“Your brain is fine, Ed. Your problem is psychological.”
Lying awake, the sounds of the Narrows were near but muffled by the many walls between Ed’s supine form and the world outside. Inside of Cherry’s on his little cot on which he’d been sleeping, not twenty feet away from a snoring Solomon Grundy in a dingy room, it wasn’t the sounds of the slums keeping him awake. His mind was caught on a loop like a broken record, replaying what Lee had said to him just a few days prior. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t focus. Like a rat taken out of his maze to be doctored and fed and then suddenly placed right back, his objective, to him, seemed clear.
It’d been pleasant, in its own way, this intermission. And, while Lee’s appeals for his less grandiose self to remain in the foreground were tempting, Ed’s resolve against such matters is thin to begin with, and depletes exponentially over time. And, the explanation for it is simple. He’d said it to her shortly before being told that his brain was, in fact, fully thawed.
“I’m not meant to be sidekick.”
And that includes hers. That statement does not, however, preclude partnerships. Luckily, after hearing his plan, Lee had been amicable toward that alternative, despite what dubiousness might still lurk beneath the surface of their relationship. She had given him the resources he’d needed, and, in turn, he’d given her a massive IOU from what would, soon, be the Second Coming of the Riddler. But, something else must come first. Just like before, there is, and only ever will be, one person he needs to hear call him by that name before he can finally metamorphose. And, despite their considerable effort, the bars of Arkham could not contain the prize that would affirm Edward’s final and grandest of transformations.
Weeks had passed between hearing that, medically speaking, his mind was fit for further acts of ingenuity, and this moment. And no shortage of planning had gone into it.
He’d planted orderlies in the asylum, disguised himself as well, and ensured that one nightly watch of a very certain ward would be entirely staffed by his people. From there, it was a matter of short circuiting the surveillance, and escaping through a service elevator that took them to the rooftop. Then, a planned distraction would alert the security to a brawl on the other side of the campus, and all that remained was to stroll out the back gate. In application, things had gotten a bit messy. Ed, for one, had gotten shot in the shoulder -- opposite where he’d last taken a bullet, making his shoulders almost symmetrical.
It had, however, paid off. Oswald, having been drugged before the entire affair to affirm that he would not and could not protest in any fashion, will be awakening soon. And when he does, he’ll be waking up to a ceiling very different than the one in his Arkham cell, and to clothes that do not stink like the Arkham laundry.
In fact, he’ll be waking up in a bed rather akin to the one he slept in while he lived under his late father’s roof.
With Ed Nygma standing over him.
