there and be happy. You wouldn’t have to worry so much.” Eddie perched on the arm of the loveseat and smiled down at her with a little bit of desperate hope in his eyes. “All of this- what happened with- with everything. If we weren’t in Gotham it would have turned out so differently.” And, he wasn’t going to say her name either. He had been intent on blocking it out tonight, especially in front of Stephanie. He didn’t want her to know how upset losing Muerte made him because he feared she’d hate him for it. Stephanie had made it abundantly clear that he had been too forgiving so mourning was out of the question.
Steph felt the shock of him jerk away from her, and she opened her mouth to shout but didn’t want to cause a scene. She almost, in fact, snapped at him for beginning a scene in this peaceful nook away from the rest of the healing city. No one even noticed them, save perhaps a few nosy loners by the bar, and so she just glared at his back as he rested his hands on her hips. Arms crossed and eyes to the sky for the moment he faced away from her. Yeah, maybe that was the problem, but it was also their city. What was Gotham without the precarious safety and class wars and everything in between? It wouldn’t be their home at all. And like Eddie, she tried to imagine herself in some other city or quiet suburbia, and she just couldn’t. None of them were built to live the day-to-day like that. Not even the little Gothamites not tied up in the city’s underbelly. The citizens of this city were carved out of a different sort of stone, molded to withstand more, much more than their Metropolis counterparts.
She gave him her hands and twisted her entire body to face him fully, and she shot him a look that spoke of how she didn’t think he was right at all. “No. No, no, no,” she muttered with a shake of her head, blue eyes closing in frustration for a second before she tugged at his hands roughly to pull him towards her again. “You’d get bored. I’d get bored.” Another tug, and her eyes snapped open to catch his dark browns. “There’s no way we’d last more than a month somewhere else. Remember Vegas? And how we both missed Gotham more than we cared to admit sometimes?” At least for her. “We weren’t made for anywhere else, baby, and you know it. Don’t pretend like you’d be happy anywhere else. Not in the long run. None of us would be.” After sweeping a hand toward the rest of the bar, her fingers entwined in his, and she tugged one more time. “I know you think this is your fault, but it’s not. And you don’t know if us being out of Gotham would change things. You can’t know.”
Eddie thought to slip away from her again, her tugging fingers making him feel like she caught him when all he wanted to do was run. He wasn’t that kind of man, though. So, instead crawled closer to her. His open blazer making it so she could hold onto him to get tangled up in his green as if they were back at his apartment on his couch. He whined, rolling his eyes up at every point she made and shook his head. Stephanie was right, she was so right it felt like a punch to his gut. “I’d rather be bored out of my mind than keep feeling like this.” Eddie said suddenly, as if he couldn’t stop himself. He gave her a look like he was trying to frantically take it back. The implication being that he was miserable when all he was trying to do that night was prove to her that he was not. A moment passed and his expression turned stern. “No, it is my fault. It’s okay, Stephanie. I told you before, I don’t mind taking the blame. Everything that happened was my fault. That’s the thing about Gotham. It lets me be who I am. In Metropolis I could be someone else. Someone safer. A clean record. Never getting into trouble or making friends with the wrong kinds of people. Isn’t that what you want?”
He pulled himself closer to her, so close she could smell the faint remnants of his cologne and feel the warmth of his breath on her neck. Eddie was asking a false question with an answer that didn’t exist. Of course she wanted him to be better, but stripping him from all the riddles and green that made him who he was would change Eddie so drastically she wouldn’t be able to see him anymore. And, he didn’t know why he was testing her when all he wanted was some kind of confirmation that they’d be okay until he recovered from finding Muerte’s body. “If we stay here I’m always going to be riddled. You’re always going to be chasing signals. And, we’re both going to put our lives in danger every chance we get. We could lose each other. All it takes is one stray bullet. One thug down in Wonder City.” He whispered, turning her face to look at him, practically nose to nose. His dark eyes weren’t searching for anything in her blues anymore. They stared back at her, in love and worried that one day it was going to trip one of them up for good.
As he moved closer, her arms slipped underneath the blazer and around his middle without a second thought. Fingers twisting and tugging into the fabric of his shirt, and the noise that rumbled in the back of her throat could be translated into a thousand different meanings. All meanings he could decode and lay out as he wished. Her blue eyes went heavy-lidded, drunkenly stupid when he was that close to her and when she was that intoxicated, and she almost asked him to forget about everything else and just kiss her until both of them forgot what happened with Muerte or whatever else Gotham tried to destroy. As he suddenly blurted how he felt, she raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. Not yet. Oh, she knew how miserable he was, even if he tried to bury it away for both their sakes. They knew each other too well. He could translate every mumble or whine from her, and she could do the same with him. And, it was simply common sense. He lost his best friend, and of course he would be. Of course he would be upset.
“Don’t test me,” she said quietly, hurt that he’d even try to pull some sort of answer like that out of her. “Don’t you dare try that.” And she closed her eyes as he came close, trying not to get angry, trying to hold onto that buzz of alcohol, and digging her fingers into his back in a way she saved for the recesses of their apartments. It wasn’t fair of him to ask her that, and they both knew it. Strip away everything, and what did you have of Eddie? A husk of a man, nothing close to what she knew or who she fell in love with. It was like asking her to drop the cowl, rid herself of the roughness born from Gotham, and just be a nice college girl majoring in education or something. Nothing like the girl he’d come to know either. She whined, curving her face away as he spoke and screwing up her face in pain. No, she didn’t want to provide him with these sort of answers. It wasn’t fair. Still, she slipped closer, unabashedly almost into his lap with one leg draped over his and the other curled underneath her, and she wrapped her arms tighter around his waist. And when he forced her to look at him, she caught the love and worry in his eyes.
“That’s the risk we’ve both decided to take,” she offered, drunken sage wisdom and a bluntness even she wasn’t used to. “We both could die any day. I could get hit by a car, you could have a heartattack. We’re all dying.” Which, honestly, was strange to hear Stephanie say. She was always the one worrying about them, about what would happen. Always the one voicing it. But, she wanted him to feel better, in her own misguided way, and maybe it was to comfort herself as well. Strip herself of some of the guilt whispering in the back of her mind. She stared at his nose for a second, then the crinkles around his eyes, then the lines around his mouth. Would he be her same Eddie without all the parts that Gotham gave him? Would she be his Stephanie? No, right? No, not at all. She pulled one hand away from his waist to cup his cheek. “I know it hurts, baby. God, believe me, I know that. But you can’t bury it away, and you can’t pretend it isn’t real.” Her thumb brushed his pronounced cheekbone in a soothing gesture. “You can’t run away. It doesn’t work like that. You’d never let me run away, would you?” And she raised a slightly challenging eyebrow at that. As if she dared him to say contrary. Her cheeks were still red, and her blues still seemed drunk, but it was still her.
She almost pressed a kiss to his lips, but instead simply hovered her lips over his. “Feel. Just for a little. Just let yourself feel whatever’s happening.”
Eddie’s dark eyes squeezed shut as she pulled closer, the feeling of having her in his arms in their shared intoxication felt good. It slowly started to smooth over his frantic need to get the hell out of Gotham. It reminded him that they wouldn’t even be here wrapped up in each other if it wasn’t for the magic of the city. He appreciated all the right buttons he managed to push. The nearly angry rise, the comforting honest truth of it all and the urge to go ahead and be as miserable as he wanted to be until he could shake it off. To him, it felt like solving a puzzle that he had been failing at for months now. It felt like they understood each other on a different level than before. “But, you want to run away.” He mumbled as she brushed her thumb across his face, eyes opening to look at her challenging blue ones. “I’ve seen you try to fight until neither of us can keep going at it.” His tone reached something close to teasing, never one to completely abandon his sense of humor even when his spirits could drop so sharply low all at once.
He stared at her a moment longer, hand pushing back her short hair, thumb against her jaw as his hand cradled the back of her neck. This was the kind of intimacy he craved from her, where they were so tangled up that the rest of the world popped out of existence. Eddie felt his chest swell, his heart pound against his ribcage in messy, hard and uneven beats. He knew that in order to feel this, he opened himself up to the other side of the coin. Which meant he couldn’t trade in one and lose the other. Just like he’d never leave Gotham. Metropolis couldn’t make him feel like this. Metropolis would only take it all away and challenge him to be the monster he was before.
“I’d never let you. You’re right. I’d never let you run away.” Eddie admitted with a tiny nod of his head as if her sage drunken advice was proven fact. He opened his mouth to argue anyway, but found himself noticeably distracted. The closeness of her making him lick his bottom lip as he tried to figure out how long it had been since they kissed. Halfway through counting down the minutes, he gave up and pushed his mouth against hers with a soft whine. The riddled man was too drunk to keep himself from getting a little lost in their embrace, the taste of her lips and how warm she felt against him. He also couldn’t stop himself from showing how much he needed her. One hand gripping her side to keep her close while the other gently stayed on the back of her neck. To an onlooker he might have seemed like he was giving too much away, making the riddle easier than it needed to be. Eddie was so bad at distancing himself from her for the sake of healthy independence. Despite wanting to do better, that whole notion of abandoning reliance on her went out the window.
“You look so pretty tonight.” He said against her lips, running his hands through her hair and leaning back on the loveseat so he could see her in that dim Gotham light. “ You’re right. Jesus, you’re right. Metropolis would try to fade your colors.” Eddie kissed her again, this time with a little more strength instead of desperation. “Slow dance with me for a little while. Tell me things that’ll make me want to stay in town.”
Stephanie shook her head slightly, not enough to break his grip but enough to let him know she didn’t really ever want to run away. She’d done it once, when she’d helped foster a crime war that nearly destroyed Gotham and she had to find a way out. Leslie Thompkins needed to teach the Dark Knight and his teenage vigilantes, and Steph needed to hide away for a little while. She’d run away then, to Africa, to hide and let her mother and friends suffer her loss. She couldn’t imagine doing that again. Leaving when things got tough and leaving her city. Yes, Damian and Dick had done it, and they’d been better for it, but that wasn’t for her anymore. She’d rather stand up and suffer through whatever Gotham decided to throw at her than duck and bolt the second it got a little more difficult. She worried, and she complained, and she hated it some days, but she knew she wouldn’t have what she did, she wouldn’t have him without all the tests.
Being so close to him made her go dizzy, had her lightheaded, stole the breath right out of her lungs, and she didn’t have it in her to respond with words at the moment. He made her go too stupid for that. She leaned into the fingers cupping her jaw, and she looked at him with a heavy-lidded mixture of love, affection, and want. And she smiled briefly when he agreed with her, a simple nod before he pressed his lips onto hers with such desperation it almost seemed indecent. She whimpered, eyes drifting shut and body trying to meld against his. Arching forward, both arms around his neck, fingers tangling into his dark curls. All the fighting between themselves, all the problems that arose because of Gotham, well, this made it completely worth it all. While it didn’t fix what happened with Muerte or how Eddie felt, he must have known that Steph would be there for him no matter what. The way she curved her body into his, the way she hungrily tried to memorize the way he tasted, how desperately her fingers tugged against his hair. He had to know.
When he pulled back, she smiled sloppily up at him before taking both his hands in hers and standing up slowly to pull him closer to the stage. “You lead,” she conceded, cheeks red from the compliment he offered. Her blues flickered down bashfully for just a moment before catching his gaze again as she settled into whatever position he wanted her to. “You’re so handsome,” she said with a smile before continuing. “Well. I doubt Metropolis has a Los Tacos. How are you going to get your taco fix? And Matilda? She’s a Gotham girl through and through. She wouldn’t fit in with all those hoity-toity poodles.”
The second they were on the dance floor, Eddie pulled her close to immediately vanish any notion of personal space between them. Both hands on her waist as he pressed a kiss to her neck and gently swayed with the music. For someone who was used to dancing with steps planned out, Eddie had a certain casual grace to him. A nearly smug confidence that made most things that he did look too easy. He might have been a man of logic puzzles and lines of code, but the Gotham air didn’t let anyone forget his thieving ways. His swindling carnie charm. He pulled back to give her a smile that looked like that time he said goodbye to her when they went to investigate Joker toxin and it felt as if they city had breathed life into him. “Matilda would go anywhere I asked her to.” He said with a rise of his eyebrows before they straightened back out. “Maybe she’s better suited for somewhere a lot quieter. Less street lights and more squirrels to chase.”
The band started playing a brassy, twinkling and slow version of a Peggy Lee song. There wasn’t a singer, but he could hear her smokey Well, alright. Okay. You win, baby what can I do? It made him pull her close and smile into the short, messy blonde hair that he loved to hide himself in. He kept having these moments lost in Stephanie where Muerte didn’t even occur to him. Short, sudden moments where he could lose himself in a roulette of memories that had nothing to do with his dead friend. Lose himself in Stephanie’s blonde hair, the way her cheeks turned pink with a simple compliment or the exact angle she liked to roll her eyes. He’d smile loosely. Kiss her gently. Then, like a dream he was suddenly aware of, it would start to fade and he’d feel this dull pain in his gut that twisted.
“The first time I talked to-” Eddie said softly, only loud enough for Stephanie to hear. “The first time I talked to Muerte I asked her to tell me a story. I ask a lot of people to tell me stories. And, I expected something I already knew. I ask people to tell stories even when I already know them.” He leaned back a little to check her stormy blues as if to see if it was okay to even talk about Muerte. “She told me this story about a sol-” He paused, eyes a little panicked like he caught himself saying things he was expected to keep hidden on the table. “Never mind. You don’t want to hear it. It’s stupid.”
Her arms slipped around his neck, and she stepped closer until she was flush against him without even a second thought. As if her body fit perfectly with his. (It did.) As if that was where she belonged most in the entire world. (And, at the moment, it was.) So, Steph lost herself in him, in the sway of their hips, in the swirl of the tinny, whimsical music, in the way his body felt pressed up against hers. She didn’t say anything to him, let him take the lead, and responded in tune to those little moments of ease and affection. Returning his kisses, running her fingers through his dark curls, humming out of tune. She wished he could just forget about Muerte, rid her from his thoughts, but Steph knew just as much, if not more, than anyone that it didn’t work that way. You couldn’t shake guilt off with a snap of her fingers as much as you tried.
As he began to speak, she threaded her fingers through his hair, back and forth in a soothing gesture. Honestly, she didn’t want to hear about Muerte. She wanted to bury the concept-turned-flesh into the deep recesses of her mind where her father and Black Mask resided, too. Things that haunted her nightmares and her waking moments sometimes, too. But, she shook her head and pressed a little closer to encourage him to speak about her. “No, it’s not stupid,” she said, voice soft and soothing and loving. “Tell me what she said.”
Eddie shook his head, trying to lose whatever thought process had just popped into his brain. “No, no I-” He even almost tried to fight her off when she pulled him close, all of his grace and smoothness gone in favor of scrappy survival. There wasn’t a doubt she was trying to comfort him the best she could, but it killed him knowing for a fact that she wished she didn’t have to. “You don’t have to. You don’t.” Eddie whispered jaggedly as she pulled close, the tone of her voice stunning him in his place. For the first time, he hated how she could prove how much she loved him with just a whisper. He hated how there wasn’t anything he could do to fight against it. Eddie Nigma wasn’t the kind of man who could untangle himself that easily.
He tried to prove to her he was fine. Dancing again, slow and close like a couple that didn’t get very many truly tender moments together. Another kiss to the side of her face with a steady sort of quiet that she only got to see when he was working at the computer or building something. But, like always, Eddie gave himself away. His heart was racing like a mouse caught in her hand. His arms wrapped a little too tightly around her waist, fabric pressed between his fingers like the first time he ever clutched onto her dress. “I only started talking to her because I wanted to know you’d live through the plague.” Eddie confessed with a sigh. “And, she wouldn’t want me dwelling. She’d honestly just want us to be happy. You and me.”
“Eddie,” she said sharply while he attempted to sweep the entire thing with Muerte away, a whisper lost in his neck as she buried her face there. It was easy with her eyes closed and when they weren’t speaking to pretend like everything was perfectly fine. Like they were back in Hawaii and escaping the constantly burning fires of Gotham City. Like they weren’t trying to combat the guilt and sadness Eddie felt over Muerte’s passing. The slow sway of their hips, the tender press of his lips against her cheek, her fingers gently tracing nonsensical patterns on the back of his neck. It was all simple ways to try to comfort the both of them and help forget what was raging just outside the confines of the bar.
Of course, it didn’t work. She felt his heart hammering in his chest, reverberating into hers and making her own race in tandem. Thumpthump, thumpthump, two hearts trying to beat as one. As he was getting upset, so was Stephanie, and it was a sick sort of thing that happened between them when they were particularly vulnerable. When one of them was smart, when at least one had their wits about them, the other could at least rely on that soothing logic provided. Eddie could balance Stephanie out when she was a ball of rage and emotions, and Steph could talk Eddie down from a panic attack when he wound himself up. But, when she felt him so desperately trying to be normal, she couldn’t help but feel her chest ache guiltily. She wanted, more than anything, to take the pain away.
She rumbled out a sound of protest against his skin when he spoke again, fingers twisting in the dark curls at the nape of his neck. “We are happy,” she murmured there before pulling back. “We’re as happy as we can be here. We have each other, right? That’s all that matters in the end. Not her, not anyone, not Gotham. Just the two of us.” Her hand slid gently up his neck, then across his jaw. Featherlight touch skimming his skin while her blue eyes searched for his browns. “I just want you to be open with me. I just want you to feel like you can tell me anything, Eddie. Even if it’s just talking about your pain. How much you miss someone. Or the good things. You can tell me anything.”
Eddie tilted his head, leaning into her touch as their eyes locked. “Stephanie.” He whispered, gently resting his forehead against hers. That single word said volumes for him. He understood as well as she did that sharing everything from insecurities to the good stuff was what made them so strong. Such a normal approach to a strange relationship fit the two of them in a way that otherwise just didn’t work in Gotham. They shared information, worked through problems and supported at each other when something went wrong. It certainly created problems once other people really grasped how close they were, but Eddie wouldn’t have traded it for anything. He liked having this little world with her. He liked knowing there was always going to be one person who worried and wondered about the kind of trouble he found himself in.
“One last thing.” He said simply, leaning back so he could look at her. “Then, we dance a little more and I’ll try to convince you to come over.” Eddie smiled, voice rising a little in that geeky tone she knew so well. This was a story she might have been familiar with, back when the worst thing they had to worry about was Vegas. Though, it seemed like it had developed a new point for the riddling man. “I asked her if she ever took a vacation from being Death and realized that before this Gotham I never took a vacation either. How do you take a break from being in the rogue gallery? I never even tried to find the answer to that riddle.” He raised his eyebrows, taking the lead again as they danced. “Now I have donuts with Harley, I take you out on non-threatening dates and vacations. I volunteer on the weekends. I go to church. Muerte might have been dangerous and horrifying some of the time, but she reminded me that no matter what I do, no matter how much I learn, I’m not just some question marked symbol. I could never be just a concept. And, she never wanted me to be anything except some weird, brilliant human.”
To anyone that didn’t suffer from grand delusions or spent years in Arkham for coming up with nefarious plots, this might have seemed unimportant. To Eddie, it filled him with a strange mix of mortality and relief that he was so much more than the sum of his parts. That all the gears and mechanisms that had been stored inside him so long ago could be modified. Or maybe they weren’t so unchangeable after all. He smiled at her, knowing that she understood too, that Stephanie had seen him change first hand. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
Stephanie sighed as he pressed his forehead against hers, loving the way he said her name like that. The soft, fond tone, the weightiness in his words swirled around her brain and settled on her with an easy smile crawling up the side of her mouth. He might have a library of her tells stored away -- lilts in her voice, eyebrow raises, twitchy smirks -- but when he gave himself away that easily, she could solve some of the riddles, too. Eddie was always the easiest riddle for her, even when he was the most difficult thing in the world. Because to her, loving him was all about knowing him. Sharing, talking, helping each other. Being true partners through and through. And though they stumbled that as often as they got it right, at least they were trying. They were improving little by little, and frankly, the journey was the most important part.
She listened intently, chin tilted up, eyes on his the entire time and a tiny, encouraging smile on her lips, and she followed his slow, deliberate steps. Careful not to step on his toes or trip over herself. (Okay, maybe it happened once. Sorry, Eddie.) And, she let him speak fully without interruption aside from running her fingers through his hair. Her mouth might have twitched down once or twice, a betrayal of her anger toward Muerte. But the anger now wasn’t just for her and what had happened to her. Now, it was for Eddie, too. Eddie, who was clearly more heartbroken than he wanted to let on. When he finished though, she flashed him another smile, this one without the anger or sadness. “Thank you,” she said. “For telling me that. Thanks.” Because, at the end of the day, it did matter that he trusted her enough to listen to his emotions. She swayed with him for a moment, lost in the way his arms felt around her, but broke the silence again. “She was a good friend to you, Eddie. I know that.” Her words didn’t hold any of that simmering rage or bleed sadness for either of them. Just a simple statement of a simple fact. Muerte was good for Eddie sometimes. It was just awful, to Steph at least, that so many people got hurt because of her. But instead of saying anything else that might be misconstrued, she stretched up to capture his lips in a gentle, loving kiss.
Eddie watched her expression as he talked, sometimes making himself aware that he was staring and focused on her stumbling feet or the curve of her shoulder instead. He understood how most people could have mixed feelings towards him, but seeing Stephanie display it for someone like Muerte was still a mystery for him. Eddie loved complexity, he loved deeper, hidden meanings that bit back if you stuck your hand too far into the darkness. The problem was he also liked to skip to the end of the book to see the conclusion before he even really started guessing. So, Eddie wanted an easy fix for all of this. He wanted to keep Stephanie happy without compromising himself too much. Most of the time Eddie knew that his blonde bat felt the same way. That something about his riddling personality had etched into her heart for good. Tonight, though? Tonight he needed a reminder.
He was lost in all of this when she reached to kiss him. A soft oh pulled from his lips in surprise. Eddie could have sworn in all his drunken glory that he could hear the music swell behind them as he kissed her back with a rumble of appreciation from his throat and right then he thought it wasn’t so bad being in love in Gotham. It was confusing and difficult and the solution kept changing, but wasn’t that what Eddie was all about?