Your One True Nemesis
Chapter 38: also on AO3
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Arkham!Riddler x Female!Reader, word count: 1k
they're awkward and i am indulging in my love of miscommunication 💚
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minors DNI!! 🔞 cw: lil bit of angst
Eddie could strop. It was one of his skills. The ability to maintain a cold, uncomfortable atmosphere in favour of feeling like he was punishing someone for a real or imagined sleight came naturally to him. You would almost classify it as one of his hobbies. But usually, at least by now, he would have come out of the strange mood and conceded, with a non-apology, in an effort just to get close to you once more. It hadn’t happened yet though. An entire week since your ‘date’ at the orphanage had gone by and Eddie still seemed to be avoiding you, or at least avoiding any long conversations with you.
Was he afraid that you were going to ask him again? Question him about the future? You imagined he was rife with commitment issues, but it wasn’t as though you were asking him for anything concrete or serious right then. Just a little hint that your future wasn’t going to be empty and void of him once he decided you were worn out and beneath him.
Perhaps you’d scared him off for real this time, or maybe, this was it. Hewas bored of you already. Complacency, the routine. The comfort and stability of a relationship was definitely out of his realm of comfort or experience. And, you could admit in private, that potentially you weren’t intellectually stimulating enough for him. Or submissive enough. Or doing your job well enough now that things were more personal between you both.
There wasn’t any point in worrying about it needlessly, however. Not when you’d come this far in your relationship with him, to get to a point where you could converse openly, or at least somewhat openly. So you lifted yourself up from your bed and headed down the corridor towards the work room.
You had no idea what you were going to say, or how you intended to confront him. Gently, was the obvious answer. But that felt like maybe you’d give him enough room to wriggle out of giving you a concrete answer. However, a more forceful approach might only make things worse. And as stubborn as you had felt yourself become, Edward’s natural talents in that department somehow rubbing off on you, you were ready to admit that you everything in you wanted to cling to his filthy shirt and tell him you loved him and never wanted to leave him, even if it meant tossing yourself into a pit of submissive, vulnerable embarrassment in the process.
It was brave, you thought, to feel this confident as you stomped down the hallway to speak to what you could only call your boyfriend. But as silly as you thought the bravery might be, you wished it had stayed around longer, because the moment you could make out Eddie’s slumped over posture sitting at his workbench, you lost all cognitive ability, and instead shuffled up behind him and stood awkwardly in silence. Rocking back and forth on your heels, you finally managed to say something, and immediately cursed yourself.
“Whatcha doin’?”
Eddie looked to you with the same confusion and concern that you were questioning yourself with, only shooting a quick sideways glance towards the robot shell he had in front of him, not even bothering to answer your question as he had dubbed it, rightfully, beneath him to offer you that kind of easy answer.
“Robot. Obviously. Duh!”
He looked to you again, raising an eyebrow. You were being weird, and he recognised it, but he hadn’t quite been able to place the reason for this until you spoke again.
“About the other day, Eddie… at the orphanage.”
His pupils widened, but he flicked his gaze back towards the workbench, avoiding eye contact with you as he uttered one single word.
“Oh.”
The silence was uncomfortable, offering you little space to ease into the conversation naturally. But you had to commit, you’d already come this far.
“It’s just that you’ve seemed very distant since then. As though maybe something made you uncomfortable. So I wanted to apologise, first of all, for springing anything on you that you weren’t expecting. We’re not really a… traditional couple, I suppose. So traditional questions and traditional steps don’t really follow in line with the rest of our-”
“Do you trust me?”
Looking to him from the floor where your gaze had settled out of fear and embarrassment, you could see an intensity in his eyes that was a little rarer these days, now that he had softened up to you.
“Of course I do.”
“Well then, I need you to keep trusting me. I can’t offer you more than that, not now. But if you can place your trust in me regardless, then the reward will outweigh whatever imagined risk there is.”
It wasn’t at all that you didn’t trust him. It was more that you were blind to what exactly you were placing your trust in. But there was a shift in his mood, a change in how he spoke to you when he said those words, that made you comfortable with taking yet another risk in order to preserve your relationship with Edward Nigma.
“Ok. Ok Eddie, I trust you.”
There were no further words spoken. He only leaned in to hold your arms tight as he pressed a kiss, strong and deep, against your lips. The kind of kiss that lovers in movies give when they’re about to board a train to a destination far away. A goodbye kiss. And without further clarifying, he dismissed you with a quick wave of his hand, turning your body around manually and then returning his focus to his work.
You knew better than to argue. It was familiar, reminiscent of your time in the sewers all those months back, when you had barely known him save for the scraps of information you got from articles and front page news reports. Like you were going back in time. Like nothing much had changed, or worse, that it had, but it was slowly changing back.
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