capeandcowllogs | (no subject)

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(no subject)

WHO: Eridan Ampora (

amoray) and Edward Nygma (

enigmaestro).
WHERE: Eridan's penthouse.
WHEN: 11/23
WARNINGS: Torture, violence, language, the usual.
SUMMARY: PAYBACK'S A BITCH: the log.
FORMAT: never

Eridan insists on getting the lunch tab. He isn't sorry for what's about to happen to Edward Nygma, not really, but he figures it's the sort of quirky thing Eddie will look back on with vague, strained amusement. Or as a horrible insult, considering what's to come. Either one is good.

"Like I said, the doomsday dewice thing? I consider myself kind of a journeyman, yeah," he says while finishing off the rest of his soda, posture lazy. The cues weren't subtle, but they didn't have to be. He was confident Eddie wouldn't duck out early on him, but sweetening the pot couldn't hurt - doomsday device, what ex-supervillain didn't love a good old-fashioned doomsday device? "I'd say the only reason none of 'em worked out was 'cos a Wris. Meddlin' fuckin' dirthag stealin' my thunder. Don't know what I was thinkin', goin' to her. It's not like she got what I was about."

"So, you ready to go?"

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"That's going to affect my blood coagulation," he said while eying the proffered bottle. The shape, that hollowed O, drew his eyesight downwards, eyes momentarily darting along his nose to his own bleeding flesh. The movement proved brief -- his swollen eye ached. His more acute pupil caught Eridan's face.

"So this is all for my benefit, is that it?" Laughter sounded croaked over split lips. Humorless, rattling, like the shutter of glassless window panes. "Because I certainly. Needed. Respect for you? Because I needed the discipline?"

The words felt cold in his mouth, each syllable an epitaph to any given tombstone. The truth of his speech shone through the mockery of his bloody smile; it was harsh and relentless. It was final.

"I'm not taking it willingly. No," he whispered. Whether Edward meant the drink or the knife, he didn't clarify.

Eridan gave Eddie a lingering look, the bridge of his nose beginning to pinch, before shrugging and finishing off the bottle. It went the same way the chair leg cum bludgeon had, tossed carelessly somewhere into his jungle of tarp.

"Suit yourself." His mouth opened, paused midway through forming some snotty remark; scalpel in hand, bloodflecked sleeves rolled to the elbow, shirt untucked and hair lying halfway in his face, Eridan marvelled over his work. Edward Nygma, adroit and untouchable, now bitter and bleeding all over these nice tarps. Furious. The better part of a year's worth of agonizing, degrading work culminating in a few hours, and then he'd never get to experience this again - like all really good things, this exact sight and the feeling it held for him would never happen again, not in a thousand years of life. Never.

Which was good. That meant it was probably the same for Eddie, too.

"You know, Ed. Once-moirail a mine, lukewarm swell a brine in my chest. I'm real glad I newer got around to krillin' you."

Preamble done, Eridan stepped back in and crouched at Eddie's right, examining his workspace. The marks would have to be clean, precise, and account for the man himself; thrashing could be minimized by appropriate bonds, and had been to the best of Eridan's ability, but there was only so much rope could do. The breathing and screaming would be a problem. But all that had long since been (obsessed over) accounted for, and as he swept a thumb over the curve of a rib, Eridan figured a little imperfection would suit a mark left on a perfectionist like Edward. Not Osborn's cold, clean lines, but something personal.

The gills themselves were less biologically accurate slits and more neat, long strips of skin flayed off. Little half-moons between the ribs, shaving off skin and fat but not deep enough to penetrate muscle, stretching from mid-latissimus to mid-serratus, respectively, and about a half inch wide each. As soon as one was finished, Eridan pressed and taped a rag to each, always vigilant for any signs that his canvas was doing worse than he was supposed to.

"Look at that, you're fuckin' halfway there already," Eridan noted aloud, four bloody rags taped to Eddie's right side. His upwards grin was nothing short of absolutely, heart-meltingly genuine. "Doin' great."

Edward squeezed shut his eyes. The refrain didn't do anything to mute Eridan's voice, and the sound reverberated through his cerebral cortex. Haunting. Viral. Memetic to memory. Words that felt like fingerprint violations.

"This needs to be it," he rasped. His throat was a tissue Sahara, stricken with cracks from all his screaming. It ached to breath -- without eyes he could tell the shape and sneer that Eridan's fabricated gills made into Gothamite flesh. The symbolic horror raged against his nerves sharper than any knife could.

"-- Are you? Are you going to--?"

Eddie choked back the plea. Are you going to stop? wasn't much of a riddle. The caressing care in Eridan's voice had been enough to unhinged the jaded ex-felon, but his pride wasn't about to peel away in curls. The indignation, the burnt orange anger he felt welling around the split cells of his torso -- that's what played compass to his focus. That proved his true north.

Swell of brine in his chest. Every little mocking barb lodged into his brain.

Doin' great.

"What degree of greatness was this ever?"

"Sounds like somebody wants the salt."

The shaker of sea salt Eridan used on his food, left strategically within reach. (A mostly empty threat.) This needs to be it was mimicked with a wink and a nudge in his tone, a laugh afterwards, the soft clattering of bloodslicked scalpels and forceps as Eridan shifted from one side to the other.

"Are you going to what? Stop? Not when it's halfway fuckin' finished, Ed. You think I'm gonna half-ass this?"

But that didn't mean he wouldn't have to make the rest quick, he reflected a shade morosely. Extra blood only bought so much time. Eridan half-rose to check Eddie's pulse, fingers pressed to the side of his neck - and, apparently satisfied with the results, kneeled back down and dug the scalpel in, just that abruptly.

"What are we gonna do after this? You want I should dump you off with your precious human sawbones? Nah, probably too... y'know, public. I know you like lickin' your wounds in priwate when it comes to shit like this." A click of his tongue. "Or should I call somebody?"

Edward shuddered, gasping with the brief convulsion. "Eridan," he said. He lifted his chin upwards, his peripheral vision still catching the sight of the blood infusion gear. The very life source that mocked him, the contraption that kept him dangling at his protege's fingers -- it scalded him to require it so deeply, so fundamentally.

Eddie figured that was the point.

"Eridan, what do you want from me?" His voice cracked the plea. Negotiation. He didn't want someone observing him like this, much less someone he could trust -- much less Mitchell, much less Felicia. Much less -- well. The very fact that his third alternative would be none other than his declared nemesis caused a bone-aching shudder.

He couldn't have Eridan call somebody.

Eddie briefly imagined Lil's furor over this lapse, a second time. Of course, it was Eddie who dismissed her, Eddie who kept her in the dark.

He knew what culprit held the blame.

Eddie's fingers curled.

"I can't," he whispered. "I can't just do that."

The plea went ignored for the moment, as Eridan paused to watch the gears click in Eddie's head. It wasn't that cavalry couldn't come later - a hospital stay, reconstructive surgery, Eridan Ampora seething behind bars. It was that maybe Eddie didn't want it to. Eridan had gambled on the man's sense of image, the cost of publicity and lost face too terrible to pay, and for the moment, it seemed like it had paid off.

The last person Eddie had called for when in such a heavily compromised state had ended with Eridan getting bitten. He supposed it made sense, in a full circle kind of way, that he had no one to lean on here and now.

"Then how I see it, you got two options. One," Eridan began, pausing in his ministrations to slap his scalpel down in his palm, for emphasis, "I dump you out somewhere and you hope for the best. You die, probably. Or two, you text Felicia you're gonna be out tonight, and we hawe ourselwes a fuckin' slumber jam. Maybe I patch you up myself and you riddle up some crazy fuckin' reasonin' away a these new battle scars a yours. I dunno. Thing is, that second one has a kinda cost to it, if you get me. Nothin' big. You don't ewen hawe to get up out of your chair."

Here Eridan stood again, drifting off to a point in the kitchen just adjacent to Eddie's seat. Something glinted back behind his set of obnoxiously fancy Swedish knives.

A video camera.

"All you gotta do is smile."

He tapped his cheek, smiling a rictus.

Edward followed the angle, his eyes magnetized to Eridan's motion. The lens glint grinned back at him, malicious and silent in its unstated voyeurism. His mouth dropped, the split lip shivering just enough to eke out more blood, the look of distress etched into his expression. It was a ruin predated: Doctor Frankenstein sitting, bound, before his creation -- except this new prodigal incarnation had a taste for memory. And memory could be so unsavory.

The sulking heat along the back of his neck, the iron humiliation, the indignity. The film reeling before his eyes.

Ampora wanted these hours. He wanted these hours forever.

"What have I done," he whispered. He spoke of Eridan. He spoke of this horror unfolding, of these heavy implications. He spoke of his ideal project, his favorite sculpture, suddenly acquiring an ambush of sentience. This clay could cut.

"I'll text her," he urged. "I'll do whatever necessary to deflect suspicion, Eridan, I'll protect you. But don't -- just don't --"

He couldn't finish the sentence, his eyes still on the camera.

"Don't giwe me that look," Eridan chided in lieu of an answer, finishing Eddie's sentence to suit himself. Stalking back, scratching at his cheek with a claw - the manicure ruined sometime between tying the ropes, the clubbing, and nicks from the scalpel - he looked down imperiously, surveying his work. After a moment, he made an exaggerated show of glancing back at the camera, and then stepping just to the left, out of its line of sight. "All lookin' like a kicked fuckin' pupa. What's up - ain't got any fire left, Nygma? Or maybe I'm just borin' a seasoned weteran a torture like yourself."

There was a threat in there, although Eridan didn't make a point of it. Instead he brought his hand up to his face, rubbing his chin with the side of a finger. Torment or not, Eddie would need to be taken care of tonight, by him or anyone else; handing him over to Felicia or Mitchell (or Norman) would be fun in the moment, but would almost guarantee some whiplash. Possibly some very severe whiplash.

"Yeah, okay. You can text her when we're through." A definite statement, no argument to be broached. He kneeled down again, digging in the scalpel. Just two more to go. "I don't imagine we're gonna hawe any more dainty lunches together after this, but let's be keepin' it all between us, alright? Our secret."

Curving the scalpel had become muscle memory at this point. Eridan poised his tongue on the edge of his teeth, thinking.

"What hawe you done? Is that like a, I'we created a monster kinda thing, or I can't beliewe I let this happen, or what? Inquirin' minds."

"How about --" he hissed out the words, reluctant syllables like lead. It would take some severe alchemy to forge any gold from those sounds, but Edward was very little if not determined. He drew his chin upwards, groaning as the most relevant wave of agony flushed over his flesh.

At the very least, it was a goldmine for someone, and Eridan had always possessed such a princely fee.

Eddie kept his eyes skyward, as if unwilling to watch any more blood loss.

"How. About. What have I done to. Deserve this, from you?" His lips pried away the words, the emotions embedded in those vowels. Despite the efficiency of Eridan's brief medical support (after all, Eddie wasn't bleeding to death), he could still feel the sticky sickness of oxygen-exposed blood against his own skin. His nerves ached and the corners of his mouth quivered with little groans.

Nevertheless. Eddie would have been loathed to drop the theatrics now.

"I've made you so much better," he insisted.

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