In honesty, Oswald didn't know what reaction Ed would have now. He'd been sure before, but now he was terrified, frozen in place, his hand gripping the ornate, silver handle of his cane so tightly that it was as if he thought if he squeezed it hard enough, he could make this entire thing turn out the right way.
Then Ed's hand moved, and for a moment his mind went blank, jaw tightening against his subconscious, bracing himself for impact: a shap slap or a hard punch where the things that his mind conjured ━ despite the way he knew Ed, despite the way he trusted him ━ the mind could be a traitorous thing ━ and it wasn't something he wouldn't be used to: to being grabbed, shoved, hit ━ these where what the hands who reached for him had always done and so, even if those hands had never been Ed's, he had prepared for the sharp crack of palm against cheek, for the blunt force of a fist to his temple, for the sudden, horrible certainty that he had pushed the only man who had ever made him feel chosen into looking at him the way everyone else did.
Contempt, revulsion, with that particular cold disgust reserved for things deemed filthy and wrong. He was a freak, after all. An odd little freak. A monster? No, not always. But he had become one because fear was the consolation prize he accepted over the respect he knew they wouldn't give him, and for a time it had suited him just fine.
He had heard it all before in one form or another, whispered behind hands, spat in alleys, dressed up in "polite language" by men with more expensive suits than his and uglier souls than he's sure his ever was, too, and so of course he had expected it from Edward now.
Perhaps not because Ed was cruel, no, but because Oswald had done a cruel thing. Because Isabella was dead. Because Ed's grief had every right to construct a weapon against him, and yet Edward did not strike him... He simply touched his cheek ━ touched him as if he were not some grotesque thing that had dragged its repulsive wanting into the light where no one had asked to see it ━ touched him as if the tears on his face mattered more than the pain of losing that... That librarian woman, as if they were not the shameful, ugly things he had imagined and yet he had braced himself so completely for impact that the tenderness of it struck him as violence anyway.
A sound caught in Oswald's throat, something much too fragile to be a laugh and far too wounded to be a sob. His eyes widened, searching Edward's face with a frantic disbelief. He looks up at Ed the way a starving thing might look down at a feast set before him, not yet daring to reach for it because surely there had to be a trick, a cruelty, a mirage in the desert ━ him, a dog that had been beaten too many times.
Then Edward kept speaking, impossible things, delicate and world-ending, if only to him. Oswald heard them, though there was a part of him that wasn't sure he was hearing them the right way, as though belief itself would be fatal.... It made sense, of course. Ed had loved a woman before... Or perhaps something resembling it, he supposed, but perhaps he hadn't ━ perhaps it had just been easy ━ convenient... Expected. He understood that from a technical level, not a personal one. Of course, he'd been... Offered a similar convenience once or twice but... He couldn't take it.
He knew what he was, he knew what he wanted to be. He wouldn't settle. He had told himself he would never accept anything less than what he deserved, and what he deserved wasn't some... Some woman who clung to him for some pathetic material sense of wealth or status.
His mouth parted wordlessly as the parlour went strangely distant around him: the fire blurred into amber, the walls, the windows, the furniture, the whole grand internal of his late father's magnificent home, the one he and Ed had shared these last months, seemed to lose its edges, reduced to warmth and shadow and Edward's hand on his face as Edward spoke his name ━ Oswald. Not Mayor Cobblepot, not Penguin, his name, the name that only his mother had ever been able to make sound loved.... Until now.
His cane, something he'd clutched so tightly, as if his very life depended on it just moments ago, slipped from his grip as his hand rises, drawn by instinct, hovering for one uncertain second near Edward's wrist before closing around it with trembling care, to keep him there, to hold that hand against him as if Edward might realize what he had done and take it back.
❝ No,❞ Oswald offered, his voice still warbling with the swell of emotions he'd been lost within in these moments as he spoke, ❝ Ed, you have nothing to be sorry for, ❞ Words that were desperate and perhaps irrational, made of relief more than truth. ❝Nothing. You didn't hurt me. You could never -- ❞ He stopped because it wasn't entirely true, but he could not bear for Edward to think himself cruel. He could not bear to let him take responsibility for the horrible thing Oswald had done through cowardice and jealousy dressed up as necessity.
And with that, he let go of Ed's wrist, and he pulled himself in, arms wrapping around him tightly, his head pressed against his chest, the drumming sound of Ed's heart in his ear, the soft warmth of him against his cheek, there was no theatrical flair in it, no mayoral poise, no reluctant calculation. He went to Edward as if drawn there by an instinct older than thought, something desperate — something that lacked the aggression of a man claiming what he owned, and more the gentle urgency of someone who had at last been told they were allowed to keep something they loved.
❝ You didn't know, you didn't know because I was too much of a coward to tell you. I should have told you. I should have trusted you, but I- ❞ A breath hitched sharply in his chest. ❝ I became so afraid... But you… ❞ He tilted his head to look up at Ed, eyes shining with an almost unbearable hope. The relief was immense, so immense that it nearly swallowed everything else. For a moment, shame and guilt and Isabella's death receded beneath the tidal force of it.
He had not invented this, had not hallucinated tenderness out of scraps, had not mistaken Ed's careful hands and warm attention for love simply because he was desperate for it — Edward loved him. Edward actually loved him. ❝ You do feel it. ❞ The smile that began to form on his face was hesitant at first, as if he feared joy was something he couldn't perform without making it ugly — it trembled there, uncertain, then widened despite him, something softer, younger, almost boyish in its disbelief.
❝ You love me. ❞ A breathless laugh escaped him then, small and high and full of wonder. ❝ We love each other! ❞ he corrected, quieter this time, with a joy in his voice so raw it could almost pass for pain. ❝ I thought… I thought perhaps.. After everything, after you saved me, after you cared for me, after the whole fiasco with Butch and the election...- ❞
His lips parted on another shaky inhale. ❝ No one has ever done that for me, Ed, not like you - not since my mother.❞ There was that old grief then, twisting through the joy, a shadow passing over the light but not extinguishing it. His mother, for whatever faults she may have had, had loved him absolutely, fiercely and at times, irrationally. She had looked at him and seen a prince when the rest of the world saw a freak, and for a time, he had believed that love had died with her, that whatever part of the world that had been capable of loving him had been buried in the ground within the heart in her chest that had ceased to beat in his arms that day.
Then Edward Nygma had found him bleeding and half-dead in the woods. Edward had brought him to his home, fed him, dressed his wounds, humoured his appetite, sung to him, endured his moods as volatile as they were, and spoke to him not as a burden, a freak, or a pathetic loser, but as someone whose presence was wanted, needed even.
❝ I would never hurt you,❞ he then said, suddenly, urgently, the joy laced through with panic again. ❝ I-I want you to know that. Whatever else you think of me, whatever else happens, you must know that. I didn't do this to hurt you. I could never want that. Never. ❞ The conviction in him was absolute because, in Oswald's mind, there was a difference between pain and harm. Pain could pass. Pain could be the cost of removing an infection before it spreads. But harm — true harm, the kind that diminished Edward, that broke him, that made him smaller or weaker or less himself — Oswald could not imagine inflicting that. Not on purpose. Not ever.
He had killed Isabella because he believed she would destroy what Ed was becoming. He had killed Isabella because she had threatened to take Ed from him. He had killed Isabella because he loved him, and in the violent, frightened logic of Oswald's heart, those things did not equal hurting Edward, rather the opposite. He wanted to protect him, to protect them both, as terrible as it was. Isabella threatened to undo that.
She would drag him back into some boring, plain little life where Oswald could never follow, where people thought Edward was merely strange and odd, and tolerated him because he could be useful when needed — she couldn't see him for what he really was — what he'd become the moment he'd accidentally snuffed out the other woman with her uncanny likeness. She was regression. She would return Ed to a dull life of normalcy. She would make him ordinary when he was more, and when together, they had become extraordinary.
