A story high above the low, recorded by few, disputed by later.

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WHO: EDWARD NYGMA and POSSIBLY YOU.
WHERE: NOHoPE.
WHEN: August 8th - August 14th.
WARNINGS: Sweep you all up on a corner and pay for my bread.
SUMMARY: You know that I cannot believe my own truth.
FORMAT: To show what a truth, it's got nothing to lose.



They had taken away his pens. After the fourteenth riddle he had marked over the once-pristine walls, they had informed him that he was acting destructively and could not do with this privilege any longer. Eddie hadn't humored this exceptionally well. If you hadn't intended for me to express myself, he had argued, you wouldn't have encouraged such easily attained access. Whose idea was it to give me the tools anyway? His words were stonewalled, met with incomprehension or disdain. And shortly soon, punishment. Edward Nygma found himself alone, without release, staring at his blackly inked words driven over his walls. A room riddled.

He kept thinking of Norman. How that man was meandering through his life, undisturbed, when he had so abruptly ruined Eddie's own. How unfair it was, how cruel. How much he direly wanted to snip out Norman's vocal chords with a charming pair of symbolically rusty scissors and --

Oh. But that was rather frowned upon, wasn't it?

"Hardly a resonating concern anymore, is it?" Eddie muttered to himself. He had been in the habit of drifting in and out of speech in his solitude. Robbed of an audience and introduced to all kinds of new anti-psychotics (how the market had changed, since his Arkham days), he found himself prone to halfway-audible discussions with his own ears. It was grand company thus far, he wouldn't argue that. His eyes focused on the wall to his left, idly reading his own desperate scrawls.

PARTIAL OBLIGATION
FOLLOWING 01000111
ENDING WITH THE PENULTIMATE IN BEGINNING

Work that had yet been erased by his self-appointed caretakers. He rather liked that one particular riddle, it was rather pivotal. The act itself was soothing, something delving deeper into his past habits. A sort of solace granted in the dark, quiet places of his mind. An old friend. A resolve, an endurance. Truth screaming behind art. Truth. Obsession. Compulsion. This was better, he reasoned, this is how it should be. And that thought was perhaps the thing that Eddie hated the most, the one idea that he couldn't suffer; knowing how Norman Osborn made this realization first.

We may as well talk on equal terms, was what Norman had said to him as they both wore their respective costumes, both soaked in darkness. Equal terms. It was a phrase that stung, as surely Norman knew. When Eddie orchestrated his rival's convoluted downfall, he had done so with the superiority of his moral action. Eddie was right, and if he had to sacrifice a few dozen innocent lives to prove how right he was, so be it. If he had to pay with minimal blood in order to rescue thousands -- maybe even millions -- then it was a price well paid. His method was unconventional, yes, but effective. He was an agent of the greater good, a visionary of the Bigger Picture. He was the hero who had humbled a monster. Equal terms dismantled the idea, mocked it. Weaponized it.

SLAIN WITHOUT THE LEAD
VILE IN CONJUNCTION
WHAT IS THE HERO?

Locked within the painfully pale rooms of the Norman Osborn Hospital of Psychological Evaluation, Edward Nygma then decided that he was done playing games.

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MULTIPLIED AND MULTIPLIED WITH TENSION PAST
EVENTS HELD WITHIN TIME, AND TIME WITHIN EVENTS.
A SETTING CORNERED.

Eddie glanced at Ruka's line of sight, following her focus on the riddles. He grinned, briefly, understanding the appeal. The thirst to know. He had, in fact, depended upon human curiosity to guide his message -- the saga he couldn't speak -- aware that the story had to surface somehow, in some manner. Norman's mechanisms had only ensured this.

"Thank you," he said. Softly. As if not to disturb her. "I do appreciate the gesture." He walked over to the papers, scooping them in hand. Headlines screamed out at him, riots and destruction. Explosions and death. Eddie gleaned over them quickly, halfway more intrigued by the promised crosswords.

"Things seem darker," he said with a bright smirk.

[dragony]

While his attention was diverted to the printed word, hers was devoted to the inked. There was the likelihood they were merely the craft of boredom, but it wasn't a conclusion she was willing to draw prematurely.

The sound of his voice in an overheard conversation -- did no one think to ask this sooner? -- moved her feet from one riddle to the next. She knew the likelihood of her solving them all would be low, as she hadn't even managed breaking all the simple riddles locking Eridan's communicator, but if even a few of these pieces held some greater meaning, it'd be worth the pursuit.

If nothing else, it'd give her something to do when she went back to the quiet with Sirius.

"Summers are usually pretty violent around here, aren't they?" she asked, turning her head to speak the words over her shoulder rather than face him directly. Her eyes were too caught on a new riddle; the writing of this one looked stranger than the last. The ink wasn't the same dark black, was it? "I suppose every season has some new pattern here."

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He followed her gaze, meeting the same riddle. The rage that bubbled off his bloodied riddles was unknown to him, but it was something Ruka would notice quickly, unknown to Eddie. He took a moment before smiling back at her, his arms swaying with a few steps towards her.

"Perhaps our typical foes hibernate otherwise," he said, joking. There was no use denying the pattern -- something he had noticed, too. It was uncomfortable, a constant that promised only further anxiety. But it was a whisper that was drowned by Eddie's own current concerns.

He watched her, watching his riddle.

"No matter, is it? We always tend to survive."

[dragony]

"What, like bears?" she asked, a little distracted by the wall. While he watched her, examining the new puzzle of more than simple words, Ruka slipped the right glove off with a practiced ease. Her hand was pale, her fingers thin; no longer a child's hand, but not yet finalized into its adult shape. Even at this age, it was easy to tell she would have long, delicate-seeming fingers and narrow palms. "Well, not survive like bears, I mean," she clarified, bare fingers reaching up to touch the letters.

If she meant to say anything after that, it was cut off with a pained cry. Her fingers barely touched those letters, the subtle dark brown of dried blood before the sound erupted from her, startled and overwhelmed. Ruka recoiled from the wall as though it were electrified completely, jerking back with such force as to lose her balance. The rubber of her shoes screeched against the floor; the girl barely seemed to notice she was falling.

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Eddie had always possessed quick reflexes. They were honed in early day, from the dark evenings spent dodging paternal fists, and perfected from years spent raw in Gotham streets. Eddie was quick to abandon his skepticism of Ruka's bears and was quicker to fling out his arms, catching the girl during her crumble.

It wouldn't do, to get blood on the floor.

"Are you all right?" His concerned was genuine, and the question rhetorical. He guided her to his bed, glancing nervously at the camera watching their movements. It had been fixed since Spider-Man had visited last, and Edward was all the more wary of the reinforced mechanisms.

"That's sort of unusual, you know," he said. He had been watching her expression moments before, he heard the cry. "Fainting at a touch. My blood isn't that acidic."

[dragony]

The girl made no protest to being moved or guided, and even upon sitting she didn't seem to be listening. Her brow was furrowed and bent for concentration, but there seemed a silent fury at the corners of her eyes, a seething at the crests of her cheeks. They were subtle twists of the face, not quite boiled to the surface, but her gaze was without focus for several silent seconds. Within, the emotions she captured were stronger, and harder to fight down; it was a screaming fury, tearing at self and at the walls that contained it, like waves smashing against the cliff it so wished to destroy.

There was only a touch of brown to the very tips of her fingers, and Ruka stared down at those spots while her hand seemed to convulse and seize up, minute movements easily missed if not watched. She curled that hand into a fist, hiding the stain and willing the tremble to cease; her pulse and breath had both gone sprinting without her. When she looked up to meet Eddie's eyes, curiosity and fear fueled her gaze; the seeking of knowledge, and the desire to flee from it.

"Are you always so angry?" she murmured, her voice so much lower for how close they were, for how likely they were to be spied upon. "How can you contain it?"