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He’s here. He’s here and it brings a wide smile to Ed’s face.
Penguin saunters into the GCPD like he owns the place - and maybe he will, one day, because he seems to own everything already, even the little things he doesn’t know about like Ed’s heart. He isn’t here for Ed, he can only dream of that as he lays on his stomach in bed, his back still sore from the cane marks that litter his flesh. It’s a mighty shame Penguin seems to fixate on Jim when he’s right there, waiting and dreaming, and when Jim’s face downturns and everyone is too distracted by Penguin and his audacity to notice the beam on Ed’s face. Not even Jim, standing next to him clutching the most recent case files in his hand and already pushing him behind him protectively.
Oh right, everyone thinks he’s traumatised . Poor Little Eddie, abducted and beaten by Evil Little Penguin, head shoulders knees and toes (and eyes and ears and mouth and nose) still healing and recovering, yet little do they know that the only thing that keeps him up at night is being pressed against Dougherty’s body. They don’t even know it was his body. They didn’t ask and they won’t. For detectives, no one has put together the pieces of Dougherty’s disappearance, Ed’s kidnapping outside Kringle’s house and that unknown body and if they can’t even manage that, he feels rather secure in that they’ll never know it was him. Not even Kristen. She herself is beginning to pay more attention to him, which is awful timing now that his intrigue is elsewhere, but it’s more coddling, tense and gentle with him like she sees him as a lamb. Maybe she’d like a lamb after the brute that was Dougherty.
This lamb wants a penguin. But that penguin wants a pig. Oh, love is so confusing.
He’s here, he’s here, he’s here! And Jim is keeping them away, separating Ed by his arm and keeping him at his shoulder, herding him like sheep, a lamb, does everyone see him like this? Penguin must too but the GCPD are vegetarians and he is a carnivore, that’s the distinction, that’s what’s important, that makes him different from Jim and Kristen and every sad sap wasting away in the precinct, that makes him worthy. Penguin walks forward, high and proud and striding forward never mind the limp and cane (that gloriously struck his back, he recognises it without ever seeing it by the curve on the cane along its spine. It matches his scars. He dreams of it held against his throat).
He’s walking straight for him - Jim, Ed wishes it were him instead but it’s always Jim, him - and none of the officers stand in his way. They’re smart for that, not as smart as him (the only way they could get away with murder, literal, would be to be the Commissioner’s lap dog) and they’d be far less deserving of his anger. He knows that their experience together - one could perhaps call it a night of passion! - was not born of anger, just chance and coincidence and that he was a thing they needed to get to Jim Gordon, and he will dream of deserving and facing that anger, but it isn’t rage that’s on Penguin’s face; he’s exhausted perhaps from a life of crime but there’s satisfaction of being who he is in that tight-lipped beam crawling up his face.
Ed’s had to learn to read expressions, it doesn’t come naturally to him unfortunately, so the glimmer in Penguin’s unsteadily darting-around eyes takes a little while to dissect, his own gaze following every slight of the eyes and his joy leaks into the tiny pursed lips that upturn each time they meet each other. Penguin squints. Edward vibrates. Jim notices. Which one does he notice?
He opens his mouth to speak but Penguin is already there with his smugness, threatening to press against Jim to show him who’s really in charge and Ed’s so busy drooling over the thought of having that, he almost forgets to listen to why he’s here, the most important thing right now, snapped back to reality by the sneer in his voice: “You’re not the centre of my world, Jim.” And it feels like a lie. “I’m not here for you.”
Jim tries to hold his head higher but his Adam’s apple bobs in his throat as his eyebrows knit together and- Ed is yanked away, his head thrown backwards and ready to pop clean off, his eyes catch curled black hair and his feet trip over themselves as he’s hidden away in Sarah Essen’s office by her herself and it feels terribly unfair that Jim, not looking behind him to notice Ed’s disappearance (even as Penguin gazes half-heartedly over his shoulder before snapping back to attention on him), keeps talking when now he can’t even hear them. He searches for a window to open but settles for peering out when he finds no way to (not without a key he doesn’t have, that Essen has and will not easily hand over) until she pulls him away and stares at him.
It takes her speaking for him to understand why she’s staring at him, and by then he’s already given her his polite smile that he uses to try to satiate his colleagues but they take as cluelessness - Ed isn’t clueless, they’re just obtuse and hide their feelings. “He’s here to kill you, Ed! You have to hide!” Her raised voice drips with incredulity, her jaw left open as she shakes her head and he glances away - at first out the window but he feels her stare and decides to stare at the floor below the window. She pulls down the blinds regardless, lets him stand fidgeting as Penguin vanishes behind the blinds, spreading his arms out as if to embrace it before he’s shut out. Then her hand settles on his back, it flinches briefly from the scars but flattens down against him harder - he supposes it’s supposed to be comfort - and her fingers tighten around the cotton shirt until he stumbles backwards.
“Do you have no self-preservation?” He convinces himself not to nod. “Don’t answer that.” He didn’t! Essen hesitates locking the door, staring through the window at Jim and Penguin, her shoulders tensing means that it must be getting more heated and his stomach hurts with jealousy. He can’t even see, not without moving her and he’s already unwelcome here even though she put him in this room. She confuses him. People confuse him. From what he can understand of them, he confuses them as well. “Stay in here,” Essen orders, facing and pointing at him before opening the door, squeezing through it and locking it from the outside which puzzles him further - why ask him to stay if she was going to make him anyway?
Now he can squeeze against the window and watch Jim and Penguin- oh, Bullock ( ugh ) is joining, his voice carrying through the walls but not his words, and so is Essen as she pushes her way into the discussion. That’s a generous way to put it, ‘discussion’, because Penguin is the only one smiling and his mouth moves confidently but softly.
He’s so handsome. Why can’t Ed be surrounded by him instead of these pigs these brutes these animals? He includes Jim in that - a well-dressed swine is still a swine - and he hesitates to include Kristen in that when she’s become wholly irrelevant to him. Now he considers her again, he looks away from Penguin (for now) to scan for her but she’s nowhere to be seen, likely burrowed away in the records room, the archives of the precinct and his mind. Since Dougherty’s disappearance - death - she’s been far more isolated and perhaps, if Ed’s attention hadn’t travelled away from her, he would be a comfort to her and maybe would have taken his chance with her. His stare returns to Penguin. She isn’t the one he wants now. Sorry. Not his fault.
Penguin stares into Jim’s soul, menacing and smug, his chin jutted out toward him like a weapon. He’s the weapon and he’s the most beautiful weapon Ed has ever seen, he thinks as he presses his hand against the glass of the window, his fingers pawing and smudging it, and his breath - a moan - fogs the glass as his forehead rests against it too and sends a shiver from his skull to his spine. Essen’s voice echoes in his mind: Penguin’s here to kill him. He’s realised having him alive is much too a high risk he’s comfortable living with; if he has his way, Edward only has an hour, tops, to live. And that utterly thrills him.
How would he do it? He’s too extravagant for a bullet to the head and he seems to be alone, not even Zsasz in sight. He came here for Ed and he came alone. He wants it personal. Perhaps he’ll test Ed with the cane, strike him over and over and over and over and over- or he’ll slit his throat open and watch him blubber on his own blood, or something slower, gutting him like a fish and pulling out the messy organs he’s spent a lifetime investigating. Ed thinks he’d prefer the cane but he wouldn’t be the one deciding. The glass squeaks, tugs at his skin as his head dips down so the glass presses against his hair rather than the forehead and his gulp back of the thoughts becomes a squeak and he suddenly feels eyes burning on him. They heard him. They get closer, he can see their feet come into view on the floor he’s transfixed on - first Jim’s loafers storming toward the door and spinning round in front of it like a stop sign, Bullock’s own loafers slugging behind reluctantly, Essen’s heels march behind Jim and stop short of stepping on his toes and settle beside him like a wall, and then in enter Penguin’s marvellous brogue shoes with the slight wedge heel that drove before into Ed’s throat and he wishes would hold him down again - and their voices are almost clear cut.
There’s a snap to Essen’s voice that Ed finds unnecessarily cruel. “We’re not letting you kill him-”
“Oh relax, Captain , I’m not here to kill him. A friendly discussion is all I need.”
“A friendly discussion? Come off it Penguin, nothing’s friendly with you,” Bullock growls, punctuated by an unhelpful but classic Jim grunt that sounds agreeable with him. “I don’t like Ed-” Charming. “-but I don’t want him dead, and I don’t want you killing him.” Nice enough, maybe? He couldn’t ask much more than that of Bullock lest he drop dead of overexertion.
“Well, you’re in luck, Harvey, because I’m not going to kill him. Just a talk, if you listened to me.” Penguin scoffed, tapping his cane against Jim’s shoes until they stumbled aside and using the opportunity to step closer to the door- just for Essen’s heel, the heel itself not the shoe that’s an important distinction to make, to step onto his shoe, threaten to pierce through the leather and Ed can feel the glower shift toward her. “I’d move aside, Captain. Don’t drag this out any longer.”
“No.”
He’s not impressed; neither is Penguin. He lifts his gaze up from the floor to look out the window and raps his knuckles against it. “I can talk to him, Captain, I’m okay with it!” He says, trying to comfort her - and, he supposes, Jim and Bullock - with his trademarked tight smile. It’s not really trademarked, simply recognisable as his. “We can talk in the morgue!”
“Absolutely not!” He isn’t sure by her tone if she’s more upset by them talking or them talking in the morgue because she didn’t even turn to face him, throwing a dismissive but firm hand down against the air at the thought, the suggestion. Penguin doesn’t ignore him, turning his head toward the window and matching his smile with a smirk that falters as his inquisitive eyes narrow at Ed’s growing beam and fluttery heart like he can tell his rib cage is struggling to contain its beats and that his stomach is doing flips as they exchange a glance.
“Worry not,” Penguin says, breaking eye contact first (it feels like a bittersweet honour to win that staring contest) and growing more exasperated with every word that the GCPD forces out of him before they’ll let him near Ed. “Your dear friend won’t be joining them-” That feels bittersweet too. “-because, as I’ve said , I don’t want to kill him!”
“What then, an apology? ‘Sorry for kidnapping you, here’s a hamper basket’?!” Essen’s body points at Bullock with a glare Ed can’t see, namely because he’s still staring at Penguin, quietly hoping that their eyes will lock again.
“Well, I don’t have a hamper basket for him, but sure, an apology. You are making this much more difficult than it needs to be - I could have talked to him and left by now!” He sighs and as his eyes roll into his forehead for an excuse to look away, he catches Ed’s boring into him and his expression morphs into something familiar that Ed’s never been able to place quite well. Kristen would wear it every time they spoke, it crosses Essen’s face now and then but is replaced by her exhaustion and humouring of him, sometimes Jim wears it, it lives on Bullock’s face all the time, grows when he and Ed speak. It’s bad, that he knows, and it’s unfair that Penguin seems to agree with them, with Bullock , so he finally looks down at his feet. “Thirty minutes-”
Jim interrupts and Ed’s chest swells with anger. The audacity of him. “Ten minutes.”
“Twenty-”
“Fine. In the morgue. I’m staying in the room-”
“No, Jim. You can stand outside, like a good soldier boy-” Ed giggles against his will but keeps his head ducked down to avoid having to face the stares. “-but this is a private conversation between me and Edward. You can respect that, can’t you Jim-”
“You don’t get to make demands, Penguin-” Bullock starts but Penguin talks over him, barely paying notice to the idiot Ed wishes he could ignore so easy.
“-as we have plenty of private conversations, remember?” Jim stops, Bullock stops, Essen stops, even Ed stops - he’s remembering, Victor untying him as Penguin and Jim negotiated his already certain freedom. “Exactly. I plan to do no harm whatsoever to your friend.” Bullock scoffs, either at the notion of doing no harm or Ed being his friend. “Twenty minutes, in the morgue, alone. That isn’t too difficult, mm?” No one is convinced, Ed can tell from the steely silence, but Penguin speaks with so much charm and confidence that it’s difficult to argue with him - Ed doesn’t want to argue with him, only everyone else in this damned building - and so he receives no rebuttal. “Good. Do you often lock your forensic analysts in offices?”
Essen glowers but moves past him to free Ed whose hands are eagerly grappling with the doorknob for release, jiggling it as the key twists in the lock - he has to do something with his hands and wringing them out like dish clothes will hurt with the feverence his hands feel and the other option he has is severely inappropriate for the workplace - and when he’s finally free, he stumbles out the office like a newborn lamb and stands before Penguin with an unsteady smile.
He doesn’t think, doesn’t think he can - haha that’s funny - before he thrusts his hand out with an all too loud: “Mister Penguin! Hello!” Penguin doesn’t shake his hand. His fingers quiver. Inappropriate for the workplace, inappropriate for the workplace, inappropriate for the workplace-
“Mr Nygma.” is the solid greeting he gets in return. “The morgue?” At the blank stare Ed must be giving, he elaborates: “I usually avoid being caught dead here. Especially there. You’ll have to show me where it is.”
“Oh! Right, right, yes! This way, Mister Penguin!” His name, his title, it sounds sweet on Ed’s tongue, sweet but sour or perhaps salty - salted caramel, he’s always had a penchant for that - whatever the flavour it puts a spring in his step, rather his shuffle, as he almost skips to the morgue, checking over his shoulder to see if Penguin is following. He is, he does, it feels weird to lead him, almost unsettling, but it’s just to the morgue, amongst the corpses Ed could have been if he’d made one wrong move that fated night. “It’s just through here,” he says to fill the silence that Penguin must have been musing in.
“If he says anything, Ed, anything that frightens you-” Jim pushes past Penguin, starts speaking but it bores Ed to death as he says the predictable Jim Gordon lines. Ed isn’t predictable, so much so that he couldn’t predict himself and yet Jim tries to do so, and he predicts that Ed will need saving. Maybe that’s a Jim thing, predicting and assuming and presuming that they all need his saving in particular. Such a need to protect, to patronise, especially him. Poor Little Eddie. He presses his lips together, tight, not smiling for Jim, not even politely because if even the corners of his lips wrinkle or upturn, he won’t be able to hold back the giggle of getting away with murder. That wouldn’t be optimal here. Penguin let him get away with it - oh such a wonderful man, he is, he’d helped him, it wasn’t necessary and yet he did out of the kindness (kindness?) of his heart - and if he squandered it with a laughing fit he may never get to see the curious but mildly impressed look on his face he’s waiting for. “-you got that?”
“Roger dodger,” he says with a nod. He’d said that to Flass once, it feels like a lifetime ago when he was still a respected, fear-mongering police officer, when Dougherty was still alive, when he really was Poor Little Eddie and no one had cared then, they only care now, when the threat is tangible and already hated, he’s just another reason to hate Penguin. He nods to hide his blazing eyes. Jim Gordon is far too good at noticing things. “I can scream?”
Jim hesitates. Good. “...yeah, sure. Scream as loud as you like.”
“Oh I will!” And that’s a threat. He turns to Penguin to ignore Jim and he smiles, polite with hidden mania underneath that Jim can’t recognise from the side but that Penguin can easily spot. It should be a comfort to him, Ed thinks, yet that bad expression Kristen, Essen, Jim and Bullock wear forms back on his face with an air of dismissal - that he knows, that he recognises. To avoid facing it, he turns away toward the door of the morgue, tightens his face in a polite grimace and opens the door for him, eyes fixed down on the tiles scuffed by his shoes. Penguin doesn’t find the floor so interesting, following the walls and hesitating on the doors hiding the corpses. Perhaps his work is in here. Maybe Ed could ask: “Are any of these your work?” He does ask, shutting the door firm behind him. He hesitates locking the door and he chooses to, and leaves the key in the door. He doesn’t want Jim barging in at an inopportune time; if Penguin kills him, that’s the highest honour.
Penguin walks to the closest corpse, scanning it up and down before looking at the name tag pressed tight between his fingers, his face contorted with boredom. “No,” he drawls, turning away. “I won’t be telling you that - whatever you are, you work at the GCPD. Who knows what you’ll tell Jim Gordon?” His smirk appears again. “But then again, who knows what I’ll tell Jim Gordon?”
Ed trembles under his gaze, pausing on his circling of the examination table as his hand rests on it for stability. “I won’t tell him anything, Mister Penguin.”
“Good,” he says coolly, eyes drifting back to the body. “The answer’s still a no. None of these are mine.” His eyes narrow at the disappointment that must be brewing in Ed’s face but he forces his smirk to say as he diverts the question back: “Are any of them yours ?” The fire in his eyes grows as Ed stammers and struggles, his eyebrow raises higher and higher up his head, like a crawling caterpillar, in wait for the answer.
“N-no, sir, just… just the one.”
“The one?” He tsks, shakes his head and moves away from the door, toward the table, as if Jim can hear them through it. “And you didn’t even get rid of that one yourself.”
“No sir. Thank you sir.”
His mouth sinks into his face satisfactorily but then his brows furrow again, falling from a great height off his forehead into his eyes that scan the floor like searching for traps - Ed would never but Penguin looking away gives him ample time to stare so he wishes he’d put something for him to find. He isn’t searching, he’s thinking. His head snaps up. “You thanked me.”
Both the action and the sentence catch Ed off-guard, his eyes dart to the side too late to not be caught staring (would that offence get him a round with the cane?) and his lips wiggle and squirm trying to break free. “Just- just now?” He finds the will to move around the table, his hand grating against the metal, but this time he moves toward Penguin, hesitant but eager.
Penguin scoffs with a roll of his eyes. “ No . When we met-” He interrupts himself with a chuckle. “You said something- oh what was it: ‘bye Penguin, thanks for having me’- something along those lines?” He waves his hand dismissively but his face is anything but, twisted with confusion (Ed confuses everyone) and perhaps even concern if he squints and pretends Penguin could care about him. “And-and-” He’s stammering on his words, which raises Ed’s own eyebrows. “-I thought it was odd, is all. After all,” he continues, stomping his cane down and his eyes widen when Ed doesn’t flinch but brightens. “I tortured you .”
“Well-well,” Ed struggles to defend himself - verbally, at least. “I just, I guess I considered it an honour to meet you since you’re famous-”
Penguin screeches, “You met me because I nearly beat you to death!” He raises his cane as both a threat and an example. “You’re lucky to be alive! If Jim Gordon wasn’t outside right now, your lucky streak may not have continued!”
Speak of the Devil and he doth appear - or at least he’ll try to, Jim, trying the door, is alarmed when it refuses to budge and he throws his shoulder into it until Ed calls out: “I’m okay, Detective! He isn’t doing anything.” And yet he wishes he would , so he adds, “Just empty words.”
Penguin growls and lunges forward, wrapping his fist in the cotton collar of Ed’s shirt, nails catching on the button, and pulls his head down so they butt against each other. “Do not test me, Edward. Nygma.” His name comes out pointed and bitter, spat through gritted teeth, and Ed bites the inner of his lip to contain himself. “I can quickly make you regret it.”
Ed can’t help himself as he mumbles: “Please do.”
“What?”
“Um.”
Penguin’s motion, his violent lurch forward, sets off Jim’s fight-or-fight-harder instinct as he wrestles with the door. “Ed? Ed!”
Staring down bug-eyed into Penguin’s own beady eyes, Ed mumbles, “I should say something.”
Penguin isn’t impressed, that much even he can tell, his mouth slumps down and his eyes sag even as they point at him, then the door, then him again. “Then say something.”
Though commanded to, though considering it, Ed doesn’t say anything, he lets Jim fight - the door, his own flaws, God - and flail to no avail. The door stays tight on the locks; Ed has the key; Penguin has Ed. Well, really, the door has the key but he believes it’s good for the metaphor. His fingers poke the skin of Ed’s throat like a tease and now that the game seems to be up (he lost, it’s the best outcome for him so, really, he’s won), he lets himself press against the force, keeping his gaze on Penguin. His fingers don’t retract or press into him further but his face sours, perhaps, in confusion. Jim’s loud thuds against the door feel like they fade away, hopefully into nothing (but, knowing Jim, likely something more).
“You are a strange man, Nygma,” Penguin says with all the allure of a murderer and Ed wishes he could press his other hand into his neck - to die being strangled would be a great honour (and would really ruffle Jim’s feathers), only at his hands - but he knows that he has to support himself with the cane. “What is a man like you doing here, working at such a dead-end job?”
If you’d called Edward’s job dead-end maybe a month ago, he’d have… realistically not said or done anything but he’d have a lot of mean thoughts about you. But Penguin is asking now, not you or someone else and not a month ago, and Ed doesn’t want to have a mean thought against him. But he’s been asked a question and well- “I am what all men seek and what all wars destroy. For total disaster, my absence you cannot avoid. Gentle and soft but managed by law. From within me, you are hesitant to withdraw.”
That emotion Ed can’t place flutters across Penguin’s face - he looks like Bullock in that instant, when he has to solve a riddle, but the difference between them is that Penguin has the ability to solve them, perhaps not the will but certainly the smarts to - but it evaporates quickly as he investigates his face, deciding if he should humour him. Instead, he sighs, shakes his head and raises his eyebrows, prompting Ed to answer his own question.
“Safety.” Penguin didn’t even try and yet Edward beams at him as if he got it first try - Jim humours him but that doesn’t feel as good as this, that for a second he even considered it and he really can’t help himself, he finds. “You see, all men, everyone, we all want to be safe and a war-” Usually he’s cut off by now, so he hesitates, stumbles over his words as he looks down at Penguin, whose brow furrows at his self-interruption. Whether he’s intrigued, bored or simply tolerating him, he’s letting Ed speak. That’s more than the GCPD has ever given him, will ever give him. “You can’t be safe in a warzone. There’s- there’s whole agencies set to manage health and safety and once you’re safe you don’t want to put yourself in harm’s way, do you? Do you?” He belongs here, he decides firmly, on the edge of being strangled by Penguin. He isn’t answering him but he feels his fingers slip loose and Ed can’t think before his hand darts to Penguin’s and holds it there, pressing it back against his neck. “ Please .”
Penguin’s eyes widen but sink into his face, his mouth downturned and his eyebrows struggling to decide whether to furrow or rise, but he doesn’t argue. His fingers grapple through the collar at the trembling flesh beneath, intrigued at the plea. Ed gets the sense he doesn’t humour begging. “A very strange man…” He finishes his thought but it sounds gentle, entertained, light. Ed’s hand travels down Penguin’s arm, it slides up his shoulder and darts up his neck as Penguin glowers at him until it reaches his cheek. Now the glare is replaced with confusion. “Nygma,” he questions, tensing his shoulders. It sounds like a purr. He can see Penguin’s teeth. Through his lips.
Big cats eat lambs, don’t they? This lamb is willing a bite.
Ed can’t help it; he flies forward, almost trips over himself, but all that matters is that his lips are on Penguin’s, crime and justice meet, he presses his back into the examination table and almost giggles. This is where he investigates death. Now he has a killer. His mouth shudders against the skin as his top lips misses Penguin’s, sucking below his nostril. He’s not inexperienced, not entirely, yet Penguin draws that out, this kiss feels as clumsy as kindergarteners marrying in the playground. Chaste and uncertain, virginal.
Penguin’s hand tightens around his throat and slams him head first into the table, smooshing his cheek down against it as he hisses, seething and spit bubbling through gritted teeth. Ed stares back up at him, a scream ripples through him (he’d promised that to Jim), his back on fire, aggravated, alarmed but overjoyed. Kissed then killed. The best of both worlds. Penguin’s fingers tear through the top button of his collar, the pads and nails drive into his skin as if to hold him still, like he’s supposed to be writhing around. He isn’t, he’s motionless as if one of the dead bodies. He’ll stay here, in this morgue. It will be his new home.
Jim’s being too quiet. Hm.
Penguin scowls down at him. “I’m in charge, Nygma. Not you.” Keeping his hand on his neck, he straightens him out against the table, the crown of his head pressed against the metal rather than his cheeks and temples, and slowly, hesitant but as decisive as Edward had always dreamed, Penguin leans down and presses his lips onto Ed’s.
This is better than anything he could ever dream. As he’d laid on his stomach (the pain felt good but that didn’t make it good, he could only take so much), he’d dreamt of Penguin. Of taking him, being taken; of brutal, bloody murder that Jim could never prove was Penguin’s doing; of being taken and this time kept, never returned; of babbling endlessly under his weight and power: ‘Mr Penguin’, he’d gasp out. As Penguin’s hand tightens on him, he thinks maybe he did gasp that out. The cold metal underneath him is difficult to pretend is his bed, he doesn’t bother after a few tries, because it doesn’t matter to him, what matters is Penguin. His dreams don’t contend, don’t hold a candle to reality and so, for once, he doesn’t shut his eyes and sink out of it, or he tries not to at least. He’s heard that keeping your eyes open during kisses is taboo but he won’t dare risk it. Yearning to stay, he wraps his arms around Penguin’s shoulders, draws him closer against his mouth, his face, letting begging whispers drip from the corners of his lips, whines cut off by a tighter grip on his neck. Blood begins to pool on the metal table and it soaks into his skin. A strangled whimper.
His lips bleed too, as Penguin bites into them. His lips are chapped, calloused, as callous as he, and Ed feels like tender clay underneath him; he begs for Penguin to leave an imprint, he had before but that was violent, this is passion, he wants his lips and neck to scar and bruise, never heal. He doesn’t deserve to heal, he thinks, and he never will. He will walk with Penguin forever until, unless, he dies. He seeks that. Even if he’s not loved back. This doesn’t feel like love. Does it matter if it isn’t? He has Penguin, Penguin has him. That’s all he needs and all he wants.
Penguin leans against him, he becomes his cane, as his other hand tips his chin up uncomfortably against the metal, he retreats from Ed’s lips, not opening his eyes as he savours the drops of blood that stick to his fingers and tries to linger under his nails, he cleans them with his mouth but the iron taste lingers on his lips as he chooses Ed again. Their kiss is iron and fire and sharp and it is more than Ed could have imagined.
And of course, it’s fucking interrupted.
A chair flies through the window, glass shards fly over their forms and Ed doesn’t want to pull away, his arms tighten on Penguin’s shoulders, hold him still, a silent beg to stay. His teeth stay driven into the soft flesh of his lips, grazing Ed’s own teeth. Desire beckons them to stay but Jim’s stare boring into them separates them. Slowly, Penguin stands up straight.
“What the hell?” Jim grunts on the other side of the door, barriers gone, his hand resting on his gun as his eyes jump to the hand on Ed’s neck, dragging him to stand too. Penguin lets him go and Ed’s hand replaces his.
“Good talk, Edward.” That’s all Penguin can say, wiggling the key Ed left in the lock and walking through the door, shoving past Jim. Jim’s stare follows him, then jumps back to Ed. Once Penguin leaves eyesight (he leans to the side to keep him there longer), Ed returns the favour. For a very long minute, neither speak, only exchanging wide-eyed stares. Maybe not speaking is for the better-
“Hello Detective,” Ed says because he’s not able to help himself. Jim’s wide-eyed stare only hardens. And there’s that emotion again, the one he can’t place, the one Penguin wore but not while Ed made his move. It had evaporated into something more sinister and delicious and easy to swallow yet, in its absence, he believes he finally understands what it is.
It’s disgust. Disgust of him.
How fascinating.
Jim doesn’t speak, still reeling from the sight. He wears disgust like a second face - emotions look uncomfortable on him, his face contorts painfully to show even a glimmer of feeling - and now he knows what it is, that emotion he sees everywhere in the GCPD, it feels so much crueller. Jim doesn’t know he’s being cruel, not because he’s stupid just blind, he thinks cruelty is kind to Ed, he’s to be shielded from harm. Even as he longs for it. Embraces it. Even as he kisses it. And to witness that, the antithesis of what he believes, Ed thinks it just might break Jim. That’d make two of them, he thinks, cocking his head and watching. His trademark smile hopefully looks far more sinister. Nothing as sinister as anything Penguin can stir up but perhaps a fraction of his talent passed on to him, through saliva.
“Take care, Detective,” Ed waves his shaky hand and squeezes through the slowly shrinking gap of the door Penguin had left open. Maybe if he hurries, he can catch him, thank him, drop to his knees and beg him to take him with him, or take him there, GCPD be damned. He needs Penguin, he’s decided, more than lust or love or intrigue, it’s an addiction. Penguin could break every bone in his body and he would still walk because who needs bones when you have him? Utter perfection?
His legs anticipate Penguin far too much, stumbling on the stairs, shoed-toes catching on the steps and he’s sent tumbling face first. “Edward!” A familiar voice yells with a worried tint. “Are you okay?!” A month ago, he’d have treasured her talking to him, would have whimpered on the stairs a little longer if it meant she’d help him up, but today he jumps up just as her hand settles on the small of his back (over those delicious, delicious scars) and before she can even offer him a hand, finely manicured and certain to be soft. As soft as her lips; he’d dreamt of them, innocently vanilla but not quite innocent. The gentle balm coating them in a glittery pink had once enticed him to reorganise the records room instead of count the organs, the job assigned to him that fits like a baggy sleeve - comfortable now and then but inevitably a nuisance, never quite fitting but it fits . She never quite fit either; fit his dreams, that is, he thinks, but she was the only thing he had - this job was the only thing he had.
Ed runs his fingers across his lips. Past tense, had. He has more now. Far more.
Soft is not what he wants or needs or desires. Penguin’s calloused fingertips are what he craves, stronger than any drug or vice. The skin tight and dying white against the curls of his prints, the ones he can always manage to remove from crime scenes but that Ed wants littered over him, harsh and rough and leaving friction against the supple flesh ripe for contorting in his grip. Kristen, soft and refined and pure, she just can’t compare to that. She’s easier to ignore now - a polite pursed smile, a babble of ‘yes yes I’m fine thank you Ms Kringle bye’ and he’s already gone, hunting and searching for Penguin, to no avail. She does not follow him, perhaps she knows where his loyalties now lie. Maybe in another life, there would be nothing to compare her too and he’d have her instead, live with her instead and never realise that roughness is what he longed for, that all the kindness in the world would never satisfy his hunger. It would only satiate him, as he does with his colleagues, and they are appeased by that but never happy. They will never be happy with him. And he would never be happy with this place, even if he didn’t know it.
Penguin may not love him and, perhaps, Ed does not fully love him either, but it’s the closest thing he will ever have to it. Under his gaze, even when it is filled with disgust, Edward Nygma finds a home.